Carrageenan is a high-molecular-weight polysaccharide with a history in food dating back over 600 years. It was originally used by the Irish more than six centuries ago to make a kind of pudding from a type of seaweed known as "Irish Moss," which contains carrageenan and imparts a jelly-like texture. In the 18th century, due to a severe famine, a large number of Irish people emigrated to the United States, bringing their knowledge of cultivating red seaweed to the New England region. With the emergence of carrageenan separation technology, industrial carrageenan production and processing gradually developed on the East Coast of the United States.
In 1837, the formal report on the extraction of polysaccharides from Irish Moss was made, and in 1892, carrageenan was first officially named "Carrageenin" by Stanwood. During World War II in the 1940s, the carrageenan industry experienced rapid development in the United States, becoming the most widely used seaweed extract in the global food industry after the war. In the 1950s, the molecular structure of carrageenan was officially determined, and it was named "Carrageenan" by the Polysaccharides Nomenclature Committee of the American Chemical Society.
In the 1960s, carrageenan was formally regulated as a food additive in the United States. In the 1970s, the Philippines began mass cultivation of carrageenan's source material, Kappaphycus alvarezii (locally known as "gigante"), providing a sustainable source for large-scale carrageenan production.