Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition North America, Inc. and Shiru, a protein discovery company, have entered a strategic partnership to develop and commercialize sweet proteins for beverages and specialty products. This collaboration combines Shiru's AI-driven discovery platform, Flourish™, with Ajinomoto's expertise in fermentation, aiming to bring natural, functional ingredients to market.

Key Points of the Partnership:

• Objective: Develop sweet proteins to replace sugar and other sweeteners in food and beverages without causing blood sugar spikes, addressing global health issues like diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease.
• Technology: Shiru's Flourish™ platform will identify new, natural, food-safe proteins that are sweet but have not been previously discovered. These proteins can deliver up to 5,000 times the sweetness of sugar and replace 70-90% of the sweetness provided by sugar in products.
• Health Benefits: Sweet proteins are metabolized differently than sugar, not triggering insulin release and therefore potentially aiding in blood sugar management and diabetes control. They are digested like other dietary proteins, making them harmless to the gut microbiome.

Ajinomoto has a strong market presence with its sweetener ingredients, serving major food and beverage companies globally. The company's portfolio also includes fermentation-produced products for various applications such as biopharmaceuticals, sports and wellness nutrition, animal nutrition, nutraceuticals, specialty and personal care, regenerative medicine, and medical foods.

“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. “We believe in working with partners and solutions that uniquely complement our century plus of expertise in the ingredient space, our expansive portfolio of products for improving nutrition, and our dedicated and talented team around the globe. 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.”

"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 Shiru Founder and CEO Dr. Jasmin Hume. “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.”

Shiru's ProteinDiscovery.ai Platform is described as the "Amazon for proteins," a marketplace for searching, discovering, piloting, and buying molecules for various applications. The searchable database includes over 33 million molecules cataloged by sequence, functional use, and successful expression.

This partnership between Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition and Shiru represents a significant step toward developing sustainable and health-promoting sweet proteins. By combining their respective strengths in fermentation and AI-driven protein discovery, the companies aim to bring innovative and functional ingredients to market, potentially transforming the food and beverage industry.

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