Meet Maine Coast Sea Vegetables

At Narrative Food, each of our gifts is designed to tell a story. We have worked with hundreds of vendors over the years, listening to their stories and sharing them with you. In this new series, we are honored to spotlight a few of our favorite small-batch makers in their own words.

Read our interview with Kara at Maine Coast Sea Vegetables (MCSV).

Maine Coast Sea Vegetables was founded in 1971 by Shep and Linnette Erhart in their farmhouse kitchen, inspired by a pot of miso soup that was especially delicious. They realized that the soups’ full, rich flavor came from the wild Alaria they had gathered from the shores of the Schoodic Peninsula, and they soon began sharing their Atlantic Wakame and other wild-harvested sea vegetables with friends and neighbors. At the time, there were few other folks harvesting and selling seaweed in Maine, and within a few years the Erhart’s built one of the most recognized and trusted brands in the industry. Today, Maine Coast Sea Vegetables is an employee-owned company in Hancock, Maine. Every year, their team of over twenty people sorts, packs and ships several hundred thousand pounds of sea vegetables to customers all across the United States (& Canada).

Tell us a little bit about you and your role at MCSV.

I’ve been with MCSV since 2013. I actually started out as the Kelp Krunch Baker, but my role has expanded a lot since then! All of us at MCSV have versatile roles in order to meet the ever-changing demands of a small, employee-owned business. Today, I answer questions for customers and help them place their orders. I also develop recipes for our website and for cooking classes that I teach several times a year. Occasionally, I visit local classrooms, school cafeterias, and libraries to get people of all ages excited about including seaweed in their diets. The school visits, cooking classes, and recipe development are definitely my favorite part of my job.

Can you share more about the story behind MCSV? Any anecdotes from the early days? 

I can’t speak to the early days firsthand, but the small-scale, ingenuity-driven venture is all part of the lore of MCSV. We have a collection of photos from those days that we share with visitors and they always evoke a sense of simplicity and earnestness of providing for family and loved ones. Not just providing, but truly nurturing one another with this part of the ocean’s bounty that is so often overlooked despite how nutritious and bountiful it is... This is the foundation of Maine Coast Sea Vegetables.

We hear stories about the Erhart family's farmhouse kitchen where it all started. Drying seaweeds, with their 10-to-1 water-to-dry ratio, peeled the wallpaper right off! In the early days, they would harvest per order, which sometimes meant trying to find the seaweed in the dead of winter. It didn’t take long to learn that seaweeds also have an ideal harvest season (each species a little different) and that harvesting and drying at that time of year made far more sense. So, for a long time, the same people would pack and sell in the winter as would harvest in the spring in summer. It was truly full circle for some.

From the "King of Dulse" in 1975 to the community of harvesters you work with today, you must have some fascinating observations about changes in the Gulf of Maine over the decades. Could you share some of their stories and how they've shaped MCSV's vision for the future?

Mostly, we talk about it in terms of trends: decades of observations and understanding that many things are cyclical.

Just recently, we heard one long-time harvester say how he used to start gathering Sugar Kelp around his birthday in mid-May and end just after the 4^th of July. Now he’s out there as early as late March or early April (depending on the snow load from the winter) but is often done by mid-June when biofouling starts. (Biofouling is an unwanted growth of underwater microorganisms, plants, algae, or small animals that can affect the taste, texture, and quality of sea vegetables before they're harvested.) 

We know that certain things can happen. When we have a LOT of rain early in the season, the flush of fresh water changes the salinity of the ocean and seems to trigger a microalgae to settle on the surface of the seaweeds. It looks like a grey mold when it dies. It’s entirely edible but visually unappealing and harder to sell. We also know that some species seem to have a boom year with lots of volume and then will have 2 or 3 off-years with very little available to harvest. Lastly, we know that community perception of seaweed harvesting has changed in some areas... Just to mention a few things we hear.

