Balancing sustainability and market reality: seaweed-based nutraceuticals

Sybille Buchwald-Werner, PhD, is a recently appointed member of the board of directors for Oceanium and founder of Newday. Here, she explains how Oceanum builds a resilient, diversified seaweed supply chain to deliver sustainable, nutraceutical bioactives like Ocean Actives H+.

Transcript

Erin McEvoy: Hello everyone. My name is Erin McEvoy, Associate Editor for Nutritional Outlook, and I'm joined today by Sybille Buchwald-Werner, member of the board of directors for Oceanium and founder of Newday, to discuss seaweed-based ingredients and nutraceuticals. Thank you for joining us today. Dr Buchwald-Werner.

Sybille Buchwald-Werner: Thank you, Erin, for having me here today.

McEvoy: It's a pleasure. What is Oceanium’s sourcing strategy and how do you work or collaborate with farmers and sourcing partners to ensure stability and quality in the supply chain?

Buchwald-Werner Yeah, sourcing seaweed is a balancing act between sustainability and market reality. Our aim is to deliver feasible, market ready products without compromising our sustainability values. And from a governance perspective, the focus is on long term supply resilience and consistent quality, and that's why we have partners, but we also deliberately did choose not to rely on a single farm or geography. So it needs to have diversity in the in the philosophy of sourcing.

McEvoy: So when it comes to nutraceuticals, what are some of the limitations or challenges seaweed-based ingredients have faced, and how did this influence Oceanium’s approach to developing Ocean Actives H+?

Buchwald-Werner: From a board perspective, Oceanium is not about correcting past limitations. Because we started with, we had the purpose to build a platform that offers flexibility and robustness at the same time, so supporting the smarter the pathways and not to be bound in one direction, it also gives a kind of, gives you a more independency, how you can move forward. It reduces your risk assessment. And so when we look at limitations, which may have been in the market, it was more viability of a natural product. It was maybe a high dosage to formulate in application models. Due to our flexibility, we have different proposals to move forward. And so therefore, we try to modulate the risk in these dependencies like this.

McEvoy: A recent study detailed the prebiotic benefits of Ocean Actives H+. How does this study inform the ongoing or upcoming clinical research on this ingredient and its benefits that Oceanium is eager to explore?

Buchwald-Werner: What I can say from a broad perspective, is that the rule of research is to strengthen the composition, the understanding of seaweed and the mode of action, and to have a credible evidence pathway and that's what we try to achieve in all the little puzzles of studies that we put together.

Erin McEvoy: So a low effective dose is valuable for formulators when developing alternative dosage formats like gummies or functional foods and beverages. But are there any functional advantages to using ingredients like Ocean Actives H+, given that seaweed based ingredients have a long history of use of stabilizers and gelling agents?

Buchwald-Werner: Starting with the Ocean Actives H+ is maybe not the right starting point, because this has been used for its health benefits, and I would call it precision bioactive, not a functional or structural purpose ingredient, but as we have our seaweed platform at the same time, we always process different ingredients. And so we have our precision bioactives, but we also have functional materials that are generated in one process. And so that gives us the flexibility and the efficiency of using the biomass so we have it, it's not out of our scope to look at functionality.