EP235. Meet the beauty industry’s most regenerative ingredient

When we think about ingredients for cosmetics, we often think about big fields filled with lavender. And what we don't tend to think about is seaweed. Now, full disclosure, I love seaweed for cosmetics. I think it has such amazing potential. It grows so fast, it can regenerate itself so quickly. It is one of the fastest growing sources of biomass on earth. Also, seaweed doesn't require fresh water or a huge land footprint like our traditional agricultural systems do. Let's not forget after all that 70% of the world's fresh water is used for agriculture. You don't need that for seaweed. And amazingly, seaweed can even sequester carbon. So this ingredient is a powerhouse that I'm thrilled to say the beauty industry is looking at more and more. Now, I've previously invited a few ingredient suppliers on the podcast to talk about seaweed and I'm really pleased to welcome another great company today who I met when I was at in Cosmetics Global in Paris earlier this year. Now, Ink Cosmetics is the trade exhibition that showcases the world's cosmetic ingredient suppliers. And here at Formula Botanica we always love attending because it means we get to see what's happening in the industry. And as I was wandering around the show, my eye was caught by the stand for Inklita Seaweed Solutions, an ingredient supplier based in Portugal that uses seaweed to create actives for the cosmetics industry. I immediately invited them onto the podcast and today you're going to learn exactly why seaweed should play an important role in the future of the beauty industry. The let's Get Started. Welcome to Green Beauty Conversations in which I challenge the beauty industry to become more sustainable, champion, independent and green beauty and encourage you to join me in changing the beauty industry for the better. I'm your host, Lorraine Dallmeyer. 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 Katarina Rica, the business development manager at Inklita Seaweed Solutions, a pioneering company dedicated to producing sustainable seaweed based ingredients. Inklita aims to harness seaweed's natural benefits and become a global leader in sustainable ingredient production As A former biotechnology researcher and someone who's passionate about the blue economy movement, Katerina's mission is to elevate the Inkleta Seaweed Solutions brand, translating its complex scientific and data concepts into accessible business strategies while setting new standards in the industry and contributing to a more sustainable future. Hi Katerina, how are you doing today?

I'm very fine, thank you so much. How about you Lorraine?

I'm good. I'm so interested in what we're going to talk about, so let's get started. Could you please introduce Inklita Seaweed Solutions? What do you make and sell?

So Inklita Seaweed Solutions is a Portuguese marine biotech company and it's born out of our founders sheer love for seaweed. We started as a spin off from Simard, which is a renowned European research center that focuses on harvesting all knowledge on everything marine basically. And as you can imagine, there lied the right combination of expertise on the enormous potential of seaweed and the biotechnology of how to correctly and sustainably extract the right compounds. And then it brew this like really the inception of a crazy idea that we should bring seaweed to the forefront of ingredient innovation. And after that, and after a few years, today we can say that Inklita develops, produces and sells functional seaweed ingredients for cosmetics, but also for nutraceutical and pet care. But we always keep apply research on our DNA and everything that we do in our day to day life.

Amazing. Well, we're going to dive a little bit more into the ingredients later on in the podcast. But first of all I want to ask the question, where did the name Inklita come from? What does it mean in the business?

It is an odd name, but it does have deep historical roots. So the word Inklita in Portuguese means illustrious or enlightened and it was used to name an entire generation of princes and princesses. They were sons. Yeah, they were sons and daughters of the Portuguese King John the first. And they were all known for their intellectual achievements and for being the drivers for the Portuguese maritime expansion. So when it came the time to name our company, we couldn't help but feel that we were also pioneers to a certain extent. We were entering a still relatively unexplored realm and we had nothing more than our knowledge on seaweed that was of course leveraged by our founders outstanding academic path. So we thought that we were much like the 15th century explorers going into the deep, into the unknown. So the name resonated and that's how the name stuck, I guess.

