How we started
In December 2018 we started our journey by experimenting with the cultivation of fresh spirulina in small photobioreactors. After grasping the basics, we started working on building our own photobioreactors.
In June 2019, we joined EGG (Enter Grow Go), the biggest incubator in Greece, gaining invaluable insights into managing a successful startup alongside our experimentation.
In February 2021, after 9 generations of experiments, we have built our first industrial scale photobioreactor. This reactor boasted a CapEx tens of times lower than that of the industrial state of the art. For one year we kept optimizing automation, chemical feed and electronics. At the same time, Theo Stefou (MSc IT) started building the first version of our IoT system, the proof of concept.
In the end of 2021, we ran our first nutritional analysis. Our chemist called suddenly, to share some amazing findings! Our happiness was so big, that we wanted to share our results with the world. Next stop was to organize our first taste party. Some friends came over to our office and tasted fresh spirulina and fresh-frozen spirulina dissolved in a glass of water. Their reactions are still featured in a video on our homepage. Everything was so promising, so we decided to move on to the next stop.
Assembling photobioreactors
After a very long market research, we found eight different manufacturers to make for us all the parts needed to build our photobioreactors. Six of them were abroad. We organized this complex, big import, and in August 2021 all parts arrived. We then designed a production line to assemble our photobioreactors. With the help of Andreas and Akis, we managed to assemble most of the parts in just about 2 months!
The following period was very tiresome as we tried to find the best place to establish our first production base. Eventually, we rented our first 'home' in Aegaleo in the summer of 2022. This place was already quite ``ready``, equipped with tiles and a cooling chamber. But we added a lot! A completely new lights system, better cooling system, better heating system, inox surfaces, automation, batteries, laboratory equipment and custom systems to clean our custom photobioreactors.
However, in the meantime, we further optimized the photobioreactors, increasing their productivity by 50% compared to the previous version! This new design was called 9.5G. Additionally, we optimized the harvest technology to take place in a closed system, with zero chance of contamination, and we perfected the IoT system too. Our IoT now had: real time alerts, custom sensors, graphs, multiple controls and could withstand very harsh conditions.
How we ended up with blue honey
It was really hard to take this decision, but we ended up performing phycocyanin extraction experiments. It is hard to know that you can produce such a nutritious food, and still process it to only take one compound out of it. However, since we got so good in performing experiments, in just a few months, we have studied all the scientific papers on this, and we combined the best, adding some steps of our own, to form an exceptional method to produce analytical grade phycocyanin every single time! This is neither about the product's purity - the highest grade, nor about the repeatability of the method. The biggest accomplishment is that we managed to retrieve three times more phycocyanin than the industrial standard method, with a CapEx tens of times cheaper and extremely low OpEx! And all these, while we produce ALL FRESH phycocyanin!
Our blue honey is only a start, many more exclusive products are on the way!
