Introduction

Chef says seaweed and sleep helped him shed pounds […] (Cable, 2015)

When famous British chef Jamie Oliver attributed his weight loss in 2015 to the ‘cosmopolitan’ notion of seaweed, he also made it clear that seaweed was a part of our cultural heritage: “I thought seaweed was hippy, globetrotting stuff but our ancestors ate seaweed. It’s the most nutritious vegetable in the world” (ibid).

Over recent years, interest in seaweed as a food has been increasing in the Western world, in research as well as in social and popular media. Unlike many other countries, Sweden does not have a distinct tradition of eating seaweed, even though many people have tasted it as an ingredient in a dish eaten at a restaurant, either at home or abroad. In social media, seaweed recipes and the experience of eating seaweed are being shared and commented on:

When I showed my latest IKEA purchase, someone asked what I use seaweed caviar for and [my] answer [was] primarily [for] fishy sauces and fish gratin.

Under the hashtag #tångkaviar, the Swedish Instagram profile yayitsvego conveys, in pictures and words, a great appreciation of the new IKEA product seaweed caviar. This product, named “seaweed pearls”, is marketed as a vegan seaweed caviar. Yayitsvego also asks how others use seaweed caviar and invites posts about different practices. The comments include various experiences of seaweed caviar: It can be used “in roe sauce with onions and crème fraiche”, “on crackers, on waffles”, “on pizza with artichoke cream and potatoes topped with seaweed caviar and arugula” or “on chips with whipped crème fraiche”, together with a glass of Cava. Someone further comments that it can be [nice] with chicken tacos, a post that is answered with “No, how scary!!! I would never dare to try that.”

Moreover, Swedish food retailers have also taken on a prominent role in social media: When, for example, the ICA Footnote 1 dietician rhetorically wonders if we are curious about “taking a bite of the sea?” she also describes what is hidden beneath the waves as a vegetable garden full of algae and seaweed. To provide some inspiration, ICA chefs have also produced six “delicious recipes using sea vegetables”, which can be found on their website (Säwström, n.d.).

Along with the contemporary desire for healthy food alternatives, seaweed has a great potential for food innovation. Seaweeds are recognized for their nutritional value and unique flavor, color, mouthfeel and textural properties. They can be used in any kind of dish in everyday cooking, as well as in high-end cuisine, with seaweed lovers even positioning themselves by calling seaweeds “sea greens” or “sea vegetables” (Mouritsen, 2017). Today, we are seeing a growing interest in various media in seaweed as an ingredient of various dishes. Here, specific taste communities are being established that share their experiences and learn from each other. In our ongoing research on marine resources for new markets, we focus on how consumers understand the development of food products and food ingredients from marine resources.

The contemporary, sustainable consumer culture is characterized by a growing interest in new and plant-based foods, but many consumers are still engaged in traditional eating habits and unsustainable consumption. To enable sustainable consumption practices, in-depth insight into everyday life consumption is required (e.g., Connolly & Prothero, 2008). Consumers today are showing an increasing interest in environmental issues (Miller, 2012; Moisander, 2008). The customer is becoming more knowledgeable, and we see how alternative approaches to consumption are establishing new behaviors (Evans et al., 2017). Retailers, on the other hand, due to their strategically important position between production and consumption, have a key part to play in the promotion of sustainability (Fuentes & Fredriksson, 2016), with retail having a crucial function as a facilitator of sustainable food alternatives. But the innovative ability of retailing and the food sector has primarily been product- and technology-oriented, focusing more seldom on consumer understanding (Hristov & Reynolds, 2015; Pinto et al., 2017).

Along with the need to increase the production of food in a sustainable way, the stages between producer and consumer have become more numerous, and the flow of goods has become more difficult to understand, manage, and control along the food supply chain. Marine foods and the blue fields of the sea have an important part to play in the trend toward more sustainable food consumption. However, how consumers are experiencing the organization and accessibility of seaweed products in the retail environment is still unexplored. Research and industry have high expectations regarding seafood and algae as sustainable food alternatives. In order to create sustainable flows of food, we need to know more about how “sea spaghetti” can interact with more traditional meals. The dialogs between the consumer, the food industry, and the grocery store are very important to the establishment of new sustainable products and types of ingredients. What is required in order for seaweed to reach a larger retail market?

