In Her Own Words: Briana Warner, President and CEO of Atlantic Sea Farms.

“In Her Own Words” is a blog post series where we highlight our amazing seaweed partners.

Briana Warner. Photo: Daniel Orr

Meet Briana Warner, President and CEO of Atlantic Sea Farms. Briana has dedicated her life to doing well by doing good. She is passionate about her incredible home state of Maine and working with partner fishermen farmers to help create a more resilient and thriving coast. Since taking over as CEO at Atlantic Sea Farms in 2018, she and her team have expanded the company to work with 24 partner farmers from Portland to Eastport. Bri has followed a winding path that brought her to kelp - including serving several tours as a diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service, starting and selling a wholesale bakery in Portland focused on pies with an international flair and employing recent refugees resettled to the area, and creating the first Economic Development programming suite at the Maine-based Island Institute. She is an avid gardener, an obsessive cook, and a proud mother of two rad sons. In 2020, Bri was named an Eating Well Magazine Food Hero, awarded the Specialty Foods Association's Business Leadership Award, and had the honor of sitting on several state, national, and global aquaculture and business policy boards. She also believes that she happens to lead the very best team of people in the natural foods space - and challenges you to prove her wrong.

Briana Warner, In Her Own Words

“I want people to know that everything we do is driven by the idea that economic problems can be solved by acting in advance of when the problems happen, and lobster fisheries is a perfect example. My background is in economic development and more often than not, people wait until after the conflict to do anything. By that time, it is more difficult to dig out of that hole.

The problem statement is that the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 99% of oceans in the world. But what if we could turn that into an opportunity statement? Here we have an overqualified workforce of individual owner-operator fishermen who have boats, access to infrastructure, a robust and generational understanding of the ocean, and a history of conservation. What if we could mitigate some of the effects of climate change on our local economy by activating and incentivizing this workforce with a growing market for kelp, and improve the health of our local oceans while doing so?

I think so often in economic development we try to solve problems by asking the wrong questions. At the end of the day, kelp can help the environment in huge ways. However, this is not how we are going to get people to farm kelp, at least not people who are going to be good at farming it. Kelp and its positive environmental impacts may bring in some excited scientists, but they do not know how to run a business. Kelp might attract a few entrepreneurs, but they do not know how to be on the ocean. The people who are good at farming kelp, know how to run a business and work on the ocean are fishermen, and they are psyched about the environmental benefits but that is not why they got into this industry. And it doesn’t need to be! That is not what this is about. We need to prove that kelp is a viable business for people, not that it is this non-profit, feel good endeavor.

Atlantic Sea Farms. Photo: The Island Institute

It is not about feeling good; you must do well by doing good.

We can prove that people can make money and do well, while also doing a whole lot of good. We can do all the social mission work if people like the way kelp tastes and if people can make money when they farm it.

We are filled with hope about diversification for our coast by being innovative and capitalizing on the strengths that we have on our coastlines to preempt any potential issues down the line that could be problematic for the coast. Every time we create a product, it’s with the goal of getting more farms in the water and solving for these issues.

It’s not about what we are doing wrong, it is about what we can do right.

So much of the narrative around climate change and ocean restoration is not heard because of the way it is delivered. Our partnership with Oceans 2050 is exciting because what Alexandra Cousteau and Oceans 2050 is bringing to the table is exactly what people need to hear. I am really inspired by her and her whole team, who show how we as thought leaders can continue to drive toward positivity, optimism, and excitement about what we can do to restore our food system, the planet, and the oceans.”