Speaker

About the speaker: 

Jeff Hafting, Ph.D. is a global leader in land-based seaweed cultivation, with more than 30 years of hands-on experience designing, optimizing, and scaling some of the world’s most productive macroalgal systems. Jeff’s work spans seaweed biology, system design, cultivar domestication, R&D strategy, product development, commercial operations, and high-value product development for food, feed, nutraceutical, and cosmeceutical markets making him one of the most experienced practitioners in the global seaweed industry.

His career began in 1993 in experimental seaweed cultivation and evolved into leading large commercial operations. He helped design, build, and manage one of the most productive land-based seaweed cultivation facilities in the world (Big Island Abalone Corporation, Hawai‘i), and later led improvements at Acadian Seaplants (ASL), home to the world’s largest land-based seaweed cultivation site for food production. At ASL, He led the successful development of industrial-scale Palmaria palmata (Dulse) production from a newly domesticated cultivar. Today, he provides science-driven consulting to help seaweed companies scale up and solve complex technical challenges.

Company info:

In 2025, Jeff Hafting Ph.D. founded Totally Seaweed Consulting to bring this expertise to the broader seaweed sector. Through his consulting practice, he helps seaweed companies, investors, and research organizations around the world scale up production, solve complex technical challenges, and design systems that are biologically robust and commercially viable. Totally Seaweed Consulting (www.totallyseaweed.com), offers consulting services that include:

•  Scaling-Up production

 • Troubleshooting biological + design challenges

 • Research & Development design and data analysis

 • Optimization of production and system design

 • Quality & Value Addition guidance

 • Technical Marketing grounded in science

 • Investor Support 

 • Proposal writing and evaluation

Presentation: 

It is called Trial AND Error, and great things cannot be accomplished without failure along the way.  From culture chambers boiling biomass, to smoke rising from paddlewheel motors, to earthquakes taking down tank walls, the speaker has learned many lessons from over 30 years cultivating seaweeds on-land. He will tell his story of trial and error, from thesis work on Pyropia (Porphyra) to his first jobs at startups in Hawaii cultivating Gelidium and Devaleraea (Palmaria), to the ice covered tanks of Nova Scotia and Chondrus and Palmaria cultivation. The speaker hopes to inspire you to keep going when failure makes it seem impossible with tales of his epic fails.