Manufacturing Plant Science | Taking Ingredient Manufacturing to a NEW Level
The Need for a New Category: Why we created the term Cellular Extraction™
Did you know we created our own extraction category back in 2013? Our process was evolving the botanical extract from macerated and percolated processes, offering a new look at species’ phyto-compound profiles.
We first created the term in 2013 because Director and Owner, Lisa Carroll recognised the need to define our new category that offered more than what we had seen of macerated extracts – we wanted to deliver a True to Nature extract, the water-soluble phyto-compound profile of a species – moving away from isolating and purifying individual compounds, and driven by our beliefs that delivering the entourage held new breakthroughs. We began sharing new analytical information of plant profiles, some of which had never been seen before. We trademarked the term in 2014, and it has become recognized in the industry. After 9 years of sharing our profiles, Cellular Extraction™ is well known, and is even sought after by leading universities wanting access to natural molecules in their entourage for research projects.
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PROCESS BEHIND CELLULAR EXTRACTIONTM
Harnessing the Entourage
We moved away from past extraction processes to create True to Nature extracts - liquids that suspend a botanical species' water-soluble phyto-compounds and their derivatives in a liquid matrix. We wanted to deliver the water-soluble entourage, the aqueous blueprint of fruit, leaf, flower or fungi. We have achieved big breakthroughs in delivering natural molecules, discovering and learning more about plant profiling, allowing us to build an extensive library of phyto-compounds and their sources.
From our early days, we began building knowledge that expanded how people could search for plant extracts. Whereas most extracts were often chosen by species (and often anecdotal information or direct analysis of the biomass), we were able to allow clients to discover new options, searching by phyto-compound(s). This opened a whole new world of information for our clients to further research and innovate from – especially as we delved into the unique profiles of under-researched Australian species and offered new information on traditional botanicals for topical applications.
Pushing the Boundaries of Phyto-Tech
As we continue to build and share a new collection of data points, we expand the analysis and identification of ingredients for a range of applications, discovering new values of species, introducing our growers' to new markets and high value crops, and our clients to a collection of new Beauty Heroes. Recently we can identify over 200 unique and individual metabolites just in the Flavonoid family of one of our botanicals!
Most importantly, our discoveries made us examine our processes more closely, building off our biggest breakthroughs to continually iterate and push the boundaries to offer more – new protocols and methodologies, higher concentrations, alternate solubilities, new species and even upcycling (repurposing) by-product biomass. Including 2 new technologies we are creating.
One of our greatest breakthroughs was our ability to capture the natural Vit C molecule in an aqueous format - work we continue to expand upon every year. We now offer world-first concentrations of natural Vit C in our Kakadu Plum Native EssenXce where we created a liquid that delivered 15-16,000mg/100g.
The Era of Enquiry – Delving into Functionality of Extracts
Since 2016, our company's ownership restructuring saw us significantly expand our science, our technical expertise, continuing to improve our protocols and develop new concentrations, and larger libraries of botanical profiles. In our pursuit to evolve, we left the early days of R&D to become a very different company that has achieved significant advances that span into exciting phyto-pharmaceutical ingredient projects, functional beverages and tincture development.
More recently, our partnerships with leading research facilities allow us to not only go deeper into the larger peaks on our LCMS and unidentified peaks, but we are applying some exciting science that allows us to record antioxidant activity by each LCMS peak. Research on this and other applications, like our collaboration on anti-inflammatory research with The University of Queensland, allows us to look further into the biomarkers and potential benefits of our Cellular Extracts and EssenXces for new natural ingredients in nutraceutical, pharmaceutical, food & bev ranges and beyond!
The More We Learn – The More We Question
More recently, there have been advances in new testing methods that will be patented. The more we learn, the more we realise there is to learn. More advances in testing technology means we learn more about how compounds behave. One thing is for sure - the entourage is key, the importance of the synergistic relationships between the compounds, how they support and sacrifice to each other - and there is still so much to discover!
Blending phyto-compound profiles holds exciting possibilities and we have a number of compounds from different species that will hold synergism. It is just the beginning for us as we discover more of nature's secrets, and how we can best harness them whilst considering a sustainable future for these species. Sharing this information with our growers, and collaborating on new commercialization formats of their crops (like the work we have done on the Queen Garnet), also provides new opportunities to revalue their crops and access new markets, along with potential to build R&D around applications they can support with defendable science.