Kelp grower completes funding round, adds business partners
COURTESY / NEW ENGLAND OCEAN CLUSTER, ATLANTIC SEA FARMS
Atlantic Sea Farms has completed a funding round and added business partners and board members. Here lobsterman and kelp farmer Justin Papkee and his crew harvest kelp off Long Island in Casco Bay.
Atlantic Sea Farms, a commercial kelp grower and processor, is preparing to expand with the completion of a funding round and the addition of business partners and board members.
The company raised $3.1 million and has the capacity to raise up to $4 million, according a Form D filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
New York City-based Desert Bloom Food Ventures, a fund that invests in and supports food companies, led the funding round, and now occupies a board seat alongside Lisa Sebesta, a regenerative food-focused investor and consultant; Chandler Jones of CEI Ventures; and Briana Warner, president and CEO of Atlantic Sea Farms, according to a news release.
Desert Bloom’s mission is to make food that is healthy and environmentally regenerative ubiquitously available and accessible to everyone.
“It is unique to find a company addressing several critical areas all at once,” Julia Paino, a partner at Desert Bloom Foods, said in the release. “We deeply value the positive social, nutritional, and environmental impact woven into the DNA of Atlantic Sea Farms.”
Also joining as a board member and advisor was Jason Jones, the founding president of Austin, Texas-based Vital Farms Inc., whose purpose is to bring ethically produced food to the table. Jones works with companies bringing disruptive solutions to market, and has dedicated his career to making a more sustainable and regenerative food system.
“Briana and the Atlantic Sea Farms team have pioneered a truly elegant farming model that creates so much benefit for consumers, farmers, and our planet,” Jones said. “We all want to support systems that diversify our food options and tread lightly on our ecosystem.”
New facility
Through the funding round supported by Maine-based law firm Eaton Peabody, Atlantic Sea Farms is in the process of building out a new seaweed processing and innovation facility, which also houses Atlantic Sea Farm’s Maine Seaweed Cultivation Center, to produce products and ingredients that are available year round.
The team is currently moving from 6,000 square feet in Saco to a 27,000-square-foot leased industrial facility at 20 Pomerleau St. in Biddeford.
Construction work by Benchmark Construction in Westbrook is underway.
The move will make it possible to continue to grow the company’s network of “partner farmers” by producing its own products as well as products for other companies, said the company’s CEO, Briana Warner.
“With the expansion of our Seaweed Cultivation Center, we will be able to continue to provide high-quality, free seeds to our network of partner farmers as well as make available seeds to others in the seaweed farming community,” she added.
Atlantic is the first commercial seaweed farm in the U.S. and now represents over 80% of all line-grown seaweed in the country. The company partners with more than 34 independent partner seaweed farms along the Maine coast.
Preparations for the 2022 kelp season are underway. The company projects well over 1 million pounds of harvested kelp, representing growth of over 3,000% since the company brought on new leadership in August 2018.
Its products and ingredients are available across the U.S.
The company provides opportunities for Maine lobstermen to diversify their incomes by growing kelp in the off-season from fishing, and provides them with free seeds produced in its Maine Seaweed Cultivation Center, as well as technical assistance and training.
The supplemental income opportunities serves coastal communities “at a time when climate change and increased regulations are making the lobster fishery increasingly volatile,” said Warner.
Warner called kelp “the ultimate regenerative crop. We don’t use arable land, fresh water, or fertilizers. This method of sustainable aquaculture helps mitigate some of the effects of climate change by removing carbon and nitrogen from the water and reducing ocean acidification.”
As of the spring 2021 harvest, the company has removed approximately 150,000 pounds of carbon from Maine’s ocean in three growing seasons.
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