Sustainable Seafood Entrepreneurs Share Tips For Success

When Norah Eddy and Laura Johnson received their master’s degrees from the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), in June 2014, the celebration was especially meaningful. Their fledgling company, Salty Girl Seafood, Inc., which they co-founded that same month to provide reliably sourced seafood from sustainably managed fisheries, sold their first order to the caterer. “Our classmates went directly from the commencement to the celebration and ate Salty Girl Seafood,” Eddy says.          

Eddy and Johnson had spent the previous 2 years studying coastal marine resources management, with a specialization in eco-entrepreneurship through a joint initiative between the Bren School and the College of Engineering’s Technology Management Program. In the program, which is the only one of its kind in the United States, students devise business plans for solving environmental problems. Both Eddy and Johnson were interested in interdisciplinary and entrepreneurial approaches to solving scientific and environmental problems. “I liked fieldwork and I knew I wanted to do applied science,” Eddy says, “and I had a goal that I would start a business after my master’s. But I didn’t think it would happen so soon.”

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