Food industry

The global functional foods market continues to be a dynamic and growing segment of the food industry. Rapid growth will continue for several years, and functional foods are expected to represent a significant share of the total global food market.

Regulations for safety and beneficial efficacy for functional foods

As the functional food sector has already matured and expanded, government regulators have become key players in the global functional foods marketplace. Solid science regarding safety and efficacy is pivotal in ensuring future market success and consumer confidence. Within EU, food legislation has recently been amended: Regulations on Novel foods and Claims on health and wellbeing are now in force. They regulate the development, production and marketing of functional foods and set the conditions for sufficient safety data, e.g. prior to launching clinical studies.

The development of functional food is a two-stage process, where food R&D and productions follows the food ingredient R&D, production and application. At the ingredient R&D stage, the development of a novel functional compound or another food additive includes identification of potential molecules (e.g. from a natural extract), optimizing these compounds (chemistry, microbiology, etc), and selecting the potential compound and eliminating the unsuitable ones. Especially, predictive and experimental data to support the potential health claim and benefit of the functional component is required at the non-clinical stage.

SBW platform for food industries

SBW provides in vivo testing services for the in-depth analysis of functional components including efficacy tests (disease models), safety evaluation (non-GLP and GLP) and in vivo ADME analyses, including both small and large molecule (protein) ingredients.

We provide an extensive platform for safety and toxicity evaluations, consisting of in silico, in vitro and in vivo methods. In addition, we provide variety of in vivo efficacy models for indications like diabetes, obesity and gastro-intestinal conditions.

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