Healthy Seaweed Co Limited promotes healthy living and increases the income of seaweed farmers

2023-12-01

Healthy Seaweed Co Limited is a social enterprise in Tanzania that processes and produces seaweed products that can be added to food and consumed directly. Their aim is to promote healthy living through the local consumption of seaweed and to increase the income of women seaweed farmers in Tanzania.

Can you tell us about the Healthy Seaweed Co?

‘We are trying to bring awareness to the people about seaweed, and how it is farmed and how the people who are involved’, says co-founder Fatuma Days. ‘Our main activities are turning seaweed into food, training seaweed farmers on how to get a good harvest and how to innovate so they can earn more. We work with 130 farmers on Zanzibar and on the Mainland, Kilwa.

In Tanzania, 80 percent of seaweed farmers are women, and there are hurdles of innovation, market exploitation, low prices and awareness of how people should include seaweed as a staple food or daily supplement. So we are trying to get the local people to include seaweed in their daily diet.

The company started around 2020, we set it up around the home kitchen, and last year we moved from the house to our own facility.

We buy the seaweed from the women and then we come and process it into the final product and train them on how to bring them a good seaweed harvest, they can also do some more innovative products so they can have more income then. So we gave 2 monthly training sessions where we visited them and we saw what they needed to improve in terms of innovation.

In the seaweed café, we are innovating seaweed into food products for the local people and for the international market. We have introduced seaweed as a food supplement so that everyone can consume it and use it in their daily lives.’

Why seaweed?

‘Seaweed has a lot of minerals and other healthy properties. Before I started this business, I experienced it myself. When I was a child, I dropped out of school because of health problems. The day my brother introduced me to seaweed was like coming back from the dead. So much has changed for me. There are a lot of people who need seaweed as a supplement.’

What’s your ambition?

‘Our ambition is to be the best distributor of seaweed products in the world.’

Why do you want to join North Sea Farmers?

‘We want to bring the seaweed raw materials to Europe. We have a blend of spinosium and ulva lactuca.’