FoodTech start-up Better Juice from Israel is collaborating with Ingredion (NYSE: INGR), a publicly traded company of specialty ingredients to the food and beverage industry. Better Juice creates a sugar replacement, non GMO, which ca reduce sugars in juice by 80%.

Ingredion Ventures, Ingredion’s venture investment arm, will lead the Series A funding round for Better Juice which will fast-track penetration of its breakthrough sugar reduction solution into the US juice market.

Better Juice’s innovative sugar reduction technology removes simple sugars in juice-based beverages, concentrates and other natural sugar-containing liquids.

The Company developed an enzymatic technology, which converts sugars into non-digestible compounds, such as dietary fibers and non-digestible sugars, while maintaining the natural profile of vitamins, minerals and organic acids in the final product.

“The Better Juice technology adds a completely new dimension to our portfolio of sugar reduction solutions for food and beverage brands on a mission to meet increased consumer demand for less sugar,” says Nate Yates, Sugar Reduction Business Leader at Ingredion. “This technology also provides manufacturers with more options to successfully reduce sugar without compromising on great taste or nutrition.”

Non GMO

The environmentally friendly clean-label conversion process applies proprietary beads composed of non-GMO microorganisms which produce enzymes. These enzymes convert the juice’s composition of fruit sugars including sucrose, glucose, and fructose into better-for-you prebiotic fibers and other non-digestible molecules. This enables sugar reduction by 30 to 80 percent.

“This alliance will accelerate our go-to-market journey,” explains Eran Blachinsky, PhD, co-founder and co-CEO of Better Juice. “Ingredion’s capital support will allow us to extend the technology to other liquids with natural sources of sugar, such as milk, beer, and wine.” 

This achievement follows Better Juice’s well-established partnership with GEA Group, one of the largest suppliers of food processing technology.

Better Juice’s solution has successfully advanced to commercial scale in the US. In recent years, it demonstrated its full proof of concept in collaboration with juice manufacturers in the US and Asia. These companies are now poised to progress to the next stage of commercialization. 

Better Juice is now fully prepped for market entry, with a capacity to process 250 million liters of sugar reduced juice per year.

Since 2022, the groundbreaking GEA Better Juice Sugar Converter Skid is included in GEA’s test center in Ahaus, Germany. Better Juice collaborates with GEA for manufacturing the bioreactor, and together they install the technology in customers’ facilities.

Better Juice, Ltd., was founded in 2018 by a team of biochemists and microbiologists from industry and from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem with the aim of helping beverage manufacturers produce better-for-you, lower-sugar fruit juice.

Their technology has accrued several patents and was initially funded and supported by The Kitchen Hub, Strauss Group’s food-tech incubator, and has raised $8 million in seed-round investments. 

Better Juice partners include: The Kitchen Hub, part of Strauss Group, iAngels, Maverick Ventures Israel, NEOME–Women’s Investing Club, Semillero Partners LLC, theFoodTechLab (TFTL) and S. Schestowitz. Most of the investors who participated in the seed round will also join Round A. These include Emil Capital Partners from Connecticut. 

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Artificial sweeteners, promoted as aids to weight loss and diabetes prevention, could actually speed up the development of glucose intolerance and metabolic disease like diabetes; and they do it in a surprising way: by changing the composition and function of the gut microbiota – the substantial population of bacteria residing in our intestines.

These findings, the results of experiments in mice and humans, were published today in Nature.

Among other things, says Dr. Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute’s Immunology Department, who led this research together with Prof. Eran Segal of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department, the widespread use of artificial sweeteners in drinks and food may be contributing to the obesity and diabetes epidemic that is sweeping much of the world.

For years researchers have been puzzling over the fact that non-caloric artificial sweeteners do not seem to assist in weight loss, and some studies have suggested they may even have an opposite effect.

Graduate student Jotham Suez in Elinav’s lab, who led the study, collaborated with graduate students Tal Korem and David Zeevi in Segal’s lab and Gili Zilberman-Shapira in Elinav’s lab in discovering that artificial sweeteners, even though they do not contain sugar, nonetheless have a direct effect on the body’s ability to utilize glucose. Glucose intolerance – generally thought to occur when the body cannot cope with large amounts of sugar in the diet – is the first step on the path to metabolic syndrome and adult-onset diabetes.

The scientists gave mice water laced with the three most commonly used artificial sweeteners – in the equivalent amounts to those permitted by the FDA. These mice developed glucose intolerance, as compared to mice that drank water, or even sugar water. Repeating the experiment with different types of mice and different doses of the sweeteners produced the same results – these substances were somehow inducing glucose intolerance.

Next, the researchers investigated a hypothesis that the gut microbiota are involved in this phenomenon. They thought the bacteria might do this by reacting to new substances like artificial sweeteners, which the body itself may not recognize as “food.” Indeed, artificial sweeteners are not absorbed in the gastrointestinal tract, but in passing through they encounter trillions of the bacteria in the gut microbiota.

The researchers treated mice with antibiotics to eradicate many of their gut bacteria; this resulted in a full reversal of the artificial sweeteners’ effects on glucose metabolism. Next, they transferred the microbiota from mice that consumed artificial sweeteners to ‘germ-free’ mice – resulting in a complete transmission of the glucose intolerance into the recipient mice.

This, in itself, was conclusive proof that changes to the gut bacteria are directly responsible for the harmful effects to their host’s metabolism. The group even found that incubating the microbiota outside the body, together with artificial sweeteners, was sufficient to induce glucose intolerance in the sterile mice. A detailed characterization of the microbiota in these mice revealed profound changes to their bacterial populations, including new microbial functions that are known to infer a propensity to obesity, diabetes and complications of these problems in both mice and humans.

Does the human microbiome function in the same way? Elinav and Segal had a means to test this as well. As a first step, they looked at data collected from their Personalized Nutrition Project (www.personalnutrition.org), the largest human trial to date to look at the connection between nutrition and microbiota. Here, they uncovered a significant association between self-reported consumption of artificial sweeteners, personal configurations of gut bacteria and the propensity for glucose intolerance.

They next conducted a controlled experiment, asking a group of volunteers who did not generally eat or drink artificially sweetened foods to consume them for a week and then undergo tests of their glucose levels as well as their gut microbiota compositions.

The findings showed that many – but not all – of the volunteers had begun to develop glucose intolerance after just one week of artificial sweetener consumption. The composition of their gut microbiota explained the difference: The researchers discovered two different populations of human gut bacteria – one that induced glucose intolerance when exposed to the sweeteners, the second that had no effect either way.

Elinav believes that certain bacteria in the guts of those who developed glucose intolerance reacted to the chemical sweeteners by secreting substances that then provoked an inflammatory response similar to sugar overdose, promoting changes in the body’s ability to utilize sugar.

Segal says: “The results of our experiments highlight the importance of personalized medicine and nutrition to our overall health. We believe that an integrated analysis of individualized ‘big data’ from our genome, microbiome and dietary habits could transform our ability to understand how foods and nutritional supplements affect a person’s health and risk of disease.”

Elinav adds: “Our relationship with our own individual mix of gut bacteria is a huge factor in determining how the food we eat affects us. Especially intriguing is the link between use of artificial sweeteners – through the bacteria in our guts – to a tendency to develop the very disorders they were designed to prevent; this calls for reassessment of today’s massive, unsupervised consumption of these substances.”

Image of artificial sweetener from Shutterstock

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