The Sacramento Inno Awards recognize some of the year's most talented and successful players in the tech and startup community. This year, the Business Journal recognized innovative companies, products and leaders. Macro Oceans is one of this year's Innovative Company honorees.
Biotechnology company Macro Oceans Inc. is turning to the sea for products that can be used in place of conventional plastic and other chemicals.
The West Sacramento-based company uses seaweed to make its chemicals, which can be used in cosmetics, food and packaging instead of petroleum byproducts, or current alternatives from terrestrial crops like corn.
“Seaweed is great,” CEO Matthew Perkins told the Business Journal late last year. “It needs no pesticides, no fertilizer and no fresh water.”
The company sources its seaweed from Alaska, where it grows in open-ocean farms. Currently, the company primarily works with a variety called sugar kelp — called kombu in Japanese cuisine.
In addition to creating a more sustainable product than current alternatives, the company is also committed to using more sustainable processes itself. Its core innovation is a zero-waste manufacturing process that turns every component in the seaweed into a usable product.
While seaweed has been used to make some chemical products for a while, Macro Oceans had to figure out how to extract certain components of the seaweed without making the rest of it impossible to use for something else.
This year, the company finished work on its new 12,500-square-foot facility in West Sacramento, which allows it to take its process from lab scale to engineering scale.
Before that, it had been working out of the Woodland ag-tech incubator The Lab@AgStart since 2021. Perkins, who has a background in agriculture and seed genetics, launched the company in 2020.
Macro Oceans has signed up a number of different client companies that are working with its products to develop products of their own, including Sway, a company that develops packaging made out of bioplastics.
This year it has also raised $5 million in seed funding, from backers including Refactor Capital, Lowercarbon Capital and McKinley Capital.
Eventually, the company plans to build its full-scale processing plant close to the source of its seaweed in Alaska.
