Molecular farming and monk fruit: Elo Life Sciences advances sweetness while reducing sugar

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. 

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.”

Ramping up production 
Regarding commercialization in 2026, Elo is “on track with this,” and the recent funding allows the company “to take the work it has been doing internally and externalize and take it to the next level.” 

“We’ll be moving to the fields, getting regulatory approvals and starting to ramp up our production and our processing, working through the pilots to validate how that’s all going to work so we can get our ingredient out,” he explains. 

In the next two years, Elo will be focused on extracting monk fruit so it has the sweetness “exactly how it is needed.”

Assessing different sweetener profiles
Before getting to the stage with monk fruit, Elo “looked at other sweeteners and we continue to look at others,” Rands tells us. 

“There are a lot of interesting natural sweeteners out there that are many times sweeter than sugar but don’t have the calories. The reason we started with monk fruit was the demand, the association of healthiness combined with the sweetness of it, and the fact that it wasn’t readily available at a price people could afford in the food system,” he underscores. 

“It’s incredibly expensive compared to alternatives. When we looked at some of the others, we saw a lot of stevias out there, but stevia often has a lot of taste problems.”

Elo wanted to explore a sweetener variation that “excels and could be better than any of the other options out there today.”

The taste properties of monk fruit are much more satisfying in that regard, and then the potency is higher, according to Rands. Stevia is associated with that bitter aftertaste, and monk fruit doesn’t have the same kind of profile, he adds. 

“So now you can use more of it and get your sweetness levels even higher without those aftertastes coming in and dominating the experience.

With monk fruit sweetener, you can go a lot further and still get the sweetness you want, he notes.

“What molecular farming does for us at Elo is allow us to not only get the best of monk fruit, but we can make sure that the super sweet parts of the monk fruit sweetener are what we’re focused on. So if you extract it from China, where monk fruit grows naturally, you get different kinds of compounds that provide some sweetness but also have some bitterness and some other things that just come from a natural plant.”

“With molecular engineering and molecular farming, you can find the pathway that makes the taste profile very sweet, and we can ensure we are harvesting mostly that part. So we’re able to direct the energy of what nature is already creating and make sure that we focus on the best parts and eliminate the aftertaste and the other negative things. And that’s the beauty and essence of what you can do with molecular farming.”

Advancing in future tech 
Beyond molecular farming, Rands believes that “precision fermentation has been the star of the day.”

“What we have found is there are some real limitations to what you can do in microbes. They’re not plants, they’re not higher organisms, they’re simple organisms that you can engineer, and there are some molecules you can use those systems for, which is great for us,” he details. 

“However, there are many ingredients that don’t work in those systems and that’s where plants are the right vehicle to create and produce those kinds of ingredients.”

“We’re not looking at precision fermentation necessarily as an option for us. We’re looking at molecular farming in plants as the evolution of precision fermentation to do more. And so I’m trying to find those ingredients that don’t work when you try to do them in fermentation, but you need more of them in the system and that’s where we’re going to be focused in the coming years.

Bioactives and compounds
Rands says he is “excited about bioactives” and their potential in the future.

“When I think of health and all the things we’re learning about, such as gut health and compounds that come from nature, we’re only now starting to understand what all those parts look like and how they affect our gut health.”Beyond molecular farming, Rands believes that “precision fermentation has been the star of the day.”

“These kinds of compounds come in tiny doses from plants and it’s impossible to extract just enough from nature to get those kinds of bioactives in our diet at higher levels. And therefore, I’m excited to see what we can do with molecular farming to produce more bioactives.”

Elo has also been looking at some of the nutritive proteins like lactoferrin. Rands says: “We’ve got some interesting results that have just come through recently on our ability to produce lactoferrin, and there have been a lot of companies that have been trying to do that for years.”

Elsewhere in flavors, Elo is tapping into things that are rare in nature, hard to harness from natural sources, and you can’t make them in microbes. “You need a plant to do the work, and that’s where our biofactories come in,” he says. 

For example, saffron is a flavor that Elo is furthest along in development and one the company is “very interested in.” 

If you look at how saffron is produced, it’s completely unsustainable. It’s really exotic and highly labor-intensive and incredibly expensive, Rands remarks. 

He also flags that “most of what you see in the world is adulterated versions because saffron is so rare and often hard to produce.” 

“You’re getting into the individual flowers to get the particles you need for that color, the aroma, the flavor. And now, we’re testing the limits of what we can do in molecular farming to produce those types of compounds,” Rands concludes.

You can read Part 1 of the interview with Rands here.

By Elizabeth Green