London-based biotech microalgae company Arborea produces BioSolar Spirulina using its BioSolar Leaf technology, a fully sealed, closed-system “breathing cultivation” platform designed to reduce contamination risk, stabilize compositional consistency and improve sensory characteristics.
The partnership involves supplier and formulation company Vita Actives supporting product development and commercialisation across food, beverage and nutrition applications, including gummies, smoothies and functional drinks.
Announcing the partnership during Vitafoods Europe (May. 5-7), Nathan Gray, head of technical marketing at Vita Actives, told NutraIngredients that the spirulina is in a ‘league of its own’ in terms of standard, taste and nutrient density.
“It is not a better version of the same product — it is a different category of ingredient,” he said.
Premium ingredient market grows
Gray explained the launch arrives as ingredient markets further split into two distinct directions: low-cost bulk commodities and high-purity, branded ingredients.
He said that in ingredient categories such as creatine, collagen, mushrooms, curcumin and ashwagandha, the cheap bulk market is competing on price, while a premium segment is emerging around quality ingredients that consumers are willing to pay more for.
“In all of these spaces, the brands that are winning are not the ones competing on price; they are the ones investing in well-validated, great-tasting, high-purity ingredients that can sustain a premium brand proposition,” Gray said. “We believe spirulina is the next category to undergo that split, and we are partnering with Arborea to be on the right side of it.”
Furthermore, consumer expectations have shifted so that purity, traceability and clean-label assurance are now baseline requirements rather than premium differentiators.
“Top finished-product brands now treat sustainable sourcing, full traceability and verified purity not a premium feature or marketing differentiator, but the basic minimum standards of being considered as a supplier in the first place,” he said. “That is a fundamental change from where the market was just five years ago.”
He said this is in part thanks to social media, which is turning consumer scrutiny into a fast, collective, and highly visible process.
“Consumers have become detectives,” he said. “They are scrutinising sourcing claims, asking brands for Certificates of Analysis, questioning batch certifications, and demanding to know where their ingredients actually come from.
“The brands they trust are the ones with answers, and the ingredients those brands choose are the ones whose answers stand up to scrutiny.”
Can spirulina follow matcha’s path to premium functional ingredient status?
As Gray noted, spirulina has been held back by quality and consistency issues that did not affect other premium categories like matcha.
“Published compositional data shows protein content can vary from 39% to 66%, phycocyanin from 5% to 25%, and carotenoid levels by more than tenfold between batches,” Gray said. “That is incompatible with the label claims that premium brands need to make.”
BioSolar Spirulina seeks to target contamination issues linked to open-pond cultivation, where studies have found elevated risks of heavy metals such as lead and frequent microcystin presence. It also tackles batch variability, where nutritional composition can fluctuate widely.
Furthermore, he noted conventional spirulina produces a strong marine off-note, so formulators typically limit it to below 1% inclusion—a dosage that often prevents the ingredient from delivering a meaningful functional effect.
However, BioSolar Spirulina claims flavor improvements thanks to the cultivation methods, limiting the environmental and biological factors responsible for harsh marine off-flavours in conventional spirulina.
Gray noted it is taste that drives repeat purchase, in turn building a category, however, historically the taste profile of conventional spirulina has impacted product adoption in food and beverage applications.
“Health foods that taste awful, unfortunately, do not sell,” Gray said. “It is precisely why, to this day, so many functional ingredients only really work in a capsule format: they simply do not taste good enough to be incorporated meaningfully into the food and drink products consumers actually want to consume every day.”
He noted that the partnership with Arborea reflects a key trend likely to direct the nutraceutical industry in the coming years: the growth of greens as a mainstream category.
Matcha has surged over the past five years from a niche import into a multi-billion dollar global category, reshaping what consumers expect from green ingredients in terms of taste, appearance, and meaning, Gray noted. At the same time, ‘supergreens’ shakes have grown into a parallel high-value category, with brands like AG1 proving that consumers are willing to pay premium prices for well-formulated daily greens products.
“Spirulina is exceptionally well-positioned to ride both waves, because it sits at the intersection of the greens trend, the protein density story, and the broader micronutrient narrative,” he said.
EU Novel Food rules and health claim for spirulina
In the EU and UK, positioning a new ingredient like BioSolar Spirulina avoids barriers on novel food status because whole spirulina biomass does not fall under novel food restrictions, Gray noted.
However, it does face tighter limits around health claims. Under EU Regulation 1924/2006, spirulina does not currently carry authorized health claims. However, companies can still use nutrient content claims where the product meets defined thresholds, Gray explained.
“There is some opportunity in the framework, particularly around nutrient content claims. Spirulina is genuinely nutrient-dense (naturally high in protein, in iron, and in a range of other micronutrients) and it is often described as a kind of natural multivitamin in a single ingredient,” he said. “Where the content of a given nutrient is high enough to meet the regulatory threshold, those claims are available to brands using the ingredient.”