Oh my goodness, I love that so much. That is so nice. You don't hear those historical stories very often when I ask people about their company names. That's wonderful. Just tapping into something you said earlier. I mean, obviously you said you're making ingredients for various different industries. Cosmetics, pet care. I can't remember what the other one was that you said.

Nutraceuticals.

Nutraceuticals, yeah. So what sort of ingredients are you making for the cosmetics industry?

The ingredients that we make, they mainly have specific properties that we can get from the seaweed. We know that different seaweeds, they have different properties and our choices are made. Of course, we go to the industry, we understand the trends. We know that, for example, at the moment, anti aging is a big thing. Cleansing, natural cleansing ingredients are also something that is really big in the industry. The because we have this so big pool of knowledge, we try to understand what are the best seaweeds, what are the best extraction processes, and then we define a portfolio.

Okay, wow. So you have lots of different types of actives then, by the sounds of things that can be used for anti aging purposes as well. Very interesting. Well, I know that many of our listeners are formulators as well, so they'll be sitting up and paying attention. You said you used lots of different kinds of seaweeds. Can you talk us a little bit through what types of seaweeds you're using to create these ingredients?

As I said before, there's so much knowledge and there are 12,000 species of seaweed available. Yeah. We need to make sure that we use the right one. So when we choose the seaweeds to work with, we have three very important factors in our mind that we keep as staples of how we how we start our research and development processes. The first, of course, are the specific properties. As we said before, we have a proprietary database that allows us to easily consult all the data from a specific seaweed. For example, where lies the biggest antioxidant or anti pigmentation bioactivities? What are the compounds associated with each of these activities? And also geographically, where can we find the right producers or harvesters of that seaweed? Where exactly during the year is the best to harvest them according to this specific property? So that is like the first thing that we do. And our database has all this information incorporated. The second main factor is availability. Of course, because we use natural biomasses, we need to ensure that we have enough and constant supply of the seaweed. And that is also very important because it provides a little bit of a safety to our clients, making sure that we will never fail in supplying the Ingredients. And the third, and I believe also very important factor is the sourcing sustainability. This means that we only work with seaweed suppliers that, as we are, are equally committed to social and environmental sustainability practices. At the moment, for our portfolio, we mainly use brown and red seaweeds. We use Foucuch vesiculosus, which is a well known seaweed from the cosmetic industry. It has wonderful properties, but we still believe they are still unexplored. It's a seaweed that has many, many other things to give. We also use, for example, Kondrus crispus. It's a beautiful red seaweed that when it dries, it is really thick. It has wonderful properties, not only after extraction, but the seaweed itself has very amazing properties. We also use Sparagopsis armata, sistuseiro umilush. These are all Azorean seaweeds. So very specific, very, very peculiar from that, from that little Atlantis, as we said, it's right between. It's in the middle of the ocean. It has this beautiful story surrounding seaweed and it's a wonderful place.

Wow, that's incredible. Can I ask, did you guys make that database yourself then? Because that sounds like a huge undertaking.

It is. As I said in the beginning, our founders had this love for seaweed and combined between, they have more than 40 years experience working on algae, so micro and macroalgae. Being from the academic world, you know, there's a lot of time and effort that you put on doing. On doing not only the applied research, but also very basic research, which is what exactly are the compounds, where they are. So there's time, and there was enough time to make this database. We also collect, of course, data from reports, from papers, from scientific papers, but most of the data was collected by our founders.

Amazing. That sounds like an enormous undertaking. So you talked about lots of different types of seaweeds. You mentioned the Azores as well. So where do your seaweeds come from if you're sourcing from so many different places?

