Entrepreneur Elín Traustadóttir: “The collagen market doesn’t have a purity problem. It has one it doesn’t test for. That’s where the real opportunity is.”

For Elín Traustadóttir, it started at sea. Years spent out on the water in the North Atlantic left her dealing with knees that ached with every roll of the swell, and rather than simply accept it, she began formulating her own marine collagen to ease it. What came out of that, years later, was AEYLíN: wild cod skin, milled down to the lowest molecular weight on the market.

Before AEYLíN, Elín spent years working in interior design, trained to notice material quality, texture, and the gap between something that looks premium and something that is. That eye for substance over surface is what turned a personal fix into a brand built around one ingredient, wild North Atlantic cod skin, and one figure the rest of the market rarely publishes: molecular weight.

– The European collagen market is worth around €4.05 billion right now and is forecast to grow at roughly 8% a year through the end of the decade, so there’s no question about appetite. What’s missing is definition. There is currently no EU-authorised health claim for collagen, so brands can describe what’s in the jar, but nobody is allowed to promise what it will do. A lot of the industry has filled that gap with tone rather than evidence, she says, continuing,

– The collagen market doesn’t have a purity problem. It has one it doesn’t test for. That’s where the real opportunity is. For us, the number we put front and centre is molecular weight. Most of the market sits at 4,000 to 6,000 Daltons. AEYLíN is milled to 2,000. That figure is measured. It comes off a lab result, not a guess.

Would you agree that Iceland is the perfect “test bed” as a market? You have a wealthy population, a significant amount of tourists, and is situated right in between two continents. Or what’s your view on the current state of the Icelandic market?

– Yes, I do agree. And that is something I probably didn’t appreciate early enough myself. As you touched upon, Iceland do has a small, but wealthy population, a huge amount of tourist footfall relative to its size, and it sits geographically between Europe and North America, so a brand built here gets exposed to an international audience faster than the population number alone would suggest. Around 2.3 million foreign visitors came to Iceland in 2025, the great majority through Keflavik (the international airport, Ed’s note), which is an extraordinary number set against a population of about 400,000.

– The Icelandic market itself is small but sophisticated. People here expect provenance and quality claims to be real, not just marketing, because it’s a small enough country that reputations travel fast. That’s a good discipline for a brand to grow up in before it goes international.

Traustadóttir launched AEYLíN with the help of the only collagen facility on the island. It handles the processing itself, taking raw cod skin and turning it into the finished collagen peptide to the specification, and at the standard set.

– That let us build the product around one species instead of a blend of different whitefish. A lot of collagen brands do that, which isn’t necessarily a problem, but it does make it harder to hold a consistent molecular weight and a consistent story about where the material came from. We wanted a single traceable source rather than a blend designed mainly to keep costs down.

– I’ll be honest that relying on one facility is a real risk. Being the only dedicated collagen manufacturing facility in Iceland, if anything happened to it, we’d have a problem. That’s why we’ve also secured a backup supplier, so we’re not exposed to a single point of failure. Diversifying the supply base is simply the responsible thing to do, and it’s also something investors specifically want to see before they back a business at this stage.

– The raw material itself is wild North Atlantic cod skin. It isn’t unique to Icelandic waters. What happens in Iceland is the processing and the standard we hold it to. European Innovation grants helped get early production off the ground, enough to properly test the market rather than launch on assumptions. That was a good use of that funding, and we’ve built on what we learned from it, with international ambitions for where we go next.

How do you expect the collagen market to develop?

– I think the claims environment keeps tightening rather than loosening. A lot of the clinical testing in this category is commissioned and designed by the same brand selling the product, so it tends to produce exactly the result that brand paid for.

– If you ask what regulatory tightening does to a brand like AEYLíN, I think it favours us. If anything, tighter claims rules should make consumers more sceptical of studies commissioned to sell a product, and more interested in brands who simply tell them what’s in the packet and where it came from and let consumer reviews speak for themselves.

– Regulatory tightening doesn’t only threaten the brands making the claims. It also threatens the retailers, the contract packers, and the platforms that carry products with unsubstantiated claims, because that liability moves downstream too.

– In the near future, I think we’d be talking about collagen showing up in more tailored formats: subscription packets tailored to each consumer’s lifestyle, daily doses in stick packs that make it quicker and easier to use on the go. I think collagen is moving toward being an essential ingredient people remember to take, not something that sits in a supplement drawer, forgotten after two weeks. You know the way so many vitamins and supplements end up.

Lastly, for you, what’s next?

– Matcha, Turmeric, and Cocoa Collagen were previously very popular and will be relaunched next year, built on the same 2,000 Dalton base and the same single-source cod skin, Traustadóttir explains. She adds: 

– The idea is to merge collagen into your lifestyle rather than asking people to remember a supplement pill or a vitamin tablet. Customers are already making collagen coffee in the morning, matcha in the afternoon and cocoa in the evening, all built around collagen. Warm drinks packed with collagen protein, just a different way of taking it. 

– We’re also still in the middle of raising capital to fund the next phase—the product range and the wider international marketing campaigns—aiming to meet investors who understand what it takes to build a premium brand in this space. And who take provenance as seriously as we do.

Elín Traustadóttir’s extra insights

– I look at supply concentration. A lot of the marine collagen sold in Europe traces back to a small number of processing facilities, even when the finished brands look completely different on shelf. Executives evaluating a collagen brand for partnership or investment should ask two separate questions: where the fish itself originates, and separately, where and how it’s processed. Those are often two different places, and conflating them is how a lot of provenance stories fall apart under scrutiny.