Image Credit: acadianseaplants.com
To me, seaweed is the stuff you trip over on romantic beach walks with your golden retriever, Lena, while she rolls in clumps of kelp in the intertidal zone. To Louis Deveau, seaweed is the stuff dreams are made of. This I learned while writing a book about the man: Cultivating Success – the Life of Acadian Seaplants Founder Louis Deveau.
Deveau, born the son of a blacksmith in Salmon River, Digby County in 1931, built a global company (with sales to 80 or so nations) based on one fundamental insight: seaweed isn’t just seaweed. He had figured this out before he launched Acadian Seaplants Limited (ASL) in 1981 from an office set up in his son’s bedroom.
Deveau started his business by buying the Canadian assets of his old employer, Marine Colloids of Rockland, Maine. At first, the US company was also the only customer for ASL’s seaweed harvest in the Maritimes. Depending on one buyer was risky business, so Deveau devised a strategy for the ages — find new markets and develop new products. To deal with the former, he quickly took off to Spain in search of customers and soon secured a contract to sell Irish moss to a Euro client.
Developing new products — that is, showing that seaweed isn’t just seaweed — proved a trickier challenge. Back then, seaweed was primarily used as a food product additive. Deveau’s innovative masterpiece was growing seaweed vegetables destined for Japan. These were cultivated at a 100-acre land-based facility in Shelburne County. Given the rigours of Japanese food regulations, selling “sea vegetables” into that market was a tough task. (It would be easier, perhaps, to teach a moose to carry your golf clubs.)
Here’s how it worked: after some false starts, the ASL charged scientists at its research centre in Cornwallis with developing seed-stock pure enough to pass muster. Each year, a single perfect cutting of Irish Moss starts off life in a test tube at the lab. From there, it’s moved to a bio-tank inside a protected greenhouse. Six months later, the biomass from Cornwallis is transferred to bigger tanks at Charlesville. There the company grows up to 12 tonnes of sea vegetables from the original, single cutting of seaweed – as it does year-in-and-year-out.
The magic is in the research and its commercialization. Any company can harvest seaweed, as ASL does in Canada, the US, Ireland, and Scotland. Many competitors produce agricultural bio-stimulants (super fertilizers) for the farming business — now ALS’s biggest customer. But no one else in Deveau’s sector built an R&D juggernaut that drew together so many top research scientists from universities and government agencies. As a result, ASL was able to show farmers that seaweed-based products from its Cornwallis-based seaweed extract plant could help them grow bumper crops of quality oranges. Skeptics, meanwhile, could verify the validity of ASL science by perusing peer-reviewed articles published in major research journals.
So there you have it: Deveau added mega-value to a traditional resource industry after starting ASL from the family home in Dartmouth four decades ago. (Today, at 90, he still puts in an honest day’s work.) ASL became a ‘knowledge-based industry’ long before those buzzwords started tripping off the tongues of every politician trying to stake a claim to the future. And it all got built from Nova Scotia. Call me biased, but I figure his story tells us we could use a few more leaders like Louis Deveau in this province.
Learn more about Acadian Seaplants at: acadianseaplants.com
Jim Meek is a Halifax based writer and consultant. His biography of Louis Deveau was released last fall by Nimbus Publishing.
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