b2b-ingredients
(5)
Shiru Built an "Amazon for Proteins" - and It Wants to Kill Palm Oil
A protein biochemist got tired of ingredient hunts that take 15 years. So she built a search engine for nature's proteins - and its first product is a fat that behaves like butter without the palm oil.
BOTALYS
BOTALYS is a Belgian botanical-ingredients company that grows rare medicinal plants, starting with Korean ginseng, inside one of Europe's largest indoor vertical farms. Using a proprietary Biomimetic Indoor Farming method, it recreates the harsh wild conditions that make plants build up active compounds, harvesting ginseng in months rather than years and producing roots with unusually high concentrations of ginsenosides. Its ultra-pure, standardized extracts - led by the HRG80 ginseng ingredient - supply nutraceutical, cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies looking for traceable, contaminant-free botanicals.
NuCicer
NuCicer is a Davis, California agtech and food-tech company breeding a new generation of high-protein chickpeas. Spun out of UC Davis and built on the largest pool of chickpea genetic diversity on earth, the company uses predictive (precision) breeding and genomics to develop chickpea varieties with up to 75% more protein than conventional beans - alongside better flavor, lower fat, and higher fiber. NuCicer sells whole beans, functional flours, protein powders, and bespoke trait packages to food brands seeking minimally processed, sustainable plant-protein ingredients that out-compete soy and pea isolates on taste and texture.
Biohm Technologies
Biohm Technologies is a Cleveland-based microbiome innovation company that studies the gut as a whole - bacteria and fungi together - rather than bacteria alone. Built on 40+ years of fungal research by Dr. Mahmoud Ghannoum, the scientist who named the mycobiome, Biohm develops data-driven biotic ingredients and gut-health testing solutions. Its flagship ingredient Mycohsa is the first probiotic blend clinically shown to break down digestive biofilms, and its Symbiont discovery platform mines a large bacterial-fungal dataset to design targeted microbiome products. After a B2B pivot in 2024, the company now sells ingredients and microbiome science to nutraceutical and food brands.
Perfect Day
Perfect Day is a Berkeley-based food-tech company that brews real dairy whey protein with microbes instead of cows. Using precision fermentation in steel tanks, it produces ProFerm - a beta-lactoglobulin identical to the protein in milk - and sells it as a B2B ingredient to food brands building animal-free ice cream, cream cheese, protein powders and beverages.