Pondweed is the biomanufacturing feedstock of the moment. These freshwater plants entered the mainstream in 2024, when Whole Foods included duckweed in its trend predictions for 2025.
Indeed, pondweed products hit the spotlight in 2025. US startup Plantible Foods opened a duckweed protein factory while the EU approved duckweed proteins for human consumption.
Foodtech isn’t the only segment getting excited about aquatic plants. Sustainable polymers, biochemicals, and biobased fuels can all be derived from these chemically complex organisms. This versatility could make it the target of new investments into biobased supply chains.
Here’s why biobased producers are turning to the feedstock.
California’s pondweed cattle feed
Pondweed is a general term for different freshwater aquatic plant species. So far, commercial attention has fallen on two in particular: duckweed (Lemna minor) – the one you are most likely to encounter in your garden pond – and Asian watermeal, or the Wolffia globosa.
Pondweeds have a tendency to rapid growth. This may be a nuisance for gardeners and wildlife conservation, but a major advantage for an industrial feedstock. Requiring few resources to grow, these aquatic plants could feed biorefineries with an abundant, year-round supply of low-cost raw materials.
In California, US startup Fyto is exploiting this abundance for the cattle feed and fertiliser market. Founded by former MIT research director Jason Prapas, it has a method of growing duckweed in lined, open ponds on unproductive farmland. Tending to the crop at all times is Fyto’s automated cropping system, which offers continuous monitoring for water quality and contaminants.
What drew startup founder Prapas to the floating plant was its protein content. The species can produce more protein per acre than soy, containing approximately 20–35% protein. Its rapid growth is another plus: it can double its biomass between 48 and 96 hours.
Cow manure to cow feed, via duckweed
Yet for all of duckweed’s advantages, there was one sticking point: it needs a high level of nitrogen. Prapas solved the problem with a circular solution – sourcing high-nitrogen cow manure from local farms to feed his Lemna.
Fyto pitches the duckweed as a sustainable foundation for the food system. Rearing the Lemna minor protein on cow waste solves multiple environmental issues.
Not only does the cow manure get cleaned up, but it also means that it turns from a toxic pollutant into an input for producing food.
It also reduces demand for soybean, the main feed source for livestock today. Thanks to its soybean dependence, cattle-rearing drives deforestation as the crop is cultivated on cleared forests in some of the planet’s most biodiverse regions. Fyto’s feed could lower some of the carbon footprint and ecological damage associated with livestock feed.
Making it commercial
Fyto is targeting the dairy feed market for now and product development is still on the agenda. Prapas advocates feeding the weed to cattle fresh. This is meant to support decentralised, on-farm feed production, avoiding the energy demands of processing and transporting the material.
Fyto also wants to develop a shelf-stable product. To this end, they are refining a scaled drying technique on their R&D farm.
Ultimately, however, Jason Prapas says that his company has a bigger vision. It sees itself as a “platform company” rather than a feed company, one that develops cost-effective processes for sustainable food production.
Eventually, the company wants to sell its high-tech duckweed cultivation system to farmers. This will give arable and cattle farmers a renewable source of organic feed and fertiliser on their own doorstep.
Indeed, Fyto’s biggest achievement is to prove that pondweed cultivation might be an economically and technically feasible way of reducing the climate impact of food.
As a climate tech feedstock, Pondweed shares a lot in common with the bioeconomy’s other wonder-material, algae. Like algae, it generally needs fewer inputs to grow than land crops like corn. They are also packed with industrially useful chemicals, including lignin (a base for biomaterials), sugar (biofuels), lipids (biodiesel), and nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (fertiliser).
These diverse chemicals make it ideal for the cascading biorefinery concept. This is a biobased production model designed around squeezing maximum value from feedstock, and has already been applied to algae and seaweed. It involves simultaneously producing different chemical products out of the same feedstock. In the case of aquatic plants, this would be biofuel, fertiliser, industry chemicals, and wastewater remediation services.
