This Calgary company wants to be an algae innovator

The food technology industry is exploding these days, and Calgary-based Algi is one of those companies helping to revolutionize the sector by creating sustainable products using micro-algae.

Its vision is to become an algae innovation house.

Algi was founded in 2019 by two students—Devon Hawkins and Alessandra Amato—who shared a passion for food and sustainability.

During that summer they participated in an innovation program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., where they first met.

Amato had just finished her bachelor of science in kinesiology, and Hawkins had completed his bachelor of communications degree.

In their research for the innovation program, they stumbled across a report on CNN and a Forbes article about algae as the food of the future.

That piqued their interest. But when they searched for algae food products, they couldn’t find anything.

“I didn’t want to do anything in the corporate world,” said Hawkins. “I always saw myself as an entrepreneur and I really didn’t want to work for anyone else.”

Then COVID hit while Amato was doing her master’s in kinesiology at McGill University in Montreal and Hawkins was finishing up a second degree at Queen’s.

“I came back to Alberta and we realized pretty quickly that Alberta is a great place to develop a food business and we made the move at that point to base ourselves in Alberta, to base ourselves in Calgary and to continue to develop Algi in Calgary,” said Hawkins.

The product was initially developed in Hawkins’ student kitchen with a food processor. After refining the product for a couple of years, they started selling it in farmers markets and some stores in Canmore, where Hawkins grew up.

Today, the recipes are being produced in a facility in Calgary.

Algi is involved in Platform Calgary’s Incubator Program. Platform Calgary is a non-profit organization bringing together the resources of the city’s tech sector to help startups launch and grow.

“In November we started the Incubator. It’s an 18-month program here and the goal was for us to just take it to the next step in the business—get us to a point where we could start going full-time in the business and getting into more stores, growing the revenue, building our market and just getting the support we need to do these types of growth activities as well,” said Hawkins.

“We’re in this gray area where we’re considered food tech because there’s no one in North America trying to build a CPG [consumer packaged goods] food company centred around algae.”

Amato said much of the research and development that went into the recipes are considered food technology because they had to develop food systems and processes themselves.

“There is this big emphasis in Alberta on technology companies and, for us, we want to be more than just a CPG company. We want to be more than just a producer of algae-based food products,” said Hawkins.

“We want to be… the best way of describing it is, a bit of an algae innovation house where we use algae to add value to a plethora of different industries all around not only just Canada, but around the world in a way that allows us to eat more sustainably, produce more sustainably, feed the world more sustainably.”