Frank Jaksch has been chief executive officer of the startup Ayana Bio since 2022. Jaksch left the publicly-traded ingredient company ChromaDex, after building it from the ground up and taking the company public on the Nasdaq stock exchange. His background includes more than 25 years in life sciences, food and beverage, and dietary supplement consumer products. 
 
Health E-Insights (HEI): What is the plant cell advantage?
 
Jaksch: Ayana Bio’s Plant Cell Advantage is the ability to use plant cell cultivation, a means to create plant materials without growing plants in the ground, to produce a full spectrum of bioactives that is representative of what is found in nature. By growing real plant cells in stainless steel tanks, this process delivers the health benefits of plant bioactives without the quality issues that come from the constraints of conventional agriculture, including climate change. Ayana Bio’s Plant Cell Advantage ingredients are DNA-fingerprint certified and 100% clean label, with standardized phytocomplexes, increased bioavailability, full traceability, and a neutral taste and color.
 
HEI: How was cellular technology conceived?
 
Jaksch: Plant cell technology has been around for decades, primarily in academic applications, but it has been challenging to scale. Ayana Bio is solving scale with two key changes: better cell lines and a multi-product production process. First, Ayana Bio uses multi-omics to efficiently optimize selected cell lines for high quality outputs. Second, Ayana Bio uses one single workflow to manufacture all plant materials, allowing for a large volume of many different high-value products, while keeping costs low.
 
In the past, plant cell cultivation has historically required multiple different production workflows to accommodate individual cell lines. The lack of a streamlined workflow limited plant cell technology companies’ ability to produce a variety of high-value plant cell products.
 
Ayana Bio’s plant cell cultivation process starts by identifying the best plant cell lines, just like traditional plant breeding. These plant cells are propagated from real plants (similar to stem cells) and assessed throughout the cell cultivation process for important characteristics like bioactive potency, stability, and purity.
 
Ayana Bio further focuses in on the ideal plant cell line for standardized quality and then provides the nutrients the plant cells need to multiply. This process is similar to brewing beer, but instead of growing yeast or bacteria, Ayana Bio grows plants directly from their cells. By providing these cells with carbon sources, oxygen, vitamins, and minerals, Ayana Bio produces the same plant biomass but without the plant itself. A few weeks later, the plant cell is fully propagated, and harvested to be used as an ingredient for health and wellness products.
 
HEI: Please discuss the ingredients that fall under the PCA.
 
Jaksch: The new Plant Cell Advantage ingredients include Dog Rose PCA, Hedge Nettle PCA, and Sage PCA. These ingredients are all non-GMO plant powders with standardized hallmark bioactive compositions and can directly replace dog rose, hedge nettle, and sage in dietary supplements and food products. Dog Rose PCA delivers joint health and immune support, Hedge Nettle PCA provides healthy inflammatory response and antioxidants, and Sage PCA offers healthy inflammatory response and cognitive support. The Plant Cell Advantage ingredient portfolio also includes Echinacea-p PCA for immune benefits and Lemon Balm PCA for sleep and mood support, launched in April 2023.
 
HEI: Which ingredient/product categories will be best suited to incorporate the PCA?
 
Jaksch: Ayana Bio’s Plant Cell Advantage ingredients can be used to formulate food, beverage, dietary supplement, and sports nutrition products that are more consistent and affordable while reducing the impact on natural resources.

HEI: Why formulate with cultivated ingredients? 
 
Jaksch: Plant cell cultivation produces a consistent supply of botanicals without the supply chain challenges. Ayana Bio’s plant cell cultivation technology methods don’t need the land, irrigation, herbicides, or pesticides required by agriculture, or create wasted biomass to extract bioactives. The end result is products that are more consistent, affordable, and less demanding of our natural resources. Sustainably producing bioactives using plant cell cultivation rather than agriculture can also be a solution to the nutrition crisis plaguing CPGs by creating plant biomass with the same nutrient profile as soil-grown plants, giving CPGs access to the same nutrients for their products without straining the agricultural system.
 
HEI: Do you feel strongly consumers will have acceptance of retail products manufactured by your customer base using such ingredients? What has your research shown about this?
 
