EP215. How seaweed becomes sustainable beauty

From time to time, new words crop up in the beauty industry. So in the beginning, you only hear them in a couple of places and then suddenly, boom, they're everywhere. And this definitely applies to the word regenerative, which is starting to emerge in many conversations and articles. And I predict that you'll be hearing the word regeneration in relation to beauty across the entire industry within the next year or two. But what does it actually mean for an ingredient to be regenerative? And what type of ingredient would this even apply to? Well, one cosmetic ingredient that I've explored a few times previously here on the podcast, and which keeps coming up again in conversation, is seaweed. Now, seaweed definitely falls in the category of a regenerative ingredient. I also think seaweed or algae offers phenomenal opportunities for the beauty industry, and my guest today thinks so too. I'm joined by Matthew Perkins of Macro Oceans who's going to tell the story of how he takes seaweed farmed in Alaska and to bring hydration to your cosmetics. So tune in to find out how seaweed is primed to take the beauty industry by storm. Welcome to Green Beauty Conversations, the podcast that challenges you to think about how you buy, use, make or sell your green beauty formulations. In my weekly episodes, I explore the sustainability of the beauty industry and encourage you to join me in changing the industry for the better. I'm your podcast host, Lorraine Dallnayer. I'm a chartered environmentalist, biologist and the CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school Formula Botanica. We have tens of thousands of students in over 190 countries around the world who study with us to become organic beauty formulators and entrepreneurs. Visit our website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. And if you want to be the first person to know what's happening in green beauty, make sure you subscribe to this podcast in your favorite podcast app. So in today's episode, I'm joined by Matthew Perkins, Founder and CEO of Macro Oceans, a startup that's transforming seaweed into low carbon chemicals for use in materials, food, cosmetics and many other applications. Macrooceans has developed a unique zero waste system that uses 100% of seaweed and the company recently launched its first cosmetic product which is a powerful bioactive providing excellent hydration for skincare and hair care products. The bioactive is not only low impact, as you'll hear in this interview, but is fully traceable from farm to face. Hi Matthew, how are you doing today?

I'm great. How are you?

Yes, I'm Good. And I'm really interested in what we're going to talk about today. So let's get started. Tell me more about your company, Macro Oceans. What do you do?

Macro Oceans is a technology company focused on the oceans and specifically on seaweed. So what we do is we work with farmers in places like Alaska and we buy regeneratively farmed seaweed and we transform it into all kinds of amazing sustainable low carbon chemicals for the beauty industry, amongst many others.

Amazing. Well, we're going to pick a lot of that apart because I want to find out exactly what you're doing and how you're doing it. But first of all, tell me, why did you start Macro Oceans?

For me, I wanted to make an impact and have a business which was part of the climate solution. I think over the last few years you've seen how many people have really become more and more concerned with the speed of climate change and the fact that we really need to do more to transition our economy to a more sustainable footing. I learned about seaweed and I had heard all this buzz about, you know, this is an incredible crop. It grows in the ocean with no need for fertilizers, with no need for pesticides, with a really great impact on marine environments. And I thought, wow, this is amazing. I wonder what we can make from it. And at the same time I realized that you could make lots of things for it. And then I thought, well, why isn't there a big seaweed industry? And I realized the reason there isn't a big seaweed industry, at least in North America, is because we don't have the technology and the right infrastructure to make products. And so that's the problem we set out to solve.

Oh, wow, that's fascinating. I did not know about that last bit. Well, we'll come back to that a little bit more. But first of all, let's tell me, tell me about the ingredient that you create for cosmetics. What is it? How does it work?

We make a hydrating marine polysaccharide. It's a bioactive product for skincare applications, but it also works really well in hair care applications too. So it provides hydration to the skin. And the reason that this product works is because if you imagine where this seaweed grows, it grows in these really harsh cold waters in the North Atlantic in, and in our case in Alaska. And the seaweed has to protect itself from all of these external stresses. It doesn't want to dry out, it doesn't want to get too much sunshine exposure. It wants to survive in the cold. And so it's developed over time, these defense mechanisms with these really powerful bioactives called polysaccharides. And the polysaccharides, there's two of them, Fucoidin and laminaran. They provide seaweed with the ability to retain moisture and protect it from UV exposure. And those same things that it does for the seaweed, it can do for the skin. So that's what we're making. We're making this really great, all natural product from Alaskan sugar kelp. It's a really great product.

