Ocean Kitchen Scotland Makes The Herald: "Creating the New Fantastic in the Old Plastic"
Ocean Kitchen Scotland founder Ally (Alasdair) Mitchell was the subject of a full-page feature in The Herald, written by journalist Simon Houston, exploring the company's journey from a lockdown side project to the business behind the Glasgow 2026 "All In" coffee stencil. The piece traces Ally's path from commercial diver to founder, and how a chance encounter with ocean-bound plastic on a salvage job set the whole business in motion.
A full-page feature, a story eight years in the making
We're delighted share that Ocean Kitchen Scotland has been featured on the business pages of The Herald, in a full-page piece by journalist Simon Houston. The headline says it all: "Creating the new fantastic in the old plastic."
It's the kind of coverage that means a lot to us, not because it's flattering (though it is), but because it's the story we've been trying to tell since day one: that plastic pulled out of Scottish waters doesn't have to be waste. It can be a coffee stencil, a knife handle, a plant pot something you actually use, made in Scotland, from Scotland's own coastline.
From a salvage job to a company
If you've followed Ocean Kitchen Scotland for a while, you'll know the story, but it never gets old to tell. Our founder Ally Mitchell spent years as a commercial diver, working everywhere from the Ivory Coast to Singapore. It was a salvage job much closer to home on the wrecked cargo vessel MV Kaami off the coast of Scotland, hauling out load after load of shredded plastic that changed everything. That, combined with the memory of a whale washing up on Luskentyre beach with over 100kg of rope and fishing net in its stomach, was enough to convince Ally that this was a problem worth building a business around.
What started as pots moulded by hand in a home shed, sold at a food market in Edinburgh, has grown into Ocean Kitchen Scotland: a company that has recycled more than 24 tonnes of rope, fishing net and broken fish boxes into pots, kitchen knives and most recently the stencils behind one of Glasgow's biggest cultural moments this year.
Why the Herald feature matters to us
Getting picked up by a national business page is a milestone in itself, but what mattered most to us was how the story was told. Simon Houston's piece connects the dots that we don't always get the space to explain ourselves: how a diver's frustration with what he was seeing underwater became a manufacturing business, how that business is rooted entirely in Scotland material sourced from Scottish ports, made by a small team here and how that same material ended up as the All In stencil, used across Glasgow's cafés and bars to mark coffees and cocktails during the Commonwealth Games.
It's also a story that's clearly resonated beyond just us. Rebecca Ricketts, who worked alongside Ally on the Glasgow 2026 All In stencil project as part of the Games' Business Engagement team, described working on the project as one of the standout moments of her time with the Games, and thanked the Herald team for giving the story the space it deserved.
The bigger point: waste with a second act
Every product we make carries the same idea. Fishing nets and broken fish boxes that would otherwise sit in landfill or drift back out to sea get collected, cleaned, shredded and remoulded into something with a job to do. It's slower and more labour-intensive than using virgin plastic everything is still processed by hand, contaminants cut away piece by piece but it's the only way we know to make sure the story on the product is actually true.
Being featured in The Herald isn't the finish line. If anything, it's a reminder of how far this has come from a windowsill of chilli plants and a shed full of melted rope and how much further there is to go. We're grateful to Simon Houston and The Herald for giving the story room to breathe, and to everyone who's picked up an Ocean Kitchen Scotland product along the way and helped keep that story moving.