Meet Slack Tide Maine

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.

You can find Slack Tide's sea salt in our B the Change Box (paired with Panamanian dark chocolate in our Chocolate for Change) and our A Taste of Maine Box. It's also available in our custom gifts. See our case study on a salt-themed custom gift thanking the clients of a wealth management firm.

Read our interview with Lauren Mendoza, the Founder of Slack Tide Maine.

Tell us a little bit about you and the work that goes into your role at Slack Tide Maine.

My name is Lauren Mendoza, and I founded Slack Tide Maine in 2020. It was born out of a lifelong love of the ocean and the state I grew up in. 

Can you tell us more about the story behind Slack Tide? 

The first time I made sea salt was for an ice cream I was making. I love making ice cream and wanted to try and make the sea salt to put into a batch of salted caramel ice cream. The sea salt was an epic failure but the process was love at first sight. It ignited a passion, and I continued to make batch-after-batch until it was what I wanted: crisp, clean, briny, and delicious. 

After gifting sea salt to friends and family with rave reviews, I knew I wanted to try it as a business. This is when I asked my Aunt Cathy to team up and form a business. We decided to sell at a market, and this began the commercial venture for Slack Tide. 

We specialize in food that tells a story at Narrative Food, so we love that each flavor of your salt is designed to tell a different story about a piece of Maine. Could you share an example of one of these stories? 

We love so many different things about the state. One fun way to share about what makes Maine so unique is through the different flavors of sea salt we have. I grew up gazing out to sea at Boon Island Light and hearing the many ghost stories that surround it. Now we have a fun nod to Boon's history of shipwrecks with a spicy ghost-pepper-flavored sea salt. 

Like so much of Maine's working waterfront, we know that you are constantly coming up against the effects of pollution and climate change. Tell us about some of your sustainability practices.

We use greenhouses in the summer to bulk evaporate the sea water for our sea salt. In the winter we rely on freezing temps for brine rejection. This greatly reduces our carbon footprint. Our larger business plan includes converting our "salt shed" (our little workshop) to solar as well. 

The barrels we use to harvest the water come from another 1% member, Maine Beer Company. When they are done with their 55-gallon drums, we take them and use them to transport water. This keeps new plastics out of our business. 

As a fellow member of 1% for the Planet, how did you decide to join?

Becoming a member of 1% of the Planet was the easiest business decision we’ve made at Slack Tide. I love the idea of joining – no matter how small your business is – because all of these small contributions add up and together can have this huge impact. For us, giving back 1% of our sales to organizations helping our planet feels like the least we can do.