So do you work with multiple different types of seaweed or just one kind? How does it work?

So we've been focusing on Saccharina lattissima, which is sugar kelp, which is what farmers are currently growing, is a really great source of these polysaccharides. But our plan is to work with lots of different types of seaweeds eventually. But that's where we've begun.

Oh, very cool. What can you describe sugarcalp for all of us listening? What does it look like? Is it big? Is it small?

This is. You have to imagine that these are grown on floating ocean structures. So think of it as a kind of square out in the ocean with some buoys and some ropes between them. And the farmers go out and collect wild saurus tissue in the, in the autumn. And what they do with that tissue is they then take the little tiny mini microscopic seeds, which are called sporophytes, and they grow them out into little small plants which they then put out on their ropes in the fall. And so now you've kind of seeded the farm, if you like. And over the winter, the crop senesces. It just kind of lies dormant. And then as the spring comes and the temperatures warm up and the days get longer, you get these enormous blades that grow from the rope. So it's kind of a long plant that grows out in the water and it can be 10, 12ft long, sometimes bigger. Basically will haul in all these ropes in May time and they harvest all the seaweed and that's when it gets sold to us and we start working with it.

So what do you do when it comes to you?

What we do is we then put it into our biorefinery. And the biorefinery is essentially a fancy way of saying we process the seaweed and so we then turn it into different things. So the first thing we do is we make sure we get all of those really great polysaccharides out, the bioactive compounds. We concentrate that to make our cosmetic ingredients. And then we make a secondary product as well, which is an alginate, which some of you in the beauty industry may. May have heard about. It's a really great thickener and emulsifier. It's now increasingly being used as a biopolymer, which is a fancy way of saying a bioplastic of types. And people are using it in thin films and all kinds of really sustainable materials. And then we have the pulp that's left over that we've been using in packaging. So our process is entirely zero waste. There's nothing really extra produced from it except for a little bit of wastewater and it's all green chemistry. So we don't use any sort of harsh extraction or toxic solvents to make our products.

That's fascinating. And I suppose all three of those different types of products. So the polysaccharides, the alginate and the cellulose could all go to the beauty industry in theory. But you don't just work with beauty, do you?

Yes, I mean, we started in beauty because beauty is a place that really puts premium on natural products. You know, the clean beauty movement has been running for quite a few years now and people are looking to clean their labels and seaweed is a great way to do that. So they really understand the powerful bioactive story as well as the value. What we call the farm to face, you know, the traceability all the way from the farm all the way to your face. And it allows us to have started with in a really great spot. But we are going to work in a wider range of industries too. So we're interested in looking at it for sustainable materials like the thin films I was talking about, as well as packaging. You know, one of the things that happens to us when we go and talk to beauty customers is they say, oh yeah, we really like your ingredient. We're going to try it. And then they immediately hold up the packaging, say, can you help us with this too? Because they want to get rid of their plastic packaging. And so we know that there's great option on the packaging side too. So we're also working on that.

That's very exciting. Does your bioactive ingredient have a name? What's it called?

Well, right now it's called Hydrating Marine Polysaccharides, which is, rather than give it a fancy name that no one could remember, we just called it what it is. But you can go to Macro Oceans and find out more about it on our website and request a sample. So.

Well, on that note, I'VE got to ask this question or I'm sure half my listeners will be left wondering, what are the minimum order quantities that you set for your bioactive polysaccharides?

Yeah, so one of the things that have been very keen to do is work with indie brands and make the product available in small order quantities. So you'll probably be quite pleased that the minimum order quantity is only one kilo. That allows you to get it into a small, small run and work with it sort of out of the gate. And yeah, and obviously samples are free, so yeah, we scale up from there. And. And we have also, unlike other people, I guess, in some of the natural products that can be very long lead times, we have a pretty. Any order up to 100 kilos we fill within a week. So it's a very quick turnaround.

I'm sure there are many formulators listening at the moment and wondering how they can incorporate those polysaccharides into their formulations. So hopefully they'll be heading over to you soon. I want to talk to you a little bit about the infrastructure didn't exist in North America at the beginning, which I thought was a really interesting comment. So the infrastructure for processing seaweed, is that what you meant by that?

