It is cheaper to produce your own spirulina than to buy dry products or vitamin supplements.

To buy 1kg of dry spirulina on the Australian supplement market you can pay from AUD$ 60 - $120 or more.

When you grow spirulina you have to feed it.  If you buy the feed nutrients from this site, it will cost about $35 to produce  5 kg of fresh spirulina (1kg of dry).  If you formulate your own feeding mix it will be a lot cheaper.

Sometimes fresh spirulina is available in certain locations in Australia - it will cost you over $240 for 1kg (about 200 g dry).

The other thing to consider is quality.  Fresh is significantly more nutritious than dry and you can be certain about the quality because you grew it yourself.  With commercial dried spirulina you can never be sure if it contains contaminants.

No.  A simple setup takes very little work at all. Spirulina more or less looks after itself. All you need to do is keep an eye on the temperature, pH, and general conditions. A couple of minutes a day, no more. 

Harvesting takes no more than 30 mins. Cleaning the tank and changing out the medium every six months or so takes about 1 hour.

Overall, it is much much less work than a vegetable patch with a much higher-value product that you can’t buy at the grocery store!

No. Not at all. A hint of a sea breeze perhaps.

Perhaps you have been near a stagnant algae bloom in the wild as it decomposes. This can smell rank. However, a healthy, live Spirulina culture hardly smells at all. In fact, a living blue-green algae culture can freshen the room it is in by producing oxygen and eliminating carbon dioxide and other pollutants.

A lot!

With commercial powdered, encapsulated or tableted Spirulina: Many of the vitamins and phytonutrients are destroyed in the drying process

The powder has a strong unpleasant taste which can overpower other flavours if you add it to other foods.  It would be like putting a sardine to your smoothie

Depending on where the spirulina is from there can be a risk of heavy metal contamination.

You don’t know what you are eating and what has been added to the commercial product

Drying has a carbon footprint

On the other hand, with FRESH Spirulina:

• There are a lot more vitamins and phytonutrients available
• It can be added to any food without compromising the taste
• It replaces most expensive vitamin supplements
• There is no risk of heavy metal contamination
• You know what you are eating
• There is a lower carbon and environmental footprint
• It is significantly cheaper than dry products
• You are in control of providing your own vitamin/dietary supplements – not some multinational pharmaceutical company

It has almost no taste to a very mild marine flavour that is reminiscent of a sea breeze.

Most would agree that dried Spirulina has a strong overpowering taste – that is why the health food industry sells a lot of Spirulina in capsule or tablet form.

Because fresh Spirulina has almost no taste, it can be eaten straight or added to beverages or cooking without imparting a distinctive flavour.

Given Spirulina is the most nutrient-dense food on the planet, you don’t need much at all. One tablespoon is plenty.

A tablespoon of fresh Spirulina paste is the dietary equivalent of 5 servings of fruit and vegetables in terms of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and anti-inflammatories.

No. Once the pH gets to over 10, there are hardly any harmful organisms that can tolerate the alkalinity. So, while there can be some infection as the culture takes off, once Spirulina alkalizes the media, it kills other bugs that could be harmful to it or to you.

There can, however, be contamination by chlorella, which can take over the culture.  Chlorella is another blue-green algae that is often sold as a health food.  However, it is hard to harvest and is indigestible in its natural state.  You can prevent this by being vigilant with hygiene.

No.  All you need are a few basic items:

• A transparent container like an aquarium or a plastic storage container (you can usually pick up second hand aquariums very cheap or even for free)
• An aquarium air pump and some silicone tubing
• A thermometer
• A pH meter or litmus paper
• An aquarium heater for cold weather
• Some silk screen mesh for harvesting
• Some tubs and buckets for moving culture around when harvesting

That’s is

If you have a 100L tank and it is properly set up in a sunny warm spot you could harvest about 3 times a week.  If the culture is fed after each harvest then you would expect to take 1 - 1.5kg of fresh spirulina each week. 

Heaps! If you buy culture from us, you are provided with a comprehensive grow manual + you can contact us directly for advice.

Remember, our mission is to make growing Spirulina is super easy.

Not much! There are only a few pitfalls that are easy to avoid. 

• Keep the temperature of the culture over 2 and under 42 degrees Celsius. Under and above these temperatures could result in your culture dying.
• Wash your hands and any implement you put into the culture - observe good hygiene to avoid contamination
• Feed your culture after you harvest, otherwise it will not regrow.
• Only consume once the pH of the culture is over 10, otherwise, there is a small risk of eating other types of organisms that may or may not be desirable. Once the pH gets to 10 and above, most other organisms will die.
• You can get contaminated with chlorella.  If this happens, the best thing to do is to throw out the contaminated culture and start again from your back-up culture.

Yes, do keep a backup culture separate from your working culture.

Under good growing conditions, you can increase your volume every 2nd days.  We advise you to increase the volume by ⅓ of the current volume each time. For example, if you have 500ml you would increase the volume by adding about 150 ml of starter medium.

So if you keep doing this every 2 days it would take about 37 days to reach 118 liters.