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Can something smaller than the thickness
of a human hair be the answer to a prob-
lem as big as hunger? In Mitsuru Izumo’s
opinion, yes. The Founder and President
of Euglena Co saw the horrible effects of
malnutrition during a trip to Bangladesh
in 1998. Izumo was just 18 at the time,
a student focusing on international de-
velopment at the University of Tokyo. He
was touched by the poverty he saw in the
South Asian country. “In Bangladesh there
was food. People ate a lot of rice and car-
bohydrates. But they didn’t have access to
any food that was really nutritional,” he
says. “The problem there was not starva-
tion, it was malnutrition.”
Two years later, when he was home in
Japan again, Izumo was introduced to the
health benefits of euglena: a type of tiny
microorganism that contains a lot of po-
tential. Euglena is an algae that has char-
acteristics of both plants and animals. It
can be found in fresh water and is a source
of nutrients for many other microorga-
nisms.
Realising its great nutritional and car-
bon capture capabilities, Izumo immedi-
ately saw his opportunity to help the mal-
nourished children he saw in Bangladesh
and started his own business at the same
time. “I joined a special research and de-
velopment programme at my university
to try and cultivate euglena massively,”
Izumo says. His main goal was to find a
way to produce this kind of microalgae at
an industrial scale and make it available –
in the form of a powder that can be used
as a supplement – for people who truly
needed it.
It was not an easy path, though. It was
only in 2005 that Izumo successfully de-
veloped a technology that allowed him to
cultivate euglena cheaply enough to make
the final product accessible. In August
2005, Euglena Co was born. Research con-
tinued, but it took a while for the founder
of the company to get clients that be-
lieved in his project. “There’s one thing
I said from the start: ‘This is a business.
I want to make profit in Japan and Europe,
but, I want to invest most of that profit in
doing social business in developing coun-
tries,’”says Izumo.
In time, Euglena Co caught the eye of in-
vestors, going from a struggling business
to a huge hit. In 2012, the company went
GREEN
GOLD
EUGLENA WHO? – Mitsuru
Izumo believes in eco-friendly
capitalism. He hopes to use a
tiny, single-celled creature to
make it a reality.
NATASHA R. SILVA (TEXT),
ANDREW CURRY (PHOTO)
9090

public in a JPY 10 billion (USD 81 million)
stock market launch and has been grow-
ing around 30 per cent each year since.
However, the success of the company did
not distract its founder from his initial
goals. The ideology that was born during
that trip in 1998 is still with Izumo and af-
fects every decision he makes.
Right now, he continues making a
profit, but invests a lot of it in charity pro-
grammes that offer school lunches – eu-
glena cookies included, of course – for kids
in Bangladesh. “In these times of greedy
capitalism, almost all my shareholders
push me to make more profit,”says Izumo.
That fact does not seem to make Izumo
nervous, though. For him, there is no need
to draw a line between business and his
beliefs. “I have a special technology to cul-
tivate euglena and no one else has it,” he
says. “So I can decide what the priorities
are. If young social entrepreneurs develop
proper and innovative technology, we can
make eco-friendly, social and public inter-
est capitalism really happen.”u
Euglena are single-celled organisms
that combine characteristics of plants
and animals. They're also nutritious.
EUGLENAWHO?
91

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SYMP-2016-46-Magazine-Euglena-Who-Natasha-R-Silva

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