#29 - Briana Warner @ Atlantic Sea Farms

Episode Recap:

ReGen Brands Recap #29 - Is Kelp The Most Regenerative Food? - (RECAP LINK)

Episode Transcript:

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated with AI and is not 100% accurate.

Kyle Krull - 0:00:16
Welcome to The ReGen Brands Podcast. This is a place for consumers, operators and investors to learn about the consumer brands supporting regenerative agriculture and how they're changing the world. This is your host Kyle, joined by my Co-host AC. Who Is going to take us into the episode.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:00:33
On this episode we have Bri Warner who is the CEO at Atlantic Sea Farms. Atlantic Sea Farms is supporting regenerative agriculture with its various regenerative seaweed products grown using regenerative aquaculture practices. In this episode we learn about the deep fisherman, livelihood and economic development vision driving the company. We get educated on what makes growing seagrass regenerative and. We discussed with Bri how we can scale vertically. Integrated, regenerative and women run businesses like Atlantic Sea Farms and others. Bri is an absolute powerhouse of a human. She dropped so much knowledge on us that it resulted in our longest episode ever. But it is well worth your time and it was fascinating and inspiring to get to know her, the brand, and their big plans for the future. Let's dive in.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:00:55
What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of The ReGen Brands Podcast. Very excited today to have our first Ocean based brand and we have Bri Warner from Atlantic Sea Farms with us. So welcome Bri.

Briana Warner - 0:01:31
So psyched to be here guys. Thanks for having me today.

Kyle Krull - 0:01:35
Absolutely. For anybody who's listened to Episode Zero, they know that I was a dive master in a previous life. I grew up in Southern California near the ocean. The ocean is near and dear to my heart. So I am incredibly stoked to have our first regenerative aquaculture brand on the pod so we can kind of share that story and the power of kelp with our audience. So super, super excited. But before we dive into all the cool stuff and all the origin story and like that brief, for those who are unfamiliar with Atlantic Sea farms, give us a quick. Run down What products do you produce? Where can people find you today?

Briana Warner - 0:02:09
So you can find Atlantic Sea Farms products and retail locations across the country, particular your natural and organic grocery stores like Whole Foods, Sprouts, Moms, Wegmans Fresh Market, Fresh Thyme, You know, kind of anywhere where you can find natural groceries. And we produce several different products. You can head over to where you buy your kimchis or sauerkrauts. For our fermented seaweed salad, which is an analog to that bright green seaweed salad that has all sorts of stuff that you don't want to know what's in it that you get sushi restaurants. Ours is it for as the traditionally barrel fermented fresh seaweed that's delicious. As well as a seaweed based kimchi, the first of its kind as far as I know. I just got back from Korea and I saw no seaweed kimchi's which I was shocked at and then I then we then you can go to your freezer section where if you check out your veggie burgers, we just launched a sea veggie burger which you guys got to have a few weeks ago. Yeah and it was.

Kyle Krull - 0:03:09
Phenomenal. It was probably one of the best veggie burgers I've ever had in my life. No joke.

Briana Warner - 0:03:13
All.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:03:13
The products were really good, really good.

Briana Warner - 0:03:15
Thank you. People talk about our sea veggie burger is the kind of product that tastes a whole lot like the veggie burgers of old that actually tasted like vegetables in.

Kyle Krull - 0:03:25
Real that were made of food instead of, yes, seed oil.

Briana Warner - 0:03:28
Exactly, exactly. It's all full ingredients and then you can head over to your smoothie section as well, where we have Blueberry Kelp cubes and Cranberry Kelp cubes for your everyday smoothie.

Kyle Krull - 0:03:39
We're going to talk about some of this a little bit later, but the challenges of marketing a brand in various aisles but before we get there. I want like, I I I do. And I don't want to ask you this question because I love the seaweed salad sushi restaurants and you just sort of like killed it potentially. So what is in those that we don't want to know about?

Briana Warner - 0:04:00
So all the same thing that's in peeps, for example, that blue 5 and yellow one. And you know, all that stuff like seaweed is not that color. Come on, if you were in the ocean diving Kyle and you saw something that was that color, wouldn't you be terrified?

Kyle Krull - 0:04:17
That is vibrant, bright green seagrasses before, but it's a good point. Like to see it on your plate who knows how many days, years, months later. OK, OK. Yep.

Briana Warner - 0:04:29
It's lots of dyes. It's also imported, dried, and then rehydrated. And because it's rehydrated, it's like. You know, it's exactly and and then a bunch of colors, they're added to it. And there's also some other things that people demonize that they shouldn't, like MSG, which is actually really delicious. We don't use it, but you know, that's been bastardized for a number of years for perceptions. But there's also a lot of other preservatives in there that make if you can keep seaweed salad in your refrigerator without any fermentation or pickling for four months, there's something wrong. With the food, there's something that that's not natural there. So our seaweed salad is fresh. It's blanched, shredded immediately, barrel fermented, with no accelerators.

Briana Warner - 0:05:04
We do it literal barrels. We mix everything by and then it gets fermented and it's got all those healthy probiotics, but also has that delicious kind of natural crunch and a little bit of a green color because when we blanch it, it turns it green. So no dyes, no preservatives, just really good natural food.

Kyle Krull - 0:05:35
Well, I'm really glad that, you know, we we killed the sushi seaweed salad, but you gave us an alternative at the same time. So it's not like it's completely moved from our lives. So that I appreciate that kind of like 1-2 combo.

Briana Warner - 0:05:48
It's, I mean it's delicious to get this stuff out there and be able to show people that, you know, right now there's three ways that people eat seaweed in the United States. It's dried into, you know, Dashi's and things, which is a delicious way to eat seaweed. Seaweed snacks and or bright green seaweed salad and then there's of course nori wraps for sushi. But that's you know, that's a different variety but you know that's that's how people think that that you can eat seaweed. That's three ways. There are thousands of others And so when you say where can you find us, you can also find us. Our products are in thorn nutraceuticals, green drinks.

Briana Warner - 0:06:05
Their novenas I drink.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:06:31
That.

Briana Warner - 0:06:32
It's so.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:06:33
Good every day.

Briana Warner - 0:06:34
There you go. So you can you're getting kelp in there. Same with like Navidas just came out with a super green super, you know like a sea green blend. Mind Blown Seafood company. Plant based seafood company with their blind Blow brand is using it in their plant based scallops, their plant based crab cakes. You can even get it in plastic bags and plastic straws with lollyware and Sway who are using it as a component into their bioplastic. So I just named sort of our our place that people see us. But there's so many ways that our seaweed is being used beyond just sort of the everyday use.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:07:10
Love that. And I mean, it's so excited to dive more just into the utility and also kind of like how seaweed is grown and why it's regenerative and all those things which, you know, but I want to, I want to start back because. The, the story, the brands, very personal story really with your path, Bri. And we got a little background on you before that episode. And I'm like is this a woman one for president or is she running like, you know, an ocean based CPG brand? Like what's is this one's been a diplomat. She's the kelp queen, You know, she's got it going on. So just take us through like your personal journey and how Atlantic Sea Farms came to be.

Briana Warner - 0:07:43
That's really nice of you to say. I think I am good in my lane of trying to produce regenerative food. But really what we are, we are trying to create a movement way beyond just sort of a food product. And I think that is something that's really different about us is that what we're doing. If we do it right, we've proven something that others haven't And it's not about kelp, it's kelp is part is, is the is part of the solution. But really what we're trying to prove is that. Climate change adaptation and mitigation can come by relying on the people that you know already already are working, I think. So let me let me rephrase that so much in climate change adaptation and mitigation strategy, we think about throwing robots at it. We think about these big tech solutions, these big ideas that millionaires and billionaires throw money at to talk about how they are solving global climate change by growing. Giant wind towers and planting giant kelp farms. Or, you know, the ideas are so unachievable. And I think often we approach climate change and food as if we either can't do anything because we're not billionaires or we have to.

Briana Warner - 0:08:38
Always look to these kind of moons shot solutions for answers to something that we actually have the answer to right in our backyard. And it's not just us. It's also just looking to the people who are really talented and skilled all over the United States and elsewhere. But I I'll just speak for us in the US like our biggest richness in the US is our people. It's not our land. It's not our technology, it's us and.

Briana Warner - 0:09:01
So we so often overlook that. And my background, I'm from Pennsylvania and from coal country. You know, I've seen the end of natural resources really hit communities hard and I've seen people put their head in the sand and pretends like it wasn't happening, even though the writing has been on the wall for ages. And I came from in an area where there's there's no hope, honestly. And we're 30.