We have. So we have one expert at our team that takes care of everything that's sourcing. Related. The first thing for us, maintaining the lowest carbon footprint for our ingredients is very important to us. So at the moment we mainly use European seaweed and we work with producers and harvesters alike. For example, we work with a seaweed. I was talking about the Azorean seaweeds. We work with a harvesting company there. Not only the seaweed network is close, everyone knows each other and we try to keep this network very tight and it's the best Way to, to work along the value chain is making sure that we all know each other and we all know exactly what we are doing. And one of the things that drove us to work with this Azorean harvesting company is that they do the harvesting with the aid of the local fishery community. They not only provided scuba diving certificates, but they also trained the fishermen on the island's biodiversity, the importance of maintaining it, how the harvesting has to be done in a specific way so that the biodiversity, the seaweed can grow again in a sustainable manner. But they also monitor invasive species. This is the kind of sourcing people that we, that companies that we search for. But as I said before, mainly European, European seaweed all across Europe.

I love that as well that we're bringing that whole sort of biodiversity conservation angle into it as well. Well, I suppose that ties into my next question, which is, do you think it's better than to farm seaweed or to harvest it wild? What's better for the environment?

Well, one thing that I can tell you, Lorraine, this is not like a black or white question, you know, there's no right answer. We know that with cultivation we can significantly increase the amount of seaweed that can act as CO2 sequesters in a very controlled manner. So here there's of course a point for producers also. If we can resort to different technologies, it's also possible to integrate seaweed cultivation with that of other aquatic species and even coming from different trophic levels. And here, of course, you can even increase the benefits more. I don't know if you know this. These type of aquacultures, they are called imta, they are integrated multi trophic aquaculture. They represent a more holistic and ecologically sound approach to cultivation and to seaweed producing. However, now making the case for the other side, it is completely viable to sustainably harvest specific species. Some of them cannot be produced because of the conditions. There are very specific seaweeds that cannot be produced here in Europe and it doesn't jeopardize wild stocks. If you do this on the right way, it can actually even contribute to a healthier growth of the seaweed. Not even mentioning the fact that it does help local communities development. And the Azorean example is a clear example of that.

Wow, fascinating. I mean, there's obviously a lot to explore here. When these producers that you work with harvest the seaweed, does it come to you? Does it come to someone else for processing? How do you extract the compounds from the seaweeds that you work with?

What we do is we make sure that the seaweed doesn't travel that much and that there's not many middlemen until seaweed reaches. So usually the seaweed gets to us already dried or grinded as we need it. In terms of the technique in itself, I'm not able to disclose that much. We have a lot of. Okay, but we always use green extraction and low energy techniques to recover the best bioactive from seaweeds. We want to make sure that we respect the environment while doing so, making sure that the extract has exactly the compounds that we need. How we do this, we use solvents that are not aggressive to the environment. We make a lot of water extractions or using organic ethanol for that. We always recycle their use whenever possible. So we recover, we have our plant recovers the solvents and then they are used again for, for other extractions. And at the end we, we always maximize the extraction yield of the process from the same amounts of biomass. And this comes also by implementing a biorefinery system in our plants.

So. Okay, well, let's talk about that because what does that mean? Because I'm sure everyone's going, what's, what's a biorefinery? Because can you explain a bit more for us?

Of course, of course. So the biorefinery concept is actually the underlying staple of our work. Our goal is to use every part of the seaweed biomass to create a variety of valuable products, ensuring zero waste. In our production process. We first assess and extract the most valuable compounds. They are usually used for cosmetics or nutraceuticals. And even here this can be done in one or subsequent extraction. So we can have a primary and a secondary ingredient with value for these two industries. The remaining biomass, they can be further processed for different uses. This can go from producing, for example, biostimulants, dyes for textile, biofertilizers, for example, animal feed at the end of the cycle. And one of the partners that we started working with, they do construction material. It's wonderful because this does not happen in an isolated form. We are actively building up the seaweed network. It doesn't only work upstream, as I explained before. So it's not only with the suppliers and the academia partners that are very, very important to the work that we do also downstream. So we partner up with other companies, sometimes from completely different industries, that can reuse our waste streams and turn them into valuable materials for them.

