S9 Ep32: Sea the Difference: Unlocking Seaweed's Potential for Beauty and Beyond with Matthew Perkins
“Sometimes, it might feel like you're not making progress, but you might just be missing a critical piece of information. Don't give up unless you understand why you want to change direction before you do it.” —Matthew Perkins
Clean Beauty Series
“Sometimes, it might feel like you're not making progress, but you might just be missing a critical piece of information. Don't give up unless you understand why you want to change direction before you do it.” —Matthew Perkins
Imagine a world where our beauty products come from the sea, not the land. Could kelp farming be the answer to reducing pressure on terrestrial agriculture while providing sustainable ingredients for our skincare? As we face growing environmental challenges, this innovative approach might just be the wave of the future we've been waiting for.
Matthew Perkins is the CEO and founder of Macro Oceans, a California-based startup transforming seaweed into low-carbon biomaterials. With a background in agriculture and a passion for sustainability, Matthew is pioneering the use of kelp in beauty products and beyond.
Tune in as Justine And Matthew talk about sustainable harvesting, clinical trials for kelp-derived ingredients, the challenges of green chemistry, expanding beyond skincare to packaging, and the future of bio-based materials in the beauty industry.
Connect with Matthew:
Matthew Perkins is the CEO and founder of Macro Oceans, a California-based startup that's revolutionizing the beauty and materials industries through innovative use of kelp. With a background in agriculture and previous experience in the digital ag space, Matthew is leveraging his expertise to transform seaweed into sustainable, low-carbon biomaterials.
His vision extends beyond beauty products, aiming to build a kelp economy that replaces petrochemicals in everyday materials. Matthew's entrepreneurial journey is marked by persistence, a commitment to sustainability, and a drive to create high-performance, environmentally friendly alternatives to traditional products.
Episode Highlights:
02:17 Macro Oceans: Inspiration and Initial Challenges
10:23 Navigating Consumer Reception and Market Impact
18:02 Lessons Learned: Before Abandoning a Project
23:42 The Impact of Food-Based Ingredients on Beauty
27:00 The Way to Move Faster
Tweets:
The future of clean beauty might be hiding beneath the waves. Listen in as @jreichman and Macro Oceans Founder, Matthew Perkins explore how kelp-based ingredients are challenging traditional cosmetic formulations and paving the way for eco-friendly alternatives. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #Season9 #MacroOceans #SustainableBeauty #KelpFarming #GreenChemistry #BiobasedMaterials #EcofriendlyBeauty #EcoBeautyTech
Inspirational Quotes:
03:39 “In principle, it always sounds like a good idea, but you have to go through the hard work of making sure it does the things that the customers want.” —Matthew Perkins
08:37 “We spent a lot of time in the lab developing our process because we wanted to do something that was low energy, zero waste, and used green chemistry as well.” —Matthew Perkins
13:47 “The reason why people are so excited is because the product works and it has just a wonderful story.” —Matthew Perkins
18:02 “Sometimes, it might feel like you're not making progress, but you might just be missing a critical piece of information. Don't give up unless you understand why you want to change direction before you do it.” —Matthew Perkins
18:49 “To us, many things seem like they happen in a minute, but really they take patience, follow through, experience, time.” —Justine Reichman
19:18 “Consumers want cleaner products; they want products that work— those things are not changing.” —Matthew Perkins
21:29 “People think that when you come from outside the industry, you can change an industry's dynamic and structure, and very often that's not true.” —Matthew Perkins
21:42 “In some of these things, the foundation is so deep. It takes a long time to change that narrative for people. It takes time, it takes trust. it takes seeing it happen repeatedly so that you get enough data to know that it works on all these different levels.” —Justine Reichman
27:00 “The reality is that we've got to move quickly, and the only way that we move quickly is when our solutions are economical.” —Matthew Perkins
27:56 “We need to create change, and the best way to create change is to read the ingredients, understand the impact that they're having, both on our health, wellness, and the environment.” —Justine Reichman
Transcription:
Justine Reichman: Good morning, and welcome to Essential Ingredients. This morning, I have with me Matthew Perkins. He is the CEO and Founder of Macro Oceans. And what we're going to talk about is his business that features kelp as the integral part of the products that he's creating for beauty and beyond. Matthew, did I get it right?
Matthew Perkins: Absolutely. You nailed it, Justine.
Justine Reichman: So for those that are not familiar with Macro Oceans, can you tell us a little bit about what Macro Oceans is before we go into the story of what inspired you, and how you built it?
