Key takeaways:
- Sweet proteins aren’t a simple sugar swap – they require manufacturers to rebuild entire sweetener systems around them.
- Regulators may accept bioengineered ingredients, but how precision fermentation fits into ultra-processed food definitions remains unresolved.
- As sweet proteins scale, questions around sourcing, origin and benefit-sharing are emerging alongside the science.
The food industry has been trying to fix sugar for years and, if we’re honest, it hasn’t quite worked. Artificial sweeteners addressed one issue but introduced a new set of challenges. Stevia and monk fruit got closer, but never really managed to dc all at once – especially not in more complex categories like bakery, where sugar is doing far more than just sweetening.
That’s where Oobli comes in. Its pitch is straightforward enough: sweetness, but from protein instead of carbohydrates. “We’re a protein,” CEO Ali Wing says. “In other words, we’re not a carb like most other alternative natural sweeteners. Almost every sugar and sugar alternative on the market today is a small molecule, and those are absorbed very quickly and can trigger blood sugar or insulin responses. Proteins don’t behave that way – they have to be broken down first.”
But the bigger story isn’t just about metabolism. It’s about what happens when the industry tries to solve one problem and runs into another. Because while sugar is under pressure, so too is the way modern food is made. And those two conversations are starting to collide.
A new operating system for sweetness
Oobli doesn’t position sweet proteins as a clean replacement, but more as a rebuild.
“Sweeteners are in more than 72% of all packaged foods and beverages,” says Wing. “For most of those products, they contain combinations of sweeteners – what we like to call ‘sweetener systems’.” The ambition, she adds, is to become the ‘foundational chassis’ those systems are built on.
In practice, that means working alongside sugar rather than eliminating it entirely. The idea is to strip out most of the sugar while keeping just enough to hold everything else – structure, texture and flavour – together.
“We can deliver 60% to 70% sugar reduction without affecting taste,” says Wing. “We’re not trying to create a world where everything else disappears. In most cases, you’re still going to need a system around it.”
She’s also candid about the limitations. “Our strength and superpower is also our kryptonite – proteins only sweeten. They don’t mask, they don’t bulk, they don’t create mouthfeel. So when you take out those sweeteners, you’re also taking out all the things they were doing in the product.”
That’s where the formulation challenge shifts rather than disappears. That challenge is already playing out in practice. Oobli has been working with Grupo Bimbo to test sweet proteins in baked goods – one of the most difficult categories to reformulate, given sugar’s role in structure, bulk and texture. The collaboration has moved beyond early trials, with testing now taking place across real product categories.
What is the oubli fruit?
The oubli fruit (Pentadiplandra brazzeana) is a shrub native to West and Central Africa that produces small red berries known for their intense sweetness. That sweetness comes from brazzein, a naturally occurring protein that can be hundreds of times sweeter than sugar but doesn’t affect blood glucose levels.
The name ‘oubli’ comes from the French word for ‘forgotten’, linked to a local description that the fruit is so sweet it makes children ‘forget their mother’s milk’. It’s this story – as much as the science – that inspired Oobli’s name.
While the fruit has been consumed locally for generations, it’s difficult to cultivate at scale. Companies like Oobli are instead using precision fermentation to reproduce the same protein without relying on agricultural production.
Regulation may not be the barrier everyone expects
Regulation tends to come up quickly in these conversations, particularly as governments take a closer look at ultra-processed foods (UPFs). The concern, broadly, is whether newer ingredients could end up caught in definitions that weren’t designed with them in mind.
Wing doesn’t think the situation is quite that binary. “If you take a blunt-force approach to defining processed foods, it becomes almost untenable,” she says. “You’d end up driving a truck through some of the important tools we have for creating better, more affordable food.”
At the same time, she doesn’t try to position Oobli’s sweet proteins as something they’re not. “We already expect and are prepared to be classified and regulated as a bioengineered process. We are a bio-manufactured process. We’re teaching yeast to do something it didn’t do before.”
What matters, in her view, is transparency and the nature of the end product. “I actually believe consumer transparency is important. I don’t think we win if we try to hide it. But what we produce is identical to what you’d find in nature. You can map it directly to plants that people have been consuming for generations.”
Behind that argument is a fairly complex production process. Oobli uses precision fermentation, introducing the DNA sequence for brazzein into a yeast strain (Komagataella phaffii) with a long history of use in food production. The microbes are grown in fermentation tanks, where they feed on sugars in a nutrient-rich broth and produce the target protein, which is then filtered and purified. It’s a process that allows the company to replicate compounds found in nature without relying on crops that are difficult to grow at scale.
What is precision fermentation?
Precision fermentation uses micro-organisms such as yeast to produce specific ingredients – in this case, sweet proteins – at scale. The process involves programming the microbe to make a target compound, which is then harvested and purified.
It’s already widely used in food production, including enzymes, vitamins and some dairy proteins. What’s new is the level of precision and the range of ingredients that can now be produced.
For companies like Oobli, the argument is that fermentation offers a way to make nature-identical compounds more efficiently than growing them in crops, particularly when those crops are difficult to farm at scale.
Origins, ownership and an unfinished conversation
The regulatory debate isn’t the only one still evolving. There’s also the question of origin and how that’s handled as the technology scales.
Many of the proteins now being produced through fermentation were first identified in fruits native to West and Central Africa. That raises questions around biodiversity, recognition and whether value should be shared with the regions where these discoveries originated.
Wing acknowledges the complexity. “We have not entered into formal benefit-sharing agreements. Part of that is because these proteins don’t belong to one country or one place – they follow the equator. We’re working across multiple regions, and we expect to find many more as we continue to explore the plant kingdom.”
Rather than positioning this as a fixed model, she frames it as something still taking shape. “It’s something we talk about a lot internally,” she adds. “We want to be thoughtful about how we recognise the origins of these proteins, but it’s not a straightforward one-to-one relationship.”
It’s a practical answer, but it leaves some questions open. If these ingredients scale, the issue of ownership and recognition is unlikely to disappear.
For now, the focus is on getting products to market. Wing points to growing interest from manufacturers, alongside shifts in how consumers think about sugar and calories. “There is added attention to what was once considered ‘empty’ calories,” she says. “People are looking for more from every bite, whether that’s protein, fibre or overall nutrient density.”
On cost, she’s confident. “On a sweetness-equivalent basis, Oobli meets or beats sugar,” she says. “Because Oobli uses small amounts, it creates room in the formulation for other things as well.”
She’s candid, too, about what matters most to major food companies. “I make no bones about it – when I’m talking with a large global CPG, it’s first about taste and then it’s about cost and cost and cost, and somewhere in there I get to start to talk about health and climate. It’s not to say that they as individuals don’t care, but their current structures incentivise the top two because their job is to mitigate change, but they’re also talking business.”
She’s also relatively relaxed about what this means for sugar itself. “We don’t spend a ton of time worrying about long-term displacement,” she says. “Sugar is a miracle crop. We just need to use it more responsibly.” She draws a comparison with energy. “Think of it like fossil fuel. It’s incredibly valuable, but we need to be more thoughtful about where and how we use it.”
That may be where this ultimately lands. Sweet proteins are gaining traction and the case for reducing sugar isn’t going away. But the shift isn’t as simple as replacing one ingredient with another. It’s about reworking the system around it, piece by piece. And as that happens, the questions around regulation, sourcing and long-term impact are only just starting to surface.
