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Are the oceans a source of an entirely new ingredient category?

With a vast library of nearly 9,500 marine micro-organisms gathered from the tropics to the polar regions, Scottish biotechnology firm Aquapharm plans to unleash the potential of an entirely new category of marine-derived ingredients – and secure EFSA-approved health claims based on pharma-level evidence.

If you’ve ever explored tide pools and poked a sea anemone to have it snap closed around your finger in defense, this is essentially what Aquapharm’s SeaRch technology does – but at a biochemical level. 

Aquapharm – a company backed by Tate & Lyle Ventures – gas worked out how to reproduce marine micro-organisms on an industrial scale.

SeaRch is its patented technique used to provoke the full range of dormant natural stress defenses in marine micro-organisms. 

EndoSeaRch takes this process a step further – into the human digestive tract ¬ with the application of this technique in vivo, by delivering SeaRch ‘reagents’ to the tract as novel food ingredients or supplements.

The company began life as a small-scale academic spin-out in 2001, before an injection of venture capital in 2007 allowed it to start building substantial operating capabilities. Now it has joined forces with the Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Research Unit in Cambridge, England to evaluate EndoSeaRch’s potential for digestive health. 

Gut health claims, such as those for prebiotics and probiotics, have so far been largely rejected in Europe, but Aquapharm believes its technique will enable it to achieve the pharmaceutical standards EFSA is looking for.

Aquapharm’s business unit Oceanx is expected to launch its first food ingredient product in 2015. Its pipeline of ingredients is being developed in collaborative partnerships. The five partnerships already announced include: Frutarom for the development of novel flavours; Leatherhead Food Research for novel preservatives; and Dr Reddy’s for novel enzymes; the other six include major household-name brand owners and ingredient suppliers and cover novel flavours, among others. 

The company says that dairy and sports drinks are likely to be some of the earliest formats to reach the market.

Aquapharm anticipates that its ingredients will be able to claim ‘impeccable sustainability credentials’.  

Aquapharm believes that the market potential of marine-derived ingredients has been established by pioneering companies such as Martek (now part of DSM) and that we will soon see the unleashing of the potential of an entirely new ingredient category

Ingredient specialist Volac launches protein direct to the consumer

Another ingredients company has opted to accelerate the commercialisation process and go direct to the consumer in order to create a ‘proof of concept’ product.

The company in question is Volac, a privately owned dairy ingredients company in the UK but operating globally with facilities in Malaysia and the Netherlands.

Volac has ventured outside the business-to-business arena for the first time with the launch of consumer-facing brand Good Whey, and the ambition to expand the appeal of protein beyond core sports users.

Dairy ingredient companies have long wrestled with how to take protein out of the sports nutrition market and into the wider consumer market. But while demand for protein is growing, consumer goods companies have been slow to respond.

The Good Whey brand is intended to appeal directly to people who occupy what Volac calls the ‘healthy lifestyle category’, promoting protein to regular, health-conscious consumers as a way to help them maintain lean body mass and healthy muscles and bones.

Good Whey is marketed by Volac through a standalone company – the Good Whey Company – and is currently exclusively available via a dedicated website (www.thegoodwhey.com). Here, customers are able to order from a range of flavoured whey protein powders to mix with milk, juice or water.

A key target group for the Good Whey Company is women, such as new mothers keen to regain their pre-pregnancy body shape and weight.

Women are usually the gatekeepers to their families’ diets and Volac also intends to promote Good Whey protein as suitable for children and, indeed, all the family. Protein can provide “demonstrable benefits to their children’s growth and development making Good Whey a convenient high quality protein food for the whole family to enjoy,” says Suzane Leser, Volac nutrition manager.

Volac is able to be quite forthright in its marketing because protein has benefited from the EU’s Nutrition & Health Claims Regulation, with three approved Article 13.1 claims. They are: 

Protein contributes to a growth in muscle mass
Protein contributes to the maintenance of muscle mass
Protein contributes to the maintenance of normal bones

Despite launching a consumer brand, Volac says it remains committed to its core ingredients business and insists it is not in competition with its own customers, who are focused on sports nutrition.

