August 9, 2021

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

It all began last year with a focus on the humble soybean. In June 2020 Danone North America and biosciences company Brightseed announced a new partnership to use AI to unlock so-far unknown health and nutrition benefits of plants. 

Reflective of a new era in precision nutrition, San Francisco-based Brightseed is the developer of the world’s first AI platform designed to discover phytonutrients (such as antioxidants) on a molecular level that have positive health implications.

“Brightseed’s artificial intelligence technology gives us deep insight into the plant kingdom, finds nutrients that we know are important for promoting health, and accelerates the validation of these findings,” said Takoua Debeche, SVP Research & Innovation, Danone North America.

As healthy lifestyles and wellness continue to be growing factors playing into consumer preferences, demand for plant-based foods is soaring.

Diets are evolving to be more fluid in nature, with consumers including more plant-based options and alternatives in their daily routines – actions based on the understanding that a balanced diet including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes can result in a more positive health outcome.

Only 12 plants, including corn, rice, wheat, soy, and oats account for 75 percent of the global food system, and it’s the bioactives in these plants that provide significant health benefits for humans. However, only 1 percent of these compounds are currently known, according to Brightseed and Danone.

Brightseed is currently working to address this fact by indexing the world’s edible plants and their phytonutrients to map them to specific human health targets using Forager® – the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform.

With the capabilities of Brightseed’s Forager at play, there is untold potential in gaining a deeper understanding of how these plants maintain their health integrity as the foundation of the world’s food supply, and for exploring new ground for plant-based innovations. 

“Brightseed and Danone share the belief that the health of people and the health of the planet are interconnected,” said Sofia Elizondo, co-founder and COO, Brightseed. “Through unprecedented access and open data exchange between Danone and Brightseed, we are breaking down the silos that have traditionally kept the food and health industries worlds apart.”

As Danone North America is the force behind the popular plant-based food and beverages such as Silk®, So Delicious® and Follow Your Heart, the partnership began in 2020 with a focus on soybeans.

Since that time, Brightseed discovered groundbreaking information, finding 10 times more bioactives than previously known, and seven new health areas, hinting at the possibility of a future new category of functional foods for Danone to commercialize on a global scale.

Today, the partners are expanding this work to explore the untapped potential in a wide range of crops and plant to form the basis for a new functional, regenerative food system.

This is rather a catbird seat.

The Functional Food & Beverage 2020 Report released by the Hartman Group in 2020 found that even though consumers were interested in functional foods and beverages pre-COVID, during the pandemic, 31 percent of consumers took more supplements, and 29 percent are consuming more functional food and beverage items.

And indeed, it is believed that this popularity will continue to grow after the pandemic. Portland, Oregon-based Market Research forecasts that the global functional food industry will experience growth at a CAGR of 6.7 percent between 2021 and 2027 to reach a value of nearly $268 billion – up from nearly $178 billion in 2019. 

“Forager is providing unprecedented visibility into the transformative power plants can have on human health,” said Taisa Hansen, SVP, research and innovation, Danone Nutricia Research. “Ultimately our goal is to make this information non-exclusive so that humanity can benefit from this collective wisdom and move faster towards a healthier, regenerative food future.”

Leveraging Forager’s ability to predict which compounds exist in various plants and how they impact human health, together Danone and Brightseed are applying machine learning and multi-omics analyses to explore beyond the conventional understanding of nutrition to delve deeper into the nascent health potential of plants from around the world by identifying and isolating their potent bioactive compounds.

“Leading food companies are increasingly interested in providing products that help to nourish and sustain wellness in their customers, rather than products that contribute to disease,” commented Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, DrPH, professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy at Tufts University in Boston and Brightseed scientific advisor. “Artificial intelligence is a promising way to improve our molecular understanding of plants and foods, so that we can find newer ways to address chronic diseases, improve nutrition security, and promote healthy living.”

Brightseed is currently building the world’s largest plant compound library, and has a target in place to  map all of the approximately 10 million bioactive compounds present in Earth’s plant kingdom, and in the process, unlock unprecedented access to natural compounds for the food, health, and wellness industries.

“At Danone, we support health by making it as accessible as possible through food,” said Hansen. “By partnering with Brightseed, we now have tools to shift the global food-system from one that is yield-driven to one that prioritizes sustainability and health beyond all else.”

– Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.