FoodHack Weekly: 20 Largest AgriFoodTech Raises of Q1

Scientist in banana labBy Nicola Spalding

Ingredient company Elo Life Systems raised a $20.5 million Series A extension from existing investors to commercialise its natural, monk fruit-derived sweetener, which it claims is 300 times sweeter than sugar without the calories.

 

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ELO at Future Food-Tech San Francisco: A ‘Giant Experiment’ to Diversify and Improve Our Food System 

We’re in the middle of a “giant experiment” with new ideas and technologies to significantly improve our global food system, a panel shared during a recent discussion at Future Food-Tech San Francisco.

The panel, “Diversifying the Food System with Novel Foods,” highlighted how technology can move the needle around the world to deliver sustainably sourced alternative foods that are tastier, healthier, and lower in cost.

“We’re at the very beginning of a giant experiment and we’re pushing down all these new paths,” said our CEO, Todd Rands.

Our global food system hasn’t evolved in decades because it had largely succeeded in its initial goal: putting calories into stomachs.

“We’ve been massively successful in creating a system that can deliver as many calories as possible to a growing population,” he said. “And those are World War II era challenges—and mission accomplished!

“We’re living with the consequences of that efficiency and success today. And the problems we’re now faced with involve chronic diseases, and we need to get better at delivering higher quality nutrition, not just the calories.”

Panelists talked about the need to protect the environment from the effects of large-scale agriculture, challenges that are spurring innovation around such tech as gene editing, precision fermentation, molecular farming, and new platforms to produce healthier foods and more sustainable solutions.

Communication plays a crucial role in convincing the world—in a compelling way—that our food system is flawed and there is a better way to deliver nutrition, said Fiona Bennie, managing director, Sustainability Studio for Accenture.

“The message to consumers has to be much different compared with B2B,” Bennie said. “It needs to be about super tasty, exciting, fun, accessible, affordable. It’s only the fast foods today that seem to project fun, and we’ve got to flip the script on that.”

Consumers will continue to make choices around foods they crave, Rands said. “For us, it becomes, ‘how do we create the same experiences, but in healthy, more sustainable forms?’”

Indeed, the panelists discussed that, while calorie needs are not spread evenly around the world, increasing nutrition density is critical, particularly in third world countries.

Rands, who had had a career in the ag business before starting Elo, spent time walking dusty roads in foreign countries and being surprised by what foods would be available.

“There would be no running water, no electricity, and refrigeration is a luxury,” he said. “And at the end of these dusty roads you’d have these kiosks selling potato chips and sugary sodas and cookies. We seem to be able to get those kinds of calories into these distant places.”

The challenge, he added, was about how to bring proper nutrition to shelf-stable products in different parts of the world.

One such example is ensuring that the world’s staple crops that have such a profound effect on diets can evolve and survive. Decades ago, the Gros Michel banana went extinct because of a plant disease—and a similar crisis is unfolding now.

The Cavendish, the most commonly available banana variety, also faces extinction. “It’s hard to think of any part of the world where the Cavendish banana is not part of their diet in terms of nutrition,” Rands said, adding the beloved crop is being wiped out by a fungus and will go away if we don’t act.

At Elo, we’re acting on it. “We’ve been using (our unique) genetic engineering and gene-editing tools to create a version of this crop that can survive that kind of extinction event,” Rands said.

But beyond the many innovative startups ready to shake up the system, panelists said it will take strategic partnerships across the board to bring lasting success.

“When I think of molecular farming, and imagine that world in 10 or 15 years, I think of our food company partners like artists,” Rands said. “You’re creating that experience the consumer craves—and it’s an incredibly complex chemical and psychological and processing equation that you’re solving. My job is to give you new colors to paint with.”

In other words, innovation itself.

ELO at World Agri-Tech San Francisco: Improving Our Food System Through New Technologies

The global food market is in dire need of being reinvented with technologies that can help deliver new crops and ingredients that are more nutritious, taste better and are more sustainable for the planet.

That was the key theme that emerged from a panel discussion during a recent World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in San Francisco.

The panelists discussed everything from advanced breeding systems to molecular farming to regulatory hurdles as new technology offers disruptive ideas and products to improve our global food system.