Matthew Perkins: So thanks so much for having me on the show and giving me the opportunity to talk a little bit about one of my passions in life, which is seaweed and the beauty space. So Macro Oceans is a startup company. We're based in California. Our mission really is to build a big kelp economy from seaweed grown and cultivated here in the United States, and turning it into all kinds of wonderful, low carbon biomaterials. So we are a technology company that works with seaweed, and transforms it into everyday materials that can be used to replace petrochemicals.
Justine Reichman: That sounds like you're really on a mission to change the world in a better way, impacting things that people use daily with ingredients that are really better for you than these other products. So what inspired you to do this?
Matthew Perkins: I think if you step back and you think about what is going to happen to the world over the next, say 20, 30 years, if we're really serious about tackling climate change and transitioning away from fossil fuels, then the majority of the world's petrochemicals that we rely on every day, so think about the surfactant in your soap, the lubricant in your engine, and most famously, the plastic that your drink comes in. All of those materials and chemicals are going to get remade by some bio based alternative because we have to phase out fossil fuels, and so that really leads us to really requiring a lot more from the land. And as we all know, and as many of your listeners will know, the agricultural system is already very intense and puts a lot of pressure on the natural world and the environment. And so a few years back, I got excited about the potential to grow seaweed in the ocean. And the ocean is 70% of the world's surface as you know, and you can grow seaweed without needing any additional fertilizers, no synthetic pesticides or other chemicals. It doesn't produce fresh water. It doesn't compete for food crops because we still have to feed 10 million people over the next 20, 30 years. And I thought, wow, this is really cool. There should be a lot more seaweed in our lives and in the world. And so that was really the inspiration for Macro Oceans. We transform it into products that people want. And by products, I mean ingredients, materials, chemicals that big brands and other CPG customers can use for consumers in everyday life.
Justine Reichman: What a transition for people like, what a new way to look at things and think about the products that you're creating. I'm wondering how that was received initially before people were talking about this, and it's become a little bit more familiar.
“In principle, it always sounds like a good idea, but you have to go through the hard work of making sure it does the things that the customers want.”
Matthew Perkins: People are always surprised. They sort of think, how is this possible? And in principle, it always sounds like a good idea. But you have to actually go through the hard work of making sure that it actually does the things that the customers want. So in our case, we launched in the beauty space, and we are making a bioactive ingredient for skin and hair care applications. It provides hydration, but people want to know that it's a real product, that it actually works and does provide hydration when you say it does. So you got to do the clinical trials, and you've got to do the studies, and you've got to formulate it in a way that makes it really easy for brands to use. And so toning an idea into reality is, I always tell people is 9/10 perspiration, 1/10 inspiration. There's just a lot of hard work that goes on behind the scenes to make things ready for the consumer.
Justine Reichman: I can only imagine when you started to talk about trials. Trials are a big deal, right? They're expensive to do, they're time consuming, and not everybody does them because it's prohibitively expensive and time consuming. So why did you feel like it was so important that you did this? That you made this paramount as part of your development process?
Matthew Perkins: Well, I think unfortunately, there's a lot of greenwashing in the space, and people making claims about their product being better, and their product being more sustainable. And we took the view that we needed to generate data so that it was easy for people to believe. And these are third party independent tests. We obviously do a lot of our own testing in house, but then we want to have those tests and claims verified by third parties so that people know that it's worth the money that we're asking them to pay for it. There's huge demand in the beauty industry to move away from the petrochemical soup that's on the back of every label. And I can hold up this bottle of soap here, hand soap. And if you try to read off all of the things that are in there, you need a PhD in chemistry. And really, the industry, like in food, wants to clean the label. People want more natural products, but people have become accustomed to products that are really effective. They really work, right? They provide the nutrition or the health benefits when you eat it. And for the beauty industry, it is the same. They want to make sure that their skin feels better. If it says anti-wrinkle, they want to see those wrinkles go away. And so you need to be able to prove that your product is as good or better than the synthetics that you're trying to replace. And so in order to convince customers to swap out these petrochemicals, we went and delivered some really impressive data on hydration. For example, we have an 80% improvement in immediate hydration versus a synthetic placebo. That's really great because people know that they can use this natural seaweed product, and they can get a really great result, then it becomes a no brainer. Then they love your sustainability and they want to swap, so that's kind of why we went for the performance data.
Justine Reichman: What was the most surprising thing that you learned from these clinical trials?
