Our goal is simple - to be the purest, healthiest and ultimate in umami. From the ocean to your plate, our hands are involved every step of the way. We're the divers harvesting in the water and the packagers and processors back on dry land. We don't overcomplicate, because our sea vegetables are already jam packed with goodness.
Seaweed Wild Harvesting
From the cold pristine waters along the Victorian coastline and around the entrance of Port Phillip Bay we dive for our seaweed, hand harvesting only the premium strong tidal plants that are grown in the first flush of Bass Strait waters entering the bay. With the smallest impact possible we pick only the mature plants, ensuring to leave the remaining crop free to grow and regenerate. Each seaweed plant is hand cut and processed at sea aboard our boat within minutes of harvest using traditional Japanese techniques. By doing so, we maintain the highest nutritional and physical quality of the seaweed plant. Further processing occurs back at our commercial facility where we blend and package our product ranges and send them off to our customers all around Australia.
Seaweed Seasonality
Australia is home to a vast array of seaweeds, some native and others, like Wakame (Undaria pinnatifida), are introduced. They grow according to seasons, just as our vegetables and plants grow on land. The season for Wakame, for example, for harvesting in Australia is between July and November. As seaweed specialists, we investigate crop locations before we begin harvesting to ensure that we do so ethically. Ethical harvesting means the seaweed has reached the optimal stage of its growth cycle and we take only the mature plants, ensuring the remaining crop can continue to grow and thrive.
Mother Nature and the changing global climate has a direct impact on the seasonal timelines and growth cycle of our seaweeds. Environmental conditions such as bouts of uncommon hot weather or huge rainfall events change the atmosphere the seaweed is surviving in. Often this has a negative impact whereby the seaweed cannot endure and dies off. These environmental factors can in turn shorten our harvesting cycles which flow on to affect our stock levels - not something we want to occur. Maintaining stock is paramount to us but it is important to note with a natural product such as ours, reliant on the wild ocean environment it grows in, this can sometimes be beyond our control.