On a summer Friday in Santa Cruz, a trio of surfers descended the sea stairs to the beach with waxed-up longboards under their arms. Stepping through seaweed on their way to the waves, they bantered about the benefits the sea greens might offer their industry.
The surfers — Cole Quinlan, Hudson Soelter and Amanda Vasconselos — are engineers at Cruz Foam, a startup that has developed biodegradable packing and shipping materials out of green pea starch. As the state grapples with how to implement a landmark plastic pollution act signed into law in 2022, the company is producing cost-competitive biofoam at a scale it hopes will eventually rid the Earth of single-use plastics.
Cruz Foam biomaterial engineer Cole Quinlan pours pea starch granules into the Extruder machine to make biofoam at their Cruz Foam laboratory in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Friday, Aug. 8, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Ashton Kutcher are investors and advisors. Customers range from The Caviar Co. based in San Francisco to the sustainable arm of Atlantic Packaging, a global shipping company.
Cruz Foam has figured out alternatives to two fossil fuel-derived plastics that linger for eternity in tiny fragments called microplastics. Scientists say these have contaminated the soil, filled our oceans, disrupted food chains and penetrated most people’s organs and bones.
Extruded polystyrene (XPS) foam, known by its brand name Styrofoam, was invented in 1941 by Dow Chemical Co. scientist Ray McIntire. The light, rigid, air-tight, water-resistant material first buoyed World War II boats and now insulates buildings around the world. Softer, versatile expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam, often mistaken as Styrofoam, followed in 1949. Invented by German chemist Fritz Stastny at BASF, the largest chemical producer in the world, EPS is in everything from coffee cups and takeout clamshells to packing peanuts.
Cruz Foam CEO John Felts and Chief Scientific Advisor and co-founder Marco Rolandi first met at the University of Washington, where Felts was a graduate student and Rolandi was his professor. The ocean lovers realized these same plastics were in their surfboards. They were “riding trash,” Felts recalled.
Cruz Foam biomaterial engineers Hudson Soelter, left, and Cole Quinlan surf in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Friday, Aug. 8, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
They started a lab in 2016 at UC Santa Cruz to try making surfboards out of chitin and its derivative chitosan — biological compounds found in crustacean shells, insect exoskeletons and fungal walls. It wasn’t easy or affordable.
“I was honestly in a windowless basement lab that was located right where the university’s collection center for foam packaging was. It was clearly staring me in the face — packaging, packaging, packaging, not surfboards,” Felts said. But it wasn’t until 2018 that Felts and Rolandi pivoted.
“The real problem was materials we use for 10 minutes that end up in the ocean,” said Felts, who still has the board he rode as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, carving around offshore drilling tar slicks that haunted the breaks.
After the “asininely ridiculous” initial goal of creating high-performance surfboard blanks, the entrepreneurs shifted to compostable packing and shipping materials. They knew they could succeed if they used existing technologies and production lines for the conversion.
Then, they heard from Maanas Maheshwari, a contact from their UW days.
Maheshwari, a “black sheep” engineer from a family of doctors, grew up in India with a tree-planting grandfather and a grandmother who used cloth shopping bags. First curious about weapons manufacturing, he fell into process engineering at the Bangkok-based Indorama Ventures, the biggest producer in the world of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) resins in everything from textiles to recyclable plastic bottles.
Wanting to try something new, he linked up with Felts around 2021. ”One day you wake up and you just feel different,” he said.
Now, he’s the company’s operations and supply chain vice president. In 2023 and 2024, Maheshwari set up a production line in Chicago and opened the Greensboro, North Carolina, center in June of last year.
“One thing that’s easy to do in California is start an idea,” he said, but the actualization of ideas was made possible by scaling up on the industry-friendly East Coast.
The Santa Cruz squad landed on pea starch because it was lighter than the shrimp shell matter they experimented with earlier, and it is a readily available byproduct of imitation meat production. The starch arrives at their headquarters as a powder. In their research and development lab — basically a giant kitchen — they created pellets that funnel into a machine called an extruder. The machine melts and heats the material at half the temperature plastics require before pushing it through a die — a disc with a shaped opening — at immense pressure.
Scrap foam from testing, a sustainable alternative to Styrofoam, sits at the Cruz Foam laboratory in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Friday, Aug. 8, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
The 4-by-8-foot foam sheets stacked on wooden shelves in the back look almost good enough to eat.
“It’s food safe for contact, but it’s not a meal replacement,” cautioned Soelter, though clients have posted videos of themselves taking bites.
Soelter grew up in Washington state, doing beach cleanups with his family, but eventually decided everyone should simply use less. Cruz biofoam, if left on a beach, will be gone in a matter of weeks, he said.
“I was torn about being an engineer because engineers’ main jobs are to produce things — Cruz Foam was weirdly perfect,” he said.
Hired after an internship, he is now the polymer materials engineer calculating the additives and processes that will embody the best balance of lightness, durability, compostability, affordability and presentation.
Quinlan, formerly the captain of the UC Santa Cruz surf team in college, who was hired around the same time as Soelter, is the electrical engineer who makes the magic happen in the machinery.
A key moment was figuring out how to fuse bars of biofoam into a sheet with water instead of glue.
Soelter and Quinlan have also contributed to the water-resistant qualities that have made Cruz Foam a favorite for cold chain shipping.
The product’s insulative properties appealed to The Caviar Co.’s co-founder and CEO, Petra Higby. “We don’t want to use Styrofoam — but we also don’t want to compromise the quality,” Higby told the sustainable packaging solutions network A New Earth Project.
She said Cruz Foam protects the company’s perishable sturgeon eggs with attractive products that are easy to use and discard.
The North Carolina factory expects to triple its crew to 18 people over the next year, and the company is expanding worldwide as well — international packaging company AMC Industrie, based in France, is now a customer. The Santa Cruz center also expects to open new positions in the Bay soon.
The engineers at Santa Cruz have also been getting non-shipping requests for items such as dissolving planters to start gardens. Once, a meat processor asked about plugs to keep entrails from sheep carcasses from spilling onto production lines.
But for now, the focus is still packing foam.
The team agrees that plastics still have a place in construction and the medical industry, but Cruz Foam has long-term lines of sight into these areas, too. They are also trying injection molding, an umbrella of plastic production of harder objects such as coffee stirrers, makeup applicators and smartphone cases.
Cruz Foam biomaterial engineers Hudson Soelter moves biofoams at their Cruz Foam laboratory in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Friday, Aug. 8, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Process and operations manager Ryan Tolles, who grew up all over the country living a “leave no trace” philosophy with his camping family, joined the company months after Maheshwari. He said it’s amusing to see workers accustomed to the East Coast work culture meet the West Coast’s collaborative approach.
“You can go to work for a paycheck or you can direct yourself to change the environment around you, and, conceptually, the world,” he said.
Tolles and his colleagues are confident that organic materials and processes hold the greatest innovations yet to come.
“It totally makes sense when you think about it,” Tolles said. “What’s the most advanced thing in the planet? The planet itself.”
