And then there’s the food side of the business — a veritable cafeteria of products and ingredients with environmental and nutritional benefits. Solazyme offers algae-derived food ingredients boasting improved nutrition and functionality while reducing costs for food processing companies. And it offers a glimpse into how we might feed nine billion hungry bellies in the coming decades.
Solazyme has harnessed its algae technology to cost-effectively produce replacements for eggs, milk and butter. Its scientists are able to design tailored oils unable to be made elsewhere, meeting the unique formulations of an almost unlimited number of supermarket products.
During a visit to the company’s headquarters last week, I was given a tour of the company’s labs — from the strain development lab (where scientists engineer algae to make novel oils tailored to specific purposes) to the fermentation lab (where rows of algae are grown at laboratory scale) to the pilot plant (where algae strains are grown at much larger scale to show how they scale up effectively).
The tour ended in the food lab, where Ken Plasse, vice president of business development, gave me a tasting tour. “The oil profile is very similar to olive oil,” he explained about his company’s algae-based alternatives. “You essentially have that outer protein and fiber cell next to a very efficient fat that can replace eggs, oil and butter, and dramatically reduce the fat as well as improve the fiber and protein. But the beauty of it is that you keep an amazing mouthfeel, more like full-fat ingredients, while you're reducing the fat. That probably is the biggest breakthrough.”
The tasting began with a sample of the dried algae itself — it has the look and consistency of dry mustard, but tasteless. Then came a series of foods prepared with algae-based products.
'The best pond-scum cookie'
Sampling an algae-enhanced brioche
First up, a brioche — “Probably the most decadent bread available,” says Plasse. “It’s full of egg, full of oil. What we've tried to do is remove all of the egg and oil and replaced it with algal flour.” Without egg and oil, it should have been rock hard and bone dry. It wasn’t — far from it. Adding the algal flour allowed the recipe to remove 70 percent of the fat and 25 percent of the calories, but keep the muffin's essential taste and texture.
Next, high-protein snack crackers with the appearance of Pepperidge Farm’s iconic Goldfish; a chocolate chip cookie, with 47 percent less fat and 23 percent fewer calories; a nonfat chocolate milk re-designed with a small amount of algae to yield a rich and creamy taste; and vanilla ice cream with only 4 percent fat — about half that of typical ice cream.
It was all quite edible and tasty. A Time magazine reporter, who apparently experienced a similar tasting at Solazyme, dubbed it “The best pond-scum cookie you'll ever taste.” I'm hardpressed to improve on that review.
"This is revolutionary food technology,” says Plasse, who’s clearly enjoying his job. “It's not incremental,” adding: “One of our dreams is to improve the school lunch program.” With protein-laden crackers and low-fat, rich-tasting chocolate milk, there’s huge opportunity for making a dent in childhood obesity.
Solazyme has no plans to market cookies, crackers or anything else directly to consumers. Instead, it will manufacture and sell the ingredients to food manufacturers. Already, the company’s ingredients have garnered high interest. “Name a big food company and they probably have our stuff in their lab right now, testing it on their various food products,” Dillon told me.
“You don't appreciate the public health implications of this technology," Plasse chimes in. “There are no GMOs. It’s non-allergenic, vegan, natural. It hits the sweet spots of a lot of our developers.”
There are also environmental benefits. “If we're making a palm oil substitute, you don't have to go ripping out rainforests in Indonesia in order to do that,” says Dillon, who holds a PhD in microbial genetics. “You can do it in a place with far less environmental impact.”
Little of the commercial production of Solazyme products takes place on the company’s premises, though the company operates a modest biorefinery in Illinois. Most production takes place in plants owned by its partners. For example, Archer Daniels Midland, the food-processing and commodities-trading giant, operates a plant in Iowa where Solazyme is gearing up to produce of 20,000 metric tons of oil a year starting in 2014. With Bunge, another agribusiness behemoth, Solazyme operates a renewable oils plant in Brazil. Solazyme has partnerships with an impressive list of other companies, including Chevron, Qantas and Unilever.
