Novozymes, Univar Expand N. American Food, Beverage Partnership

Novozymes, the world’s largest industrial biotech company with U.S. headquarters in North Carolina, is leaning into a strategic alliance with Univar Solutions to expand its reach across multiple markets in North America. 

This week, the Danish biotech company, which maintains a campus in Franklinton and an R&D facility in the Triangle, confirmed it had signed a new food ingredients agreement with Illinois-based Univar, effective May 1.

It comes one month after the pair agreed to an exclusive distribution agreement into the U.S. and Canadian beverage production, homecare, and industrial cleaning markets.

“With this bigger, exclusive agreement, we will be able to jointly go deeper with customers,” Novozymes spokesperson Frederik Bjørndal tells the North Carolina Biotechnology Center. “Ultimately, the channel partnership will enable our sustainable and innovative biological solutions to achieve a bigger reach and get into the hands of many new smaller customers.”

Biological solutions are transforming the food and beverage sectors.

Using next-generation biological solutions in place of traditional chemicals, Novozymes says it can help customers in food ingredient sectors get more out of their raw materials and stay one step ahead of the latest craving in food and beverage. 

Among its offerings: helping to extend freshness properties, expediting production, boosting nutritional value, or addressing challenges in new markets such as plant-based foods and beverages. 

It includes consumer trends like oat milk, for example.

Novozymes offers a package known as the Novozymes Oat 360 toolbox that helps develop oat drinks and bring them to market faster. 

“Observing specifically the fragmented food and beverage space, we look forward to leveraging Univar Solutions’ strong commercial reach,” says Arnaud Melin, Novozymes’ vice president of consumer biosolutions, Americas.

Multiple markets

The latest agreement is one part of an exclusive distribution agreement signed last month that builds upon the companies’ existing 15-year partnership in Europe.

Novozymes’ enzymes and probiotics/microbes work in a broad range of applications.

They are designed to help customers more efficiently use raw materials, reduce energy consumption, and potentially replace traditional chemicals with more sustainable alternatives in the homecare, industrial-cleaning and beverage ingredient sectors.

Novozymes says it will work closely with the Univar Solutions flagship solution center in Houston, Texas to “better capitalize on consumer demand.”

In the past, Novozymes has formed alliances with leading bioagricultural businesses like Monsanto to boost sustainable agriculture worldwide.

However, Bjørndal stressed this latest agreement is not anything like to the “BioAg Alliance” from 2014.

“This is a distributor for us – not an innovation partnership,” he said.

“The BioAg Alliance was a strategic R&D, field trial, and commercial alliance in ag biologicals; this is something very different.”

Novozymes has around 900 employees working across its three locations in North Carolina.