Matthew Perkins: I learned that there's a lot of different ways to do your studies, there's a lot of subjective studies out there, and not a lot of rigorous science. I think it depends on what you're trying to do. Obviously, if you're trying to produce a really inexpensive body wash, you're not going to pay top dollar for a high performance product. But in other cases, even stuff which is sold as expensive face creams really doesn't have real science behind it. And unfortunately, that's kind of the industry. So there's a lot of myths out there, as well as real performance.
Justine Reichman: Yeah. I can only imagine the things that are in these things, and the things that I see trying to decipher and break them down to something that I understand is really challenging, and I do that both with my food and the products I put on my face and body. I think it's encouraging to see somebody like yourself taking an initiative here to be able to include something in a product that we know what it is, we know where it comes from, and we know what it can do based on your trials. So you mentioned that one of your first entries into this was in the beauty industry. Can you talk to me a little bit about that, and tell me more specifics?
“We spent a lot of time in the lab developing our process because we wanted to do something that was low energy, zero waste, and used green chemistry as well.”
Matthew Perkins: Yeah, absolutely. So we started with a species of brown seaweed called Sugar Kelp, which is native to the Pacific Coast, so from California, north to Alaska. It's also found in the Northeast and in Northern Europe, and it's what farmers were growing. And we thought it was a pretty, beautiful and interesting story. We met farmers up in Alaska. These are pristine places with abundant wildlife and nature, and it's just a perfect, wonderful place to grow high quality kelp. And we bought some kelp and we thought, let's see what we can make out of it. We really spent a lot of time in the lab developing our process because we wanted to do something that was low energy. We wanted to do something that was zero waste. And we wanted to do something that really was using green chemistry as well, because there are a lot of harsh chemicals and solvents you can use to try and extract the bio actives, or extract the different compounds you're looking for. But doing it in a sustainable way is actually quite complicated, so we spent a bunch of time really trying to understand what we could make. And one of the things we noticed early on is that seaweed, when it's in the wilderness, has really kind of three jobs to do.
The first thing it's got to do is not dry out because it's in the water. And if it comes out of the water, it dies. Second of all, it's getting bashed around as it moves on rocks, sea life and whatever else. So it's got to kind of have these self healing properties, and then it's getting hit by sunlight all the time. And so it's got to protect itself from UV light. And these same things that the seaweed is really good at doing are actually the same benefits that you can derive for the skin. And so in the literature, we saw this correlation between things like soothing of the skin after UV exposure, anti inflammation. Really good if you have been bruised or cut. And then obviously, hydration, which is the primary thing we focused on. Initially, it really just got to lock that moisture in. And so all of these really cool things the seaweed just does naturally, we were like, we can bring this to the skin. And that's really our inspiration in what we did. So it's a natural product that really has performance, and it's fully traceable from the farm where we grow it, all the way through our process to the customer. And so that level of traceability and sustainability is something that is a core part of our ethic, as well as the value proposition, honestly, to the brands. So we're very excited about it. And the impact and reception in the market has been wonderful.
Justine Reichman: I can only imagine. And as you're sitting here talking about this, I'm wondering, I don't know if you're able to share which clients you work with, or who your first client was. But for them going from some of those other ingredients to know this, to better understand what the impact is that they're seeing, both for the planet as well as for the individuals.
Matthew Perkins: We've actually worked with two different groups. I would sort two different parts of the industry. I should say, on the one hand, we've worked directly with brands, and we've built relationships with companies that are really seaweed forward, like Captain Blankenship, which is a seaweed focused hair care brand. Project Reef, which is a wonderful brand that's kind of come out of the ocean. These brands have been thinking about marine ingredients and marine stories. And obviously, there's a natural fit for us. But we've also really been making a lot of inroads into bigger, clean beauty companies as well, which we'll be talking about more of them as they launch. And then the second group of people we've actually found really warm and interesting relationships with that we formed over the last, say a year or so, are the contract manufacturers and people like KKT Innovations down in Florida. They really understand how difficult it is to deliver natural performance. They're really impressed by the performance and the clinical results we've had, and how easy it is to formulate our product. And also the traceability, sustainability story, people are kind of really interested in that. And so people like KKT Innovations have been really wonderful, both on the formulation side and their connections into contract manufacturers too. So it's really kind of broad based interest in innovation, which has put us in the market, and given us good traction.
Justine Reichman: I can see that. And so when you're talking to these clients that you have that are utilizing your product, are they sharing with you what the experience of the customer is? Any feedback?
“The reason why people are so excited is because the product works and it has just a wonderful story.”