To answer that question, we explore the forms and contexts in which seaweed is being introduced to consumers in the retail environment. This future marine food will not end up on store shelves by itself: Retail actors are important innovators when it comes to the introduction of sustainable alternatives. New products must make sense to, and become important to, the consumer. In this chapter, we investigate how consumers navigate in-store in order to find seaweed products, as well as how they experience the organization and accessibility of these products.

Materials and Method

I think I prefer to eat seaweed if it’s designed as a delicacy, maybe something you put on a small biscuit and eat with … yes, I’d prefer champagne. Definitely not for home cooking. Footnote 2

This is how one woman reflects upon seaweed as a new food ingredient in Swedish cuisine. Her own experience of seaweed spans between Japan, where she tasted seaweed for the first time, and the smelly seaweed on Sweden’s south coast beaches. She does not think that seaweed tastes particularly good, but she believes that it contains healthy proteins and minerals, in the same way as oysters do. If the seaweed is “guaranteed to be free of bacteria and toxins”, then she sees great potential in it becoming a future delicacy.

To understand how consumers navigate in-store to find seaweed products, and how they experience the organization and accessibility of these products, we have to understand the way in which consumers classify seaweed as food. The introductory quote is taken from our ongoing studies of seaweed experiences (Fredriksson & Säwe, 2020; Merkel et al., 2021). For the research project as a whole, we utilize different methods of data collection, such as expert interviews with agents from the field, social media posts, popular media, and newspaper articles. A qualitative survey was conducted, designed as an online questionnaire and generating around 150 answers that were analyzed for this book chapter. A letter version was sent out as well. The questionnaire focuses on consumers’ seaweed experiences, attitudes, and practices in different settings. Footnote 3

In the questionnaire, we started by asking open and brief questions like: Have you ever eaten seaweed? Where did you eat it and in what form? What did it taste like? Did it taste as you expected it to? We also wanted to know what the respondents use it for, where they buy it (if they use it), and what kind of products they usually buy. In order to gain insights into the retailer’s role as a facilitator of new products, we also conducted an expert interview at a Swedish marketing agency.

In what follows, we will give examples of the contemporary expectations characterizing a marine resource such as seaweed. Here, there are many opportunities and challenges which, in different ways, highlight the grocery store’s difficulties in dealing with innovation and changing patterns of consumption. Despite the fact that consumer interest in new marine products is cautiously positive in Sweden, our empirical material shows that knowledge of cooking methods and areas of use are quite poor, with many people even expressing a strong reluctance to eat seaweed. There are also concerns about what seaweed actually contains. In our questionnaire, we see a clear disinclination toward seaweed as a food, with our analysis indicating that shop** for seaweed is not easy to do.

Shop** for Seaweed

I often buy new products – if the price is low, if they’re clearly visible in the store and if they’re nicely packaged. If it’s good, I’ll buy it again, otherwise I won’t. (Swedish woman, born in 1994)

As we know, price, visibility and packaging are important factors when purchasing food. This also seems to apply to the purchase of seaweed. In our data, there is a great variety of types of products and places of purchase. The products mentioned include everything from dietary supplements, containing algae and bought a few times a year, to seaweed chips, seaweed salad, sushi, tea, seaweed noodles, seaweed caviar, agar-agar, or kelp products for treating the teeth of a dog. The most common places for purchasing these products are small specialty stores, health stores, Asian stores, pharmacies, selected food stores or more traditional grocery stores, and restaurants. Some people buy online, especially if the product is already well-known. Some informants also state having found various seaweed products abroad.

