THE ENTREPRENEUR
SAM BAKER, 25
Co-founder and CEO
WriggleBrew, Orlando
Sam Baker fondly remembers fishing with his grandfather while growing up in Oviedo, northeast of Orlando. But in 2019, when they returned to one of their favorite spots, Baker’s grandfather gestured toward the water: “We’ve been skunked here. All the fish are dead.”
What Baker saw shocked him: an algae-choked pond reeking of decay. A new housing development nearby washed fertilizer into the water, contributing to a deadly algae bloom, Baker says. “If I have kids, where am I going to take them fishing? That doesn’t seem very sustainable if new developments destroy the lakes and ponds.”
Baker says that’s when the idea for a future startup venture, WriggleBrew, was hatched with his science-minded friend Gabe DeGaglia. Their goal: to replace synthetic fertilizers with a natural alternative made from worm poop.
The two had bonded in high school over chemistry experiments and science fairs, earning scholarships that led them into the University of Central Florida’s nanomaterials lab. There they worked on quirky environmental projects, like building supercapacitors from compost, and even founded a student club called the “Knights of Trash” to clean up their campus. But the fertilizer disaster near Baker’s childhood fishing spot changed everything. “I went back to Gabe at the lab and asked what could we do to solve it.”
DeGaglia had an idea: earthworms. Their castings are natural fertilizers that don’t create harmful runoff. “If you can use them instead of synthetic fertilizer, you cannot have runoff happen, and therefore you can’t have red tide, you can’t have algal blooms, etc. I thought, if it worked, it could be groundbreaking,” Baker recalls. The challenge: Worm manure in liquid form isn’t shelf-stable, but Baker and DeGaglia set out to find a way. Two years of tinkering later, they had cracked the formula, selling early batches at garden shows.
‘A Eureka Moment’
WriggleBrew officially launched in March 2022, and within a month won UCF’s top business competition, The Joust, providing seed funding. The startup soon began landing their first Florida nurseries and farms as customers, including Lukas Nursery, 4Roots Farm, IMG Citrus and Ralph Taylor’s Nurseries. (WriggleBrew also sells on Amazon).
Around this time, Baker and DeGaglia came across research pointing to a possibility that worms could also digest plastics. If worms could eat plastics and still produce usable fertilizer, the impact could be staggering, the duo thought.
The co-founders submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation, describing a process to test whether worms, and eventually artificial “worm guts,” could break down plastics safely. NSF awarded them $275,000 in early 2023. “We set up a real lab instead of my mom’s garage,” Baker says. “Six months later, we had a breakthrough.”
Using their worm guts, the team decomposed a pound of Styrofoam in just five days, faster and at larger scale than anyone had managed before, Baker says. Another 70 tests followed, confirming the process worked on plastic bags and bottles, too.
That was in mid-2023, and their breakthrough also coincided with WriggleBrew’s first major commercial sales of fertilizer — “a Eureka moment” for the startup. Now the startup could begin to bring in serious revenue, and at the same time chase a solution to the urgent problem of plastic waste.
In 2024, they secured a federal agriculture department grant for $125,000, validating for them that multiple U.S. government agencies see WriggleBrew’s potential, Baker said. “That’s two sets of Ph.D. scientist review boards giving it a thumbs up. We felt like, OK, we can really do this.” WriggleBrew also swept the prestigious Cade Prize for Inventivity, taking home the grand prize, category prize and student choice award.
But the biggest win yet arrived this past summer: a $1.2-million Phase II grant from NSF. The funding enabled partnerships with Berkeley National Lab and two European research teams to pursue their research. On the commercial side, WriggleBrew secured a major distributor, selling 25,000 gallons of fertilizer to corn and soy farms across the Midwest. Farmers pre-ordered 40,000 gallons for the following season.
“The dream has been to replace synthetic fertilizer with an organic alternative in a cost-saving way for farmers, and it’s starting to manifest. The dream is to go from shipping 40,000 gallons a year to 4 million gallons a year. Likewise, with plastics I’m looking at doing a couple hundred pounds of plastic destruction this year; in 5 to 10 years, I want to be doing one ton a day. Instead of that going to the landfill, it comes to us and then leaves here as soil, free of microplastics. That’s the dream.”
Squirm and Persist
For all the wins, there have been so many challenges — learning finance, people management, grant writing, sales, logistics and even how to clean a 275-gallon tote, Baker says. “I look back at myself when I first started this business, and I was hopelessly naive.”
But the close-knit team, many of them friends from high school or UCF, stuck together. “It grew almost like a co-op. They were volunteering until we could pay them. Now we’re nine people, we still play games after work,” Baker says. “Being a startup is very fun if you have the right attitude.”
What’s next? “Ship more fertilizer, destroy more plastic,” he says. That entails scaling up production and better understanding all the ways WriggleBrew adds value to farmers, while building relationships with plastic waste producers, county extension offices and local governments.
Baker is candid about the stakes: Microplastics are in our food, our water, even our brains. “The human health risks can’t be understated, and history shows us what happens when we ignore things like this,” he says, referring to lead. “We can’t wait 30 or 40 years to find out the damage.”