S8 Ep 4: Modern Technology and Innovation: Molecular Biology Meets Consumer Demand for Natural Sweeteners with Todd Rands
“What we needed was the diversity of what nature provides, we needed to get better nutrition to more people… not in the big corporate way, but doing something different than anything that we've done before.” —Todd Rands
With sugar consumption linked to health issues like obesity and diabetes, consumers are looking for healthier options that allow for moderation without compromise. Innovation in natural low-calorie sweeteners holds promise for addressing this need and empowering personal choices.
Led by CEO Todd Rands, ELO Life Systems is developing sustainable, natural ingredients by engineering plant biofactories. With decades of experience in molecular biology, agriculture, and venture capital, Todd's vision is for ELO to make healthier, plant-based products accessible to all through agricultural innovation.
Join in as Justine and Todd explore ELO's research process, partnerships with major brands, goals of making plant-based ingredients widely accessible, and leveraging molecular farming to revolutionize global agriculture and food production.
Connect with Todd:
A seasoned life-sciences executive, Todd Rands has more than 25 years of scientific, legal, and business leadership at Fortune 500 companies, venture capital-backed startups, and top-tier law firms. With Elo’s advanced technology and a world-class team of innovators, Todd brings a singular focus to making everyday foods consumers love more nutritious and better for the planet.
Episode Highlights:
02:10 Reimagining the Food System with Cutting-Edge Tech
06:58 A Natural Alternative to Sugar
13:13 Molecular Farming for a Healthier, More Sustainable, and More Affordable Food
19:22 Sugar Alternatives and Their Health Impacts
Tweets:
Craving something sweet but keeping health top of mind? Join @jreichman and @EloLifeSystems CEO, Todd Rands as they share breakthroughs in natural low-sugar sweeteners that let you satisfy both. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #Season8 #ModernTechnology&Innovation #ELO #lowcaloriesweet #naturalsweetener #molecularbiology #biofactory #plantscience #AgTech
Inspirational Quotes:
04:11 “Our food system is designed to solve World War II era problems. Were essentially trying to get as many calories as possible to as many people as possible… We wanted to reimagine a different future— to get better nutrition to more people. We needed to improve the quality of that nutrition and make it more broadly accessible and affordable.” —Todd Rands
05:35 “It all begins with what nature's provided us. Once we identify those interesting ingredients in nature, we can reconstruct those in our plant systems and start to grow and scale them so that we are able to use them as essentially bio factory.” —Todd Rands
11:32 “What got things moving was this consumer demand for better sweeteners that are natural.” —Todd Rands
16:15 “We can help them eat healthier. But they don't have to make trade-offs, they can still choose the foods they already love and enjoy.” —Todd Rands
16:52 “It changes the game— what we grow, how we grow it, where we grow it. We can reimagine this future of food because we can use tools like molecular farming.” —Todd Rands
20:01 “What we needed was the diversity of what nature provides, we needed to get better nutrition to more people… not in the big corporate way, but doing something different than anything that we've done before.” —Todd Rands
Transcriptions:
Justine Reichman: Good afternoon, and welcome to Essential Ingredients. I'm your host, Justine Reichman. With me today is Todd Rands, the founder and CEO of ELO Life Systems.
Welcome, Todd.
Todd Rands: Hi, Justine. It's great to be here with you today.
Justine Reichman: Likewise, I'm excited to chat with you and learn more about Elo. What's behind it. But before we get started, if you would just make an introduction for yourself, as well as state your title and the name of your company.
Todd Rands: Glad to do it, Justine. I'm Todd Rands, the CEO at Elo. I came from a background of science and agriculture and law. I sort of come from that island of Misfit Toys where throughout my career, I've pivoted several times, but learned a lot along the way. Early days, I was a molecular biologist doing cancer research, using all sorts of new technologies to try to cure disease. And as I advanced, I got more into the other types of inventions and patent law and ways we can bring technology from the bench all the way out to the market to solve real world problems. I got very excited about doing that for a number of years. And ultimately, after a lot of therapy, I got out of law and moved into more of the business and the strategy side of things, learning to be a farmer working at some companies along the way. And ultimately, I fell in love with the venture space because we would work with these companies all the time that were taking on big, bold, audacious problems that they were trying to solve and had no appreciation of risk taking. They just seem to believe that they could do anything. And it was so refreshing when you're sitting across the table from people like that who are challenging assumptions, pushing the limits of technology, trying to do more to change the world. And it was such a great experience. I couldn't wait to jump out of what I had then as more of a corporate job and had a chance to just jump to the other side and start chasing those types of problems and dreams.