Yes. So seaweed is essentially a newish industry in North America. Obviously it's well established in Asia already, because in Asia seaweed is a core part of the diet. It's on everybody's dinner tables, you know, and they say in Japan people eat 30 different types of seaweed a week. And that's probably. I've never counted, but I presume that's right in North America and in Europe, it's really not a staple food ingredient. And so the industry is still nascent, it's new. And that means that there isn't a lot of necessarily well established ways of growing and harvesting and processing and storing the seaweed. And so people have been building a lot of those things from scratch. So typically now where we work in Alaska, there's really only two ways to process the seaweed right after harvest. One is freezing it and the other is drying it. And there isn't a lot of infrastructure for drying. Like, no one has large scale dries in Alaska yet on the freezing side, they're able to use a lot of the fishing industry's infrastructure, which is kind of interesting as well. So one of the reasons we really like Alaska is because they have a lot of really experienced fishermen who know how to work on the oceans, which is important when you have a regeneratively farmed ocean crop. And in addition, they have a lot of infrastructure, infrastructure already built for the fishing industry that allows us to use some of that when we, when we process seaweed, which is nice.

That is really fascinating actually, because I can imagine that drying those giant blades of, of sugar kelp would be a really difficult undertaking as well. I mean, seaweed is inherently so wet, so I can see why the freezing route would be easier anyway.

And we actually have been working on a different technique which will allow us to store the seaweed at ambient temperatures for up to 12 months. And so we've been trying to move away from freezing and drying because actually of them are very energy intensive and expensive. And so we think this is a natural product. We don't want to dry it because why would you want to remove all that water when you have to add water for your extraction process anyway? And so what we've been working on is a way to just store it at room temperatures with using some all natural green chemistries to do that. And we've run some initial trials and it looks quite promising. So we're pretty excited about that innovation as well.

Yeah, that's fascinating actually, because I suppose that really ties in with that whole concept, as you said, of it being a regenerative ingredient. And on that note, can you tell me what you mean by that?

Regenerative has, it's a new word that some people will be familiar with and others won't. And it began, I would say, on the land, with land farmers. And really what they were trying to do was to think about how you could have farming working more in harmony with nature. And that's kind of been translated into the oceans. And I think for us, we tried to take that concept a little bit further and apply it to an actual ingredient. And so what we've come up with is sort of four key things that we think help define what a regenerative ingredient is. So the first one is it should be effective. Anybody who buys your ingredient, they want it. Number one, it has to do what you have bought it to do. In our case, you want to have a really great natural hydration agent, a bioactive, and it's got to have clinical results to back it up, which we have. So those are the kind of table stakes. Then number two is it needs to be natural. So generally speaking that means bio based. And there are lots of different ways of thinking about bio based. It could be be straight from plant, it could be a fermentation, it could be, you know, something else. But Generally speaking, it should be natural and not. Not synthetic. The third is that it should be low impact. And by that I mean not only the way it was, if it's from a plant, the way that it was grown, but in addition the way in which it was processed. So for us, we said, okay, we started with a very sustainable ingredient. We now want to make sure that we're not doing something really ridiculously unsustainable when we turn it into a really high quality bioactive. So we have this zero waste, you know, green chemistry that's really low, as low impact as we can be. And then the fourth element, which I think is really important as well, is to not forget the people behind all of this. And so it should be have a community benefit, it should be community led. And in our case, you know, we work with these fishing communities, native communities in Alaska that are really sort of salt of the earth people. You know, they are trying to build and businesses that are also. But they're also stewards of their own resources and in this case the oceans. And so, you know, that's a really important thing that should be built into that model.

Yeah. Wow, that's very comprehensive. Thank you for running us through that. Let's talk a little bit about those ocean farmers that he talks about, because I think a lot of people probably have never really put together the word ocean and farmer before. When we talk about farmers, we often think about, you know, farming the land, as you yourself said earlier. So tell us a little bit more about what an ocean farmer is. I mean, you've described how they grow and harvest the seaweed, but how did you even go about finding these companies or individuals to work with?

