Nutraberry

About Nutraberry

While earning my MBA at Seattle University, I discovered that I was more entrepreneurial than I had realized. As vice chair of the Puget Sound AIChE section, I helped organize a sustainability conference and invited University of Washington professor Graham Allan to speak. Through Graham, I learned about the seeds left behind by fruit processors and saw an opportunity to turn that overlooked material into useful ingredients. I started Nutraberry in 2011. In 2013, I joined forces with Graham’s son, Robert Allan, whose engineering and manufacturing skills helped us build the operation. We began by pressing berry seeds for oil and milling the remaining material into fiber. More than 100 commercial orders, including personal-care exfoliant orders through DKSH, showed that customers would pay for these ingredients. Those early orders also revealed a bigger formulation challenge. Food companies wanted the benefits of fiber without grit, unwanted texture, or settling. We integrated low-damage particle engineering to make difficult materials easier to use. A USDA/NIFA STTR Phase I award supported research into micronized raspberry-seed fiber with Washington State University and King’s College London. We now apply that approach to our own upcycled ingredients and to customer-supplied materials, including legume hulls and sensitive actives. My connection to AIChE later led me to the Langer Prize and Professor Robert Langer’s work. I saw a connection between our work making functional ingredients easier to formulate and VitaKey’s work on the precise delivery of nutrients. I reached out to Professor Langer, and he introduced me to VitaKey’s CEO and CSO. We held an initial technical discussion about whether our particle-engineering capabilities could complement its approach to precision nutrition. Today, Mondelēz is conducting a paid evaluation of our chickpea-hull material, and Lubrizol/Lipotec funded our first processing campaign. We are raising $600,000 to establish dedicated capacity and turn successful evaluations into recurring production. The opportunity ahead is to help make the next generation of nutritious foods practical to manufacture and appealing to eat.