Briana Warner - 0:09:28
40 years out now from there being viable natural resource based industries and people are still waiting for the white whale to come in. And I, you know was a diplomat for a number of years. I worked in economic development and I came to Maine about 10 years ago and what was really exciting to be about Maine. There's a lot of things that are exciting to be about me and I feel like if I should have any job it should be like carrying the banner of of like me.

Kyle Krull - 0:10:20
The state of Maine.

Briana Warner - 0:10:24
Because I just have so many good things to say about it not being of the place. But you know not only is it beautiful, not only do we have these amazing resources and all the reasons that people want to go to Maine, but what we also has is if you lookout of the coast we have this rocky gorgeous clean. Nutrient dense coastline. We also have 4000 plus lobster license holders that are making their income on the water and they're doing it successfully. 10 of the best years of lobster have been in the last 20. They're reinvesting in conservation ethics into their own industry that is making that industry boom. So we're seeing more lobsters in the past ten years than we have before. There's a darker side to that, which is because of the world around us.

Briana Warner - 0:10:39
Nothing to do with the lobster industry itself. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 98% of oceans in the world. Wow.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:11:17
And no matter.

Briana Warner - 0:11:18
No matter what we do to conserve this industry, lobster larvae will no longer survive at the rate that they are now at some point in the future and so. That setting that up like economic development, like we could stick our head in the sand or the water however you want to look at it. Yeah, and pretend like this, kind of like that. We did everything right, which we did in this industry. We've really invested in our people. We have 4000 plus lobster license holders that are individual owner operators. There's no big fleets. If you are fishing on your boat, you must be the license holder.

Briana Warner - 0:11:29
There's no sort of like big men dominating the industry. There are these 4000 individual business owners that are keeping working waterfront moving in Maine that you know you go to Oregon or California and it's yachts, you go to Maine, it's locked roads. We definitely have our share of yachts, which we'd like to, but we we have a lot of working waterfront. We have more than most other States and so. Like, how do we keep that, you know, and how do we take the amazing human capital that we have on our coast and and have them look at themselves and say, OK, what can we do to diversify? Because we want lobster to always be there. It will likely always be there in some way or another, but it's going to be changing and we're overly reliant on one species and that is dangerous for whether there's climate change or not. That's dangerous. It leaves us very vulnerable.

Briana Warner - 0:12:20
So how can we be looking at our incredible human capacity, in our incredible natural capacity of more coastline than the state of California, and think about how we can diversify in the face of climate change and adapt?

Anthony Corsaro - 0:13:01
Are you just through a lot of stats? You just threw a lot of stats at me that I wasn't aware of That coastline, more coastline than the state of California. That's crazy. I didn't know that. And I want to circle back to something you started with, which is like. We're spending billions of dollars on direct air capture and it's like direct air capture has been around for billions of years, bro. It's called photosynthesis.

Briana Warner - 0:13:18
Yeah.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:13:19
Like, it already exists, all right? And it doesn't cost any money. Actually, it's The funny thing about it, but. That is, that's incredible. So, you know, how did you get involved in, you know, solving those problems for the lobster industry that led to this? Like, what was the next step to you seeing all that? And then it I get turning.

Kyle Krull - 0:13:36
Into this I want to go one step before that, before we went like solving those problems, like why did you want to solve those problems? Why was that important to you?

Anthony Corsaro - 0:13:42
Yeah.

Briana Warner - 0:13:43
Yeah. And I I think on the coastline of California, because I can see Kyle's California being like, what the hell?

Kyle Krull - 0:13:51
I'm not kidding you.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:13:53
Make this make.

Briana Warner - 0:13:54
Sense I can see. Head tilting. So it's because we have all these inlets and islands that give us more coasts? Yep, Yep. But I saw. Look at the map.

Kyle Krull - 0:14:03
It must be those, like cookie cutter inlets that go sideways. Yeah, all the.

Briana Warner - 0:14:07
Time. Yeah, no, that's exactly it. I love that I saw it. I see Californians go through this every time. Like, no, but we're the biggest when you look.

Kyle Krull - 0:14:16
At When you look at a map, it's like your brain doesn't make sense of that.

Briana Warner - 0:14:19
But if.

Kyle Krull - 0:14:20
It's a detailed enough map, which mine probably isn't, yeah. Anyways.

Briana Warner - 0:14:26
Yeah, but I will. But I will say who really Trump's us both is Alaska. Alaska has more coastline than than I think California being combined. So that they they got us on that. So why did why did I want to help, why did I want to get involved. I think when I came back to from Maine and I saw, you know I saw how we kind of always wait and I felt a little bit helpless as a diplomat just being like God, this isn't what I thought it was going to be. We're always waiting. We're always reactive. We're never sort of. Proactively getting out in front of things. So when I came to Maine, I fell in love with the place immediately. My husband's a Mainer and so I'm a lot and that's that's why we came here. But the, you know, the the place is the kind of place that we all want to raise our kids in because trees but you know like people don't like. One time I was out an island. I think for an illustrative point I was out on an island and I.

Briana Warner - 0:14:54
It was pouring, so I couldn't walk where I was going. So I called one of the Islanders and said, like, hey, can you come pick me up? And she said, I'm not on the island, but you could use my car. And I was like, well, how do I get your kids? She's like, she's like, they're in the car. Like your keys are in the car. Like what She was like, yeah, what if someone needs it? And like, I think, like that is that is sort of like the communities that we live in. And it's, it's the it's one of those last places, the United States, where where you feel.

Briana Warner - 0:15:23
Like, you know it's it's the kind of place you want to replicate. It's the kind of place you want to be your neighbors check on you. It's a community that supports each other. It's it's a place where like niceness prevails. It's you know and I think and nature is everywhere and food is everywhere and people invest in beautiful things. And I think it was it was Anthony Bourdain who said main people invest in.

Briana Warner - 0:15:53
You know, beautiful food and beautiful and simple, beautiful things that make their everyday like it's just a place where values small things and and you know, so for me it felt like this place that, you know, you want to be, you want to be part of, you want to be part of the fabric. And I had gotten a job as an economic development director for an organization that was really focused on making sure that island and coastal communities in Maine were preserved. Into the future and allowing people to kind of be who they've always been. Because there is because it is a place that everyone wants to be. There's a lot of downward pressure from people who want second homes on the coast of May. People who want to come up and see the coast for two months is the two weeks is their playground and then go back down to their house in Boston or Philadelphia or New York or whatever. And and they kind of take it as this token of a place. Not as a place where real people where we all kind of see this this way of life as being something that's part of our.

Briana Warner - 0:16:46
Every day. And so there's a lot of downward pressure on housing. There's a lot of, you know, gentrification of the coast that's taking up working a really important and irreplaceable working waterfront. There's there's a lot of those conversations going on. So working for the organization that was looking at saying like how can we keep year round coastal communities.

Briana Warner - 0:17:16
As these schools go from 60 kids kids to 30 kids to 20 kids, like at what point do we lose these year round communities that mean everything to who we are and the way that we do that is making sure they're year round viable, rewarding incomes and lobster right now is keeping these communities thriving and. You know, we are all equally concerned, including those within the lobster industry, about how long that will last at the level that it currently is. So I started working with fishermen along the coast and saying like OK guys, what can we do to diversify? And it became very clear to me that oysters, mussels, seaweed and scallop aquaculture were a way to both give back to the environment, make the environment better, provide people with nutrient dense. Regenerative foods and help people adapt to climate change by bleeding into the skills that they're really good at and the and the skills have to continue to be in these heritage industries and be be who they are. You know you can't take a fisherman and put them behind a hotel desk. Tourism industry but #2 because like.

Kyle Krull - 0:18:45
Nobody would come to Maine.

Briana Warner - 0:18:47
Nobody would come to Maine. They'd be like, Oh my gosh, that was a terrible experience. But also, that's not what they're good at. It it's not. And that's what we often. Do like, why can't coal miners make solar panels? And so I, you know, with seaweed in particular, it's a perfect offseason income. It's complementary to lobster. It uses the same equipment that people use to lobster, same, you know, general staffing like a sternman, you know, same kind of territory of water. Offseason. But there was no buyer in the country and no one making seaweed into products. So that was 2018 and the entire country grew 30,000 pounds of seaweed at that time. But millions? That's it. Nothing. Thirty £30,000 total and we are importing 10s of millions of pounds for tax sushi. Exactly right. And so it felt to me like.

