The story began in Milan during Expo 2015.
Amid discussions about food, sustainability and innovation, a simple question emerged:
What if the by-products of the food industry could become a resource?
Orange peels, coffee grounds and vegetable residues were everywhere, usually treated as waste. But they also represented an untapped material potential.
Krill Design: design as experimentation
In 2018, Ivan Calimani, together with Yack Di Maio and Martina Lamperti, founded Krill Design.
The first phase combined design, 3D printing and material experimentation to explore how organic residues could become new objects.
The first real application came with Autogrill, which challenged the team to transform the orange peels generated daily by its juice bars into design products. Soon after, collaborations with San Pellegrino and the Municipality of Milan expanded this experimentation, generating new materials and new forms. Among these initiatives was Co.ffee Era, a project collecting coffee grounds from Milanese cafés and transforming them into everyday objects.
In 2022, Krill Design launched Ohmie, the first lamp made from orange peels. The project gained international attention through Kickstarter and Indiegogo, demonstrating that bio-based materials could combine sustainability and design.
From design to material
Through these experiments, one insight became clear:
the real innovation was not the objects themselves, but the material behind them: REKRILL®.
KRILLMAT: scaling the material
In 2024, with the support of Crédit Agricole, Primo Capital and Algebris, the company began developing its own industrial production plant.
This marked the transition from a design-driven startup to a material company focused on industrial production.
Today, under the name KRILLMAT, the company develops and produces REKRILL® bio-based polymers for industrial applications.
What began as experimentation in circular design has evolved into a new approach to materials: a shift from objects to materials, and from experimentation to scalable solutions engineered for industry.
