Kraft Foods and Medisyn Technologies Expand Collaboration to Discover New Ingredients

Innovations could benefit product quality, food safety and health and wellness, latest example of Kraft Foods' open innovation strategy in action.

19 May 2010 --- Kraft Foods and Medisyn Technologies, Inc., have expanded their collaboration to discover novel ingredients that could provide benefits for product quality, performance, food safety and health and wellness.

For Kraft Foods, the collaboration is part of a larger open innovation strategy to seek outside innovators and more quickly meet the latest consumer needs and market opportunities. For Medisyn, an innovator in the rapid discovery of novel bioactive compounds for use in foods and drugs, it's an opportunity to partner with a large, established company and leverage Kraft Foods' scale.  The new agreement comes less than two years after the companies' collaboration was first announced and expands the scope from opportunities in health and wellness to those in food quality, food safety and product performance.

"At Kraft Foods, open innovation means being innovative about how we innovate," said Todd Abraham, Senior Vice President, Research, Development & Quality, Kraft Foods.  "We're increasingly looking outside our own walls, and we're excited about Medisyn and the potential its technology offers to help us more quickly meet the latest consumer needs and market opportunities."

"We are delighted Kraft Foods will work with Medisyn to accelerate novel ingredient discovery across several of its emerging market opportunities and current market applications, said David Land, president of Medisyn. "We're pleased our Forward Engineering technology could help Kraft Foods create new, delicious and affordable foods."

The expanded relationship leverages Medisyn's technology to discover novel ingredients that enable a broad array of market opportunities including but not limited to product performance, food safety & quality and health and wellness.  Medisyn has been engaged in a research and licensing collaboration with Kraft Foods since December 2008 to discover effective bioactive ingredients suitable for use in food.  The work utilizes Medisyn's Forward Engineering technology platform to identify, analyze and optimize promising bioactive compounds.  Medisyn's technology can accurately predict how a compound will behave based on its structure, greatly streamlining the discovery and development of new food ingredients.