Searching for the next hot cooking oil? It could be from algae

Some companies are offering a new niche entry that they say could be a contender: cooking oil made from microscopic algae.

It comes as cooks are trying an expanding array of oil in the quest for the healthiest, most sustainable of all, from avocado to olive to coconut.

Certain kinds of microalgae—organisms invisible to the naked eye and found both in water and on land—can be used to create a neutral-flavored cooking oil that is high in healthy fats and requires less energy and land than crops such as olives, manufacturers say.

Whether a swath of consumers will bite on algae—which to many people conjures up images of green slime—remains to be seen. But some chefs are intrigued.

Los Angeles-based Algae Cooking Club, which sells its oil in sleek, 16-ounce aluminum bottles at prices up to $20 each on its website, is working with New York Michelin-starred restaurant Eleven Madison Park. There, chef Daniel Humm is experimenting with the oil to better showcase subtle flavors, including in a mushroom-dashi soba dish on its current menu. Humm has a stake in the company and works on product development. The oil is also available at grocery stores, including Erewhon, the Los Angeles-based luxury retailer.

“It’s just getting its footing,” says Algae Cooking Club’s co-founder and chief executive Kas Saidi, who declined to reveal sales numbers.

Algae are among the fastest-growing organisms and some naturally contain oil as about 30% of their cell weight, a mechanism to store energy, research has found. When algae are fed sugar, they grow and expand the oil they store, similar to the way humans and animals store fat. Companies and researchers are using algae to make biofuels and nutritional supplements, as well as cooking oil.

Amsterdam-based Corbion, which manufactures the oil for Algae Cooking Club and others, operates a fermentation plant in Brazil that uses local sugar cane. The process aims to grow microorganisms in a controlled way. A small amount of algae is added to a fermentation tank and fed sugar, allowing the algae to grow, multiply and mature. After the algae have filled up the tank, the feeding continues and they accumulate a higher level of oil—increasing to up to 80% of cell weight.

A centrifuge process is used to separate the oil and it is sent to an edible-oil refinery.

The Prototheca moriformis algae Corbion uses to make its cooking oil is originally from the sap of chestnut trees. In contrast, the company uses marine algae to produce another oil that is mainly used as a nutritional ingredient.

Algae cooking oil has just a quarter of the saturated fat found in olive oil and is higher in heart-healthy monounsaturated fat than other popular cooking oils, according to Algae Cooking Club, which uses testing data from Anresco Laboratories and Analytical Resource Laboratories. It also contains less of the polyunsaturated fat that is found in seed oils. Algae oil has a higher smoke point than many other oils, allowing it to remain stable when used for high-heat cooking without degrading the oil or affecting flavor, the company says.

Cooking oils high in oleic acid, including those made from microalgae, can help get healthy fats into the diet and improve overall health, says Tom Brenna, a professor of pediatrics, chemistry and nutrition at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the nutrition of cooking oils, including those based on algae.

Other oils, including olive oil, also contain the beneficial monounsaturated fats along with antioxidants, says Joseph Profaci, executive director of the North American Olive Oil Association, a trade group. And many consumers turn to olive oil for its taste, he says. “What’s missing from the algae oil is the yum factor.”

Algae cooking oil remains a niche product for now. The company is still not selling enough of the algae oil used for cooking to scale up production and lower the cost of the feedstock and the fermentation process, says Ruud Peerbooms, Corbion’s president of health and nutrition. “There’s quite a big gap.”

The cost of production has been an issue for other forms of algae oil. As a biofuel, algae has been too expensive, according to Bruce Bugbee, professor at Utah State University who has researched algae-based biofuel. But the economics might be different for a pricier cooking oil.

Its sustainability is also difficult to gauge. Despite its potential to use less land, the process might still require significant natural resources. “It takes large amounts of energy and other resources to grow and process the algae,” Bugbee says. “This is a very synthetic thing.”

Corbion’s algae-oil process uses energy from the remnants of sugar cane and ferments in the dark, rather than a more energy-intensive process that needs CO2 and light to ferment the algae. “This process does not require endless pumping and consumes far less water,” Peerbooms says.

Expanding algae as a cooking-oil ingredient seems promising despite the energy required to heat up fermentation tanks, says Stanford University sustainability professor Steven Davis, who studies agricultural emissions. Fermenting algae is likely to use less water than traditional agriculture while limiting CO2 emissions and the need for fertilizers, he says. Algae can also flourish in many different types of environments, Davis adds. “If we can reduce the demand for conventional land-based oils, that could be a big win.”

Jonathan Wolfson, co-founder of San Francisco-based Thrive Nutritional Sciences, says cost was an issue with his first forays into algae-based products. The company, Solazyme, was founded to make aviation and transportation fuel from algae. In 2015, it began selling an algae cooking oil called Thrive. “It became a little bit of an obsession,” Wolfson says. The company, renamed TerraVia, in 2017 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and sold its manufacturing and ingredient lines to Corbion.

“One of the challenges is it was too expensive to really be accessible in a broad way,” says Wolfson.

In 2024, Wolfson relaunched Thrive using products made by Corbion. Thrive sells a pure algae oil for $40 and a Premier Culinary blend $25 for a 16.9 ounce bottle. The lower-priced oil blends algae oil with sunflower oil expressed from a high-oleic breed of sunflowers, which Wolfson says also offers beneficial monounsaturated fat while keeping costs down. He says the company is launching another algae-oil blend for $14 and a cooking spray for $8 in August.

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