Speaker

About the speaker: 

Sam Garwin is the Director of Market Development at GreenWave, a nonprofit that builds scalable, equitable equitable markets for regenerative ocean farmers. Through education, commercial R&D pilots, and value chain support, she enables companies to get kelp from sea to sale as ingredients in food, beauty, and beyond. Since 2019, Sam has led Seaweed Source, an app with wraparound business development support that connects over 100 seaweed across eleven U.S. states and Canadian provinces. The Kelp Innovation CoLab, launched in September 2025, provides fully-funded collaborative R&D for brands interested in developing products with functional kelp ingredients.. Sam draws on more than 15 years of experience building sustainable supply chains and socially responsible business models. Before GreenWave, Sam was the CEO of Fleishers, a pioneer of pasture-raised whole-animal retail butchery; and an early employee of Maya Mountain Cacao, a direct trade bean-to-bar cocoa supplier. Sam also serves on the National Advisory Board for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Company info:

GreenWave works to replicate and scale regenerative ocean farming – a zero-input kelp farming model that breathes life back into our oceans. Through farmer-forward training and support, climate subsidies, and infrastructure and market development, GreenWave partners with coastal communities and innovators across North America to create a thriving blue economy. GreenWave has been featured in the BBC, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine, and is the winner of the 2021 Curt Bergfors Food Planet Prize.

Presentation: 

Over the past decade, GreenWave’s work has evolved in direct response to the realities of building a kelp industry — not in theory, but in practice. Working alongside farmers, processors, and buyers across the value chain we have learned some important lessons about what it takes to grow an industry from pilot to commercial scale. In this session, we’ll share how these experiences drove three critical shifts in our programming:

from one-on-one farmer support to regional, cohort-based capacity building;

from supporting individual operators to strengthening entire end-to-end value chains; and 

from positioning kelp as a hero ingredient to leveraging it as a functional, problem-solving input for existing sectors.

It will be also discussed why building a robust, scalable seaweed industry depends as much on durable business relationships and coordination as on technical innovation, and highlight several collaborative models GreenWave is testing to accelerate industry readiness and long-term viability.