When Alanna Kieffer dips her net into 1,500-gallon tanks near Tillamook Bay, she said people passing by sometimes draw closer, apparently curious to see what’s in the bubbling, open-air tubs. Crabs? Lobsters? Fish?

“They look confused when they see seaweed,” said Kieffer.

She laughed.

Oregon Seaweed, where Kieffer is a sales manager, is a land-based seaweed farm that grows dulse, a cold-water, red seaweed native to the Oregon coast. It is a high-protein vegetable the company grows free-floating in tanks filled with seawater and harvests using nets.

The company’s leaders are marketing their dulse as a seasoning, ingredient and an alternative protein source to meat.

The majority of the world’s commercial seaweed production — a $15 billion global industry, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization — happens in Asia.

Seaweed is still a niche product in the U.S., but according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, seaweed farming is the fastest-growing aquaculture sector.

Oregon Seaweed, at the forefront of this industry, first opened in Bandon in 2018 and started a second farm in Garibaldi in 2020.

Its founder is Chuck Toombs, who worked in sales before becoming a marketing instructor at Oregon State University.

While at OSU, Toombs went looking for product ideas his students could explore for a class project and stumbled across OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, where Chris Langdon, a professor and marine scientist, introduced Toombs to dulse.

Langdon and others at OSU had been experimenting with dulse for decades and had patented a fast-growing strain called C3.

This strain grows quickly — about 200 grams per square meter per day with sunlight.

It also, according to Langdon, has a high average protein content of 20% on a dry weight basis.

When Toombs learned that Langdon had recently seen a similar seaweed for sale at a grocery store for about $60 per pound, Toombs got excited about dulse’s business potential.

In 2015, Toombs licensed OSU’s strain and started his own company.

Toombs and Langdon shared a viral moment that year while working with chefs testing dulse in recipes; they discovered that deep frying dulse produces a crispy, salty treat similar to bacon.

“Bacon-flavored seaweed” made international headlines.

“The story went around the world,” said Langdon, of OSU.

This selected strain, he said, has a savory, salty flavor and a “strong marine element” and works well as a seasoning, such as in flakes over seafood fettuccini.

Dulse has been eaten for more than 1,000 years, said Langdon, with the first known report from an eight-century monk who wrote about collecting dulse on Ireland’s shores.

The sea vegetable, however, remains rare in American cuisine.

“What Chuck (Toombs) is trying to do is broaden the palette of Americans,” said Langdon.

According to Kieffer, the sales manager, many restaurants now buy dulse from Oregon Seaweed. It is also sold at farmers markets and will soon hit grocery store shelves.

Toombs has an even bigger vision for the future. He plans to market dulse to alt-meat companies, such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, as a protein source to replace soy.

If he gets an alt-meat contract, Toombs plans to build a larger farm to expand production.

Kieffer said the company is also exploring other uses for dulse, such as in fertilizer and livestock feed.