by Tom Mason

THE PRODUCT LOOKS TYPICAL of the stuff you find in the imported foods section of the local supermarket: a colourful vacuum-sealed package covered with Japanese writing. a strange course powdery substance inside. But pour the contents into a bowl of water, stir, and almost magically the flaky powder morphs into lush, leafy seaweed coloured in rich pink, green and yellow hues. It’s called nori, a popular salad seaweed destined for the hungry Japanese market, and the real magic is how it is grown – in a huge network of rectangular tanks covering several acres of land in Charlesville, at the mouth of Pubnico Harbour in Nova Scotia’s Yarmouth County. It’s something of a technical marvel – the only dry-land commercial seaweed cultivation facility in the world, run by a company for whom technical marvels have become old hat – Acadian Seaplants.

With seaweed making up about 15 percent of the Japanese diet, growing it has always been big business. But until the Charlesville operation started, most salad-grade seaweed came from farms located right in the ocean. The Charlesville facility gives Acadian Seaplants a capability that no one else in the world currently has – the ability to carefully control the conditions that seaweed grows under. “We can do things here that you just can’t do in the ocean because you can’t control the ocean,” says Acadian Seaplants president J.P. Deveau. “In the ocean you can’t feed the plants. We can feed them in a way that brings out those characteristics that our customers are looking for. It’s an intensive system that requires a tremendous amount of science and technology to manage.”

For 25 years, Acadian Seaplants has been using science and technology to manage operations – inventing technologies, processes, products, and all the while creating an industry where none existed before. Today the company has 300 employees and grosses over $30 million annually selling a ubiquitous product that most Nova Scotians barely pay attention to – the seaweed that litters beaches, lines wharves and fills the province’s coves and bays. The Nova Scotia-based company has become the largest producer of seaweed-based specialty products on the planet, operating five processing plants spread over three Maritime provinces that turn ascophyllum nodosum, known colloquially as rockweed, into value added products like fertilizers, industrial chemicals, animal feed additives, beauty additives and food ingredients – 40,000 tons of seaweed every year. In the process Acadian Seaplants has become one of the most scientifically sophisticated businesses in Atlantic Canada.

J.P. Deveau represents the second generation of Deveaus involved in the business. The son of company CEO and founder Louis Deveau. J.P. was invited by his father to join Acadian Seaplants after earning an MBA degree in 1985. His first office was his own childhood bedroom in the family home, a spare room that his father had converted into the Acadia Seaplants’ head office.

Today the company operates out of a more spacious venue – a large complex in Dartmouth’s Burnside Industrial park that houses about 45 people including administrative staff, sales and marketing personnel and a few researchers. But much of the real innovation happens two hours down Highway 101, in a converted barracks at the old Cornwallis naval base in Annapolis County. Here at the Dr. James S. Craigie Research Center, Acadian Seaplants researchers including nine PhD level scientists, conduct research into everything from the growth rate of potted plants infused with seaweed fertilizer to the best way to grow nori. It’s a research facility that would do most universities proud – a series of labs packed with state-of-the-art equipment. In one hermetically sealed room, large glass cylinders filled with multicoloured flowers of seaweeds bubble and bob under bright lights. In another lab, scientists place the roots of a New Guinea impatiens into a root scanner to measure the effects of seaweed fertilizers on growth. A series of sealed rooms contain plants growing under carefully controlled light, humidity and temperature conditions, while company scientists carefully quantify the effects that the seaweed fertilizers are having on them. Acadian Seaplants spends between five and 10 percent of annual revenue on research and development. Some of the innovation is created through partnerships the company forms with research institutions like Dalhousie, Acadia, Nova Scotia Agricultural College and the National Research Council (NRC), but much of it takes place right here in Cornwallis.

The pilot lab is tucked away in a corner of the Craigie Research Center. The lab is the dress rehearsal area for any new product developed at the research center. A scaled down version of the Cornwallis production plant, the pilot lab contains everything needed to chop, cook, separate, press, filter and evaporate seaweeds to mold them into end products. It’s a way for Acadian Seaplants to see if a new product can be produced commercially, without taking up the entire processing plant to do it.

