Business of the Month: Amai

What are Designer Proteins and Why Do We Need Them?

Why is Israel one of the leading countries showing progress in sugar substitutes? How can a sweet taste be redefined? Ask the professionals, and they will tell you that it’s all about a designer protein. Amai, an Israeli company created the world’s sweetest protein, and now, the company is redefining the way we satisfy our sweet tooth. Amai (means ‘sweet’ in Japanese) takes sweet proteins found along the equatorial belt and applies Agile Integrative Computational Protein Design (AI-CPD) and precision fermentation to make proteins fit for the mass food market. Inspired by the low-stability protein found in nature, AI-CPD designs a protein that is similar to proteins that are part of life in harsh environments such as the Dead Sea, acidic swamps, or scalding hot springs. The novel, GMO-free ingredients are healthy (zero calories, zero glycemic index), tasty and cheaper than sugar (in sweetness units). They are also widely food-compatible, scalable, sustainable, and environmentally friendly. In other words, a perfect modern protein for those seeking something sweet yet Amai provides a welcome protein boost.

Currently, sweet proteins are found in hundreds of food products. Yet the use of this protein is hampered by high price, lack of supply, imperfect taste profile, and lack of sufficient shelf-life and stability in some applications. Amai conducts AI-CPD using designated cloud-computing-based software, designing proteins that are between 70% to 100% identical to the sweet proteins found in nature. The AI-CPD platform allows Amai to present healthy proteins with optimized taste, stability, food compatibility, and expression yield. The GMO-free proteins are produced by precision fermentation. Beer and yogurts are examples of fermented foods. Precision fermentation adds a layer of harvesting the protein product from the fermenter thus getting a pure protein.

How does it work? Simply put, sweet proteins bind to our sweet receptors just like sugar, thus triggering the sensation of sweet taste. At the same time, the upper gastrointestinal tract digests them just like regular proteins from typical food sources like meat, yogurt, and eggs which many consumers enjoy daily. Thus, the hypersweet protein feels like sugar but then, unlike sugar and its current substitutes, has no adverse interactions with the human body.

Amai’s team of 25 (70% female, 9 PhDs) is currently focused on achieving high-yield large-scale production followed by regulatory clearance to enable sales in less than two years. Amai already has numerous Joint Development Agreements with multinationals such as PepsiCo, Danone, Ocean Spray, and others. The Amai list of prototype products includes beverages, dairy, chocolate, dried fruits, confectionery, and more. In each such product, the Amai sweetener replaces 35-70% of the added sugar – up to the point in which consumers cannot feel the difference between the full-sugar product and the Amai-sweetened product, a task that is done by Amai’s 20 supertasters who conduct the taste testing in a blind fashion. But the sweet revolution is just the beginning as with over $15M that Amai raised, it is expanding to fitting other Designer Proteins to the mass food market in the meat, plant, and milk space.