Dutch food scientists have created a bright turquoise soda made from a kind of algae which absorbs more carbon than it emits through the production process.
Sustainability aside, the soda is made from a superfood called spirulina that features in many health and beauty products, and which offers tremendous health benefits which the producers are counting on as being the chief driver of sales.
Called Ful, the curious vivid blue color is a gamble which the creators, looking to accelerate a transition to net zero emissions in their home country, are willing to take, and they’re aiming for the brand name to be synonymous with the rare color in the next ten years.
Algae solutions are popular in the Netherlands, and Dutch product designers have used it as 3D-printing materials to make chairs and shampoo bottles, fuel for vehicles, and now as a base and flavoring agent for soda.
Ful is currently produced in white peach and lemon ginger flavors at a local Dutch brewery that’s a large producer of the food-grade CO2 which feeds the algae that make the beverage, and a large buyer of glass bottles.
The Ful folks metaphorically connected the brewery’s exhaust pipe with the soda machine’s air intake, and have made the whole process carbon negative by around 1.5 kilos of CO2 per kilo of soda.
“Then you have this really wonderful closed-loop system that could be highly localized, but also scalable all over the world, using existing infrastructure,” one of the three co-founders, Julia Streuli, told Fast Company.
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The drink is a source of vitamin C, calcium, antioxidants, magnesium, chlorophyll, and a rare source of chelating agents which remove heavy metals from the blood, putting it more in competition with kombucha than with Coke.
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The beverage is currently unavailable in the U.S., but it can be ordered in the EU and UK, with the occasional discovery inside health food shops.
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