What Darron Hill’s kelp business reveals about access and opportunity in Atlantic Canada’s ocean economy

When people picture Black entrepreneurship in Atlantic Canada, they rarely picture the ocean. They almost never picture kelp. However, along Nova Scotia’s shoreline, Darron Hill, the founder of Scotia Kelp, has built a marine-based business that converts Atlantic kelp into health, beauty, and agricultural products.

Born and raised in Nova Scotia’s historic Black communities, Hill’s entry into entrepreneurship began as a personal pursuit.  A long battle with environmental sensitivities that caused skin issues led him to discover kelp’s healing potential. Rather than treating that discovery as a private remedy, he saw a viable product and a local resource waiting to be transformed into value.

“I wasn’t thinking about starting a business at first,” Hill said. “I just wanted to feel better. But when I saw how well it worked, I thought, if this helps me, it can help other people too.”

Hill’s business choice stands out against a broader pattern documented in the Black Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (BEKH) study Factors Impacting Business Choice for Black Entrepreneurs in Atlantic Canada. The study finds that Black entrepreneurs in the region are concentrated in low-growth sectors such as food services, retail, arts, and personal services. These industries offer lower startup costs, fewer regulatory barriers, and faster entry.

Crucially, the study does not attribute this concentration solely to limited ambition. Instead, it identifies access as the defining constraint. Capital intensity, regulatory complexity, licensing requirements, and thin mentorship networks quietly narrow the field of viable choices for Black entrepreneurs long before a business plan is written.

In capital-intensive sectors like ocean-based innovation, these constraints become structural barriers. Kelp farming and innovation, although niche, sits squarely within a high-barrier ecosystem. It requires marine access, research and development, infrastructure for processing, and a tolerance for uncertainty that few early-stage Black entrepreneurs can afford. That a Black entrepreneur has entered this space is unusual not because Hill is extraordinary, but because the support available to Black entrepreneurs in the broader business ecosystem makes paths like his rare.

While Hill’s choice of business is not common within the Black entrepreneurship ecosystem, his motives fall in line with the rest of the findings. The study found that business choice among Black entrepreneurs is often shaped by personal passion, cultural identity, and a desire to make a lasting community impact. For Hill, those motivations extended beyond individual wellness.

“Because of that passion, it’s put me in a position where not only can I help other people, but I can help our environment as well—taking steps to reduce our carbon footprint, supplying natural choices, better choices than chemical-laden products,” he said.

Hill’s ambitions are unfolding within a market of growing global significance. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the global ocean economy doubled from USD 1.3 trillion in 1995 to USD 2.6 trillion in 2020. If considered a country, it would have ranked as the world’s fifth-largest economy in 2019. Despite being bordered by three oceans, Canada has not been among the leading contributors to this growth, which has been driven largely by countries in Asia and the Pacific, as well as the United States, Norway, and the United Kingdom.

Against this backdrop, Canada’s Ocean Supercluster is pushing to grow the country’s ocean economy to more than $220 billion in GDP by 2035 and generate over 1.2 million jobs across direct, indirect, and induced employment. Federal policy discussions increasingly position Atlantic Canada’s blue economy as integral to that growth.

“What can you do to make sure that our community benefits from these things as well?” Hill asked. “Because I go to a trade show with all kelp manufacturers, harvesters, and processors, and I’m the only Black person in the room.”

Despite these conditions, Hill has established a foothold in a sector that is both environmentally significant and economically promising.

“I could be the match that lights the explosion for Nova Scotia,” he said. “Our aquaculture products are world-renowned because of our cold North Atlantic temperatures in our ocean. We have the best dulse and Irish moss in the world.”

For now, Hill is working to stay afloat in a vast blue ocean of opportunity. His current focus is on increasing production and building partnerships with local researchers and international trading partners.

“Luckily I’m a good swimmer,” Hill said. “Because most people would have drowned by now.”