The kelp producer who wants to get Americans eating seaweed

An important development from the financial markets: The kelp producer who wants to get Americans eating seaweed 7 hours ago Share Save Add as preferred on Google Michelle Fleury North America business correspondent Elizabeth Ellenwood Kelp farmer Suzie Flores quit the New York City rat race Suzie Flores left a Manhattan career to farm sugar kelp off the Connecticut coast. Now she's trying to convince the US that the future of sustainable food is growing under the waves. On a February morning, when most of coastal New England is braced against the cold, Suzie Flores is frequently out on the water.

The sea has to be calm enough, ice cleared from the boat, GPS buoys still where she left them. If the conditions line up, she will head out from the marina in Stonington, Connecticut - one of the last remaining commercial fishing ports in the state - to lift a line of sugar kelp, a type of seaweed, from the Atlantic. In February there is not much to see yet, just thin fronds that will become metre-long blades by spring.

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She measures, photographs, and sometimes takes water samples for marine scientists. Then she heads back in. A decade ago, Flores had an English degree, a desk in a Manhattan academic publishing firm, and a commute from Jersey City.

Today she runs Stonington Kelp Company from a marina she and her husband bought and now live on, harvesting a crop unfamiliar enough in the US that she has spent years persuading people to eat it. Her husband Jay, a former combat photographer in Iraq and Afghanistan, came home, in her words, unsettled, and he retrained as an engineer. Around the same time, Flores had three children in quick succession and began questioning the life she was building.

What, she wondered, would she want them to say about her at her funeral? The answer was not market research for higher education software. The family moved north, found a run-down marina on the Connecticut–Rhode Island border, and bought it.

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Flores went back to school to study environmental science, and emailed Charlie Yarish, a University of Connecticut biologist credited with pioneering seaweed farming in the US. He replied the same day and pointed her to GreenWave, a non-profit helping new farmers navigate permits. "I have like my newborn baby strapped to my chest when we're having these phone calls," she says, "trying to figure out if all of this could work.

" She felt the stars were aligning "1000%". There was one problem - the market didn't materialise. Elizabeth Ellenwood The kelp is farmed off the coast of Connecticut When Flores harvested her first crop, she had thousands of pounds of seaweed and nowhere to sell it.

"Had Jay and I known about that element of work," she says, "I don't know if we would have gone into it. " So she created a demand herself. She cold-called farm-to-table restaurants, talking chefs through sugar kelp's mild, briny flavour.

Financial markets are tracking the development closely as investors assess the likely impact.