Regarding physical stores, some informants believe that seaweed products can mainly be found in larger cities. One female informant says that she received a seaweed product as a gift, and that this gift then opened the door to other marine products. Consuming seaweed seems to be an ongoing learning process whereby new shop** practices develop in step with new experiences. Introductions are often via familiar products:

The first thing I bought containing algae was sushi, I still buy it a few times a year. Then I started to buy seaweed caviar a couple of times a year. During recent weeks, I’ve been buying seaweed salad and seaweed chips about once a week. I buy sushi at a nearby restaurant, and the other products at the Coop because I usually shop there (n 5).

Trying to identify a store that sells seaweed seems challenging in itself and shows that it is not easy for the consumer to classify this new ingredient. The overlap between categories, for example, seaweed products making certain health claims or plant-based substitute products, adds to the lack of clarity. Moreover, once the consumer has reached the store, it can be difficult to navigate around it and actually find the product. In our questionnaire, we ask, “On what shelf in the store did you find the product? How was it presented?”

Searching for Seaweed in-Store

Seaweed caviar used to be next to the normal caviar before, now Coop has a fridge with only vegan products in it. There doesn’t seem to be any order on the vegan fixture the products are mixed up and the range changes frequently. Algae salad and algae chips are on the Asian shelf /---/ and there are bowls and so on, curry stew and canned soy, which is also on a shelf on the other side of the store, noodles, algae etc. (ibid).

This is how one of the informants describes her difficulties finding the seaweed products she is looking for. The lack of logic and clarity in the physical location of the products is a common experience. Many customers navigate on their own, moving between the various shelves and sections:

The nori sheets were next to some other sushi ingredients (like pickled ginger), quite low down on the shelf. The algae salad was in a fridge near the cash register, more or less at eye-level, next to tofu and fresh herbs (n 59).

Consumers looking for seaweed caviar usually find it in various places: Among other kinds of caviar, among baking ingredients and gelatin, the red algae AgarAgar could be found, while those looking for health products containing seaweed will find these on “supermarket health shelves”, “like a product packed with vital minerals and vitamins, it is placed next to different things, might be omega 3, might be vitamin C … etc.” (n 29).

One woman from Singapore tells us that you “could pick out food to go in a take-away box” at the ICA deli counter “alongside all the other items”, while one man who moved to Sweden from Australia exclusively goes to Asian stores to buy his seaweed products: “Haven’t seen seaweed in regular shops” but, if he were to look, he would describe the following locations as possibilities:

It could be in the cold fresh food section (salads and stir fries), the frozen section (salads and cooking) or the specialty section (flavored powders), or the Asian section (for dried, whole, leafy products) (n 63).

Several of the informants experience Asian specialty stores as crowded and sometimes disorganized, but the seaweed can usually be found among “other dried noodles / soy products”. Those not used to shop in specialty stores do not seem to have much experience of buying seaweed products:

I think it’s difficult to find seaweed products, at least where I’ve been shop**. But lately, I’ve seen that more products are coming, so I’ll probably try again soon (n 54).

Consumers who are more experienced in buying different seaweed products at their everyday grocery store navigate between shelves such as “the veggie shelf, the Asian shelf or the eco/health shelf” (n 58). Several informants say there is usually a shelf called “ethnic food” or “world food”. Such a shelf is often “next to other Japanese and sushi products” (n 43), or “among the products that are vegetarian and vegan, as well as where you find sushi ingredients” (n 35).

We call it the “foreign shelf” … near the tacos, where you can find curry paste, glass noodles, coconut milk, American sweets, and that Arizona iced tea in a nice green bottle, etc. (n 34).

The fish or cold counters also seem to be places where many customers look for seaweed products, with one woman saying that the product had been “presented like any other product” (n 66). The difficulty of classifying and categorizing seaweed with other products is a recurring challenge for retail players.

The Lack of Retail Innovation

Swedish marketing agency Retail House has extensive experience of how to launch new products. According to its expertise, the challenge of innovation and product development is all about implementation and categorization. When it comes to selling seaweed in-store, one of the first questions the marketer asks is whether it is “a fish product or a plant-based product”. Footnote 4 It is not difficult to develop new products, but the journey to the store is much more difficult.

