Sea Salt: History, Health, and Why Chefs Reach For It

Salt has been made along this coastline since before written history reached it, and for most of that time it stopped being made here entirely. What's happening now - three small, separately founded companies hand-harvesting sea salt in Cornwall, Devon and Dorset - is a revival of an industry that Cheshire rock salt put out of business in the 1860s, not a continuation of one that never stopped.

A trade that goes back to the Iron Age

700 BC - 1860

Salt-working sites are recorded right along the South West coast: Iron Age and Romano-British saltworks at Carngoon Bank and Trebarveth on the Lizard in Cornwall, Roman salt mounds across the Somerset Levels near Highbridge, Woolavington and Cossington, and saltpans on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. In Devon, saltworking at Seaton on the Axe estuary ran from the Saxon period through to about 1710, with documented salthouses, sluice-fed pans and named Salt Officers recorded in parish records between 1706 and 1748.

The trade mattered because salt was the only reliable way to preserve fish before refrigeration. Cornwall's pilchard industry in particular depended on it - salted pilchards travelled and kept, and profits for fishermen rose accordingly. That dependency is also what ended the local industry: when rock salt mining opened up in Cheshire in the 1860s, it undercut the labour-intensive business of evaporating seawater, and salt production died out along this coast within a generation. For roughly 150 years, sea salt from the South West wasn't a thing anyone could buy.

The revival started with a walk on the Lizard

Helston, Cornwall

Cornish Sea Salt Company traces back to a chance find. Founder Tony Fraser came across the remains of an Iron Age salt works in a cove near Coverack on Cornwall's south coast and wanted to know why an industry built on some of the purest water in the country had simply stopped. He set up production at Porthkerris, close to that original site, drawing seawater from eight metres offshore in Grade A classified waters off the Lizard Peninsula - water the company describes as carrying a notably high mineral count, though that's the company's own characterisation rather than an independently published figure.

The company was incorporated in 2004 and produced its first harvest in February 2008, most of which sold to two chefs: Rick Stein, who stocked it in his own delicatessen, and Mark Hix, who put it on the tables at The Ivy and Le Caprice in London. The process itself is closer to traditional evaporation than industrial extraction: seawater is drawn into tanks, brined to the right mineral concentration, and the crystals and flakes are hand-harvested as they form, then air-dried and screened by eye. What started as an eight-person operation at Porthkerris has grown into a company of around 45 people, now based at Gweek near Helston, exporting to more than 30 countries.

No South West sea salt currently carries protected status. The only UK sea salt with a Protected Designation of Origin is Anglesey Sea Salt / Halen Môn, registered in Wales in 2014 - a reminder that the South West's revival, however established it now looks, is still a relatively young industry rather than one with a formal geographical guarantee behind it.

Devon and Dorset's own revivals

Devon · Dorset

Cornwall wasn't the only county to lose its salt trade, and it wasn't the only one to bring it back. Devon Sea Salt, founded in 2017 by Chris Hambley, is the only sea salt producer in Devon: a small, family-run operation at Weir Quay overlooking the River Tamar, inside the Tamar Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It's a deliberately low-tech operation - no commercial boilers, no machines, seawater collected up to two miles offshore by boat when conditions are right, and the whole process done by hand in small batches. The company has since won a silver award at the Taste of the West awards.

Dorset Sea Salt Co. followed the same pattern the same year. Jethro, its founder, read about the vanished salt industry on Portland's East Weares and, with backing from the Prince's Trust, set up a salt works on Chesil Beach in 2017. The natural flakes are the foundation of the range, but it has grown into nine blends - oak smoked, garlic, chilli, lemon and thyme among them - alongside fine curing salt and a grinder option. Dorset Sea Salt Co. is listed in the Guide.

Producer	County	Founded	Method
Cornish Sea Salt Co.	Cornwall (Helston)	2004 / first harvest 2008	Brine tanks, hand-harvested, ~45 staff
Devon Sea Salt	Devon (Weir Quay, Tamar)	2017	No machines, hand-collected by boat
Dorset Sea Salt Co.	Dorset (Portland, Chesil Beach)	2017	Solar/gentle-heat pans, hand-harvested

Sea salt versus table salt: what the evidence actually says

Sea salt is often sold on the promise that it's healthier than table salt. The evidence doesn't support that. According to the NHS, Mayo Clinic and Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, sea salt and table salt contain essentially the same amount of sodium by weight - both are around 97-99% sodium chloride, and the trace minerals sea salt retains from evaporation (small amounts of potassium, magnesium or iron, depending on where it's harvested) are present in quantities too small to make any meaningful nutritional difference. A 2023 survey by the UK campaign group Action on Salt found that 61% of consumers wrongly believe sea salt is lower in sodium than table salt, and more than a quarter of Which? members thought rock and sea salts were generally healthier - a misconception the group has been actively trying to correct.

The genuine differences are about processing and texture, not health. Table salt is mined, refined to remove impurities, ground fine, and in the UK is commonly fortified with iodine - a real public health measure, since iodine deficiency remains a documented concern, particularly in teenage girls and pregnancy. Sea salt is less processed and generally not iodised. Its coarser crystals mean a given volume contains less salt by weight than the same volume of fine table salt, which is part of why cooks report using less of it - not because the salt itself is less potent, but because a pinch of large flakes weighs less than a pinch of fine grains. NHS guidance still applies regardless of which salt is used: no more than 6g of salt a day for an adult, about one level teaspoon.

