How Save Da Sea’s plant-based seafood caught a wave of success

By Katrya Bolger

After becoming vegan in 2018, Aki Kaltenbach started looking for seafood alternatives for herself and clients of her family’s Japanese restaurant chain. But the British Columbia-based restaurant manager couldn’t find any. So Kaltenbach started working on her own recipes and serving those products in her family’s restaurants, which helped validate her feeling that there was a broader market for these products. 

In 2019, she decided to dive into her plant-based seafood alternative business full time. Leading with a sustainable ethos, Save Da Sea aims to mimic the flavour of seafood using simple ingredients with products such as their “smoked salmon”, made from carrots, bull kelp and Omega-3s from flax oil.

Looking back on her business journey, Kaltenbach says growing it was the hardest thing she’s ever done: “People tell you how hard it is to run your own business, but it’s hard to truly understand until you experience it for yourself. I’m fighting fires every other day, from supply chain issues, increasing costs, equipment breaking down to retailers delisting your products.”

Another challenge was securing funding opportunities. Early-stage consumer-packaged goods businesses like Save Da Sea rarely make a profit in the first few years. That made getting loans from traditional lenders such as banks “virtually impossible” for her business, Kaltenbach says. As for other loan programs, she says they often operate at high interest rates which makes it too expensive for most small businesses to apply.

That changed in early 2023 when she connected with WeBC, a not-for-profit focused on helping British Columbia-based women entrepreneurs grow their businesses. An advisor at WeBC suggested she look into the WEOC National Loan Program – a federally funded program that gives loans of up to $50,000 to women-owned businesses. Run by the Women’s Enterprise Organizations of Canada (WEOC) –a non-profit network of organizations supporting women entrepreneurs – the loan program was designed to reduce the barriers that women business owners often face when seeking funding, by eliminating things like minimum credit scores or collateral requirements, but also by providing them with on-going access to expert advice and resources from advisors.

The funding that Kaltenbach received led her to set up Save Da Sea’s state-of-the-art facility which they now operate in Victoria, British Columbia. It also allowed them to invest in equipment to increase their production capacity, which helped them reduce labour costs. This has set them to achieve profitability by the end of 2024, Kaltenbach says.

In 2022, WEOC released its Bootstrap or Borrow? report exploring the factors that shape a woman’s decision to pursue business funding. The research found that while two-thirds of respondents planned to grow their businesses in the next three years, only 50 per cent had applied for funding for the coming three years. A lot of that has to do with their uneasy relationship with the idea of debt, the report says. Nearly 8 in 10 noted that they “hate owing money”, even if they say they can “distinguish between good debt versus bad debt”. But Kaltenbach says her experience has challenged that perception: “As an entrepreneur I spend a lot of my time finding money to help grow our business, and debt is an important tool in your toolkit to unlock growth without having to give up ownership of your company through equity.”

In the years to come, Kaltenbach plans to keep building Save Da Sea. The business is currently set to expand into the U.S. Pacific Northwest. They are also in the process of developing new products, including a line of plant-based seafood dips that will launch later this year.   

For all the challenges that come with being an entrepreneur, Kaltenbach says being able to serve a growing customer base hungry for seafood alternatives makes it well worth it – not to mention the fact they get to do work that supports the environment. “By inspiring more people to shift to a plant-based diet, we can help relieve pressure on our oceans,” she says – and make waves while they do.