The Aztec record
The earliest written record of spirulina as food comes from the Spanish chronicler Francisco Hernández, who documented the Aztec people of central Mexico harvesting and eating “tecuitlatl” — a blue-green algae cake made from the surface of Lake Texcoco, the lake on which Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City) was built. His account dates from the 1570s, describing practices that had existed for generations before Spanish arrival.
Tecuitlatl was collected by skimming the lake surface, dried into thin cakes in the sun, and sold in Aztec markets. Contemporary accounts describe it as widely eaten — a significant protein source in a society that had limited access to animal protein. The algae blooms of Lake Texcoco were seasonal and were harvested during the peak growth periods.
Lake Texcoco was eventually drained through Spanish engineering projects in the seventeenth century to prevent flooding, ending the large-scale algae harvests. The knowledge persisted in fragments but spirulina disappeared from Mexican food culture for nearly 400 years.
Lake Chad: a continuous tradition
On the opposite side of the world, the people around Lake Chad in north-central Africa (present-day Chad, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon) developed an independent tradition of harvesting spirulina from the lake’s alkaline waters. The product is called “dihé” — dried algae cakes that are still produced and sold in local markets today.
Dihé is used as a seasoning and broth base, crumbled into soups and sauces. It remains a meaningful protein source in a region with food security challenges. This is not a historical footnote but a living food tradition — families in the Lake Chad basin have harvested and sold dihé continuously for centuries, and continue to do so.
The fact that two populations independently discovered and incorporated spirulina into their diets — separated by thousands of miles and without contact — is one of the most compelling aspects of its history. It suggests that wherever high-alkaline shallow lakes exist, people who lived near them eventually figured out that the blue-green layer on the surface was edible and nutritious.
The scientific rediscovery: 1960s–1970s
The modern spirulina story begins with the Belgian botanist Jean Léonard, who encountered dihé in Chad in the late 1950s and recognised the dried cakes as algae. He collected samples and, with colleagues at the Institut Français du Pétrole (IFP), began the first scientific characterisation of the organism in the 1960s.
The IFP was initially interested in spirulina not for nutrition but for its potential as a feedstock for industrial applications. What the analysis revealed — approximately 60–70% protein, a complete amino acid profile, high beta-carotene — redirected attention toward its food and nutrition potential.
Ripley Fox and his colleagues at the Sosa Texcoco plant in Mexico began commercial cultivation in the early 1970s using the alkaline waters near Mexico City. The plant remained operational for decades and helped establish the basic cultivation protocols — open raceway ponds, bicarbonate-rich water, controlled pH — that remain standard in the industry today.
NASA, the space program, and spirulina’s halo
In the 1980s and 1990s, NASA researchers studied spirulina as a candidate food for long-duration space missions, valuing its high nutrient density, small cultivation footprint, and CO₂-to-oxygen conversion. This association contributed significantly to spirulina’s positioning in Western markets as a “superfood” — even though no actual space missions ever used spirulina as a primary food source.
The association was real (NASA did publish research on spirulina for controlled ecological life support systems) but the marketing extrapolation — that spirulina was “NASA-approved” or used by astronauts — was an overclaim. The research was exploratory, not operational.
Commercial expansion: Japan leads the way
Japan was the first major consumer market for spirulina supplements, beginning in the mid-1970s. DIC Corporation (Dainippon Ink and Chemicals, now DIC Lifetec) began large-scale spirulina production in Japan and established many of the quality standards that defined premium spirulina for years.
Japanese consumer demand for spirulina — initially driven by the health food movement of the 1970s and later by the functional foods industry — built the market infrastructure that made spirulina accessible globally. Several Japanese studies on spirulina’s cholesterol and immune effects from the 1980s and 1990s form the foundation of its evidence base.
The United Nations and food security
IIMSAM (Intergovernmental Institution for the use of Micro-Algae Spirulina Against Malnutrition) was established as a UN observer in 2003, recognising spirulina’s potential in addressing protein-energy malnutrition in low-income countries. Several programs in Africa and South Asia have distributed spirulina supplementation to malnourished children with documented results on weight gain and anaemia correction.
This humanitarian thread in spirulina’s story is underappreciated in the supplement market context. The same organism that is sold as a premium product in health food stores is also one of the most cost-effective interventions for childhood malnutrition — with a protein-to-cost ratio that no conventional food source can match at scale.
From food to supplement: where we are now
Today spirulina is produced commercially in China, India, the USA, France, Japan, Spain, Turkey, and several other countries, with China and India accounting for the majority of global volume. The global market is estimated at several hundred million dollars annually and growing, driven by plant-based diet trends, interest in sustainable protein, and the ongoing evidence base for specific health outcomes.
The trajectory from Aztec lake cakes to global supplement market took roughly 500 years — with a 400-year gap in the middle. That the tradition survived in Chad uninterrupted gives the story its continuity. Spirulina was never “discovered” in the scientific sense — it was always there, eaten by people who needed it. Science simply caught up with them.