Our CEO, Todd Rands, said his Elo’s mission was to make food healthier and more sustainable using molecular farming.

While we can go out in nature and find a wide range of amazing ingredients in plants, he said, they’re rare, hard to get enough of from natural sources—and there’s no way to scale and produce them for our food system.

“We can reengineer that and produce, at scale, using plants essentially as biofactories,” Rands said.

Scientist in banana lab“This gives that natural pathway that we can engineer into those plants, with the rest of the part of the factory provided by the plant. Now, food and beverage companies have whole new tools to work with as they create new and interesting consumer experiences.”

Indeed, Tom Adams, CEO of Pairwise, said previous technologies were focused on what animals consumed, not what people consumed.

He added that there was a lot of value and opportunity in creating crops that fit into people’s lives—using technology to do so.

“We created a leafy green that has nutritional value like kale but has the crunch and taste of romaine,” he said, noting that it was possible with CRISPR technology.

Shimpei Takeshita, president representative director of Sanatech Seed, talked about the Japanese startup’s GABA-enriched tomato, its first CRISPR-edited food to enter the market in 2021.

These tomatoes, popular in Japan, contain high levels of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), an amino acid believed to aid relaxation, lower blood pressure, and sharpen mental acuity.

“Without this gene-editing technology,” Takeshita said, “these kinds of high concentration GABA tomatoes cannot happen.”

While there are challenges, including existing, outdated regulatory frameworks, the panelists see a bright future.

“We can improve crops that, traditionally, have been overlooked,” Rands said. “And they’re not commodities, but incredibly important staples to the world’s diet.”

Rands noted that Elo Life Systems was solving a crisis affecting Cavendish, the most commonly available banana variety. In short, this banana is facing extinction due to a fungus ravaging roots in banana farms around the world.

“We’re using [our unique] genetic engineering and gene-editing tools to accelerate what normally would have taken decades of breeding to bring genes over from related crops and species of bananas,” he said. “We’ve advanced the breeding so that it’s disease-resistant and can survive.”

In other words, new companies and products are changing the narrative from a heavy focus on farming efficiency to a focus on providing better tasting ingredients that provide more nutrition, not just calories, the latter of which was a strategy that dates to World War II.

“Now we have a very different set of problems that we’re solving for, with human health, chronic diseases, climate change,” Rands said. “When people see the benefit of what we’re going to deliver to a new generation of products, it wins hearts and minds and changes their experiences with the foods and why they’re buying the things they’re buying. And that’s the winning formula.”

Food Business News: AI’s role in innovation expanding rapidly

By Donna Berry

SAN FRANCISCO — At times attendees of the Future Food Tech conference held March 21-22 in San Francisco may have been skeptical about the futuristic discussions taking place during the program and on the exhibit floor. At other times, it all came together and made sense. And even better – it made sense for right now.

“Foods have to be delicious and nutritious,” said Isabelle Esser, chief research and innovation, quality and food safety officer for Danone SA, Paris. “Technology needs scale and impact. It’s all about positive nutrition, and this requires collaboration.”

That’s much of what Elo Life Systems, Durham, NC, is striving to accomplish. Elo Life’s molecular farming platform produces ingredients that may be difficult to harvest from natural sources and may not be synthesized through artificial or other techniques. The company produces easy-to-grow crops as bio factories for the ingredients.

“We’re on a mission to unlock nature’s abilities to make consumers’ favorite foods more delicious, healthy and planet friendly,” said Todd Rands, chief executive officer of Elo Life Systems. “It’s about making foods more nutrient dense, not calorically dense, which has been the case with our food system since the second half of the 20th century.

“We use AI (artificial intelligence) and proprietary algorithms to gain deeper insights across native genomes, genes and traits. Innovation with healthy and sustainable food is desperately needed, and our collective future depends on creating new solutions that do not exist today.”

The company’s first product is a monk fruit-derived sweetener that will launch in 2026. Rands said the company is working on the production of varied bioactive ingredients and novel proteins.

 

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Fast Company: How Elo Life Systems is helping save bananas from extinction

Elo Life Systems is one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in the small & mighty (1-50 employees) category.

