FUL Foods: Unlocking blue spirulina protein for healthy beverages as demand soars
26 Aug 2024 | FUL Foods
Sara Guaglio, co-founder, COO and CFO, walks us through spirulina’s benefits and applications in functional beverages, lattes and ice creams. She shines a light on overcoming the microalgae’s challenging taste and stability issues to formulate an antioxidant protein pigment. Guaglio also outlines the company’s natural extraction process, which stabilizes spirulina’s nutrients without using chemicals.
Hello everyone, this is Inha Noreen from CNS Media, a journalist at Food Ingredients First.
Whole Foods is a Netherlands-based female founded food tech company focused on developing healthy beverages and ingredients from spirulina, a blue-green algae, and today I'm delighted to be joined by one of the co-founders, Saraguo.
Thank you for joining us today, Sara.
Thank you, Isha, for the opportunity.
So Sarah, can you start talking about what's happening in the Spirulina Innovation worldwide and what drove you to this malcroalgae?
Sure.
So, spirulina, you know, has been around for a while.
It's not a new ingredient.
In the 70s, the UN has named it as the best food for the future and NASA is giving it to its astronauts in the, for the space missions and, and this is thanks to the, let's say, unique combination of quality and quantity of macro and micronutrients.
The spirulina features.
So people are very used to see it, in the aisle of, supplements, , in pill or powder forms.
However, what we saw in the last few years is that the consumer wants to, have, wants to consume indeed it's, healthy, nutrients and not only in pill forms but more and more in the form of normal daily, let's say, food and drinks, normal food and drinks.
So this is basically where we started, and Julia, Christine and myself met in business school in Singapore and we were sitting on this very exciting shift that was happening in the food space where the consumer was looking for more functional and healthy food and we saw that functional food was growing sometimes at a very staggering numbers.
So, we started from there and looking into sustainable innovation to feed the growing population and we stumbled across microalgae, more specifically spirulina.
And when we learned that the spirulina features all these healthy components like protein, vitamins, antioxidants, and minerals without, you know, asking the planet for any resources like you don't need arable land, fresh water, you don't need the pesticides to, to grow it.
You can grow it in deserts or on top of of , of the building.
It kind of, , you know, I kind of clicked something in our business school students at the time.
And so we decided to, to try to fund a company that would feature this incredible and sustainable ingredient in everyday food and beverages, and this is how, let's say food was born back in 2020.
After Let's say almost 4.5 years that we are working on it.
We have an ingredient called the Foolblue, which is an antioxidant protein pigment that you can add to a vast array of applications, and Foolblue, which is a functional beverage that we distribute mainly in the US.
OK, great.
And talking about the beverage product you mentioned, Pu Blue, how do you think it aligns with the health and wellness goals of consumers?
Full Bloom for us was kind of a no-brainer, you know, people are more and more moving away from unhealthy sodas, looking for, things that do not have anything artificial.
So, we really wanted to, To create something that would have something beneficial for the consumer featuring the the benefits, the health benefits of spirulina with very low sugar and with the natural ingredients and this is where Full Blue was born.
However, you know, the main, , the main goal that we had was to make it tasty because it's true that the consumer wants something that is healthy and convenient and.
And and natural, but obviously you don't have a chance if you don't make it taste good.
So this was the, the main, let's say challenge that we took on back in the days and now we, we got through testing and trying with a very vast array of consumers, so we, we think that we got to a really good tasting product and we're receiving a lot of good reviews about it.
OK, that sounds really interesting.
And I think while formulating the product, you talked about the taste and the focus on formulation.
What were some of the challenges your team faced when you were creating the, product?
Spirulina is very known for its health benefits, but if we are honest, it's not like, it's not known for a great taste and indeed when we started to work with it, we immediately noticed a somewhat of a, a strong and challenging taste to work with.
So this was for sure the very first challenge that we, that we tackled, but also a not so easy to use technical characteristics.
So it doesn't dissolve very.
It doesn't have a per se, a very appealing color if you use it as a whole.