Briana Warner - 0:19:18
It was a great opportunity. So I raised some funding and we started a fund basically with this coastal organization to invest in the first commercial seaweed farm in the country. The company was named Ocean approved and say, OK, let's expand your seat, your supply chain to include fishermen. And after about a year the there was a founder transition and I was asked to take over as CEO. And that was 2019 and here we are in 2023. And this year we worked with 27 partner farmers. We're just starting our new harvest season as of this week and we plan to process to process around £1.3 million of Cal.

Kyle Krull - 0:20:26
Wow. Let's go say.

Briana Warner - 0:20:29
Yeah, yeah.

Kyle Krull - 0:20:31
That's crazy. My mind can't do the math because the numbers are too different like £30,000 to 1.3 like what's the growth factor there?

Briana Warner - 0:20:38
It's a lot like it's too many times. Lots of times, yeah. We always are. Like we're the vast majority of seaweed grown in the United States, line grown seaweed in the United States. But we're still .001% of all the line grown seaweed grown in the world. So we have a lot of growing to do and we have a lot of opportunity. And I think, you know, what we really do is we produce the seeds. So we're super vertically integrated. We produce the seeds.

Briana Warner - 0:20:40
Back to like, why did I do this? The answer is how do I make it look like lobster? To get fishermen to come in, we need to provide the bait. It's the seed, so we produce all the seed inhouse. There's also no one else I could buy it from, so I can't be like, let me just go to that.

Kyle Krull - 0:21:20
How do you produce kelpsey?

Anthony Corsaro - 0:21:22
Yeah, yeah.

Briana Warner - 0:21:23
Yeah. Well, there's what we're doing now and what we want to do in the future. And what we're doing now is basically putting on a snorkel. And you know going going to the beds that we know are really, really healthy in the fall. So around August and literally diving on those beds, picking up the best mom and dads that we think would be, you know, great parent material for our our land grown seaweed and we harvest around £10 for every £400,000 we grow. So we're really not touching the beds, it's like no. No disintegration of the beds at all. Can I come?

Kyle Krull - 0:22:03
Volunteer to help do this like this.

Briana Warner - 0:22:05
It's so fun.

Kyle Krull - 0:22:05
Day I would love to come.

Briana Warner - 0:22:08
Honestly Kyle, this year my staff didn't bring me along and like very, very clear that they didn't need my help anymore. Which I was like what? Like I've been doing this for four years, but apparently I've not needed any work so it is a fun day.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:22:25
Those beds are natural beds and then you're using the seed for the line grown, is that correct?

Briana Warner - 0:22:30
Yep. So Kelp starts to feel real sexy around August and starts producing. Kind of. You needed to start reproducing. And so we go and look for kind of the healthiest seed, the largest.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:22:43
Calc Sexy Ass Co.

Briana Warner - 0:22:44
Sexy calc like down there and you're like pointing at your colleague like look at this one, this one looks ready and then you bring it in and you know if you were if you. We're letting the seaweed just sort of let go of it seed tissue throughout the year. You know, in the water it would slowly release. What we do is we make it feel like it just got washed up on the beach and it's like, OK, I'm going to that, I'm going to release everything. So we base, it's a very natural process. You know, we just put it in a dark cooler.

Briana Warner - 0:22:54
And then the next day we bring it out. We we what what we do is if they call it sporing it off, we'd let that we basically let the spores release into natural seawater that we just grabbed from the ocean. And then the little kind of sporlings look for something to attach to. So they swim around and we give it to PC pipes with twine wrapped around it and it looks to kind of attach to twine. It grabs onto that twine and holds on and that's where it will grow for the next six months. So we bring it. We keep it in our nursery for about 45 days, No inputs, just fresh seawater, 12 hours daylight, 12 hours night. And then we give it to our partner farmers about, you know, 45 days later. And it's a PVC pipe with kind of like brown. It almost looks like, I don't know, almost looks like.

Briana Warner - 0:23:39
You know, hair almost out on a tube, you give it to farmers. We give our seed for free to our farmers. They tie it to the end of of a mooring line and then they unravel that at 1000 for 1000 feet horizontally, attached it to the other mooring and then let it sit for the next six months. They check it, they tighten it, but that's how it grows. No water, no arable lands, no pesticides, no inputs.

Briana Warner - 0:24:07
And then?

Anthony Corsaro - 0:24:37
What depth? What depth? Like are people like hitting these or like is there a way that they could get damaged?

Briana Warner - 0:24:43
There definitely is ways we mark them really, really, really well. So and also if you're if you're boating in January and Maine then you're not paying attention to where you're going. If you miss the buoys then you're doing something very, very wrong and you shouldn't be out there -, 10 degree weather. But you know they yeah, it's it's nasty. So we have everything really well marked. It's about 7 feet under the water. So it's there's very little visual impact at all other than mooring balls and then it grows it around. We usually have those set around 30 to 50 feet for the. So you know it grows 1012 feet long by the end of the year and we just started harvest season now it's it's April 20th so.

Kyle Krull - 0:25:29
Super exciting. There's a few things I need to expand on here.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:25:32
Fascinating.

Kyle Krull - 0:25:34
Yeah, I mean.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:25:35
Fascinating.

Kyle Krull - 0:25:35
Aquaculture is so cool. And I I read Eat Like a Fish by Brent Smith a while back and that was like my indoctrination into aquaculture and it was like absolutely mind blowing the coolest book I've ever read. But even prior to us talking about that, what I really liked about something you said about how the power of changes within the people and like your statements that were just so empowering about how individuals have the ability to make a huge impact. And I think that's really important to call out for. You know why we're doing the Regent Brand Podcast is because we want to educate individuals that they can make purchasing decisions that can have a huge positive impact and that power really does come down to the individual. So just wanted to highlight that really like aligned with a lot of what we talked about and the other folks we bring on to this podcast. So that was super cool. Number two, we sort of skipped some of the, I mean we we briefly covered I think you mentioned that the power of bivalves and regenerative aquaculture.

Kyle Krull - 0:26:02
Kind of like, give us some stats. Talk about, you know, you know, how did you first learn that these were regenerative? What was appealing to it or about it to you? How did you convey that message to the fishermen? Walk us through that process.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:26:43
And like what what about the agronomics of actually producing these, like makes them regenerative and like it's so good because I think that's that's the money piece, right?

Briana Warner - 0:26:51
Yeah, it is. I think you know, there's. I always get this sort of superior attitude when I'm on like on a panel with like someone who's like I do regenerative beef. I'm like, OK, regenerative beef, like, like, sure, it's better than not regenerative meat. But like let's talk about actual regeneration and I think seaweed is, you know, people know generally that seaweed is good for the environment. I think in some ways it is oversold. I think you hear a lot about carbon, Carbon sequestration, for example. You know, you guys know this, but maybe some of your your listeners might not. That sequestration means permanently stored away, right? When you eat something, your body is not a carbon sink. We can't just continue to add carbon to our body and it just gets loaded up there until the day we die. And then, you know, if we ate a ton of seaweed salad.

Briana Warner - 0:27:20
You know, when we were 88, maybe that works, but, like, throughout your lifetime. But what is really impressive about seaweed is more, you know, it's it's actually kind of more interesting than carbon sequestration. And I think right now we're all just looking for that silver bullet. So that sequestration piece is what everybody wants to talk about because it feels like, oh, here's an answer, we're gonna solve climate change, sequestration. And people kind of go to that what it's when the reality is the solution is regenerative cattle, it's regenerative vegetables, it's all.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:28:24
Cycling. It's cycling, not sequestration.

Briana Warner - 0:28:26
All of it. It's all better.

Kyle Krull - 0:28:30
To your point, everybody's get that carbon tunnel vision and I was actually really encouraged by a lot of the conversations on Climate Day for Expo W is it felt to me like the industry was kind of. Taking a step away from that carbon tunnel vision and.

Briana Warner - 0:28:42
People are starting to talk about.

Kyle Krull - 0:28:43
These cycles, which is really, really important, It really needs to happen.

Briana Warner - 0:28:47
It's exactly. I mean I think it's it's. You know, it's as if we're looking at our kids in school and saying they have to read Tolstoy in order to be good students. And the kids are like, I don't know how to do math. I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to be a person. I don't know. You know, we just like.

Kyle Krull - 0:29:04
Give me Toy Story and that's like.

