At Elo Life Systems, imagination is not only a key to success; its execution is a priority. As a company whose mission is to reimagine the future of food, the team is all about harnessing nature's untapped potential to make food tastier, healthier, and more resilient while requiring less from the planet. In the first story in this series, we introduced the burgeoning company’s vision and efforts. In this story, we learn even more from Chief Executive Officer Todd Rands about the advantages and benefits that Elo brings to its produce partners.
A: We’re not your typical startup. We were spun out of a larger company, Precision Biosciences, in 2021. Precision had been working in the plant sciences since 2006, and Elo itself was created as a subsidiary in 2018. So our unique technology, plant genetics know-how, and our team have been together for some time. We’re experienced in working at multiple levels of the food supply chain—whether it’s working with produce companies on crop protection and improvement, or food and beverage companies with our sweeteners.
On the crop protection and improvement side, Elo’s capabilities offer significant advantages over other gene editing programs. This includes clear and complete ownership of our editing tools. This avoids the expensive and cumbersome royalty and IP issues related to crops created through CRISPR.
A: Elo’s Custom Cultivate platform allows you to edit clonal crops, berry, fruit, and tree crops, and crops with long breeding cycles that have historically only received minimal investment in genetic improvement.
For seed crops, using Elo means you’re no longer reliant upon transformation germplasm but can instead work directly with elite, commercial germplasm or high-value parental breeding lines, which means faster cycle times for product improvement.
A: Yes. In addition to our work on important staple crops, we’re also harnessing nature to create the future of sweeteners.
Through molecular farming, we’ve produced natural sweeteners that are up to 300X sweeter than sugar without calories. Demand for such products from food and beverage companies is growing as consumers actively cut back their sugar intake while looking for natural alternatives, and governments around the globe introduce sugar taxes to tackle the obesity epidemic.
Available in both juice and powder-based formats, the sweeteners feature mogrosides produced by common fruits and vegetables grown in the U.S., making them more accessible, affordable, and sustainable. Mogrosides are the sweet molecules found in monk fruit. Big food and beverage brands prize monk fruit sweetener for its sweetness and zero calories. But it’s grown only in China, so supply is expensive and unreliable. The extraction process in Chinese factories often affects its purity and taste. And importing it has a big sustainability impact.
With molecular farming, we enable fruits and vegetables, like watermelon and sugar beets, to produce only the sweetest mogrosides. That means we get a clean, sweet-tasting sweetener without any negative aftertaste.
Our juice-based sweetener launches first in 2026, and we’re actively in talks with large food and beverage companies who are interested in using the sweetener in their products. Juice companies are particularly interested. They can use our watermelon juice-based sweetener to replace apple, grape, and other filler juices that are high in sugar and calories. In doing so they reduce sugar and calorie content by 25 percent or more while maintaining the coveted 100 percent juice label.
A: The great part about using molecular farming to produce our sweeteners is that we’re able to tap into existing agricultural and manufacturing infrastructure. That leads to supply chain ease and reduced cost, as there is no need for new land, equipment, or processing to create our sweetener.
We can easily and rapidly scale up acreage and manufacturing to meet demand. At the same time, we have team members experienced in the food industry, so we’re able to work with food and beverage companies on how to best use our sweetener in their products
With opportunities as far-reaching as their imagination, this is a team that can certainly be counted on to support the creative flexibility of the ag industry. 
