While soybeans have been lauded as a rich source of protein, high in fiber and low in saturated fat, the popular ingredient found in everything from alternative milks to plant-based meats could be loaded with even more valuable nutrients that are a boon to human health. 

A new partnership announced Wednesday between upstart Brightseed and dairy giant Danone North America is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence in an attempt to unlock those hidden nutrients. Brightseed, a three-year-old upstart, acts as a “search engine,” co-founder and chief operating officer Sofia Elizondo said, to comb through thousands of phytonutrients, or small molecules, to discover those that could potentially have the biggest health and nutrition benefits in humans. 

Danone North America could then consider incorporating the most promising ones into its plant-based brands like Silk and So Delicious or recent extensions into the plant-based space by Oikos and Activia.   

“We don’t know everything that’s in there” even in plants such as soybeans that we know a lot about, Elizondo told Food Dive. “That is the exciting part of our partnership with Danone. … Plants are highly, highly complex and pretty fickle.”

​A plant’s genome can be eight-times at complicated as a human one because it not only helps the plant grow, but do other life-sustaining tasks like attract bees for pollination or repel pests.​ 

The same plant, she said, can exhibit different characteristics depending on the climate or the soil that it is grown in. These differences can affect the plant and the potential health attributes it exhibits, meaning the same crop could have different benefits or varying levels of expression. As a result, Brightseed and Danone North America are first studying soybean varieties from around the world for differences in their nutrient and taste profiles.

Takoua Debeche, vice president of research and innovation at Danone North America, said partnerships like the one with Brightseed are an important way for the company to continue improving the taste, texture and nutritional characteristics of its plant-based offerings. This takes on greater significance as consumers incorporate more plant-based foods into their diets.

While she declined to detail the findings uncovered so far, Debeche said so far they are “very promising. … The new insights that Brightseed is bringing, even if they are very preliminary, are actually revealing heath opportunities beyond … what is already known,” she said. “Some of the health benefits are very much in line with what our consumers are interested in.”

While the two companies are beginning with soy, Debeche said Danone North America and Brightseed are “envisioning expanding the scope [of the partnership] in the future” to include widely used plant-based crops like almonds, coconuts, peas and oats, or potentially expand into more emerging plant ingredients. 

Once the molecules of a soybean or another ingredient are mapped to uncover the human health benefits, Danone North America and Brightseed will validate the findings either in a lab or through human trials to analyze how the nutrients impact a person’s health. 

Danone is the latest in a growing number of food companies to incorporate AI to quicken the pace of product discovery or to better understand the ingredients that go into their products. With countless bits of information and pressure to innovate and get products to market faster, companies are no longer just relying on traditional methods of product R&D and testing.

Conagra Brands, the maker of Healthy Choice, Reddi-wip and Slim Jim, uses an AI-enabled platform to identify consumer preferences and release on-trend products to market in a fraction of the time. And McCormick & Co. has partnered with technology giant IBM to use artificial intelligence to comb through its data faster and more effectively by knowing which ingredients work together or which ones can be used as substitutes for each other. McCormick launched its first three AI-enabled products last spring.

For its part, Danone North America has unveiled new products this year that address consumer demand for lower sugar or alternative sweetener options, different textures, as well as more plant-based varieties. 

Oikos tapped into the nut butter trend with almond butter and a drinkable energy option high in protein, potassium and calcium and as much caffeine as a cup of coffee. For its Activia brand, it’s rolling out versions with less sugar and new flavors, a drinkable smoothie and a dairy-free option made with almond milk. 

Earlier this year, Danone North America entered the ready-to-drink coffee arena with Silk lattes and brought to market a plant–based heavy whipping cream alternative under the banner. The company also has started to build the oat milk category with beverages, yogurt alternatives, coffee creamers and frozen desserts.

As competition heats up in yogurt, and specifically plant-based offerings, Danone North America is optimistic working with Brightseed could give it an advantage over its competitors..

“The discoveries that we make with Brightseed are certainly going to be integrated into our innovation pipelines in the future,” Debeche said. “Innovation is really an important driver of growth in our category.”

Leaders of EU countries still disagree strongly over a proposed economic-recovery plan tied to the bloc’s next long-term budget, European Council President Charles Michel warned top MEPs on Thursday.

A senior Council official said Michel described “entrenched” disagreements, including over the core question about whether the recovery plan uses grants or loans to deliver financial assistance to regions and sectors hit hard by the pandemic. National leaders are also at odds over the size of the recovery fund and the overall budget.

Philippe Lamberts, the co-leader of the Greens group in the European Parliament and who took part in the meeting, said Michel had been “cautious and honest in his assessment of the situation.”

Leaders will hold a videoconference on Friday of next week to try to make progress on the plan. But they have played down any prospects of a deal in that meeting. Michel told the leaders of Parliament’s political groups he would use the summit to “mainly try to give EU countries guidelines for work,” Lamberts said.

National leaders have posed an array of serious “technical” questions that have yet to be answered by the European Commission, which drafted the recovery plan, Michel told the parliamentary leaders behind closed doors, including questions about the so-called allocation key by which cash would be divided among EU countries.