Briana Warner - 0:29:06
You give me a Toy Story, like, you know, we're just like missing the whole puzzle, like we're missing the development. Like we're that's one indicator of a lot of different things that we need to do. And what kelp does is, you know, it's regenerative in more ways than just environmentally. But on the environmental side, it's regenerative and that it actually removes carbon nitrogen from the water column. So where it grows, we've done several different studies with different organizations that have shown by drawing carbon and nitrogen out of the water it is actually. Reducing the pH of the water. So for those who aren't sort of like super into the conversation around ocean acidification, basically as you all know we have a lot of carbon, excess carbon in the air. What most people don't know is when that heart carbon hits the ocean, which is more than 70% of our of our world, that ocean absorbs that carbon and it changes the pH, it makes it more acidic.

Briana Warner - 0:29:36
That acidity works a whole lot like how you would put Pepsi on metal. You see that acidic that you know. When you put acidic things on, you know, basic things, they erode. So just assume Cocacola sitting on your hubcap for an hour, You're going to see some migration for three weeks. You're going to see some rust.

Briana Warner - 0:30:03
Then you're going to see a bull eaten through. It's the same thing with shell bearing organisms in the ocean as that ocean becomes more acidic, shell bearing organisms like bivalves, like more importantly phytoplankton which is producing most of the oxygen in the air. We thinks it's trees. It's not. It's phytoplankton. You know, they're seeing that erosion and that you know, heart it's makes it harder for them to survive because they're putting all of their energy into making sure that they're rebuilding their shells.

Briana Warner - 0:30:26
Rather than muscle strength, rather than they're sort of like meat, or in the in the case of phytoplankton, just fighting to survive.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:31:04
Wow.

Briana Warner - 0:31:04
So when you plant kelp in the water, what you're doing is you're drawing that carbon and nitrogen out of the water within that Halo. So I want to make sure I'm not over selling it. It is within the Halo of the kelp farm. We have done trials where we've done muscles within the Kate help Kalo on the outside and then far away that the ocean is very, very, very, very big. So you know, like the water, water moves, so planting muscles, you know quarter mile away, we don't see effects. But within that Halo, you're seeing massive effects. In fact, you're seeing shell strength almost double as strong in only six months. You're seeing muscle mass increase significantly. And that's both a combination of the fact that the muscles are able to put their energy into their meat rather than their shell rebuilding their shell, but also because they're feeding.

Briana Warner - 0:31:25
Excuse me, feeding from the detritus of the kelp that is kind of feeding marine organisms there. We're also seeing ecosystem services in general and then more importantly, you know, maybe not more importantly, but equally importantly when it's being served on your plate, it is anything, it is replaced, it is better than any single thing you could eat.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:32:17
Spicy take there.

Briana Warner - 0:32:18
For the environment like it will no water, no air will land. Making the ocean better. And you know, there there's like no downside to it. So Even so when you're replacing broccoli, you know, people are like, replacing me. I'm like, cool. Replacing me. Sure. Also replacing spinach, which used water.

Briana Warner - 0:32:25
Pesticides, arable land, you know, it's it's better than any other thing. I have this fight with my Muscle Farmer colleagues and my oyster farmer colleagues as they would argue that they are equal to seaweed. I say they're a little less, but you know, three of those combined, you know, by aquacultured bivalves and aquacultured seaweed are the best foods on the planet that you can eat for the planet and then you add to that. The adaptive side for fishermen being able to diversify their income in the face of climate change and then youth have a truly regenerative food.

Kyle Krull - 0:33:16
That That's extraordinary. It's ego first.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:33:19
It makes me think about like, right, the American Prairie grasslands, we would have that same system with bison and other species, right, Which would be like the what is the actual natural, you know, inputs and outputs of the system, which I think on land it's much harder to replicate or kind of. I don't want to use the word industrialized, but like mechanize or produce lots of food with whereas it seems like this system we can replicate that natural biodiversity and those relationships and actually like do it in a more high production way, which I think is awesome because we need to produce a bunch of food.

Briana Warner - 0:33:51
Yeah. I mean, the more kelp there is, the better it is for the environment. And I think that's that's kind of incongruent with most things that we grow. Yeah. You know, like and and I mean there's certainly an environmental caring capacity. We see it in China. You know, with Korea, however, they produce 33 million tons of seaweed and they could produce so much more and the environment would continue to improve. Yeah, China, China has, you know. They have reached that environmental caring capacity. But I can tell you in the United States there is no world in which we could plant even 1/4 as much as China just from a social perspective. So we will not get, we will never get to that environmental caring capacity and in the meantime to get there, which is, you know, they produce billions.

Briana Warner - 0:34:26
Billions of pounds, but just getting there, you know, every sort of Korea's water where the kelp farms are. And I just got back from there on a trip with the World Wildlife Fund because conservation groups are sponsoring growth of as much kelp as possible because they recognize how good it is for the environment. They wanted us to fly out to Korea. Which World Wildlife Fund got us out there. To say, like, this is the scale where it's still even more than this, would be better for Korea.

Briana Warner - 0:34:47
But you can go, you can go on a boat for 40 minutes and still not see the end of farms and it's it's in the in the water is is you know regenerating with with it every time. So I think I think it kelp is one of those exceptions say with oysters and mussels where you could really you you know we could as as consumers should not only be eating it because it's good for us Kelp and mussels and oysters are super nutrient dense. But also, the more we eat and the more we demand, the more can be grown and the better it is for the environment and for the for coastal communities.

Kyle Krull - 0:35:51
Totally. And I want to touch based on the ocean acidification piece and I really appreciate you educating us there and this is a theory that's popped up in my brain. I'm hoping you can confirm or tell me I'm completely off the mark. You know, from a land inputs perspective, two of the worst things that happened with phosphorus and estrogen is the runoff that ends up in the ocean causing carbon dead zones. And contributing to ocean acidification and based on what you just said, it feels like if we could start kelp farming in some of these major runoff areas like the Gulf of Mexico, could that help to sort of mitigate some of that crisis there because it's utilizing the nitrogen to grow the kelp instead?

Briana Warner - 0:36:31
There's a lot of people looking into kelp as a phytoremediation tool. It's not what we're doing. You know, we're working on food sources you don't want to have food from. You know, like think about the Billion dollar or billion oyster project or million oyster project. I forget the.

Kyle Krull - 0:36:47
Exact name of the new.

Briana Warner - 0:36:48
York, Yeah. And I I I can't vouch for that project one way or another. I don't know a lot about it. But think about that concept of like, but you know, putting a bunch of oysters in, you're not going to eat them. Right.

Kyle Krull - 0:36:59
Right. It helps to clean up the environment. And just to explain that to the listeners, essentially people are putting bivalves, oysters, mussels, etc. Into contaminated harbors and bodies of water to help to clean it up. And and what Bri's saying is like, people don't want to consume that because you know, these these oysters are consuming all of that pollution essentially. But they can still do a really great environmental service by cleaning up that body of water.

Briana Warner - 0:37:24
That's exactly right now. Now kelp does not absorb. As much like you know, it doesn't absorb as much the environment as bivalves for example. So oysters are kind of bringing up a lot more intake. What kelp can do is feed off nitrogen and to your point about kind of fertilizer outflow, it's the nitrogen that it can take up. Though both the good thing and the bad thing about kelp is it's not, you know, taking up a bunch of crap from the water which makes it really good to eat, but but we farm it in super clean cold waters anyway, but it can to uptake nitrogen. So there is some work going on in like New York for example. Right now I'm not New York City, but kind of along the coast here like Montauk and places like that where people are looking at fighter remediation. I think we're probably two or three years out from really understanding.

Briana Warner - 0:37:45
What KELP can do for that purpose, it's not our business model, but I think it's exciting to potentially see some of that happening.

Kyle Krull - 0:38:22
Super cool.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:38:24
Yeah, Brie, I want to make sure we talk about the commercial side of this, right. This has been an amazing kind of education on the backside, economic development, the agronomics. But let's talk about you kind of went into this with the vertical integration and we kind of stopped at the agronomy, right. And I'm assuming building a brand was part of that vertical integration to have this whole system to commercialize these products and you know, basically. Basically build that economic engine. I'd love to have you educate us on kind of what is commercializing this looks like. Why is that a challenge, I'm guessing based on kind of societal diets and like people just being uneducated about these foods. What does your channel mix look like? Just talk to us about like actually building this brand and what that's been done.

