Shiru, a functional ingredients discovery company, announced today a new partnership with Puratos, the industry leader in innovative food ingredients for bakery, to evaluate naturally-occurring proteins identified by Shiru’s proprietary Flourish™ platform as a promising next-generation egg replacement.
The partnership will focus on scaling the production of prototypes for further evaluation, leveraging Puratos’ expertise in the bakery, patisserie and chocolate ingredient industry. The project aims to produce new functional ingredients that will unlock opportunity and innovation in plant-based baked goods that are both sustainable and tasty.
“Puratos and Shiru share the vision that our food system can be a force for good in terms of sustainability and nutrition, making us ideal partners,” said Jasmin Hume, Shiru CEO and founder. “Our Flourish discovery platform has identified functional ingredients that can unlock desirable plant-based baked goods products. We’re eager to test and scale these discoveries with Puratos, the global leader in baked goods ingredients. By working together, we have the chance to make a major impact towards a more sustainable food system.”
Flourish, Shiru’s discovery platform, uses machine learning and bioinformatics to search through hundreds of millions of naturally-occurring proteins to identify promising candidates that match a specific desired food function—in this case, for use as ingredients in baked goods. Then, using precision fermentation and high-throughput screening techniques, Shiru produces these proteins and evaluates their performance as ingredients. The result is a functional ingredient that can be produced sustainably at scale whose taste and nutrition are as good as or better than animal-based alternatives.
With Puratos, Shiru will scale production and testing for the target functional proteins, accelerating the timeline for making these ingredients available in baked goods for consumers. Puratos will leverage its fermentation capability and expertise to produce prototype quantities of the Shiru discovered proteins before conducting detailed food application testing in a range of baked goods.
“At Puratos, we truly believe that collaborations can fuel innovation within the food ecosystem,” stated Paul Baisier, Chief R&D Officer at Puratos. “As a company rooted in biology and science, Shiru is the perfect partner in the Puratos’s journey to finding novel uses for proteins discovered by Shiru’s Flourish platform as functional food ingredients that are sustainable, healthy and delicious. Together with Shiru, we will be able to accelerate our plant-based product innovation pipeline for the benefit of our customers and consumers.”
Puratos has a strong history of innovation in the food space, and of using technology to enable breakthroughs. In addition to the ingredient development aspect of the partnership, Shiru is also exhibiting in Puratos’s Puradome, a cutting-edge FoodTech Center where the harshest conditions of planet Mars are used as extraordinary inspiration to stimulate food innovation.
This partnership is the latest from Shiru’s innovation pipeline, including a recently announced partnership with nature-based ingredient solutions company CP Kelco. Shiru also recently announced that Impossible Foods veteran Ranjani Varadan joined as Chief Scientific Officer, as well as three industry-leading advisors, including Dean Banks, former Tyson CEO.