Petrochemicals are all around us—from ubiquitous plastic packaging to the inconspicuous lining of your takeaway coffee cup, and in everyday products like soaps, deodorants, and toothpaste. But that will change, according to Matthew Perkins (MBA 2009). When industries transition away from fossil fuels, all those petroleum products will be replaced with bio-based alternatives. And Macro Oceans, the startup Perkins founded three years ago, is positioning seaweed to be the ideal successor.

Early in his journey, as he started to grasp the scope of the potential opportunity, Perkins set out to experiment with seaweed and asked kelp farmers if he could buy some. “They said, ‘Sure, but what are you going to do with it?’ ” Perkins recalls. “Then I realized there was no infrastructure to store it or process it.” Further downstream, he found that manufacturers in the food, beauty, and packaging industries were hungry for cost-effective, bio-based ingredients but couldn’t get their hands on them. Enter Macro Oceans, a biomaterials company that’s forming the connective tissue for a seaweed value chain.

In a Nutshell
“We buy seaweed from farmers, we stabilize it at ambient temperatures, and then we transform it into a series of different outputs,” Perkins explains. “For every package, we know exactly what farm the product came from, how it was processed, and how it got to the customer. That’s the value proposition: an ultrasustainable material with total traceability and transparency.”

Beauty as a Beachhead
Macro Oceans launched its first product last year, with a bioactive ingredient that can be used in skin care. The industry’s clean movement, where synthetic, hard-to-pronounce ingredients are being replaced with natural ones, offers ideal alignment. “We’re really growing this product. We’ve got some fantastic clinical results to back it up and all the reasons why seaweed is good for the skin—but we’re not a beauty company,” Perkins says. “For us, beauty is the thin end of the wedge. It’s a high-value market to begin in; then we’ll grow into larger-scale markets, such as packaging.”

Down to the Last Drop
Macro Oceans extracts value from every last ounce of raw materials, from the high-value, bioactive compounds that the beauty industry is demanding, all the way down to the seaweed cellulose that’s essentially a by-product. The profitability of the former allows them to scale the latter and to offer packaging materials at a price that’s actually viable for that kind of commodity. Between those extremes, Macro Oceans also produces a flexible biopolymer, called alginate, that’s widely used in the food industry as an emulsifier. “The only thing left, at the very end, is a little bit of water that is clean enough to drink at that point,” Perkins says.

Yield
Macro Oceans raised a $5 million seed round in 2022, led by Refactor Capital, Lowercarbon Capital, and the Alaska-based McKinley Capital. Farmers produce $6 billion in seaweed annually, according to the USDA. Most of that is grown in Asia; the US market is still developing.

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