Designer seaweed
The largest producer of seaweed-based delicacies in the world, Acadian Seaplants has created an industry where none existed before
The product looks like one you would find in the imported foods section of the supermarket: a colourful package covered with Japanese writing with a coarse powdery substance inside. Pour the contents into a bowl of water and stir, and almost magically the flaky powder morphs into lush leafy seaweed coloured in rich pink, green, and yellow hues.
It's called Hana-nori™ and it's a popular seaweed salad destined for the hungry Japanese market. The real magic lies in how it's grown: in a huge network of rectangular tanks covering several acres of land in Charlesville, at the mouth of Pubnico Harbour in Nova Scotia's Shelburne County. It's something of a technical marvel because it's the largest land-based commercial seaweed cultivation facility in the world. And it's run by a company based in Dartmouth, N.S., called Acadian Seaplants Limited, for which technical marvels have become old hat.
Hana-nori™ is a unique seaweed indigenous to the Canadian Atlantic Coast.
With seaweed comprising about 15% of the Japanese diet, growing it has always been big business. But until the Charlesville operation opened, most salad-grade seaweed came from farms located in the ocean. The new facility gives Acadian Seaplants (www.acadianseaplants.com) a capability that is thought to be currently unique in the world: to grow commercial volumes of seaweed under carefully controlled conditions. "You can't do it in the ocean, because you can't control the ocean," says Acadian Seaplants president Jean-Paul Deveau. "In the ocean, you can't feed the plants. We can feed, grow, and process them in a way that brings out the characteristics that our customers want, such as color, texture, and shape. It's an intensive system that requires a tremendous amount of science and technology to manage."
For 26 years, Acadian Seaplants has been using science and technology to enhance its operations, inventing technologies, processes, and products while creating an industry where none existed before. Today the company has 300 employees and its sales exceed more than $30 million annually, for marketing a ubiquitous product that covers beaches, lines wharves, and fills the province's coves and bays, and that most Nova Scotians pay scant attention.
The company has become the largest producer of unique seaweed–based specialty products on the planet, operating five processing plants spread over three Maritime provinces that turn Ascophyllum nodosum, known commonly as rockweed, into value-added products such as fertilizers, crop biostimulants, plant-growth regulators, animal-feed additives, beauty additives, and food and nutraceutical ingredients by harvesting 40,000 tons of fresh seaweed each year from well-managed natural populations. In the process, Acadian Seaplants has become one of the most R&D-intensive businesses in Atlantic Canada.
Jean-Paul Deveau represents the second generation of the family involved in the business. The son of company chairman and founder Louis, Deveau joined Acadian Seaplants after earning an MBA from McGill University in 1986. His first office was his own childhood bedroom in the family home, which his father had turned into Acadian Seaplants' early headquarters.
Today the company operates out of a more spacious venue: a large complex in Dartmouth's Burnside Industrial Park that houses about 45 people, including administrative staff, sales and marketing personnel, and a few researchers. But much of the real innovation happens two hours away, in a converted barracks at the old Cornwallis armed forces base in Annapolis County. At the Dr. James S. Craigie Research Centre, Acadian Seaplants researchers, including nine PhD-level scientists, investigate everything from the growth rate of potted plants infused with seaweed fertilizer to the best way to grow Hana-nori. It's a research facility that would do many universities proud, a series of labs packed with state-of-the-art equipment. In one hermetically sealed room, large glass cylinders filled with multicoloured seaweeds bubble and bob under bright lights.
Acadian Seaplants spends between 5% and 10% of its annual revenue on research and development. In another lab, scientists place the roots of a New Guinea impatiens plant into a scanner to measure the effects of seaweed fertilizers on growth. A series of sealed rooms contain plants growing under carefully controlled light, humidity, and temperature conditions, while company scientists carefully quantify the effects that the seaweed extracts are having on them. Some of the innovation is created through partnerships the company forms with research institutions, including Dalhousie and Acadia universities, the Nova Scotia Agricultural College, and the National Research Council (NRC), but much of it takes place right in Cornwallis.
The pilot plant is tucked away in a corner of the Craigie Research Centre; it's the dress rehearsal area for any new process improvement or product development. A scaled-down version of the Cornwallis production plant, the pilot plant contains everything needed to mold the seaweed into finished products. It's a way for Acadian Seaplants to see if a new product can be made commercially, without taking up the entire processing plant to do so.
