Scaling Ireland’s red seaweed sector

“How far away is that cliff edge?” I ask, inching the family car down a narrow track in Ireland’s Beara peninsula. 

“You’ve got about two metres.” My husband is using his reassuring voice – which means that I probably have just over one metre before he’ll want to bail. 

Moments later, however, we’re safely in front of Pure Ocean Algae’s 600m2 seaweed hatchery outside Castletownbere, in southwest Ireland. The building boasts three industrial refrigeration units and multiple conditioning tanks that can grow different macroalgae species from seed stage to early maturity. Once inside, CEO Michael O’Neill gives us an overview of his farming operation and his journey from domesticating wild dulse in 2019 to creating food ingredients and health supplements with red seaweed.

Inside Ireland’s largest indoor seaweed hatchery

Pure Ocean Algae’s refrigeration units can hold 300 tanks apiece, with each tank holding a net that can yield in excess of 350 kg of dulse – or dillisk – per growth cycle. Up from 15 kg per net in 2019 – a time when they were still reliant on wild stocks. 

According to O’Neill, the surge in finishing volume came down to optimising water management and light regimes while the dulse was initially developing, as well as a breeding programme which developed dulse strains that are more resilient and productive. 

The aerated tanks are modular and the flow-through system means that the water doesn’t contain material that competes with the seeded dulse as it grows on the nets. The approach allows the team to condition nets from the start of the production cycle, ensuring consistent coverage across the net’s full surface area. 

“We’re preparing these nets for the water. We started at the end of January, and we have a few that we’re storing for the next growing season. If you see the fuzz on it, that’s the growth starting,” he says, allowing me to lift the net out of the water. 

“We’ll be putting those to sea in October. By that time, we’ll have complete coverage and you’re talking between eight and ten fronds per plant, so it outcompetes everything in the water,” he adds. 

O’Neill has learned that without this early conditioning stage, “anything and everything” will try to attach and settle on the net, especially mussel spat and other species of algae. 

“If your plants can’t outcompete everything else that’s in the water, you’re finished… The longer we can keep them here, the better,” he explains. 

Though his harvest volumes over the last two years have exceeded his expectations, he concedes that the growing seasons haven’t been straightforward. 

“Last year was a strange one on the water, there were a lot of things happening around the coast that we didn’t expect,” he reflects. 

These included a marine heatwave and heavy rainfall over the summer months. And when it came time to harvest, O’Neill noticed a large volume of small and immature plants. 

“A full plant can reach about 18 inches – last year we had huge volumes of stunted plants instead of ones with large fronds,” he explains. 

“Our growth looks more normal this year. We’re seeing more mature plants and good coverage on our nets. We expect to bring in over 300 kg per net during this cycle,” he adds.

Growth trials and market fit

Since kitting out the hatchery in 2023, O’Neill has branched out into brown seaweeds like saccharina, digitata and alaria. 

“We’re looking at developing a biorefinery process that allows us to turn seaweeds into biostimulants. We’re also exploring the idea of integrating the seaweed with existing biomass stocks like marine sidestreams from seafood processing,” he explains.

Despite successfully growing multiple types of brown seaweeds in his hatchery system, O’Neill says that the subsequent links of the value chain aren’t in place. 

“I think what’s become clear over the past two years is that demand for kelp isn’t what people thought it would be. It’s getting more difficult to sell kelp, and it isn’t because the market has become flooded with huge volumes of material,” he reflects.  

In his view, Ireland has got to grips with brown seaweed cultivation, but the lack of buyers for farmed kelp is stalling the industry’s development.   

An additional challenge is that farmed kelp has to compete with wild varieties that are often cheaper. According to O’Neill, Ireland’s wild seaweed harvest doesn’t have a strict management regime – especially when compared to the rest of Europe. This adversely impacts Ireland’s supply, and can leave the market fluctuating when wild stocks come under pressure.

“Kelp cultivated is more expensive than kelp cut off the rock…We need to create products that justify the expense of cultivated material, and we haven’t been able to do that,” he says. 

“You need to find the right market fit for this to work. A lot of people are trying to identify that fit with the wider industry. Kelp is a great product, it provides a lot of bioremediation and is brilliant for the environment, but you still need a strong bottom line to grow the business. You need a business case, and the business case is getting harder to make,” he elaborates. 

“Red and brown seaweeds fill different product niches… you can do different things with them. The question is how far down the rabbit hole in terms of processing and biorefining do you want to go with brown seaweed? Creating a cascading biorefinery is expensive and adds a lot of cost, so you need to have the return on the finished product,” he adds. 

In addition to his kelp trials, O’Neill has also explored Asparagopsis production. Although he’s found it relatively easy to grow, he has struggled to sell it. 

