Solazyme Chops Roquette (again) in the Great Algae Flour Fight

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... a judgment for Solazyme and against Roquette, confirming an earlier arbitration award we covered last February in The Great Algae Robbery, here.

Just before Christmas, Robinson (Judge Sue Robinson, Federal District Judge for the District of Delaware) ruled that “the court confirms the Award. More specifically, the court grants Solazyme’s motion for an order to confirm the Award and denies Roquette’s motion for an order to vacate the Award, as well as Roquette’s motions for summary judgment as to its declaratory judgment actions. Judgment shall be entered accordingly.”

The background

For those who have not yet read The Great Algae Robbery, the case revolved around the use of Solazyme’s intellectual property to create high lipid algal flour and an algal protein with attractive nutritional characteristics.

How do you get a good flavor, but with healthy fats (instead of transfats, for instance) and other nutritional benefits? That was the challenge. The company that could come up with a healthy and palatable flour — many saw a route to riches.”

Herein lay the promise of the Solazyme technology, which was contributed to a joint venture with Roquette Freres, called Solazyme Roquette Nutritionals. When the JV dissolved in 2013, arbitration was invoked to determine who owned what of the intellectual property.

In early 2015, arbitrators ruled comprehensively in favor of Solazyme, including ownership of “[a]ll Roquette patent applications filed on or after November 3, 2010 relating to microalgal foods, microalgal food ingredients, and microalgal nutritionals, as well as all methods relating to making and using the same, including but not limited to those” patents listed by the Panel. This, after the arbitrators determined tat Roquette had been secretly filing duplicate patent apps on the (then) SNR intellectual property, only filing for them as Roquette and omitting Solazyme’s ownership interest.

At which point, Roquette headed for Federal District court to overturn the arbitration ruling. Not an easy undertaking, as under the Federal Arbitration Act, a court’s role Under the Act, Judge Robinson noted that “a court’s function in reviewing a commercial arbitration award is “narrow in the extreme” and is “extremely deferential.”

You can buy it today. Algility that is, a Roquette product based on the SNR patents which have been awarded to Solazyme in arbitration and now confirmed in US District Court.

Transformative for diets and the corporate fortunes of their makers — it is not hard to guess why the Food Ingredients “Europe Excellence Awards” for 2013 gave the nod to Algility as “the most innovative ingredient” of the year. And no surprise that Roquette values the patents and Solazyme wants them back. READ MORE