About Us
Our mission is twofold: to provide high quality North Atlantic sea vegetables as user-friendly foods, supported by reliable information; and to build respectful, long-term relationships with our customers, suppliers, employees and the environment.
Intentions: We strive for honesty, accountability, patience, and care. We understand that these gifts from the sea come with a responsibility to apply evolving sustainable practices in growing, harvesting, processing and distributing. These intentions also apply to our community outreach efforts and customer education.
Maine Coast Sea Vegetables was founded in 1971 by Shep and Linnette Erhart in their farmhouse kitchen, inspired by a pot of miso soup that was especially delicious. They realized that the soups’ full, rich flavor came from the wild Alaria they had gathered from the shores of the Schoodic Peninsula, and they soon began sharing their Atlantic Wakame and other wild-harvested sea vegetables with friends and neighbors. At the time, there were few other folks harvesting and selling seaweed in Maine, and within a few years the Erhart’s built one of the most recognized and trusted brands in the industry. Today, Maine Coast Sea Vegetables is an employee-owned company operating out of a modern processing plant in Hancock, Maine. Every year, our team of over twenty people sorts, packs and ships several hundred thousand pounds of sea vegetables to customers all across the United States (& Canada). We pride ourselves on being able to offer reliable and trustworthy information on the nutritional, health, culinary, and environmental benefits of North American sea vegetables.
Founder Shep Erhart, 2021
Most of our sea vegetables are harvested from the cold waters of the North Atlantic. Harvest grounds are carefully chosen to be in compliance with Organic Certification to ensure the highest standards of quality, purity, and long-term sustainability. We test our sea vegetables every year for microbes, heavy metals, radioactivity, and other pollutants. Our sea vegetables are a whole food from the ocean. They’re dried at low temperature, carefully hand-graded for quality, and some are milled; but they are otherwise minimally processed before packaging in our certified organic facility in Hancock, Maine.