Matthew Perkins: That's one of the big things that we've heard good results about.So one of the things that happens, I don't know if you're familiar with the three moments of truth. I believe it was developed by Procter and Gamble back in the day. So they have this kind of idea that a consumer likes to buy or purchase something if they meet the three moments of truth. And the first moment of truth is when they walk into the store and they have an experience with your product. They look at it, and does it look appealing? The second moment of truth is when they try it. So in this case, putting it on your skin, feeling what it looks feels like. And the third moment of truth is when they get it home and continue to use it. And if they have a great experience for all three touch points, then they're likely to be repeat customers. And for us, the story is the thing that is really appealing. They see it, oh, wow. Seaweed, zero waste source from Alaska. This is incredible. And then they try it, and this is where our clinical results really stand out because you get this immediate improvement in hydration. It has this really nice skin feel. When you put it on your skin, you're like, oh, wow, this really works. And then obviously when you get it home, you have that same experience. And so that is really the reason why I think people are so excited because the product works, and it has just a wonderful story.
Justine Reichman: I would agree. And I'm curious to know what these products are potentially so I could go try them. Where do we find that?
Matthew Perkins: We're definitely gonna be putting more of that online as it comes. Some of them are launched. Some of them are launching, and they'll be in major specialty retailers, big box retailers, some online stores as well.
Justine Reichman: So can you share a couple of the ones that have already launched?
Matthew Perkins: Some that have already launched? One is Sea Sud's skin, which is a small indie brand. Captain Blankenship, as I mentioned, is coming soon. Project Rift is coming soon. So there'll be some more coming out, and we'll definitely put them on our social media as they come.
Justine Reichman: Great. Because as people listen to this, they're going to be intrigued. And the next question from them is, okay, so where do I buy it? That was my next question. How do I buy it? I'm intrigued. I like hydrated skin. I like less wrinkles. I like it better for the planet. All of it sounds good, so I want to go back to the beginning. When you started this, were you a first time entrepreneur? Or have you founded other companies? Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to this point?
Matthew Perkins: So my background is actually in agriculture. I spent a decade working on the seed side, so looking at different products, different seed genetics, and how they get in the market to grow more food, essentially, for people. One of the miracles, I guess, of the last 50 years is just the amount of calories we can grow in commodity crops. And there's a lot of downsides to that system that we could talk about. But essentially, it is pretty amazing how much technology is on the field. And so that's kind of where I've spent a good bulk of my time. And yeah, this is my second company. The prior company was in the digital AG space. I built a software service for farmers, helping them understand how different seeds would perform. So if you were a corn grower in Iowa and you wanted to know what seed you should buy, we had a really big database of independent trials. Again, performance data, which showed people what works and what doesn't based on where you are and what your practices were. And yeah, farms are really like that. So we grew that business and sold it to another company. And so this is my second startup.
Justine Reichman: A little different. I might say you're a serial entrepreneur.
Matthew Perkins: I don't know if the serial bit comes in after three or when it becomes serial. But yeah, this is my second rodeo. I guess you could say.
Justine Reichman: After doing this first startup to the second one, what would you say are some of the lessons that you learned from the first one that you brought to the second one?
Matthew Perkins: One of the important things to remember is that you have to hold on to something long enough to see if it's going to work, but don't stick with it too long. And it's a little bit counterintuitive because I think, as an entrepreneur, we're incredibly impatient, and so we want stuff to happen. And sometimes, you're not sure if it is actually working, and I just need to give it a bit more time, or should I really pivot and try something else. I'll just give you an example from Macro Oceans. When we first launched this product, we were new to the beauty industry. We didn't know many people. We had some challenges getting in front of the actual decision makers of people who develop products and make decisions on R&D, and we were getting some good feedback from brand owners. So these are founders who are also formulators. Those people are easy to get in front of. But as you move to bigger brands, it's pretty hard to find the right folks to get in front, and it's all based on trusted networks. And so we weren't sure, was the product what people wanted? Or was it not? Because we felt it was really good, and we had some good data, and we had some good feedback, but we weren't really sure. And then when we got connected to our head of sales, Allen, who's been in the industry 15 plus years, who has all those trusted relationships, that's when it really took off because he could get us in front of the right people. One of the things to always remember is that, sometimes, it might feel like you're not making progress. But actually, you might just be missing a critical piece of information. And so don't necessarily give up unless you understand why you want to change direction before you do it.
“To us, many things seem like they happen in a minute, but really they take patience, follow through, experience, time.”
