In collaboration with this year’s Reuters Transform Food, we speak to Elo Life Systems Michele Fite on reimagining the future of food.

Elo Life Systems stated mission is to “reimagine the future of food”. While Chief Commercial Officer Michele Fite admits this sounds like a cliché, the company’s top priority is anything but. Their first products are natural sweeteners that are up to 300 times sweeter than sugar, without calories.

Demand for such products from food companies is huge as consumers are actively cutting back on their sugar intake, and countries the world over introduce sugar taxes in an effort to tackle the obesity epidemic.

“We’re really excited about what our product can do because of the huge amount of sugar it replaces, and its great taste – and because it’s affordable as well,” she says.

Available in both juice and powder-based formats, the sweeteners feature mogrosides produced by fruits and vegetables grown in the U.S., making them more accessible, affordable and sustainable. Mogrosides are the sweet molecules found in monk fruit. Big food and beverage brands prize monk fruit sweetener for its sweetness and zero calories. But it’s grown only in China, so supply is expensive and unreliable. And importing it has a big sustainability impact.

Through molecular farming Elo teaches fruits and vegetables, like watermelon and sugar beets, to produce only the sweetest mogrosides, says Fite.

The product is under wraps till launch, with the juice-based sweetener launching in 2026, followed by the powder. But Elo Life System’s molecular farming technology has been in development for more than ten years, mostly under Precision BioSciences, the biotech company it spun out from in 2021.

Fite has been in the food industry for more than 30 years. However, the past ten years “are just the most exciting thing I’ve seen,” she says. There is still a lot of exciting work underway, she says.

“There are so many new technologies being brought to the forefront, and investment dollars and a willingness to try new things, to change how food is impacting our health and our planet,” she says.

“Industry, startups, large companies, food ingredient companies, and even technology from outside our industry is coming together and unlocking new categories of ingredients and new ways to make food that’s completely reinventing our food supply chain, from what we grow, to how we grow it,” she says.

Fite cites precision fermentation – which uses microbial hosts as “cell factories” for producing specific ingredients as one technology she is excited by. New enzymes that can reduce the sugar content of fruit, and 3D structures or ‘scaffolds’ to recreate the structure and taste of animal tissue are also promising, she says.

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