Growing from the sea up

Scarborough seaweed company plans new drying greenhouse as business expands

SCARBOROUGH — It seems government regulation can give as good as it can take away.

On Dec. 10, Tim and Kelly Roth, owners VitaminSea, which makes a variety of products from seaweed harvested off the Maine coast, will go before the Scarborough Planning Board with plans to build a new 21-by-96-foot drying greenhouse. The new structure, which will allow the Roths to extend their processing season to grow their quickly growing business, is made possible by recent changes to zoning regulations in the Pine Point area of town.

In September, the Town Council approved changes that, in many ways, rolled back the clock on 1970s-era rules that had stepped in the way of traditional waterfront uses in favor or residential development.

Those changes made the VitaminSea greenhouse a possibility, allowing the Roths to expand a business they are in only because state changes forced them from the fishing industry eight years ago.

“I wouldn’t be dealing in seaweed right now if we could have continued fishing, but rules and regulations kept taking this and taking that,” said Roth, who fished for 28 years, starting in New Jersey and moving to Maine in 1992.

“We had fantastic fishing right up until the end, but it all got kind of pulled away from us,” said Roth, who used long-line techniques, rather than nets. One thing that ruined the trade for him, says Roth, was the need to throw away fish the rules were ostensibly designed to protect. Not using a net meant not dragging in whatever was out there, but sometimes pulling a fish up on a line would give it “the bends.” If that fish happened to be outside approved parameters, by size or species, Roth would have to throw it back, even though it had died.

Roth turned in his fisherman’s cap for a captain’s hat, and spent his time manning tugboats in New York. But the new schedule, three weeks on and three weeks off, drove him to distraction.

“My biggest thing is downtime, I have to keep busy,” he said, on Friday, while giving a tour of the company’s production facility in old Snow Canning plant on Pine Pint Road.

The road to that location, and the greenhouse to be built outside it, began when Roth used capital from the sale of his two fishing vessels to buy a small boat with an outboard motor for harvesting seaweed. What started as a hobby and the sale of two 30-pound bags for $10 turned within two months in 200 bags a week sold to lobster dealers for $6 each.

“It was just me and a little rake, pulling it into my little board and bagging it up, but if I filled 50 bags a day I made $300,” said Roth. “It was a real workout, but I was loving it.”

Before long, the Roths joined the Maine Seaweed Council, a group founded in 1993 that has developed many of its own biodiversity studies and member rules on harvesting rather than wait for regulations to be handed down by the Department of Marine Resources.

“This has been a sleeping industry,” said Roth. “You don’t hear that much about it and I think they like it that way.”

Eventually, the Roths decided to diversify into production, making and selling many of the things seaweed can be sued for, rather than to focus solely on supplying one type to the lobster industry.

Today, VitiminSea has 52 different products, including seasonings and crunch bars made from edible varieties, plus pet and horse supplements, soaps and fertilizers. 

The company harvests 200 tons of rockweed each summer for its feed line, with nine contracted employees. Since expanding to edible products about a year ago, the Roths expect to more than double to $100,000 their annual revenue.

In addition to the popular SeaCrunch, VitaminSea’s product line includes a blend of flaked dulse and sea salt called Sea’sonings, along with a selection of products made from sugar kelp, kombu, wakame and bladderwrack among other seaweed varieties.

“Sea vegetables are so packed in nutrients,” Roth said. “It’s just a powerhouse.”

The kelp used for many of the edible items are sun-dried in season on tables at a 10-acre farm the Roths own in Scarborough. They live in Buxton. In addition to extending the season, the greenhouse will allow the Roths to keep edible seaweeds undercover while drying, at a spot close to the production facility in the old canning plant, which VitaminSea shares with 10 other companies.

Henry Pelletier, who bought the old Snow plant and now manages the building for Blue Cold Distributors, owned by his daughter, and its other tenants, says expansions there are thanks to the town’s rezoning efforts.

"It's probably been the best result I've got from the town since I came here in 1995," he said. “"I think it's going to work for a lot of people. You'll maybe see a couple other people now who, because of the zoning change, are going to get more involved."

“They are careful,” said Roth of the town. “They’re not just letting any old thing go up here in Scarborough. For them to open up and say we’re going to allow some new development, that’s great.”

Changes included creation of an “industrial overlay district” in the area of the old canning plant, where the town created a new “town in village zone” in hopes of establishing a “walkable community” there. Overlay rules allowed tenants in the canning building to continue and even develop industrial uses without having to seek a special exception from the Zoning Board of Appeals.

“Before, any time you wanted to change anything down here you had to go for a variance. Kudos to the town for recognizing that was waste of everybody's time," said Susan Bayley, owner of Bayley's Lobster Pound.

"We wanted that to be able to continue to be a growth industry," said Bacon. "It's really our only waterfront area that is conducive to the marine industry. The new districts allow for seafood processing and provides more allowances for industries that zoning hadn't allowed for.”

What it hadn’t allowed for was business development and growth. Now, Roth said, his new company has that opportunity.

“We’re just a mom-and-pop shop trying to put out a healthy product,” he said.