VERO BEACH — As Steve Schlosser begins a tour of his Vero Beach oceanfront algae farm, his handshake is a testimonial to his product: He doesn’t wince anymore. Years ago, at age 50, his wrists were so stricken with arthritis that he was getting cortisone shots to ease the pain.
It was then that his love of algae first bloomed.
Within weeks of eating a daily dose of the pond scum known as spirulina, Schlosser found he was pain free. “My swelling went down immediately. I haven’t been to a doctor since I started eating this,” he says.
The kitchen-counter operation that supplied Schlosser with his morning blob of algae has four years later grown into a multi-pond operation at Florida Tech’s Vero Beach Marine Lab on the barrier island.
Now CEO of Florida Algae, Schlosser and two partners have placed Spirulina Ice, their nutrient-dense, extravagantly priced superfood – $35 a pound – in 200 juice bars and 80 health-food stores around the country.
In Vero, the spirulina, fresh or frozen, is wholesaled by White Rabbit Acres, an organic farm west of town. Retailers include Michael Haggerty, who developed his flavored Pond Yum frozen pops – including one dipped in chocolate – for his new downtown café, Planet Yum, located at the northern side of the Pocahontas building.
Haggerty also uses spirulina in his smoothies, as does LovJuice and La Tabla, two popular Vero juice bars.
The algae even shows up in spa treatments at Costa d’Este resort, where its skin-softening properties are backed up by Schlosser’s wife, Fiona. She remarked on her husband’s hands after soaking for hours a day in spirulina tanks and is now developing a line of skin care products.
The algae’s national distributor, E3Live, buys thousands of pounds at a time, Schlosser says, billing it as “the world’s first and only fresh-frozen live spirulina.”
Schlosser is a retired Rockwell engineer who oversaw a staff of 600 who replaced analog phone lines with digital. When he took an early retirement, his pastime options were increasingly limited by a nagging problem: his aching hands. Researching anti-inflammatories, he came across spirulina, a well-known supplement in powder and tablet form. But few were discussing using it straight out of the pond.
Then he read about a spirulina grower in France that marketed the product fresh. “They said that eating it fresh was a great anti-inflammatory but they couldn’t send it to the states because of restrictions,” Schlosser recalls. “Then I saw that NASA was experimenting with farming it in space. I found a professor working on that out in California and asked him to send me some.”
The professor sent him a few dollops of live spirulina in a little glass Coke bottle, the cap taped over with duct tape. Days later, it arrived at Schlosser’s Fort Lauderdale home, as fresh as any pile of slime could look, and more importantly, still alive. Schlosser set up an aquarium on the kitchen counter, tossed in the algae and waited.
Happily, Schlosser watched as the water did what every pool owner dreads: it turned green, then greener, the sort you wouldn’t dip a toe into. Soon there was enough algae growing that a coffee filter dragged through the water could catch 10 tablespoons or more.
Schlosser harvested his crop and got to work on recipes. “You’d be surprised: It’s about as mild as butter,” he says. Nothing like the mucky-tasting, heat-treated powder form.
“I just started experimenting, adding it to stuff, and right away my swelling went down.”
Word started to spread through Riverside Park, his Fort Lauderdale neighborhood, home to “a lot of old hippies” with high demand for alternative nutrition. “Pretty soon I had two or three aquariums going, and my wife said, ‘That’s it.’ So we moved it out to a couple of ponds in a greenhouse in the front yard.”
Soon, word drifted down to the chef at Miami’s famous South Beach hotel, The Standard. “The chef contacted me through a mutual friend of my wife,” he says. “I took some down to him and met with him and he put it out there. And he called me the following Monday and said, ‘Whatever you can produce, I want it.’ That was three years ago.”
Vero’s spirulina is now in all five of The Standard hotels, including in L.A. and New York.
“They’re making martinis out of it,” says Schlosser. “They call them spirutinis.”
As successful as spirulina has been, another algae may end up being far more lucrative for Schlosser. In a joint venture with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Florida Algae’s Vero operation is growing algae that could be used as a supplement in cattle feed to reduce the use of antibiotics. Currently in the approval process with the Food and Drug Administration, if the algae comes to market, Florida Algae could get the contract to produce “hundreds of thousands of pounds,” says Schlosser.
The company has leased 10 acres at White Rabbit farm to increase the scale of the test project, and is looking at a 100-acre tract west of I-95 if the algae is approved for use in cattle.
