Seed-breeding company Equinom to open new R&D Centre
Equinom advances its breeding capabilities to provide novel seed-to-table solutions.
Israel based Equinom, Ltd., the first seed-breeding company announced that it will open an R&D centre that houses all vital departments together –biochemistry, applications, sensory, and breeding. The new centre will enable these departments to work and communicate synergistically throughout the course of seed breeding and development, resulting in a more efficient and more accurate process.
The new centre empowers Equinom to generate source ingredients for the food industry starting at the seed level. This will allow the company to more effectively address the needs of stakeholders (food and ingredient companies) across the supply chain while creating seed solutions from seed-to-table.
The new centre, located at Kibbutz Givat Brenner in the agriculturally rich center of Israel, provides end-to-end research and development capabilities to accelerate Equinom’s efforts to develop the next generation of its non-GMO Smarter Seeds boasting exceptional characteristics.
Preserving the old to reshape the future
In an exercise of expansion through preservation, a vintage building was restructured, preserving the original heritage warehouse. “We faced a slew of challenges reshaping an antique warehouse into a modern facility,” confesses Gil Shalev, CEO of Equinom. “But sustainability plays a big part in Equinom’s core values. Our decision to relocate to an old warehouse instead of building an entirely new facility is in line with our commitment to combine traditional treasures with high-tech capabilities.”
The new R&D centre, at more than three times the size of Equinom’s original facility, contains all of the company’s development disciplines: agronomics, bioinformatics, biochemistry, and food science. The four state-of-the-art laboratories cover most of the company’s R&D units: seed processing, biochemistry lab, food application lab, and a high-tech sensory lab.
The biochemistry lab adds a second layer of deep analysis of seeds and discovery of their traits. It allows for full analysis of a seed strain’s nutritional profile (protein, oil/fat, fibers, starch etc.) with high-throughput capacity and analysis methodology. This process is unique to Equinom, yielding the minutest details of thousands of lines every season and providing, together with the bio information team, a full genotype and phenotype of each crop.
The food application lab is distinctive to Equinom and is crucial for interpreting the needs of the food industry from seed to table. It can directly incorporate food engineering inputs into Equinom’s breeding technology.
“Consumers are now demanding clean-label plant-based products,” stresses Itay Dana, VP of Marketing for Equinom. “By discovering appealing textures starting at a seed level for, as an example, meat analogues, we can dramatically reduce the need for extensive processing This means food manufacturers are better able to provide consumers products with cleaner — and clearer — labels. Equinom’s seeds can potentially reduce production cost by almost 40% via fewer ingredients, lower price, reduced need for flavor enhancers, and encouraging strong consumer adoption.”
Equinom advances its breeding capabilities to provide