Where it ends up

Cornish Sea Salt's own account of its reach - "appreciated across the globe by Michelin-starred chefs" - is a marketing line, but there's a genuine list of named chefs behind it. Nathan Outlaw, whose Restaurant Nathan Outlaw at the St Enodoc Hotel in Rock holds two Michelin stars, has used it in his own published recipes, including a salt-cured hake dish. Andy Appleton used it for ten years as head chef at Jamie Oliver's Fifteen Cornwall before taking it with him to his own restaurant. The Dysart Petersham in Richmond, a Michelin-starred restaurant built around a "very low salt, very low sugar" approach to cooking, uses Cornish sea salt specifically as part of that philosophy - a case where the choice of salt is itself part of the kitchen's stated ethos rather than an afterthought.

Internationally, the company has held the Queen's Award for Enterprise in International Trade (2017, for 552% export growth over three years) and now ships to more than 30 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, North America and Oceania, with a US retail launch via distributor World Finer Foods in 2024. It sits in a small field of well-known finishing salts with strong regional identities: fleur de sel from Brittany, hand-skimmed off the surface of shallow seawater pools; Maldon salt, the pyramid-flaked salt from Essex that's been produced since 1882 (not South West, but the best-known English comparison); and Icelandic Saltverk, evaporated using geothermal heat and used by Michelin-starred kitchens in Copenhagen and Reykjavik. What distinguishes hand-harvested regional sea salts from ordinary table salt in professional kitchens isn't a health argument - it's texture, crystal structure and how a specific mineral profile reads on the tongue, the same reasoning that puts a specific olive oil or vinegar on a pass rather than a generic one.

How it's actually used

Chefs draw a firm line between crystals and flakes. Coarse crystals, the denser, punchier form, hold their crunch through baking and are used for curing, brining and marinades, where a slow, controlled release of salinity matters more than an immediate hit. Flakes are lighter and more delicate, built to dissolve on contact - a finishing salt sprinkled over a dish just before it leaves the kitchen, where the goal is a burst of texture and flavour rather than seasoning the food as it cooks. Neither is generally recommended for baking recipes that specify table salt by volume, since the conversion isn't one-to-one.

The numbers and what's next

The wider picture here needs a clear distinction: the UK's overall salt market - 5.3 million tonnes consumed in 2024, valued at roughly £1.4 billion - is dominated by rock salt for de-icing and industrial use, not the kind of sea salt discussed here. The UK sea salt market specifically is far smaller and growing faster: valued at roughly $1.52 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $2.14 billion by 2034, a forecast annual growth rate of 3.85%, according to market analysis firm Deep Market Insights. Globally, the sea salt market was worth an estimated $19.86 billion in 2025, on course for $24.77 billion by 2031.

Growth in this category is increasingly about premiumisation rather than volume - specialty and origin-labelled sea salts earning more per tonne even where overall consumption grows only modestly, driven by demand for minimally processed, "clean label" ingredients and continued strength in premium foodservice. Cornish Sea Salt's own trajectory reflects that: the company reported a 46% sales spike during the pandemic as home cooking increased, quadrupling output at its salt house to keep up, with particularly sharp growth through UK supermarkets including a 202% uplift in Tesco listings. Specific UK harvest tonnage for individual producers isn't publicly published, so it isn't quoted here - the growth is real and documented, but the absolute scale remains a gap in what's publicly available.

The longer-term question for solar and brine evaporation methods is climate, not demand: production depends on stable access to clean, high-salinity seawater and predictable weather for evaporation, and abnormal rainfall or coastal flooding can disrupt a harvest in ways a mined or industrial producer never has to consider. For three small, hand-run operations working across Cornwall, Devon and Dorset, that dependency on the coastline they're named after is both the whole point and the real constraint on how far the revival can scale.

Dorset Sea Salt Co. is listed in the Guide; for other South West producers and makers, browse the Guide's Makers listings.

Sources

• Cornish Sea Salt Company, company history and process pages - cornishseasalt.co.uk
• BBC News, Ancient technique for modern firm, 2008 - news.bbc.co.uk
• Cornwall Trade and Investment, Cornish Sea Salt case study - cornwallti.com
• Companies House, Cornish Sea Salt Company Limited filing history - find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk
• Falmouth Packet, Cornish Sea Salt recognised for outstanding growth, 2017
• Devon Sea Salt company site and Heart of the South West Growth Hub case study
• Dorset Sea Salt Co., Guild of Fine Food and Taste of the West producer listings
• NHS, Salt in your diet - nhs.uk
• Mayo Clinic, Sea salt vs. table salt: What's the difference? - mayoclinic.org
• Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Salt and Sodium - nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu
• Action on Salt, Other salts - actiononsalt.org.uk
• gov.uk, Protected geographical food and drink names - Anglesey Sea Salt / Halen Môn
• Deep Market Insights, United Kingdom Sea Salt Market report, 2025
• Mordor Intelligence, Sea Salt Market report, 2026
• IndexBox, United Kingdom Salt Market forecast, 2025
• Business Live, Cornish sea salt sales soar thanks to lockdown foodies, 2021