The Aztec record (16th century)
The earliest written description of spirulina as a food comes from Spanish chroniclers in the Valley of Mexico. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier in the army of Hernán Cortés, described seeing in the markets of Tenochtitlán a blue-green substance harvested from Lake Texcoco, formed into cakes, dried, and sold widely. The Aztec name was tecuitlatl.
For centuries the identity of tecuitlatl was a footnote of historical curiosity. In the late 20th century, samples preserved in Mexican archives were re-examined and identified as Arthrospira maxima — confirming the unbroken line from Aztec markets to modern commerce.
Lake Chad and dihé (continuous tradition)
Around the alkaline shores of Lake Chad, in West Africa, the Kanembu people have a tradition of harvesting spirulina that almost certainly predates the Aztec record and has never lapsed. Women collect the green slurry from the lake’s edges, dry it into small flat cakes called dihé, and sell them in local markets where they’re used in stews and sauces.
French researchers documented the practice in the 1940s, then again — more comprehensively — in the 1970s. The same harvesting and drying techniques are still in use today.
The 1960s rediscovery
European interest in spirulina as a modern food source began in the 1960s, driven by a combination of food-security research and the dawning of the “single-cell protein” movement. Belgian and French researchers studying the dihé harvest realised they were looking at one of the most protein-dense, nutrient-rich foods ever documented.
The first commercial cultivation in Lake Texcoco itself began in the 1970s — the Aztecs and the modern company Sosa Texcoco harvesting from the same waters, four centuries apart.
The Hawaiian and Asian production era (1980s–present)
Modern commercial production scaled up in the 1980s with Cyanotech’s outdoor ponds in Kona, Hawaii — still a benchmark for quality control today. Taiwan, Japan, and then mainland China followed, with Inner Mongolia eventually overtaking everyone on volume. India and Europe expanded through the 2000s and 2010s, with European producers specialising in smaller-scale, premium, often closed-system cultivation.
The space programs that took it seriously
In the 1980s and 1990s, both NASA and the European Space Agency studied spirulina as a candidate food for long-duration space missions. The reasoning was simple: it grows in a closed loop, produces oxygen as a by-product of photosynthesis, and packs the protein and micronutrient density of a small farm into a tank you could fit in a shuttle bay. Detailed cultivation studies on the International Space Station continued into the 2010s.
Spirulina has not (yet) made it onto astronaut menus, but the research advanced understanding of growth conditions, nutrient density, and storage — much of which flowed back into the commercial industry.
The supplement era (1990s–today)
The 1990s saw spirulina move from niche health-food shops into mainstream supplements, briefly captured in the worst kinds of marketing language: cure-all, miracle, “ancient secret.” Most of those claims have not held up. The ones that did — protein density, iron contribution, allergic-rhinitis effect, modest cholesterol and blood-pressure support — have a quieter, more durable evidence base than the marketing suggested.
What this site is doing
Spirulina Guru sits at the calmer end of this story: not the marketing, not the mythologising, just careful curation of what the evidence shows, what works in the kitchen, and which producers do the boring work of testing their product properly. We are part of a long-running food tradition, not a fad.
See what spirulina actually is for the biology, or how it’s grown today for the modern production picture.