Fans of “Shark Tank” probably recall the 2022 episode with Umaro Foods, a Berkeley company that makes vegan bacon out of seaweed. Investor Robert Herjavec put a slice of the product in his mouth and promptly spit it out – not into a napkin, just on his plate – with a loud “ugh.”
Beth Zotter, CEO of Umaro, recalls dying on the inside at that moment. “Oh yeah — but I don’t think it showed up in my expression,” she says.
Zotter wound up having the last laugh on “Shark Tank.” Mark Cuban liked the plant-based bacon and plopped down a $1 million investment in Umaro, which Zotter co-founded with plant biologist Amanda Stiles in 2019. By 2024, the company was gross-margin positive with $1 million in annual-recurring revenue. Today, you can find its applewood bacon in Whole Foods stores across California. Even the NBA’s Chris Paul, a vegan, is now an investor.
Seaweed might not be the first thing you think about sidling up on a plate with fried eggs and hash browns. But it’s high in protein, one of fastest-growing plants on earth and requires no land, fresh water or fertilizer. As the world’s food-supply chain gets ever-more stressed – a result of climate change, population growth, unpopular tariffs and the like – it’s being seen as a viable future food, in the vein of cell-cultured meat and cricket flour.
Umaro still makes bacon, but its bigger business is refining seaweeds like kelp via a proprietary process into proteins and high-value ingredients. Soon, it might also move into biodegradable packaging. Zotter recently took a few minutes to chat about what’s on the horizon.
Q: What’s the best way to describe what Umaro does?
A: We’re not a plant-based meat company. We’re a seaweed-refining company. We figured out a way to unlock the individual molecules in seaweed for higher-value applications. Our process actually produces two products: One is protein and the other is alginate.
Q: What’s the protein used for?
A: What is really popular right now, and I just don’t see any signs of it abating, is protein enrichment. You see protein-enriched pastas and crackers, so I’m excited to work with partners who want to use this ingredient to make things like dumplings and noodles. A lot of people are trying to get more protein into their diets, sort of a result of the GLP-1 and keto diets. They’re like, “If you’re going to eat pasta, at least get some more protein in there and make it nutritionally balanced.”
And the global market of protein is about $25 billion for protein ingredients, isolates and concentrates.
Q: What’s this alginate stuff?
A: It’s a specialty chemical worth a lot of money – like, $20,000 a ton. Alginate is usually added as an ingredient into things you wouldn’t notice. It’s also used for the casings of sausages, so it makes a good, clear film. I don’t know if we’ll actually get this grant or if it will be canceled (by the current administration), but we recently won an award from the Department of Energy to use our alginate to make a biodegradable plastic film. Our partner on that award is (the San Leandro startup) Sway.
Q: Let’s talk about your bacon, because it’s served in about 500 restaurants nationwide – including the Bay Area’s Roam Artisan Burgers – and people seem to enjoy it. What makes it popular?
A: Our innovation is that we’ve used seaweed to encapsulate and contain a whole lot of fat. There’s a lot of really bad vegan bacon out there. Most of the other products are sort of like soggy, soy-based flab. But we’ve figured out a way to use seaweed gels to essentially make a solid, crispy fat analog that delivers a lot of flavor, because fat is where most of the flavor molecules hang out.
Q: This is not a health food?
A: It has a lot of fat, like bacon, but no cholesterol. We do not try to say it’s healthy. It’s just better than bacon…. It is shelf-stable, because it has a low moisture content. A lot of chefs really appreciate that they don’t have to use cold storage for the products. It’s also easy to cook, at two minutes in an air fryer, so in terms of convenience that’s another win.
Q: Where do you see seaweed fitting in with the future of food?
A: We see that climate change is driving major disruptions in water availability, as the weather patterns change. You’ve got increasing droughts and increasing flooding, coupled with extreme heat, which puts even more water stress on crops. That’s just going to be even more of a risk to the stability of our food supply. Drawing more of our protein and macronutrients from the ocean is essentially a risk-mitigation strategy.
Q: Is climate change a threat to seaweed farming?
A: Rising sea temperatures are the biggest threats. But like all the other crops, there are major breeding programs in place to create temperature-tolerant strains of seaweed.
Q: Where do you get the raw ingredients? The California coastline?
A: Seaweed is a very big industry in Asia, and that’s where we get it for now. Eventually, we would like to source from North America. But right now, the supply chain in Asia is much more mature and able to supply the volumes that we need to scale.
What’s compelling about seaweed is that it’s already a commodity. It’s already grown at commercial scale and large volume – 20 million tons a year. What we’re doing that no one else figured out how to do is to refine it into ingredients to allow it to be used in a much larger variety of food products. Especially in the Western world, some people don’t find seaweed very palatable, so by separating it into its protein and other components, we can more easily integrate it into food products.
Q: It sounds nicer than eating insects, at least?
A: I do hope we’re eating more cricket protein in the future. In terms of consumer perception, seaweed is considered to have a “health halo” so people feel healthy when they eat it. So we have that going for us.
Beth Zotter
Age: 47Position: Cofounder and CEO of Umaro FoodsEducation: B.A. Harvard University in environmental science/public policy; M.S. UC Berkeley in energy and resourcesResidence: Albany
Five things about Beth
1. She grew up in Fairfax, Virginia.2. She likes soccer and snowboarding, plus surfing when she gets the chance.3. She’s vegetarian and doesn’t like cooking: “Trader Joe’s pre-cooked lentils are one of my go-tos.”4. She helped build a seaweed farm off the coast of Maine, which survived 20-foot waves during a Nor’easter.5. She likes watching sci-fi shows like “Black Mirror”: “More and more I see reality replicating sci-fi, so I’ve become more of a sci-fi fan.”
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