Harnessing Nature's Solutions: Sensient Creates Eco-friendly Ingredients to Maximize Your BioAg Ranges

With rising demand for sustainable agriculture, biological crop inputs offer great promise. In an exclusive interview, AgroPages spoke with Lisha Daniel, Innovation & Technical Director at Sensient, about the company’s new Bloomgenix™ line of biostimulants and fermentation nutrients. 

Drawing on decades of experience with botanical ingredients, Sensient is now leveraging its technical expertise to create targeted biological solutions for agriculture. As Daniel explained, Bloomgenix™ aims to provide BioAg partners with more tools to drive innovation and productivity. 

From concentrated, animal-free biostimulants to fermentation nutrients that boost yields of beneficial microbes, Sensient is focused on equipping formulators and farmers with solutions to enable smarter, more sustainable farming.

With rigorous quality control and deep science behind its ingredients, Sensient sees itself filling a vital role in cultivating the next wave of progress in biological agriculture. As Daniel stated, ″Our path is to further evolve our toolbox of powerful ingredients″ by digging deeper into the science of nature’s solutions.

Lisha Daniel

Innovation & Technical Director at Sensient

Sensient has made major investments in bio-based solutions for agriculture in recent years. What drove the strategic decision to grow the BioNutrients business, and what do you see as the greatest opportunities in this space? 

Historically, Sensient has been a part of the agricultural sector for many years. We grow several thousands of acres of a variety of crops every year, all over the world. From California-grown garlic, onion, and parsley to black carrot and butterfly pea flowers in South America, EMEA and APAC, Sensient is a vertically integrated leader of natural colors, extracts, and specialty ingredients. Our team of agronomists partner with growers to maximize productivity of our own crops while also trying to enhance local economies. 

All of this skin in the game has led us to work to optimize our biologically derived technology. In growing this technology, we are able to leverage our raw material sourcing, production, and extraction capabilities. As we have developed and tested this technology on our own crops globally, we have recognized that the rest of the Ag community has the same need to solve real-world problems as we do.

How does Sensient expertise in food ingredients and flavors translate to the plant nutrition arena? What unique capabilities does Sensient bring to developing bio-based crop inputs?

With decades of experience working with botanicals and biologically derived raw materials and extract specialty ingredients, Sensient has unique capabilities in not one or two, but well over a dozen of very different extraction techniques. The ability to partner with and transform such a wide variety of biological sources to different functional profiles is of distinct value to Biostimulant, Biofertilizer, and Biocontrol manufacturers looking to create targeted solutions and enhancements to their existing offerings.

Your new Sensient Bloomgenix™ line claims to help BioAg manufacturers streamline R&D and get products to market faster. Can you explain the technology and innovation behind Bloomgenix™? 

At its core, Bloomgenix™ is designed to improve our customer’s product and productivity. There is no single magic bullet; each of our solutions has a unique make-up or fingerprint resulting in different mechanisms of action. As a supplier of raw materials (ingredients) to develop BioAg solutions, we also extend ourselves beyond the product with technical and analytical support, formulation guidance, and support with trials.

With Bloomgenix™ Biostimulants, we designed a diverse toolbox of animal-free, high-performance Biostimulant ingredients for formulators (Biostimulant manufacturers). These ingredients are potent and highly concentrated in their effects. So whether it be seed treatments, fertilizer enhancements, or before or after onset of stress, these ingredients provide formulators with greater ease of use and flexibility to design targeted solutions. This is particularly beneficial as Biostimulant formulations are combined with traditional fertilizers and micronutrients.

Our Bloomgenix™ Fermentation line is toolbox of fermentation nutrients designed to improve yields and overall productivity when growing microbes used for biocontrol and biostimulant purposes. Our customers are looking to maximize their fermentation yields during manufacturing, all while delivering new BioAg microbes that are robust and differentiated. The fermentation nutrients we have designed are equipped to satisfy the nutritional requirements of complex microbes, improve downstream processing and to even help reduce lengthy, costly fermentations.

How does Sensient collaborate with partners across the agricultural value chain to enhance their biostimulants and bio-based crop nutrition offering? 

Sensient’s focus is on equipping BioAg manufacturers with potent ingredients and tools to create and enhance their formulated products. For example, with Bloomgenix™ Biostimulants, we equip formulators with the mode of action (gene regulation) related to the efficacy of our ingredients so they can make better formulation decisions. We believe the science behind ‘how’ and ‘why’ our products work is just as important as demonstrating efficacy. 