Briana Warner - 0:39:02
That's a cakewalk. I mean, easiest part of the job. People just, you know, when they sit down for dinner think, you know, I want kelp. You know, there's there's a lot of education that needs to be done. I mean it's it's new to the United States and you know, I it's not new to every population in the United States. Obviously there's a lot of particularly Asian American communities that have. Not really relied on seaweed for a really long time to be part of their.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:39:33
Diet eating like when you say China Princess so much. Like how do they eat it like?

Briana Warner - 0:39:38
I'm and everything. Everything really. You know, it's a little bit in soup, a little bit in seasoning. It's a little bit, I mean get it on a Geary, get a tempura, get a rice gold, get a kimchi. Like it's it's in every everything, you know, just a little bit of mommy. And the reason is because American. I mean a bust on American diets for a second here, but like until about 10 years ago. If you said umami, people would be like, what's that we had? I've got different tastes. Umami like the depth of our food was so weak. It was so like just put salts on it. Salt is not umami. And now, like Japanese food is taking off, Korean food is taken off, Chinese food is.

Briana Warner - 0:40:00
You know, coming to America in a more Chinese form rather than kind of the really delicious, beautiful cultural mix that is Chinese American food, but different. You know, it's different than a lot of the food that's coming now.

Kyle Krull - 0:40:31
Somebody who spent four years working at PF Chang's. I'm very familiar with the Americanized Chinese.

Briana Warner - 0:40:38
Food. It's great, right? Like, it's, you know, I'm one of those people that I get really, kind of. Up and I'm Italian American and I get up in arms when people say things like, oh, that's not real Chinese food. Yeah, that's not real American food. That's not real time or that's not really tall food. It's that real Chinese food or that's not real Mexican food. You're like, yeah, exactly. Because that's what we do in the US We are like, bring it all. We'll make it American. And some way or another an American doesn't look like hot dogs and hamburgers. American looks like crazy ass ramen formulations, crazy ass burritos, some with rice in the.

Briana Warner - 0:40:45
Why? I don't know. Because we thought it would be great. Let's try it. Let's go through it. Like, I mean and there's that's so cool to have a culture. Like that's what makes America beautiful, right? Like, you know, you go into the European Union and where I worked in my last tour, you go to each country and you're like cool, same dish in every restaurant in Germany.

Briana Warner - 0:41:15
Unless it's an American restaurant or a, you know, like, but they everybody like, there's no new, there's nothing new. What we do in America is we take all these different, the best of everything, and then we smash it together and what people have kind of realized, what people have realized in the last, you know. Ten years or so is that umami is a really, really important component that 3/4 of the world have known forever is one of the most important components just coming on to that train. So you know, I think you're starting to see that influx of umami. And that's really you can get umami from three things, fish, mushrooms and seaweed. It's kind of it.

Briana Warner - 0:41:56
And you know, anchovies are delicious, not super sustainable. And not everyone likes fish.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:42:30
Doesn't all fermentation also add umami? Or am I wrong there Bri?

Briana Warner - 0:42:34
Yeah, most of it does, yeah. For for fermented foods, it kind of has that like probiote, these kind of yeast strains that are like miso or kind of like fermented beans as usually it's the starters that that is always going to have like a dumami flavor because it's got that kind of sense. Um, you know, so I but in the, you know, in the 90s in Pennsylvania, if someone said let's go get some sushi, I'd be like you. Now you can go to any restaurant, any grocery store in America, even if you're in, you know, far northern Maine where there's a town that doesn't have a name like R156. And there's, which you take out and there's seaweed snacks, right? So like in the past 30 years, we have seen an explosion of seaweed onto the market. So people are eating it and people are seeing the value of that taste profile. But the imports from Asia are not creative for the American palate.

Briana Warner - 0:43:13
It's, you know, people aren't you know, going people in the in the US aren't used to taking a beautiful dried hand cut pieces and putting it in a soup that they cook for 8 hours in a day. Like it's not gonna happen. That's not what we do here. There's some that do, but not much. People want convenience and so to see that innovation, you know, we we look at that as an opportunity of 15 miles at the grocery store right now. See me Does it 12:45?

Briana Warner - 0:43:36
That means I have 14 1/2 or 15 1/2 depending on what grocery store you're looking at. My old tackle and I can. I can put it in paneer, I can put it in kelp cubes, I can put it in chocolate, I can put it in crackers. I like, where do you want umami? Let's put kelp in it and let's kelp in it. And so it is both the opportunity and the challenge because it's also putting seaweed out there and categories that people don't know where they are.

Briana Warner - 0:44:06
People don't know how to find them, and you have to do a lot. You know things like this podcast, for example. Your listeners will now hear the podcast and be like I didn't even know that I could get kelp in my smoothies. We'll go out and try that. Or a sea veggie burger. They're brand new to the market. There's nothing like this out there. And so it is both the opportunity and the challenge. And you know, we've been slowly sort of introducing first products on the outer end of grocery where like people who eat it, fermented foods are going to be like sweet. Yeah, seaweed, let's do it. People eat smoothies like they've been putting wheat grass, which tastes like garbage in there. And there's smoothies for what? Help. That's good.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:45:08
And could be inflammatory.

Briana Warner - 0:45:10
And could be in flavors, right? Yes. No, it's.

Kyle Krull - 0:45:13
Often contains mold spores because it's growing indoor in an unnatural environment.

Briana Warner - 0:45:17
Is that right?

Kyle Krull - 0:45:19
That's correct. Most of the sea or sorry. Most of the wheat grass has grown indoor and is moldy, which is why some people feel like this nausea after taking a wheat grass shot for the first few minutes. There's one company in Canada that does outdoor growth grown wheat grass and they do it frozen. But yeah, we're way off topic now.

Briana Warner - 0:45:36
No, I'm like fascinated by that. That's really good to know. No, it's totally true. Bullet and people are eating it in their smoothies, right. So kelp is like a much easier inclusion and better for you and much more, you know, adaptable. So we kind of stayed in those categories. Now we're moving toward the center of store and you know, trying to get more conventional customers because we've built sort of our ground base of ambassadors of people who are super excited. About what we're doing and how we're doing it now, we'd love to bring that to you know the average 8 year old who wants seaweed snacks and their lunch they're already having. But they their parents don't know where it's from. They don't know what's in it. They don't know what water it's grown in and they don't know what labor practices were used to grow it. And here we can provide something that's domestic. So I I'm doing a video a few months from now or next month for.

Briana Warner - 0:46:04
Just a passion product project I have with this brand that does education for kids on eating different foods. It's called Kalamatas Kitchen. It's a beautiful. Yeah, it's they do like several children's books and you read them about how to kind of try new foods. And anyway, we're doing the video on kelp and next month just to kind of talk about kids eating kelp. So I asked my kids last night like, hey, you want to start a video?

Briana Warner - 0:46:30
You wanna like talk about kilt? And they're like, sure, whatever. It's a seven to seven and five year old is what I have. And they were like, I was like, you know, some kids don't eat Kelt. They're like, why? I'm like, I don't know. They think it's gross and they're like, why? I think they're gross. Like they don't get it, like why would like that was gross And I think.

Kyle Krull - 0:47:13
Like classic 7 year old response.

Briana Warner - 0:47:15
Yeah, I think they're gross, right. But like you know, the point being that like. You know, it's all about just kids trying it, people trying it. Once it's in people's diets, we focus a lot on universities that they become buyers through their whole lives.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:47:30
There's a real like that. I love media and content and branding and advertising and marketing and the whole thing. So I'm biased here, but like, there's such a need. For just like an all out guerrilla style campaign for different regenerative foods like this. So like in my mind I see a Netflix series where we go behind all this story that you've told us today. We talk about how you eat it. We talk about how it's grown. Like I see stuff like that and I think back to like when I was a little kid at the at school, you know there's a giant poster of Le Bron with a milk mustache Got milk And it's like, well I guess milk is cool, You know, it's like so like how how?

Anthony Corsaro - 0:47:40
How do we recreate that for these products that are grown regeneratively and like, it's funny, but like it's very serious because there's a massive, there's a massive like marketing machine behind a lot of the stuff that we need to replace and we need to take market share from.

Briana Warner - 0:48:19
Yeah, absolutely. And I think you guys are doing that with this podcast though, honestly. Yeah, like, yeah, it's true. Like these market like the way that people are getting and having. We need to reach people in a number of different directions. We need to reach people from regeneration. We need to reach people from Ocean Health. We need to reach people from their their care.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:48:37
Density.

