Macro Oceans Inc., a company developing techniques to create products from seaweed, has opened a pilot manufacturing plant and lab in West Sacramento.
The company is working to create products for cosmetics, food and materials industries using extracts and formulations from farmed seaweed.
“Seaweed is great. It needs no pesticides, no fertilizer and no fresh water,” said CEO Matthew Perkins.
The company works with farmed Alaskan sugar kelp, an abundant and renewable source of minerals, proteins, carbohydrates and other useful nutrients.
The San Francisco-based company started in the fall of 2020. In May 2021, it took lab space at the Lab@AgStart in Woodland, an incubator for agriculture and food technology startups.
The company still maintains bench space at the Lab@AgStart to have access to some of its specialized lab equipment. The company’s new space in a West Sacramento business park is in 12,500 square feet, of which about 3,000 is lab space, 7,000 is warehouse and the rest is office.
Macro Oceans picked Woodland, and then West Sacramento, for access to the University of California Davis. Four of the company’s five employees are Ph.D.s, Perkins said.
The company is backed by venture capital funding, but the amount and the investors haven’t been made public yet, Perkins said.
The Greater Sacramento Economic Council assisted Macro Oceans in finding the new research and development space in the region, which is a growing and globally recognized food technology and ag-tech hub, said Greater Sacramento CEO Barry Broome.
The West Sacramento space will allow the company to make its products in a pilot plant, Perkins said.
“You can’t have a conversation with a customer until you have a product,” he said.
Macro Oceans intends to sell its products to other manufacturers as an ingredient. The company doesn’t plan to make any end products or to be a brand, he said.
In addition to nutritious foods and cosmetic ingredients, other applications include thin films that can be used to coat the inside of takeaway containers that are biodegradable or for products that make biodegradable packaging.
Macro Oceans' pilot plant in West Sacramento is primarily for research and development work and small-scale manufacturing for initial products. A large-scale plant is likely to be built by the company in the future closer to its source of seaweed, which is open-ocean farmed off the coast of Alaska. Sugar kelp, which is the company's primary focus now, is edible and in Japanese cuisine it is known as kombu.
Since seaweed is 90% water, most of the initial extraction work is done as close to the farms as possible.
With increasing corporate responsibility in regard to carbon sequestration and climate change, Macro Oceans' products offer some built-in incentives for manufacturers to use them because they are natural, carbon neutral and traceable.
