Five minutes at FI Europe  with … 

Ezequiel Abad
Sales & Business Development

Agro Food Industry Hi-Tech: What kind of innovations are you presenting at FIE?
Ezequiel Abad: Historically, our main innovations are in speciality products within our line of antioxidants, sterols, vitamin and lecithin. We offer the strictest guarantee for non-GMO soybean tocopherols available in the market, with full traceability up to the seed.  More recently we launched materials from non-GMO crops by definition, such as Sunflower and Rapeseed: our Sun-E vitamin E, Sunvolec lecithin and Tocomix R are highly differentiated as non-GMO, non-soy materials, increasingly important for many customers. We continue in two ways down this road: One, we take our signature non-GMO products like vitamin E in powder form. These powders have been one of the big steps in recent times. Second, our organic certifications, now available for vitamin E and tocopherol.

AF: Given this attention, do you also use specific processing techniques?
EA: We have minimised the use of solvents in our production process.  For example , for products such as our Sunflower and Rapeseed-sourced tocopherols, no solvents are used at all.  In the product lines where they are used, they are completely removed from finished products.

AF: One of the issues with antioxidants is their bioavailability. Do you offer some solutions for this?
EA: Speaking about vitamin E, in particular a-tocopherol, the largest source by far is synthetic. This source contains all eight isomers of a-tocopherol but of them only one, R,R,R-a-tocopherol, is the most bioactive and bioavailable. In natural sources but especially sunflower, practically all of the tocopherol is in the most bioactive and bioavailable isomer, so we offer a much greater bio-efficiency –at least 2:1 vs synthetic vitamin E according to several technical studies, translating in greater in vivo benefit.

AF: What products are you now adding to your offer?
EA: A completely different product we added is sunflower lecithin. This was a natural development since sunflower tocopherol was already one of our most recognizable products, and we had already access to excellent raw materials. Our lecithin is a premium grade lecithin coming from sunflower-only processing facilities, free from any risk of contamination. Therefore it is naturally non-GMO and non-soy, with the value this adds to the customer.

AF: How do you see the demand for this type of product evolving?
EA: While Europe has been traditionally the driver for non-GMO demand, we see a substantial trend towards non-GMO in the US. Many manufacturers are looking for something differentiating there, giving customers a unique proposition. Since the products we offer are clean label, non-GMO, non-soy, and organic we are in a strong position to intercept this demand. Asia is growing while South America up to a point, but it has potential.

AF: Since non-GMO is one of your main proposition, how do you meet the challenge of techniques such as CRISPR/Cas9 that blur the lines of what a GMO product is?
EA: We believe it is important to have in clear definitions in legislation and welcome technologies that revolutionise the detection GMO’s. We are not the only producer and many of these products are sold as “non GMO”. Due to the absence of proteins in finished tocopherol products, there is no technical “guarantee” for non-GMO.  This is why we rely on hard-IP identity preservation with full lot-by-lot traceability to the seed for all of our soybean products.  Every lot we produce is auditied and individually certified by a third party. This is something unique in the market: what we see usually are very vague “non GMO” certifications, based on aspects like “this product comes from a region where GMOs are not used”. We ensure every possible guarantee.

AF: What can we expect from AOM in the next future?
EA: We are completing and launching a new plant building, adding more capacity to our pharmaceutical grade blending and packaging rooms for powders and liquids, and where we will develop new formats for our products. We want to be everywhere our products are consumed.