Nutritious, Natural Sugars: A Conversation with Bonumose Founder Ed Rogers

iSelect managing director Mark McCall recently participated in a panel discussion at the Family Office Impact Summit at the United Nations headquarters in New York. Hosted by Gitterman Wealth Management, Family Office Insights and 5th Element Group, the event was a private gathering of 250 Family Office, ESG, Impact, and Climate Change Experts to discuss the relationship between private capital and positive social change. Mark was able to sit down with Ed Rogers, CEO of iSelect portfolio company Bonumose, to talk about the intersection of food and health, the potential impact of “healthy” sugars and the opportunities that Bonumose is seeing in the market for nutritious, natural sugars.

Mark McCall: Good afternoon everybody. My name is Mark McCall. I’m a managing director at iSelect Fund. We are a venture capital firm headquartered in the Midwest. With me is Ed Rogers. He’s the CEO and cofounder of Bonumose, one of our exceptional portfolio companies.

I just want to first of all say thank you again to Jeff, to 5th Element, and everyone else for this fantastic conference. I am not from a family office, but I feel like I’m in a family of 300 people right now. This is right down our alley and I love everything that’s going on here.

Just a few words about iSelect. Again, we are a venture capital firm. We’re headquartered in the Midwest in St Louis. We primarily invest in food and agriculture and healthcare and life sciences, a little bit of resource efficiency as well. We have over 50 portfolio companies, and importantly we are an open ended evergreen platform, making it very accessible for investors to invest in the companies that we bring onto our platform, which is about two companies every month, to invest on a continuous basis and also to develop customized investment plans.

Ed, I’m going to let you introduce the company, but one of the things I’d like to point out is the title of this session starts with “natural nutritious sugars.” I’m quite sure that most of you have not seen the words “nutritious” and “sugars” in the same sentence. So, with that in mind maybe introduce the company a little bit and perhaps give the audience a little bit of a taste of what that means.

Ed Rogers: So our company is a 3- year-old startup based in Virginia and we’re focused on nutritious sugar. Right off the bat, nutritious sugar is a thing and our company has a technology that will democratize nutritious sugar, making nutritious sugar affordable for mass market adoption.

It’s important to acknowledge whenever you’re talking about an alternative to regular sugar, to sucrose, which is the gold standard of sweeteners. It’s great tasting, it’s very functional and food sugar does a whole lot of things in foods beyond just bring sweetness. It provides the structure to foods. It reduces water activity in baked goods, so it helps reduce microbial contamination. It depresses the freezing point in ice cream to result in a creamy ice cream.

So these are all things that sugar does: it’s great tasting, it’s functional and it’s cheap. So all alternatives are going to be judged that way at least by the consumers.

So we have a process for producing rare sugars such as tagatose and allulose. They occur naturally in fruits and some grains and actually tagatose occurs in the Cacau tree, the tree that produces the bean for chocolate. But they occur in such tiny quantities that they can’t effectively be harvested.

There are processes for making these rare sugars that are expensive and we’ll talk about that in a second, but what you really need to know is that they really shine when it comes to health. So allulose and tagatose do not raise your blood sugar level. In fact, tagatose has been shown in phase three clinical trials to reduce blood sugar levels. So not just not raised, but actually reduce. They are not going to cause cavities.

Allulose has even been shown to break up dental plaque, so it’s good for oral health can be used in toothpaste and mouthwash. They both contribute to weight control. They are extremely low calorie. They give a sense of satiety. They don’t trick the brain into overeating. The brain thinks of them just like regular sugar, and so they’re not going to lead to overeating.

And then the last one I’ll mention is gut health. Tagatose is a prebiotic, so it’s a dietary soluble fiber. It goes into the large intestine, it feeds the good gut bacteria in the large intestine and leads to all sorts of good things there. So there is a host of other health benefits that I could get into time permitting, so they’re great for you. They’re not just benign. They’re actually beneficial.

Sometimes we say “beyond benign, they are beneficial.” And they also don’t taste weird. There’s no aftertaste from tasting these things. They taste very much like regular sugar. The sweetness is almost identical. They function