Making Healthier Sugars Tagatose and Allulose – Ed Rogers of Bonumose

This is the first interview in a two-part series on novel food ingredient technology companies for sugar reduction. Don’t miss the second interview with Alan Hahn of MycoTechnology.

Ed Rogers is the co-founder and CEO of Bonumose, a food ingredient technology company. The company’s patented process was invented by co-founder Dr. Dan Wichelecki and utilizes combinations of natural enzymes to convert plant-based raw materials into low cost, “good sugars” tagatose and allulose, that aim to mimic sucrose (or table sugar) and come with a host of claimed beneficial properties. Tagatose is yet to be used as a food ingredient due to its high cost to produce. Allulose is starting to show up in the market more, but is still very costly to produce, requires a lot of processing and expensive feedstocks. You can find allulose in Quest Nutrition’s new Hero food bars, for example. Bonumose’s technology aims to significantly simplify and reduce the cost of producing healthier sugar like allulose and tagatose.

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In this interview, we cover:

• [1:44] What are tagatose and allulose?
• [14:24] Clinical research behind these sugars.
• [16:40] How Tagatose and Allulose are made today at a high cost versus Bonumose’s use of enzymes to reduce the cost by more than 10x.
• [22:18] How Bonumose got started, and the IP behind the company.
• [34:13] What is needed to scale get broad scale adoption of these novel sugars.
• [41:45] The case for sustainability in producing sugars this way.
• [46:56] The suprising thing about food and beverage companies and their lack of confidence in consumers.

Learn more about Bonumose:

• Bonumose pitch at Foodbytes
• Company website

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