Southern Seagreens wins Changemaker trophy at 2025 Produce Awards - Produce Awards

Aug 28, 2025

From invasive pest to superfood: how three mates turned underwater weeding into an award-winning food business.

Nine point seven billion. This is how many people will call Earth home by 2050. It’s a lot of hungry mouths to feed. This makes finding sustainable future food solutions now more essential than ever. Luckily, one small kelp farming business on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula has been doing just that.

Cam Hines, Bert Cross and Rob Brimblecombe created Southern Seagreens to breed and farm native kelp. The three mates also wild-harvest the invasive kelp species wakame (pictured at top) – a fast-growing introduced kelp that has been crowding out native kelp species.

Why farm seaweed?

Seaweed farming is one of the most sustainable agricultural practices on the planet. Farming native kelp requires no arable land, no fresh water and no fertilisers or pesticides. It just grows away down there under the sea, absorbing nutrients and minding its own business.

But it’s not just about sustainability. Kelp happens to be one of the most densely nutritious vegetables on the planet. It contains more calcium than milk and more iron than red meat by weight. It’s also a great source of a whole ocean-load of other important vitamins, minerals and antioxidants – everything from vitamins B, C and K and magnesium, iodine, folate and fibre to omega-3 fatty acids. It’s low in fat and calories, and as it’s rich in prebiotics, it’s also great for your gut health.

Meanwhile, by removing invasive wakame, the Southern Seagreens team is helping native kelp populations re-establish. And because of the way that they harvest the wakame, they’re now seeing their efforts have a real impact.

Winning the war against wakame

One of the reasons why wakame is so insidious is because it releases millions of spores, which can spread rapidly and grow quickly to form large, dense ‘forests’, crowding out other seaweed species. The Southern Seagreens team removes the entire wakame plant, including the part of the plant that releases the spores.

“What we are starting to see now, in our fourth year of wakame hunting, is that the areas we have hit hard, we are not seeing it return in any significant way,” Hines tells delicious. “And in some of these areas, we are seeing native golden kelp return in good numbers. This is pretty exciting, as we have lost approximately 90 percent of our local [golden kelp] population over the last few decades.”

Native kelp isn’t just a highly nutritious food source for humans; it also plays an important role in providing food and habitat for our diverse marine species. The kelp improves the marine ecosystem as it grows. So Southern Seagreens’ efforts are not only producing a new, sustainable food source; they’re also helping to ensure the health of the marine environment we rely on to produce other seafood sources.

Award-winning flavour

As for the wakame, while it’s invasive, it’s also highly versatile as a unique, umami-rich ingredient. The bulk of Southern Seagreens’ wakame harvest goes to forward-thinking local chefs, who use various parts of the kelp to create new and imaginative dishes. So impressed have chefs been with their business, it scored the Southern Seagreens team a delicious. Harvey Norman Produce Award, with the three intrepid seaweed farmers winning the Changemaker trophy at this year’s awards.

But you don’t need to be a chef to get your hands on Southern Seagreens produce. The team also produces a range of native kelp condiments and seasonings for consumers, including Smoked Kelp Umami Wonder Dust – an ‘umami bomb’ that was first developed for chefs. You might also want to shake your booty in the kitchen with their Kelp Disco Jam, a flavour-lifting relish quite unlike any other – savoury with a hint of sweetness, and perfect for eggs, noodles, toasties or cheese boards. Dried wakame is also available to consumers, and has a wide variety of culinary uses – soups, salads, stir-fries… dive in.

Head to southernseagreens.com to find out more.