Briana Warner - 0:48:38
Nutrient density taste. People who want to see farmers and fishermen continue to have jobs. You know you have to hit people from all these different angles and one of them's going to appeal and if it doesn't appeal to them then I'm not going to spend any time on them anyway, right. Like great. Let's move on. And and in fact demographically what we see is mid millennials and younger both genders 100% behind seaweed. Millennial women up to exers women, sure men.

Briana Warner - 0:48:40
Gen. Xers and over generally aren't our demographic.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:49:19
These two masculine men that have been told they're too masculine on this podcast are firm seaweed. Come believers.

Briana Warner - 0:49:25
There you go, Not the word. I mean millennials and younger are and that's also because men are making buying decisions in their 20s and 30s and early 40s now because believe it or not, us young young millennials or mid millennials are actually in our 40s now, but you know we. Like to think of ourselves as younger, but you know, I think that that's something that I find really interesting as well as, like when you think about marketing, who are you actually marketing to? And do you go for the people who it takes a lot of a lift? No, You go for the people who are looking for the future of their planet, for their own health. But also men at that age are not making the buying decisions in the household. The people in the millennials and younger are, and they're interested in creating a better planet. And that's how we're bringing people to the brand for the first time.

Briana Warner - 0:49:40
And then once it has to be really, really good, people can buy first for their sustainability goals. They'll buy second for the taste. And that's where our products really, you know, shine. Once we have first purchase, we see all, you know, most people come back for a second.

Kyle Krull - 0:50:27
I wonder from like, so I'm putting my sales hat on like category development like we're always compare when you're having these conversations with retailers it's you know what a category velocity expectations, how are you performing against the category but because. You're trying to break into various categories with this entirely new piece of innovation, like where do you compare yourself? Like who do you compare yourselves to? What are you trying to achieve within the category? Talk to us about those interactions with the retailers.

Briana Warner - 0:50:53
Retailers, I have to say, like. You know, to to be kind of brand loyal, but true. I'm not doing this to try to get sales, but Whole Foods Market and Sprouts Farmers Market have both been massive champions of our work And to see, you know just in June 20th from going down to Austin as the invited grocery vendor one out of the entire. All of them to talk about our mission to the entire senior team because they're like this is the type of brand that is actually walking the walk. It's similarly with Sprouts. I mean, you guys saw that Expo W you might have seen like our key buyer from Sprouts just came back and flipped burgers with us for a while, I mean.

Kyle Krull - 0:51:41
People are dedicated to.

Briana Warner - 0:51:42
What we're doing and they want us to succeed, that doesn't always transfer into people taking it on the shelf and I think. People are always like, great, you know, I want this to be the case. Let me help you and let me help you. You target our market and I think a perfect example is like, hey, that your cup cubes are really, really beautiful. We want them. We know they will sell, but they will not sell unless you tell us on the front cover how I'm supposed to use it.

Briana Warner - 0:51:51
Like great, help us with our boxes then right, like we're learning to you're the expert on selling to your customers, we're the expert on making kelp. So tell us so it's also I think going into this with really dropping any hubris. I see so many people in the CPG sector, so many founders and entrepreneurs who the swagger. Of just like I know best, I am. You know the person who is going to sell, you know, something vapid, like a popcorn with a semi regenerative sprinkle on it or some shit.

Briana Warner - 0:52:33
But you know, like they there's like.

Kyle Krull - 0:52:48
They like sprinkle on.

Briana Warner - 0:52:51
I have a little bit of sprinkle. You know, it's it's, you know, we're doing things better with our regenerative popcorn. You're like, OK, cool, but you know, like no, no friends to popcorn. But I think we're doing something that's so different and so new that if we don't have our minds open till learning from as many people as we can and getting the people who are helping us on board as supporters of what we're doing. The vast majority of our placements in retail or an ingredient, you know, people wanting to use our product is because they are inspired by what we're doing. And I think like lollyware, they're coming out with a seaweed straw. Our product is more expensive than wild harvest by a lot and they have a price point they have to reach because they are straw but. They're working with us to figure out how do we make this work, how do we get, And we'll be announcing a big partnership next month with them, But because it's the right thing and because they're excited about working with a woman run company who's investing in the future of Maine. And I think, I think that's really been fun for us, is just dropping the hubris and being like teach us where do we want to help. Because we're not a sea veggie burger company. We're not a kelp cube company. We're not a.

Briana Warner - 0:53:40
Cemented seaweed salad company. We are at Kelp Company. And what can we do to get as much kelp as possible out to consumers so that we can get more farmers in the water? Because the situation is urgent. We need to act now and we need to get more farms in the water with more fishermen with diversified incomes. And we need to do it now so the more people who buy whatever it is that we make, the more we can have an impact.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:54:33
And I I would almost add. You're not a kelp company. You're a main economic development company, which is like what all these businesses need to be and which is why I think Kyle and I are so passionate about talking about brands, because brands are either parts of, they're not either. They're always parts of the ecosystem that is doing that economic development piece. And I think you know. Like more vertical integration, more partnerships, more diverse capital stacks, like we need all all those things. So curious if you can just give us like a brief peek behind the curtain of like have you set up the different business entities if there is multiple entities and like how have you funded this whole thing?

Briana Warner - 0:55:07
Yeah, I think, I think there's there's a big difference behind if if a nonprofit has to do work in an area, it's usually. It should be to set something up to disappear. So what I mean by that is, you know, if there are market solutions for a problem, there's no need for nonprofits. And this is in the food and ag space. I I can't speak for, you know, social services is a completely different scenario, right? That's right. That's separate. But in the Food and Agriculture space, or seafood.

Briana Warner - 0:55:21
If there's a nonprofit that's not working to put themselves out of business, then they're not working toward the right solution. And I think for Atlantic Sea Farms, people say, are you a nonprofit? And I'm like, absolutely. We're not profitable yet, But that's what we have. We have a we have a path to profitability. If we are not profitable, this is not a viable economic solution. I need to be able to be hit by a bus in five years.

Briana Warner - 0:55:49
And every funder needs to be able to hit by a bus and this still needs to continue. And I think you know when you're looking at constant grant cycles as a nonprofit or as sort of like regenerative thinking, like that's great. But unless it can stand on its own 2 feet without the whims of philanthropy, then you're not you're you're not proving anything and you know if I'm gonna build a network of. 100 farmers growing £100,000 in Maine in the next four years, They need to know that their product is going to be sold and they need to know that their kids should invest in it. This is their investment and they're leading this future. So I think that's where we why a brand is so important to us and why profitability is if we are insanely profitable.

Briana Warner - 0:56:48
Because we did good and because we're doing well by doing good, then we've actually really proven that this is viable industry. Until we do that, we've proven nothing. So right now we do. I'm not independently wealthy at all and I always think it's funny when people are like. Oh yeah. Seed friends and family money. I'm like whose friends and family are you talking about. Why don't I have friends and family like that like and and that's certainly not the world I came from and and in fact I, you know someday when I'm when I'm older and we've made this a huge success. My goal would be to start an entire fund called friends and family to act as that for the ugly entrepreneurs that that's.

Briana Warner - 0:57:34
It's a ridiculous concept that friends and family fund people because what we're doing is we're saying 99% of people will never have the opportunity because they don't have. They're not from the social networks that a lot of them do that. But similarly, women only receive 2% of the venture funding in the country right now, even though they run 50% of the businesses. That's a staggering statistic. And if we're not talking about that, I'm not really sure what we're talking about. But that's that statistic is it speaks for itself, 2%, I remember someone said, yeah, but Bri, when you add a male cofounder to it, it's 9%.

Kyle Krull - 0:58:40
Not the right response.

Briana Warner - 0:58:43
Yeah, OK, that's even worse. So 2% is a pretty bleak number. And when you look at regenerative agriculture, the the funding is is pretty bleak for for most of those brands. So we have really run against the tide and pretty much every way on those statistics, which makes me really proud of what we're doing, but also hopefully can bleed the path for others that can step behind us and it's not because I'm from money. You know and it's it's it's simply through you know a lot of luck quite frankly, but also a firm business idea that people really could get behind and get excited about. But we we are mostly venture backed right now and those are all venture funds that are based. It's sort of the Nexus of impact and profit.

Briana Warner - 0:59:14
So we don't take pure impact money and we certainly wouldn't bring on someone that's like pure hedge funds. We need the big sort of hockey stick growth right now, kind of funder, but somewhere in between because we need to be, we need to be held accountable to growth and profitability in order to be able to serve the people that we're we're trying to serve, which is the fisherman that we're working with.

