The food industry is ripe for reinvention. For far too long, it’s been focused on inexpensive, processed foods that commonly favor calories over everyday nutrition—and the consequences can be devastating for both consumers and the planet.

Annually, the economic, environmental, and health costs of food consumption—to the tune of nearly $20 trillion—underscore a narrative in which millions of people are suffering and dying from diet-related diseases. Traditional approaches continue to fall short.

At Elo, we’re reimagining the future of food, part of a transformation that’s sweeping the global food system. We’re harnessing the untapped potential of nature to make food tastier, healthier, and more resilient—while requiring less from our overburdened planet.

And we’re innovating around a method that we believe will be a major game-changer: molecular farming.

Molecular Farming: What Is It, Exactly?

Quite simply, molecular farming—where plants use sunlight, water, and CO2 to create ingredients—is changing the environmental footprint of food production.

It’s the process of producing valuable, natural molecules—think sweeteners, spices, proteins, and other key food ingredients—using the power of nature. Using easy-to-grow crops as “biofactories” via molecular farming enables us to produce desirable ingredients in existing crops rather than destroying limited, natural sources or taking up more land.

As a result of this work, we can completely reimagine our food system, from what we grow to how and where we grow it.

Nature provides an endless range of amazing ingredients—flavors, colors, even preservatives. The problem: many are rare. They’re both hard to source and hard to grow; that makes them expensive, and getting any meaningful volume would be destructive to their native environments.

Molecular farming enables the production of these ingredients to become both affordable and accessible.

How Does Molecular Farming Work?

In plants, scientists identify rare, naturally occurring compounds that have the potential to positively affect the way we make our food, usually as a key ingredient in a food or beverage product.

Here’s an example. Our first molecular-farming product is the “holy grail” of sweeteners—natural sweeteners that are up to 300 times sweeter than sugar, without calories! The sweeteners feature mogrosides, which are the sweet molecules found in monk fruit. Big food and beverage brands prize monk fruit sweetener for its sweetness and zero calories. But monk fruit is only grown in China, so supply is expensive and unreliable. The extraction process in Chinese factories often affects monk fruit sweetener’s purity and taste. And importing it has a big sustainability impact.

Through molecular farming, we identify pathways in rare plants that produce their desirable ingredients. Those pathways are then added to crops that can be grown nearly anywhere—and they’re optimized to produce even more. In turn, these new crops function as biofactories to produce these ingredients at scale.

Here’s an example: using watermelon as a biofactory to produce our sweetener. Watermelon is a common crop that can be grown nearly anywhere, cheaply and efficiently, which significantly reduces monk fruit sweetener’s cost and environmental impact.

The ingredients are extracted from the new plant and used in food and beverage products. This enables us to use plentiful, locally sustainable crops to source new or hard-to-access ingredients, dramatically increasing supply while lowering costs and carbon footprint.

Here’s an example. We harvest the watermelon biofactory crop that produces our sweetener. Once picked, the watermelon is crushed, and our sweetener is removed as a liquid. That liquid can be used by beverage companies to replace juice concentrates that are often high in calories while improving the health and nutrition of their products.

Molecular Farming: How Elo is Different?

While molecular farming was first used in 1989 by pharma companies, Elo and other startups are using it today to improve and evolve our food system—and for us it means delivering more accessible and affordable nutrition that will improve the health of the planet.

Our innovation starts with a deep understanding of the natural pathways that produce the most desirable ingredients in our food system. We’re one of the only companies using molecular farming to make healthier ingredients using diverse plant sources.

Other companies in this space work with commodity crops, such as soy or wheat, modifying a single gene to create a simple ingredient, often focusing on recreating animal proteins.

Elo uses AI, machine learning and data analytics to work with up to a dozen genes in more complex plants—such as fruits and vegetables—that can create more intricate ingredients. These ingredients can then be used in thousands of food and beverage products that consumers already know and enjoy. Meanwhile, we plan to extract ingredients in their pure form, without any modified DNA from their biofactory plant, meaning the ingredients would not be considered bioengineered in the U.S.

With molecular farming, we see many inherent benefits over other alternative methods of ingredient production, such as precision fermentation. While precision fermentation has many pluses, its downsides are notable.

For example, some precision fermentation ingredients are often more expensive than those produced by agriculture. That’s because they require specialized processing equipment. As a result, foods created with precision-fermentation-produced ingredients will carry price tags that only the most well-off consumers can afford.

With molecular farming, on the other hand, we can use the natural “machinery” of plants to create biofactories that can make incredibly complex natural molecules and ingredients that are much more affordable and accessible. And we sustainably create highly functional ingredients from rare natural sources by using common fruits and vegetables that already exist within our food system. Leveraging current agricultural and manufacturing infrastructure allows us to minimize costs, and avoid the need for additional farmland and expensive new processing equipment.

Molecular farming also has positive implications for crop productivity and sustainability. For example, we can use sugar beets to produce our sweetener as a co-product alongside sugar. This dramatically increases the productivity of sugar beets, while ensuring no additional land or other resources are used to produce our sweetener. It’s a huge win for sustainability, affordability and scalability.

The Future of Molecular Farming

With molecular farming, we’re only now discovering the possibilities of what it can do for the planet.

At Elo, our focus is on technology that can use molecular farming to make nearly any complex ingredient we can discover. That’s exciting because we can sustainably produce new flavors, aromas, or health-related compounds—and even things like natural preservatives that exist in plants.

One thing is certain: our food system must evolve. Consumers want—and increasingly expect—affordable, great-tasting foods that are better for them and the environment.

Molecular farming is one of the most promising technologies in food and agriculture—and we’re 100% inspired by ingredients we can create that empower everyone to feel good about the food they eat every day.