Buying algae
You need a raw material that meets your requirement on quality, volume, consistency and price, from a supplier you can rely on. We work out what the requirement actually is, find the producers who meet it, and stay in it until the goods arrive and the orders repeat.
What we do
Define
What is actually required, before anyone starts searching.
Whether an alternative raw material exists that meets your requirement, and what replacing the current one costs in price, in production and in the end product. We start from the function rather than the species, and we set the dose from a threshold rather than a supplier brochure.
Whether the supply exists at your volume today, or whether you would be funding it into existence.
Find
Which producers actually hold it, with names and samples.
A long list of producers, shortened against your specification and your own supplier criteria, then audited. We request the samples, you evaluate them, and we establish the connection.
A price benchmark against comparable specification elsewhere, and a total landed cost view rather than a cost per kilo.
Land
Sourcing does not stop when both sides say yes.
The contract paperwork, the agreed specification and the sampling protocol, the import and export documents, the transport and the invoicing, with someone staying on it until the goods arrive and are accepted.
A rolling forecast, so your supplier plans production against your real annual requirement instead of treating every order as new.
How each step runs
Quick Scan
A short assessment with a fixed scope and a fixed fee. Either which of your ingredients has a credible microalgae or seaweed alternative, or whether the algae you already buy is well sourced.
The long list
After step one the buyer is free to use the information and search for a supplier. But BlueBurn can assist and provide the service to guide the buyer through the forest of unlimited options.
BlueBurn works with a network of scientists and selected farmers around the world. BlueBurn has a good understanding of the supply side and can create a long list of potential suppliers based on the needs and requirements of the buyer. We assess our own producer network and our knowledge database of research papers.
The short list
A short list is defined. The long list is assessed in combination with the needs and requirements from the buyer and the capabilities of the supplier. Interviews are held with the suppliers and samples are ordered.
What actually decides quality is not in any database: how the crop is farmed, when it is harvested, and what happens to it in the days after. The same plant, cut a month later or dried differently, can be a premium input to one buyer and unusable to another.
Producers verified against your specification rather than against their own marketing, samples arranged, and the regulatory route into your market.
Guiding and overseeing the supply chain
Deals rarely collapse because the two parties disagree. They collapse because nobody is holding the thread.
BlueBurn stays in it after the introduction. Chasing samples, holding both sides to dates, and building the document set for the destination market: which authority issues each certificate, which signs it, and in what order. Some of the traps come from regulatory structure rather than carelessness, and finding a route through them takes research on both sides.
An example
A second qualified supplier for a raw material that had only one source
A European hydrocolloid producer needed a specific functional property found in red seaweed, from a single country, with the quality and the availability both expected to decline. They had searched for alternative suppliers for more than a year without result.
We started from the functional property rather than from the species. A different species turned out to meet the same requirement, which opened a set of suppliers the original brief had excluded.