Brady Ryan is the younger son of the Ryan Farm clan. After high school, he attended the University of Washington in Seattle, where he obtained a degree in Mathematics and discovered a passion for plants and agriculture. After graduating in 2010 he worked for Local Roots Farm, after that he interned with the Ballard Bee Company in Seattle, which led him to start his own San Juan Island enterprise in 2012.

He first tried making sea salt as a youngster when he and his best friend decided they would save some money on Christmas gifts by collecting some seawater from the beach and making salt. The only problem was that to make it they boiled the water on their parent’s stoves, which used tons of electricity and made a huge mess! Luckily they found a better way. Now the process uses the power of the sun to slowly evaporate large ponds of seawater inside greenhouses. The greenhouses increase the temperature of the air, which speeds up evaporation and of course keeps the rain out. Unlike many sea salt farmers, San Juan Sea Salt lets their seawater evaporate all the way down, bringing the whole wild and briny mineral rainbow of the ocean into their salt to broaden the flavor.

While store bought sea salt is chemically refined to be 99% sodium chloride, the ocean itself is much more diverse in its mineral makeup and they let those trace minerals (calcium, magnesium, potassium and much more) remain in their salt so that when you eat it, you are reminded of the sea from which it came!