Oh, I didn't bother responding to that one because I didn't...

Oh, I didn't bother responding to that one because I didn't think it really needed a response. It will be expensive for the same reason almost everything else with free ingredients is expensive. Air is free, but if I want to buy, say, liquid nitrogen (harvested from the air) or argon etc. it will be relatively expensive. Wild harvested fish don't get produced by handing cash to Neptune, but they're still expensive. The primary ingredients for your vegetables are sunlight, water and CO2, but they're hardly free. It's not like you can set up some black box algae factory, staff it with oompa loompas and have the product stream out on a conveyor belt. There will be all sorts of costs, everything from admin and maintenance to processing, marketing, packaging, distribution, basic laborer wages, etc. If it was almost free, why wouldn't someone else already be doing it? Currently most algae is farmed in ponds. AEB has made the claim that their super high tech (according to them) method is cheaper than growing the stuff in ponds. That's pretty hard to swallow and they don't have a great track record with backing up their claims.

As you keep pointing out, this is not a brand new product. This is not an open niche. So, unless demand increases (either as a fad or ongoingly), AEB will need to undercut existing suppliers, who are already getting free sunlight and CO2.