With regards to Bloomgenix™ Fermentation, we use some of our proprietary analysis to help BioAg manufacturers identify the right types of nutrients to improve fermentation productivity. We also leverage this understanding to recommend sources of nutrition (prebiotics) to strengthen the effects of BioAg microbes upon application into the soil or around the seed.

Overall, our collaborations involve strong, value-enhancing partnerships between our team of agronomists and scientists who work closely with BioAg manufacturers to select the right ingredients based on their innovation roadmap and business objectives. 

With rising concerns over sustainability in agriculture, how are Sensient's biostimulant solutions helping to reduce environmental impacts while boosting yields?

Emissions from the forest, land, and agriculture sector likely represent 22% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. On top of that, the agriculture industry faces issues of biodiversity, soil health, water conservation, deforestation, and more. We are aware of these challenges when we develop our biostimulant solutions, and we prioritize sustainable solutions.

For example, we designed our Bloomgenix™ solutions such that, when applied to a crop, they can improve the uptake of nutrients into the plant, thereby reducing the crop’s resource requirements. That means less arable land use, less water, and fewer emissions both on the farm and in transportation. Further, the higher nutrient-use efficiencies can help farmers reduce their use of synthetic nitrogen-based fertilizers, thereby improving both soil and water health, while ultimately harvesting a higher quality yield.

Products like Bloomgenix™ also see upstream environmental benefits by upcycling waste streams and byproducts from breweries and corn processing. The result of our biostimulant solutions is less waste, fewer emissions, smarter farming, and smarter production.  

Where do you see the most potential for biostimulants to solve real problems for farmers? 

Biostimulants have great potential because of their effectiveness, assurance, and overall ROI is a natural, no-brainer for farmers’ crop nutrition programs.

Manufacturers definitely have more room to demonstrate the effectiveness of biostimulants in conjunction with traditional crop inputs or other biological inputs. Identifying synergies between biologicals that are complementary to traditional chemical inputs is a significant step forward in increasing adoption by growers.

How does Sensient balance consistency and quality control with the need for localized, customized natural solutions? 

Sensient has a wide range of natural solutions, and we operate in high-quality standard sectors, such as food, pharma, and personal care. Our customers rely on our ingredients for consistent manufacturing of their end product. Quality is a core value of Sensient, along with honesty, product safety, and professionalism. We make food-grade ingredients across the company and so, if a product is not safe or does not meet our quality standards, we simply do not ship material to our customers. 

Because of our global footprint, Sensient's warehouses follow the same quality principles. They are extensions of every business unit, allowing our BioNutrients division to ensure efficient logistics that meet local customer needs.

What sets Sensient apart from other players in the BioAg industry? Why should your BioAg partners choose Sensient as a trusted supplier?

Sensient has a noteworthy background and expertise in extraction and fermentation processes, which allow us to explore hundreds of natural sources to create valuable materials for Agribusiness with the maximum quality.

More importantly, we are fanatical about customer service. We are totally responsive. We have a collaborative R&D model with a committed, sophisticated scientific and technical team with resources to serve our customers. We understand that most B2B companies focus on achieving a material supply agreement, but we want to go beyond that. We believe in common goals between companies and want to partner with our customers to meet their needs, including in high-value, long-term projects. We rigorously track our service metrics to ensure our customers are totally satisfied with the service, the products, and the projects we have selected together. Our goal is to ensure our customer/end-customer objectives are always met.

As a leader of Sensient BioNutrients, what is your vision for where you want to take the BioNutrients business over the next 3-5 years in terms of innovation, growth and market expansion?  

We’ve built a successful business supporting some of the key leaders in the BioAg manufacturing industry through our high-performing ingredients and customer-centered service. While we continue to grow our business supplying the needs for these market leaders facing strong tailwinds for natural solutions and high manufacturing demands, we expect to expand our offering to additional BioAg manufacturers looking for ingredients to solve innovation and production challenges. 

With our access to such a large bank of unique biologically derived sources coupled with such a vast array of different proprietary extraction technologies, Bloomgenix™ has a robust pipeline of continuing innovation. Beyond working with third-party research services and universities to validate our technology, we may also look for strategic customers as partners that can accelerate the evaluation of some of the unique ingredients we have yet to tap into, both for biostimulants and biocontrol applications. 

Our path over the next few years is to further evolve our toolbox of powerful ingredients. This is built on Sensient’s commitment to dig deeper into the science and efficacy behind our ingredients, so that BioAg manufacturers have access to unique biological–based technology for the next wave of innovation in the industry. 

This article was initially published in AgroPages' '2023 Market Insight' magazine.

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