Cyanotech Exits Animal Feed Market

KAILUA-KONA, Hawaii—Cyanotech announced the company made a strategic decision to discontinue its astaxanthin product for the animal feed market to focus its efforts on production and marketing of BioAstin® Natural Astaxanthin in the higher value human market. According to the company, marketing and investment efforts in that direction in the past few years have yielded extremely positive results.

“Our sales of BioAstin have recently escalated. For example, in our third quarter ending Dec. 31, 2007, we saw a 137 percent increase in BioAstin revenues compared with the same quarter of the previous year,” said Gerald Cysewski, Ph.D., Cyanotech’s founder and CEO. “We have been focusing our marketing on the human nutrition market where we have a cost advantage due to our large production capacity. In the animal market we compete with lower cost synthetic astaxanthin. While there are clear, quantifiable reasons why natural astaxanthin is superior to synthetic in both human and animal applications, our strategy has evolved to exclusively target the human astaxanthin market. Cyanotech has been the leader in the human market, with the largest production capacity and the highest sales of all producers. We see this important decision as our BioAstin customers’ insurance that we will continue to be the best-stocked and most reliable astaxanthin supplier in the industry.”