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.”
Read the full article