Caithness seaweed firm to feature on BBC programme

A WICK-based company is to feature on a BBC programme next week. Inside the Factory presenter Cherry Healey visited the Caithness premises of seaweed firm SHORE and with co-founder Peter Elbourne and a team of local harvesters collected and found out about the different types of the product used in food manufacture.

The show looks at how seaweed is used as casings for vegan sausages. Cherry also cooked up some seafood dishes using seaweed with Jim Cowie of The Captain’s Galley in Scrabster.

Mr Elbourne said: "It was a pleasure to welcome Cherry and the BBC film crew to our harvesting operation. They visited us last year and Cherry really rolled up her sleeves and got stuck in. We are a small operation based in one of the most remote communities in the UK but we’re on a mission to bring this ocean superfood to far more people in the UK. It has been a fantastic opportunity for our business to be involved in the programme and has really given us the chance to show what do here and the versatility of seaweed as a serious future food."

The company has been sustainably harvesting and drying seaweed since 2016, turning it into all-natural super grain chips and now also supplies companies across the UK and beyond. Seaweed grows with no need for land, fresh water or fertiliser and absorbs oceanic carbon dioxide.

SHORE has a 15-strong team which works all year round to hand harvest the best seaweed and in 2018 was the first seaweed company in Scotland to put a farm into the sea, focusing on selected species of seaweed that are in high demand but more difficult to harvest from the wild.

At the factory in Wick, the seaweed is sorted, washed and then dried at low temperature to preserve nutrients. It’s then milled to a range of sizes and stored for year-round supply. Last year the team harvested over 75 tonnes across 10 different species.

The company launched its seaweed chips in 2020 and they are stocked in various stores in the UK as well as the USA, Hong Kong and Singapore.

The television programme can be seen on BBC 2 at 8 pm on Tuesday, April 25 and again at 7.30pm on Saturday April 29.

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