Successful First Milestone to Produce Vibrant Natural Food Colors with Phytolon

We’ve successfully completed the first development milestone of our multi-product collaboration with Phytolon to produce natural food colors!

This achievement has resulted in the distribution of an equity milestone to Ginkgo.

Our partnership, which began in February 2022, aims to produce vibrant betalain pigments spanning the entire yellow-to-purple spectrum using cell engineering. The completion of our first milestone has unlocked the commercial potential of Phytolon’s yellow-to-purple palette and further established this broad and cost-efficient offering to its clients.

By leveraging Ginkgo Natural Product Services, Phytolon has significantly improved the efficiency of its yeast strains to generate these vibrant, sustainable colors and offer cost-efficient replacements to artificial dyes.

Phytolon’s naturally produced betalain pigments can be used throughout the food industry as safe, sustainable, and viable alternatives to synthetic dyes, which are facing increased scrutiny and bans. As governments continue to intensify regulations on synthetic dyes, consumers will increasingly seek out more sustainable and nature-derived products. By partnering with Ginkgo, Phytolon is in a strong position to scale their robust array of food colorants for the global market.

Phytolon soon expects to bring the full color palette enabled by these two new strains to market.

We will continue to work together under our existing agreement toward achieving additional milestones that further increase production efficiency.

“We are so excited to reach this key milestone with our partner, Ginkgo Bioworks. This achievement puts our colors at the forefront to efficiently replace artificial dyes in our food and create a healthy and sustainable world. Our clients are now able to explore high-performing natural colors in their brands, covering the full range from purple to pink, red, orange, and yellow shades.” - Tal Zeltzer, co-founder and CTO of Phytolon

We’re proud to be a driving force behind the realization of this milestone and the R&D breakthroughs it represents. Ginkgo Natural Product Services have enabled Phytolon’s products to be competitive worldwide and create a broader palette of options for the industry. We’re happy to be able to provide innovators like Phytolon with our services and give access to our codebase to accelerate their product development. As we celebrate this success, we look forward to sustaining this momentum to further enhance the performance of Phytolon’s products.

Learn more about Ginkgo Natural Product Services and read Ginkgo’s white paper on the Bioproduction of Aromatic Molecules at https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/offerings/whitepaper-bioproduction-of-aromatic-molecules/.

Posted by Kevin Madden