26 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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