handcrafted fine foods from THE ICELANDIC FJORDS.
Fine Foods Íslandica is a seaweed farm and food production company. We create delicious, easy-to-use seafood and seaweed ingredients for fancy kitchens. By sourcing ingredients from small food producers in Iceland, we bring minimally processed, high quality flavours and nutrients of Icelandic local produce to our customers. We do not use any palm oil, MSG or additives.
How it all began…
Bergsveinn Reynisson (Beggi) is a sheep farmer, mussel-fisher, former seaweed harvester, avalanche monitor and nature’s child who spent his whole life in Reykhólahreppur.
Jamie Lee met Beggi during her master’s seaweed research while studying at the University of the Westfjords. Curious about wild mussels, she had a taste and fell in love with the sweetness of these wildlings from the clean fjords. She noticed that mussels below market size were discarded. An idea came as she was eager to not let good food go to waste…
Young mussels were infused with the umami flavor of sugar kelp in one Icelandic stormy night. After two years of taste-tests and fine-tuning, the first recipe was born.
Steindór Haraldsson and Jamie met during a community meeting. Steindór is an expert in all things food-related, especially cooking with seaweed. After having a taste of Jamie´s mussel-seaweed broth, he offered to help make her dream to sell this broth come true.
Icelandic mussel production took a hiatus in 2021, prompting us to pivot and create more seaweed products. Jamie now spends time growing seaweed, collecting mussels, fish heads, sea urchins, crabs and slowly stirring a large caldron to cook up more delicious, umami-loaded recipes. Digging into her childhood memories of running around her grandparents’ Chinese seafood restaurants in San Francisco and Hong Kong, she hopes to bring this culmination of her culture and love for nature to your fine tastebuds.
Jamie Lee
Co-founder, marine resource manager and designer
QUENTIN MONNIER
Co-founder, captain, fisherman
Bergsveinn Reynisson
Mussel fisher and producer
Steindór Haraldsson
Food Scientist
Our mission is to build social resilience through sustainable seaweed cultivation.
We contribute by sharing knowledge, market access and production space with new growers in local communities. Since our establishment in 2021, we have come a long way and evolved into a collective with diverse skills. With personal contributions, grants and support of the community, we are able to develop farm systems, our own products and provide free workshops to universities, schools and the public. We dedicate much of our work to lowering hurdles to entry for local communities.
In 2024, we were selected to take part in the EU Horizon program, A-AAGORA (https://a-aagora.eu) to protect and restore marine ecosystem. As an associated region in this project, we closely partner with Strandabyggð municipality to provide free seaweed workshops for local communities, give hands-on training and technical support to new seaweed growers and conduct biodiversity studies with researchers from the University of the Westfjords.
We believe we grow better, together!
