KANSAS CITY —Two-thirds of consumers today say they are trying to limit their sugar consumption, according to the 2024 Food and Health Survey from the International Food Information Council (IFIC). That’s an increase of 5 percentage points from just a year ago, which means the concerns among consumers are continuing to rise.
Added sugars are often the target of these efforts. However, three in 10 consumers surveyed by IFIC are trying to limit or avoid both added sugars and sugars that are naturally present in foods.
There’s a great deal of technology being applied to the sweetener space. Molecular farming is another science being explored to produce specialty ingredients. Instead of using a bioreactor, as is the case with precision fermentation, plants are genetically modified to produce the ingredients.
Elo Life Systems has a molecular farming platform that 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. The company’s first product is a monk fruit-derived sweetener that will launch in 2026.
“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 Life Systems. “It’s about making foods more nutrient-dense, not calorically dense. We use artificial intelligence and proprietary algorithms to gain deeper insights across native genomes, genes and traits.”
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