BioHarvest grows plant ingredients in labs not field

[00:00:00]Now, what if the future of farming doesn't involve fields at all? An Israeli biotech company is growing valuable plant-based ingredients inside bioreactors, aiming to transform how we produce health, nutrition, and even pharmaceutical products while using a fraction of the land and water required by traditional agriculture. So, for more, I'm now joined by CEO of BioHarvest, Zaki Rakib. Zaki Rakib, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:00:29]Um, you are basically growing the compounds of the plant. Are you still also growing the plant in the laboratory, or are you just focusing on extracting the molecule?

[00:00:39]>> No, no, we don't grow any plants. We don't cultivate anything. We take the original cells, we take them from the plant, and we never see the plant again.

[00:00:48]We basically grow only the productive cells that create those valuable compounds that we're looking for.

[00:00:56]Uh, we are the manifestation of what Hippocrates said about 2,000 years ago, "Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food." So, our um AI capabilities combined with combined, sorry, with our programmable biology enable us to really extract from nature the most beneficial compounds, make them more potent, more accessible, and more consistent. Again, without using one uh iota or a of land or anything like that, and with using a fraction of a fraction of electricity, water, or land required.

[00:01:31]>> So, can you tell me how much the cost uh the cost are reducted, and the water is reducted? Like, how much of an environmental impact does this have?

[00:01:39]>> It's a factor It's a two orders of magnitude. It's about 100 X in terms of electricity, land, or or water required for the same amount of uh ingredients.

[00:01:50]So, we compare apple to apple, we look at how much how many grapes would I have needed, uh and how many vineyards, and how much land, and how much water, and how much electricity compared to the same amount of ingredients I'm producing, it's about a factor of a hundred.

[00:02:07]>> So, how do you plan to scale your production because we have other companies around the world that are also attempting what you are doing, but how is it possible to scale your product so that you lower the cost and actually make it successful?

[00:02:21]>> So, we we've developed a proprietary platform that, uh, leverages AI, automation, computer vision, and programmable biology. We spent 15 years to perfect this platform, and that's why we can cover multiple industries. We are very competitive, uh, price-wise. We haven't seen anything, um, as of now at the scale that we're producing. So, it's a game of scale, and, uh, we hope our competitors we keep them on the treadmill. By the time they they do what we do today, we'll be advanced in what we do, uh, you know, an order of magnitude better, uh, but again, as I said, we use, uh, programmable biology, we use AI, we use computer vision, and we have top cell biologists day and night really, uh, uh, perfecting, uh, what we do, and we're focused only on plant cells.

[00:03:13]That's also one of the strengths is keeping the focus on plants.

[00:03:18]>> So, talk me through your products because I as I understand it, you are focusing on this grape health supplement. Uh, what what is it?

[00:03:27]>> So, it's really one single product, uh, out of many products that we're developing. I mean, we're a platform technology, but let me focus for a second on Vinya. Vinya is the name of the the commercial name of this, uh, of this product, which is, uh, uh, uh, uh, a great example of what we call precision botanics. It's a red grape cell-based composition. It's inspired by the French paradox, by the way, which is the observation that the French maintain good cardiovascular health despite the rich diet. It's a benefit linked to the polyphenols found in red grapes and red wine. So, what we do, we actually grow the cells that contain a high concentration of this uh of these polyphenols. One of them is well known to be resveratrol, and we magnify our bioreactors are able to magnify. That's why we get the scale, and in one capsule containing 400 mg of this powder, it's equivalent to 1,000 grapes. You would have to eat 1,000 grapes with all the sugar or drink an entire bottle of wine in order to get what you uh are going to get in a one single capsule that you take daily.

[00:04:37]Um so, that's what uh And besides that product, we have other products that we are developing uh in different uh areas, and not just in nutraceuticals.

[00:04:46]>> Because it's you're you're also looking to expand into towards food in the future, or you're just going to concentrate on health supplements?

[00:04:53]>> No, no, no. We are we are into food. I mean, we are into food as well as we are into pharmas and fragrances. We have a multiple projects going on simultaneously. For food, we have two uh sweeteners that we do with one of the biggest enterprises in in sweeteners, Tate & Lyle. They're based in the UK and in in the US. Uh we have two molecules that we're developing for them. We're developing a molecule for a fragrance that 15 billion dollars uh market a year. And we're developing also uh a saffron uh molecule that would go for both food and for uh nutraceutical.

[00:05:31]Saffron is one of the ingredients, you know, culinarily used and one of the most expensive one, 90% of which grow in in Iran. So, there's also geopolitical matters in this case, and so we uh are capable of producing saffron and sell it both in the dietary supplement space as well as in the in the food in the food area.

[00:05:53]>> The CEO of BioHarvest, Zaki Rakib, thank you for being with me today.

[00:05:57]>> Thank Thank you for having me. Thank you.