Intro

We follow the sequence in which a business is conceived and carry out our entrepreneurial activities.

This year, based on the content of our project, our team has proposed a business plan for tomato sugar substitute additives, and the company will be fully focused on the development and promotion of tomato sugar substitutes in the initial stage of its creation. In the long term, the company will introduce sweetness measuring test strips and assist in standardizing the sweetness scale 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.

Unmet needs not yet covered by other existing solutions

Although there are a number of sugar substitutes available in the market, most of them are sugar alcohol substitutes at present. Protein substitutes such as thaumatin protein, which we have chosen, 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. 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

Our team's product is a novel sugar substitute that is a sweet protein thaumatin derived from African bamboo yam. We use tomatoes as a chassis to produce this type of sugar substitute.

Possible

Technique Possibility

When kicking off brainstorming for the project, we intended to do something interesting - create a new production system for Thaumatin sugar substitute. 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 vesicular transport signaling molecule, to the N-terminus of the thaumatin protein, which could precisely and efficiently escort the thaumatin to the vesicles 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 RMB 2 per catty, underscoring the fact that tomatoes are an affordable and widely grown crop. The head of the Shenzhen Agricultural Bureau also told the SZU-China team that “small tomatoes are a more economically viable crop than regular tomatoes”. In view of this, a project to produce sugar substitute based on tomato chassis is not only easy to start up and promote, but can also create abundant employment opportunities for society at all stages of the project implementation, including cultivation, experimental research, market supervision, and promotion and sales. The promotion of this 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 Whitepape. At the same time, in order to provide consumers with a comprehensive introduction to the safety of our products for consumption, we have carefully compiled a Product Brochure.

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

TOMOTO

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.

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

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 Strengths and Weaknesses Analysis (SWOT Analysis) methodology. Through this methodology, we conducted an in-depth exploration of the internal strengths (Strengths) and weaknesses (Weaknesses), external opportunities (Opportunities) and threats (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.

ANALYSIS

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

Turnaround (W+O): When external opportunities do not fit SWEETEIN's internal resource strengths, or the match is insufficient, SWEETEIN 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 SWEETEIN's strengths, those strengths will not be fully utilized, in which case SWEETEIN 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, SWEETEIN 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 SWEETEIN.

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 x 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 has gone through the financing period and the tomato sugar substitute product has a suitable distribution channel, we envisioned the development of hardware related to sugar substitutes designed to measure the sweetness values of different sugar substitutes sweetened with different sugar substitutes. In order to compare the sweetness values of different sugar substitutes, we would set a concentration as a unit sweetness, and when a drop of a differently sweetened liquid was added to the hardware facility, the hardware would tell you the specific sweetness of the liquid's sweetness versus the unit sweetness, and thus how sweet the liquid was.

In the long term, we hope to extend the hardware to food regulatory agencies so that sweetened foods will have the specific sweetness value printed on their packaging to inform consumers of the sweetness of the sweetened food, and so that consumers will have a conceptual tool that they can use to compare sweetness when selecting different sweetened foods.

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.