A Grassroots Approach to Marketing

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When I first started farming, my, my expectations

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for harvest would be that I would go out

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and do one giant massive harvest, bring everything back,

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sell it at my docks, you know, go inside my house,

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crack open a beer, and that was the end of it.

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But I quickly realized since the, um, market for

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large scale purchases was not as, as big

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as it is in other states, um, that I had the opportunity

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to kind of do smaller batches.

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I don't have a giant walk-in refrigerator, so I kind

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of use the ocean as my refrigerator

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and I will harvest to order.

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So every week, starting in March, um, as soon as I get my,

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uh, food safety regulation tests all complete, uh,

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I will start reaching out to chefs, um,

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and batching my harvest so that I can make a trip out a week

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or maybe two trips out a week.

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I bring my seaweed back in, uh, coolers,

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and then I deliver it directly to the restaurant.

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So it is usually a pretty busy day, go out in the morning,

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deliver in the afternoon, get back home

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to get my kids off the bus,

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All of the other seaweed farmers in the region

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who are in the exact same position that I'm in.

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So it also gave us the opportunity to become friends,

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share ideas, um, share methods, talk about, uh,

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packaging issues that we might have.

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Most importantly though, it allowed us to kind

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of share the efforts of marketing and sales,

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and that collaboration turned into us forming a cooperative.

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So it was the Sugar Kelp Cooperative consists

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of five farmers, and we all just get together once a month

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and brainstorm and share ideas.

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Goal of the cooperative every year right now is

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to continue putting on this New England Kelp Harvest Week so

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that we can all boost our sales at the same time,

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the cooperative is also kind

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of more broadly educating the public through kind

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of grassroots marketing.

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And we're being really consistent with how we message,

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how we talk about kelp, how we suggest people eat it,

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how we tell people how to handle it, how to store it.

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Um, we're kind of sharing resources.

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So if I make a video about, um, blanching seaweed at home,

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all of the other farmers can have access to it.

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They don't need to recreate, uh, all

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of these assets essentially.

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And, um, hopefully one day we'll come up

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with a really cool product that can help

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support the cooperative as well.

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And it helps all of the local farmers make a little bit

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of money while we figure out how

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to grow the market in other ways.

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And probably one of the biggest reliefs of working

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with these other farmers, because everybody knows a couple

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people and we've kind of turned that small little handful

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of chefs that we all know individually into a critical mass,

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which is been very helpful for us.

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Um, it is, uh, that part is, is pretty brutal.

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It is, um, old school kind of sales, sales

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and marketing that you have to just go knock on doors

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and, um, make a lot of spreadsheets

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and, uh, really get very involved in, um,

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what these chefs are kind of following on social media

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and the news and things like that.