What comes to mind when you hear the word “ingredient”? Maybe flour? Butter?
Ingredients are the components that make up thousands if not millions of everyday products. They are everywhere and in everything, from your dietary supplements to the cream you apply to your face daily… Incorporated in formulated products to provide specific benefits or properties, they are usually segmented into two categories:
- Active ingredients – these provide a differentiating benefit, like antioxidants or collagen (added, for instance, to face cream to provide anti-ageing properties).
- Functional ingredients – these give products their distinctive look and feel (textures, dyes, scents, etc.). For example, pectin gives texture and stability to yogurt products, while silicone is widely used as a smoothing agent in cosmetics.
Examples of functional and active ingredient categories
The spectrum of applications for both categories is vast, with ingredients being used in a wide array of industries, such as food and beverages and cosmetics, among many others. In this article, we have chosen to focus on ingredients with consumer product applications, although they are also widely used for pharmaceutical and industrial purposes.
The ingredients market is fast moving
As the fundamental building blocks of innumerable consumer products, demand for ingredients is poised to grow at a faster rate than average economic growth, primarily driven by demographics, GDP per capita and the growing penetration of processed products. For example, the beauty industry is projected to grow annually at a rate of 6% over 2025–2030, almost double the average global economic growth rate of around 3.5% per year.
But beyond underlying industry growth, the ingredients market itself is expected to be disrupted by complementary drivers. While consumers are increasingly looking for products that align with their values (sustainable, green, ethical) without compromising their expectations in terms of performance and experience, we see that the sustainable segment (i.e. strictly bio-based or bio-synthetic ingredients) is set to gain significant market share over traditional or unsustainable items. Indeed, double-digit growth rates are projected for sustainable ingredients over the next decade(s).
The growth of beauty ingredients and proteins markets will be driven by the acceleration of sustainable and alternative segments over 2025-2030
New avenues for biotech alternative ingredients
Most of the ingredients available on the market today traditionally fall into one of two categories: bio-based or non-bio-based.
Non-bio-based ingredients often refer to those processed through petrochemical synthesis. They are not sustainable and are poised to become less and less attractive to consumers.
Bio-based ingredients are derived from various types of plants and animals, and their production at industrial scale requires significant consumption of natural resources. Although they are generally considered clean, the degree of their sustainability is now being questioned… above all, to protect wildlife. The two following examples embody the issue: the red pigment carmine, extracted from the cochineal insect, and the moisturising agent squalene, requiring the livers of three sharks for 1 kg of pure product, are now excluded from most companies’ ingredient portfolios.
Many other bio-based ingredients – such as naringenin, an antioxidant with anti-ageing properties – are cultivated, requiring large swathes of land. Indeed, to produce them requires land that could otherwise be used to grow food crops. Their production consumes water intensively and often uses pesticides. They are also subject to seasonality, hampering yearlong supply. And their final price is usually a reflection of these complex production processes.
In addition to banning animal-based ingredients, industry giants have made commitments to replace low-sustainability ingredients in their portfolios:
- Nestlé announced in 2021 its goal to source ‘100% sustainably produced key ingredients by 2030.’ [1]
- In 2020, L’Oréal shared its sustainability commitments stating that 95% of their ‘ingredients in formula will be biobased, derived from abundant minerals or from circular processes’ by 2030.[2]
Now, they must promote credible alternatives and scale them, and the clock is ticking.
Biotech: exploring a sustainable alternative
As its name suggests, biotech is technology rooted in biology. It harnesses cellular and biomolecular processes to develop products. The advantages of biotech are numerous and powerful: sustainability, traceability, higher purity, improved safety and no seasonality, to name a few.
Let us take an example: precision fermentation takes traditional well-known fermentation to new heights by applying bioengineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation to programme microbes to make specific customised molecules. These molecules can be bioidentical to existing ones or novel compounds with exciting new applications, using available resources such as biomass or waste. Research in this field is extensive, and many start-ups are challenging and changing the way consumer products are made using these techniques. They now require funding to bridge the gap between technological advances and commercial reality. While many have benefitted from the recent highly favourable venture cycle, raising USD 60bn over 2019–2021, there is still room for new investors willing to help them reach the next step of their development.
Illustration of funding raised by US biotech startups
Charting a course for investment decisions in biotech ingredients companies
While the investment case for biotech ingredients companies seems appealing, combining fast growth and high barriers to entry, it is key to understand various elements beforehand to make a viable economic decision. Here are three relevant angles to challenge a company’s capacity to deliver.
Three business model identified across the value chain of bios-synthetised ingredients for consumer products
- Identify and protect the ingredient
Discovering a promising ingredient is the first step. This requires scientific, technical, and economic considerations, and all three must weigh equally in the minds of R&D teams. They must make sure that the ingredient is safe, has sufficient fields of application and an attractive substitution potential, and is indeed able to be bio-manufactured at the right prices and volumes. This step has historically been a long (from several months to more than a year) and expensive one, but it has been made easier thanks to advances in scientific fields and computer science.
As the origin of these novel ingredients is rooted in technology, companies must make sure that their road to production is protected throughout, from scientific discoveries to chemical pathways and manufacturing know-how. A strong IP strategy and patent portfolio are major assets to harness the market potential of a discovery and to provide efficient barriers to entry. This is a crucial element in the construction of a viable biotech company.
- Phase growth and target the right end markets
The strategy implemented during the scale-up development phase will play a major role in separating winning projects from losing ones. Large volumes mean economies of scale and enable manufacturers searching for price parity with existing market alternatives to travel further down the cost curve – research data shows that production costs decrease by 30% every time capacity doubles.[3] But the journey from scientific to economic reality – making sure that the designed pathway is economically efficient in large scale conditions and securing manufacturing capacities – is not easy and could well find start-ups ending up in Death Valley before they find this parity. Finding multiple niche end markets willing to pay a price premium for a clean ingredient might prove to be a practical approach before addressing lower-priced industries.
- Manufacture smartly at commercial scale
Biotech companies must also navigate complex industrial decisions to reach the necessary capacity, either facing enormous investments to build their own facilities, or finding the right production partners in a context of capacity shortages at contract manufacturers. And while scale is critical to reach viable production costs, other drivers such as input costs, geographical footprint and transportation cost optimisation, and technology improvements (from strain engineering to downstream processes) play a significant role, making the need for a flexible and modular production tool even more crucial. Unfortunately, numerous projects find themselves unable to go beyond the manufacturing scale-up step, bringing their journey to a premature end.
Margins and capital intensity of R&D provider and Ingredient supplier business models are highly different
Many biotech companies now stand at the foot of the manufacturing scale-up cliff. The benefits they could draw from designing robust strategic alliances with experienced engineering and manufacturing players are clear; if they do not opt for such alliances, they will have to navigate Death Valley on their own…
[1] Creating Shared Value and Sustainability, 2021 report
[2] L’Oréal pour le future, 2020 brochure
[3] Synonym – State of Global Fermentation – November 2023
Jean-François Partiot – Partner, Accuracy & Klemens Lemarre – Manager, Accuracy
This article has been written with the collaboration of Julie Wolff-Kerjouan, Manager
Accuracy Talks Straight #9 – Industry insight