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 continue with 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 an especially delicious pot of miso soup. They realized that the soup’s 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, very few other folks were harvesting and selling seaweed in Maine, and within a few years the Erharts 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 and Canada. We pride ourselves on our ability to offer reliable, 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 are dried at low temperatures and carefully hand-graded for quality, some are milled, but they are otherwise minimally processed before packaging in our certified organic facility in Hancock, Maine.

MCSV Team