In a Sacramento lab, someone stirs a clear powder into a glass of water and hands it over. You drink it. It tastes like water. That is the entire point, and also the part that took a decade of science. The powder is fiber - roughly the equivalent of several bowls of oatmeal - and it has vanished into the liquid without leaving a flavor, a color, or a single clue. one.bio built a company on that disappearing act.
Most ingredient companies want you to notice their work. one.bio wants the opposite. Its job is to put back something modern food quietly removed, and to do it so cleanly that nobody at the table can tell. The fiber is there. Your gut knows. You don't.
"Adding oat fiber to a beverage and saying this is the equivalent of four or five bowls of oatmeal - consumers get it."
Food got louder. Your gut went quiet.
Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. Humans evolved eating something on the order of 80 to 120 grams of fiber a day. The modern average sits near 12. Along the way the same food system added roughly ten times more sugar than people consumed two centuries ago. The result is a population that is, by one.bio's count, about 95% fiber-deficient - not as a lifestyle choice, but as a side effect of how food is now made.
Fiber, it turns out, was never just roughage. It was a signal. It fed the microbiome, which in turn helped regulate blood glucose, immune response, mood, and inflammation. Strip the fiber out and you don't just lose bulk - you cut a conversation between food and biology that the body had relied on for a very long time. one.bio's founders read the rise in chronic inflammatory disease as the sound of that conversation going silent.
Plenty of companies have tried to add fiber back. The trouble is that traditional fibers misbehave. Add enough to matter and the food turns gritty, chalky, or unkind to the digestive system. So fiber became the nutrient everyone agreed was important and almost nobody put in at a meaningful dose. That gap - important but impractical - is the tension one.bio exists to resolve.
"Modern food processing strips fibers and starves the microbiome. one.bio helps restore core functionality like blood glucose regulation."
Two men named Matt, one metal catalyst
The science started at UC Davis in 2019, under a less catchy name: BCD Bioscience. Dr. Matt Amicucci, working alongside Dr. Carlito Lebrilla, Dr. Bruce German, and Dr. David Mills, had spent years on something deceptively academic - mapping the molecular structures of plant fibers and what each one does inside the body. He calls the result the Glycopedia. Think of it as a dictionary for a language made of carbohydrates, where every entry links a fiber's exact structure to the biological effect it produces.
The original lab method was almost mundane: use an iron catalyst and hydrogen peroxide to chop long-chain plant carbohydrates into short, soluble fibers. It was built as an analytical tool, a way to take molecules apart and study them. The bet was that the same trick, scaled up, could become a factory - one that releases bioactive short-chain fibers from seeds, nuts, fruits, grains, even agricultural byproducts that would otherwise be waste.
In 2023 the company brought in a co-founder who knew how to turn lab results into things people buy. Matt Barnard had already co-founded Plenty, the vertical-farming company, which means he had spent years on the unglamorous problem of scaling biology into supply chains. The team's internal shorthand is almost too neat: Amicucci is "The Alchemist," Barnard is "The Architect." One discovers, one builds.