Aqua Botanika
aquaculture farm
Meet our founders
Nataliya Robinson
Nataliya is an entrepreneur with a portfolio of successful interlinked businesses. One thing they all share is a passion for natural, holistic, and effective services and products. Aquaculture is something she became interested in when researching the uses of seaweed for her skincare business. She quickly identified that not only was there a thriving and rapidly growing market for the use of seaweed in Food, Pharma, Beauty products and other industries but that in the UK there is a problem with sourcing good quality seaweed grown in healthy environmentally friendly settings.
As a result, in 2019 Nataliya decided to set up her own farm in Torbay working with like-minded people. This farm is now established, and the first crops will be harvested this spring.
Nataliya is determined to use this as a springboard to launch further farms and create a healthy thriving seaweed farming business serving the high-end and growing market for this wonderful environmentally friendly product in the UK and beyond.
Daniel Ptacek, FCIOB
Daniel is a specialist in strategy, guiding and assuring innovation, IP, new product development and corporate governance including P&L responsibility. He has been a business leader and innovator across many sectors, delivering contracts on large capital projects including the Millennium Dome, London; the Dynamic Earth Project, Edinburgh; Glaxo’s Laboratories at Stevenage; and the world’s largest healthcare transformation in KSA. Daniel has a record of delivering contracts on time, safely and on the money.
In 2000 he moved into decarbonization, mostly in the built environment, at a time when global warming was barely acknowledged. From negative CO2 cement to direct flue gas carbon capture, it became clear that moving away from fossil fuels in these hard-to-abate industries is an arduous journey. The most successful outcomes in carbon capture, carbon abatement and weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels are ones that mimic nature. When the opportunity arose to start Aqua Botanika he did not hesitate; here at last was a product that is natural and therefore the ecological and regenerative benefits of its usage are immediate and plentiful. He is delighted that what he was taught as a young man in Maine, USA about how to gather and use seaweed, that this knowledge is finally proving of value.