7 seaweed trends to close out 2024
After last month’s dense deep dives, here’s an easy-to-digest listicle for all to enjoy, with 7 trends I observed in 2024.
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1. More cooperations and mergers
Everything Seaweed merged with Macro Oceans; Marine Biologics acqui-hired Spoitz, Arctic Seaweed and The Seaweed Company entered into close collaboration, SeaWeed-Tech fused with DSG, the Pembrokeshire Beach Food Company joined the Car-y-Mor family, SymbioTex blended with FlexSea. These are all small-scale tie-ups, since the Atlantic seaweed industry is tiny to begin with, but they point to something larger: companies have gotten to know each other over the past few years, discovering their own strengths and weaknesses along the way. The upshot has been specialization, and the beginning of consolidation and cooperation.
For 2025, expect this trend to continue and to grow more intercontinental, with East-West and North-South networks slowly becoming stronger and denser.
2. Biorefining beachheads
3 years ago, my Linkedin feed was full of people on a boat with some smiling seaweed in their hands. These days, my feed is full of beauty award ceremonies and organic potato farmers with an arm around their shoulder. In other words, the dozen or so seaweed biorefineries that started up around 2020 have chosen a beachhead market and are now doubling down on it.
While the dream of profitably selling seaweed side streams lives on, developing a portfolio of brands and deploying diverse sales teams to hawk those products is a sizable challenge. Will the majority of biorefineries evolve into Japanese-style conglomerates serving vastly different markets, or will most ultimately choose to specialize and cooperate / outsource?
3. Bioplastics stayed funded
At least $43 million went into 7 different seaweed bioplastics companies in 2024, Notpla being the biggest beneficiary at $26.8 million. Investor confidence perhaps stems from the fact that startups have worked hard on their cost competitiveness and material properties, locked in their first 20,000 tons of low-cost seaweed supply (processing side streams are a popular choice, see trend #2 above) and zeroed in on their beachhead markets, whether that’s cardboard coatings, polybags, detergent pods or paper.
Those who refrained from investing have a powerful counterargument: ruling elites have never shown a willingness to regulate the plastics industry and China alone added approximately 44 million tons of production capacity for ethylene and propylene in the last 5 years; this leaves major plastics players with little reason to acquire (within the lifespan of a VC fund, which is counted in dog years) bioplastics tech that will remain at best a marginal side show to their petro-empires for decades to come.
4. The shifting startup landscape
5 years ago, Europe, North America and Australia were abuzz with talk of seaweed bioplastics, biorefineries, biostimulants, blue carbon and Asparagopsis, while sea moss was deemed scientifically wrong, but financially oh so right.
Those themes are less popular with Western startups in 2024, but they have gained currency elsewhere: new Asparagopsis startups have sprung up in Asia and Africa, Japan and China are pushing seaweed as blue carbon, Indonesians have belatedly woken up to the biostimulant opportunity, South Americans are setting up biorefineries and sea moss reached East Africa. What about new startups in Europe and the US? They came back to food, with more tailored, slept-on ideas to bridge the demand gap.
Stay tuned for next week’s newsletter, listing 53 seaweed companies born in 2023 and 2024 that illustrate some of these trends.
5. A renewed focus on food
Three years ago, many seaweed growers in Europe and North America felt that food was not the way forward if scale was ever to be achieved. They pointed at the gap between what people wanted but couldn’t be grown (dulse) and what could be grown but didn’t sell (kelp), pivoting instead to biostimulants and feed.
But others stuck to it, and with their efforts, the gap is closing. Acadian Seaplants grew 300 tons of dulse this year, thereby perhaps quadrupling Canada’s dulse supply in one fell swoop. There were no such major wins on the kelp side of the equation, but pay close attention and you start to notice many little wins: a couple of hundred pounds here, half a ton there, three pallets on their way to somewhere else.
To be clear, the gap is still there - but so is the opportunity. The Western equivalent of nori sheets or wakame salads has not surfaced yet. Where might that recipe come from? Could be anywhere of course, but it might just be those usual suspects, the French. I know, it’s annoying, but they do have great food, and outside of Asia, France has for decades been the country with the biggest consumption of its own local seaweeds. Today, companies like Zalg, Neptune Eléments, Bord à Bord, Hep Ken, Sea4Earth and Olala are cooking up something new.
6. “AI” ingredient discovery
It was a recurring refrain in 2024: companies said they were building a database of seaweed properties at a very granular level, to then unleash an algorithm that would help them quickly formulate new ingredients. An approach that has already seen success in sectors like perfume, nutrition, pharma, etc.
It’s certainly an interesting line of inquiry, although the lack of data for algae is something that needs to be addressed. Who will win it, though: an algae company with sector-specific knowledge, or a tech company with a more powerful algorithm?
7. Bioremediation
Seakura and Mediterranean Algae both pivoted to bioremediation for ports and desalination plants recently. Last year, Gross-Wen finished installation of the first microalgae wastewater treatment facility. And just a few days ago, RegenAqua opened the world’s largest freshwater macroalgae wastewater treatment facility. These projects are sure to bring more attention to an area where algae are not only good at their job and kind to the environment, but also make sense economically.
Hidden bonus: fermentation and enzyme-assisted extraction for seaweeds has long been seen as uneconomical, risky (contamination) and too far away in terms of R&D (still have to discover those enzymes). In other words, it’s the kind of thing academics get really excited about. Don’t expect immediate applications here. But there is renewed attention to the idea, on the one hand because these techniques promise a clean, green, efficient chemistry, and on the other hand because of the stronger focus on problematic yet hard-to-valorize biomass like harmful algal blooms and hydrocolloid processing waste.
Finally, bullet point 8 is not a trend, since we haven’t seen any evidence of it yet. It’s more of a wish for the new year. Because you never know.
8. Investors will think beyond equity
The nature of capitalism invites investors to be self-centered and short-sighted. However, seaweeds, along with other “climate tech” that looks to disrupt oligopolist, commodity-driven industries, need the opposite: capital that is in it for the long run, looking at investment opportunities with a systems lens.
As investment firm S2G notes: “Customer discovery is critical and can be hard to obtain from a customer that needs scale, when you won’t have the scale they need for years. The time to market, therefore, is often longer. Investors need to have the financial endurance and commitment to support companies through multiple funding rounds. Structuring deals with a long-term view of capital needs and burn rates is essential for success.”
For seaweed companies to outrun the chicken-and-egg dilemma and reach scale, investors need to put down the blunt hand axe of private equity and open up the Swiss army knife of outcome-based or revenue-based financing, asset-backed debt, project finance and structured equity. Will they?