Thoughts from Briana Warner: Atlantic Seafarms' former CEO

In January Atlantic Sea Farms, the largest farmed seaweed company in the United States, announced it had raised $3.8 million, from investors including True Wealth Ventures, Third Nature Investors and Builders Bridge.

Warner - CEO for seven years, who has now been replaced by Mikel Durham - answered the following questions. 

How did you manage to raise so much for ASF at a time that industry experts are referring to as “the seaweed winter”? 

I'm not going to sit here and say it's easy, but at the end of the day, investors are looking for aquaculture businesses, and seaweed businesses in particular, that have strong business fundamentals. It's not an industry where if you build a farm, people will come. Atlantic Sea Farm’s strength in having full integration and understanding of each part of the supply chain has allowed the company to rise above and raise money. even in a very difficult time.

Why did you decide to step down as CEO at such an exciting time? 

I started this in 2018 when there was about 50,000 pounds of farmed kelp coming out of US waters - total. Last year, we ended last season with around 1.3 million, from just Atlantic Sea Farms’ partners. 

What we've accomplished is tremendous. We built an industry that, quite frankly, just didn't exist in 2018 and now it's viable. We produce the vast majority of the farmed seaweed in the United States and it's all focused on exactly what I wanted to accomplish: doing well by doing good, providing supplemental income sources to fishermen in the face of climate change and providing an answer to a market demand. 

But after this most recent funding was raised, I did a lot of introspection and thought through this next phase of ASF. I felt like it was the time to start bringing in experts that are able to build out that market so we can amplify our impact. Mikel Durham was on our board as an independent. Durham was excited about what we were doing and was excited about the environmental and economic prospects of seaweed. That is exactly the type of person that we need in order to continue to grow our impact and get to our goal of 100 farmers farming 100,000 pounds in the next 10 years.

Can you share a little bit more about your continued role? 

I'm going to be continuing on in an advisory capacity. I'll be consulting for ASF and still retain my equity stake. 

What are you most proud of achieving as CEO?

I'm proud of the team we built, who were willing to come to work every day and do the hard work of inventing an entirely new market and supply chain because they believe in what we were building.

I am also really proud of the farmer network. When we first started, we had to recruit people. We were trying to find leaders in the industry who would take a risk to farm kelp when they didn't have any reason to believe that it was going to work. And now, five-and-a-half years on, we have people from Maine and New England seeking to work with us, hard working folks looking for supplemental income sources. It's something that didn't exist five-and-a-half years ago. 

In many parts of Maine you're very much the face of the company. How did the farmers take the news? 

Over the past few years, we've built up such a tremendous group of people  on the ASF team that it's become about so much more than me and my faith.

Can you share a little bit more about Mikel Durham, the new CEO?

She currently sits on the board of the Marine Stewardship Council and just stepped down from the board of Tyson Foods, where she had served for quite some time. She was the CEO of American Seafoods, one of the largest poly-processors in the world. She has a ton of experience at PepsiCo.  She's a crazy accomplished person and is passionate about what we're building at ASF.

Could some outside of this world see your stepping away from CEO at ASF as an emblem of the seaweed industry struggling?

This move actually shows the opposite. The seaweed space, until recently, has mostly been filled with a lot of people who were in a very startup space. The fact that I'm able to step down and welcome such an accomplished CEO shows that we've arrived.

What can we expect to see with ASF and the new CEO? Will the products be in 8,000 stores rather than 4,000? 

There's some exciting things on the horizon, including some more mainstream products that people are putting in their cart every day.  You're going to see some new species of seaweed coming online in the next few years. 

Now, you have a new role as the VP of marketing and strategy for Bristol Seafood in Maine - is  this a move away from aquaculture?

I'm still very much working at ASF, but it is a bit of a breather. I'm really inspired by the way that Bristol has grown their company with a sense of purpose. They were one of the first free-trade B Corp seafood companies out there and they are dealing with mostly aquaculture products. They are committed to their mission to provide healthy protein. 

I'm hearing from across the board that there's less funding for ocean-focused ventures from nonprofits to sustainable aquaculture businesses. Is that a trend that you saw Atlantic Sea Farms? And do you see that changing?

There is less money than 2021 but there's less money across the board in food since 2021. On the venture side of things, there was this moment after Beyond Meat, where people started investing in food like it is tech and oceans. There was this feeling in 2021 that it was reasonable to expect 10x returns in food and agriculture immediately. That's just not how food systems are built. That's not how we consume food.

The pendulum has swung a little bit too far in the other direction and now people are terrified of investing in food. I'm hoping that the pendulum swings back more towards the middle. I don't think we can ever expect to see what we did in 2021 and I don't think we should. There was a lot of money that went into the ocean sector that basically got thrown into the ocean. 

I think the money will start loosening up soon for blue foods. But I do think that people have kind of realised that food is not AI, food is not tech. 

What bright spots do you see in the future for seaweed farming in the US, whether that's on the business side or for farmers or for consumers? 

Seaweed needs investment at every level. It needs investment on the growing side, it needs investment on the nursery side, it needs investment on the manufacturing side and then the upstream side.

Atlantic Sea Farms is really focused on the supply side: we’re growing seaweed, we're investing in our nursery infrastructure, we're producing a really great set of food products. Our future goes beyond food as people are starting to invest into biorefining to turn seaweed into extractions like fucoidan, or high value alginates for bio textiles or bio plastics. There needs to be investment in those upstream processors so folks like Atlantic Sea Farms can continue to grow out our supply network. 

In 2024 we saw 12 Tides change ownership, AKUA shuttered. Do you see an opportunity, potentially, for another kelp food that isn't vertically integrated? 

In any market you're going to find a lot of headstones along the way. There's a number of reasons that businesses don't survive, not all of which are their fault. 

But also - do we need another seaweed chip company? Probably not. We need the folks out there that are already doing seaweed chips to use American-grown seaweed. Are you making crackers right now? Are you Ritz? Why don't you  incorporate seaweed into your crackers? How about Campbell's Soup? You're making broth. Why don't you use some kombu in your broth?

You can imagine seaweed in every aisle of the grocery store when you think about it that way. Seaweed is a natural umami: it's not chemical, it's not animal-derived. I don't think we're at the tip of the iceberg yet on the ways that seaweed can be used and the way it can be employed. But there needs to be investment in people like ASF, who are primary processors, and also people who are doing upstream refining. 

So is 2025 the year that we're going to see a chip from ASF? 

(laughing) It's gonna be an exciting year for ASF. We have a lot coming up. We have some new species coming out of the water this year for the first time. We have some new products coming out on the market this summer. It's going to be a great year for ASF.