On the Goan coastline, where the waves wash up more than just sand and shells, Gabriella D’Cruz sees possibility in the dense, tangled forests of seaweed swaying below the surface. To her, these underwater meadows are not just marine ecosystems, but a future for food, health, and livelihoods. When the tide pulls back to reveal glistening stretches of the shore, she steps into the water. The sea is her workplace, her laboratory, and her muse. Around her, forests of seaweed sway like green-brown silk scarves in the current, their quiet abundance hiding both opportunity and fragility.
“I realised early on,” Gabriella recalls, “that conservation without any kind of monetary benefit to communities is often enforced. It comes heavy-handedly, and it doesn’t work.”
Her words carry the weight of lived experience. For years, as a marine conservationist, she worked at the intersection of government bodies, NGOs, fisher communities, and boat operators in Goa. She saw firsthand how blanket bans or restrictions meant to “protect” marine ecosystems often alienated the very people whose livelihoods depended on them.
“If you tell a boat operator to stay away from a reef because anchoring damages coral, he won’t listen; he needs the income,” she explains. “But if you give him a mooring buoy and brand him as a safe, sustainable operator who protects reefs, suddenly he gets more tourists, more business. That’s how conservation works, when it creates incentives.”
It was in Tamil Nadu, while researching reef ecosystems, that Gabriella’s story took a new turn. There, she met women harvesting seaweed. They were often accused of overharvesting, of putting pressure on fragile ecosystems. But their words stayed with her: “This is our only income. It puts our kids in school, and it feeds our families. We have our own methods, our own rhythms, but stopping this is not an option.”
That encounter crystallised something. “Globally, seaweed is expensive. But these women were making very little money. Why? If this were a high-value product, why wasn’t that value reaching them?” She remembers their frustration. “They told me that everyone came there, made them fill out forms, took photos, and wrote articles. But nobody does anything.” So Gabriella decided she would try building a seaweed business herself to understand its challenges.
From Researcher to Entrepreneur
With no roadmap except a conviction that things could be different, Gabriella founded The Good Ocean. What began as an experiment to see if Indian seaweed could find a place in high-value markets soon became a bridge between coastal harvesters and some of the country’s most inventive chefs.
“Chefs were really interested,” she says. “They weren’t using Indian seaweed in Asian dishes. They were whipping up pani puri, seaweed bhel, crackers and even a seaweed martini. They were putting it in Indian dishes in ways no one had ever imagined.”
Unlike the imported kombu, wakame, or nori used in Japanese and Korean restaurants, Indian seaweed carried its own personality. Briny, earthy, sometimes bitter, sometimes deeply umami, it wasn’t a replica of East Asian seaweed. It was something else entirely. And chefs loved it.
“We don’t really have much literature about it, but you can eat almost every single seaweed species in India currently. I’ve eaten everything that I’ve seen and it’s been fine. However, there might be individuals who have specific allergies towards it. The larger question, though, is about palatability because they’re not all very pleasant tasting. Some of them are quite bitter, while others have a strange texture and are quite chewy. Some of them have a lot less flavour than others,” Gabriella explains.
Today, Gabriella’s small team of just four people carefully harvests sargassum and other palatable species along Goa’s coast. “We only take a fraction, less than 5%,” she explains. “We don’t rip them out from the root; we use a sickle. We move carefully through the forest so it continues to thrive. Being calm in the water is important; if you panic, you damage more than you harvest.”
Back on land, the seaweed goes through an almost ritualistic process sorted by hand, washed in salt and freshwater, and dried slowly in a moisture-free room. “It takes about 12 hours,” Gabriella says. “Then it’s vacuum-packed, so it stays stable for two years. Clean, transparent and traceable.”
The Good Ocean may be small, but it’s deeply intentional. Gabriella works with chefs at restaurants like Mumbai’s Masque, local bakeries in Goa, and food innovators developing crackers, seasonings, and more. They have collaborated with Atmosphere Studio to launch India’s first seaweed crackers.
Seaweed also has several health benefits. Two teaspoons of seaweed, she explains, can provide daily iodine needs, plus iron, calcium, magnesium, and even B12 in some species. “It’s good for the gut and good for the skin and can be a miracle resource, if handled responsibly.”
Seaweed, Gabriella reminds us, isn’t only about food. It can become bioplastics, inks, glues, textiles and even wound-healing bandages. It captures carbon, improves gut health, and protects skin. “It’s this incredible, versatile material,” she says, “and yet in India, we’re only scratching the surface.”
For Gabriella, the work is as much about dispelling myths as it is about innovation. “People think seaweed farming is easy. That you just tie it to a raft, leave it in the ocean, and it grows. But it’s not glamorous at all. It’s hard, technical, and constantly shaped by climate change. Farming bananas took 10,000 years of refinement. Seaweed farming, even in Korea, has just 400 years of history. In India, only 25. We’re still figuring it out, every day.”
The ocean adds its own unpredictability, cyclones that rip apart rafts and warming waters that cause disease outbreaks. “It’s not just the market that’s difficult,” Gabriella says, “the farming itself is the hardest part.”
India’s coastline is home to over 800 species of seaweed, 143 of them in Goa alone. Not all are delicious, not all are easy to harvest, but each is part of a vast, largely untapped resource. With government schemes now pushing for aquaculture permits and funding, more players may enter the sector.That’s why she stresses the need for caution.
For now, she is content to build slowly, season by season, tide by tide. In her hands, seaweed isn’t just an ingredient. It’s a story of women’s livelihoods, of chefs’ creativity, of oceans demanding care. “Conservation has to work for everyone,” she says finally. “For the reefs, for the oceans, and for the people whose lives are tied to them.” And with that, she looks back at the sea, the forests swaying beneath the waves, waiting for the tide to turn.