“I sense a huge political difficulty. There is no real coming together at the moment” — Charles Michel, European Council president

Several leaders have complained that one of the proposed formulas is based on data that is not related to the COVID crisis, including unemployment numbers from as early as 2015.

Taken together, Michel said, the technical questions and political disagreements — along with pre-existing divisions over the long-term budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) — leave leaders facing a long, difficult path toward a compromise.

“Discussions will be very difficult and very complex,” Michel told the leaders in Parliament, according to the senior Council official. “I sense a huge political difficulty. There is no real coming together at the moment.”

“I am very realistic,” Michel added, “and huge divergences still exist.”

‘Climate of mistrust’

Multiple parliamentary officials confirmed the substance of Michel’s remarks, and said that he had offered a sober assessment of all the obstacles to a compromise that must still be surmounted.

“Michel mentioned a climate of mistrust,” one of the officials said.

Among the contentious issues in the debate over the MFF is the matter of rebates, which have been used in the past to limit the budget payments of some relatively wealthy “net contributor” countries that pay more into EU coffers than they get back. If those rebates are ended or phased out, those countries would see a steep increase in budget obligations.

Lamberts also said he and his colleagues discussed issues of governance with Michel, including the role of the European Parliament and national parliaments in controlling executive power over the recovery plan. “It is up to parliaments to set the rules,” Lamberts insisted. A budget deal can only take effect with the European Parliament’s approval.

Michel’s remarks in the meeting with the Parliament’s Conference of Presidents highlighted the excruciating difficulty that EU leaders face in trying to fashion a grand bargain over the Commission’s plan for a roughly €1.1 trillion MFF and a €750 billion recovery fund, comprising €500 billion in grants and €250 billion in loans.

The recovery plan would be financed through new joint debt. The Commission has proposed delaying the repayment of the debt until the subsequent MFF begins in 2028, and paying it back over a 30-year period.

Germany and France have endorsed the concept of joint debt to finance the recovery plan, which is strongly supported by Italy, Spain and Portugal among others. But the so-called Frugal Four — Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden – oppose the idea of borrowing money to use for grants, and put forward an alternative approach using only loans to be repaid by individual countries.

That disagreement has spurred rancorous debate, with the financial questions at times taking a back seat to a deeper philosophical fight over EU solidarity, and has rekindled lingering resentment over the handling of the eurozone debt crisis a decade ago.

Koen Geens, Belgium’s EU minister, said it would be tough to reach any compromise before leaders can see each other face to face.

“Screens do strange things to us and don’t allow for confidential meetings,” he told POLITICO in an interview. “EU leaders normally don’t travel to capitals ahead of these summits to gain flight hours, but to establish human contacts.”

In the two weeks since Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put forward her MFF and recovery proposal, Michel has been conferring with heads of state and government, speaking to them individually or in small groups.

Chalre Michel, right, is welcomed to the European Parliament by its president, David Sassoli | Daina Le Lardic/European Union

Based on those consultations, Michel expects heads of state and government to have a first formal discussion about von der Leyen’s plan at next week’s virtual summit. But given the still-intense disagreements, Michel does not intend to put forward his own new, baseline MFF proposal — called a “negotiating box” in budget shorthand — until after that meeting, with an eye toward resuming negotiations at an in-person gathering in July, health conditions permitting.

Another Parliament official said that Michel stressed the need to build trust and consensus among the national leaders and that it would be impossible to reach a deal without at least one summit, if not more, in person.

“His plan is schmoozing on June 19, and a special summit at the start of July in person. And then a negotiation box and a second summit in July to try to get an agreement, but all will depend on the atmosphere at the end of the [first July] summit,” the official said.

Several leaders in the European Parliament have called for a far bigger MFF than either the Commission or Michel have proposed in the past, and some of Michel’s remarks on Thursday were clearly intended to lower expectations that national capitals would be willing to shell out more money than is currently being discussed.

“We can’t talk about anything any more the same way we did before this crisis, and the same goes for the Frugal Four” — Koen Geens, Belgium’s EU minister

Across the EU institutions, there is growing acceptance that the Commission will have to adjust the allocation formula for the recovery funds, but there is little clarity or consensus about which metrics should be used, or how best to gauge the needed assistance. Adding to the challenge is the fact that health and economic conditions across the EU are still in tremendous flux.

Geens said Belgium was among those countries concerned about the allocation methods. “Together with a number of other countries, we’ve asked questions about the distribution criteria,” Geens said. “We’re now waiting for the Commission to see whether adjustments can be made and which consequences these adjustments would have.”

However, he said the pandemic clearly raised the stakes of the budget negotiations, and may ultimately make leaders more open to compromise.

“Corona has been a game-changer,” he said. “We can’t talk about anything any more the same way we did before this crisis, and the same goes for the Frugal Four. I also experience this within the Belgian government: There’s more flexibility and it doesn’t always make sense to discuss numbers behind the comma when you’re faced with matters of life and death.”

Barbara Moens and Lili Bayer contributed reporting.