Dive Brief:
- Ingredion is partnering with two AI-driven food tech firms to accelerate the discovery of new ingredients that support consumer demand for gut health benefits and other functional properties.
- The ingredients supplier is collaborating with discovery platform Shiru to identify the next-generation of prebiotics. It's also teaming with Holobiome, which generates insights on how ingredients behave in the gut.
- The partnerships with Shiru and Holobiome represent how Ingredion plans to integrate AI throughout the reformulation process to accelerate food innovation, according to Michael Leonard, Ingredion's chief innovation officer.
Dive Insight:
Ingredion is experiencing surging demand from food manufacturers to reformulate or create new brands that respond to trends such as fiber, clean-label or high-protein.
Gut health represents one of the most promising frontiers in food innovation as fiber becomes the next star ingredient among consumers. However, research around the microbiome is still nascent and many companies are left to advance the science themselves.Nestlé, for example, recently launched its own study into how dietary fiber interacts with gut health.
By collaborating with Shiru and Holobiome, Ingredion is advancing both ingredient discovery and research. Together, Leonard said, the partnerships "strengthen how new ingredients are identified, evaluated and advanced for use in food."
Shiru's platform can screen more than 77 million natural protein sequences to find the best new ingredients from a "functionality and performance standpoint," Leonard said. This means discovering ingredients that both improve health without compromising taste, texture or other qualities.
Once those ingredients are identified, Holobiome's platform can then generate insight into how they perform in the gut using profiles from over 90,000 people and a reference database of more than 2 million gut bacterial genomes.
"What we're adding now with these partnerships is earlier visibility into which ingredients are most promising and how they tend to behave once they're used in food," he added.
While the partnerships are aimed at trendy ingredients such as fiber and protein, Leonard said both firms bring tools the company can leverage across its entire portfolio, including starches and texturants. The collaboration isn't a short-term bet on a single ingredient or product but a representation of how Ingredion wants to transform the discovery and formulation process.
"This is really about us building smarter discovery capabilities upstream so our customers can innovate with more confidence as expectations around health, functionality and ingredient transparency continue to rise," Leonard said.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the number of natural protein sequences Shiru's platform can screen.
