A cottage business becomes a college business after seaweed snack company donated to UNE

Sep. 30—When a small Maine nutrition bar company found itself at the crossroads of scaling up or shutting down, the owners instead forged a different path — they donated it to the University of New England.

The Portland company, SeaMade Seaweed Company, manufactures a snack bar made with cranberries, honey, almonds and, of course, the main ingredient: seaweed.

After eight years at the helm, co-owners Tara Treichel and Mark Dvorozniak handed the company over to the Biddeford university this summer. SeaMade's next CEOs will be college students.

UNE students already grow and harvest kelp from the school's aquaculture research farm, and they can harvest honey from the university's two beehives, meaning two of the primary ingredients are already accounted for at no additional cost.

Business students will help run the financial and marketing aspects of the company, the university said in a news release, and nutrition and other health students will study the bars' nutritional profile.

"It's not about us taking over just the production of a bar, it's really about engaging in an interdisciplinary education that's focused on developing a sustainable and nutritious source of food that really sort of exemplifies Maine," said Cameron Wake, director of UNE's Center for North Atlantic Studies. "We're not in the bar-producing business, we're in the education business.

"It boggles the mind, the number of different student research projects that we could engage in," added Wake, who will lead the program.

They could explore what environment for the bees produces the best flavor of honey or whether sugar kelp is the best kind of seaweed to use. Could the bars be made with blueberries instead of cranberries? What's the most sustainable packaging? How can they streamline production?

Manufacturing will have to stop while the school gets the program up and running, Wake said, but UNE-branded bars could be in hand by the spring.

To start, the school will have 10 students working on the project throughout the semester in classes and through internships, though officials are still working out the details.

COTTAGE TO COLLEGE

Treichel said she started thinking about making something with seaweed — maybe a bar or a cracker — in the early 2000s. It wasn't until 2016, though, that she came back to the idea.

"I went to the grocery store and I bought all sorts of grains and seeds and sweeteners and binders and I started mixing stuff together" to see what worked, she said in an interview Monday.

She found six flavors she liked but it wasn't until Dvorozniak, her business partner, came on board that they settled on the cranberry-almond-kale bar that became SeaMade's signature product.

The duo grew the business over the next several years with the help of grants from Maine Technology Institute and space at the Fork Food Lab. They kept it as a small "cottage company," Treichel said, but eventually got SeaMade Bars on the shelves of over a dozen stores.

But they said they were limited in how far they could scale the company. The price of seaweed was becoming too expensive for their profit margins and while nutrition bars are an easy, low-pressure introduction to seaweed as an ingredient, the industry is competitive.

"There are no intermediate steps to scale up in terms of the manufacturing," Treichel said. "You can make a bar by hand as we were doing or you could buy a slab line that will make you 50,000 bars at a time ... That's just too big of a jump."

They needed to scale up, or shut down.

The idea of donating the business didn't come up until Treichel met Carrie Byron, an associate professor studying seaweed aquaculture at UNE. Treichel said the idea felt like a good fit — she didn't want to completely discard what had been her passion project for so many years.

While business and education partnerships are common, it's unclear if SeaMade is the first business to be donated to a university. Treichel and Dvorozniak will stay involved as mentors and advisers for the students.

"I felt like it was going to have more impact to do something philanthropic with it," Treichel said. "It's a little bittersweet giving up something that I created, but knowing that it will continue on and perhaps grow, it makes it worthwhile."

A FOOD OF THE FUTURE

Students will be involved in every step of the process, from growing the seaweed to marketing and distributing the finished product, said Charles Tilburg, director of the School of Marine and Environmental Programs.

They'll work on the bars "from the ocean to the consumer in a way that I can't think any other project could," he said.

Tilburg said the students have already helped the school apply for a commercial aquaculture license from the Maine Department of Marine Resources, (Right now, UNE only has a research license).

"Students are always excited about going out on the water, about harvesting the seaweed," he said. But the license application showed them the administrative side, "the part that's not nearly as sexy but is just as important," Tilburg said.

That hands-on experience is vital, he said, as Maine's seaweed aquaculture industry grows.

The state harvested 1 million pounds of kelp last year, up from less than 53,000 pounds five years earlier. Biddeford-based Atlantic Sea Farms, the country's largest kelp farming operation, reported a harvest of over 1.3 million pounds in the 2024 growing season.

Treichel is also excited about the growth opportunities for seaweed, which she said is both sustainable and nutritious.

"I think it is going to be a food of our future," she said.

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