That’s why it’s so important to find agents of change in retail. Most retailers are not, they’re learned to manage large systems. Footnote 5

The mortality rate of newly launched products is 80% within the first two years. Footnote 6 Climate-smart products often end up on a remote shelf. Sudden trends do not survive for long among Swedish food retailers. When the consumer, who really wants to shop climate-smart, enters the store, it is canned tomatoes and toilet paper that are in focus. In front of the respective product shelf, it becomes clear how the discrepancy between intention and action increases in step with the store’s inability to present and market sustainable products.

In contrast to the lack of retail innovation, some restaurants have succeeded in making seaweed visible as a new culinary experience: In the research field of algae, the chef is perceived to be an important facilitator. Due to their nutritious content, richness of taste, and appealing appearance, seaweeds have also become popular in the restaurant world. Interest in growing algae has increased in Sweden, not least due to several research projects addressing the benefits of seaweed. These ongoing projects are often technology- and market-oriented and in collaboration with local entrepreneurs and chefs. Along Sweden’s west coast, local entrepreneurs have started to invest in seaweed as a resource, for delivery to selected restaurants and retailers. Their business offers, among other things, pick-your-own and seaweed safaris, in combination with nature experiences and cooking with seaweed. Here, seaweed becomes an exclusive product sold by a small-scale business that creates green value in a local context (Fredriksson & Säwe, 2020; Merkel et al., 2021).

Along with the need to increase the production of food in a sustainable way, the stages between producer and consumer have become more numerous, with the flow of goods becoming more difficult to understand, manage, and control. In order to bring a change to contemporary consumption patterns, it will be necessary to identify agents of change that have the ability to enable more sustainable food consumption. A store is organized so as to create needs, and also, in various ways, to encourage consumption: However, as sustainability issues are becoming increasingly important, the physical store is also playing a crucial part in guiding the customer toward more conscious consumption.

The difficulty of introducing seaweed into Sweden’s kitchens is expressed in various explanatory models that emphasize the lack of retail innovation, in the EU’s and the Swedish Food Agency’s strict regulations, and in the consumer’s lack of interest, ignorance and reluctance to change. In this context, beliefs, values, and claims regarding healthy and sustainable seaweeds are being activated. But the gap between seaweed as the food of the future and consumer understanding is also becoming more obvious.

Seaweed is a newcomer to Swedish cuisine. But will it ever end up on the menu as an everyday food? In our part of the world, there are no traditional practices of eating and cooking seaweed. Although seaweed and algae can be bought in some grocery stores, it is still a rare ingredient. Despite the fact that Sweden’s culinary culture has undergone a genealogical and gastronomic renaissance during recent decades, and the fact that today’s consumers are enlightened and aware, everyday food and shop** routines are rarely open to change. Retail has a major responsibility to offer green products and encourage sustainable consumption.

Seaweed Futures and Features

I’ve heard that seaweed is very nutritious and has a different type of carbohydrate/fiber composition than plants that grow on land. We should learn to eat and cook that, but I have no knowledge of what’s good to eat and what isn’t. (n 63)

Seaweeds are new food products which, thus far, have only reached a niche market in Sweden, but which have a great potential to become attractive food products since marine resources could be transformed to more sustainable products, from an environmental and health perspective. A recently published Swedish study shows that consumers may be positively inclined toward including seaweed as part of their diet, mainly due for sustainability reasons (Wendin & Undeland, 2020). These findings also showed that the most preferred ways of consuming seaweed were as snacks and bread or in various dishes.

To conclude the questionnaire, we asked the respondents to describe the typical seaweed consumer. Descriptions of such a consumer also included descriptions of a context, more or less specific, of which the “typical seaweed consumer” was a part. Here, the connections between lifestyle and seaweed consumption can be understood as a number of narratives that point to new markets and possible future scenarios.

On the one hand, the empirical material contains descriptions of a consumer who is well-educated and environmentally conscious, while on the other, descriptions of other ethnic backgrounds and marine experiences are recurrent. The different narratives reveal notions of gender with connections to an alternative lifestyle like the “super duper hipster-raw food veganista living on a farm without water/electricity” (n 27).

