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The hot Thai sun is beating down on the rooftop of the Hotel Novotel Bangkok on Siam Square, in downtown Bangkok. There, a few dozen white barrels line the edges of the rooftop; inside, a bright green jam is bubbling in the heat. There’s no smell – just the captivating sight of an urban farm harvesting spirulina, an edible green algae sometimes referred to as the “spinach of the future”.
The Novotel’s rooftop spirulina farm is the brainchild of EnerGaia, a Thai startup pushing the boundaries of urban farming. Saumil Shah, EnerGaia’s 42-year-old director and founder, decided to invest in the microalgae business after reading an article about how carbon dioxide from an industrial facility could be used to grow algae.
Shah grew up around Atlanta. He graduated from the niversity at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he studied aerospace engineering. After designing aircraft engines, he moved to General Electrics, and in 2006 the company sent him on an assignment to Bangkok, where he fell in love with the Thai way of life.
He formed EnerGaia and began installing edible algae-producing, CO2-eating bioreactors around Bangkok. His aim is to use unused spaces – rooftops, vacant parking lots – to encourage more urban farming, starting with spirulina. Right now, his biggest challenge is that of familiarity. “People simply don’t know what spirulina is,” he says.
At the Novotel Bangkok café, customers on high-backed leather bar stools drink spirulina shakes: a vibrant green juice containing cucumber, green apple, lemon juice and algae. Except that, unlike other brunch foods, spirulina is roughly 3.5bn years old. The edible algae was once part of the diet of Aztecs and populations near lake Chad.
Scientists only rediscovered it relatively recently: one of the earliest modern references to spirulina comes from the International Association of Applied Microbiology, who referred to it as “a wonderful future food source” in 1967. Heeding the call, Nasa later studied it as a potential food source for astronauts. In recent years, it has increasingly become a popular nutritional supplement for health geeks around the world.
What drives interest in this single-celled cyanobacteria is its nutritional profile. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), dried spirulina has a protein content of 59-65%, and only only 36 kilocalories per 10 grams. (By comparison, raw beef has around 20% protein content.) Spirulina is also a complete source of amino acids and Omega-3, has a high concentration of essential minerals, and contains vitamins B1, B2, B3, B6, B9, B12, C, D and E.
According to a 2014 European Commission report, the production volume of food and feed supplements derived from microalgae has risen from 1000 tonnes dry weight in 1999 to 5,000 tonnes dry weight in 2004, and 9,000 tonnes dry weight in 2011. Today, 25m tonnes of seaweeds and other algae are harvested annually for use as food, in cosmetics and fertilizers, or are processed to extract thickening agents or used as an additive to animal feed.
In this market, spirulina dietary supplements have the largest production volumes worldwide: 5,000 tonnes a year worth about $40m annually, according to the report. The key players are concentrated in the US, with companies such as Cyanotech, Earthrise and USA Nutra developing and commercializing natural products from microalgae. Recent estimates suggest some 1000 tonnes are currently sold in the US market – 80% in the form of health and dietary supplements.
Still, the study notes that large scale commercial production of microalgae is still an “infant industry”. George Grimble, a nutritionist at the University College London’s Institute for Liver and Digestive Health, says that while spirulina is great, it’s decades away from becoming a major food, because there simply aren’t enough consumers around the world who would look at spirulina they way they look at vegetables or meat.
“The issue with algae is it’s quite difficult to formulate it into foods that people are familiar with,” he says.
However, Mauro Vigani, a senior research fellow at University of Gloucestershire’s Countryside and Community Research Institute, says that despite the challenges the microalage sector still needs to address, its growth potential is high. “Since 2000, the microalgae sector has grown five to 10-fold,” he says. “So far, the greatest investments have been made in the US, Australia and Asia.”
Vigani believes more consumers should be made aware of the advantages of microalgae products. “It would be beneficial to have the support of government institutions and public campaigns.”
This is where EnerGaia comes in. The company is headquartered in a small building in Bangkok. The first floor hosts a research and development center – a small, busy office where Shah and his team design labels, brainstorm ideas, and work towards conceptualizing the next generations of microalgae. The company employs two microbiologists from Thailand and two local technicians who are responsible for working at the farms and packaging the spirulina. There’s also an office manager, an export sales manager from France, and one intern from Mexico who is helping the startup with organic certification application paperwork.
Upstairs, the team maintains a spirulina master culture in a fully equipped lab. In a room next door, a modified washing machine spin-dries the algae. EnerGaia runs a second urban farm in Bangkok’s Green Zone – a preserved area in the middle of the city’s river that hosts only community projects and green businesses. With more than 900 tanks, this facility is about 10 times bigger than the one occupying the Novotel rooftop.
The Novotel’s spirulina farm consists of 80 sq m of space, 15 stories above the busy streets of Bangkok. There are two sets of around 40 interconnected bioreactors, closed tanks that hold more than 250 liters of water each and form a closed system that prevents pollutants from entering and limit evaporation. Spirulina flows from thank to tank thanks to a blower that pumps filtered air in the system. In the future, EnerGaia hopes to adapt this design to use CO2 emissions from industrial sites to feed, aerate and mix the algae.
Manuel Raymondin, resident manager of the hotel, says the hotel rents its rooftop to EnerGaia for just a few dollars a month. “We don’t want to make money on it,” he says. “[We] thought it was a superb idea to be the first one to be able to grow Spirulina on the top of a roof in a hotel in Bangkok. Why not?”
The EnerGaia team harvests the spirulina three to four times a week, taking it from the farm to a facility that spin dries the algae and packs it. It is then shipped back to the Novotel, and to 11 other stores and retailers around Thailand. Over the course of a year, EnerGaia gets somewhere between 300-500kg of fresh spirulina from the hotel rooftop. It retails for around $40/kg; to diversify its offer and reach more costumers, EnerGaia also sells pasta containing spirulina and dried spirulina powder.
The company’s turnover is currently around $70,000 per year. “Not so much yet, but we are growing 200% per year for the last two years,” says Shah.
He now hopes to partner with NGOs and multi-governmental agencies like the UN and the World Health Organization to deploy its urban farming system in refugee camps on a trial basis. The EnerGaia system can be installed anywhere, as long as the temperatures are above 32C (89F) and below or around 38C (100F).
“I think we can make a big positive impact on several fronts: not just the environmental footprint but also food security,” Shah says.
He hopes spirulina will become as ubiquitous as other once niche foods, such as kale or quinoa are today.
“The challenges make me nervous, but all in all we keep making progress. And that’s very good.”
