The flavor and fragrance industry knows terpenes well. Whether natural extracts, aroma chemicals or essentials oils, terpenes and terpene derivatives represent nearly $650 million globally. They give toothpaste its minty taste, furniture polish its fresh, clean scent, and signature fragrances their indescribable bouquet.

Allylix is well positioned to deliver terpenes and terpene derivatives – specifically, sesquiterpenes. Traditionally sesquiterpenes are expensive materials due to their high cost of extraction and purification which has narrowed their use to just a few high end applications. Despite their limited supply and high prices, however, sesquiterpene fragrances are highly valued by the industry as they are “substantive” – a rare characteristic that enables a fragrance to last on skin and cloth for an extended period of time.  When these substantive compounds form the base of a fragrance, the scent remains after other compounds have volatilized, a characteristic known to only about 25 to 30 fragrance ingredients out of the thousands available today.

Cost-effective terpene production

Through Allylix’ proprietary technology platform, the company can produce sesquiterpenes at a tenth or less of the cost of naturally extracted materials.  Allylix has identified a number of sesquiterpene flavors and fragrances where low cost supply would significantly broaden use in a range of applications, including foods, personal care and household products.

Nootkatone and beyond

The company is in commercial production of its first two flavors and fragrances, nootkatone, a grapefruit fragrance, and valencene, an orange fragrance. A pipeline of other low-cost compounds is planned for commercialization by 2012.

In addition to known compounds, Allylix has the technology to discover and develop novel compounds that offer new flavor and fragrance profiles for the industry. With Allylix' technology platform, developing new compounds requires only incremental investment for each new product.  Specifically, because optimized host strains and fermentation processes can be used for existing and novel compounds with only minor optimization, the cost of each new product is only the cost of developing an optimized gene. 

Stable and sustainable

Allylix has developed and commercialized processes for its first products, increasing yields by several hundred-fold.  The company scaled the processes for these first products to the 20,000-liter commercial scale.

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> Nootkatone
> Valencene
> Allylix Technology