If it can be produced, and if there is a market for it, new seaweed-extract products will eventually be churned out in bulk at the Cornwallis processing plant. Located in another part of the decommissioned military base, the production plant is typical of the kind of assembly-line factories that manufacture everything from newsprint to automobiles. It starts with a huge pile of moist brown seaweed at the plant's loading dock. The company relies on a network of about 300 independent fishermen who sustainably harvest the seaweed from coves and bays around the Maritime provinces (the seaweed used at the Cornwallis plant comes fresh from the ocean from an area that stretches from Shelburne to Digby). The liquor produced from the processed seaweed extract is further processed into a liquid concentrate or a soluble powder.
One of the final products is a huge sheet of dry seaweed extract that feels like thick rough paper. As it rolls off the giant drum it's ground again, this time into a black powder that is packaged into boxes and labelled in one of more than a dozen languages, then shipped to more than 70 countries. The high-grade plant-growth regulator may be used on cotton crops in Turkey, grapes in California, citrus in China, or tomatoes in Italy.
There is no blueprint for this kind of equipment. Unlike printing presses or heavy excavators, some of the machines in this plant exist nowhere else in the world. Acadian Seaplants technicians must be constantly improvising, designing not only the products themselves but also the tools and technology that will make them. At the same time, the company also invests heavily in market development.
Louis Deveau (left) holding a plate of Hana-nori™, with son and Acadian Seaplants president Jean-Paul Deveau.
"We knew from the beginning there wasn't going to be a substantial market for our products in Atlantic Canada," says Deveau, "and that we would have to go search the world." Early marketing efforts involved trips to the library and calls to trade commissioners in Canadian consulates overseas. But soon Deveau hit on a novel solution: He started offering jobs to foreign students studying in Atlantic Canadian universities, young business grads who wanted to continue to live and work in Canada but who knew intimately the language, culture, and customs of their native countries. Today the company is even hiring people located within the export countries to manage its international business.India is one of those markets. It's the second-largest market to which Acadian Seaplants sells, and the company has been conducting business in the subcontinent for more than a decade. "It's a fascinating country, but it's a relatively difficult country to do business in," says Deveau. "India has inherited a bureaucracy from the British—logistics are very complex—but it's a huge country with a big agricultural base. Our products help improve the quality of their crops and, therefore, they can generate more revenue."
Helping developing countries find clean organic methods to boost agricultural production meshes well with Acadian Seaplants' corporate philosophy. For a company that depends on a natural marine resource, ecology and environmental stewardship have always been vital. "Early on we decided that we would monitor and study our harvesting practices so that we would understand what was going on," says Deveau. "The first thing we did was quantify the amount of seaweed that's there. We put together a team of people led by one of our PhD scientists." The team took aerial photographs of all of Acadian Seaplants' 3,300 seaweed beds, measured their size, and then took physical samples of every bed, a process that took several years to complete. "By knowing how much we have and how fast it grows, we know that we harvest less than the annual growth every year," says Deveau. "We go back every year and we verify. We know we're not cutting into the principal, and we know that what we're doing is sustainable forever."
The company has also made changes to its harvesting processes. A rake that was once used to rip seaweed from rocks has been replaced by a cutting tool that shaves off the top of the plant, much like a lawnmower trimming grass, leaving the roots to continue growing and producing. Mortality rates of seaweeds are also carefully monitored. The company has also taken a hard look at processing techniques to make sure that they're environmentally friendly and limit waste products.
For example, a few years ago the Cornwallis plant produced a stream of waste sludge. Today that byproduct is turned into a soil-amendment and is given to local farmers. The products themselves are also environmentally friendly and devoid of toxic ingredients. Many of them even carry organic certifications. "They are an alternative to using chemical–based products in agriculture," says Deveau. "They are natural products that provide functionality equal to or better than chemical–based products."
Another way the company leads in environmental stewardship is by locating manufacturing plants close to the seaweed source, rather than in a central processing facility that requires the raw material to be transported over a long distance. In addition to the Cornwallis and Charlesville plants, Acadian Seaplants has processing facilities in Pennfield, N.B.; Miminigash, P.E.I.; and in Yarmouth, N.S. Some of the plant processes are beautiful in their simplicity: in Yarmouth and Pennfield, decommissioned runways at their local airports were pressed into service as seaweed-drying facilities. The passive solar heat from the blacktop acts as an ideal low-tech drying surface, thereby reducing the requirement for fossil fuels.
"We're prepared to invest in technology, to invest in the development of new products and processes in order to come up with products that are unique, that aren't easily replicated or supported. By doing that, we're able to build a customer base that's quite loyal," says Deveau. "If you're going to be competitive, you either have to be the low-cost producer or you have to have products that are differentiated. In a country like Canada, with our high standard of living, it's very difficult to be the low-cost producer. We needed to add substantial value to our products so that our customers are prepared to pay the price."
— Tom Mason