Yeah, so I started this journey back during COVID and obviously a lot of us were cooped up and had a lot of time to spend on the Internet. So essentially thought, I really want to talk to some of these people who was crazy enough to grow seaweed in the ocean in Alaska. This sounds wild. I'm going to go find them. So I couldn't go there. So I started just trawling on the Internet. And I found that in Alaska anyway, every farm is permitted. So you can't that do just put a farm wherever you want. You have to get a license to it, essentially. This is actually quite important because, you know, Alaska is really vast, wild, beautiful place. And the government there obviously want to tap those resources for their people, but they also want to protect the nature. So they have a relatively, I would say fast but thoughtful process by which you can say I want to put a seaweed farm here. And they say, okay, you know, is that going to interfere with fishermen? Is that going to interfere with marine life? Okay, it looks fine, we can put your farm there. And then they monitor it and they see. So they publish a big list of who has permits. And I just started working my way down the list, calling them essentially and saying, hello, you know, I'd like to buy some seaweed. That was kind of the adventure I went on and eventually connected to the leading growers in two main regions. One is Kodiak, which is a giant island that sits off the main continental body in the Gulf of Alaska, which is. It's got this incredible position in the ocean. It gets all of the upwelling of nutrients from these big circulating currents that move through the North Pacific. And so it's got really rich sea life life there, and it's a wonderful place to grow seaweed. And then in Southeast Alaska, which is further down towards the lower 48, which is where most people live, and I spent time just kind of chatting to them and asking about, you know, what they were working on and getting some samples and learning about what their business is. And a lot of them also are not solely seaweed farmers today. They're also fishermen. So in the case of Southeast, the farmer we're working with down there, he's actually got an oyster farm as well. Amazing, amazing products. You know, he's selling these fresh oysters into local, local market, and that's a booming market in Alaska as well as people, you know, I would say that's also a regenerative ingredient, has essentially all the same benefits that seaweed does. And then the other farmers we work with in Kodiak, they're actually fishermen. In the summer season, they go out and they do more traditional set netting of salmon, which is a really sustainable, interesting way to fish salmon. A really high quality product. They always feed me lots of salmon when I go there. So really wonderful people. And you real stewards of the land, of the environment as well.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. And I love that this came from you trawling the Internet and looked at as well, going, who are these people who grow seaweed? Where can I find them? Did you secretly harbor a wish of becoming an ocean farmer yourself?

I realized that actually. I mean, it's very romantic idea. And I realized quickly by talking to these guys that it's really hard work. Our farmers, the farmers we work with, they go out in the middle of winter when temperatures are sub zero and it's blowing A gale. And, you know, they now need to go and check the, that their farm hasn't torn loose and floating off, you know, down and down into, you know, into the Gulf of Alaska. So it's definitely tough work. They are, yeah, definitely have way more skills than I do in terms of actually being a farmer. I don't think I'm really cut out for that.

Fair enough. Well, how is the, how has the beauty industry responded to the bioactive polysaccharides that you've released so far?

It's been great, actually. I think that people are looking for cleaner products. I mean, that's not a new thing. And seaweed, fortunately for us, is also not not new. It's been used in cosmetics for, I don't know, hundreds, if not thousands of years. And people understand that it has all of these really great natural properties. So I think the thing that people really like is that we've been able to show them that they can buy a really high quality product, but they can also get this incredible traceability story from farm to face. They can also get this zero waste story that allows them to know that the rest of the material is not just being chucked out, it's actually being turned into other useful things like patches, packaging. And so, yeah, people have been really excited. And so we're working with a lot of independent beauty brands and formulators, everything from founders in their kitchen making products to slightly better known bigger brands and then some more mainstream people. I think that in the mainstream space there's definitely a lot of excitement around marine ingredients and a lot of them are already using seaweed in some form. And so they definitely are interested in this product that we've made.

Amazing. Well, congratulations on bringing that one out. I think it sounds absolutely fascinating. As I said earlier, I'm sure there are many formulators listening who will be knocking on your door. Let's talk a little bit about the traceability component because it's something you've mentioned a few times. Why do you think companies, particularly in the beauty space, is so interested in this traceability aspect of their ingredients?

Well, I think one of the things that was surprising to me as a non beauty person coming into this industry was how incredibly complicated the whole chain is. So, you know, I always thought that when you went into Sephora or you looked at one of those brands that they would actually be sourcing and manufacturing their products. And turns out that most of them don't do that. There's contract manufacturers and formulators, there's. And then they're distributors on top of that. And so as soon as you start to see how the industry works, there's all these layers of people who are buying and making products. And so it becomes very complicated very quickly. And I think one of the things that a lot of brands want to do is really have a lot more trust in their supply chain. And that's actually quite difficult for them to do with, with a lot of their ingredients. And so they've said, oh, well, look, I mean, if macro oceans can do this, then we feel like other people should do this too. And so there's increasingly a move to really understand how is my product made, can I trust it, and what are my consumers are expecting me to actually understand and account for how my product is made. And so, you know, they're feeling that pressure from the emerging consumers. Obviously, it's not very mainstream right now, but I think a lot of people are moving that direction. And brands, good brands, are always anticipating a couple of years ahead of what the consumer trend is. And so as a lot of these things start to bite, I think people are realizing they have this looming problem that they need to fix. And so that's. I think one of the reasons why it really resonates is there's not a lot of people out there who can do that. And a lot of ingredients are a little bit black box, so they don't tell you how it's made. They don't tell you really where it came from. They just say country of origin. And that's about as good as it gets. And we are able to bring the actual farmer to life. And I think that's the thing that gets people excited.

