Spirulina Powder

Spirulina powder is the whole dried biomass of Arthrospira platensis, a filamentous cyanobacterium grown in shallow alkaline freshwater raceway ponds. Culture is harvested on fine screens, washed, dewatered, spray or drum dried and milled. Nothing is extracted and no carrier is added, so the powder is the organism itself rather than a concentrate or an extract. Thovek supplies it standardised to not less than 60% protein on a dry basis and not less than 10% C-phycocyanin, the blue pigment-protein complex that gives the powder its blue-green cast. USDA reference data for dried spirulina give 57.5 g protein and 28.5 mg iron per 100 g, and gamma-linolenic acid accounts for roughly a fifth of the total fatty acids. For formulators the material behaves as a dispersible rather than a soluble ingredient: it wets into a stable dark green suspension and is typically used at 0.5-5% in greens and meal-replacement blends, or filled directly into capsules and compressed into tablets. The phycocyanin fraction is water soluble but both heat and pH labile, so drying temperature at the farm and any downstream pasteurisation step will both move the assay. Literature puts phycocyanin near 20% of dry weight in freeze or sun dried biomass against about 4% when oven dried, which is why a buyer formulating for colour should name the figure they need rather than rely on a nominal grade. Flavour is strongly vegetal and needs masking above roughly 2% in beverages. Open-pond culture can be colonised by microcystin-producing cyanobacteria, so every lot is released against the 1.0 µg/g total microcystin threshold set by the Oregon Health Division in 1997 and used internationally for blue-green algae products, alongside heavy metal limits aligned with Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/915. On origin and allergens: this is a freshwater cyanobacterial biomass, not a marine, fish, mollusc or crustacean product, and it is vegan, vegetarian and free from milk, egg, soy, gluten, nuts, peanut and sesame. One point to carry into label copy is that the cobalamin present in spirulina is predominantly pseudovitamin B12, so the material should not be declared as a source of vitamin B12.