Alaska Pure Sea Salt

Jim and Darcy Michener started making sea salt on their honeymoon. Not as a business plan — they were in the Philippines in 1999, watched locals harvest salt from the ocean by hand, and got hooked on the idea. Back home in Sitka, Alaska, they spent over a decade experimenting before opening their production facility in 2011.

The process is straightforward but slow. They draw water from Sitka Sound — one of the cleanest marine environments on Earth, with no nearby industrial agriculture, factories, or coal plants — and evaporate it using a proprietary slow-cook method. No anti-caking agents, no bleaching, no additives. What comes out is a delicate flake salt with clean ocean flavor and none of the bitterness you get from mass-produced table salt.

Production runs about 500 pounds per week. Jim and Darcy handle everything themselves: harvesting the seawater, monitoring the evaporation, hand-finishing and packaging each batch. That scale is intentional. It keeps quality control tight and means every jar traces back to a specific production run.

The product line has grown beyond plain flake salt into flavored varieties — Alder Smoked, Sitka Spruce Tip, Wild Blueberry, Lemon & Lime, Spicy Hot Pepper, and seasonal limited editions. The spruce tip salt, made with hand-harvested tips from the Tongass National Forest, is probably their most distinctly Alaskan offering. Earthy and bright at the same time — the kind of finishing salt that makes you rethink what seasoning can do.

The salt market is dominated by a handful of industrial producers who mine, bleach, and add anti-caking chemicals to produce the uniform white crystals most people pour without thinking. Alaska Pure Sea Salt works on a completely different model — one source, one process, two people, no shortcuts.

You can find it in Whole Foods stores across the Northwest and in specialty shops from Alaska to New York. Their online shop ships anywhere in the US.

Products

• Original flake sea salt (hand-harvested from Sitka Sound)
• Flavored salts — Alder Smoked, Sitka Spruce Tip, Wild Blueberry, Lemon & Lime, Spicy Hot Pepper, Coffee Bean, Rosemary, Vanilla Bean
• Seasonal limited-edition batches
• Gift sets and salt cellars
• Bath salt products

Why We List Them

• Family-owned and operated by Jim and Darcy Michener since 2011
• No outside investors or corporate backing
• Single-source salt from one of the cleanest marine environments on Earth
• No additives, bleaching, or anti-caking agents — just ocean water and heat
• Small-batch production (~500 lbs/week) with full traceability