Kyle Krull - 1:00:01
Yeah. I want to put back on one thing. You mentioned luck. And to me, luck is where hard work meets opportunity. Yeah, so. So whatever luck you ran into, I think that, you know, there's probably a bit more credit than you gave yourself, at least in that.

Briana Warner - 1:00:13
Statement. No, it's been a lot of grit too. But I mean it always, it's always luck too, right? Like that's always part of life, right? You, you grit, you work hard. You have a fundamental business that I idea that makes sense. You do really, really good work. You know and in some areas we've had nothing but bad luck. Like we two weeks prior to COVID hitting, we launched a giant bowl with David Chang and Sweet Green. There is billboards in the middle of Times Square that said my kelp and Sweet Green with David Chang holding up a big thing of kelp and we had no retail presence and we were like. You've done it. We're gonna sell out of Kelp. Like, let's get more farmers in the water. And then three weeks later, there was a picture in time of Times Square being empty with that stupid billboard right in the background that was screaming at us. Um, you know there's and you get back up you you know? But I'd still consider myself just so fortunate to #1 have been able to live on this coast and see this tremendous opportunity.

Briana Warner - 1:00:51
There's a lot of luck that comes from building up strong relationships with fishermen and having them trust me and then being like, yeah, sure, I'll do this because it takes 3 to prove it out so that other people get in. And without those first three, we would be nowhere. And then the radios start going off like, hey guys, they actually pick up that kelp. Where do you think they're going with it? What are they doing with kelp? Like, you know, and then kind of going from there. So it's it's a combination of a lot of things, but.

Briana Warner - 1:01:15
You know it's we, we will likely be raising one more pretty significant rounds really bringing on investors, continuing to bring on investors that believe in what we're doing and really putting the people of the business at the core of what we're doing and the consumers on the other end of the planet. And then hopefully we'll be you know in a place where we can look out and assess like OK, do we can do we become sort of the brand that you know starts building farms in. Other places and really like taking this model and replicating it elsewhere or you know what do we do. So we are actually starting to work in Alaska next year. We have a farming Rd. out here that we work with. And so we are starting to kind of move off geographically because there's there's a lot of opportunity elsewhere to also kind of replicate this model.

Kyle Krull - 1:02:35
That's incredible.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:02:36
Yeah.

Kyle Krull - 1:02:37
I want to take this to the future. What what the future holds for the land, sea, farms and. There's also two questions I have failed to ask so far, so if you can somehow tie both of these into your answer, that'd be great. One, I'd like to learn more about the nutritional density piece of sea vegetables in general. And then #2, like all the potential utilizations of seaweed, kelp, sea vegetables like that, whether that be animal feed, plastics, etc. So I've given you quite a task to try to, you know, answer the future of the brand while incorporating those two things. But just put it out there. You know what? What's the future hold for Atlantic sea farms?

Briana Warner - 1:03:13
So right now we're growing two species of seaweeds, skinny kelp and sugar kelp. Skinny kelp is only found in Maine.

Kyle Krull - 1:03:19
How many species are there?

Briana Warner - 1:03:22
So there are currently about 195 macro algae species in Maine. There's in Maine. In the Gulf of Maine, there's another 100 plus in Alaska. I was in New Zealand earlier this year. They have over 1000 native species of macro.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:03:42
Oh my goodness.

Briana Warner - 1:03:44
About 400 of them that don't exist anywhere but New Zealand, that's cool. So the the opportunities are and when I when I say this, I mean it honestly, the opportunities are boundless and I don't think we've been scratched the surface.

Kyle Krull - 1:04:03
I mean, it almost feels disrespectful to just call it all kelp. Yeah, it'd be like if we only if we didn't have names like corn and sweet potato. We just called everything vegetables.

Briana Warner - 1:04:13
You know.

Kyle Krull - 1:04:14
There's that level of diversity. It just it seems borderline disrespectful to the plan.

Briana Warner - 1:04:19
It kind of is. There's so our seaweed scientists who if you're a seaweed scientist, you're called a psychologist for just a fun piece of trivia.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:04:29
For.

Briana Warner - 1:04:29
Parties, our psychologists on staff, who's who's just absolutely brilliant. We are at a board meeting last month and I, I said to him before I had like, hey, you know, just let's make sure that, you know, we're going to be presenting on a lot of the science. I think, you know something will be really helpful is if you boil it down to make sure that it's really kind of accessible so everyone can use the language that you're using, he's great. And I had never heard him say this before and I couldn't. I lost it in the middle of the meeting. I couldn't keep a straight face, he said. So one of the new species where we're working to grow is a red seaweed, and it's got 40% protein content. It's amazing. It's never been grown as well in the ocean. We have a number of years before we're going to be able to commercialize it, if we can at all. But we're working on it. I mean, it is native to the Gulf of Maine. It's not like we're introducing anything, but we would be taking pressure off the wild beds because it's a highly commercial species.

Briana Warner - 1:04:51
And it's and it's called dulce. And he said, you know, just for clarity, we are closer, we are closer related genetically to mushrooms then dulce is to kelp.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:05:35
What?

Kyle Krull - 1:05:36
And dulce is a type of kelp.

Briana Warner - 1:05:39
No, dulce is a red seaweed, so kelp is a species of brown seaweed. So and but when he said that it just ain't really got I was like I guess that's what I meant by dialing it down to the but I I can't kind of get that out of my head but it's you know the morphology the genetic makeup that you know all of it is so different. So I think you know in in Asia in in East Asia. People have been growing seaweeds for about 400 years. They've been growing commercially, like industrially sized and since the 70s. And there's still only between 5:00 and 10:00 species grown at scale. And we have.

Briana Warner - 1:06:07
We are so at the and they use it mostly for food or food extracts. So there are certain types of seaweed in Indonesia for example, like when you they're in your toothpaste or shampoo, they're in sort of everything you use, but it's either food or sort of a emulsifier. What we can do with seaweed is not even remotely started and I talk about bioplastics. That's kind of a first step that we're working on. But there's also, you know, things called for Coydon's, a nutrient, a piece a key nutrient. And many kelps called for Coydon's, which are being more and more studied now that people think might actually be, you know, key to unlocking some of the issues around Alzheimer's.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:07:10
Wow. Wow.

Briana Warner - 1:07:12
Yeah, there's types and and there's a lot more research to be done. I'm not going.

Kyle Krull - 1:07:15
To so potential pharmaceutical applications.

Briana Warner - 1:07:18
Huge, huge potential pharmaceutical applications. Again, we're probably three to 10 years away from really knowing those. But some really exciting work coming out of some of of of the US and Europe in particular around the facoitin studies. Iodine is another one. You know, we used to all eat Iodize salt. We don't anymore. And people aren't. The reason that iodine was added to salt in the 40s and 50s is because people weren't eating enough iodine. We're still not eating enough iodine as that has been sort of faded, phased out. And kelp has a ton of iodine in it, which is great for thyroid function. Without iodine, our thyroids don't function. And some there's some assessments that around 30% of the American population has thyroid dysfunction. You know, there's there's a lot of like you kind of add these things plus then it's just delicious.

Briana Warner - 1:07:39
If you look at kind of meat alternatives, you know, protein content and many seaweeds that were not commercially growing are extremely high and they improve the environment. So I, you know, when I look at the future of of Atlantic Sea Farms, it's not kelp, it's, you know, lots of different seaweeds. It's a custom grower. It's. Being able to say hey you want more polyphenols for your bioplastics, I've I've been able to cultivate the species of shotgun kelp that is 60% polyphenols and we'll process that into bioplastics to help eliminate the plastic bag problem. You know, it's it's there's so many ways to go with this and at the base of it if Atlantic Sea Farms is doing it, it's being led by fishermen and I can't kind of go to that enough.

Briana Warner - 1:08:30
We are creating a system where we can lead the way for fishermen to diversify so that in 30-40 fifty years we look at the coast of Maine, we look at the coast of Alaska, we look at the coast of New Zealand. And we see seaweed being the answer for health issues, for environmental issues, for food issues, for whatever, and see thriving working waterfronts that are maybe even more working waterfront infrastructure that we have now instead of yachts.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:09:35
It's crazy. It sounds like a circular powerhouse of opportunities. And I'll.

Kyle Krull - 1:09:40
Make also a shout out to see someone to answer the future outlook question while incorporating both both sub questions in there. So great work.

Briana Warner - 1:09:49
Thanks. I talk about it a lot.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:09:53
Yeah. Yeah. Bri, last question to take us home was that question we kind of asked all of our guests, which is how can Regen brands get to 50% market share by 2050, what needs to happen?

