Fiber is one of those most lacking parts of everyday nutrition. It is vital to overall health. Comet Bio formulated a new product Arabinoxylan or “Arrabina,” a plant-based prebiotic fiber that recently won the Innovation Challenge at the Future Food-Tech Summit in San Francisco. It has 3.4 grams of fiber beneficial for the gut, immune health, and more. Could this fiber be the game changer in your health?
Joey Thurman:
Welcome to Talking Plant Protein. Today, we have award winner, right? Loula Merkel, chief business officer of Comet Bio. Thank you for coming on.
Speaker 2:
Thanks for having me. We're really excited to be here.
Joey Thurman:
Yeah. You have an interesting product, so we want to get into that, but what is the award that you won at FFT?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, we were very excited. We applied to the Givaudan Food Tech Innovation Challenge at Future Food Tech, and they screened hundreds, apparently, of companies and selected our product, Arrabina, to win the innovation challenge.
Joey Thurman:
Well, that's great. Did you get a big trophy or was there a ceremony? What was that like?
Speaker 2:
There was lots of applause, and some handshakes, and some LinkedIn posts.
Joey Thurman:
Okay, that's good now. I mean, maybe somebody to make a trophy for you. That'd be good.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that's a great idea.
Joey Thurman:
All right. Now, your product, the award winning product, it's probably nice to hear, right? What is Arrabina?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, great question. Arrabina is a dietary fiber that we believe is actually nature's preferred dietary fiber. It has prebiotic benefits, so it's great for your gut, as well as other nutritional aspects. And some of the distinctions of this product are that it's very potent, so you don't need a lot of it, and you can take a lot of it without having any of the limitations and drawbacks that some people associate with fiber.
Joey Thurman:
Yeah, because with fiber sometimes people get a lot of digestive distress, especially we have a lot of people that are going more plant focused and when you start adding that fiber, prebiotic fiber, post-biotic, all this sort of stuff, you get that digestive distress. Your product, from what you've seen, doesn't cause any of that?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, we've done our own clinical trial as a matter of fact. And what that study showed is that you can take as many as five servings and not have any difference from a placebo. We don't think we've actually reached the limit in terms of tolerance.
Speaker 2:
And the way we explain this is that Arabinoxylan, which the active ingredient in our product, is actually very prevalent in nature. Humans have been eating it for millennia because it's actually the key component of things like wheat bran, and corn bran, and oat bran. It's a very natural product. It exists. We've been eating it for a long time. However, we're the first company that has found a way to isolate it, purify it, and make it available as an easy to use ingredient.
Joey Thurman:
Wow. I mean, so it's been around but nobody's been able to take it and add it to different products. And I watched that you guys said it in mixes quite easily in water. And what is the process to get it from the planet, the plant essentially, into the product that you know today?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, great question. That's where our science comes in. We have a proprietary process as well as a proprietary product that we're producing. And we extract this product from wheat straw, and that's the leftover parts of the wheat plant that are not harvested and used for food currently, but they can be. And we see an opportunity, a really big opportunity, to help close the fiber gap by utilizing these overlooked materials.
Joey Thurman:
Now there is quite a fiber gap around the world, and especially in the states, so what advice would you have for... There's a lot of people that watch this show that want start their own business or a product, what advice would you have for them?
Speaker 2:
At Comet Bio, the primary way we look at opportunities is being market led. We look out to the industry to see what actual needs there are, both from a nutrition standpoint as well as a consumer trend standpoint. And as a B2B ingredient customer, we try to look forward to what our customer's customer is looking for, and then seeing if there's a solution we can provide.
Speaker 2:
And that's actually the origin story for Arrabina as a product as well. We identified the fiber gap based on research we were doing in the food industry. And it just so happened that Arabinoxylan was a product that was approved by FDA, but there wasn't an existing product out there in the marketplace, and that's how we identified the opportunity to fill that need. And I think that's the advice I would give other folks, is that really look to follow what the market is leading us to rather than try to commercialize innovation just because it sounds cool and it's a cool new thing to do.
Joey Thurman:
Yeah, look at where the market or the fiber road has taken you. Well, for you guys, for sure. What excites you about Comet Bio or Arrabina? And what's on the horizon for you guys?
Speaker 2:
Well, everything excites us about Arrabina. There's a lot of exciting things happening at Comet. We raised 25 million last year, and that's going to support our first dedicated commercial facility that is coming online later this year in Denmark.
Speaker 2:
We also are taking orders now for customers to actually take some of that volume beginning in the first quarter of next year. And then we are already starting to plan and have discussions with partners about expansion. This initial facility is just scratching the surface in addressing the overall market demand here, and so we're really excited about not only bringing this facility up but also planning for future growth.
Joey Thurman:
Thanks for coming on. Where can people find out more information about your company?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Great. Our LinkedIn page and cometbio.com.
Joey Thurman:
Beautiful. Thanks for coming on Talking Plant Protein.