SINGAPORE (Mar 18): If anyone had told Alan Phua not to play with his food when he was a kid, he certainly did not listen. As the “Master Builder”, or co-founder, of start-up Alchemy Foodtech, his job is to tinker with food. And he will not be happy until he has achieved his goal of making white rice, bread and flour safer for diabetics to consume.
For Phua, diabetes is a disease that hits close to home. Both his grandmothers died from complications arising from diabetes, and five of his mother’s six siblings have the disease. Right off the bat, he recites some shocking statistics: There is one death from diabetes complications every six seconds and an estimated 425 million diabetics worldwide today. In 2016 alone, 1.6 million deaths were due to diabetes. By 2040, the world’s diabetes population is expected to reach 642 million.
Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle-related chronic disease caused by excessive levels of glucose in the blood, owing to the body’s ineffective use of insulin. It is largely associated with being overweight, having a poor diet and a lack of activity. High blood-glucose levels over time lead to nerve damage (which could result in amputations), kidney failure and blindness. A majority of diabetics are type 2.
“My partner Verleen [Goh] and I decided that we needed to do more to tackle this problem affecting the global ageing population,” Phua tells The Edge Singapore in a recent interview. “We realised that diabetes is a trend that cuts across borders. So we asked endocrinologists around the world, ‘how do we fight this disease?’ And their answers were all the same: You have to control the food that goes into your body.”
Phua and Goh then started 3½ years of R&D into ways to improve the nutritional value of food that is most commonly consumed. They realised the problem lies in people’s love of the refined carbohydrates found in rice, flour, bread and noodles, which are staples in most diets.
“Everything prescribed for diabetes —metformin, insulin jabs — is to counteract the effects of the food we eat,” he says. By that logic, if the food does not cause high blood-glucose levels in the first place, then, theoretically, medication could be a thing of the past in the longer run.
Substitute for refined carbs
Experimenting with plant-based fibres and resistant starches, which slow down digestion, they came up with 5ibrePlus (for which the patent is pending), a substitute for refined carbohydrates that is digested more slowly and lowers the overall glycemic index (GI) of the food product, without changing its taste, look and texture.
The lower the GI in a food, the slower the digestion of the food and release of glucose into the bloodstream. Low-GI products are suitable for diabetics as they help in the regulation of blood glucose levels. Unfortunately, the taste of high-GI, highly refined carbohydrates is still preferred by most people, Phua points out.
“A lot of us have gotten used to the taste and feel of white refined flour, bread and rice. Some of us simply cannot make the jump to whole grains or brown rice,” he says. “So when we created this technology, we wanted to make sure the food manufacturers could continue with their refined carbohydrate formula but when made with a small percentage of our substitute, the overall GI is lowered.” For example, the GI of white rice is typically between 80 and 100, but with 5ibrePlus, the overall GI can be lowered to 60.
According to Phua, taste is key to persuading people to make changes in their food choices.
In 2011, he and Goh established their own vegan, low-calorie ice cream brand called Soyato, which uses fat substitutes to recreate the taste and creaminess of ice cream but with none of the guilt.
“We are food people; we love to eat but we also don’t want to die!” he says, bursting out into laughter.
While developing Soyato, they learnt that taste was the most important factor. “No matter how healthy a food is, if it does not taste good, nobody will eat it. If we can deliver both taste and healthiness, we’ve got a winner,” he says. “We also realised that we don’t want to be a gimmick. Many products claim to be low-calorie, but have other additives that make them unhealthy. That’s just replacing one problem with another.”
Commercialising 5ibrePlus
Alchemy is already working with partners such as Gardenia, Lim Kee Food Manufacturing and Tan Seng Kee Foods, the maker of Kang Kang noodles, to commercialise the use of 5ibrePlus in the most popular types of food.
Last September, the start-up raised $2.5 million in pre-Series A funding. The funds were invested in the construction of its laboratory in Science Park, which houses a food lab and a biochemistry lab for research into the digestion rates of carbohydrates and analysis of food texture.
Looking ahead, Phua wants to scale up Alchemy’s business in Singapore, as well penetrate other countries, especially China, which it has identified as a key market. “The vision is to make our product the industry standard for anti-diabetes food manufacturing,” he states. Phua wants Alchemy Foodtech to be to food manufacturing what Intel is to computers. But he is also under no illusions about just how much effort and investment that will take. “We are open to strategic buy-ins to help us achieve that.”
“We want [to reach a level where] when you buy a loaf of bread or a sack of rice, you’re always trying to look for our ingredients [in it]. To do this, we will work with far more partners, not just on the consumer side but also the strategic investment side as our business matures,” he adds. “It will take us a while, but we will look towards scaling up quickly towards our mission of helping to tackle diabetes.”
