The Caribbean has farmed sea moss for 40 years. It's only now learning what it's worth.

Reporting and sources for this article include the Food and Agriculture Organization, Fauna & Flora, International Trade Centre, Exalreport Saint Lucia, and research published in Nature Climate Change.

"Sometimes life gets difficult, and women have to stand alone with their children," says Prieul Walter, a member of the Praslin Community Women in Sea Moss Group in Saint Lucia. "Sea moss is a way and a means of bringing money to the table."

Walter's group was not farming sea moss before 2020. When Saint Lucia's borders closed in March of that year and the tourist economy stopped, coastal communities turned to what was already growing in the shallow water in front of them. Saint Lucians had been cultivating sea moss since the 1980s. The pandemic did not create the industry; it accelerated a global market that had been building quietly for years and made plain what that market was actually worth.

The global sea moss industry, spanning raw dried product, gels, powders, capsules, beverages, and cosmetic ingredients, was valued at approximately US$2.18 billion in 2024. The supplements segment is growing at 15 per cent annually. For the first time, the infrastructure to capture a meaningful share of that value within the Caribbean is being built: through farming innovation on the water, certification programmes on land, and a regulatory framework the FAO published last year.

Sea Moss Superfood Boom

Sea moss is red algae, not a single plant but a category. The variety farmed commercially across most of the Caribbean is Eucheuma cottonii, a fast-growing species that thrives in warm shallow water and can double its mass within four to six weeks. Saint Lucia has grown it on rope lines anchored to the seabed for four decades. It is harvested by hand, washed, sun-dried, and sold, most often as dried whole fronds that leave the island and become something else somewhere else.

The nutritional profile that drove the superfood boom is genuine. Sea moss is rich in iodine, potassium, and calcium, and produces carrageenan, a natural gelling agent used across food manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics. Global seaweed exports reached US$3.9 billion in 2025, with around 68 per cent of that figure coming from derivatives like carrageenan. Most of the 36 million Americans who consume sea moss products annually buy it in gel, capsule, or powder form, none of which is typically produced in the Caribbean.

Dried sea moss leaves a Saint Lucia farm at a broker-set commodity price. By the time it has been washed, soaked, blended into gel, encapsulated, or formulated into a skincare product and placed on a shelf in New York or London, it is worth multiples of what the farmer received. That gap between raw material and finished product is not unusual in agricultural trade. What is unusual is that the farming region has the climate, the expertise, the species, and now the regulatory framework to close it.

Saint Lucia is building the certification that changes the price

Export Saint Lucia is leading the process to establish a Geographic Indicator for Saint Lucian sea moss. A Geographic Indicator works like a Protected Designation of Origin: it ties a product's identity legally to its place of origin and production method, in the same way Champagne or Parmigiano-Reggiano function in European food markets. Once in place, certified Saint Lucian sea moss could command a price premium that large-volume commodity producers elsewhere cannot replicate, because the origin and the method are what the buyer is purchasing.

That process runs alongside a broader institutional build-out. Fauna & Flora has trained more than 100 farmers in Saint Lucia in food safety practices and record-keeping. The International Trade Centre, with European Union support, is working with producer associations in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to help farmers move from raw sales into value-added products and export relationships. In April 2025, the FAO published its cultivation manual for the Caribbean, authored by Saint Lucian sea moss expert Thomas Nelson, covering site selection, pest management, post-harvest handling, and alignment with Aquaculture Stewardship Council standards. It is, in effect, the technical due diligence baseline for anyone buying from or investing in the sector.

More than a third of Caribbean sea moss farms are run by women, and that proportion is reflected in who is leading the move into value addition. In Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, producers working with the ITC have shifted from selling dried raw product to formulating branded goods and building direct export relationships. "Women are not only cultivating, but we are also formulating, branding, researching, and building export-ready businesses," says Ronita Ollivierre of the Saint Vincent Sea Moss Association. "Seeing women lead in this space reflects resilience, creativity, and economic empowerment in action."