Alongside the industry heavyweights famed for pioneering the plant-based category, smaller businesses with big ambitions are also championing the future of sustainable, animal-free food. In this month’s Start-up spotlight, we speak to Elo Life Systems, a US-based company that aims to meet growing consumer demand for healthier natural ingredients through providing a natural, zero-calorie sweetener created through molecular farming methods. Todd Rands, the company’s CEO, tells us more.

What is Elo Life Systems’ long-term mission?

Elo’s mission is to unlock nature’s abilities to make consumers’ favorite foods more delicious, healthy and planet friendly. From unique plant-based sweeteners to saving crops like the banana from extinction, we focus on ingredients that empower consumers to feel good about the food they eat every day.

How can your molecular farming approach provide benefits for our global food system?

Molecular farming allows us to completely reimagine our food system, from what we grow, to how and where we grow it. It enables more local, planet-friendly sourcing of ingredients, while expanding our access to the diversity in nature, effectively reducing the environmental impact of food production.

Via molecular farming, Elo produces sought-after ingredients that are difficult to harvest from natural sources and cannot be synthesised through artificial or other techniques. This provides better quality nutrition that is affordable and accessible to everyone. We use easy-to-grow crops as biofactories for these ingredients, enabling local, commercial-scale production while reducing their cost and environmental footprint.

How is Elo Life Systems innovating in this space?

Elo’s innovation starts with a deep understanding of the natural pathways that produce the most desirable ingredients for our food system. Utilizing advanced data analytics and computational biology, we find the best combinations of natural genes and enzymes to produce our ingredients, construct and optimise the pathways in plants, and then grow the resulting crops to produce our ingredients at commercial scale. We are harnessing nature to sustainably power the ultimate biofactory.

What are the benefits of Elo’s natural sweetener for the plant-based food industry?

Elo’s plant-based sweetener is 300 times sweeter than sugar, with zero calories, and a taste profile that is very similar to sugar. Our sweetener empowers food and beverage companies to reduce sugar and artificial sweeteners while improving nutrition in thousands of everyday food and beverage products people enjoy. And because it is plant based, it helps the industry meet the growing consumer demand for healthier and more natural ingredients in their foods. At the same time, our molecular farming platform enables more local, planet-friendly production, effectively reducing the environmental impact of food production.

How are machine learning and data analytics technologies shaping the company’s approach?

Machine learning and analytics greatly speed the process and the insights we’re able to uncover. We use sophisticated data analytics and algorithms to find the patterns in nature. This enables us to design and optimise the complex metabolic pathways that produce our ingredients, like Elo’s sweetener, in nature. And by constructing those pathways in crops, Elo can affordably scale commercial production.

How can Elo’s approach provide an environmentally friendly solution?

Molecular farming is completely changing the environmental footprint of food production. From what we grow, to how and where we grow it, molecular farming – where plants utilise sunlight, water, and CO2 to create energy – enables us to produce more while using substantially fewer resources.

How does this work? For ingredients that are highly desired but rare in nature, we cannot simply strip natural sources of plants from delicate native ecosystems, nor can we continue to deforest land to create more space to grow additional crops. Using crops as biofactories via molecular farming enables us to produce those desirable ingredients in existing crops rather than destroying natural sources or taking up more land. Produce more, use less.

Our sweetener is a great example. It is inspired by monk fruit, which has been used in China for hundreds of years and is increasingly popular in the west. It is prized by consumers and food and beverage companies alike for its sweet taste and no calories. But monk fruit can only be grown in remote valleys of China, and requires extensive labour to grow, harvest and process in Chinese factories before being shipped all the way around the world for use in our foods. A totally unsustainable and expensive production model.

Through molecular farming, we reduce monk fruit’s cost and carbon footprint through local production. We use our biofactories to produce monk fruit sweetener in other easier to grow crops. And we’re able to produce the sweetener as a co-product in existing crop systems. This ensures we don’t require additional land and other resources to produce our sweetener.

What has been the biggest challenge faced by the company so far?

There’s been great reception to our sweetener, as everyone is seeking to reduce excess sugar in their diets. The biggest challenge thus far arises from the complexity of the food and beverage markets. There are literally hundreds of thousands of applications in products and brands which each need time to formulate, evaluate, market test and prepare for commercial launch with Elo’s new sweetener. For Elo, that has led us to seek partners that share our vision for innovation… that are daring to dream big and throw out the old conventional approaches to producing food. We’ve found a few such partners, where we can combine their commercial capabilities with Elo’s technological, biological and agricultural expertise. Finding true synergies with such partners is key to our success.

Where is the company in its commercialisation journey?

We’re moving from the lab to the field, where we will build our production scale in the coming year. And we are continuing to secure partners that are ready to work with Elo to reduce sugar and other artificial ingredients in their foods and beverages. We expect to have the initial regulatory (GRAS) status with FDA that is needed to commercialise our sweetener by 2025.

What has been its biggest achievement to date?

We often focus on the technical product achievements when listing our biggest accomplishments, and there have been plenty. We are doing something that is incredibly complex, something that no one else has done before. Producing sweeteners by building natural multi-step enzymatic pathways that all need to work in synchrony inside of a plant is not easy. But seeing that work come to life with a product that everyone is excited to taste is incredibly rewarding.

But our biggest achievement at Elo, by far, is the team and culture we’ve built. A group with unparalleled intellectual horsepower, driven to take on the toughest challenges, motivated by Elo’s mission to improve human health through food, and unified by our values – that is the ultimate secret of our success.

What’s next for Elo Life Systems?

The next two years will be incredibly eventful at Elo, as we scale up production of our first product using molecular farming – Elo’s all-natural zero-calorie sweetener. We will also be working with CPG and ingredient companies to incorporate and evaluate Elo’s sweetener in new foods and beverages. And we have our eye on the horizon as we explore other new ingredients to produce via molecular farming, including novel proteins, natural preservatives and high-value flavors and bio-actives. The future is incredibly bright, as molecular farming enables us to deliver more accessible and affordable nutrition, while improving the health of our planet.

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