Justine Reichman: So is this your first time as a founder?
Todd Rands: No. The first company I joined in the venture space was a biopharma company working on an antimicrobial compound that we took to the clinic and got into those early clinical studies. Ultimately, we ended up winding that down as so many biopharma companies that you run into challenges in the clinic. Then I was able to move on consulting for a number of years helping other startups to come forward with their products, figure out their strategies, and the opportunity at Elo came along. Elo is an interesting company. They were sitting inside of a big pharmaceutical company that was using certain technologies to make cancer therapies, and they had this little agricultural division that was using the same kinds of technology, but doing it in agriculture in plants where they could come in and do some editing in the DNA to make improvements and help companies that were trying to make new products in the agricultural space. And the owners of that therapeutics company decided that they needed to spin that out because it was so different from what they were chasing with their cancer therapeutics. And so Elo was spun out and created as a stand alone company just a few years ago. And that's when I came on board. I saw this tremendous potential, it was like a Ferrari engine for R&D in the agricultural space with all these really great technologies that we could apply to solve problems that they didn't have the other parts of the car built yet. They needed a steering wheel, they needed some tires, so I came on board. And ever since then, we've been essentially building out the rest of Elo. And its mission and the products that we're going to focus on and use all of that R&D horsepower now to drive the company.
Justine Reichman: So when you joined Elo, what was your vision?
“Our food system is designed to solve World War II era problems. Were essentially trying to get as many calories as possible to as many people as possible… We wanted to reimagine a different future— to get better nutrition to more people. We needed to improve the quality of that nutrition and make it more broadly accessible and affordable.” —Todd Rands
Todd Rands: We wanted to make foods healthier. And at the same time, improve the environment. It kind of comes if you think about what the food system is today. And this is the problem that I see us solving where our food system is designed to solve World War II era problems. We're essentially trying to get as many calories as possible to as many people as possible. And that was the kind of challenge we were facing back in those days and mission accomplished. You can look at what we're living today. We're living with the consequences of that success. We have all of these chronic diseases and obesity, and trillions of dollars of resources now going to fight these types of problems. And we wanted to reimagine a different future. We realized that it wasn't about delivering more calories to more people. We needed to get better nutrition for more people. We needed to improve the quality of that nutrition and make it more broadly accessible and affordable. But we realized that we could do it with our technology. We can go using plants as a bio factory in essence. We can produce better ingredients in these plants that can be scaled and delivered to the food companies so that they can use these ingredients in everyday foods that consumers already love and enjoy. But we can make those foods healthier for them. And then we can also, at the same time, improve the impact on the environment. Both of those missions are really key to what we're doing at Elo.
Justine Reichman: How do you improve the quality and the nutritional factors in this food?
Todd Rands: It all begins with what nature provides us. We really use nature as our guide. And so if you think about all of this diversity in nature, it's just a miracle how much is out there, but much of it's just not accessible either because it's present in really small levels, or it's really hard to make it through other types of systems. And so here's all these great things nature's made for us, but we can't really access them, scale them and use them in our food system. Well, Elo has come up with a way where once we identify those interesting ingredients that are out there in nature, we can reconstruct those in our plant systems and start to grow and scale them so that we can harvest them from the plants that we're able to use as essentially like a bio factory.
Justine Reichman: What do you consider interesting? What qualifies as interesting when you're out in the fields?
Todd Rands: Oh, the world is full of so many, many interesting molecules, spices and flavors. We're learning about all these bioactive compounds that are good for your gut, but they're often just present in really tiny amounts. If you go back three or four decades, well, we would just go to forest, the Amazon to find enough. We would just start scraping the environment to get enough of a molecule if we wanted it badly enough. And that's just not acceptable, right? So we need different ways that we can produce those kinds of ingredients. And the big one for Elo right now, we took a long, hard look at what's going on in the food system that needs to change. Where are the trends going? And there's two areas that got us really excited. One is sugar reduction. How do we reduce excess sugars in our diet? I don't mean eliminate sugar because there's always going to be cake, cookies and sweets. But if you start reading the packages in the store, it's amazing how many ordinary foods just have excess sugar added at levels that are just unhealthy. And we knew that that's where trillions of dollars of societal cost was going to try to fight chronic diseases that come from that. So we wanted to come up with a molecule and new ingredient that we could help fight the excess sugar in our diets.
