Seeing Potential in Seaweed

Dr. Kaan and Partick Martin, founders of the Milltown Company, supply the industry with seaween-based animal feed scince 2005. As the Galway Independent reports, they are now searching to eradicate synthetics and chemicals out of aqua and agri feed and replace them with natural sustainable organic feed ingredients, such as macroalgae or seaweeds.

“Since 2001 we were playing with the idea of using seaweeds to replace mineral premixes in animal feed, because currently they all use just standard mineral salts and often these mineral salts are not as good in being taken up by the animal because it’s a salt in oxidised form. If it’s organically bound in a natural substance it’s much easier so we worked with this,” Dr Kraan, founder of Milltown, explains.

The company has already patented a number of seaweed-based feed formulas and market them under the brand “OceanFeed”. It currently has 12 employees in Milltown, offices in the US and Australia as well as production facilities is Vietnam and Indonesia.