If it can be produced, and if there is a market for it, new fertilizer products will eventually be processed in bulk at the Cornwallis processing plant. Located in another part of the decommissioned military base, the production plant is typical of the kind of assembly line factories that manufacture everything from newsprint to automobiles. It starts with a huge pile of moist brown seaweed at the plant’s loading dock. The company relies on a network of about 300 independent fishermen who harvest the seaweed from coves and bays around the Maritime Provinces. The seaweed used at the Cornwallis plant comes from an area that stretches from Shelburne to Yarmouth. The piles are pitchforked into a grinder, cooked in a large vat to extract its nutrients, passed through a series of centrifuges and filter presses, then into an evaporator. The penultimate product is a huge sheet of dry pressed seaweed that feels like thick rough paper. As it rolls off the giant drum press it is ground again, this time into a black powder that is packaged into jugs or drums and labeled in one of more than a dozen languages. The high-grade fertilizer may be used on cotton in Turkey, grapes in California, apples in Taiwan or tomatoes in Italy.

There is no blueprint for this kind of equipment. Unlike printing presses or heavy excavators, some of the equipment in this plant exists nowhere else in the world. Acadian Seaplants technicians must be constantly improvising, designing not only the products themselves but the tools and technology that will produce them.

At the same time, the company also invests heavily in market development. “We knew from the beginning there wasn’t going to be a substantial market for our products in Atlantic Canada and we would have to go search the world,” says Deveau. Early marketing efforts involved trips to the library and calls to trade commissioners in Canadian consulates overseas. But soon Deveau hit on a novel solution. He started offering jobs to foreign students studying in Atlantic Canadian universities – young business grads who wanted to continue to live and work in Canada, but who knew intimately the language, the culture and the customs of their native countries. Today, the company is even hiring people located within the export countries to run branch offices overseas.

India is one of those markets – the second largest market that Acadian Seaplants sells to. The company has been conducting business in the subcontinent for more than 10 years. “It’s a fascinating country, but it’s a relatively difficult country to do business in,” says Deveau. “India has inherited a bureaucracy from the British. Logistics are very complex. But it’s a huge country with a big agricultural base. Our products help improve the quality of crops to the point were it might make the difference between domestic grade and export grade.” That’s critically important in a country that, within memory, had trouble simply feeding its own population.

Helping developing countries find clean, organic ways to boost agricultural production meshes well with Acadian Seaplants’ corporate philosophy. For a company that depends on a fragile natural resource, ecology and environmental stewardship have always been vitally important. “Early on we decided that we would monitor and study our harvesting practices so that we would understand what was going on,” says Deveau. “The first thing we did was quantify the amount of seaweed that’s there. We put together a team of people led by one of our PhD scientists.” The team took aerial photographs of all of Acadian Seaplants’ 3300 seaweed beds, measured their size and then took physical samples of every bed – a process that took several years to complete. “By knowing how much we have and how fast it grows we know that we harvest less than the annual growth every year. We know we’re not cutting into the principal, and we know that what we’re doing is sustainable forever. We go back every year and we verify,” says Deveau.

They’ve also made changes to their harvesting processes along the way. A harvesting rake that was once used to rip seaweed out of the sea bottom has been placed by a cutting tool that shaves off the top of the plant like grass, leaving the roots to continue growing and producing. Mortality rates of seaweeds are also carefully monitored. The company has also taken a hard look at processing techniques over the years to make sure that they are environmentally friendly and limit waste products. A few years ago, the Cornwallis plant produced a stream of waste sludge. Today that sludge is turned into a soil amendment product and sold to local farmers. Of course the products themselves are also environmentally friendly and devoid of toxic ingredients. Many of them carry organic certifications. “They are an alternative to using chemical based products in agriculture,” says Deveau. “They are natural based products that provide functionality equal to or better than chemical-based products.”

Another way the company follows good environmental stewardship is by located manufacturing plants close to the seaweed source, rather than in a central processing facility that requires the raw material to be transported over a long distance. In addition to the Cornwallis and Charlesville plants, Acadian Seaplants has processing facilities in Pennfield, New Brunswick, Miminigash, Prince Edward Island and in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Some of the plant processes are beautiful in their simplicity. At the Yarmouth plant a decommissioned piece of tarmac at the local airport was pressed into service as a seaweed drying facility. The passive solar heat from the blacktop acts perfectly as a low-tech drying surface.

“We’re prepared to invest in technology, to invest in the development of new products and processes in order to come up with products that are unique, that aren’t easily replicated or supported, and by doing that we’re able to build a customer base that’s quite loyal,” says Deveau. “If you’re going to be competitive, you either have to be the low-cost producer or you have to have products that are differentiated. In a county like Canada with our high standard of living, it’s very difficult to be the low-cost producer. We need to add substantial value to our products so that our customers will see the value and be prepared to pay the price.”