Courtney Boyd Myers @ AKUA
Spongebob's Favorite Regenerative Kelp Burger
Courtney Boyd Myers is the Founder and CEO of AKUA. AKUA is supporting regenerative agriculture with their lineup of frozen, plant-based meat alternatives like burgers, crab cakes, and ground meat that are all made with regeneratively farmed kelp.
The Brand
AKUA makes plant-based foods from ocean-farmed kelp, offering nutritious, sustainable, and delicious products including their original, chili sesame, and lemon and herb kelp burgers, and the soon-to-launch SpongeBob kelp patties (mini burgers for kids of all ages).
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Getting Rid of the Crap
It’s never one thing that defines our journey. For Courtney, it started with growing up in the 1980s, obsessed with The Little Mermaid and watching her dad (who helped create the Burger King Kids Club) suffer from diabetes, cancer, and two heart attacks. Years of obsessing over food labels got her wondering about "all the crap" on grocery store shelves that people were really unknowingly buying for themselves and their kids. She quickly realized she wanted to work on something that dealt with the root cause of this issue: that how we grow our food is causing damage to the environment and, ultimately, human health.
Inspired to transition out of tech to start a food business, Courtney reconnected with her brother’s best friend, Bren Smith, who had helped start GreenWave. Sitting on a boat with Bren, she learned about how their non-profit that was training New England fishermen to grow regenerative kelp. Inspired by that conversation and a life-long love of eating seaweed, Courtney immediately decided her job was to get people to eat more regeneratively farmed kelp.
Finding the Right Product
It all started with kelp jerky. While it made sense for many reasons, they couldn't get the manufacturing or consumer adoption to scale. But they knew they had significant interest in their work with a successful Kickstarter campaign and a robust set of email subscribers.
COVID intervened, putting a halt to their best-laid intentions with kelp jerky but allowing the time and bandwidth to explore and trial kelp burgers. Tapping into their existing audience who had supported the jerky trials, Courtney and her partner launched the "Kelp Beta Burger Club," sending out thousands of samples in exchange for product feedback. With lockdowns, they had a captive audience and built a rich data set to help inform the product launch and investor presentations.
Where’s the Innovation?
Unfortunately, CPG and food startups aren’t innovating at the same pace as tech. The capital intensity, complicated route-to-market, and significant infrastructure costs make this a significant challenge.
“One thing we noticed is if you see a trend in tech, you’re already too late. If you see a trend in food, sit back 10 years and get started working on it. It takes too long to create new products – the whole manufacturing system is not set up to innovate.” – Courtney
One outlet that does move faster is restaurants and the food service channel.
“Once you’re on a menu, it’s hard to get discontinued. I much prefer sitting with a chef and talking to them about kelp and AKUA versus talking to a grocery store buyer.” – Courtney
A Healthier Krabby Patty
With the launch of their first Facebook ads, it didn’t take long for the comments to come in calling their kelp burger a KRABBY PATTY (from SpongeBob Squarepants). They soon received an email from Nickelodeon, which Courtney was sure called out trademark infringement. On the contrary, Nickelodeon was proposing a licensing deal.
While the proposal didn’t resonate at first, as Courtney waited for her first child, the idea of making kid-sized kelp burgers, licensed with SpongeBob, took on a whole new meaning. The product is hitting store shelves as we speak.
“One of the big reasons Nickelodeon was looking for brands in the ocean health space is they’ve launched a really awesome platform called Operation Sea Change. They’re using the brand to raise awareness around ocean health, limiting ocean plastics. Another reason is the founder of SpongeBob Squarepants, Stephen Hillenburg, was a lifelong vegan and ocean conservationist." - Courtney
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Nothing’s Impossible
Courtney gives kudos to Impossible Burgers for introducing vegetarian options that could appeal to a meat-eating audience. But AKUA is focused on a clean, plant-forward approach to plant-based foods. Each burger has 12 grams of protein with zero sugar and fat. But it’s the micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) from the kelp that stand out.
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“We're looking at mass agriculture on land right now where we're growing vegetables in depleted soil. We're not getting the same vitamins and minerals out of our food that we once were. When you eat a kelp burger, you feel fantastic, you feel so good.” – Courtney
"We’ve done a lot of consumer testing on how to sell to people, leading first with our nutritional messaging and also climate change. What matters first is the deliciousness factor, with health as number two and climate change, as number three." – Courtney
Our Path to 50% Market 4 Regen
Courtney believes there are three elements that create change in any society: government, commerce, and consumers. Consumers can only be taken so far because price matters. To get price parity, we need government support, we need subsidies going into regenerative food crops. We also need corporations to adopt and implement sustainability strategies. Ultimately, though, it will take a change in mindset – one that Courtney is optimistic we’ll see from the younger generations.
You can check out the full episode with Courtney from AKUA HERE.
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This ReGen Recap was produced with support from Kristina Tober