Flours and proteins are just the beginning
In the short-term, Solazyme is focusing food R&D efforts on optimizing the production process for its existing ingredients, while in the medium term, it will likely look to introduced related products such as protein isolates or proteins with a more neutral taste or color profile, says Rakitsy.
Longer term, however, a raft of new ingredients could emerge from the Solazyme pipeline predicts Rakitsy, who says scientists at the firm have screened tens of thousands of algal strains to identify those capable of producing ingredients with commercial potential.
Indeed, “knowing what to look for at the screening stage is half the challenge”, observes Desai, who notes that Solazyme’s main oil-producing microalgae strain was first identified by botanists more than a century ago on the sap of a chestnut tree, but they probably didn’t anticipate it would be gracing supermarket shelves in the 21st century.
“Algae has been around more than a billion years - plants all evolved from it, and fish eat it, and we eat them,” says Rakitsy, who says algae is arguably the oldest food ingredient on the planet, rather than the new kid on the block.
“Going forward there is a lot of opportunity to enhance the portfolio. This is just the beginning.”