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Manufacturing, Quality & Purity

Since the late 1990s the Seagreens company has pioneered the harvesting of human food quality seaweed in Europe. They set new standards of production first in the Norwegian region of Lapland and in recent years with a new facility in the Western islands of Scotland.

Seagreens harvest three closely related species of brown wild wrack seaweed from clean, cold waters. Seagreens® are uniquely certified free of all likely ocean borne contaminants. Unlike land vegetables, the most nutritious seaweeds come from cold climates. Unlike oriental seaweeds, where for example in Japan most seaweed production is on farms in water tanks, Seagreens are harvested in the wild under licence from local land owners and from the British Royal Crown Estate. They are cut by hand or using small ‘paddle-wheel’ cutter boats, then collected and taken immediately to the factory for drying.

Selected living plants are carefully monitored and once re-grown after harvesting they are allowed to reach nutritional and reproduction maturity and then harvested again only once every 3 - 5 years. Seagreens are also distinct in that they meet the stringent water quality and sustainability standards demanaded by European and American Organic standards.

A small number of closely related, shallow water species are harvested for their outstanding, balanced and complementary nutritional profiles. These are dried at low temperatures within 12 hours of harvest to maintain their freshness and quality. To ensure the integrity of nutrients, particularly their complete mineral content, the seaweed is never powdered but produced in fine or larger granular form.

Harvesting times are chosen so as to benefit from seasonal variations in the concentrations of nutrients within the plants. Unlike Seagreens, “most wild seaweeds are a product of industrial scale harvesting for horticultue or their extracts. This is especially true of kelp which is often taken from deep sea ‘kelp forests’ in vast quantities for the alginate industry, and used for many kinds of industrial processes. Since it has not been harvested, let alone processed, specifically for human nutrition, all seaweeds are definitely not equal and many sold into the human food chain are of very inferior quality. Seagreens contain no root or ‘stormcast’ seaweed, no sand, shells or other extraneous material. Nothing is added or extracted.