Danone and biosciences company Brightseed, creator of Forager artificial intelligence that maps and predicts the health impact of plant-based compounds, have announced a partnership to advance Danone’s plant-based expertise.
Through a multi-year collaboration, the companies will co-build understanding of the world’s most common crops, while exploring lesser known plant sources. The aim of the partnership is to establish a blueprint for a “health-forward and regenerative food system” while accelerating Danone’s development of plant-based products. It follows last year’s partnership between the two companies.
Since last year, the two companies have focused on identifying new biological connections between bioactives present in Danone’s raw plant sources to human health. In one plant, Forager uncovered 10 times more bioactives than previously known and seven health areas, Brightseed claims.
“At Danone, we support health by making it as accessible as possible through food. By partnering with Brightseed, we now have tools to shift the global food-system from one that is yield-driven to one that prioritizes sustainability and health beyond all else,” said Taisa Hansen, SVP of Research and Innovation at Danone Nutricia Research. “Forager is providing unprecedented visibility into the transformative power plants can have on human health. Ultimately our goal is to make this information non-exclusive so that humanity can benefit from this collective wisdom and move faster towards a healthier, regenerative food future.”
Bioactives in plants provide significant health benefits for humans, yet less than 1% of these compounds are known to science. With Brightseed’s AI, the company says, there is untapped potential to further understand how these plants maintain their health integrity and explore for plant-based innovations.
“Brightseed and Danone share the belief that the health of people and the health of the planet are interconnected,” said Sofia Elizondo, co-founder and COO of Brightseed. “Through unprecedented access and open data exchange between Danone and Brightseed, we are breaking down the silos that have traditionally kept the food and health industries worlds apart.”
The companies aim to leverage Forager’s machine learning and multi-omics analyses to explore beyond standard nutritional conventions, elucidating the health potential of plant sources from around the world by pinpointing their potent bioactive compounds.
By 2025, Brightseed aims to map all of the approximately 10 million bioactive compounds in the plant kingdom to their health impacts.