What is PrismaBlu?

PrismaBlu Vivid is made from three ingredients.

Within the finished powder, approximately 25% is C-phycocyanin, with around 35% total phycocyanins.

Those numbers aren't different ways of describing the same thing.

The 45% refers to the amount of spirulina extract in the formulation. That extract contains phycocyanin along with other material extracted from the spirulina.

So 45% spirulina extract does not mean 45% pure phycocyanin.

And the remaining 55% isn't there simply to make up the weight.

Phycocyanin is a protein as well as a pigment.

That's part of what makes it such an extraordinary natural colour, but it also means it isn't as indestructible as a synthetic dye.

Vivid uses trehalose alongside the spirulina extract to produce a practical, standardised dry powder and to help protect the phycocyanin through processing and storage.

Trehalose is a sugar, but at the quantities in which Vivid is normally used, you're adding very little of it to the finished recipe.

At a 1 g/L dose, for example, the roughly 52% trehalose content contributes about 0.52 g of trehalose per litre.

We could simply call it a carrier and move on.

We'd rather tell you what's actually in the bag.

The final 3% is sodium citrate.

Phycocyanin is sensitive to the conditions around it, particularly pH. Sodium citrate is used as part of the formulation to help maintain a more suitable environment for the phycocyanin.

Again, it has a job.

Vivid isn't 45% spirulina extract because the rest of the bag needed filling. It's a formulated blue spirulina powder designed to deliver a particular colour strength in a usable form.

We can.

And eventually, PrismaBlu won't be just one product.

But more concentrated isn't automatically more useful.

If you're making a latte, lemonade, gelato or frosting, the useful question isn't: how much spirulina extract can we physically fit into this powder?

It's: how much powder do I need to get the blue I want?

Vivid is designed to sit at a useful colour strength for everyday food and beverage applications. A small amount produces a very strong blue without requiring you to measure absurdly tiny quantities.

For other applications, a different concentration or formulation may make more sense.

That's the reason PrismaBlu is a family rather than simply the name of one powder.

Spirulina is biological material.

The amount of phycocyanin in it isn't determined by someone typing a number into a machine. It is affected by the biomass and by what happens during extraction and processing.

That means an extract can vary.

For someone buying blue spirulina, though, that variation isn't particularly helpful. If you develop a recipe using one batch, you reasonably want the next batch to behave like the first one.

So we standardise PrismaBlu to a defined colour strength.

One of the ways phycocyanin powders are graded is by their E-value: a measurement of how strongly a defined solution absorbs light around the wavelength where phycocyanin shows its characteristic blue absorption.

The higher the E-value, the greater the colour strength.

Rather than treating whatever comes out of an extraction run as the finished product, the formulation can be adjusted to bring the powder to its intended grade.

That's what we mean by standardised.

The target is the blue, not an arbitrary percentage of extract.

Imagine developing a blue coconut lemonade.

You get the colour exactly where you want it and settle on 0.8 grams of powder per litre.

Then you buy another batch three months later and discover that you now need 1.1 grams to get the same result.

The powder is still blue. It's still made from spirulina. Nothing on a generic blue spirulina label necessarily tells you that anything changed.

But your recipe did.

Standardising colour strength reduces that uncertainty.

Natural colour will always interact with the recipe it's used in, but the ingredient itself shouldn't be a moving target unnecessarily.

Both figures describe something slightly different.

Approximately 25% of Vivid is C-phycocyanin, while approximately 35% is total phycocyanins.

Phycocyanin isn't a single indivisible idea printed on a label. Spirulina's phycobiliprotein system includes different pigment-protein components, and different analytical measurements can produce different numbers depending on exactly what is being measured.

That's why we don't think a large percentage printed on the front of a packet is particularly useful without explaining what that percentage means.

For Vivid, we state the numbers separately: about 45% spirulina extract, about 35% total phycocyanins and about 25% C-phycocyanin.

They are related. They are not interchangeable.

Because we don't want to sell one anonymous blue powder forever.

Different people need different things from blue spirulina.

For some, the priority is an accessible colour strength that's easy to use in everyday drinks and desserts. Others may want a more concentrated extract, a different formulation, or fewer additional ingredients.

PrismaBlu is the name for that family.

Vivid is where we're starting.

As we introduce other PrismaBlu grades, we'll publish their compositions the same way: what's in them, how strong they are, and why we've formulated them that way.

No mystery proprietary blue blend.

Just tell us what you're trying to make, and we'll tell you what's in the blue.