Jaksch: Amidst the increased spotlight on ultra-processed foods, we recently released our Ultra-Processed Food Pulse survey to explore consumers’ attitudes, values, and willingness to consume ultra-processed foods as well as the variables ultimately influencing purchasing decisions of these foods. Our survey affirmed that the majority of Americans are open-minded about incorporating healthier, processed food options into their diets if these options exist. Some notable results include:
 

• Two-thirds of adults would eat more and pay more for ultra-processed foods that included more nutritious ingredients or added health benefits.
• Additionally, 67% of adults would be willing to pay more for an ultra-processed food that contained more nutritious ingredients that deliver better health benefits, regardless of household income. Of those, 68% would pay up to $3 more.
• Younger generations and parents especially are most eager for options. Millennials and Gen Z adults, along with parents with children in the household, are more interested in trying and paying more for healthier ultra-processed foods, and 84% of 18-34-year-olds vs. 43% of 65-plus year olds.

Ayana Bio’s plant cell cultivation can help produce affordable, nutrient-dense ingredient additives by growing plant material directly from cells and optimizing for important characteristics like high bioactive content such as antioxidants, stability, and purity. Our goal is to integrate these innovative, nutrient-dense ingredients into ultra-processed foods people are already reaching for at the grocery store to help them reach their health goals.

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“Ayana Bio exists to address four intersecting problems: the global nutrition gap, agricultural limitations, the climate crisis, and ingredient quality. All of these factors have negatively impacted people’s access to proper nutrition and have created supply chain constraints that will only get worse over time.” — Frank Jaksch

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HEI: Within the nutraceutical industry race to be unique, where does PCA position Ayana?
 
Jaksch: Precision fermentation has become the most common technology across the food and nutrition industries in recent years. While it can be valuable for delivering specific, single compounds found in nature, there is a limitation, as it can deliver only one bioactive at a time. Ayana Bio’s plant cell cultivation technology can produce the full spectrum of bioactives in a plant while developing cell lines in parallel and in high throughput. Other plant cell companies lack this capability and can only focus on one cell line at a time. 
 
Ayana Bio is also the only company to use high throughput synthetic biology capabilities like sequencing, omics technology, and analytical chemistry to select the best plant cell lines at a massive speed and scale. Ginkgo Bioworks’ AI-driven foundry allows Ayana Bio to analyze hundreds of plant cell lines simultaneously for the most promising starting points. Ayana can find, create, and scale complex plant molecules for industries that depend on the highest-quality ingredients.

HEI: What’s the investment to develop PCA as well as the cost to your customer.
 
Jaksch: Ayana Bio is not a service business or a CRO; we’re an ingredient company that has built the research and development capabilities necessary to succeed, and as such, we are making the investments to handle the development costs of plant-cell ingredients on our own. However, because some of Ayana Bio’s customers have specific ingredient needs that aren’t necessarily in our development pipelines, we are also open to having discussions regarding co-funded split research. We are confident that our costs to customers are competitive with existing and traditional agriculture ingredients on the market now. 

HEI: Do you truly feel Ayana is helping the planet by introducing plant cell technology?
 
Jaksch: Yes. Ayana Bio exists to address four intersecting problems: the global nutrition gap, agricultural limitations, the climate crisis, and ingredient quality. All of these factors have negatively impacted people’s access to proper nutrition and have created supply chain constraints that will only get worse over time.
 
We need new production methods to help take the strain off of agriculture in an increasingly hot planet and hungry population. Agriculture isn’t the most efficient way to meet our botanical needs, leading to shortcuts on sustainability, purity, safety, and hygiene. Not all calories are created equally and without a more reliable, sustainable agricultural supply chain, we can’t produce enough nutritional plants to make a real impact and feed the growing world population. This is where Ayana Bio steps in, with its plant cell cultivation technology.
 
Ayana provides the most efficient and effective way to produce the quality plant bioactives we want and need. Plant cell cultivation reduces the amount of land, irrigation, herbicides, or pesticides required by agriculture and does not create wasted biomass typically produced when extracting bioactives. It also solves the bioactive potency, quality, and standardization problem, as it is very challenging to reliably obtain plant-based ingredients with consistent levels of plant bioactives sourced from agriculture-based supply chains.
 
As Ayana Bio’s Plant Cell Advantage ingredients enter more products on grocery store shelves, we can enjoy the health benefits of blueberries, chocolate, saffron, and other nutritional ingredients produced in plants, without the limitations of agricultural production. 
 

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Sheldon Baker is a full-time freelance writer who covers health and wellness and other fun topics for Nutraceuticals World, Rodman Media, and other publications. He’s based in Northern California near Yosemite National Park, and enjoys exploring worldwide destinations, especially New York City, Mumbai, India, and Sydney, AU. He’s also happy to hang out at home with his wife and the many young foster children in their care. Follow him on Twitter @SCB3128 or send him an email at sbaker@bakerdillon.com.