The company has launched the 10th version of breakfast cereal containing milk fat globule membrane phospholipids and dairy proteins supplied by Fonterra.
This is only one example of an upgraded product that Radix Nutrition has launched.
The company has embarked on 60 product upgrades with its proprietary nutrition software data. These products span freeze-dried breakfast cereal, protein powder, and smoothies.
For its upgraded breakfast cereal launched in October, founder and CEO Mike Rudling told NutraIngredients that the product was designed to be 45% higher in nutritional value, such as the use of Fonterra’s MFGM for cognitive health and performance.
“We design food products like a software company. We have all of these food products, but underneath it is this design platform,” he said.
The breakfast cereal comes in a single-serve pouch and can be eaten just by adding water or milk to rehydrate the freeze-dried ingredients.
Available via e-commerce, the products will also be launched in New Zealand’s grocery chain Foodstuffs.
What’s the software platform about
Drawing on the recommended dietary intake (RDI) of nearly 90 countries and scientific databases, the software aims to help food formulators understand the nutritional needs of different populations.
The software also contains data on nutrients from 45 food categories, ranging from natural ingredients to packaged and processed foods.
These nutrient profiles include amino acids, polyphenols, flavonoids, fatty acids, carbohydrates, and prebiotic fibers.
Together, these datasets allow the company to identify the health or nutrient design targets and the ingredients to use.
“We can see to a high degree of resolution to about 2,500 nutrients in natural food ingredients from 45 different categories or classifications of nutrients.
“We then marry the nutrients side of our data set to a health side of our data set, where we look through nearly 90 different countries’ recommended dietary intake standards,” said Rudling, who described this process as “computational nutrition.”
Faster and more efficient
The process also allows the company to design products faster and more efficiently, said Rudling.
“We can design products through large language models so that in our software package, one of our formulators can have a conversation with the software and a two-way conversation around how a formulation is better or worse, or it can suggest how to make the product better.
“From there, we can bring various data science techniques to just go through a massive amount of calculations to get the nutritional values of our products up. This means faster route to market, much healthier products, better taste, better cost,” he said.
The method is a stark contrast to how his company has been formulating products for the past 10 years.
He gave an example of how his company tried to design a next-generation whey protein that has a better Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score (DIAAS), where he and his team spent three to four months calculating the scores.
“We kind of did that by hand, and we would have done several thousand calculations over three or four months. Now, we can do 250,000 calculations in four seconds,” he said.
“We realized we could not do this with manual databases, and we would need to create a software platform to be able to help us work with tens of millions of different data points...
“We think in 10 years, this is how food will be designed,” he said.