“It all begins with what nature's provided us. Once we identify those interesting ingredients in nature, we can reconstruct those in our plant systems and start to grow and scale them so that we are able to use them as essentially bio factory.” —Todd Rands
So we found this really interesting sweetener in nature. It actually comes from this Chinese fruit. It's called monk fruit, and it only grows in very remote valleys in China with just the right fog conditions on the sides of these mountains. And it's really hard to grow. You have to hand pollinate every flower in order to produce the fruit. So there's tremendous labor costs. And not surprisingly, it's incredibly expensive and hard to get enough supply. Well, we figured out how to take that same pathway that's in monk fruit, but put it into some of our other crops that we could grow and scale like a bio factory. And then we can produce enough of it that we can make it available for the food industry in a way that's affordable. So it can actually be used really broadly. And there's a tremendous demand for it. It's 300 times sweeter than sugar, it has zero calories. It's kind of like stevia, except it tastes good. There's a lot of people that aren't big fans of stevia, and I'm sure some of your listeners are going to argue with me about that because it's such a relative thing.
Justine Reichman: Where did you guys come into place with monk fruit? Can you tell me where you guys come up with this? What are you doing differently than other people using it?
Todd Rands: The big challenges with monk fruit today are the cost. This is getting now into some technical weeds, but $350, $400 a kilogram. And because of the cost, it just can't be used very broadly. So when you see it in foods today, sometimes people will sprinkle in just enough so that they can put it on the label because they know consumers want to see monk fruit sweetener in a lot of their foods. They actually really are attracted to the health and just the naturalness of what monkfruit sweetener can provide.
Justine Reichman: What are some of the health benefits by the way.
Todd Rands: Just getting rid of sugar, there's a long history of anecdotal evidence in China in terms of anti inflammation and other positive properties from using it in diet. So they actually use it in a medicinal way for a long period of time,
Justine Reichman: Are there any specific studies that you can share?
Todd Rands: There are some studies out there. And again, most of them are out of China where they've looked at some of the other properties of monk fruit sweeteners or monk fruit extract in the studies that they've looked at there. But the one that sticks out to me was they were looking at the anti-inflammatory properties of it. We're focusing on how we can produce the sweetener from monk fruit in systems that we can scale and grow so that we make it more broadly available and more accessible. That's exactly where we're headed. The idea actually came around because we had some partners working with us. Big beverage companies that were very interested in making monk fruit more accessible and affordable so they could reduce sugar. As we've talked with all these CPG companies that are using sweeteners, they're all really working hard to reduce sugar across their entire portfolio. And it's a challenge because there's a limited number of options. We've seen these trends going where people want to get away from artificial sweeteners, and want to move to more natural sweeteners. And stevia is one of the solutions that's available, but it's got its limitations with its taste and some off notes. And monk fruit sweetener has been highly prized and valued for it's just tasting as close to sugar as possible. So that's what really got things moving was this consumer demand for better sweeteners that are natural, and monk fruit sweetener is right at the top of the list.
Justine Reichman: What are some of the greatest impacts that you're seeing as a result of creating this with your clients that you're working with to provide this?
Todd Rands: Well, the first thing we've seen is just excitement. We're early days, we're still in the development phases because biology takes time. We've got to grow things in the field and have to go through several seasons to get that all produced and scaled up. So we'll be out in the field next year starting that amplification and growing to reach our scale. But yeah, the reception has been tremendous. They see new opportunities now to move away from artificial sweeteners to have another tool in their toolbox with reducing sugar. And some of the format's we're creating are going to be able to do things. Imagine a juice that's reduced sugar, but it's still 100% natural juice. So they can make juice products that have a lot less sugar in them and replace some of the filler juices and other things they use like apple and grape juice, which are just high sugar content. That's what they add to kind of fill the beverages out but call them 100% juice,. Now that you'll have a solution that brings all the sweetness but a fraction of the calories. So we have a format that's going to be available as a juice base, and then we have another format that will be the traditional powder that people can use across lots and lots of different products.
