Developed Product

This year, SZU-China created Sweetein, a safe, reliable and nutritious sweetening additive based on thaumatin, a naturally occurring soluble sweetening protein. Sweetein is a tomato syrup containing our sweet protein thaumatin. Sweetein Tomato Syrup is a sugar substitute that can be incorporated into our diets in a variety of ways. Not only does it add a unique flavor to beverages, but it can also be used as a seasoning in cooking, giving dishes and soups layers of sweet and sour. In baking, tomato syrup brings a special aroma and sweetness to cakes, cookies and breads. It can also be used as part of a salad dressing, mixed with olive oil and vinegar to enhance the flavor of a salad. Tomato syrup can also be used as a dipping sauce for foods such as French fries and fried chicken, and it plays an important role in creating specialty cocktails.

We use synthetic biology to produce such sugar substitute syrup products. In our business blueprint, we hope to further advance the sugar substitute market for our Sweetein product and gradually replace other sugar substitutes and free sugars as a new type of sugar substitute.

The members of SZU-China will seize every opportunity. This year, we seized the business opportunity in the sugar substitute market and started the business plan for Sweetein products without stopping.

Based on the content of the project, we expect to create company SWEETENIN and propose a business plan for tomato sugar substitute additives. At the initial stage of the company's creation, we will focus on the development and promotion of tomato sugar substitutes. In the long term, the company will introduce sweetness measurement hardware and expects to assist in the standardization of sweetness metrics in the Shenzhen market.

Unmet needs

Potential customers and the market

Currently, rising health awareness is driving the growth in demand for low-sugar or sugar-free products. Consumers are seeking natural and healthy sweet alternatives to reduce sugar intake and prevent health issues such as diabetes. There is a growing demand for sustainable, healthy sweeteners in the food and beverage industry. The wave of sugar reduction is driving the rapid development of the “sugar substitute” market, with China's annual production of sugar substitutes growing from 170,000 tons to 270,000 tons between 2015 and 2022, and maintaining a high growth rate. According to EMIS data, the global market size has reached the order of $6 billion, and will grow at a rate of about 3.75%. This shows that sugar substitutes have become an indispensable food for people all over the world. In the team's preliminary questionnaire survey, the masses are willing to try new sugar substitutes to improve their diets, and the simultaneous expansion of the market demand brings significance to the development of our project.

Sugar substitute cater to an increasingly health-conscious consumer base, with the potential user market consisting primarily of healthy eating advocates, diabetics, weight managers, and those sensitive to conventional sugar. The user base of the sugar substitutes market is rapidly expanding with the global focus on sugar intake restriction and growing demand for natural, low-calorie sweeteners. In addition, innovations in low- or no-sugar formulations in the food and beverage industry have further broadened the market potential for sugar substitute products, making them a preferred choice for consumers pursuing healthy lifestyles.

TAM: Total Addressable Market (TAM) is the maximum size of the potential market that can be reached by a particular product or service. In order to determine the TAM for Sweetein's products, it is assumed that Sweetein's products will cover all current sugar substitute use. Therefore, the annual TAM for sweetein is the total number of sugar substitute products sold worldwide. The industry is projected to generate an estimated $9.66 billion in revenue by 2025.
Accessible: We believe that the current demand for sugar substitutes by some companies in Shenzhen opens up a potential market for us. Shenzhen offers a very favorable entrepreneurial atmosphere for synthetic biology companies , especially the Synthetic Biology Valley in Guangming New District. Therefore, we can easily seek distributors and establish distribution channels in Shenzhen. That's why we will focus on Sweetein tomato sugar substitute development in the early stage of the company's startup.

Unmet needs not yet covered by other existing solutions

Although there are a number of sugar substitutes available on the market, most of them are sugar alcohol substitutes at present. Protein substitutes such as thaumatin, which we have selected, have been approved by the FDA, but their market has not been developed in large quantities. In addition, many of the existing sugar substitutes are not produced in an environmentally friendly or cost-effective manner. Some of the sugar substitutes have even been shown in literature to be harmful to humans. Among them, aspartame, the most widely used, is listed as a risk by WHO. Naturally derived sugar substitutes such as steviol glycosides and erythritol have some benefits, but in the long run they are not digested by the body and enter the bloodstream directly through the small intestine, where excessive intake can lead to gastrointestinal symptoms and an increased risk of blood clots.

As a substitute sugar thaumatin which has been approved by FDA, although it has the characteristics of high sweetness, high stability, high temperature resistance and acid resistance, this kind of sweet protein exists in the seeds of the African tropical plant bamboo taro, the number of this plant is small, the cultivation conditions are harsh, and the enterprise is difficult to satisfy the market demand because of the high loss, low yield and high cost of the protein extraction from the seeds.

