Ooho: The Edible Seaweed Water Pod and How It Works

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Ooho!: The Edible Seaweed Water Pod and What Became of It

Ooho is a small, see-through pod of water whose skin is made from seaweed, so you can eat it whole or bite it open, drink, and compost what is left. It began around 2013 as a design-school answer to single-use plastic bottles. The young designers behind it went on to found the London company now called Notpla, which has handed out tens of thousands of pods at big public events and won a major environmental prize in 2022.

Here is how the pod works, where the technique comes from, what the real-world trials showed and what an edible package can and cannot replace.

What an Ooho pod actually is

Picture a water balloon the size of a large cherry tomato, except the balloon is a soft, jelly-like film. Squeeze it gently and it wobbles. Put it in your mouth and the film bursts, releasing a mouthful of water or juice. The film itself has almost no taste and is safe to swallow.

The idea was never to shrink a whole bottle into a pod. A single Ooho holds only a sip or two. Its strength is in moments where people need a small drink quickly and would otherwise grab a bottle, take two swallows and throw the rest away: races, festivals, outdoor events and takeaway meals.

In their entry for the Danish Design to Improve Life award, the designers described their package as “simple, cheap (2ct/unit), resistant, hygienic, biodegradable and even eatable.” The two-cent figure was their early estimate for a home-made pod, not a price for commercial production.

The kitchen chemistry behind the skin

Ooho borrows a technique chefs call spherification. It relies on two ingredients that react quickly when they meet:

  • Sodium alginate, a thickener extracted from brown seaweed and listed on European food labels as E401.
  • Calcium chloride, a food-grade salt (E509) also used in cheese-making and pickling.

When a liquid containing one ingredient touches a bath containing the other, calcium ions link the long alginate molecules into a gel. The outer layer sets within seconds to minutes and becomes a thin, flexible skin, while the inside stays liquid. The Ooho designers used a double membrane, which made the pods stronger and less sticky to handle.

The method is not new. According to Wikipedia’s overview of spherification, Unilever documented it in the 1950s, and the team at the Spanish restaurant elBulli, led by Ferran and Albert Adrià, turned it into a famous modernist-cuisine trick that produces fruit “caviar” and the popping pearls found in bubble tea. What the Ooho team did was apply a restaurant technique to a packaging problem.

Basic versus reverse spherification

Chefs distinguish two versions. In the basic method, alginate goes into the drink and the drops fall into a calcium bath; the gel keeps thickening, so the spheres must be served quickly. In the reverse method, calcium goes into the liquid and it is lowered into an alginate bath, which gives sturdier spheres that keep for longer. Anything meant to sit on a table, even briefly, benefits from that extra stability.

From student project to Notpla

The pod was developed by Royal College of Art graduates Rodrigo García González and Pierre Paslier, who began working on it in 2013 after the Innovation Design Engineering course the RCA runs with Imperial College London. They released the original recipe under a Creative Commons licence so that anyone could experiment with it at home.

The two founded a start-up, Skipping Rocks Lab, in London. As the project grew, the company renamed itself after its material, Notpla, a seaweed-based film that Dezeen reported breaks down faster than PLA, a common plant-based plastic. The same material can coat cardboard so that it resists water and grease, which opened the door to takeaway boxes and sauce sachets. Over the years the company has offered pods filled with cocktails at festivals and ketchup instead of plastic sachets.

The London Marathon test

The most visible trial came on 28 April 2019. At a station 23 miles into the London Marathon, volunteers gave runners more than 30,000 Ooho capsules filled with Lucozade Sport Orange, the largest trial of the pods at the time. Runners could pop a whole pod in their mouth or bite it and suck out the drink. Lucozade had first tested the capsules at the Richmond Marathon in September 2018.

The pods were made on site with a machine designed by the start-up, so they did not have to travel or sit in storage. According to Dezeen, the membrane breaks down in roughly four to six weeks, about as quickly as fruit peel.

The capsules were one part of a wider effort. The marathon reduced its drinks stations from 26 to 19, served drinks in compostable cups at two of them and sent collected bottles from three London boroughs to be recycled into new bottles. Plastic bottles were not abolished; the race simply used fewer of them and tried a few alternatives side by side.

What an edible pod can and cannot replace

Early coverage often claimed that pods like these would replace plastic bottles. That was always too big a promise, and it helps to be clear about the limits:

  • Volume. One pod holds a mouthful. Nobody is going to carry a day’s water in seaweed bubbles.
  • Shelf life and storage. A thin gel skin cannot sit in a warehouse or a hot car for months the way a sealed bottle can. Pods work best when they are made close to where they are used.
  • Hygiene. The outside of a pod is touched before it is eaten, so it needs clean handling, much like fruit served at an event.
  • Waste that does not get eaten. A dropped pod is far less harmful than a dropped bottle, but it still needs composting or ordinary waste collection.

The designers’ original pitch also said that most plastic bottles are never recycled. Recycling rates vary a great deal between countries and years, so that figure should be read as a general warning rather than a precise global statistic. The broader point stands: the best container for a quick drink at a crowded event may be one that leaves almost nothing behind.

The Earthshot Prize and where Notpla stands now

In December 2022 Notpla was named one of the five winners of the Earthshot Prize, the environmental award founded by Prince William, at a ceremony at the MGM Music Hall in Boston. Dezeen’s report described the company’s work as a seaweed-based alternative to plastic packaging; each winner received a grant of £1 million to scale up.

The prize reflects a shift in the company’s focus. The bouncing water pod is still its best-known image, but coated paper and food packaging have far larger markets than marathon drinks.

Trying spherification at home

Because the original recipe was shared openly, Ooho-style spheres are a popular kitchen science project. Hobby kits sell food-grade sodium alginate and calcium salts with instructions. A few practical points help:

  • Use only ingredients sold as food grade, and follow the kit’s amounts.
  • Very acidic juices or drinks rich in calcium, such as milk, can stop the gel forming properly; that is when the reverse method is used.
  • Rinse spheres in plain water after the bath to remove excess salt.
  • Serve them soon. Home-made spheres keep thickening and are best eaten the same day.

It is a fun way to see how a small change in chemistry can turn the idea of a container upside down: instead of a bottle you throw away, the wrapper becomes part of the snack.

Sources: Dezeen: Ooho capsules at the 2019 London Marathon; Dezeen: Earthshot Prize 2022 winners; Wikipedia: Spherification; Design to Improve Life: Ooho! nomination. Video and concept by the Ooho! designers (Skipping Rocks Lab, now Notpla); first shared on this site via True Activist.

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