NPEW 2024 live: Spotlight on innovations from AI and bioactives
19 Mar 2024 | Brightseed
Alina Slotnik, Brightseed’s VP of bioactives and Swati Kalgaonkar, the company’s medical and scientific affairs director, detail the F&B applications of the company’s latest ingredient developed through AI — Bio Gut Fiber. They underscore opportunities for bioactives and the growing potential of AI in the nutrition industry, helping to predict consumer trends and increasing product efficiency.
This is Yolanda van Hal from Nutrition Insights.
I'm at Natural Products Expo West with Bright Seeds, and I'm here with Alina Slotnik, the VP of Bioactives, and Swati Kalgaunkar, who is the director of Medical and scientific affairs.
Thank you both for joining us today.
Welcome.
Can you tell us what your focus is at Expo West this year?
Is really on our maiden bioactive ingredient to market, which is bio gut fiber.
We launched it a little over a year ago and we've really been seeing great market traction for it.
It's a bioactive rich hemphill fiber, and it's, as you've probably seen in the show.
Fiber is really having a great and I think very nutritionally necessary moment and we're happy to be at the bleeding edge of that, offering our customers the opportunity to formulate in a lot of different formats with this bioca fiber.
We're also super excited to be partnering with Manitoba Harvest and you know.
Fueling the launch of our first, consumer product, worked on together.
So this is their bioactive fiber, which has recently launched into Whole Foods and on Amazon nationwide, and it's featuring the bioGov fiber, ingredient and we're super excited about how it's going and the response that it's received.
Awesome, great to hear.
And can you tell us a bit about what is driving innovation at Bright Seed at the moment?
I think that what drives innovation for us, both, you know, during our life cycle and today continues to be our AI platform origin, which is really focused on, illuminating bioactives in nature and really to deliver health benefits and products, just like our mission says, we're here to.
Illuminate nature to restore human health and the way that we do that is not only through the process of discovery and building the largest available library of bioactives and their respective health benefits, but translating those discoveries into real tangible ingredients that go into consumer products and are able to impact the health of consumers.
So we're that's been our focus.
It continues to be our focus both to grow the library.
To continually accelerate the pipeline of ingredients that we're bringing to market.
Awesome.
And talking about AI, how do you see the role in the food and nutrition industry?
How does that develop and what do you expect for the future?
So I would say AI is something that's definitely, definitely a groundbreaking innovation at this point in time.
If you think about the turn of the century when people first got acquainted with the internet, for instance, and everybody wanted to.
Have a network strategy in their business.
I would say today we're looking at that strategy being AI, so folks definitely want to understand how they can take AI and and use that as a strategy to further their business, and the food industry is no different.
If we're looking specifically at products, it's not just the consumer facing trends or consumer trends that AI is helping with or helping to predict and therefore bringing in products or helping to create.
Products that actually help with those consumer demands, but if you look more at the product end, it's really helping with increasing the efficiency around product safety, product labeling, product innovation like Alina just talked about.
So if we have a platform like Forager that's actually helping to find novel bioactives that then go into products, that's definitely the kind of innovation a lot of the food industry is looking at, and I do expect it to keep growing year on year.
Awesome, great to hear.
And can you expand a little bit on the types of consumer trends that you've seen and how Bright Seed anticipates a response to those?
I think one of the growing trends is around this idea of bioactives and specifically around higher nutritional and health benefits in health and wellness foods.
People really want to get kind of the most bang for their.
Up, if you will, with each, you know, eating, snacking, supplement, occasion, and bioactives are really here to fuel that as much as possible, not only in finding bioactives across a greater and greater breadth of, health areas and health territories, but also creating these ingredients to be functional for different types of food, beverage, and supplements.
Applications.
Now we're able to think about including these bioactives not just in traditional more pharmaceutical style formats like maybe tablets and capsules, maybe gummies every once in a while, but really in more too food formats that are becoming increasingly popular with consumers.
So we're super excited to see bioactives, you know, really everywhere, not just in the supplement aisle of the store.
But, kind of, we like to think of it like it's the next chapter of vitamins and minerals.
So hopefully one day it will be vitamins, minerals, and bioactives, and we'll see them in products all over our stores and e-commerce.
And I think that more an immediate trend that we're really seeing, especially at the show, is around fiber.
You know, fiber is certainly such a critical nutritional need.
But the fiber gap has really existed for a really long time without really much improvement, I'm sad to say.
And I think really what we've been so excited to hear on this show is finally, I think, really this motivated resurgence around the nutritional importance of fiber, and , we're excited about kind of leveling that up even one step further to talk about bioactives in fiber.
Because not all fiber sources are created equal, kind of like over the last 10 years we've learned a lot about proteins in the world.
I think fiber is ready for that kind of moment, where people really understand that bio gut fiber is primarily an insoluble fiber and has two unique bioactives, NCT and NFT, not found in any other commercially available type of fiber, and that these bioactives act differently but in a complementary way to the fiber content.
So there's.
More to gut than just digestion.
There's more to fiber than just the more traditional types of soluble fibers that people are familiar with.
So we're super excited to tell that story and to enable that in the products.
And can you give some examples of what the focus of pricing will be in the next coming years?
I think that's super exciting.
Like I said, we're focusing on getting ingredients to market, and those ingredients are really going to span a lot of health health territories.
A couple of the key health areas that Brights its own ingredient portfolio will focus on are gut health.
On his metabolic health, on, on kind of brain health, including cognition, mental health, and sleep, and last but not least on liver health, which I think you may for those following Brighty that they've seen us be interested in for some time, but I think that.
That's part of Bright Seeds activity, but one of the things that is great about our platform is we're not only limited by the direct development that Bright Seed is doing to bring ingredients to market by virtue of our partnerships, we get to, you know, really expand the universe of ingredients that will hit the market.
Thanks to Forager and our discoveries, right now we stand at a library of approximately 30,000, 30,000 predicted compounds, so like millions of, of plant, tissues screened, but 30,000 actual predicted compounds with their health benefits.
And even though I'm very bullish on.
Seeds capabilities.
I think it's safe to say we're not going to launch 30,000 ingredients immediately, and so it's great to have partners that are really interested in bringing some of the ingredients that we've characterized and identified to the market just so we can get more bioactives to CPG companies to help them innovate.
Awesome, thank you both so much.
Thank you.
