Molecular Farming
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Some of the world's most popular natural flavors come from plants that are difficult to grow or may only produce small amounts of the compounds we use. Dr. Matt DiLeo with Elo Life Systems says molecular farming could change that by producing those same compounds in crops that farmers already know how to grow.
DiLeo… “ There's so many amazing flavors and aromas and ingredients out there, but it's really common that these plants that make some of our favorite flavors either produce just tiny amounts, or the plant itself is hard to grow. The reason why vanilla's a great example, we all are very familiar with it and it's actually an orchid that grows in the rainforest. And it's not even really grown in agriculture. When you go to the grocery store, there's almost no real vanilla in any of those products, but there's a huge amount of vanilla-flavored ones. And what that is is that there's a single chemical—it's one of the main chemicals in vanilla, it's called vanillin. And you can make it really cheaply now using synthetic chemistry. So everything in the grocery store that tastes like vanilla is pretty much this imitation vanilla molecule as opposed to you see the extract in the spice section where it's 15 bucks for a little vial. There's all these amazing, rich, healthy, delicious molecules that are just too expensive or too variable to really be put into the food products, and we either then don't get to use those flavors or we get these kind of poor substitutes. And that's something that I think we can really address with molecular farming because we can produce that exact same chemical in a crop, to your point, like corn, that we know how to produce at scale and we know how to produce relatively inexpensively.”
Elo’s first product is a monkfruit sweetener molecule that can be grown in crops like watermelons.
