microTERRA

microTERRA is a Mexico-based business-to-business food technology company that cultivates Lemna (duckweed), an aquatic plant, on nutrient-rich agricultural and aquaculture wastewater and processes the biomass into functional food ingredients. Its current commercial line, marketed as MAS, is a natural Lemna extract positioned as a flavour modulator: the company states it intensifies flavour with umami notes so that monosodium glutamate can be reduced, blocks undesirable notes such as bitterness, improves mouthfeel and body, and integrates flavour components across a formulation. Variants are presented as UMAMI, BETA and ALPHA. The company describes the ingredient as clean-label, produced through a bioprocess protected by intellectual property, and applicable to beverages and solid foods in sweet and savoury applications and compatible with baking, extrusion and freezing. In a 2025 founder interview the flagship product was described as MASK, a natural flavour enhancer used to potentiate, modulate and mask aftertaste in alternative meat, dairy and sweetener products.

The company's earlier positioning, as described by accelerator and investor sources, centred on a functional binding ingredient for the plant-based food industry that carried no colour or taste, allowing nutritional value to be added without altering texture, taste or appearance. microTERRA partnered with existing aquaculture farms in Mexico to grow Lemna, which absorbs nitrogen and phosphorus from the water while it grows, so that cultivation cleans the farm's water as a by-product.

At its origin the company operated in aquaculture water treatment: it built circular systems in which fishpond wastewater was pumped into cylindrical bioreactors where microalgae absorbed carbon dioxide, nitrogen and phosphorus, returning cleaned, oxygenated water to the pond while the harvested biomass was dried and used as a protein input for fish feed. The company said such a system could supply up to 60 percent of a farmer's own feed, and that remote sensors let technicians monitor water quality and advise the farmer through a cloud platform and mobile app."]

Founding story

Founder and CEO Marissa Cuevas Flores, a renewable energy engineer with a master's degree in sustainability management from Columbia University, traces the idea to a 2017 lecture at Singularity University on planetary boundaries delivered by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, which identified nutrient runoff as an urgent challenge linked to food security. She sought ways to recover nitrogen and phosphorus from water rather than let them cause algae blooms and dead zones, and after ruling out kelp and seaweed because of long growing times she turned to microalgae and later to aquatic plants such as Lemna. She built a system in 2018 to turn wastewater into fertilizer but found insufficient market demand; while interviewing a farmer for market research she saw tilapia tanks and redirected the work toward fish feed produced from fishpond wastewater.

Business model

Business-to-business supply of ingredients to food and beverage manufacturers and formulators. In its earlier aquaculture phase the company sold or installed wastewater-treatment systems to fish farmers, with the protein by-product offsetting the cost of the equipment, and explored selling raw protein ingredients to fish feed producers. In the ingredient model, microTERRA partners with existing aquaculture and agriculture farms that grow Lemna on their nutrient-rich water, giving farms an additional revenue stream and reduced wastewater footprint while keeping microTERRA's own capital expenditure low; the company has said it is pursuing an asset-light downstream manufacturing strategy.

Sale of Lemna-derived functional ingredients (MAS/MASK extracts) to sweetener producers, small and medium food businesses and large food corporations; earlier revenue was expected from aquaculture water-treatment systems and the sale of dried biomass as feed protein. An investor write-up in 2021 cited management forecasts of $2.5M revenue at 20 farms in 2022 and $165M annual revenue at 205 farms in 2025, with about 95 percent of revenue from decolorized lemna and gross margins of roughly 55-60 percent.

Traction

By late 2021 the company reported validating the market through more than 40 customer interviews, sample requests from about half of those firms and nine samples sent to customers including Berlioz, Barentz and NAT; interest from multinational food companies including Danone, Nestlé, Mars, Givaudan and Unilever; plant-based cuisine trials with three Mexican restaurants (Berlioz, Waldo's and Vegamo); operations on three farms with 12 farmers soft-closed as of August 2021; and a first lemna system installed in January 2021. In its aquaculture phase the company was in talks with 10 fish feed producers in Mexico. In 2025 the company reported multiple co-developments with successful results and an expanded sales team, while targeting downstream production capacity of up to 50,000 kg annually and two new ingredients and two new patents.

Latest developments

In February 2024 the company launched a duckweed-based ingredient aimed at reducing sugar in food and beverages. A July 2025 founder interview set out three priorities: expanding commercial sales of the masking extract to sweetener producers, small and medium businesses and large food corporations; an asset-light manufacturing scale-up to reach up to 50,000 kg of annual downstream production; and R&D to optimise MASK and add two new ingredients and two new patents.