🛒 The Check-Out: Algae Cooking Club

+ more in our basket - CPG incubators, London cafes and local refilleries.

May 30, 2024

Happy Thursday! Welcome to The Check-Out - your weekly dose of brand x sustainability inspiration, and your discovery box of what the team is loving this week. It’s great to have you here.

Ever thought of yourself as a ‘Curious Gourmand’? No? Ok, well in Algae Cooking Club’s eyes you just might be, and quite frankly, in ours too (yes, we think about you…a lot). Why? Because we’re pretty sure that you love finding new ingredients and trying them in your kitchen, just as much as we do. At Following the Footprints we OBSESS over finding cool new brands doing cool new things to make our cool planet cooler. Like spend-30-minutes-in-planet-organic-writing-down-new-brand-names obsessed. Today, FTF team member Jenny is introducing us to her latest obsession - algal bio-oil.

After we dig into the Algae Cooking Club, we’ll share what the Following the Footprints team has loved and consumed this week. Let’s dig in…

> Brand Spotlight

The Better Bio-Oil: Algae Cooking Club

By Jenny Nova

Earlier I was sitting on the subway detailing to a friend what the rest of my day entailed. “I need to finish my piece on Algae Cooking Club’s algae cooking oil,” I told her before we reached our stop. “What,” she said, “in the world… is algae cooking oil?” and before I could give her my extremely eloquent and enlightening explanation, we had reached our destination. Eunice, this one’s for you.

Algae oil is one example of the growing category of bio-oils gaining popularity as renewable fuel options. As we’ll see today, though, this innovation is hitting our pans and plates sooner than you may expect.

What in the world is algae cooking oil?

For consumers, algal bio-oil can translate into a cooking oil offering health benefits primarily found in fish (or fish oil). Algal oil is an excellent vegan / vegetarian alternative to fish products; fish – that feed on microalgae – typically pass along the health benefits to us in the form of necessary-for-function omega-3 fatty acids: ALA, DHA, EPA. Algal oil cuts out the middleman by directly offering those same omega-3 benefits, sans fish. Cutting the middleman feels more necessary than ever - many aquatic dwellers are being overfished and there are incoming restrictions on fish oil production (source), positioning algal oil as one of the potential foods(ish) of the future.

Algal oil as liquid luxury

Splashy newcomer brand Algae Cooking Club (ACC) recognized the planet-friendly positioning of algal oil production: investors have said that the process of using “sugar to ferment algae is the most planet-friendly on the market, utilizing less CO2, land, and water than any other product.” ACC themselves stated that bringing their algal oil to life “uses 1/10th of the land and water that vegetable oil does, and has half the carbon footprint of olive oil.”

They also saw the opportunity for a better-branded competitor to take an algal oil offering beyond the niche wellness space. They’re clearly hoping to quickly push themselves along the product adoption curve (see below) by partnering with heavy-hitting culinary institutions like vegan fine-dining three Michelin star restaurant Eleven Madison Park. They hope this promotion of their oil will quickly raise awareness, establish legitimacy and grow consumer trust. They call their target consumers “Curious Gourmands” - a group of 65 million people, 91% of whom actively seek out new ingredients to use while cooking.

Takeaways for algal-inspired brands

Why do we find this splashing-onto-the-CPG-scene so intriguing?

Know your customer: Right now, it feels like we’re in the era of elite home cooking content - creators like Justine Snacks, Hailee Catalano, and Tee & Zach are some of the many influencers showing accessible make-at-home recipes to millions of TikTok followers and helping drive ingredient trends in a way akin to fashion (see Graza’s buzz). ACC is wise to partner with a revered restaurant like Eleven Madison Park to capture the attention of their clearly defined target customer base and be the oil someone is excited to flaunt when actually making one of their saved TikTok recipes.
Make your product a staple: Given oil is in most everything we consume, the environmental threats to sustained global oil production are real. By attempting to create a more sustainable offering, ACC’s algae oil could quickly become a go-to for environmentally conscious home cooks who look for healthy options that don’t heavily deplete natural resources.

Have you tried Algae Cooking Club’s oil or seen it stocked anywhere near you? Let us know your thoughts with a direct reply, we love hearing from you!

Check Out Algae Cooking Club

> In Our Basket

🔎 What we loved and consumed this week:

From Leone in London: Right now, this one's unfortunately only for the London locals - but you should add it to your list for your next trip! Trampoline Cafe in Angel is truly heavenly. Brought to you by the team behind NEMI Teas (read our spotlight from two years ago here), they stock other brands we love like ChariTea and Karma Drinks. Partnering with The Hotel School, they focus on supporting refugees on their ‘upward journey’. 11/10.
From Lexi in Ontario, Canada: I’ve been loving my local refillery lately where I can get everything from plant-based meats to cleaning items. I’m a serious repurchaser of their laundry strips (example here), which are so much lighter (leading to less transport GHGs) and easier to use than traditional liquid! The store has also begun selling meal boxes made in-house to combat the shipping and excess materials of traditional meal subscriptions.
From Jenny in NY: In preparation for this week’s piece on Algae Cooking Club, I dug into the CPG incubator and venture studio Squared Circles. I just finished reading their research report on their target consumer, the “Conscious Maximalist.” Nothing makes my sociology-major-self more pleased than a delightfully designed cultural investigation, and this one is worth a read for all brands looking to reposition their offerings or better resonate with their target audience!

That’s it for today!

Know a brand we should spotlight next? Let Leone know!
Have links that can make the team learn or laugh? Share them with us, we might just share them in The Check-Out next week.
Hungry for more? You’ll see us on Monday! That’s when we suit up and get serious, digging into a topic that is guaranteed to make you look smart at standup.

Much love,

Team FTF