The Business Debate - interview with CEO Cees de Jong

Well, let me go back a bit. First, when I was studying medicine, the best bacteria was a dead bacteria. A lot has changed since, and science has progressed, so we now know so much more about bacteria being of nature's own mechanism also to keep us healthy.

Some of the benefits were known for four centuries. I mean, the way we make cheese and fermented foods and yogurts — that's been out there for ages. But science has progressed, and what we see now is that actually bacteria can help to keep humans healthy, to keep animals healthy, but even plants can be kept healthy by spraying the right bacteria on the land.

One of the things that we found is that in dairy products, the bacteria are around and they keep the products fresh and safe longer — in yogurt for instance and in cheese. But we now also see that we can reduce those means of food waste in other products like salad and on salmon. And actually, what happens is that the good bacteria prevent the bad ones from growing, but they also suppress molds and yeasts from growing. So the sickness-making microorganisms are being pushed out by the good natural occurring bacteria.

Awareness about bacteria will need to increase, and the differentiation between good and bad bacteria. In some countries, regulations are changing, or regulators are adopting and allowing us to use the good bacteria, and it will prevent a lot of wastage and extend shelf life for all kinds of food matrices.

What we've done is we've spread bacteria on the land. And what they will actually do is they will help the plants to grow better. So the yield of a plant that grows on the land that's sprayed with bacteria is often some twenty percent better than if the land is untreated. What the bacteria do is they form a film over the roots of the plants, they protect the roots against all kinds of microorganisms that want to benefit, and they help the uptake of water and nutrients. So if you would look at the roots of the plants that are treated, very nice. Now the advantage of course is this is all natural, these are bacteria that are naturally occurring. And as opposed to chemicals, you don't need to treat that often because the bacteria stay in and around the plant longer.

No, we don't think so, because the bacteria that we use are naturally occurring bacteria, and they almost live in symbiosis in the ecosystem. So as long as they are wanted and natural in that environment, they stay around, and otherwise they will simply not be there.

The farmers today, they do the trials with our products and they see how efficient they are. And given the effect that our products stay in on the root system much longer than the chemicals, it's actually quite an efficient solution. But more importantly, it's an all-natural solution. And when I was not so long ago visiting some of our sugar cane customers in Latin America, in Brazil, actually there was a truck in the field that had been converted to a mobile hospital. Being a medical doctor, I got interested, and then I was told that the chemicals that are sometimes still being used — they're so toxic that if the workers get exposed to them, they need to be treated on site. So you can imagine that a big benefit to those users is also the use of an all-natural product.

I would say because we still have the sort of paradigm that bacteria are not good. But we recently did a study on three continents with sociologists and anthropologists, trying to figure out where the consumers are going, what drives their behavior. And what we get back is that consumers are looking now for authentic foods. They want to know where it's coming from, it needs to be safe, it needs to be fresh, it needs to be healthy, it needs to have all of that, and then they don't want the use of these chemical preservatives or artificial ingredients.

Yeah, we've seen that our work aligns very well with SDGs 2, 12, and 3. So better farming, less waste, healthier people. We've defined clear goals for the company to also drive the development of those SDGs.