Justine Reichman: I think that's really keen advice. Because I think so often, when I think about it, we are in a rush. But if you look back at companies, and we can just use Oatly as an example, I had never heard of this company until all of a sudden, it's in every coffee house being used by the barista. And it seemed like it was an overnight success, but it took them 8 years. I mean, it wasn't overnight. It did not happen to get into the equator and all these coffee shops around the corner. So if we can use something like that as a barometer to know that, to us, many things seem like they happen in a hot minute. But really, they take patience, and they take follow through, experience and time. But like you said, to manage that so you know when to (inaudible) versus sticking it around, there's a fine line.
Matthew Perkins: Yeah, and that's totally correct. And in the case of ingredients, and in the case of clean beauty, it's a longer term, durable trend. Consumers want cleaner products. They want products that work, those things are not changing and so we were playing in that theme. Sorry for the planes flying over. We were playing with that theme, and we knew that it was in demand so we needed to then debug our product and figure out what was wrong, specifically about what we were doing. And it turned out that the product was great. We actually just didn't have the go-to market connections that we needed. And so when we solved that problem, it really began to move. And I think that's worth picking apart the problem and trying to understand, what are the things that are blocking you from having really good information about why to make a decision?
“Consumers want cleaner products; they want products that work— those things are not changing.”
Justine Reichman: One of the things you mentioned in regards to this was the accessibility of the network, or not having connections, or the right relationships in that network. How did you battle that or overcome that, I should say.
Matthew Perkins: I think that that was one of the things that I brought from agriculture. Agriculture is an extremely relationship driven business and industry. So if you think about a faux man, he lives in a certain geography, or she, and they grow a crop. It's usually a family business. And if you're an apple grower in Washington, or a tomato grower in the Central Valley, you're going to be working with people who are in your area, right? So when some guy arrives from Silicon Valley or whatever and says, hey, you should try my new wonderful robot. The farmer will look at them and say, well, hold on a minute. Have you ever tried this thing? Does it work? How much is it going to mess up my operation? And you've probably heard this story a dozen times before. So in the beauty industry, one of my early observations was actually beauty, at least on the ingredient and the product development side works fairly similarly to agriculture. These are trusted, long term relationships where people work in communities that are well established, and in defined geographies. Once we realize that, then we work again to solve that problem. And that's how we overcame that. Sometimes people think that when you come from outside the industry, you can change an industry's dynamic and structure. And very often, that's not true. Everything can be disrupted.
Justine Reichman: I think some of these things, the foundation is so deep and that it takes a really long time to change that narrative for people. It's not going to happen in a hot minute as much as we'd like it to. It takes time, it takes trust. Seeing it happen repeatedly so that you get enough data, so that you know that it works on all these different levels. And US data has to establish trust. So as you're building this and you're kicking it off in the beauty industry, what can we hope to see from these products as you expand to go beyond, as you say, beauty?
“In some of these things, the foundation is so deep. It takes a long time to change that narrative for people. It takes time, it takes trust. it takes seeing it happen repeatedly so that you get enough data to know that it works on all these different levels.”
Matthew Perkins: Yeah. So beauty for us is the beachhead. We think that there's a great opportunity to bring these natural products to consumers through brands, and we're going to continue to grow that business and come up with new flavors of our product with better performance and specific performance. So that's kind of definitely on our roadmap. And then beyond that, we're also thinking about ways that we can use kelp as a buyer material to replace things that are in everyday life. So one of the areas we've been looking at is in packaging, and there's a lot of really cool and interesting applications that can be done there. Now in those industries, actually, the same lessons apply. We've got to come with performance. If we come with crazy bad performance, no one's going to buy our product. That's number one. Number two, we got to make sure that the sustainability side lines up with their expectations. And number three, because these are commodities, packaging is cheap. We need to be price competitive. Those are all things that we're working on. But I think there's a great opportunity to use this really sustainable resource to actually move us away from pretty, dirty, and honestly just damaging industries that are kind of the past, right? We're trying to build the future here. That's very much our mission, and we're going to keep chugging that away.
Justine Reichman: As you're on that journey, and you're using health as a better for your product to replace other other ingredients, are there any other foods, if you will, that you see being integral to the future of beauty? Clean beauty in particular.