As you know, we love your Kelp Krunch -- especially how it also gives back to the College of the Atlantic's Allied Whale program. Could you talk about this program and why you support them?

As I understand it, Kelp Krunch (as we know it now) started as a candied kelp coated in sesame seeds. (In fact, there is a recipe in our Sea Vegetable Celebration cookbook based on that early version.) It sounds like everyone agreed it was delicious, but it was fragile and didn’t travel well. Somehow this transformed into the bar we have today. There was even once a peanut version, a soy version, and something with raisins.

Around that time, an Erhart family friend (and College of the Atlantic graduate) was working for Allied Whale. Apparently, this was what inspired our founder Shep Erhart to include whales (which the whole family is passionate about today) into the seaweed business and donate a portion of the proceeds to their work. Allied Whale started not long after we did, and they too are pioneers and innovators. They have the largest humpback and finback photo ID catalog (and were some of the first to adopt this method of tracking for research).

Shep's daughter and our current General Manager, Seraphina, says she’s pretty sure all of this is why she knows a good number of otherwise obscure pieces of information about whales.

Sea vegetables offer some amazing health benefits for both people and the planet. As experts who work with it daily, what excites you most? 

All of it is exciting, at some level. We know there is a lot of ‘hype’ about seaweeds and the many ways they may be able to help the planet... But we’d also caution that much of it is still very much either a bit of “wishful thinking” or maybe one small research project.

Each project is usually only referring to one species, so it can be taken a bit out of context. People will often refer to “seaweed” as if it’s all the same, doing the same thing. We feel confident in saying it’s good for the planet, soil, ocean, animals, and humans (maybe each a little differently), but it’s not going to “save us.” Sea vegetables have been around doing their thing, providing us with a LOT of oxygen, helping with carbon uptake, and more for a few million years most likely.

However, what also seems apparent is that, in almost all of these areas, it’s hardly been studied while seeming to have an AMAZING amount of potential. Bioplastics made at least in part from seaweed? Yes, please! Biofuel made of seaweed? Yes, please! A highly nutritionally-dense food for humans and animals that does not involve input? Yes, please! A great way to put nutrients back into our soil and reduce our dependency on chemical fertilizer? Yes, please! And more...

But we also want to be careful that the research and development of some of these ideas does not get too far ahead of the available biomass and accidentally ruin it. It’s important that the research drive innovation, aquaculture be driven by needs, and regulation be put in place before there is a problem.

Let's dive into the process of the sea vegetable harvest. Could you tell us what a harvest looks like and what goes into your organic certification?

In the early days, we did the harvesting. These days, our business is buying, selling, and making value-added products with seaweed. There are variables per species and area that is needed to access, but the gist is this:

1. Go out at the low tides around the new and full moons (3-5 days each cycle), from March to October. Each species has about a three-month “ideal time to harvest period” in a six-month window.
2. Some are cut with a knife into a boat or basket. Some are harvested by hand, using a loose grip, into a burlap sack or basket. Some are accessed in the sub-tidal areas by boat. Some are accessed in the inter tidal areas by a landed skiff or dory or on foot.
3. All are brought back to land and dried immediately. We work with 6 independent operations; dealing in whole leaf that is bagged and boxed immediately in bulk that we keep in our warehouse. We also work with 4 seaweed businesses that specialize in one or a few species and also mill. We buy pre-milled product by the pallet load from them.

Today, Seraphina deals with the Organic certification process and had a few things to add here… 

"We were the first to be certified in ’92, Shep helped develop the early guidelines. The goal was to have something that would ensure the same practices were being followed by all harvesters but that left Maine Coast Sea Vegetables out of the roll of “policing.” But also, we saw that organics were a growing interest in the market place, creating a great deal of consumer trust. This is still true today. While it has certainly become more complicated over the decades, we feel it brings important value in ensuring sustainable harvesting, quality product, and consumer confidence through traceability and accountability all along the supply chain."