“Seaweed’s like the next soy. 20 years ago no one had heard of it; now it’s in your fridge, it’s in your makeup, it’s in your cosmetics, it’s permeated throughout many industries,” says Karen Scofield Seal, CEO and co-founder of functional seaweed ingredient maker Oceanium.
Seaweed has potential, in and out of the food industry. It can, of course, be eaten, but it can also be used in animal feed, sustainable packaging, fertilizer, and even cosmetics products.
Yet it faces several challenges. Difficulty of scaling creates more risk, leading to challenges gaining investment. Furthermore, the increasing impact of rising temperatures on yields in tropical regions has the potential, in the future, to put pressure on seaweed as it had on many other crops around the world.
The potential of seaweed
As of 2021, global seaweed production was roughly 36.3m tonnes, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation.
There are more than 12,000 species of seaweed globally as well, far beyond kelp, the most well-known type.
Only a dozen of these are currently commercially farmed, according to Simon Davis, managing director of functional seaweed ingredients comapny Seadling. “There’s so much more to discover,” he says.
Their immense diversity also means that seaweeds have a wide range of uses. Kelp, for example, which is grown primarily along the Eastern Pacific Coast, has a lot of nutritional potential.
“How do we get kelp into everything, seaweed into everything?” asks Samantha Garwin, director of market development for regenerative ocean organisation company Greenwave at the Blue Food Innovation Summit in London this month.
As soil quality on land decreases and challenges crop yields there, Garwin points out, the micronutrients within seaweed, such as iron, magnesium, vitamin A, vitamin C, and iodine, are becoming more valuable.
Kelp can be a functional ingredient which goes into human food, pet food, biostimulants and personal care products, she suggests.
Another seaweed that is enormously useful is asparagopsis. This is used as an anti-methane solution, explains Seadling’s Davis, added to livestock feed to reduce their methane emissions.
The geographical areas that have the most potential, from an investment perespective, are South East Asia, Latin America and East Africa, suggests Gracie White, director of global ocean investments at Conservation International Ventures.
There’s a lot of opportunity for innovation in these markets, as seaweed is already being cultivated at scale there.
For upstream companies, such as those working with seaweed producers, Conservation International Ventures looks for companies able to sell into a variety of different markets.
For investments into downstream companies prioritising end use (such as bioplastic companies), it looks for companies able to make use of a variety of different seaweed species, to protect against risk to a single species.
“East” and “West” have very different potentials in seaweed, suggests Sowmya Balendiran, co-founder of Sea6 Energy.
For example, seaweed grown in the West is better suited to food, whereas seaweed grown in the East is often better suited to packaging and bioplastics due to scale differences.
Because of this, she suggests, the East and West should collaborate.
Finally, seaweed is sustainable. It requires no arable land, no fresh water, no fertiliser, and absorbs nitrogen and carbon dioxide, according to Greenwave’s Garwin. “It is really hard to find a reason you shouldn’t be sourcing seaweed as an ingredient,” she says.
Challenges faced by the seaweed market
The seaweed market still faces a range of challenges, however. One of these is in funding.
The global seaweed market faces a “chicken and egg problem”, suggests Conservation International Ventures’ White, “with supply and demand continually leapfrogging each other”. Investors still see risk in the area.
The Silicon Valley model, which involves putting money into start-ups and expecting “exponential and massive scale”, does not work as well for seaweed as it does for tech, White suggests. This is because the sector can’t scale as easily as something like software.
After series B or C funding, there’s a “gap”, suggests Sea6 Energy’s Balendiran.
Different seaweeds grow better in different climates, but like many other crops, tropical seaweeds are vulnerable to changing climatic conditions.
“It’s very vulnerable to future ocean warming issues,” explains Seadling’s Davis. While they are not seeing these problems yet, it remains a clear potential issue in the future.
In order to counter this, the seaweed industry is developing seed varieties that are resilient to high temperatures.