Yeah, I can understand why it does, actually. Well, on that note, I suppose my final question is, what do you foresee seaweed meaning to the beauty industry in the future? What other ingredients could you be making from seaweed, perhaps?

I think that we've only really scratched the surface of what we can do with these bioactives. We started with hydration, which is a pretty broad category of things, but we see a lot of opportunities. It's in the literature and we've done some initial research on this, which is around more specific things that the bioactives can be good for. So things like anti redness, things like anti aging and wrinkles around eyes, things around UV protection. And so I think there's a lot of those types of, you know, really specific things that we're going to explore and bring to market over the next few years. I think that there's other interesting ways to give people seaweed without necessarily having all of the, the claims behind it. So some more of a botanical product. And I think that there's opportunities for us to look at other species too. You know, I mentioned it at the beginning, but sugar kelp is just one type of kelp. There's giant kelp and there's winged kelp and there's dragon kelp and there's bull kelp. So I can give you all of these and farmers want to grow them. So we're going to, you know, if we can create markets for them, I think there'll be a lot of interesting new products coming out of the seaweed sector. So for me there's a lot of applications on the sort of bioactive space and then I, there's great opportunities to look at it in the alginate space too because that can be used as a skin barrier protection and anti pollution aid as well as just the functional ingredients. So there's a lot of different directions we can go and then obviously the packaging. So I think the beauty industry, for better or for worse, they're going to have to put up with a lot more seaweed in the years to come.

Well, I for one will be looking forward to it. I think it sounds fascinating. I think what you're doing is amazing. Where can people find out more about you and Macro Oceans and come and buy your bioactive?

Yeah, so definitely you can start with our website, which is macro-oceans.com and we've made a landing page for Formula Botanical Listeners which will take you to a free guide about all the science of seaweed and particularly the bioactive compounds. So feel free to go there. It's Macrooceans and then Formula Botanica and you'll be able to try that out and get our free seaweed science guide. And yeah, then we'll follow up with you by email and get you a sample. We ship samples all over the place. So yeah, definitely get in touch and we'd love to work with you. And we actually like to talk to all the brands that request samples because, you know, there's ways that you can use seaweed that maybe we haven't thought about and there are things that we can do. As a startup company, we're always looking to understand what customers really want and so if you have clever ideas and things you want to try, then we'd love to do that. For example, we, you know, someone came to us and said, said, oh, we really like to try this in a hair gel format. And we thought, well, that's interesting. We'd never thought about that, but let's give it a go. So we've been working on that product and there's lots of permutations of that conversation which we love, we absolutely love having. So please get in touch if you want to work with us.

Sounds amazing. We'll include all of those links in the show notes, so go over to macro-oceans.com and go and check it all out. Matthew, it's been a pleasure having you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Lorraine, it's been a delight. Thank you so much for the work you do with the industry and bringing clean beauty to the world.

Thank you so much. See you soon. Bye.

Thank you. Bye.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Have you ever tried seaweed in your cosmetics? Leave us a comment on our social channels as both the Formula Botanica team and I love hearing from you. And if you want to hear more about some of the topics we covered today, please do delve back into the podcast archives. So some great Examples include episode 181 in which I interviewed Jeff Chapin of Carbonwave, another really innovative seaweed based company company, all about the seaweed based emulsifier that they've made for cosmetics, or episode 168 in which I break down my four reasons to love algae in skincare. There is a wealth of information in our old episodes and I do encourage you to go back and listen to them. Thank you for joining Matthew and I for this latest episode of Green Beauty Conversations. I really hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please do leave us a five star review so that other people can enjoy these conversations too. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever your favorite podcast app is and stay tuned for the next episode. Follow Formula Botanica Formula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter or LinkedIn and come and give me a follow at Lorraine Dharmeyer on Instagram. Visit our website@formulabotanica.com and sign up for our free online formulation course today. Sam.