The above problems of sugar substitutes need to be solved urgently, and the existing methods do not solve the problem completely, which gives our project room for development.

Possible & scalable & inventive

For our product Sweetein to break through in the market, it had to be able to fulfill the above market needs. Therefore, we need to consider the possibility, scalability and creativity of Sweetein to find out if it has the characteristics that the market and traders want. Click following bottoms to learn more.

Possible

Technique Possibility

Sweetein products utilize a plant for the efficient production of sweet proteins from tomatoes based on a " fruit+biopower " design. With this design, we are able to obtain nutritive sweeteners from tomato juice without going through the complex process of purification.

Fruit: The choice of tomato fruit as the new production system is clearly more convenient than biopower, which allows us to obtain the product directly from tomato juice.

Biopower: Using synthetic biology to build a factory power line to create a novel production system for thaumatin sugar substitutes. The project is divided into two segments: a production system and a storage system.

In the production system, we constructed a binary vector that strongly expresses thaumatin under the E8 promoter, which was subsequently transformed into Agrobacterium. Heterologous expression of thaumatin in tomato was successfully achieved by invasion of tomato healing tissues by the engineered Agrobacterium.

In the storage system, in order to stably store the produced sweet protein in tomato, we attached the 114-bp sequence of sweet potato sporamin-N-terminal pre-peptide (SPS-NTPP), a vacuole transport signaling molecule, to the N-terminal of the thaumatin protein, which could precisely and efficiently escort the thaumatin to the vacuole for storage, and after completion of the targeting work SPS-NTPP was able to self-decompose without any effect, drastically increasing the content of thaumatin in tomato. For more details, please see the description.

Economy Possibility

In 2023, the average annual market price of tomatoes in Shenzhen, where the SZU-China iGEMers live, has stabilized at $285.3 per kilogram, underscoring the fact that tomatoes are an affordable and widely grown crop. The head of the Shenzhen Agricultural Administration also told the SZU-China team that “Small tomatoes are a more economically viable crop than regular tomatoes, and farmers are more likely to grow small tomatoes than regular tomatoes”. In view of this, a project for the production of sugar substitutes based on tomato chassis can be easy to start and scale up.

In addition, the project will create a wealth of employment opportunities for the community at all stages of implementation, including cultivation, experimental research, market supervision, and promotion and sales. The project is expected to have a positive impact on the local economy and provide broad career development prospects for professionals in related fields.

Community Possibility

Legal regulation

During the research phase of the project, team members attached great importance to the safety of genetically modified (GM) food. Therefore, we have thoroughly analyzed and interpreted domestic and international laws and regulations involving GM foods and compiled them in a book called The Biosecurity and Bioethics Whitepaper. In the whitepaper, we provide experience for some project design and safety control related to synthetic biology food from the perspective of food safety, combined with domestic and international laws and related regulations. At the same time, we have written a Product Manual for SweetGlow, a hardware developed on the long-term development of our company, to make it easier for the public to use.

Public Will

The innovative concept of tomato sugar substitute has successfully attracted the attention of the public, and according to the questionnaire survey data above, the vast majority of respondents expressed their willingness to try the new sugar substitute. From a social feasibility point of view, these efforts not only reflect our commitment to food safety, but also demonstrate the potential of our project to meet market demand and public expectations.

Scalable

TOMATO

As a crop with remarkable adaptability and production potential, tomato has great scale-up possibilities. After obtaining official certification from the Shenzhen Agricultural Promotion Center and the GM product regulatory agency, our tomato seeds are eligible to enter the wholesale market and be sold to farmers. Promotion in other regions follows the same principle, i.e., after passing the review and certification of relevant local policies and regulations, they can be sold. Given the high economic value of tomatoes, the potential for market scalability is expected to be further explored and expanded.

SUGAR SUBSTITUTE

As the global market for sugar substitutes is growing significantly, our company recognizes the enormous potential offered by this trend. Against this backdrop, large-scale production of sugar substitute products has become particularly feasible. Our company is committed to capitalizing on the current trend of market expansion by optimizing production processes and increasing production capacity to meet the growing market demand. We believe that with our product strengths and innovative capabilities, we will be able to capitalize on the opportunities afforded by this era to further expand the market share of our products and achieve long-term growth and success for our company.

