Foamlab at BlueCity’s Biodesign Night

3 days ago
2 min read

Last week, the Foamlab team headed to BlueCity (010) in Rotterdam to join the kick off the Week van de Circulaire Economie. It was an evening that proved one thing: the #biodesign community is growing and evolving—fast.

While the night featured a breathtaking array of "living" innovations, a singular question hung in the air:

What does it take to move these bio-innovations from the lab into the real world?

On Stage

Our Product Manager, Alice Buso, took the stage to share the Foamlab journey on developing and scaling bacterial cellulose foam production.

To bring bacterial cellulose to a global scale, we are currently tackling three major shifts:

Material Agency: At Foamlab, we are constantly negotiating with living organisms. Designing with the understanding that our "workers" (the bacteria) require specific conditions to produce high-performance materials is the only way forward.
Redefining Performance: We believe in offering bacterial cellulose foam that goes beyond being "good for the planet" to "better than the fossil-fuel alternatives".
Rethinking Scale: Our vision is to move away from centralized, energy-heavy factories toward distributed and localized production.

Beyond the talk, we showcased physical samples of our bacterial cellulose foam. It was incredibly rewarding to see the audience so drawn to the material.

A Shared Mission

Alice shared the stage with inspiring speakers who are all pushing against the boundaries of bio-innovations:

Teresa van Dongen, on blending light installations with microbial life.
Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, on the Zoöp movement and the non-human stakeholders we all live with.
Studio Tjeerd Veenhoven, on the potential of mycelium in waste stream transformation.
George Birch (Oyster Heaven), on restoring our North Sea reefs.
Poorva Shrivastava, on making sustainability fun with SeaSpark.

A huge thanks to the BlueCity team for fostering this ecosystem and to Emma van der Leest for hosting. If this night was any indication, the future isn't just circular—it’s alive.

Want to learn more about our progress with Bacterial Cellulose?