Amazing. Gosh, that's absolutely fascinating. I'd love to see houses built with seaweed. Who knows what might be possible in the future. So I want to address the elephant in the room because I hear this from people in our community. Obviously we work a lot with formulators. Sometimes people say I don't want to use seaweed in my cosmetics because it stinks. Does it really stink or is that just a myth?

Well, it most certainly the latter, of course. So let me start by explaining. Fresh seaweed can have a really strong oceanic odor. And when we go to the beach, the decaying biomass that lays there doesn't help our case either because it does. It smells like decaying biomass, whatever it is. But the seaweed that it's used in cosmetics is typically very processed, it's refined and it does almost always remove the unpleasant or what is perceived as a the unpleasant smell. Also, the percentage of incorporation of our functional ingredients is really small. It's between 0.5 to 3%, which makes the smell in the final product be almost unnoticeable. But transparency is one of our values. So I need to make sure that everyone that's listening knows our ingredients are not completely odorless at all. But it has the natural scent of the sea. And for our clients, sometimes it's even seen as a plus. Not only because it is part of the story of the final product, because if you are using a seaweed product, there's usually an underlying story behind it. And the scent, that is little scent of the sea kind of helps to build up that story as well.

I completely understand and agree. Actually, I think if you completely strip ingredients of all their color and scent, then what are you left with at the end? Maybe it isn't even like the original ingredients. So you see this a lot with natural ingredients. Though I think there are very few that don't have any scent. So I completely understand. So what do the extracts that you create actually do on the skin? Why should someone use seaweed in their formulations or their beauty products?

Well, although we know that seaweed are still sub explored resource, there are many, many, many species that have incredible bioactive compounds that can improve health in many ways. So we started opening our eyes with all the data that we that we collected and we understood that there are many compounds on seaweeds that had anti aging, antioxidant, anti inflammatory, antibacterial as well even have some anti cancer properties. We wanted to bring that knowledge that we knew from health area into our skin, into skin care. What we know today is that seaweed ingredients can be like a true elixir of youth. At this moment, many seaweed have compounds with anti aging properties. Due to the antioxidant features, they can either block, for example, oxidative stress effects from pollution, the effects of blue light and uva. They can reduce skin inflammation. Processes also have powerful hydration and firmness and elasticity properties. Some compounds from specific seaweeds can also play a very vital role in the maintenance of skin microbiome. So usually, what I say in a nutshell, we can find the same compounds in seaweeds that we can find in other plants, for example, or others that have similar bioactivities. However, what we know is that seaweeds have many more benefits, namely when we think about production yields. That's one of the things, and of course not even mentioning the environmental factors. We don't use arable lands, we don't need fresh water to grow, we don't use fertilizers, we're not competing directly as a food source and many, many more. So there's a lot of reasons why we should use it. And it is normal to compare, but it's a good comparison, to be honest. We do the same. We're even better than plants. So we are a very, very good alternative.

It sounds like it. It's amazing how many different bioactive compounds there are in seaweed. And it's fascinating to learn that you can pretty much extract any kind of active that you want, by the sounds of things. So tying in with what you were just talking about in terms of the environmental footprint, how do you think seaweed can help with the sustainable beauty movement moving forward?

So we know that again, as I told you before, the potential of seaweed in cosmetics is immense, owing it also of course, to the rich composition and the benefits we've been talking about. Also, seaweed, as you can understand, they are very versatile. So seaweed based ingredients can be used both for face, body, hair products and good ingredients. And I want to make this like good seaweed based ingredients. They can have multiple functionalities, which leads to a decrease on the number of bioactive ingredients that you add to the final product, but also decreasing fragrances and even preservatives due to the antioxidant properties. In my opinion, of course, seaweed deserve to be at the forefront of the sustainable beauty movement. It's an easy, easily renewable resource. I don't know if you know this. It's the fast growing, fastest growing biomass in the world, does not require fresh water or fertilizers, as I said. And it does contribute to the mitigation of ocean acidification and also to the improvements of many bioecosystems it has a very low carbon footprint. When we compare it to other traditional and natural cosmetic ingredients, it's biodegradable, it's non toxic. Reducing of course then the environment, environmental impact of the cosmetic products. I know I keep repeating myself, but it's important. It does provide livelihood for coastal communities promoting economic development without harming the environment, which for us is very important. So by incorporating seaweed into their products, I think the cosmetic brands can easily align with the movement. They can offer consumers effective natural and environmental responsible options. So I believe that this will not only enhance the brand's value at the end of the day, but actually contribute positively for the planet and to the society.

