Meet Jules Marsh | Co-Founder & CEO of Kelpful Cooperative Inc.

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jules Marsh and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jules, how does your business help the community?
We’re a small worker owned cooperative run by women who began with a dream of farming seaweed. We say “This is What Climate Resilience Tastes Like” because seaweed embodies the qualities of a climate resilient resource- it is abundant, renewable, fast growing, and needs no fresh water or fertilizer to grow. Seaweed also sequesters carbon and nitrogen, improving the marine ecosystems where it grows!

Collectively, our team has spent decades harvesting and using seaweed in our daily lives. With this knowledge we have developed programming to educate, provide unique experiences, and grow ocean stewardship. This curriculum has taken years to develop which places high priority on the mindful, responsible harvesting methods that we use. We want everyone to enjoy and immerse themselves in seaweed and become stewards of these extremely special places. We put the ocean first in everything we do. It is with great honor, privilege and gratitude that we offer the experiences we do in order to grow our mindful seaweed foraging community.

What should our readers know about your business?
Kelpful has had quite the journey since the starry eyed dreams of having a seaweed farm back in 2017. We learned very quickly that it wasn’t possible to have a seaweed farm in the open ocean in California, yet. This led us down two paths: networking and supporting the industry and agencies in making that possible & wild harvesting seaweed so that if/when we had our own farm, we would know how to process it and also build the market and consumer awareness. From 2020 to 2023 we developed phenomenal food and self-care products, built a well-known brand, and were in stores like Whole Foods. We went this direction because at the time, and it’s still true today, it’s what the seaweed industry in the US really needed. But our roots actually began with a seaweed cooking class. This was the first official public thing we ever did as a company in 2019 and the turnout was incredible, including a journalist, and it led to our first article publication. I still have that article printed and framed. It was so much fun and joyful to educate our community in a hands on way and share a meal together. Education and serving our community has always been our top priority, and has always brought us the most joy. During the years we were making products, we had an overwhelming amount of requests to join us harvesting and to learn the practices, so in 2021 we formally launched our seaweed foraging tours. We continued to build from there and began developing curriculum for our local school districts, taking students on field trips, expanding into workshops that can be done anywhere, working with various organizations to educate and provide unique experiences primarily focused around seaweed, but including invaluable knowledge and experience on climate change, coastal resilience, sustainability, and ultimately building ocean stewardship. The economic market of the last 4 years has been extremely rough, especially for small businesses, particularly for food small businesses, and even more so for aquaculture food small businesses. While we ended up developing a great snack product that we were ready to launch on a national scale, we were unable to raise the capital we needed to make it happen, and to get our operations to scale. So, in October of 2023 we made the tough decision to close our production warehouse, discontinue product production, sell off assets, and pivot to focusing on educational experiences and supporting the industry in other ways. Melissa and I spent years and countless hours doing likely hundreds of pitches, through so many organizations and private groups and individual investors, and often we were seen as “silly little women” or our offer wasn’t attractive because in the food industry, especially the farming industry, the return isn’t what even an “impact” investor is looking for. The reality is, our food system is on the brink of collapse and rather than funneling money into more tech, we need to be pouring money into supporting aquaculture food production and marketing. And right now, for the majority of us in this industry, that isn’t happening. So now, in addition to our public outreach work, we are working toward forming a coalition that can serve as a global model for supporting aquaculture food production. We have a plethora of knowledge and experience in production, branding, and marketing, including our own custom app we built for tracking production, inventory, and order fulfillment, that we want to share. We aim to provide business training, resources, shared support in the sales industry with direct pipelines into stores, branding and messaging consistency across the industry, and access to real funding. We want to prevent what happened to us, from happening to any more aquaculture small businesses and develop a model that is economically sustainable, and replicable. It is a lot of work, and work that I am mostly shouldering myself these days as Melissa has had to move on to other ventures at this time. So, what does Kelpful Cooperative look like today? My days vary anywhere from leading foraging tours, workshops, cheffing seaweed dinner events, giving guest lectures, harvesting seaweed for aquariums and restaurants, writing grants, endless meetings in an attempt to make movement on the coalition, business administration, and dreaming big. Outside of my work for Kelpful, I am a private chef, I live on a boat and am working on my captain’s license, I work on local boats in Morro Bay, I’m a stand up comedian, I’m a musician, and I’m a mom. Somehow I also find the time to balance self-care and time for me and enjoy cold plunging in the bay with the Morro Bay Odder Club and have the best community here always attending some activity whether it’s yoga, sound baths, various support groups, or just relaxing on the back deck of my boat at sunset. I’m living in a place of almost financial scarcity, but I am more happy and free than I ever was managing a CPG company in the volatile capitalistic environment of the US business world.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Whenever I have friends visit I like to show them the following:
Cold plunge in Morro Bay with the Morro Bay Odder Club
Visit otter nursery area in the bay and the sea lion dock either by kayaking with Central Coast Outdoors or on a boat with SubSea Tours or whale watching with Morro Bay Whale Watching
Tidepool adventures with myself, Kelpful
Breakfast/brunch at Hidden Kitchen in Cayucos
Check out my 42′ yacht that has amazing views and unique up close experiences with wildlife, sunsets and stargazing from the top deck are the best and sleeping on it is heaven! (I have 6 beds!)
Visit the Elephant Seals in San Simeon
Check out the Morro Bay History Museum
Visit Set & Setting, an awesome store and even more awesome community of people
Sound bath at Let’s Get Tuned
Yoga with 9th Limb Yoga
Hike Cerro Alto that has the best panoramic views of the whole county
Experience a brunch or dinner event hosted by Chef Dominique Benavidez of Agridulce
Visit Black Market Cheese Company for a farm tour & cheese tasting
Lunch or Dinner from Giovanni’s Fish Market for some solid seafood
Lunch or Dinner at Robin’s Restaurant in Cambria
The nature in and surrounding Morro Bay is stunning and there is so much to be seen out in nature just walking around whether it’s the large stretch of beach, the boardwalk along the waterfront, Morro Bay Rock, or hiking the surrounding hills

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Our inspiration came from a Bioneers podcast talking about the organizations Atlantic Sea Farms & Greenwave and their efforts for seaweed farming on the East Coast. Co-Founder and former CEO, Melissa Hanson, and I both listened to the same podcast at the same time, and started separate seaweed companies in the same town, and we didn’t meet for almost a year after that. It was clear we were meant to work together and thus the Kelpful we have today was forged. We have been inspired, supported, and worked along side many organizations and wonderful people over the years such as Cal Poly SLO, California Sea Grant, Sunken Seaweed, Daybreak Seaweed, The Cultured Abalone Farm, Rootless, Barnacle Foods, Sea Grove, Sea Trees, and most recently the Usal Project. This past year we went through a large pivot from previously being a CPG seaweed product focused company, shifting to solely focus on educational experiences and supporting the seaweed industry with our knowledge and resources. During this transition, there has been 1 author and 1 book in particular that has been particularly inspiring and served as a personal guide for promoting stewardship and our connection with the ocean and nature. The book is Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and by submerging myself in this text I gained a whole new perspective and deeper connection to marine mammals, the ocean, social movements, and stewardship that I channel into my educational work.

Website: https://kelpful.com

Instagram: @kelpful_ca & @kaptainkelp

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jules-marsh-01a29452/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KelpfulCoop/

Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/kelpful-san-luis-obispo

Image Credits
Erika Cole Photography
The Happiness Function