Elo Life Systems’ CEO: “Molecular farming is the beginning of reinventing our food supply chains”

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. 

Elo Life Systems uses crops as biofactories for these ingredients, enabling local, commercial-scale production while reducing their cost and environmental footprint.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.”

We need natural processes and that’s why plants are such great factories for us, he affirms. “We use them like biofactories and they’re the ultimate sustainable factories.”

Doing “more with less”
With molecular farming, you can start exploring new horizons of reinventing food supply chains, says Rands. “You start imagining how you can really change what you’re growing, where you’re growing it and when you’re growing it because you now have a more efficient system, and essentially, you’re creating more ingredients with the same sets of resources.”

“So now I can ‘get more for less’ in terms of productivity and sustainability. And that’s the power of what molecular farming is going to do for us. And we haven’t even scratched the surface of that yet,” he highlights. 

Advancing gene-editing capabilities 
Elo is also exploring ways in which it can make plants more resilient, especially in the face of climate change. 

Rands explains that as the temperate and warmer tropical climates move north, diseases often come with that. “Crops that are growing in those areas and the other latitudes haven’t seen these challenges before, and it’s wiping them out. So anytime a storm blows and brings all that disease and fungus, there is a new set of challenges. But with gene-editing, we’re able to go in and help make those crops more resilient and sturdy and hold up against some of the diseases that can be detrimental.”

Elo recently partnered with Dole to explore ways in which they could save Cavendish bananas from a deadly fungus threatening extinction. “Using gene-editing technology, we’ve been able to come in and find new ways of making banana plants more resistant to the fungus,” Rands says. 

“We knew we had to do something to save bananas from this disease taking over,” he continues. “Bananas are such a great source of nutrition. Everyone, I think, in every country and culture grows up with sweet bananas and their diet in some form. It’s a universally-known food and there aren’t that many of them.”

Elo then started exploring the cousins of bananas. “We went through the family tree and found all the places there was some natural resistance to this disease and then figured out where those traits came from in the extended family tree,” he outlines. “With this, we were able to come into the current variety and find ways to make those changes using gene editing so that those crops could get the benefit of their family lineage and have natural resistance to the disease.”

The company’s plants in Honduras are currently going through the processes of growing in real-world conditions and Elo expects to have more data on the trials toward the middle of the year.

Future crops 
A key part of Elo’s mission is to make food and nutrition more accessible. And Rands says, “We’re extending that mission to some other crops.”

“We’ve recently signed up with a large NGO that we’re working with on cassava and cowpea (Vigna unguiculata), also known as black-eyed peas,” he comments.The company is exploring ways in which it can make crops like bananas more resilient.

“Our vision is to benefit third-world countries and you’ll hear and see more from us as we take these same tools now and try to bring more innovation to crops that have largely been overlooked but are incredibly important parts of people’s diets around the world.”

Previously, we’ve been focused on row crops like corn and soybeans in the US and the Western world, he outlines.

So, in the future, Rands explains, Elo will look to move away from the idea of “mass-produced food, that gets as many calories to as many people” type of world we’ve lived in since World War II. 

“Now, we’re moving to this new set of challenges of how to truly improve the nutritional value of foods and getting this to more people while doing it at a scale that is affordable, without increasing the price of food and improving the environment while we’re at it.”

Rands believes that’s where these technologies, like molecular farming and gene editing, are going to make “a real difference.”

Stay tuned for Part 2 of Food Ingredients First’s interview with Rands, which will be published later this week. We discuss the company’s monk fruit sweetener, which is slated for commercialization in 2026 and future opportunities for bioactive ingredients. 

By Elizabeth Green