Evgen invests in functional food fast-track
Evgen said its “value capture” lay in the fact it did not seek to develop and then license ingredients to existing food industry players, but to guide ingredients all the way to market as new fully-fledged brands.
“Evgen will commercialise new nutritional healthcare brands via standalone portfolio ventures within target geographical markets or revenue sharing arrangements with strategic commercial partners,” the Sheffield-based company said.
Best of class
Those involved in the company, including chief executive Dr Stephen Franklin, have been trawling international food research institutions for ingredients and have signed a first option agreement with an un-named, non-European university for an ingredient that “stood out”.
No further details could be released due to the existence of a confidentiality agreement between Evgen – owned by UK companies Imprimatur Capital and Enterprise Ventures – and the university.
Franklin said Evgen aimed to have three “best of class technologies” in its stable and noted weight management, cognition, mood/anxiety, sleep and inflammation were of particular interest.
In a statement he said: “By starting with a strong intellectual property position, we are able to make the investment required to create a new brand platform with the scientific substantiation required to support authentic claims that consumers can trust”.
Market paths
Franklin said the company sought to bypass a path that many promising ingredients ended on, where development often stalled at the point where start-ups signed licensing deals with other partners as their own venture capital dried up.
Momentum could be lost as the corporation worked out how to incorporate the ingredient into its product range and the revenue stream for the start-up could be terminally delayed.
“It can be five years before anything happens – longer even,” Franklin told NutraIngredients.com. “But because of our knowledge of the global functional foods industry and the fact we are cherry-picking the very best ingredients and technologies, means we are in a position to go all the way to market.”
Only at that point would further investment be sought, if required, but Evgen would maintain a majority holding in the brand.
“We are happy to draw the attention of the big food players if and when the time is right,” Franklin said. “The business model is all about applying our market and science knowledge to develop the brand as quickly as possible. The company is much more about end-products than technologies.”
Imprimatur managing director, Dr Ben Ferrari said: “The functional food area has been a target for us for some time. Imprimatur Capital continues to build its international network of formal commercialisation agreements with universities and research establishments, and during that process we have been encouraged by the number of functional food innovations that we have seen.”
“For us, Evgen represents the ideal investment vehicle to select the best intellectual property, and to then turn these into the proprietary engines of tomorrow’s nutritional healthcare brands.”
Franklin was previously involved with another UK company, Provexis, which launched a tomato extract-fortified juice range called Sirco in early 2006.
Sirco has subsequently been discontinued after Coca-Cola became involved in the venture in the second half of 2007.