“The markets haven’t really developed. The products that are out there are further down the value chain and the markets that are closer to growers aren’t really there. I’m still not sold on the market,” he says. 

In O’Neill’s view, there are other ways for livestock farmers to access bromoform, the active ingredient in Asparagopsis that abates ruminant methane emissions, including synthetic products, which may be less expensive. Although some Australian seaweed producers say that there’s demand for a natural product, livestock farmers tend to be very sensitive to costs. 

“We’ve done a lot of work and research on the hatchery side of things and a fair bit of that is solved, but we haven’t seen a complete solution to the problem in an Irish context. I mean, we have the cows – they’re going nowhere for a while yet – but we need to make sure that the technology is right,” O’Neill emphasises. 

When speaking to The Fish Site in 2022 and 2023, O’Neill highlighted Ireland’s limited hatchery infrastructure and slow licensing process as hurdles to the sector’s growth. Despite noticeable changes on both fronts, the industry is still lagging behind its European peers. In his view, the main bottleneck is now in processing. 

“There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, where we need to produce enough seaweed to validate the efficiency of a biorefinery and advanced processing. We know we can grow the stuff – but we need to know what the market is and where it’s going,” O’Neill says. 

“What we’re missing [in Ireland] is the processing piece at scale that encourages farmers to go in… The advanced processing that allows producers to extract biostimulants and alginates is lagging [behind],” he adds.

O’Neill also notes that the drying, milling and fermenting of red and brown seaweeds into their constituent parts remains cumbersome and expensive. Accessing processing facilities can be difficult as well, since they are often far from farm sites. 

“The processing technology is there, but it isn’t in the locality – I really don’t want to be dragging wet seaweed across the Irish Sea. That’s not my idea of a good time,” he says.

From starting out to scaling up

O’Neill and his team made the decision to farm dulse after identifying the unmet demand from the EU’s food ingredient sector. This helped spur the company’s ongoing partnership with ingredient companies like the Carbery Group, a Cork-based manufacturer that supplies ingredients to 50 countries across the globe.

Since their successful launch in 2019 however, Pure Ocean Algae has pivoted to health and wellness supplements, leaning into dulse’s pharmaceutical potential. With plans to launch in June, O’Neill’s marketing literature will feature dulse as a “functional” product – with emphasis on its enriched micronutrient and protein components. 

“We discovered that our red seaweeds are highly functional – because of the way that we grow them – in comparison to a wild product,” he says.

O’Neill adds that the term “functional ingredient” isn’t just marketing hype. The company has engaged in multiple clinical trials with the University of Limerick and the Technological University of the Shannon. He expects six academic papers to be published this year demonstrating the efficacy and functionality of his dulse. He is also continuing his work with the BioDulse Project, a long-running study that explores dulse as an active ingredient to control type II diabetes. 

He explains that the brand work is finished and that his team is organising Pure Ocean Algae’s e-commerce site to facilitate direct sales to consumers. This has been built alongside the company’s original business-to-business platform to sell their dulse. 

 “We have one supplement that we’re launching in Hong Kong and mainland China through our e-commerce platform,” O’Neill says. “We’re also launching another range of five products for the Irish, European and UK markets in the next two to three months. This includes an immunity/gut biome supplement and a skin vitamin.”

By identifying the functionality of hatchery-conditioned dulse, O’Neill has been able to broaden his customer base. He’s now able to interact with buyers who are interested in functional ingredients instead of those solely purchasing the dried and milled seaweed. 

“The efficacy that we’ve developed with the dulse [products] means that we can have more serious conversations… There’s huge interest,” he notes. 

“Supplements are fairly straightforward for us to make. We can combine our dulse with other ingredients to make outstanding and natural products. We view the ‘natural’ space as our niche. It’s a huge market with a lot of competition, but we can tell a unique story and offer unique products, so we think that can set us apart. People want to believe that seaweed is good for you. There’s a halo effect there, but you need the efficacy, and we’re able to provide that,” he adds.

As the growing season progresses, O’Neill has embarked on another round of fundraising. 

“We’ve been talking to potential partners since Christmas 2024. There’s plenty of interest, but firms are a bit more cautious because of the current economic and political climate. We’re looking to fill out the two refrigeration rooms to seed more nets and do more vegetative production, as well as funding the expansion of our dietary supplement range of products,” he explains. 

“The industry has been developing. Our conversations with investors are different now because we know a lot more. We’ve seen a lot of interest from wholesalers who want to buy dulse. There’s a willingness for new products, particularly natural ones. But you need to be able to show your point of difference from other products. We’ve been able to do that, and the conversations have been very positive,” he says.

“We’ve managed to find our niche and have been very lucky so far,” he concludes.