Zero km (and risk) supplements in Milan

The light bulb went on during Covid, when Nip Tech, a Milanese start-up active in the production of food supplements, experienced the difficulty of sourcing raw materials. 'The trade blockade,' says startupper Glauco Isella, former founder of Babasucco, a company producing vegetable juices and extracts that has become a success story in Italy, 'had stopped the production of the food supplements that we were producing and selling in large-scale organised distribution and in parapharmacies. We could not get the active ingredients we needed, mostly from India and China'.

At that time, it was Covid. At other times, wars and international tensions, one of which was the Red Sea crisis over Houthi attacks on merchant ships, had slowed and stopped production or caused severe fluctuations in commodity prices. All of them came from territories subject to geopolitical crises. 75% of the raw materials from which the active ingredients are obtained are imported into Europe from China and India, the rest from Africa or South America. The active ingredients extracted from the seeds of ashwagandha, dandelion, centella and dozens of other medicinal herbs are then processed and transformed in Europe, Germany, Austria and Italy, particularly in the Milan and Pisa areas, and used for the industrial production of supplements, cosmetic products or medicines. This is an extremely vulnerable supply chain, which has often broken down in recent years.

"During Covid, given the success of the vertical farms," Isella continues, "we thought that zero kilometre production would eliminate all the problems in the supply chain. From seed to finished product in one plant would have been the ideal solution for the sector'.

So, Nip Tech set up a working group of technicians (an agronomist, a biochemist, a biologist and a pharmacist) who, together with the Universities of Parma and Pavia, studied the feasibility of the vertical farm project and started experimentation. Nip Tech's process has an ecological approach with enzymatic extraction of the active ingredients, without chemical solvents. The process is based on a combination of technologies that makes it scalable and reproducible everywhere. The active ingredients are zero-kilometre, transport and environmental costs are lowered. The extraction yield increases while preserving the purity and quality of the ingredients. Technicians document extraordinary results compared to standard processes: higher assimilation and concentration of active ingredients by almost ten times and twelve times shorter extraction times. Total production times are halved.

The next step is to patent the process of extracting the active ingredients from the individual raw materials. A patent for each seed, including the software and the industrial process. The first patented process was the extraction of mullein.