Briana Warner - 1:10:07
I think there's a few things that need to happen. I think one, people need to feel. Consumers need to feel and understand, not just understand but really feel in their hearts that they can make decisions at the grocery store that will help improve the planet. And that's going to take green and blue washing. Because of my industry, it's called blue washing. To be really called out and evaporated because when people feel like they're making good decisions and then find out that they're not, that's even more terrifying to me. That loss of hope is even more terrifying than people who haven't started the process. So it's going to take regenerative brands to be honest about who they are and what they're doing and how they're doing it. I also think it's going to take buyers decisions to set goals and really work to. Put those into place. And I think those goals need to be put place around people and planet, not just technology solutions. And I think right now sometimes the fastest way for a brand like you know, you know, I mean a grocery chain like Kroger or Walmart or whatever to reach their goals is to put all goals in a in a place that are achieved through carbon offsets.

Briana Warner - 1:11:03
That are that are through technology rather than through meeting full sourcing and I think people being able to hold these places accountable are going to help brands like Atlantic Sea Farms be able to to plug in. I think the other, the other thing that's going to need to happen in a really big way is for packaging companies to catch up with consumer demand because right now that I think that is a huge problem for regenerative brands like Atlantic Sea Farms is there's not a lot of packaging particularly in the frozen. And refrigerated space that is regenerative in and of itself and functional. Yeah, yeah. And then it's going to be, it's going to take dollars from all of the people who want to make the planet better instead of putting them into climate nonprofits or, you know, solutions that make them feel better through philanthropy. It's going to be investing in future businesses that can actually change the game rather than run programming.

Kyle Krull - 1:12:27
I think both Anthony and I are still because your answer incorporated my personal project, Passion Project and Anthony's and various others. But I think you hit the nail on the head and you did a really good job of kind of breaking down each different sector that needs what type of support to make this thing work. I read an interesting article earlier this week, I think on Grocery Dive about how regenerative investments are faltering because there's no level of standardization to prove. The regenerative claims being made by the brands and until that is standardized, the investment community just doesn't really have the mechanism to say like, OK, I believe in this or I don't. So to your point about transparency and like making sure that like the regenerative claims are actually legit, totally agree that that needs to happen. At the same time, it's such a complex, complicated problem because measuring the impact of regenerative aquaculture versus grass fed bison. Completely different on so many levels. So it's a huge challenge that we're going to have to face as a movement, but something that needs to be done.

Briana Warner - 1:13:30
Well, and I think with that you know getting kind of heady for a second is, is understanding the value of investments. I think so many times regenerative investors or people who claim to be regenerative investors still want to see the growth of what is liquid death. What is that bottled water company? And I don't know anything about them. I shouldn't, I shouldn't point to like a specific brand, but like growth at all costs is what gives you the hockey stick. If you're if you're an investor in regenerative brands, you have to recognize that it cannot be growth at all. Costs and growth, yes. Substantial growth, absolutely. Market rate returns? Sure.

Briana Warner - 1:13:50
Growth at all costs, absolutely not. That has what been what has gotten us into the problem we're in environmentally. And I think that there needs to be some value placed around environmental impact in the investing space and I think that's not in the form of carbon credits. But as far as you know figuring out some sort of people much smarter than me, you should be looking into figuring out like how do we. Financially incentivize those sort of investments beyond, again beyond carbon credits because they mean nothing but like how can we, how can we kind of reward that? Because I do think there's a lot of talk around regeneration in it, in it often is very incongruent with the growth expectations and the and the returns that people want to see. I mean a 10X return on a five year investment.

Briana Warner - 1:14:47
In regenerative aquaculture means growth at all costs and and you gotta wonder when when funds have that sort of expectation, if we're really talking about regeneration or if we're talking about greenwashing and making social signaling decisions. I think a perfect example is 90% of solar panels and residential solar panels installed in the United States. Are pointed toward the road. Not necessarily because that's where the sun signs, but because people want to show that you know, some. I'm not saying 90% of the time it's not where the sun shines, but a lot of time it's not. It's because people want to see, people want to show their neighbors that they put up solar panels because it's social signaling that they are environmentally conscious.

Briana Warner - 1:15:42
And and you know that's what you see with a lot of regen funds too. And I think we as a community need to be challenging that as, as you know, growth at all costs is not regenerative. But how can we show that, you know, growth is really, really important, profitability is really, really important, 5X returns, Should we should be able to show really good growth with that? But maybe our expectations around how companies should grow is part of the problem and why our planet is broken.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:16:33
God, Bri, you and I could have a whole separate 90 minute conversation about that. So many things I'd like to add there. You hit the nail on the head and I think you know it comes down to a few things, right. It comes down to the venture models, not the right model for all these businesses. And a lot of times the venture money needs to be married with other forms of capital that make a stack that can satisfy all those things that you just talked about. So it's about. Having really strong individual tools and then us capital stacking across the ecosystem and that is really we're we are massively under capitalized as as an ecosystem. So that's one problem and then we need those individual entities created and then we need them to work together and I think we can get there but like that's that's the solve for those things that you.

Briana Warner - 1:17:18
See my opinion. Totally. And I will say we've now raised $9 million in total and it's all from people like that. They are out there, they're.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:17:27
Amazing.

Briana Warner - 1:17:28
People out there that really, truly stand behind what they're saying and those people are few and far between, but man, when you get them like the support that we have for our business from our investor, our shareholder group is unbelievably cool. And it's not that they're not high pressure. Of course they are. They want us to, to be, to beat our goals, right? But man, it's they are out there. I just wish there were a whole lot more.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:17:58
We're working on it.

Kyle Krull - 1:17:59
Yeah. Also, I just want to expand a little bit on the, the example you're presented between Atlantic sea farms and liquid death. You know, liquid death from an innovation standpoint, they're putting water, which humans have been consuming forever literally into an aluminum can which has been produced since, you know, probably the 50s, maybe before that like. The supply chain doesn't have to change for a brand like that to grow, but to get, you know, lobster fishermen to learn and understand about aquaculture, to teach them to solve all these problems like that takes time, you know? And it's just to your point where you like, if we're really trying to change the food system, those expectations have to shift because the models are completely different. And there's no way that a regenerative brand who's truly doing things the right way can achieve those same types of growth numbers.

Briana Warner - 1:18:43
They can't. But you know what would be, you know, I said liquid death, but let's talk about General Mills, right. Like you know what would really blow Atlantic Sea Farms up. General Mills putting kelp powder, our kelp powder and three of their skews. These brands have the ability, you know what we do ingredient, you know, we're not just a brand. Our brand is as a small component of our work and to be like, OK, liquid death like. Take that growth, put some kelp in it, right. Like let's let's let's like let's challenge you to let's go Unilever, let's let's, let's put kelp in a cracker. Because you know what It also sells. It's not a risk. You know, I think like I said, Whole Foods is doing some amazing work. They're in Kroger right now. They're doing a bunch of innovation work with their with their brand on our kelp, like cool. Let's actually stand where we where we.

Briana Warner - 1:19:13
Say we're going to. So I think, I think people are trying. I do think though there's huge opportunity for those, those brands that have had that incredible growth to really assess their supply chain and be like, OK, cool, we've got here and we did it at growth at all costs. Now now that we're here, what can we do that actually changes the game?

Anthony Corsaro - 1:20:05
Hashtag put some kelp in it.

Briana Warner - 1:20:07
Put some kelp in it, Kelp in everything.

Kyle Krull - 1:20:09
Eat More Help Morally Podcast.

Briana Warner - 1:20:12
Exactly.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:20:14
Bri, your legend. Thank you so much for joining us. This is amazing.

Briana Warner - 1:20:17
Thank you guys. It was so great to talk to you.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:20:23
For show notes, episode transcripts, and more information on our guests and what we discussed on the show, check out our website, regen-brands.com. That is regen-brands.com. You can also find our Regen Recaps on the website. Regen Recaps take less than 5 minutes to read and cover all the key points of the full hour long conversations. You can check out our YouTube channel, Regen Brands Podcast for all of our episodes with both video and audio. The best way to support our work is to give us a five star rating on your favorite podcast platform, subscribe to future episodes and share the show with your friends.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:20:32
Thanks for tuning into The ReGen Brands Podcast, brought to you by the Regen Coalition and Outlaw Ventures. We hope you learned something new in this episode and it empowers you to use your voice, your time, and your dollars to help us build a better and more regenerative food system. Love you guys.