Deep Blue Greens
JWU faculty and alumni on the opportunity — and necessity — behind the rise of the sea vegetable industry
Story by Dan Morrell for JWU Magazine
Travis Bettinson’s ocean farming epiphany came in early 2019. He was listening to an episode of the Gastropod podcast, which featured a conversation with Bren Smith, cofounder of Greenwave, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching regenerative ocean farming to fishermen around the world.
Bettinson '10, who lived in Seattle at the time, had heard a little about the kelp industry from random mentions in national news outlets over the years, but this conversation was diff erent: Smith offered a deep knowledge of ocean farming, discussing the environmental value of cultivating seaweed and how well, for instance, seaweed co-cultured with shellfish — a food source that Washington led the nation in producing.
“Man, there have got to be farmers doing this,” thought Bettinson, who was running a catering service and working as a private chef at the time. “But the problem is that Americans don’t eat kelp at enough scale that the farmers can be supported.”
So Bettinson committed to change that dynamic. “I said right then that I’m going to do the research and development (R&D) and develop food products that can have a large impact.” As Bettinson dug into the challenges of the industry, he found that sea farmers often had to sell their products for compost or bioplastic research — “which is pennies on the pound.” For sea farming to flourish, someone would need to devise something that could actually entice American shoppers.
The more he considered the opportunity, the more sense it made. “It was this wonderful marriage of culinarily beautiful ingredients that have wonderful flavor, that are nutritionally dense, but also provides farmers — who are performing a wonderful environmental service — a market.”
In November 2020, after a year of R&D that surfaced everything from fermented seaweed hot sauces to sea vegetable soups, Bettinson launched Blue Dot Kitchen, where he currently serves as CEO and director of research development. In early 2022, the company launched its first product, Seacharrones, a crispy, crunchy kelp-infused snack, now available in more than 45 stores in the Pacific Northwest.
Bettinson’s passion for the promise of sea vegetables is not isolated. The commercial sea vegetable market is expected to grow to $37.8 billion by 2028, at a rate of about 10% per year, according to Grand View Research. Buzzy startups Akua and Umaro Foods have raised millions of dollars in startup funding with the promise of offering sea vegetable-based meat substitutes. For the past four years, Portland, Maine has been hosting “Seaweed Week,” an “annual food and drink festival celebrating the kelp harvest in Maine”; this year, the city also hosted the country’s first-ever “International Seaweed Conference USA.”
“Right now my mailbox is blowing up with seaweed,” says Associate Professor Branden Lewis, Ed.D., ’04, ’06 MBA, a specialist in international cuisines and sustainable food systems.”
There’s someone looking to partner up to develop sea vegetable products and another company looking to get their sea vegetable products into the Johnson & Wales dining halls. “And my students buy it to use for their chef tables, because when they’re in my Culinary Sustainability classes, they research seaweed and they see why it’s sustainable.”
Those reasons are myriad. For one, it’s a zero-input crop that is grown underwater, so there’s no carbon footprint outside of distribution. “It also sequesters carbon dioxide at a much faster rate than land agriculture,” says Bettinson. “Additionally, as it’s growing, it’s constantly shedding bits of itself into the ocean. And 20 percent of the total growth of sea vegetables — and kelp in particular — gets left in the ocean for long-term carbon sequestration.” That absorption of C02, Bettinson notes, is doubly useful, as it helps to locally deacidify water systems — a necessity for the health of coral reefs, shellfish and many other elements of the ocean ecosystems.
ABOVE: BRANDEN LEWIS WITH CULINARY SUSTAINABILITY STUDENTS PREPARING A MENU STARRING SEA VEGGIES.
“It’s health and nutrition, it’s people and planet, and it’s an economic opportunity that hasn’t really been fully exploited out here in the West,” says Bettinson, who notes that places like Norway, Finland and Japan are well ahead of the rest of the global markets.
But the rise of the sea vegetable industry is also a frontier borne of necessity, says Lewis. “The reason it’s drawing so much attention is because we’re really reaching Earth’s carrying capacity,” he notes. “As we do that — and as we’re seeing more and more land at risk for commercialization and not enough agriculture and too many people to feed, and we start looking at alternative sources of nutrition — then sea vegetables in the ocean are a big touch point when we talk about sustainability in academics.”
This constant chase of marine resources is part of New England’s economic origin story, says James Griffin, Ed.D., ’88, ’92 M.S., an associate professor in the Food & Beverage Industry Management department.
Consider the giant wooden codfish hanging in the House of Representatives chamber of Boston’s Massachusetts State House. “That’s because the economy of Massachusetts started because Gloucester was a commercial fishing port,” Griffin notes. “The first folks who came to Gloucester were from Gloucestershire, England — and the only thing they could do was fish.”
An abundance of varying cod species supported the industry for generations until the 1980s, Griffin says, when the industry collapsed due to overfishing. Subsequent regulations forced consideration of alternatives, which led to the expansion, for instance, of the lobster industry. “It was a constant question of ‘What other species, what other fisheries can we look at?’” says Griffin. “Long story short, the current view on sustainability and exploring new ocean resources is born of that spirit — a spirit of having to look constantly at this wild resource and say, ‘Hey, if there was economic benefit or nutritional value from this, and it’s now in decline, what else is there?’”
Today, that mindset has led to an unexpected resource. “I’ll tell you this: The last thing on earth we ever thought we’d be looking at is seaweed,” says Griffin.
And he has taken a very thorough look. In 2018, he worked with the Island Institute, a nonprofit focused on addressing the environmental and socioeconomic challenges of Maine’s island and coastal communities, to research how the state could increase the economic viability of sea vegetable products so that lobster producers could cultivate them in the shoulder seasons.
“It’s not a lot of money; I call it gas money,” says Griffin. “But if we could develop this fishery, this seaweed production, and cultivate and grow it, lobstermen might be able to generate enough money in the shoulder season to the opening of lobster season to perhaps pay for their fuel for the season.”