And it's incredibly unstable, specifically when you try to use it in the most common, let's say, industrial food applications, so you cannot pasteurize or you cannot use it with a low pH.
So those were the main challenges that we had to tackle.
And, and the way we tackled that was by being creative and creating a technology that would that would overcome these challenges without using any chemical or let's say, or any process that would denaturate the main components and the benefits of spirulina.
OK, and, looking at your product, I think they have a very attractive bright blue hue to them.
Would you tell us about it, how you came up with the color, and, how you, do you keep it stable?
Absolutely.
So that is, if you want the core of our, of our innovation and of our technology.
We have 4 patents at the moment for, for this technology, and basically what we do is a natural extraction process, as I mentioned, we use, we don't use anything chemical.
And, and we try also to make the process, we try to make the process as sustainable and as low energy intensive as possible.
So basically, you can think about it as we release the components, so we separate the nutritional components from the spirulina biomass from the plant and then we Stabilize them so we make sure that the active components stay bioactive per se until the consumer.
So we basically apply a process that keeps not only the color but also the nutritional value and the nutritional benefit of the different components of spirulina intact until it reaches.
As the consumer and I want to underline that because you know, in food production, often you go through some processing that involve a heat heat processing sometimes even very high or very low or very high pH to make the food, the food and beverages that we consume every day safe for consumption.
And sometimes, you know, it's challenging to keep these active components, these bioutrients available to the end consumer through these processes, and this is what we do with our patented process.
So not only we extract and we render the the components more bioavailable for the consumer, but we make sure that this stays available and stable until the final product.
OK, great.
And the technology you just mentioned, would you like to tell us briefly about it, how it goes from the main biomass to the final product or ingredients we get in hand?
Absolutely.
So it's , it's really what you can think, , we, we call it an extraction process, and so, or even a bio-refining, if you will.
So it's not very different from other, other components or other parts of the food industry like, milk is one example or soy is another or even the oil industry if you will.
So we basically separate the different.
Components from the main, from the initial starting point for the initial biomass.
So we make sure that you know, we, the first ingredient, for example, is around, it's just a fraction of the entire biomass and we extract this protein blue, this protein pigment component with a very potent antioxidant, antioxidant protein.
Antioxidant properties and then what we are left with is around 70 to 75% protein biomass that we are now using to create our second ingredient which is a white protein powder that we're going to launch by the end of next year.
OK, that's, that's very interesting.
And the protein ingredient that you are going to launch, it can also be used in other foods and beverages, right?
So can you tell us more about the applications in food and beverages?
Of course, so the application in food and beverage is, is basically, is very, is limitless, let's say you can, for the first ingredient which is the blue pigment, thanks to the stability of the, of the color and the nutritional, and the nutritional bioactive components, you can really use it in a very large.
Number of applications.
So we tried it already, not only in beverages but also, you know, in lattes application in the form of syrup or in baking goods or confectionery or ice creams, you name it.
We even brewed the beer, a few weeks ago with one local brewery.
With one local brewery.
So, the applications is really, is really vast and for the protein, it will be the same.
So we're still finalizing the technical characteristics of it, but, we'll make sure that, you know, this is going to, to be specific to the needs of the market for, that specific ingredient.
OK, wonderful.
And I think to wrap up this interesting conversation about the wonderful Blue pigment and spirulina, what do you think it can, what kind of role it can play in the future of food and what are, what is the company planning in the future with the ingredient?
We believe that, you know, this is just the beginning of the use of microalgae, spirulina and more broadly microalgae in the, in the food industry.
Thanks to not only the health characteristics but also the fact that you can potentially scale up the product.
Of of spirulina microalgae without wasting natural resources.
We believe that there is incredible potential for being used in potentially every food and beverage application to make them more functional and more healthy.
So this, exactly why we are going towards creating new ingredients and, our plans would be to find a new application for our, full blue spiruline ingredient, but also to go on and extract more ingredients for even more, needs for the consumer.
