Shiru FAQs
SHIRU’S INGREDIENTS
What kind of ingredients is Shiru producing?
Shiru is developing a growing range of functional ingredients, initially focused on gelation, egg replacement, and structured fats functions. With the FlourishTM platform, any needed functional ingredient can be matched to a naturally-occurring protein, opening up a wide range of possibilities for future ingredient discoveries. For more information, visit our Products page.
How are your ingredients produced?
At Shiru, we use precision fermentation, powered by strain engineering, to produce our ingredients in a scalable, sustainable way. Many people are already familiar with existing food products that use fermentation, like beer or yogurt; precision fermentation is a refined version of that process that allows us to produce the exact proteins that we need. Learn more about the precision fermentation process here.
Can I buy Shiru ingredients?
Shiru’s aim is to provide a better ingredient toolkit for food developers, enabling the food industry to create tasty, nutritious, and more sustainable products. Our current focus is on providing ingredients to these food developers, whose finished products will then be available for consumers to enjoy.
How can we work together?
Shiru partners with leading food companies looking to replace specific functional ingredients in their products with more sustainable alternatives. We also work with partners that are interested in supporting the scaling of sustainable ingredient production. If you’re interested in creating the future of sustainable food with us, reach out here.
SHIRU’S DISCOVERY PROCESS
What is Flourish™?
Flourish™ is Shiru’s patent-pending discovery platform that evaluates the hundreds of millions of proteins found in nature to discover novel uses for them as functional food ingredients. Think of Flourish as food science’s matchmaker, driven by data and cutting-edge scientific techniques to match food scientists’ needs with sustainable and delicious functional ingredients. The Flourish platform includes phases of machine learning and bioinformatics, precision fermentation, and food-specific testing—all to power the discovery of new ingredients. To learn more about Flourish, visit our Approach page.
How does Shiru use technology to identify and produce its ingredients?
Facilitated by the Flourish platform, Shiru combines machine learning, bioinformatics, strain engineering, precision fermentation, and high-throughput testing to select and produce nature-based proteins that can provide specific ingredient functions. These novel ingredients can then replace unsustainable animal-based products in food, without sacrificing taste or nutrition. To learn more about each of these technologies, we encourage you to visit our blog!
Why does Shiru focus on proteins?
Shiru uses proteins found in nature, like in plants and fungi, as precision ingredients to more sustainably make our favorite foods. Proteins provide many functional qualities of food, such as structure, texture, water retention, and sometimes even color. For this reason, they make very effective ingredients when we’re looking at replicating specific characteristics of food that are generated today by animal products.