BERKELEY, CALIF. — Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition North America, Inc. and Shiru, a protein focused company, are partnering to develop and commercialize sweet proteins for beverages and specialty products. The partnership will use Shiru’s artificial intelligence platform Flourish and Ajinomoto’s fermentation capabilities to produce the sweet proteins.
“Our partnership with Shiru is one of many examples of our approach to innovation,” said Ryan Smith, chief growth officer and executive vice president at Ajinomoto Health and Nutrition. “As collective industry leaders, we believe this partnership will position both of us to be on the cutting-edge of what’s next in functional ingredients, specifically in protein, an increasing category of interest for consumers. This partnership, and our balanced strengths, will allow us to identify natural proteins for use as sweeteners across numerous applications to meet the changing demands of the food industry and what consumers expect.”
Shiru’s Flourish platform will help find additional natural, food-safe proteins that were not previously known to be sweet, according to the company. Shiru’s database features natural proteins from plants and microbes and its trained AI engine, Flourish, for proteins, bio-industrial applications including food, ProteinDiscovery.ai, according to the company.
Shiru said the platform may help users to identify and test functional proteins found in nature.
Shiru said the ProteinDiscovery.ai is a marketplace for partners to search, discover, pilot and purchase molecules for food, agriculture, personal care and advanced material applications.
Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition and Shiru said the partnership will enable them to enter the sweet proteins category for the first time.
“Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition conducted a tremendous amount of due diligence and determined that partnering with Shiru provides them access to a landscape of protein solutions that is truly differentiated and represents the fastest way to discover and develop commercially valuable sweet proteins across their product lines,” said Jasmin Hume, PhD, founder and chief executive officer at Shiru. “At Shiru we share Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition’s vision of eating well and living well. Together our companies are now using artificial intelligence to supercharge this mission, which we are very excited for. We are already identifying high-value, natural, scalable proteins for Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition’s brands which we know will positively impact human and planetary health alike.”