Very exciting. And I'm sure everyone listening is also seeing the enormous potential for seaweed in sustainability. So what's the big mission for Inkleta? I mean, you're doing some incredible work over there. You've got some fascinating ingredients. What are you hoping to achieve with all of this?

We are hoping that we will one day become the gold standard on the development and production of sustainable seaweed based ingredients. And not only is this a more internal goal, but we want this to shine through. With that we can spread the seaweed network that we were mentioning and finally making seaweed the main star of the show. So bringing it out, bringing it to the sun and making sure that everyone knows the potential of seaweed.

That is a lovely mission and I have no doubt you'll be working hard to make it the star of the show. And any future plans for the business in the meantime, are you going to be making other ingredients? Are you moving beyond actives? What's any other plans?

The plans for now are to grow of course, as a cosmetic ingredient producer. We have a very ambitious roadmap. So until the end of the year, we will launch three more ingredients focused on anti aging and cleansing. We are pursuing our R and D work now both for cosmetics and nutraceutical industries. And we have a goal of reaching a portfolio of 10 ingredients by 2025. So we're very keen on having this out. And at the same time we want also to bet on co development projects with different organizations. They can be from this side, from cosmetics and nutraceutical industries, but also on pet care. And we are nodding also to the food and beverage industry, making a way and opening a path for novel foods. It's very excited a little bit off of what we're doing at the moment because. But as I told you at the beginning, research is so much embedded in our DNA that We cannot help ourselves in putting our foot and our footprint also in other kinds of work.

Sounds very exciting. I look forward to watching you get all of these products out onto the market. So if anyone's listening and they want to come and buy some of your ingredients, where can they do that? Where can they find out more about Inklita Seaweed Solutions?

So you can find us at LinkedIn, that's our main source of information. But also you can visit our website which is inklita seaweedsolutions.com amazing.

We will include those in the show notes. If there are any indie formulators or businesses who are interested, what's the best place for them to come and chat to you? Is that through the website? Is that through LinkedIn?

They can also send us an email if they want sales@inklit seaweedsolutions.com and we will be present in several events, cosmetic events. This year we will be at Cosmetorium as well in Barcelona. I think it's going to be the next one. So if you want to go there, go through our booth. We will be there waiting for you to have a to have a very sustainable chat.

Amazing. We look forward to that. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today, Katharina. It's been really lovely talking to you.

Thank you Lorraine.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Have you ever used beauty products that contain seaweed? Or if you're a formulator, have you ever formulated with seaweed? 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 as well. Some great Examples include episode 215 in which I interviewed Matthew Perkins of Macro Oceans in the US who talked about the way that they work with ocean farmers to create their seaweed actives. Or episode 181 in which I talked to Jeff Chapin of Carbonwave, whose company in the US has made a fascinating seaweed derived emulsifier using the sargassum bloom in the Caribbean. Or episode 168, which is a short opinion piece, just a few minutes of Just Me, in which I share my thoughts on why I think seaweed is the future of sustainable beauty. There's a wealth of information in our old episodes and I do encourage you to go back and listen to them. Thank you for joining Katharina 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 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 Botanicaormula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn. We're everywhere and come and give me a Follow Lorraine Dallmeyer on Instagram and LinkedIn, visit our website@formulabotanica.com and sign up for our free online Formulation course course today.