The strategic collaboration, which will officially start in October, will be effective for three years until Oct 2022, according a statement from BY-HEALTH.
BY-HEALTH said that the collaboration was the firm’s latest drive in developing products with “new functions, new raw materials, and new techniques,” underpinned by the firm’s R&D cooperation with materials suppliers, research and medical institutions.
This is not the first time the Chinese firm is working with Fonterra, with the two enjoying a “longstanding partnership” in dairy protein, said Komal Mistry-Mehta, director for Sports & Active Lifestyles at Fonterra NZMP.
The new partnership will see the two collaborate in the areas of functional dairy proteins, milk fat globule membrane (MFGM), and probiotics, such as NZMP’s BifidoB-HN019 and LactoB-HN001.
For these two probiotics strains, the partnership will explore the novel health benefits that they offer, such as metabolic problems, anti-ageing, and mental wellness, on top of immunity and digestion boosting claims, Mistry-Mehta told NutraIngredients-Asia.
“In terms of the areas that they promote, the strains started out with immunity and digestion functional claims. Given the nature of the strains, we found a number of benefits over the year, such as gestational diabetes, asthma for infants.
“We are doing some work around the strains and their effects on anxiety. We found that these strains not only have a number of benefits that we can work with customers on, but also in terms of the types of applications to use in too.”
Some of these applications that both parties will look at are functional foods and beverages.
“What these strains have is that they have the ability to be quite stable in different applications into food applications…Food and beverages and supplement will be the area of focus.”
According to Euromonitor, the probiotics market in China is forecasted to grow at 31% CAGR according to Euromonitor in the next five years, reaching RMB$103.6bn (USD$14.6bn) by 2025.
BY-HEALTH’s international collabs
This is the second major partnership that BY-HEALTH had announced in the past one month.
Late last month, it announced that it would work with DuPont Nutrition in developing probiotics with new functions, particularly in anti-ageing, oral, and skin health.
The two new partnerships brings the total number of collaboration that BY-HEALTH had signed with overseas firms in the past three years to four.
Last Oct, it signed an innovation strategic agreement with Spanish firm Bioiberica S.A.U, and German firm BASF SE and BASF Personal Care and Nutrition GmbH in May 2017.