BY REBECCA BARKER

The Cavendish banana—the most-common species sold in stores across the United States, Europe, and China—is at risk of going extinct from Fusarium oxysporum, a deadly fungus. Elo Life Systems, a biotech startup which was spun out of a gene-editing company in December 2021, genetically engineered Cavendish bananas in an effort to make them resistant to the fungus.

In April 2023, Dole planted Elo’s gene-edited bananas—Elo altered a handful of the fruit’s 30,000-plus genes to generate proteins that will defend it from the fungus—to carry out a field trial on a plantation in Central America. Elo is also working to use its computational biology and “molecular farming” that’s designed to teach fruits and vegetables how to behave to create sustainable alternatives to environmentally intensive produce.

The company, which raised $24.5 million in February 2023, is creating an alternative to the increasingly popular zero-calorie monk fruit sweetener. At present, monk fruit is expensive to source, only grows in particular climates, and rots quickly. Elo uses watermelons and sugar beets as biofactories to grow the monk fruit protein and then extracts it to make a lab-grown substitute. The company believes it’s on track to commercialize the sweetener by 2025.
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Food Ingredients First: Elo advances sweetness while reducing sugar

04 Mar 2024 — In a Part 2 interview with Todd Rands, CEO of Elo Life Sciences, he discusses with Food Ingredients First the company’s advancements in its monk fruit sweetener which is slated for commercialization in 2026. This molecular-farming product is pegged as the “holy grail” of sweeteners — a natural, monk fruit-derived sweetener that is 300 times sweeter than sugar without calories.

The company is also exploring the production of other ingredients, including novel proteins, natural preservatives, and high-value flavors and bio-actives.

Elo Life Sciences also recently announced its oversubscribed series A2 financing round, raising US$20.5 million to boost its healthy and sustainable food ingredients pipeline.

“We saw a huge emphasis that consumers, governments and companies have on reducing sugar because of all the negative health effects that it is causing. You can measure it in the trillions of dollars per year in terms of the costs of all chronic diseases and the burden on society that sugar creates,” says Rands.

Sweetener with coffee.
Monk fruit can be used in thousands of food and beverage products to reduce sugar and artificial sweeteners while also enhancing nutrition.
“If we can reduce sugar in people’s diets and get to a place where you get all the sweetness, but none of the calories and the other harmful effects that sugar causes, that would be the single, most important thing we could do to improve human health.”

Using molecular farming, Elo is able to take the monk fruit and put it into crops where it can be scaled, grown and made more readily available at a very affordable price. Rands says monk fruit supplies “a clean taste but with none of the calories.”

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Food Ingredients 1st: Elo Life Systems’ CEO: Molecular farming is the beginning of reinventing our food supply chains

todd rands26 Feb 2024 — Elo Life Systems is reimagining food systems by unlocking the diversity of nature to make ingredients healthier and more sustainable, according to company CEO Todd Rands. In a detailed (Part 1) interview with Food Ingredients First, Rands explains the technologies and strategies the company is pursuing to get the best out of food and future supply chains.

“There are so many ingredients out there that can help us reinvent our supply chains. We’re looking at molecular farming as the future and asking questions such as, ‘How else can we apply these tactics and reinvent food production? How can we start adapting our food systems to be more efficient and still give food companies and consumers everything they need and want?”

Through its molecular farming platform, the company produces sought-after ingredients that can be difficult to harvest from natural sources and cannot be synthesized through artificial or other techniques.

It uses easy-to-grow crops as biofactories for these ingredients, enabling local, commercial-scale production while reducing their cost and environmental footprint.

Elo Life Systems spun out from Precision BioSciences in 2021, Rands tells us. “We wanted to focus on molecular farming solely as it is a relatively new area that the industry is starting to understand the huge potential that it has. Most of the big food companies are accelerating in the alt-meat space with proteins from plants, but we are focused more on diverse molecules and ingredients that come from flavors, bioactives and colors that come all from nature.”

“We have a different focus in our molecular farming systems than most of those other companies out there today.” Rands believes what sets Elo apart is “the ability to understand how to make these ingredients derived from nature.”

