The 3rd of November, Eevia Health (“Eevia” or “the company”) announced that the company has developed a new plant extract with product benefits for cognitive health and improved sleep. The new ingredient product, Feno-Cerasus™, is a standardized anthocyanin extract from tart cherry (Prunus Cerasus). Eevia Health focuses on the cognitive effects, including sleep quality and quantity, memory, as well as stress, and cortisol levels.
The main health benefit for promoting Feno-Cerasus™ is improved cognitive function. Tart cherry has one clinical study with 37 subjects showing a positive effect on cognitive performance, and another four clinical studies with 63 subjects documented positive outcomes in sleep quality parameters. From PubMed 10/2022, one can also observe that 39 clinical studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Furthermore, tart cherries have been studied for muscle recovery (15 studies, 280 subjects), metabolic health (8 studies, 180 subjects), cardiovascular health (5 studies, 150 subjects), antioxidant properties in clinical studies (2 studies, 59 subjects), and for pain management with positive results (2 studies, 108 subjects). Consequently, Eevia Health’s recent strategic focus on cellular recycling is supported as the tart cherry has preclinical evidence of autophagy induction via AMPK signal pathway and anti-inflammatory properties via Sirtuin6 activation of cyanidin, which has been confirmed in in-vitro studies.
“We are pleased to offer a new anthocyanin extract for cognitive health. The maintenance of cognitive health is a growing area for consumers. Eevia Health already has customer interest. The product will have perhaps the highest concentration of anthocyanins in the industry, while also providing a whole spectrum of other health-beneficial polyphenols as well,” says Petri Lackman, CTO of Eevia Health.
In conjunction with the press release, Analyst Group has contacted Eevia Health CEO Stein Ulve to ask questions about the new product.
Could you give us a brief background about the product and how the idea to create the product, Feno-Cerasus™, came to mind?
We are looking to utilize our green-chemistry platform to make other polyphenol extracts with the technologies we employ, especially when our technology can provide a superior product in terms of bioactive or nutritional profile than for instance membrane filtration technologies can. Over the last year, we have had multiple requests for tart cherry extract, so we thought this product fits well with our capabilities and matches up with our strategic focus on certain health indications.
Can you tell us more about Eevia’s strategic focus on cellular recycling and what role the tart cherry plays for someone uninitiated? Are there synergies with other product lines?
The Cellular Recycling is an extremely interesting area of human health. The failure of cells in recycling waste materials such as protein precipitates, organelles and other waste products is deemed as a root cause for a range of disease pathways. You will see an escalating interest in cellular recycling over the next five years and it will become a mega-trend within health and nutrition. Tart cherry has some documentation towards autophagy induction. It is not a key product for this strategy, but it is complimentary. It has benefits for cognitive health and as a polyphenol rich product, it is anyway a product that fits our equity story.
We understand that this might be difficult question to answer, but could you give us some insight into Feno-Cerasus’s potential price level and positioning in relation to your existing product portfolio?
We are probably the first manufacturer to offer a tart cherry extract standardized at 10% anthocyanins and with a high concentration of polyphenols. It follows that it will be a quite expensive product compared to other tart cherry extract that may offer 2% anthocyanins. Therefore, the price of the product will be over 300 euro per kg.
Which markets are, in your view, relevant for Feno-Cerasus™, how fast are they growing, what are some of the main players that develops and sells comparable products, and how do you differentiate?
US brand owners which focus on condition-specific supplement will be the primary target group. The segment for Cognitive Health is growing faster than the overall market. We will differentiate with a higher concentration of anthocyanin, and a wider composition of other polyphenols, and compounds of high molecular weight.
What are your expectations with the new ingredient product in the portfolio? How will it drive sales going forward?
We do not expect large sales coming from the Feno-Cerasus™ (tart cherry extract). If so, it will be a bonus. However, the effort will provide a decent ROI, because the investment was small. It has been a nice and reinvigorating experience for us to develop a new product this year after a few years of focusing on existing products and manufacturing. Launching a new product satisfies some customer and shows our agility with customers. The Feno-Cerasus™ also compliments our focus on Cognitive Health and it is for us, quite easy to manufacture.
