Taste the Nation: From drying carrageen in the kitchen to making seaweed gummies

'We'd eat dilisk like you'd eat Taytos'

Evan Talty of Wild Irish Seaweeds.

For over one hundred years and four generations, Evan Talty’s family have been harvesting seaweed from the shore of their home place in Caherush County Clare.

His great grandfather supplied local markets with seaweed to use as fertiliser, and then his grandfather began exporting to Scotland.

In the early 2000s, Evan took over the business, producing seaweed-based products for the retail market. Today Wild Irish Seaweeds supplies seaweed for the food, pharmaceutical, nutraceutical and cosmetic industries. It also produces a range of food products including their extremely popular Seaweed Sprinkle, on shelves at Lidl stores and retailers around the country.

In 2009, Talty launched two products - dilisk and carrageen - onto the emerging wellness market.

“Seaweed products weren’t massively mainstream here in Ireland at the time,” he says. “You would have seen them on the shelves of your local health shop but in America and France and further afield, people were starting to see the health benefits of seaweed, and we went after that.”

Was the idea of consuming seaweed a hard sell on Irish soil? It was not an easy one in the beginning, he admits. “It was out there, but seaweed certainly wasn’t as on-trend then as it is now.”

Operating a business model of slow and steady, Wild Irish Seaweeds began to gain momentum from the outset.“We started working out of our kitchen. Then we had a little room in a shed that we converted to a drying unit and we made all of our labels on the kitchen table. Two years later, they built a purpose-built factory.”

In 2017, the company received a cash injection of €50,000 after appearing on RTÉ’s Dragons’ Den, which gave the business the opportunity to change its focus towards supplying the cosmetic and pharmaceutical businesses.

Today, they supply somewhere in the region of 70 to 80 tonnes of dried seaweed to the food, pharmaceutical, cosmeceutical industries, while also keeping a presence in the Irish market grocery, which they are doing this year with the Lidl Kickstart programme.

Programmes like this give the brand visibility, says Talty. “We would always say that our brand is kind of our shop window. Going into the likes of Lidl opens up a more mainstream customer base for us.”

The placement in Lidl has given the company the opportunity to test their newest product on the marketplace, a collection of four ‘Seaweed Sprinkles’.

Evan Talty from Wild Irish Seaweeds with his range of seaweed springles. 

“This product is aimed at young people for whom everything is fast. They want to be able to consume healthy food without too much time or effort.”

Producing a product with as little carbon footprint was essential for the company, so the sprinkles are packaged in paper jars.”We want to make sure that every decision we make is sustainable. We are heavily reliant on the natural resources of the sea and we are huge advocates of eco-friendly practices and procedures.”

In January this year, the company will launch a seaweed gummy product, in line with the consumer demand for gummies. The product has been in development for a number of years and marks a clear departure for Talty and his team.

“When it comes to supplements and nutrition, the global market is veering towards gummies,” he says. “We’ve been doing some stuff with the likes of CVS pharmacies in the US and a lot of US-based companies using Irish seaweed.”

The entrepreneur says that in terms of global trends, Ireland is about three years behind America. “We try to stay ahead of the curve that way. At the moment we are looking at contract manufacturers of the gummies. There is so much in the formulation side of it for each company, so it’s a lot of work, but it’s exciting work.”

Seaweed is as much a part of Evan Talty’s life at home as it is at work. “It has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. In the morning, we would have seasoned our eggs with a sprinkle of seaweed instead of salt,” he points out. “My grandmother showed us how to make a remedy for coughs and colds made out of carrageen so we always have a stash of that in the cupboard. Then with dilisk, well we eat dilisk like you would eat Taytos.”

To find out more, check out wildirishseaweeds.com.