Skip to content
Pursuits
Goods

The Key Ingredient in These Hot Sauces, Gins, and Jerky? It’s Seaweed

The super ingredient is not only good for you, it's good for the environment.

Seaweed is showing up in a wide range of new products (clockwise from top left:) Gunpowder & Rose rum, Loliware straws, Bullwhip hot sauce, Sheringham gin, Atlantic Sea Farms “sea-beet kraut,” Akua’s kelp jerky, and Monterey Bay’s sea grapes.

Seaweed is showing up in a wide range of new products (clockwise from top left:) Gunpowder & Rose rum, Loliware straws, Bullwhip hot sauce, Sheringham gin, Atlantic Sea Farms “sea-beet kraut,” Akua’s kelp jerky, and Monterey Bay’s sea grapes.

Photographer: Kelsey McClellan for Bloomberg Businessweek

By

From
Reprints

It’s rare to get good news from the sea. Water temperatures are rising, fish stocks are being depleted, and the fish we eat are increasingly full of microplastics. But the oceans do hold one positive portent: seaweed. It’s regenerative—it can grow about a foot a day—and carbon- and nitrogen-sequestering. Research suggests that, per acre, it can absorb more than 20 times as much carbon dioxide as a forest. In the U.S. and Canada, entrepreneurs are cultivating it and other macro algae for everything from kelp jerky to capsules containing shots of Glenlivet.

These companies have ambitious plans to grow in 2020, taking up more and more space on shelves and cleaning up more and more oceans. “We are eyes on the blue green economy,” says Chelsea Briganti, chief executive officer of packaging company Loliware. “Seaweed represents an opportunity, everywhere you look.”