In Sweden, I imagine someone who’s very health-conscious, probably also a foodie, who likes to post pictures of their food on Instagram, maybe a bit of a hipster. I’d think the typical seaweed/algae consumer is rather young (under 40). Apart from that, I think seaweed/algae is still considered to be something of an “ethnic” food that you can mainly buy in Asian food stores, so I also think of people of Eastern or Southeast Asian descent when I think about the typical consumer of seaweed/algae products. (n 59).

Awareness is a quality that accompanies several of the descriptions: “Aware. Maybe a member of a nature organization. Researchers, managers, exclusive restaurants.” (n 83) But there is also a general curiosity as regards trying “new stuff” in general and new foods in particular. Another recurring factor is the availability of time: “Curious, willing to try new experiences and with the time to make new recipes”. When it comes to seaweed in the form of dietary supplements, such as tablets or powder, influencers are mentioned as an important channel (n 66). This also includes a vegetarian diet as part of a healthy lifestyle.

The data showed us that there is a wide range of ideas and images surrounding seaweed, from the marine resource that is a revolutionary force to reflections upon whether it is healthy or not. A connection is visible between healthiness, environmental impact and the revolutionary magic of seaweed. These different experiences and perceptions of seaweed enable the development of various products and markets, but insight into the consumer’s ambivalent attitudes also requires clarity and transparency.

Conclusion

The point of departure for this book chapter was the need to explore how consumers experience the organization and accessibility of seaweed food products in retail stores in order to support future sustainable consumption efforts. The argument was made that the grocery store’s position between goods and consumers entails great responsibility when it comes to the transition to a more sustainable society. The grocery store is in many ways the intersection between everyday consumption and contemporary sustainability work. Retailers are in control of the flow of products and goods from producers to consumers on most European markets, and sustainable food production involves understanding the contradictory practices of consumption. This is a crucial starting point when it comes to being able to increase the competence of the actors of the food system.

In line with previous research, we emphasize that empirical studies are needed in order to understand how consumers make sense of new food products, as well as how they and retailers play a crucial part in more sustainable consumption. Sustainability services (Fuentes & Fredriksson, 2016), as well as nudges toward sustainable consumption (Connolly & Prothero, 2008) by retailers, can contribute toward hel** consumers classify new food products and establish links to already familiar ingredients.

To conclude, the data showed us that Swedish consumers connect seaweed products with various other categories that can be found in supermarkets, such as vegetables or fish. Here, consumers expect seaweed to form part of vegetarian or vegan alternatives. Moreover, other classifications offered by retailers, for example “exotic”, “world food”, “ethnic”, or “foreign” foods, especially sections where food from Japan or miscellaneous Asian countries is offered, also resonate with consumer expectations with regard to finding seaweed products. Another possible classification of seaweed products links with ideas about sustainability. This means, on the one hand, seaweed is connected with ecological food products, while on the other, it is connected with healthy foods.

As has been shown, consumers seem to be quite open and flexible regarding the positioning of seaweed products in stores. As previous research has shown, certain consumer groups feel like taking their responsibility as regards consuming more sustainably. Those consumer groups could function as early adopters for new seaweed products and could be targeted accordingly. Retailers and practitioners could help consumer understanding of these new products by educating them about sustainability and providing sustainability services through, for example, shelf labeling or special offers. Vegetarian or vegan alternatives to already-established products could be placed next to these familiar foods in order to make it easy for the consumer to understand how new products are intended to be used, and how they fit into current cooking and eating practices.

In this chapter, we have analyzed a number of challenges concerning the potential for seaweed to reach a larger Swedish retail market. The results reveal a disparity and ambivalence in attitudes and approaches to seaweed among consumers, paving the way for new consumer insights, retail guidance, and in-store services. We emphasize the responsibility of the retail sector in being one of the main actors introducing alternative and new food products. We seek to raise issues relating to communication and organization, as well as how to facilitate sustainable food consumption.