This week, novel ingredient discovery startup Shiru announced they have commercially launched their first ingredient, OleoPro, a plant-based fat ingredient the company says doesn’t have the environmental costs or health consequences of animal fat. As part of the announcement, the company disclosed that the company’s first commercial partner is Griffith Foods, a commercial food ingredient manufacturer.
As readers of The Spoon know, Shiru is part of a cohort of startups using AI to discover new ingredients more quickly than traditional methods. Unlike many first-generation synthetic bio products, OleoPro was developed using machine learning, enabling a multifold acceleration of the discovery and testing phase according to the company.
The company’s discovery timeframe for OleoPro took less than three months. According to the announcement, “Shiru’s biochemists and computational biologists used AI to scan and select nearly 10,000 formulations” in that time frame, and “then they determined the precise molecules that would combine to form an ingredient with the unique oil-holding protein scaffold of animal fat.” The entire discovery and commercialization process took 18 months from the project’s start, much shorter than the multi-year process typical of classical synthetic biology workflows.
And now, according to Shiru CEO Jasmin Hume, that time frame for discovery will compress even more now that the company has built out its machine learning model. Finding a new novel protein or functional ingredient will take “eight to 10 weeks is like what we’re comfortable with,” Hume told me in a recent interview. “And what that means is, it’s not just digital, but at eight weeks, we have up to half a dozen proteins that we’re making at a couple of grams. And so we go from totally digital to pilot-produced ingredients, not one but a couple that can work, in about eight weeks.”
“Instead of a half decade and more than a quarter billion dollars in R&D to ship a viable product, Shiru used AI to dramatically reduce the cost and time to market of an essential ingredient of plant-based meat to a matter of months and a few hundred thousand dollars – and the cost of protein discovery at Shiru continues to decline,” said Dr. Ranjani Varadan, Shiru Chief Scientific Officer, in the announcement. Varadan, who sat down with The Spoon last summer, was previously VP of R&D at Impossible Foods.
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