"KeyGene helps us to quickly address the consumers’ needs"

Lora Kilgore-Norquest works with Ingredion, a US-based company that produces plant-based proteins as well as starches that can be the basis for a healthier diet. “In doing so, we may want to decrease bitter flavors in peas, or make starches more resistant to digestion in the human intestine. This is where the help of the agile and professional team of KeyGene is crucial to us”, Kilgore-Norquest says.

Ingredion is a US-based company that produces, among other products, pulses that provide valuable plant-based proteins. The legacy of Ingredion is in starches and there also, the company is looking for healthier and more sustainable additions to the diet. “We breed for better flavor, better nutrition and better health with sustainability in mind” Lora Kilgore-Norquest, senior plant science manager at Ingredion summarizes.

Although Kilgore-Norquest describes Ingredion’s Plant Science team as a ‘small and mighty’ team within Ingredion, it does not provide all the necessary services that are needed.

To produce pulses that have a better taste, making them fit for a diet with less meat, or to produce starches that resist microbial digestion, advanced knowledge of genomics is needed. “That is where KeyGene came in for us, more than six years ago”, she emphasizes.

Challenging flavors

“The flavors of yellow peas have long been a challenge to the industry”, Kilgore-Norquest mentions as a concrete example of the cooperation. “If you want to produce attractive beverages, bars or other protein rich ‘consumer packed goods’, you don’t want them to have a bitter flavor. KeyGene has helped us to identify the regions in the genome of pea lines that affect this flavor via applying their innovations in DNA technology and metabolomics technology. This way, we have been able to produce a less biter pea for our customers.”

Beyond sequencing

“KeyGene is beyond sequencing, though”, Kilgore-Norquest stresses. “They have provided us with the facilities to produces more than one growth cycle per year, very much speeding up the process of developing new marketable products. Apart from knowledge and agility, it is this speed in our cooperation that we appreciate so much.”

Kilgore-Norquest expects a lot from the cooperation with KeyGene in the future as well. “We will continue to work on fortification of plant-based proteins, as the market for alternatives to meat is under increasing pressure since the pandemic. Not only bitter flavors have our attention there.”

“If we want to make pulses more competitive in this market, we must look at, for example, the harvestability as well. Therefore, with the help of the knowledgeable KeyGene-team, we may want to develop peas with a different type of leaf and stronger stems for standability as well, making the harvest potentially more efficient.”

In starches, Ingredion specifically works on ingredients that are more resistant to microbial digestion in the human intestine. “That way, we could provide a dietary alternative to the medicinal approach of the so-called GLP-1 inhibitors like Ozempic, that have become so popular on the market today”, Kilgore-Norquest says.

“We hope to continue to benefit from the cooperation with KeyGene on these paths in the future as well. I therefore look forward to continuing our work with Walter Nelson and his KeyGene US-team.”