Benson Hill Building a Seed to Ingredient Value Chain

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Traditionally, seed companies have developed products for a farmer customer, optimizing for what they want: agronomic resilience and yield. But what if a seed company is optimizing for a food business customer instead? That’s the approach Benson Hill is taking and CEO Matt Crisp says it opens the door for better ingredients and more value for everyone involved.

Crisp… “We began a few years ago, innovating a business model to really find a way to reach past the farmgate and serve and link ultimately, consumer interests and our customer's interests with farmer interests. And there are ways to do that by focusing on quality traits and things like nutrition density, moving product in an identity-preserved fashion, and then capturing the real value of those genomics/genetics innovations as seed innovation, which is that might be at the ingredient level. It might be at the fresh food level. And to boot, those markets are exponentially larger than the seed market or the ag inputs market.”

Crisp has a background in both investing and operating companies, so he knows a challenge like this is a lot to take on.

Crisp… “Executing a delivery model is not trivial. In ag and food especially. In this value chain, it's not easy.”

Benson Hill is partnering with both farmers and food companies to deliver their proprietary genetics of soybeans and yellow peas.