“Impact Unicorn” in progress: Innovate UK heavily backs SuperLoaf alt-nutrition to reign in obesity

14 Sep 2023 --- The UK government has given Modern Baker its sixth grant of £450,000 (US$ 562,000), bringing the total funding to £4 million (US$5 million), in a concerted effort to fast track the expansion of its “alternative nutrition” staple food concept. The company re-engineered the traditional bread into a high nutritional SuperLoaf minus the salt, sugar, carbohydrates and saturated and trans fats creating a weight management crisis.

The grant was awarded to SuperLoaf’s inventor Melissa Sharp and its co-founder Leo Campbell to grow nutritious formulations to other processed foods such as breakfast cereals, pasta, ready meals, yogurts and pastries. The mission of the company is to become an Impact Unicorn by 2028, the definition of which is to have a positive impact on a billion lives.

“The key moving parts of the alt-nutrition platform technology that powers SuperLoaf are prebiotic plant fibers, bioactive plant fibers and targeted fermentation, all of which result in a highly intriguing on-pack ingredient deck of 15 or more different plant ingredients,” Melissa Sharp, founder of SuperLoaf tells Nutrition Insight.

“The world’s favorite UPF (ultra-processed foods), the industrial loaf, is generally regarded as the most challenging staple food to produce, which is why the SuperLoaf team have initially focused on bread and now, sweet bakery. Breakfast cereals and pasta are the next two staples currently being reformulated by our team,” Sharp explains.

Breakfast cereals are among the most misunderstood of all UPFs with “phenomenally high” levels of refined carbohydrates (fast carbs). 

“However, the manufacturing process of breakfast cereals lends itself to being reformulated with our fermented Alt-Nutrition ingredient blend, and our research team is highly optimistic about much improvement we can bring to this staple and reframe breakfast cereals as a vehicle for positive nutrition,” she notes.

“It’s pretty much the same story for pasta, but with the added intriguing dimension of further increasing resistant starch levels through re-heating once cooked.”

Active, positive health impact
The grant also facilitates Modern Baker’s innovative nutritional research into making healthier processed foods that are scalable. The company’s research focuses on replicating the nutrient profile of a fruit, vegetable and whole grain diet from natural plant sources and developing the processes required to integrate it into processed foods. 

“Early on in our research, we realized that HFSS-orthodoxy (of which the Nutrient Profiling Model is the cornerstone) that sits behind food policy and regulations is decades behind the science of nutrition, and all of our research, and indeed our Alt-Nutrition solution, has been focused outside all that HFSS-orthodoxy,” Sharp continues.

“As such, much of what our Alt-Nutrition can achieve for the human digestive system is way outside all the decades-old existing health claims. However, frankly, most consumers don’t trust health claims on-pack anyway, so we feel comfortable. All the nutritional attributes that are in Superloaf will translate across to the other food categories we are working on, and in some cases will have even more positive effect.”Melissa Sharp, founder of the original SuperLoaf concept.

Unhealthy UPFs comprise nearly 60% of the UK’s calorie intake. The funding represents a national commitment to engineering healthy alternatives. SuperLoaf has set a standard demonstrating that carb-based UPFs can be re-engineered with prebiotic plant fibers, bioactive plant compounds and targeted fermentation. The R&D took six years to perfect.

Modern Baker’s Alt-Nutrition ingredient blend analyzes how the digestive process works inside the human body and has been designed to modulate the absorption of glucose, fructose and lipids in the small intestine as well as deliver an optimized substrate of nutrients to the gut microbiome.

“When we started our research, we, like everyone else, assumed any solution would need to sit outside the UPF industry. However, when faced with the realization that feeding a population of 10 billion people by 2050 could only be solved by re-engineering the UPF industry, our efforts refocused on working with the food industry as our friend, not as our enemy,” Sharp outlines.

“Our key insight as to why UPF has got trapped in what Henry Dimbleby describes as “the junk food cycle,” is purely down to the decades old HFSS-orthodoxy that is completely out of sync with contemporary scientific understanding.”

Last year, a WHO study warned that more than half of the EU’s adult population is overweight or obese, prompting more vigorous calls for stricter regulations and better nutrition labeling. 

The grant has been awarded as part of the Better Food for All: Innovation for Improved Nutrition funding competition. It will be invested in applying Modern Baker’s “alt-nutrition ingredient” in a broader range of staple foods. 

Low-emission staple foods
SuperLoaf received an 87% score rating in the grant application. Innovate UK’s Plan for Action outlines the Better Food for All competition as part of Innovate UK’s funding support for growing the future economy. 

“Our journey has been one long series of scientific and technical challenges. A good example is overcoming the challenges of getting a sticky dough through high speed machinery. The other big challenge was funding the R&D and for that we have to thank Innovate UK who have now given us six successive grants to further our work,” Sharp says.

“I think a key reason in how we have overcome multiple challenges is that our team is not made up of scientists or food industry lifers, so we are able to look at the challenges from completely different angles and perspectives.”

High-calorie foods, such as those high in fat, oil and sugar, can taste good but often cause overeating, leading to obesity and significant health problems. Researchers from the Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan have investigated what stimulates the brain to cause overeating and discovered a genetic mechanism associated with high-calorie, food-fueled obesity.

Earlier this year, the World Obesity Federation predicted that by 2035, 51% of the world’s population will be overweight or obese if current patterns are unchanged. In its recently published Atlas report for 2023, the federation forecasts that the economic cost will hit US$4.3 trillion by 2035, which amounts to 3% of the global GDP and is on par with the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

The funding also includes a separate £16m (US$20 million) windfall for the Novel Low Emission Food Production systems competition to support UK-registered businesses in developing innovative solutions to address significant nutrition challenges.

SuperLoaf is available in Marks & Spencer stores, making it accessible to most of the country’s citizens.

By Inga de Jong