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Seaweed company with base in Wick wants its brand to be a household name


By Gordon Calder

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A SEAWEED processing company, which has a base in Wick, plans to develop its brand into a household name over the next five years.

New Wave Foods, which trades as Shore Seaweed, already has established retail links for its plant-based snacks with supermarkers across Scotland, including the Co-op in Thurso.

Peter Elbourne hopes the company's brand will become a household name. Picture: Callum Mackay.
Peter Elbourne hopes the company's brand will become a household name. Picture: Callum Mackay.

The company is also in discussions with a number of other national retailers and exports its products to countries, including Ireland, Switzerland, Poland and recently has secured orders from as far away as the Middle East.

Shore Seaweed, which has just celebrated its fifth anniversary of its first harvesting at Nybster - between Auckengill and John O'Groats - hopes to keep growing as joint managing director, Peter Elbourne, explained.

He said: "Our aim over the next five years is to turn our local seaweed into a mainstream superfood and develop the Shore brand into a household name. That will be based on delivering tasty plant-based seaweed snacks and foods that appeal to the growing number of mainstream health-conscious consumers, who are increasingly seeking sustainably sourced foods.

"To support this we will continue to grow our seaweed harvesting and processing capabilities in the local area, in a way that keeps sustainability at the heart of everything we do."

Mr Elbourne recalled that five years ago the company completed its first harvest of seaweed when 135kilograms was collected. Since then, the team has sustainably harvested 235 tonnes of fresh Caithness seaweed.

He said the backbone of Shore's team are staff such as Mike Harper, Stewart Harper and Dave Parry who were part of that first harvest. They not only collect the seaweed but help process it at the company's Wick factory so it is ready for despatch to customers in the UK and Europe. They have each hand-harvested and carried more than 50 wet tonnes of seaweed in the past five years.

"Our success is based on sustainably producing quality seaweed and the hard work of Mike, Dave and Stewart has been central to this. It is the effort put in by our dedicated harvest team that underpins our operations and, after five years, what they don’t know about seaweed harvesting isn’t worth knowing", added Mr Elbourne.

Shore, which harvests and wholesales the seaweed and produces a range of snacks and foods with the plant as the main ingredient, employs 15 people at its operations in Wick, Alness and Glasgow.

As previously reported, the company received a funding boost of £1.7 million after getting £600,000 from the Scottish Investment Bank and a similar sum from private investors. A further £500,000 is to come from Highlands and Islands Enterprise, although it will be "drawn down over a number of years", according to the company.

The funding helped Shore to get its new range of products into the retail market. Before its snacks were only available in health food shops and online.

The edible-seaweed business, which has its headquarters in Alness, revamped its bagged-snack range and expanded it with several new flavours in a bid to increase its share of the plant-based food market. The investment was expected to create five new jobs at the Wick site.

The company uses four types of seaweed for its products. Apart from developing its range of snacks and foodstuffs, it also sells the seaweed to other food manufacturers.


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