Christine Esposito, Managing Editor06.16.22
Unilever and Genomatica (Geno) have launched a new venture to scale and commercialize alternative to palm oil and fossil fuel-derived cleansing ingredients. With growing demand for sustainably-sourced palm oil, this venture aims to deliver additional responsibly sourced palm oil alternatives to the market.
With $120 million jointly invested in the newly-formed initiative, and with other strategic investors expected to join, the venture will develop an alternative, plant-based ingredient using biotechnology.
According to Unilever, the venture has huge potential to help power its growth and strengthen its supply chains by creating cost-competitive alternatives and reducing its dependence on a small number of feedstocks that can have high levels of volatility.
It marks Unilever’s largest investment in biotechnology alternatives to palm oil to date.
The global CPG firm and maker of leading brands across household and personal care has had a long relationship with Geno. This new initiative bolsters the relationship between two like-minded companies.
“Unilever and Geno began collaborating in 2005 to accelerate the development of novel ingredients to improve the effectiveness of Unilever products,” said Richard Slater, chief R&D officer at Unilever. “Our two businesses share a mission to harness science and nature to accelerate the commercialization of sustainable materials that will drive real impact and change. With this new venture, we will be reinventing the chemistry of home and personal care products for the 21st Century.”
Geno, based San Diego, has started to scale the process to produce the exclusive ingredient, according to Unilever.
According to Slater, by using a fermentation process, the plant-based alternative creates a fatty alcohol ingredient for surfactants.
“What’s particularly exciting is that the ingredient is chemically almost identical to the palm kernel derived version, meaning we can use the ingredient without compromising product performance,” Slater said.
Beyond creating a newly transparent supply chain, initial estimates have shown that companies could reduce the carbon footprint of palm-derived ingredients by up to 50% with this technology-driven, plant based alternative.
The Unilever brands that will use the new ingredient have yet to be confirmed, Slater told Happi.
“However it could be deployed in any number of the products across our Personal Care, Beauty & Wellbeing, and Home Care portfolio that rely on the use of surfactants in order to clean,” he said.
“The innovation is poised to benefit the combined $625 billion global personal care and home care industry as a whole, so we know consumer packaged goods businesses like ours will be keeping close tabs on the pilot venture’s success,” he added.
Slater said that based on Geno’s track record of scaling and commercializing production, the ingredient could be available for use between 2026-2028.
“In phase one, the initiative will conduct R&D to pilot and demonstrate the scalability of Geno’s technology via a large suite of patents for commercialization in the home care and beauty industries. If successful, phase 2 will see major investment to build a commercial scale biotechnology plant,” Slater said.
“We’ve developed our technology in response to our planet’s urgent climate crisis and we’ve proven that biotechnology can replace traditional production methods to produce ingredients with bio-based sources that deliver both high-performance and sustainability, at scale,” said Christophe Schilling, Geno CEO, in a statement.
With $120 million jointly invested in the newly-formed initiative, and with other strategic investors expected to join, the venture will develop an alternative, plant-based ingredient using biotechnology.
According to Unilever, the venture has huge potential to help power its growth and strengthen its supply chains by creating cost-competitive alternatives and reducing its dependence on a small number of feedstocks that can have high levels of volatility.
It marks Unilever’s largest investment in biotechnology alternatives to palm oil to date.
Shared Mission
The global CPG firm and maker of leading brands across household and personal care has had a long relationship with Geno. This new initiative bolsters the relationship between two like-minded companies.
“Unilever and Geno began collaborating in 2005 to accelerate the development of novel ingredients to improve the effectiveness of Unilever products,” said Richard Slater, chief R&D officer at Unilever. “Our two businesses share a mission to harness science and nature to accelerate the commercialization of sustainable materials that will drive real impact and change. With this new venture, we will be reinventing the chemistry of home and personal care products for the 21st Century.”
Geno, based San Diego, has started to scale the process to produce the exclusive ingredient, according to Unilever.
According to Slater, by using a fermentation process, the plant-based alternative creates a fatty alcohol ingredient for surfactants.
“What’s particularly exciting is that the ingredient is chemically almost identical to the palm kernel derived version, meaning we can use the ingredient without compromising product performance,” Slater said.
Beyond creating a newly transparent supply chain, initial estimates have shown that companies could reduce the carbon footprint of palm-derived ingredients by up to 50% with this technology-driven, plant based alternative.
The Unilever brands that will use the new ingredient have yet to be confirmed, Slater told Happi.
“However it could be deployed in any number of the products across our Personal Care, Beauty & Wellbeing, and Home Care portfolio that rely on the use of surfactants in order to clean,” he said.
“The innovation is poised to benefit the combined $625 billion global personal care and home care industry as a whole, so we know consumer packaged goods businesses like ours will be keeping close tabs on the pilot venture’s success,” he added.
Slater said that based on Geno’s track record of scaling and commercializing production, the ingredient could be available for use between 2026-2028.
“In phase one, the initiative will conduct R&D to pilot and demonstrate the scalability of Geno’s technology via a large suite of patents for commercialization in the home care and beauty industries. If successful, phase 2 will see major investment to build a commercial scale biotechnology plant,” Slater said.
Geno's Biotech
Geno’s biotechnology converts plant-based raw materials into chemical building blocks that are key components of widely used materials. The alliance with Unilever joins additional partnerships, including a multi-year collaboration with Lululemon athletica to bring renewably-sourced, bio-based materials into lululemon’s products; Covestro AG to produce significant volumes of a plant-based version HMDA used in sustainable coatings; Asahi Kasei to commercialize renewably-sourced nylon 6,61 made from Geno’s bio-based HMD; and Cargill-Helm, which has licensed Geno’s BDO process technology and is using Cargill’s global feedstock supply and fermentation manufacturing expertise to initially produce and distribute an BDO at scale.“We’ve developed our technology in response to our planet’s urgent climate crisis and we’ve proven that biotechnology can replace traditional production methods to produce ingredients with bio-based sources that deliver both high-performance and sustainability, at scale,” said Christophe Schilling, Geno CEO, in a statement.