Matthew Perkins: I've seen a lot of really cool new things happening in beauty. One of the big trends is cycling. You'll probably hear this word a little bit more in beauty than you might do in some other industries. Because in food, we're typically eating the primary product. But in beauty, we're actually quite interested in waste streams from people in other industries. So for example, I came to a show the other day and saw a hairbrush where the handle of the hairbrush was made out of wheat straw. And essentially, when they're harvesting wheat, the rest of us, you're all getting the grains which is what they make the flour, noodles, pasta, bread and all that stuff with. But there's a whole bunch of straw left over, which traditionally just gets left in the field to decompose. Well, somebody thought, what if I could take that, could grind it up and do a few clever things to it and turn it into a material to replace the plastic that goes into hair brushes? And so that's one tiny example. But there's many people looking at both ingredients as well as materials coming out of some of these waste streams from the food industry, which I think is super, super interesting. I think our economy is going to generally shift more towards zero waste.
Essentially as a manufacturer, all of these waste streams are costing us money because we have to pay to get rid of them. So if you can turn them into a product and sell it, you're just improving your business. But in addition, it's really just part of the story here about how we get away from fossil derived materials and chemicals. And so I think you're going to see more and more of these innovations coming, especially in a place like California which has a big food purchase and industry, and a lot of smart people who want to try and make the world more sustainable.
Justine Reichman: As you look forward three to five years and people start to innovate more and lean on these products, the food as a replacement for some of these less desirable ingredients, what impact do you think, a percentage, that you will see change, both in people's health and wellness, as well as in our culture, and in the environment?
Matthew Perkins: Well, in the seaweed space, for us, one ton of seaweed grown is one ton of CO2 removed from the ocean. So that's a dry ton of seaweed. It's a ton of CO2 removed from the ocean, which helps us with combating ocean acidification and these types of things. Now that impact is magnified when you can link it to displacement of a petroleum based product. One of the things which I think all of us need to do in order to be not greenwashing is to do life cycle analysis. Where we look at all of our inputs, we look at our manufacturing process, we look at what we displace, and we try to calculate what truly is the impact of each product. I think that is going to become more mainstream. More and more companies are doing this. Big companies also have internal targets around some of these things, and they have no real idea or way of actually meeting them. And so that's an opportunity for a company like ours. And I think you're going to see more and more people do that. The reality is that we've got to move quickly, and the only way that we move quickly is when our solutions are economical. And we've seen that with the uptake of, for example, solar energy is now the cheapest form of electricity out there, and that comes through innovation on the solar panels and the installation, and getting them hooked up to the grid and all that stuff. And now people say, well, if I got to put in new capacity and I'm just going to go solar because it's the cheapest and the best for the environment. And I think for every category, that's going to be the way it happens. People are going to just start choosing these products because they have good performance, they are cost competitive, and they're just better for the world. So if we can do those three things, I think we're going to see a pretty rapid shift away from what is an old dirty industry.
Justine Reichman: I think we're always going to have the old dirty industry because people are familiar with it. Do you think people are going to get on board and really understand that we need to create change? And the best way to create change is to read the ingredients, understand the impact that they're having, both on their health, wellness and the environment.
“We need to create change, and the best way to create change is to read the ingredients, understand the impact that they're having, both on our health, wellness, and the environment.”
Matthew Perkins: I think we need both. We're going to have folks who are the early adopters, who are reading the labels, and who are trying to drive that change. Honestly, I'm an outlier here. I do look at my label, I do care where it comes from, but I'm pretty sure most people are not spending the time doing that. They don't have the time or the interest, and that's okay. We're helping to build the market. And as we build the market, more and more opportunities become available. As these products get better and better, the prices come down. We'll be able to displace the other ones. And then before long, people are not even going to realize that they're tide detergent is actually bio based. That's it's been that way, and it's just the same, and no one ever realized it. I think that's kind of how this is going to happen. And really, we just need a lot more innovation on the performance and the pricing side to get us there.
Justine Reichman: This is all super exciting. If people want to find out more about you and what products they can look for, where would they go to find more information?
Matthew Perkins: You can come to our website, it's macro, M-A-C-R-O, oceans with an S .com. or follow us on Instagram or LinkedIn, and that's where we post all the information. We'll be promoting brands that launched with us so stay tuned. There's going to be a lot of really awesome kelp based beauty products coming your way pretty soon.
Justine Reichman: Awesome. Thank you so much, Matthew, for joining us today and helping us kick off this series. or at least not kick it off, but talk about the impact of food on the future of beauty.
Matthew Perkins: Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Justine Reichman: For those that are tuning in today, don't forget that we have a new episode every Tuesday. If you don't follow us, please do at essential.ingredients, and we look forward to continuing these conversations. See you later.