There are many ingredient companies who are frustrated with the slow pace of commercialisation and the reluctance of many branded food marketers to take advantage of new ingredients. Going around those marketers to create their own brands and show just what can be achieved is becoming an increasingly popular path for ingredient companies to take.

Pharma giant rushes to leverage Article 13.1 immunity health claim

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Fat chance

Governments all around the world want to tackling obesity – not least because of the cost to society is huge. Excessive weight in childhood can translate into serious diseases such as blood pressure, arthritis and diabetes. The cost of treating these diseases is borne by health services and, depending on the country, funded with public money.

At the moment it’s easier to treat the conditions that come with obesity rather than help consumers lose weight. Find a way to battle the bulge and a huge profit might be made. But it is a struggle for companies – food, medical and pharmaceutical – to turn fat into gold.

Apparently, the recession has sapped demand for gastric bands. I see the pharmaceutical firm Vivus is trying to get approval for its new diet drug, Qnexa. Despite a committee advising America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommending that it be approved, the FDA may yet reject the drug. Even if the drug is approved it is unclear that patients will buy it. Qnexa combines two treatments that are already on the market so doctors may prescribe the existing drugs rather than Qnexa’s more expensive version.

For now, its more profitable for the pharmaceutical industry to treat fat patients than to try and make them slim. And, it seems, the same is true in the food industry. It is more profitable to feed fat people sugary products than reformulated versions. And, in all fairness, the full fat, sugar and salt versions normally taste much better.

In the UK, in particular, though it is felt that the big food firms are failing to support the battle against obesity.

Danone, Nestlé, Tate & Lyle and Unilever have all declined to sign up to a UK government-led initiative on calorie reduction. Sainsbury, Kraft Foods, Kellogg and Coca-Cola have also refused to sign up. But Pepsico, who core brand are Walkers, Quaker, Tropicana and Pepsi, will be signing up.

Is calorie reduction the right way to improve public health? There is a part of me that believes in personal responsibility. Shouldn’t parents make their own decisions about which chocolates, crispy and fizzy drinks they let their children eat?

But I’m afraid the reality is that some of the most significant health advances have been made by population-based public health approaches in which the overall welfare of the population trumps certain individual – or industry – freedoms.

The public smoking ban is a prime example. Doctors report it has already had an impact on reducing cardiovascular mortality. With obesity rates rising, now is the time for the food industry to realise that public health must come before profit.

Hungry for a hamburger from the future?

Meat grown from scratch in the laboratory for human consumption in not yet commercially viable but it could soon be – if Dr Mark Post at the Eindhoven University in the Netherlands achieves his goal.

As yet laboratory-grown fillet steak isn’t on the menu. Indeed the patty Post intends to put inside his bun this October will have cost about a quarter of million euros to grow – from stem cells in a laboratory.

To ‘make’ enough meat to eat, the cultures from stem cells are allowed to multiply a millionfold before they are put into Petri dishes to develop into muscle cells. Here they are encouraged to work out and build up their strength with pieces of Velcro on to which they can attach themselves in order to stretch and relax spontaneously.

Quite an indulgence just to make the world’s most expensive hamburger, you might think. But Post’s ambitions are larger than this. He hopes to scale up the operation to make laboratory meat on a commercial scale.

The stem cells themselves are extracted from cattle muscle, and in theory one cow can supply as many hamburgers as a million slaughtered animals can today. The nutrients however need to come from other sources ¬ conventional crops or algae which grow faster than vascular plants and provide the necessary amino acids, sugars and fats.

Consumers may fear Frankenstein foods, but this way of growing meat has its advantages. Raising animals is a resource-intensive process. About 30% of the world’s ice-free land is used for it. Yet of the nutrients in the plants these animals eat, on around 15% is turned into meat.

Post’s laboratory meat could liberate land, reduce greenhouse-gas emissions (cattle are a notorious source of methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide). More over you don’t even have to slaughter a cow to obtain stem cells from it – a biopsy will do.

Yummy, huh?

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