Inventive

Our project utilizes the latest synthetic biology techniques to introduce efficient production of surrogate sugars in tomato through the use of transgenes, strong promoters and localized peptides, which is an innovative application in the food industry.The emergence of Sweetein solves the current problem of substituting for the market's inability to balance safety and yield, safety and cost, and meets the need for sugar control as well as providing rich fruit and vegetable nutrition. What's more, we have realized the transformation of tomato fruits for the first time in the history of iGEM, which is the first step of attempting to transform fruits. In the future, we are expected to replace the excess sugar in fruits with thaumatin by means of synthetic biology, so that diabetic patients and obese people can enjoy sugary fruits as well. Meanwhile, Sweetein provides a cost-effective and safe synthetic biology factory model, which is expected to provide a feasible solution for the production of medicinal proteins and vaccines in the future.

Development plans

We have thought extensively and adequately about our development plan. In our business plan you can inquire about our development plan, company capabilities, resources, risk assessment and business plan.

Realistic milestones and timelines

We set detailed development milestones, including phases of gene editing, field trials, small-scale production and marketing, each with clear timelines and expected outcomes

Profit models

Market Analysis

Characteristics and Current Status of Selected Sweeteners

In China, the market price of thaumatin in 2024 is roughly between $200 and $230 per kilogram. By dividing the unit price of the sugar substitute by its sweetness, we can calculate the price per unit of sweetness, and the results show that the price per unit of sweetness for thaumatin is in the range of 0.11 to 0.13 dollars. Compared to other sugar substitutes, thaumatin not only has excellent properties, but also has an intermediate price.

However, the current market requires too high a starting quantity to order thaumatin, which can only be obtained by extracting it from the African Thaumatococcus daniellii . The main problem is that it cannot be produced on a large scale, which prevents the market from expanding. At this point, our synthetic biology approach stands out, using the natural fruit tomato as a chassis to produce a natural sweet protein. If large-scale production can be realized in the future, we expect that the application of thaumatin in the market will be significantly expanded due to its safety and nutritional properties.

Fund

Initial development needs are certainly high in terms of funding, and because of this, we will need additional assistance from all walks of life throughout our development process. From the iGEM competition cycle through the proof-of-concept stage, we will receive the majority of our funding from family, friends, mentoring professors, grants, and university support. In the startup phase, we will actively seek help from iGEM's STARTUP and apply for funding assistance from the Synthetic Biology Industrial Park in Shenzhen Guangming New District for small synthetic biology companies. At the stage of establishing distribution channels, we will rely on venture capitalists and initial public offerings. For mature distribution channel establishment, we will rely more on private equity.

Profit

Facing companies in need of sugar substitute additives, our products will enter sales in press type bottles with a net content of 600g per bottle, which is expected to be sold at $59.9 per bottle, which is below the market price of $114.1 per 1kg. The design of the press bottle is more convenient for milk tea stores, cake stores and other food stores to add syrup to food products.

For individual buyers, our product will be sold in packets of sugar substitute syrups with a net content of 100g per packet, which is expected to be priced at $14.2 per packet. The price is $71 per 1kg below the market price, and the minimum sales units of Sweetein syrup is one-fifteenth of the current starting quantity, which can achieve better retail results. We use ziplock bags to make storage easy. When buyers want to add a little sweet flavoring to their cooking or desserts, they can open a small packet and drizzle the syrup over their food.

In the short term, we will derive our revenue from investors who are interested in us. In the medium to long term, we will derive our revenue from the demand for sugar substitutes from merchants, including milk tea stores, cake stores, light refreshment stores and other businesses.

Resource and Capability Assessment

In order to comprehensively plan the future development of the company's products, our team conducted an exhaustive resource and capability assessment. In this process, we utilized the Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-Threat (SWOT) Analysis methodology. Through this methodology, we conducted an in-depth exploration of the internal strengths and weaknesses, external opportunities and threats of the company's competent project products. Through SWOT analysis, we are able to better understand the company's position in the current market environment, and accordingly make informed decisions and formulate long-term corporate strategies to achieve sustainable development and market competitiveness of the company.

Strengths
- Sweetein is safer than traditional sugar substitutes such as aspartame.
- Sweetein does not require a purification step in the production process, improving economic efficiency.
- Tomatoes are a widely grown cash crop and are easy to market.
- Protein has strong thermal and acid stability, which is favorable to the downstream food industry processing and production

Weakness
- Genetically modified seeds have not yet been submitted to the state for approval.
- The production efficiency of tomato endosperm needs to be further optimized.
- The packaging of the product needs to be considered in greater depth.
- Careful consideration needs to be given to the marketing approach so that consumers will accept the new concept of “synthetic biological sugar substitute”.

Opportunity
- The rise of the sugar substitute market provided an opportunity for sweetein products.
- Traditional sugar substitutes have limitations and the best known one, aspartame, is classified as a carcinogen.
- Sweetein is an innovative sweetener that uses tomatoes as the production chassis, which has made it highly visible in the market.
- Shenzhen Municipal Government Supports Novel Synthetic Biology-Related Enterprises

Threat
- We rely on investors to realize the beginnings of our company.
- There is no precedent for genetically modified tomato seeds to enter the Shenzhen market
- Currently there may be better chemical methods of producing sweet protein that will be more efficient.