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Raleigh News & Observer: Durham agtech startup strives to save the banana from potential extinction

By Brian Gordon

It’s happened before. In the 1950s, the world’s most common commercial banana — the kind found inside most U.S. grocery stores — was a variety called Gros Michel. But then the spread of a fungus named Fusarium began to wipe it out, so growers shifted to a new variety, the Cavendish, which proved resistant to the illness the fungus caused.

Tasty, transportable and growable year-round, Cavendish bananas dominate the global market today. It is now a grocery mainstay, accounting for roughly 99% of global banana exports. Yet this concentration also makes the industry susceptible to an old foe.

A new strain of Fusarium is spreading, and some fear it could cause the Cavendish to go extinct. Fusarium lives in the soil and enters plants through their roots, rotting crops from the inside by constraining their water and nutrients. The condition is known as Fusarium wilt or Panama disease. It is moving faster, researchers have found, across Asia, South America and Africa.

Once the fungus colonizes an area, it can ruin whole swatches of once-fertile land.

The World Banana Forum, a division overseen by the United Nations, has created a task force to address Fusarium wilt. Governments from Taiwan to Belize have gotten involved, too. And in 2021, two of the largest fresh banana producers, Dole and Chiquita, entered a global alliance to help halt the threat.

Joining these international efforts to save the Cavendish is a Research Triangle biotech startup.

“If you think about one food that you could imagine in every country, in every culture of the world, there are not very many that make that list, but sweet bananas are one of them,” said Todd Rands, president and CEO of Elo Life Systems. “And so, it’s such an important part of the staple diets around the world.”

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Food Business News: Elo Life Systems Raises $20.5 Million

sugar pouring from a spoon into coffeeBy Brooke Just

DURHAM, NC. — Elo Life Systems has raised $20.5 million in an oversubscribed Series A2 funding round. The funding round was led by DCVC Bio and Novo Holdings. Other investors included Hanwha Next Generation Opportunity Fund, AccelR8, and Alexandria Venture Investments. With this funding round, the company has raised $45 million to date, according to the company.

Elo Life Systems is an ingredient company for the food and beverage industry. Elo Life’s molecular farming platform produces ingredients that may be difficult to harvest from natural sources and cannot be synthesized through artificial or other techniques. The company produces easy-to-grow crops as bio factories for these ingredients, according to the company.

With the funding, Elo Life Systems said it will scale and commercialize its sweetener product, increase its molecular farming pipeline of healthy and sustainable ingredients, and expand its crop protection and productivity efforts.

“At Elo, we’re on a mission to unlock nature’s abilities to make consumers’ favorite foods more delicious, healthy and planet friendly,” said Todd Rands, chief executive officer at Elo. “With strong support from our investors, we’re well positioned to scale up our production and stay on track to launch our first product in 2026.”

 
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The Plant Base: Elo Life Systems Secures $20.5m in Series A2 Funding Round

By Rafaela Sousa

US ingredients company Elo Life Systems has secured $20.5 million in an oversubscribed Series A2 financing round.

The round was jointly led by DCVC Bio and Novo Holdings. It included participation from Hanwha Next Generation Opportunity Fund, AccelR8 and Alexandria Venture Investments.

The funding will be used to scale and commercialise the company’s sweetener product, increase its molecular-farming pipeline for healthy and sustainable ingredients and expand its crop protection and productivity efforts, including work to save the banana from extinction.

Elo explained that through its molecular farming platform, the business produces sought-after ingredients “that are difficult to harvest from natural sources and cannot be synthesized through artificial or other techniques”. The company, therefore, uses easy-to-grow crops as biofactories for these ingredients, reducing costs and environmental footprint.

Elo is introducing its first molecular-farming product, a natural sweetener derived from monk fruit that is 300 times sweeter than sugar and calorie-free. Scheduled for launch in 2026, this sweetener can be used in numerous food and beverage products to reduce sugar and artificial sweeteners while improving nutrition.

Additionally, the company is exploring the production of various ingredients, such as innovative proteins, natural preservatives and high-value flavours and bio-actives.

Elo CEO Todd Rands said: “At Elo, we’re on a mission to unlock nature’s abilities to make consumers’ favourite foods more delicious, healthy and planet friendly. With strong support from our investors, we’re well positioned to scale up our production and stay on track to launch our first product in 2026.”

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