How the project moved from challenge to measurable outcome
Working with University of Waikato Senior Research Fellow Dr Chris Glasson, Premium Seas developed an extraction process that could scale beyond the laboratory.
The resulting product launched in New Zealand in August 2024 and entered the United States market in early 2025 — the only mozuku fucoidan of its kind available to the global market outside Japan.
The challenge
Fucoidan — a carbohydrate molecule found in brown seaweed — has a growing body of research behind it, but extracting it consistently at commercial scale is technically demanding.
Premium Seas needed to develop and validate a process that produced a high-purity, high-yield ingredient without the capital outlay of building that capability from scratch. Without access to specialist expertise, the path to market would have required significant external investment.
What we changed
Dr Christopher Glasson, Senior Research Fellow in Marine Science and Aquaculture, provided technical development support across the extraction process, improving both product quality and fucoidan yield through commercial-scale equipment trials.
The collaboration also drew on the broader University of Waikato marine science capability in Tauranga, alongside partners including Callaghan Innovation, Ferrier Research Institute, and the New Zealand Food Innovation Network. The product was scaled up at The FoodBowl before launch.
