Climax Foods unlocks opportunities in next-generation sustainable food with nutritional data science

18 Jul 2023 --- Food-tech company Climax Foods is set to use Benchling’s platform as its central source for R&D data, collaboration and insights. The company sees that growing demand for environmentally-sustainable foods and fast-evolving consumer preferences have disrupted traditional nutrition industries, with sales of plant-based dairy and meat alternatives continuing to increase. 

R&D Cloud – Bencling’s centralized platform that unlocks the power of biotechnology – allows Climax Foods to centralize its data, which improves data integrity and prevents data from being lost, incomplete or mischaracterized. The adaptable platform enables the speed with which Climax Foods generates new experimental products. 

“Sustainable foods are the future and data science is how we achieve this,” says Karthik Sekar, head of Data Science at Climax Foods. 

“Our building blocks are the three hundred thousand varieties of plants, which can be combined in millions of different ways to reach specific textures, flavors, smells and environmental impact.” 

“This is a huge combinatorial screening problem that even the largest labs can’t crack when done manually. Climax Food is uniquely positioned to meet this challenge with our focus on data and machine learning, Sekar adds.” 

Data-driven innovation 
Climax Foods uses data to develop next-generation plant-based alternatives to dairy products. For each of the company’s plant-based cheeses, it measures several data points, including flavor, texture, meltability, color, nutritional value, scalability, cost and sustainability. 

With this data, the company models and prototypes products in an assay-model-feedback loop that continuously improves and develops new digital recipes with machine learning. 

Sustainable foods through data science is the future, says Sekar.“There’s a lot of excitement for how machine learning and AI can be used in the food industry. At Climax, we’re delivering on that promise today,” explains Sekar. 

“We continuously train our portfolio of machine intelligence tools to enable the plant-based recreation of any taste and texture while optimizing for nutrition and lowering costs.” 

“Benchling specifically gives us the solid foundation where data is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable with FAIR data principles. This quality data and Benchling’s flexible system provide the ideal setup for developing and training our machine learning models.”

Benchling’s cloud-based platform further supports machine learning through featurization, data correctness and quality checks. 

Faster lead times 
Through its data-driven innovation, Climax Foods yields faster product cycles. Recently, the company announced the discovery of the first plant-based protein ingredient that replicates the melt and stretch of dairy protein casein, created through machine learning. 

Benchling’s centralized platform organizes ingredients, formulations and evaluations, ensuring they are comparable. The platform helps Climax Foods manage more sophisticated data science, optimizations and machine learning as it evolved its R&D, for example, tracking individual product attributes without increasing costs.

Climax Foos’ prototyping team was outgrowing the company’s use of separate files and Google Sheets, as these could not accommodate multiple users inputting high volumes of data simultaneously. The company also recently partnered with cheesemaker The Bel Group to co-develop new plant-based cheeses. 

Edited by Jolanda van Hal