This ability to make multiple products from one input makes the overall business more economical. High value-added products like enzymes and polymers can do the heavy lifting in terms of raising margins while lower value products like biofuels can offer steady revenue and raise market share.
Thailand leads research
The US is a relative latecomer when it comes to pondweed-tech compared to Thailand, which is the leading centre for pondweed research and commercialisation.
Kasetsart University in Bangkok has a dedicated Duckweed Holobiont Resource & Research Center, founded through a collaboration signed between the Thai and Japanese governments in 2021.
The centre studies potential applications for the plants. One of its big successes from a commercial standpoint is ramping up duckweed productivity using purely biobased methods.
In a major breakthrough, the centre found that by inoculating their duckweed with a growth-promoting bacterium called P23, they were able to boost growth rates in their crop.
This kind of research falls on fertile cultural ground. Eating aquatic plants is nothing new in Thailand – the duckweed species Wolffia globosa is a traditional dish in the North and Northeast, popular for being inexpensive and high in nutrients.
Thai startup Advanced Greenfarms is taking advantage of this cultural receptivity to aquatic foods. The startup has taken native strains of the Wolffia and developed productive and high-nutrient varieties. It farms these at scale and turns them into pastes and dry powders for the supplement market.
However, the alternative protein market is not the only application for these pants.
Remarkably, duckweed can eat up nitrogen and phosphorus, even at high concentrations that would poison and kill other species. This makes them a natural fit for cleaning agricultural and industrial effluents from rivers and lakes in a sustainable way.
The research centre is trialing use of duckweed as a water decontamination biotech. In Pune, India, Lemnion Green Solutions is already using duckweed as a wastewater treatment solution, deploying the species to treat 1 to 3000 kilolitres of polluted water per day.
Putting invaders to use
A system of biorefineries that can process different kinds of pondweed could hold both economic and environmental benefits in the EU.
Some pondweeds pose an environmental risk, rapidly choking off oxygen and light in waterways. A prime example is Elodea nuttallii, an aquatic invasive alien species classified in the EU as a Species of Union Concern.
Managing the E. nuttallii invasion is costly. A risk assessment carried out in 2016 estimated the annual management costs for the species in EU countries to be between 0.1 and 1 million € in 2016, rising to more than €13 M in the future.
Yet using this voluminous biomass could generate more economic value than dredging and disposal. Studies suggest the plant could be harvested for use in fertilisers and biogas production.
While wild E. nuttallii supply waxes and wanes with the season and weather, it could become a supplementary source of biomass for biorefineries around the region, highlighting the supply security advantages of tapping local invasive species in industry.
Diversifying the biobased supply chain
Labs and companies around the world have been delving into the industrial potential of pondweed for years. Now, the feedstock is gaining momentum commercially in multiple segments. Foodtech has been quick on the uptake thanks to the high protein content of these plants.
The startups in the duckweed tech space are geographically diverse, dotted across North America (Fyto), South Africa (Aspyre Foods), and Asia (India, Thailand). This supports the notion that pondweed can be cultivated viably in different regions, under different technological systems and cost models.
Europe remains a notable exception to this global trend of pondweed production. Despite the regulatory approval of duckweed proteins there in 2025, the region does not have homegrown producers like in North America and Asia.
This could be changing thanks to momentum from a core group of Belgian researchers. In 2025, The European Duckweed Network (EDN), led by Ghent University academics, organised a duckweed workshop in their university city. Here, biologists discussed the climate virtues of the ‘water lentils’ – the common duckweed and Wolffia globosa – advocating for their sustainability benefits. A spin-off may be in the making.
Does all this mean that pondweed will replace algae as the biomanufacturing feedstock of the future? It is more likely that pondweed will supplement existing sources of biomass supply than replace any outright. With next-generation feedstocks like cultivated algae still in the process of scaling up, the bioeconomy can only benefit from a more diverse rostrum of feedstocks.