ANALYSIS

Leverage (S+O): Leverage occurs when internal strengths and external opportunities are matched. In this case, SWEETENIN employees should utilize internal strengths to seize external opportunities and fully integrate opportunities and strengths.

Turnaround (W+O): When external opportunities do not fit SWEETENIN's internal resource strengths, or the match is insufficient, SWEETENIN needs to provide and add new products or technological resources to facilitate the transformation of internal resources and weaknesses to strengths in order to cater to or adapt to external opportunities.

Flexibility (S+T): When external conditions pose a threat to SWEETENIN's strengths, those strengths will not be fully utilized, in which case SWEETENIN needs to find ways to overcome the threat or use the strengths to bypass the threat.

Defense (W+T): When internal weaknesses and external threats meet, SWEETENIN will face serious challenges. In this case, contraction or consolidation of operations may be considered.

Risk Assessment

Business plans

In summary, we have prepared a business plan for SWEETENIN.

Further developing

Teams' capabilities

We are a team dedicated to solving the world's problems with synthetic biology techniques, consisting of students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Most of our members are undergraduates, including students from biological sciences, biotechnology, marine sciences, biomedical engineering, and clinical medicine. The different disciplinary backgrounds help us to think from different perspectives when tackling challenges.

In addition, we have strong backing-our PIs and advisors. We would like to express our gratitude to them for their support and help. PIs have rich experience in synthetic biology competitions, comprehensive knowledge and skills in biology. PIs and the advisors have helped us solve a lot of difficult problems encountered in the project.

With these team members, we are confident to build SWEETEIN successfully.

Stakeholders' communication

During the course of our project, we have established good relationships with stakeholders. Furthermore, as a startup, we had to make sure that the opinions and impacts on the different stakeholders were visualized. Therefore, we use figure to visualize the interest of stakeholders in the project and the power they bring to the project.

For more details, please move to Integrated Human Practices.

Long-term impact

Sugar Metrics

After the company had survived the financing period and the tomato sugar substitute product had a suitable distribution channel, we envisioned the development of sugar substitute-related hardware designed to measure the sweetness values of different sugar substitute sweeteners.

Fruit farmers need to test the sugar content of their fruits at harvest time; dieters want to know how much sugar is in their beverages that may increase their calorie intake to avoid falling into the “calorie trap”; diabetics are even more desperate to have a machine that can help them test their sugar content, not all sweet substances are harmful, but to avoid consuming the wrong kind of sugar, they have to say goodbye to many delicacies, which greatly reduces their quality of life. Unfortunately, there is no quick and convenient instrument that can fulfill all of the above requirements. The dietary assessment function in the most commonly used health management apps is only a “guess” based on machine vision and big data, which is often far from the reality; and it is very difficult for ordinary people to avoid excessive sugar intake by relying on their own experience; not to mention that these methods are not applicable to fruit farmers at all. The methods are not applicable to fruit growers at all.

In order to compare the sweetness values of different sugar substitutes, we envisioned setting a concentration as a unit sweetness, and when a liquid of different sweetness is dripped into the hardware facility, the hardware will tell you the ratio sweetness of the liquid sweetness to the unit sweetness, thus knowing how sweet the liquid is. After relentless searching and exploring, we finally found a detection method based on the fluorescent reaction of lanthanide metal esters with sugars, and based on this, we designed SweetGlow, a lanthanide metal ester-based fluorescent sugar detector.

In the long term, we hope that the hardware can be extended to food regulatory agencies so that the sweetened food products can have the sweetness value printed on their packaging to inform consumers of the sweetness of the sweetened food products, so that consumers can have a conceptual tool that can be used for comparing the sweetness of different sweetened food products when selecting different sweetened food products.

Sugar-reduced & sugar-controlled

The direct impact of our products is to provide new sweeteners that can achieve “0 sugar, 0 calories, 0 fat”. Assuming that our products are successfully marketed and sold, it will help fitness populations or patients with diabetes, obesity, etc. to achieve the purpose of controlling and reducing sugar and eating sweets at the same time. In the long run, this will further promote the economic growth of the sugar substitute industry in Shenzhen and even in China.

The indirect impact is that our product form can pull the tomato planting economy, providing a new planting - production mode for the market. If our product is successfully marketed and sells well, then in the long run, more research teams could develop a wider variety of food products along the lines of this type of crop as a chassis for the production of a certain type of edible protein.