We've spent years seeing the same problem from both ends.
Kristin spent 18 years inside the food industry — 15 of them in seafood — at companies like Mars and Nomad Foods. He watched good food get written off as a normal cost of doing business, year after year, while regulation pushed harder toward cleaner, simpler labels. Along the way he helped unlock more than $50 million in value by fixing exactly this kind of waste. Eventually he left a well-paid corporate career to do it properly.
Dr Pedram spent 25 years on the other end of the same problem: in the lab, turning shrimp-shell waste into usable material. By the time the two of us met, he’d worked on 200+ chitosan projects in 75 countries and was already one of the world’s leading experts in the science.
Two different careers, one conclusion: the technology to fix this already existed. It just hadn’t been built to work at scale. So we started Karmic to do exactly that.
Food security isn't a production problem. It is a waste problem.
Food security isn’t a production problem. It’s a waste problem.
We believe the fix is a circular, regenerative food system — one where the waste from one part of the chain becomes the fuel for another, instead of a cost nobody accounts for.
Shrimp shells that used to go to landfill become the chitosan that keeps food fresher for longer, helps crops grow stronger and replaces materials that cost the planet more to make. Waste in one place, productivity in another — not an afterthought. The whole design.
Get more from what's already grown.
Our job isn’t to grow more food. It’s to get more out of the food already being grown. Every extra day a product stays fresh is less of it thrown away — and more margin for everyone who touched it on the way to the shelf.
That’s the mission: reduce spoilage to unlock productivity and margin across the supply chain, while building a more climate-resilient food system along the way. Less waste, more value, same harvest.