ALICE LAING
GREAT OYSTER BAY, TAS
A holiday Down Under inspired a move around the world and the discovery of a new passion.
Alice Laing’s business idea was inspired by Tasmania and cooked up in a pot on top of her grandmother’s stove in Suffolk, south-east England.
“We lived in London but had been on holiday in Tasmania where my husband is from. He brought me down to the east coast and it was just so, so beautiful.
“Surrounded by this amazing, clean water and land, you felt you were so far away from everything. And it seemed crazy that Tasmania was importing sea salt when there was this pristine natural resource.” On their return to the UK, Alice and husband Chris googled ‘How to make salt’ and experimented by boiling up a potful of salt water from the English Channel on her grandmother’s Aga cooker.
“Then we researched and realised no one else was doing it in Tasmania, and that’s where it started. And somehow we just talked ourselves into the idea,” Laing says.
The couple moved to Tasmania in 2013 and set up production at Great Oyster Bay on the east coast between Launceston and Hobart.
“We look out over the bay and peninsula; it just couldn’t be more stunning,” Laing says. “And the water here is incredibly clean and pure. That’s what makes the salt so unique – it’s bright white but we don’t have to rinse it or clean it, so it retains all the sea minerals and nutrients and tastes exactly like the ocean.”
Today, their company, Tasman Sea Salt, manufactures more than 600kg a week, including a range of flavoured salts made with the likes of Tasmanian pepperberries and wakame harvested on Bruny Island. There is also a smoked salt that is cold smoked over Tasmanian Oak and Blackwood to create a richly aromatic, smoky caramel flavour.
Laing acknowledges it’s a lifestyle far removed (both literally and figuratively) from her former life as a marketing executive in central London. “It’s amazing, you know, but moving here is probably not something I would have chosen to do necessarily,” she says.
“This is a huge lifestyle change and it wasn’t that we wanted to go and live by the ocean. We did it because we really believed that we could make an incredible product. Sometimes you just have to follow your passion.”