Boosting Supply of Natural Sweeteners
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Natural sweeteners are becoming increasingly popular as consumers look for healthy sugar-free options. Dr. Matt DiLeo with Elo Life Systems says molecular farming offers a new way to more efficiently produce those plant-based sweeteners at scale.
DiLeo… “ And so if you talk to consumers, if you talk to experts in the food company about what's important to consumers, you kind of hit these major high-level touchstones, right? People want food that's delicious. They want it to be healthy. They want it to be natural. They want to be able to feel good about what they're putting in their bodies and giving to their families. And then one of the first specific things you'll hear after that is they want to eat less sugar. There's been estimates that it causes approaching a trillion dollars in unnecessary medical expenses every year because we're just consuming this substance that tastes great. And then what we learned is that there's this whole area of natural sweeteners where there's these molecules that are made by a number of different plant species that actually they bind to the sweet receptors on your taste buds, and they trigger that sweet sensation, but they don't have calories. And that's when we really kind of—our ears perked up. We're like, okay, well, here are some, some plant-based sources of chemicals that could really solve this major consumer need right? People want sweet things, but they don't want to have so much sugar they're putting in their bodies. And the more that we learned about this, we realized that there's kind of a unique opportunity to do this with molecular farming.”
By ‘molecular farming’ he means that through genetics we can grow the molecule for natural sweeteners in established cropping systems.
