One.bio, a startup with tech enabling formulators to add “invisible” fibers to foods and beverages at inclusion rates of 20g+ without compromising taste or texture, is gearing up to launch its first products next week.
Flavorless, odorless, colorless, and water-soluble, the company is pitching its one.bio 01 oat fiber to food and beverage companies as a functional ingredient, but will debut in GoodVice, a new consumer brand one.bio has developed in-house.
The firm has not yet revealed the first products to launch under the GoodVice brand but has shared prototypes including a chocolate milkshake with 20g protein and 20g fiber and a sparkling fruit seltzer with 20g fiber.
“We could put 50g in there and you still wouldn’t notice it,” cofounder Matt Amicucci, PhD, tells AgFunderNews.
Can fiber step out of protein’s shadow?
Fiber has long been the poor cousin of protein. Even though most Americans fail to meet recommended intakes. US guidelines call for 14g of fiber per 1,000 calories—roughly 25–38g per day for most adults—yet average consumption sits at just 15–16g.
That may be starting to change, however, as interest in the gut microbiome grows and fiber’s role in satiety comes into sharper focus in the age of GLP-1 drugs. “Fibermaxxing” is also gaining traction on social media with more brands now highlighting grams of fiber on the front of pack.
However, the message that we need diverse fibers for optimal health is often lost on consumers who still see fiber as “roughage,” says one.bio.
Against this backdrop, the California-based startup is hoping to start a more nuanced conversation about fibers, which are not all the same, says Amicucci, who spent years studying the structure and function of fibers and their impact on gut microbiota. For example, some can strengthen the gut barrier while some can reduce inflammatory signaling. Others may influence glucose regulation and satiety.
“For a long time, fiber has been a black box,” he says. “But we want to shift the conversation from fiber to fibers and move the messaging from regularity on to gut health, metabolic health, cardiovascular benefits, and mental benefits.”
From analytical chemistry to scalable production
One.bio was founded in 2019 by Amicucci; Carlito Lebrilla, PhD; Bruce German, PhD; and David Mills PhD at UC Davis. Matt Barnard, cofounder of vertical farming firm Plenty, joined as cofounder and CEO in 2023.
Its core technology is a chemical method for disassembling polysaccharides (longer-chain carbs) from thousands of plants and microbes into “invisible and tasteless” fibers.
The process—which does not change the structure of the fiber, but makes it soluble, digestible and palatable—is initiated by a reaction between a metal catalyst and an oxidizing agent to produce reactive radical species that chop up polysaccharides into oligosaccharides that can then be characterized using liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry.
This enables formulators to add meaningful amounts of fiber to products at levels that were previously out of reach because the fiber content made the end product unpalatable, says Barnard, who says one.bio is working with “some of the largest food and beverage brands.”
One Bio’s patented process is “proprietary and novel” but can be “executed on equipment that is standard,” he claims.
‘The Glycopedia’
While the method was originally developed as an analytical tool to identify and study fibers, it also serves as a scalable process to produce them, says one.bio, which has characterized and cataloged the structures of 4,000+ fibers across the plant world in a “Glycopedia” that maps fiber structures to microbial fermentation pathways and downstream biological outcomes.
“We’ve mapped thousands of different foods to determine what dietary fibers they contain structurally,” explains Amicucci. “Then we put them through an in-house ex vivo fermentation platform, where in high throughput, we’re taking dozens of different fibers and crossing them with the microbiomes of dozens of different individuals. We’re looking at what microbial populations are stimulated or suppressed by certain dietary fibers and which metabolites are produced by those microorganisms when they consume the fibers.
“Based upon those we can start to understand the areas where different dietary fibers will be able to influence human health.”
He adds: “It’s really a reversal of the way that people have looked at the functional properties of fiber in the past. Rather than starting with a fiber and saying let’s see what it can do, we know what benefits we are targeting before we select the fibers to scale up and bring to market.”
For one.bio’s first product, he says, “We wanted to target butyrate production and we found an oat fiber that was able to [stimulate gut microbes to] produce the most butyrate in the highest amount of people.”
According to Amicucci: “We have a pipeline of several fibers that we believe will impact different health outcomes that are going through the scale up, validation and regulatory processes. Our initial oat fiber and our barley fiber are self-GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe] and we’re going through the process of the FDA-notified GRAS as well.”
Testing and validation
One.bio recently completed a two-week human clinical study with 63 adults designed to assess tolerability and efficacy. Participants completed daily surveys on GI symptoms, diet, energy, and sleep quality and supplied blood and stool samples at the beginning and end of the study. They also used a continuous glucose monitoring device.
According to one.bio, participants consuming its oat fiber experienced:
- Improved digestive comfort “even at uncommonly high levels, defying the bloating trade-off of inulin, FOS and other common fibers.”
- “Reduced blood sugar spikes [after a meal] and improved glucose stability throughout the day.”
- “Improvements in mood and mental focus within two weeks.”
“The thing that was most exciting to me to see was that participants [consuming the highest dose, 20g/day] spent far less time in unhealthy glucose ranges,” says Amicucci.
He adds: “This is an open label trial that was not placebo controlled; we compared each person to their own baseline period [before the fiber dosing started] because people don’t compare themselves to other people, but to how they [themselves] felt before the treatment.”
Whole foods vs fiber fortification
While everyone should aim to eat more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains with fiber structures intact, adding fibers to foods can provide a range of health benefits from satiety to improved blood glucose control, says Amicucci.
“I would love it if every gallon of oat milk that’s sold had as much fiber as two bowls of oatmeal. We should be bringing apple fiber back into apple juice and making orange juice that will no longer spike your blood glucose because it has as much added fiber as three oranges in it. Imagine all the categories that would benefit from adding barley fiber, from breads to pastries. This really is the vision.”
While one.bio did not look at satiety in the recent study, he says, “You could argue that GLP-1 drugs are effectively a pharmaceutical response to the absence of fibers in the modern diet. The great thing about when you consume something containing fiber, is that it takes hours to ferment, so your microbiome is drip-feeding butyrate and in turn the signal to produce satiety hormones such as GLP-1 over long periods of time.”
Fiber’s formulation problem
According to one.bio, commercially available fibers can come with challenges:
👉 Natural fibers, fructans, and synthetic or dextrinized fibers (eg. psyllium husk, wheat bran, flaxseed, chia, oat hull fiber) are produced through mechanical processes like milling and are readily fermented in the gut. However they can pose formulation challenges due to high viscosity and gelling or insolubility, preventing firms from adding meaningful amounts.
👉 Chicory root inulin and fructooligosaccharides (FOS) can increase GI distress if added in meaningful amounts, while their degradation to fructose during baking or in mildly acidic solutions can also result in products with more sugar and less fiber than stated, claims one.bio.
👉 Synthetic (e.g., short-chain FOS, polydextrose) and dextrinized fibers (e.g., soluble corn fiber, wheat dextrin, cassava root fiber, galactooligosaccharides) were created to meet the need for soluble, non-gelling fibers. But their fermentability by gut microbes can be limited due to a lack of transporters and enzymes for their degradation, claims one.bio.