Justine Reichman: When you envision this, because I like to make my own juices. I only put a small amount of apple in because I don't like it too sweet, but a number of lemons and all these different things. It's a balancing act. So are you saying that there's going to be a potential that, let's just say that you do want green juice, but you don't want to add apples because it's high in sugar. You add a little bit of this monk fruit, which will add a little sweetener, not be quite as high in sugar as the apple.
Todd Rands: You'll have a juice format that has a fraction of the calories of what apple juice would provide in terms of sugar content.
Justine Reichman: For example, when you go buy apple juice, sometimes they add sugar. I'm just talking about it in raw form, does it have less sugar than that?
Todd Rands: Yes. In our case, we're using watermelon. So we can actually create a super sweet watermelon juice, then blend into those same kinds of products instead of using apple juice or white grape juice which add all those extra sugar calories. You can use this watermelon juice with a fraction of what you would get from the other sources.
Justine Reichman: The goal is to make this available not only to larger organisations, maybe Coca Cola, but also to individuals who are cooking in their house making cakes and cookies for the holidays.
Todd Rands: I think we're headed exactly to that kind of place. Ultimately, we want consumers to have an experience with it in a form that they can use in their everyday lives. They go looking for it in the grocery stores in the products that they're buying off the shelf because they already know. They love it, and they're using it in their own house.
Justine Reichman: And because of what you've learned to conduct your own research to be able to integrate this as food, as medicine, use it in alternative ways, because it's such a hot topic right now talking about the impact of food on our health, which is exactly what you're doing by reducing the sugar. But you also talked about the anti-inflammatory qualities. So wondering where that falls into your plants.
Todd Rands: I would love to get to that point where we can actually do that. We're in a startup right now where we're pretty focused on the main set of problems and challenges of reducing sugar. But absolutely, I could see a world where some of the institute's who traditionally do that type of work start to, as this product expands and becomes more common in the food space, there's going to be a lot more interest and a lot more energy going and exactly what you were saying, Justine?
Justine Reichman: What do you think the most important thing consumers should know about what you're doing?
“We can help them eat healthier. But they don't have to make trade-offs, they can still choose the foods they already love and enjoy.” —Todd Rands
Todd Rands: I think the product, this vision of understanding how technology can deliver something better, that we can help them eat healthier, but they don't have to make trade offs. They can still choose the foods they already love and enjoy that we can deliver something to them that's healthier for them that they can feel good about when they're choosing it. Because it's not only healthier, but it's going to be better for the environment because of the way we're producing it. We're not going to be making ingredients in remote valleys of China and then shipping them all over the world to get them back into a package in the US. We're going to be able to grow these locally, scale them and make them accessible and affordable in a way that's better for the environment. I mean, it really changes the game, right? What we grow. How do we grow it? Where do we grow it? We can really reimagine this future of food because we can use tools like this, we call it molecular farming. And that's a name that a lot of folks throw around in our space is, how do we use plants like bio factories? And now, you can forget everything that we've ever done. How we did it before because we can just totally rewrite the map for how we grow our food and produce our food. And that's what's so exciting about what we're doing at Elo. We're just one company with this particular product that we're moving forward with. But the potential of what that technology can do is tremendous.
Justine Reichman: Are there any hard statistics that show the impact of changing from sugar to monk fruit for people's health?
Todd Rands: I don't know that I've seen that comparison you're describing directly with monk fruit. But there's certainly a lot of studies that show the benefits of coming off sugar. Sweeteners are a way that we can substitute for that sugar without sacrificing the flavors that we love. I kind of talked to people sometimes when you really think about what sugar is, it's like the world's biggest drug trade. You've ever come off sugar. You know exactly what I'm talking about, right? It's the psychological effect, the emotional effect, the physical effects. It just wipes you out when you try to come off sugar. And I know because I've tried to do it like 10 times, maybe the last two years. So there's this constant cycle that we go through that proves that sugar is doing something to us that's not healthy. And of course, the statistics and the health data that's available. I mean, it's like tobacco smoke. Everybody can see the harm that it's causing. There's no question in that, but we can't stop because we still crave the switch. And that's what we need to fight.
Justine Reichman: So is monk fruit gonna be addictive too?
Todd Rands: We have any data, but it doesn't have those same effects because it's not metabolized. The way that sugar is, it doesn't affect your body, the insulin production, none of that response is there with these high potency sweeteners like monk fruit, or stevia or the others.
