We recently found out that, a few years ago, organizations like the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) got together and established what’s known as World Food Safety Day with the aim of raising awareness and teaching folks about foodborne illness prevention. As we didn’t realize the scale of the problem was such that it warranted an entire global day… we went digging for information.

What we found out is, World Food Safety Day was just celebrated earlier this week, and the numbers around food safety are staggering… it seems that one in ten people get sick from their food. Sadly, far too many ultimately perish. Not only that, but climate change is making it worse. That’s because warmer weather means hot breeding grounds for bacteria. And, as livestock and crops warm up, they may not fare well and end up sick. All this spells more food risk.

So… what’s the answer? Well, like most stuff, it’ll be a multipronged attack. For instance, researchers with North Carolina State University recently announced they’d created a new method to detect foodborne illness early so they don’t get bad… or worse, out of control. After all, there’s no closing that box once it opens. What’s cool about what they’ve done is they’re using “optical tweezers” to trap and track individual bacteria, which means better data from smaller samples.

That’s a big deal because if we can detect tiny amounts of what makes us sick, we don’t have to wait for the illness to spread to be obvious or observed… that time costs lives. This type of thing is going to be what we need, because we’re (of course) leaning hard on tech to snatch our backsides from the fire here. And, luckily for us, we happen to have a Commander in Chief who believes in the gift of technology, and we specifically mean ag biotech.

Also sometimes referred to agritech, ag biotech is short for agricultural biotechnology. Basically, it’s agriculture meets science… if you’re a mad scientist movie fan, you’re already ahead of the game. However, this won’t be the attack of any killer tomatoes, this will be science working with those who know food to overcome challenges facing our leaders. And they’ve got ‘em… they’re trying to feed billions, and the bearing-down sun isn’t doing anyone any favors.

With ag biotech, we apply science to living things… animals, plants, and microorganisms, to make them better and safer. In this instance, we’ll use it for food safety so hungry people can eat. Now, back to President Biden, because he’s been busy in this space. As far as he’s concerned, food biotech is the future. He’s serious too, in April 2023, he issued an executive order focusing on building a new approach to safety, sustainability, and equity when using ag biotech.

In terms of how biotechnology can help with food safety… if we utilize our resources properly, the sky really is the limit. Since we basically have genetic scissors and lots of other fun toys, we can build what we need. Here’s what to know: the space is growing quickly, it’s brutal (makes sense), and the kind of people who get into it are solvers. We can see why… solve big problems, get a big paycheck.

Expect things like near-instant pathogen detection, sensors that you can eat (real-time data), or vaccines and antibodies for things we wouldn’t normally consider, like salmonella or mad cow. Both are serious illnesses. In dollars, the global biotechnology market sat at over $859 billion as of last year, and is expected to reach over $1,683 billion by 2030. The food safety slice of that should grow to over $25 billion by 2028 from around $15 billion in 2022.

We’ve seen some companies making this very human, and working on problems that are life or death, like allergies. For example, San Francisco-based IgGenix, a biotechnology company that just raised $40 million in Series B funding in February… which caught our eye, because we saw that they picked up Eli Lilly and Company as a new investor. What are they doing that’s so interesting?

Well… it would seem they’re using single-cell RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) to isolate cells and reengineer them to flat out block or prevent allergic reactions. As a person with life-threatening allergies, this is exciting. Not only that, if you are the caregiver for, or are the parent of, someone with dangerous allergies, it could change things for the better. Sometimes, even the meds used to treat allergic reactions can be scary due to other underlying conditions. They may have something here…

It got us thinking… if we can do that, why can’t we just prevent dangerous food from going out to people in the first place? Well, with things like molecular tests, that’s feasible. And, with things like AI essentially “out of the bag” now, we’re applying that here too. We can apply it to the entire production process, along with robotics and the blockchain, and the things we can do at that point are only limited by our willingness to experiment. Come back next week, we’ll have more from the IPO space.