Terrence and I recently had the fortune of attending Kelpfest 2026, an annual festival hosted by the Ecology Action Center to bring together Atlantic Canada’s seafarming network. They were also generous enough to honour us the opportunity to be panelists, sharing how two partners with anthropology and fine arts backgrounds have built a scientific-driven, seaweed based skincare brand at the far reaches of the earth in Grates Cove, Newfoundland.
For us, the story of 7 Fathoms is one of celebration - a celebration of family, community, the conditions, intense winds and rains that sculpt the landscape, fostering the aquaculture that has not only been supporting our community for centuries, but life on earth for millenia.
The organizers at Kelpfest invited us to speak at a panel entitled “Paths to Commercialization and Market”. Organizers, audience members, industry peers and fellow seaweed geeks sat before us all asking the same question: how has a biotech company situated in a remote community managed to develop a business model that is commercially viable?
While the discovery of seaweed’s restorative effects is a deeply personal part of our family’s history, it is our community of Grates Cove that has been the central pillar of our success. Common praise we receive as we expand our network, and which we personally pride ourselves on, is how 7 Fathoms operates on a fully vertical business model. Harvesting, extraction, production, and sales all happen in-house, in Grates Cove, by the people of Grates Cove. We are a quintessential homegrown company. Without the inside story, operating a business at the end of the Baccaleau Trail seems counter-intuitive for the remote location. Yet it’s an irreplaceable advantage that enables us to produce the quality of extract fundamental to the product we deliver to our clients.
It's not just that we're using these specific seaweed species, laminaria digitata and bladderwrack, but it's where they come from. We're in one of the most turbulent, cold-water environments in Newfoundland and Labrador, and it makes a difference to the bioactivity of the seaweed. Throughout the course of evolution, the harsh, nutrient-rich intertidal zones around Grates Cove have conditioned seaweed to produce more bioactive compounds for the purpose of withstanding stormy winds, tattering tides, and UV exposure. When we extract, we're extracting all those water-soluble compounds along with those trace minerals. While these biocompounds are highly effective for skincare, extracts that have high bioactivity have high potential—not just for how we're currently using them, but for other applications as well. We hope to expand our company into a variety of fields, establishing the versatility of seaweed along the way. A lot of the work that we're doing now is to validate and verify that our extracts are site-specific and specific to our extraction process, and to validate their quality.
Seaweed is an industry still very much in its infancy, knowledge about its applications still in the dark ages. That’s why we perceive participation on panels like those at Kelpfest, clarifying the science behind seaweed, as a responsibility to the public. One example I often like to share includes the initial study we did on fucoidan after partnering with our scientific advisor, Dr. Robert Helleur. Having dedicated his thesis work to seaweed, he took an immediate interest in the experiences of our customers and of our hypothesis that these bioactives support and maintain the skin barrier. His participation has been pivotal in building partnerships with the local scientific community and beyond. The first of these partnerships was with the Chemistry Department at Memorial University. Together we did a project through Mitacs to analyze fucoidan, one of the key bioactives in our extract, and measure its sulfation and bioactivity. It measured off the charts compared to other commercial samples. That was a point of validation for our extraction process.
Since then, the sky has been the limit. We’ve become part of a NL accelerator, Bounce Health Health Innovation, which created a stepping stone to participating in the BIO International Conferences in San Diego and Boston. Our first visit there led to our involvement in Emergence, an incubator out of PEI. During a second attendance at BIO, we successfully applied to the National Research Council. This opened a new pathway to working with the Marine Institute to measure anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and antioxidant properties. Our most recent stage in research and development includes a project at Holland College on how our extracts perform with UV absorption and repair.
Forging this network in the scientific community has enabled us to delve deeper into the science behind seaweed, develop new products based on those findings, and to keep in step with our mandate to celebrate the power of seaweed for the benefit of the public. The more we encourage people to consider their skin conditions and the potential of seaweed, asking themselves “I wonder if…”, the more light will be shed on the wonder of this natural resource.
Communication is integral to the growth of the seaweed industry. Last year we transformed our brand for that exact reason. SeaWise™ is what happens when you take ten years of science, and make it understandable in five seconds.
This odyssey of research and discovery has culminated in the publication of a scientific brief. This detailed overview of scientific studies of 7 Fathoms Seaweed Extracts – Laminaria Digitata and Bladderwrack – tells you everything you need to know about the effectiveness of the bioactive compounds in our extracts to revive skin that has been through storms.
