Eco Cascade launch event
The seaweed industry in Scotland the UK is at a significant stage.
There is amazing market opportunity. There is an exponential increase in global demand for seaweed-based products to provide replacement for fossil-fuel plastic and to provide sustainable sourced proteins and nutrients for the human and animal food industries.
UK based products company are mainly at the innovation or start of scale-up stages. They are still feeling their way into their products and seeking to refine their understanding of what they want in terms of species and primary processing – they need suppliers who can be flexible. The UK based farmers are also at that start-up phase, finding their way around best practice to ensure best growth and learning what markets are best suited to their products, locations and brands. Having access to a facility such as EcoCascade is vital to bridging the gaps between the buyers and the producers and enabling industrial scale research into most energy efficient ways forwards.
On 26 April EcoCascade had their official launch event at their premises at Kyle of Lochalsh. This was an excellent chance to bring all the seaweed community across Scotland together and to show off the achievements of the last year.
EcoCascade CIC is a social enterprise working for the seaweed community to provide energy efficient high quality primary processing and research into scale-up issues to enable the emerging seaweed cultivation industry to access the markets for the widest possible range of end point applications. Founded in March 2022 EcoCascade has already established a food grade facility at Kyle of Lochalsh in the Northwest Highlands, providing wash, chop, drying and packaging services as well as business development support creating links between buyers and farmers. EcoCascade have been supported by substantial grant funding from Marine Fund Scotland, won £75,000 in Scottish EDGE (including the IBioIC special award) and raised over £35k in a Crowdfunder which has enabled them to be operational in time for Spring harvest 2023.
The aim is to create a facility containing a range of primary processing equipment, enabling producers to access top quality kit suitable for the demands of all markets with full traceability and LCA determination for every batch. This should help to ensure that both buyers and sellers can swiftly pivot and navigate the steep learning curves as the whole market moves forward to maturity.
The launch event was a spectacular success. More than 75% of the cultivators were in attendance along with most of the significant buyers – from all across the spectrum of products and including the food and bioextracts markets. Getting all these people into the same space along with equipment suppliers and funders to be able to talk nitty-gritty on the next priorities for this community led facility was a really useful experience. Being able to have those discussions literally alongside understanding of the machinery involved to achieve the outcomes at scale gives a reality check that can’t be obtained from on-line discussions. Of course, the beautiful surroundings and the tasty morsels on offer from local chef and the seaweed-based food companies definitely helped!