Justine Reichman: So I know you've had a very big background. The law, the microbiology, the startup, all these different things that have brought you here today. Why did you choose to do this?
Todd Rands: It really struck a passion for me. It's that intersection of technology, agriculture and food. I spent a lot of years working in the agricultural industry, part of that machinery that was really excited about feeding the world and drove their mission to how we are going to deliver more food to people, but it was all focused on corn and soybeans. And that didn't excite me. It didn't feel authentic to me that we're trying to feed the world and do good in the world. But I don't think the world needs more corn and soybeans. I think there's enough of that. What we needed was the diversity of what nature provides. We needed to get better nutrition to more people and so I saw this opportunity in Elo to really put the technology to work to do good, not in the big corporate way and doing something different than anything that we've done before.
Justine Reichman: So if somebody wanted to learn more about Elo, how might they do that?
Todd Rands: Well, a good place to start is you can go to our website at elolife.com. There's a lot of resources there. We have a lot of news, we get a fair amount of coverage too from the media about the work we're doing. Not only do we have this first product with our sweetener that you'll see and read a lot about, we have other molecules we're looking at with our molecular farming platform and looking at what else we can produce that's really in high demand, but hard to get from nature. And then we also have some really interesting work because part of our mission is to protect foods from climate change and from other challenges they're facing. And we have a big project we've been working on for several years with the dole company, bananas, because there's this terrible disease that's wiping out all of the yellow bananas that you love, the cavendish bananas that everyone eats. And it's such an incredible food, if you think about it. Every culture, every country, bananas are a part of their diet because it's such a convenient source of nutrition and it's affordable. Well, it's gonna go away if this disease is going to wipe it out if we don't do something. And there's a race right now to fix that. So we've been doing a lot of work in line with our mission to protect those types of crops.
“What we needed was the diversity of what nature provides, we needed to get better nutrition to more people… not in the big corporate way, but doing something different than anything that we've done before.” —Todd Rands
Justine Reichman: If somebody wants to access the product, when can they expect to be able to do that?
Todd Rands: We'll be working in the fields next year to start getting that scale I mentioned. How are we going to get enough samples that we can start really giving it out so food companies can begin to work on their formulations and see how it fits with all of the other things they have to put together. And all of that's going to start happening next year. Working now on partnerships. We're not going to be the experts. We're not going to sell our own colas and yogurts with our sweetener in it. We're going to be relying on partners that want to reduce sugar in their products.
Justine Reichman: So who would be your ideal partner?
Todd Rands: Well, the big industry in beverages. Obviously, Coca Cola and Pepsi are the two really dominant dreams. It's a dream and that maximizes the opportunity, for sure. But what I'm finding in the early stages is there's a lot of really interesting, innovative brands that are a little edgier and looking for something new that can differentiate themselves, and they're ready to move fast. And so startup speed is like oxygen to me. I've got to keep moving quickly, because capital is leaking. And so you've got to keep moving fast in getting your product forward. And those companies have been really interesting to me as we've found partners that are ready to, they share our vision for innovation. They understand it, they get it. We got to figure out how to make it work and take some risks along the way. And then eventually, the bigger companies are, when they see the momentum, and that's when they really want to get in?
Justine Reichman: I asked you that question. Because of course, we have other founders, researchers, VCs, et cetera, people that listen and watch these video casts. I wanted you to be able to have an opportunity to share who you'd like to partner with in case somebody that's listening or watching wants to get in touch, so thank you. If they did want to partner with you, what would be the best way to connect?
Todd Rands: Well, it's certainly easy to get a hold of me. I've got a link on the website where you can click and send me a message. We'd love to talk to potential partners. We have a lot of those discussions underway with ingredient companies as well as with more traditional CPG companies across a number of different spaces, beverages, dairy, protein powders and meal replacements, as well as cereals and some of the kinds of foods that you can imagine where sugar reduction is a high priority.
Justine Reichman: You have so much to reach for and so many opportunities to bring the amount of sugar down and replace it with a little better for your solution. So Todd, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing all about Elo and everything that you're working on, and we'll follow along and stay up to date so we can continue to see the progress.
Todd Rands: I'd love to do that, Justine. Of course, if you're ever out in the Research Triangle out here between Raleigh and Durham in North Carolina, we'd love to have you out for a tour and let you taste some things. We'll look forward to coming back and sharing our progress when the time is right.
Justine Reichman: I hope so.
