Nutri-tech start-up Novella has leveraged proprietary technology to grow nutritious botanical ingredients while leaving the whole plant out of the equation. This comes amid a rising demand for natural botanicals accompanied by incremental price increases resulting from a shortage of these products.

Nutrient cultivation is at the heart of the advanced technology geared toward growing botanicals outside the field. 

Novella can grow any plant tissue but currently is focusing on the cultivation of a few high-end botanicals, including some widely consumed vegetables that boast potent concentrations of nutrients such as vitamin C that cannot be extracted via existing methods. 

Its novel platform in the plant world will help boost global accessibility to high-value nutraceuticals while trying to mitigate supply chain disruptions, circumvent climate change and expand plant life cycles. 

Novella’s new platform can obtain large amounts of plant-based nutrients without the need to grow a whole plant.“We don’t need the whole plant to get access to specific bioactive compounds,” explains Kobi Avidan, CEO and co-founder of Novella. “It also isn’t necessary to discard up to 99% of a plant and incur tons of agricultural waste just to derive specific nutrients. We have the technology wher we can narrow the harvest of an entire field for its plant essence in a single bioreactor.”

Moving away from field-to-bottle
The traditional “field to bottle” protocol for producing nutraceuticals involves a long, complex, and often vexing process of lengthy cultivation and labor-intensive harvesting of sensitive botanicals and using vast stretches of agricultural land. 

The raw materials are then transferred, often overseas, for extraction before transfer to another factory, often in another country, for formulation into a final supplement. 

This can also lead to difficulty in achieving standardized doses of natural substances.

Mitigating supply disruptions 
The supply chain for botanical extracts is continuously at the mercy of the natural growth cycles of the plants, volatile environmental conditions, climate fluctuations, and social and economic constraints, points out Novella. 

These are made worse by conflicts, political instabilities and logistical hurdles, which are still reeling in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Thinking outside the field
Rather than grow the whole plant, Novella screens specific plant tissues – including stems, fruit, leaves, and flowers – to determine the highest concentrations of desired actives. A cell culture (callus) is formed from these tissues and amplified in bioreactors. This results in a pure, pesticide-free powdered product composed of whole-cell plant tissues with their naturally occurring complex of nutrients intact.

Novella’s cultivation system eliminates the need for extraction by increasing the concentration of the actives within the plant cells themselves, which are contained in a natural protective shell to prevent oxidation. This also assures total bioavailability.The novel process could reduce food waste as it allows the company to only grow the parts of the plant it needs.

“Growing nutrients outside the plant is actually a simpler process than growing meat cells outside of the cow,” explains Avidan. “Moreover, we can now cultivate any ingredient close to the market of interest. This will be instrumental in lowering costs, as well as lightening their ecological footprint.”

Novella will grow the ingredients in a controlled, strictly non-GMO environment, with precise regulation of stressors such as light and temperature to create an ideal environment for cultivating specific bioactives at consistently potent and highly precise quantities. 

Exploring kale
Novella has made headway in exploring certain vegetables, such as kale, for sourcing some popular in-demand vitamins and antioxidants. Although hailed as a nutrient-dense “super plant,” many consumers avoid kale due to its bitter flavor and tough, fibrous texture.

“Kale has captured the interest of the functional food, supplement, and pharma industries due to its long list of vitamins and minerals,” explains Shimrit Bar-El, Ph.D., co-founder of Novella. “But it is very difficult to work with and process. We are specifically exploring the vegetable for its vitamin K and unique carotenoid composition.”

By shifting the cultivation of popular micronutrients to the lab, the Novella platform can help free up vast agricultural terrain for rededication to the growth of food crops while making high-value nutraceutical ingredients more readily available.