OSLO, NORWAY — Orkla Food Ingredients, a unit of Orkla ASA, has signed a license agreement with Renaissance BioScience Corp. under which Orkla will produce and sell Renaissance acrylamide-reducing yeast to food manufacturers in the European Nordic and Baltic markets beginning in the third quarter of 2017.
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| Thore Svensson, senior vice-president of Orkla Food Ingredients |
“Renaissance’s acrylamide-reducing yeast has shown promising results in baked goods trials, and Orkla is pleased to be working with Renaissance to make this valuable advance in food safety available to food manufacturers,” said Thore Svensson, senior vice-president of Orkla Food Ingredients.
Cormac O’Cleirigh, chief business development officer at Renaissance BioScience, said Renaissance is pleased to be working with a partner that it believes “sees the importance of reducing acrylamide in the food supply.”
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| Cormac O’Cleirigh, chief business development officer at Renaissance BioScience |
“This is a key region for the introduction of our acrylamide-reducing yeast, given that it is where the presence of acrylamide has the highest level of consumer awareness,” Dr. O’Cleirigh said.
Renaissance said its acrylamide-reducing yeast has shown “promising results” in large-scale industrial trials in baked foods and snack foods, as well as in lab scale tests in fries and coffee. The yeast was granted Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) status by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2016, giving it the same status as conventional baker’s and brewer’s yeasts. The acrylamide-reducing yeast is patent pending and was developed using classical non-G.M.O. techniques, the company said.
Renaissance is working with Orkla on final product development and commercial rollout.
Based in Oslo, Orkla supplies branded consumer goods and concept solutions to the grocery, out-of-home and bakery markets in the Nordics, Baltics and selected markets in Central Europe and India.
Renaissance BioScience Corp., based in Vancouver, Canada, is a privately held applied life sciences company that develops novel, yeast-based, patent-protected technologies for the global food, beverage, nutrition, biofuel and pharmaceutical industries.
