COMPANY REPORT ▶▶▶
The Seaweed Company: “Seaweed in sustainable agriculture and food”
The Seaweed Company grows and processes seaweed and is about to market products containing seaweed. The company is convinced that seaweed will play an important role in sustainable agriculture and nutrition.
BY CAROLIEN KLOOSTERMAN, EDITOR OF FOOD&AGRIBUSINESS AND BOERDERIJ
Edwin Sneekes (l) and Joost Wouters are two of the three founders of The Seaweed Company.
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f it were up to the founders of The Seaweed Company, seaweed will soon become a common ingredient in food, animal feed and fertiliserin Europe. “While seaweed is well known in Asia, we still have a lot of pioneering
work to do here,” says Joost Wouters, one of the founders of the young company. The company quickly set up three sea- weed farms, as the founders call them, and developed vari- ous seaweed-based products. It’s now about to launch these products on the market. “Although we’re still a young com- pany, we no longer see ourselves as a start-up. We don’t just
have a few products that we are trying to sell. If someone asks us to supply 40,000 liters of biostimulants, we can do that,” says co-founder Edwin Sneekes.
Seaweed has many possibilities The Seaweed Company started over two years ago. After a ca- reer in various international companies, Joost Wouters decid- ed to take a different, more sustainable approach. When he started with seaweed “there was an immediate click.” Wout- ers: “I knew straightaway that I would continue with this. Sea- weed has so many possibilities. Especially its sustainability at- tracted me.” He met Edwin Sneekes, with a background in space and aerospace engineering, and Stefan Kraan, a sea- weed biologist, and together they founded The Seaweed Company in late 2018.
Four growing locations The company has set up four farms: in Morocco, in India and two in Ireland. Last year, another test location was added off the coast of Scheveningen in the Netherlands, where the combination of seaweed cultivation and solar panels in off- shore wind farms is being investigated. A different type of seaweed is grown at each location: mainly brown seaweed in Ireland, red seaweed in India and green seaweed in Morocco. “There are 12,000 types of seaweed and each type has its own properties. Each species needs different conditions to grow properly. We grow three types of seaweed, which we mix together. In this way we get the best properties of the three types in one blend. “
Science-based approach The seaweed is dried and ground after cultivation and then brought to the Netherlands. There the three types are mixed together. That mixture can be added to all kinds of products. The company opted for an approach based on science. “When I first got to know seaweed, it was used as input for biogas production. A great shame, because there are many valuable ingredients in it,” says Wouters. “We didn’t want to be just any raw material supplier. We started researching everything: what’s in the seaweed, what do the different components of
18 ▶ ALL ABOUT FEED | Volume 29, No. 3, 2021
PHOTO: ROEL DIJKSTRA
PHOTO: THE SEAWEED COMPANY
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