When you walk into the lobby at Brightlands Campus Greenport Venlo, the first thing you see in the corner to your right is a tower. At this Nutritional Concepts Lab brews Venlo native and MiFood director Raymond Nolet super-healthy drinks with his team (two employees plus interns). Drinks that, in their plastic packaging, are nearly identical in appearance to the smoothie bottles from the supermarket. According to Nolet, however, they are no match for his Joycie.
The idea was born during the Floriade in Venlo. Raymond Nolet: “I have worked in the agricultural sector for 30 years and have always toyed with the idea of whether or not we can also consume the bioactive substances in fruit and vegetables as a preventive measure. In other words, can we boost healthy people’s resistance to ensure they are less susceptible to cardiovascular disease, non-genetic cancers or age-related diabetes (type 2 diabetes)?
- MiFood claims to produce super-healthy drinks with a mix of fruit and vegetables, aiming to provide half of the recommended daily intake in one beverage;
- Raymond Nolet explores the idea of using bioactive substances in fruits and vegetables to boost resistance against diseases;
- MiFood developed a product called Joycie, which has undergone extensive research to measure its effects on consumers’ resistance to diseases, with positive results.
Greenhouse as pharmacy
He naturally had a strong suspicion that it’s possible, but he believed it had to be proven scientifically first. “I know, everyone is always saying how fruit and vegetables are healthy. And then there’s this whole group of people who immediately say that there is way too much sugar in fruit for it to be healthy. We just assume it’s healthy, but what ‘healthy’ is, exactly, we don’t know.”
He put the question to growers and entrepreneurs during the Floriade event. One of these substances is lycopene, a so-called carotenoid that is found in tomatoes, rose hips and watermelon, for example. Nolet proposed taking on the challenge to change tack. “I said: you grow fruit and vegetables to feed people. Why don’t we start doing that with the goal of preventing disease? Let’s consider the greenhouse to be a pharmacy. And instead of growing tons of tomatoes, produce one kilo of lycopene instead.”
Raymond Nolet studied in Groningen and Wageningen and began his career at Nutreco, an animal-feed producer. After passing through many waystations, he ultimately became a business developer at the Brightlands Greenport Campus in Venlo. “I still have pictures of me standing here in a completely empty lobby. That lab there (points) was my first assignment. Greenport still holds a huge place in my heart. Since then, many things have fallen into place and landed well. And if you ask me, it’s really going to take off once entrepreneurs start collaborating even more.”
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Nolet was the one to set a good example; in order to develop his drink Joycie, he worked with many researchers and entrepreneurs on campus. “First of all, I wanted to know how to measure precisely what these bioactive substances do in the blood. There weren’t any measurement methods, so we developed this together with Brightlabs. Measuring effects is now even possible by scanning someone’s eyes.”
At the same time, he also asked growers to view it from a different angle. “The tomato that I wanted had to undergo a lot of improvement in order to have a positive health effect. We studied how best to grow, fertilize, illuminate and harvest blueberries, blackberries, tomatoes and peppers. And without genetic engineering; I stay as far away from that as I can. The goal was to achieve a higher concentration of bioactive compounds naturally, substances that don’t break each other down in the mix.”
So much goes wrong
When you see the finished product, a bottle of a mix of fruit and vegetables, you might think Nolet completed his mission fast. However, as it turns out, it’s a long story and he has learned through trial and error. “People ask me what kinds of things I’m working on. I make sure not to tell them what I’m doing wrong. So many things go wrong in a process like this. In that sense, we have a five-year head start on anyone trying to imitate our product. Time and time again, with each setback we encountered, we went back to find where things went wrong, why certain substances don’t mix or why the bottle opened spontaneously in the refrigerator. We now know an incredible amount about raw materials, how products behave during processing, shelf life, and so on.”
According to Nolet, key to this was the scientific research conducted in collaboration with Maastricht University, with professor and toxicologist Theo de Kok and assistant professor Simone van Breda of the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences and Toxicogenomics. The idea was to monitor exactly how substances behave in our circulatory systems, and what the possible effect is on cardiovascular disease, for example. Nolet: “After a few months, the first customers wanted to know whether the mix had any effect. Was it true that this daily addition of 250 grams of fruit and vegetables made them more resistant to diseases? The answer was yes.”
Holding all the reins
There is now a scanner in the office at the Greenport Campus. “This shows customers that we work with scientific programs, and can substantiate all our claims. It’s not like we constantly sit here with a ruler at the ready,” Nolet laughs. “But it does allow us to continue to track the effects of different combinations of fruit and vegetables.”
Raymond Nolet tells his story with infectious enthusiasm. “It’s not my profession; it’s my life.” He looks fit, exercises, and is over sixty; at MiFood, he holds all the reins and nothing escapes his attention. No doubt that his energetic appearance helped win over the four investors/shareholders involved as well as the province.
Zero return in initial years
“In 2018, we said: we’re going to invest a lot of money in this, and we’ll see returns at some point. We knew that the return would be zero during the first few years. We looked at each other. Do we want curative medicines? Or do we really want to start a movement, help everyone start living a healthier life? This means living according to the BRAVO principle: exercise more, no smoking, no alcohol, eat a healthy diet and get plenty of relaxation. We are taking responsibility for nutrition. Call it a mission.”
These days, MiFood is fully committed to sales; a bottle of the product costs €3.20; one bottle a day should suffice. The company isn’t just targeting people over 50 but also adolescents and students who could use a serving of vegetables. Nolet is looking for a producer. Once sales and production have been taken care of, he wants to go back to research. His aim is to figure out if he can brew a combination of bioactive compounds that could help in the fight against diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or multiple sclerosis.
His story always encounters the same questions: Healthy eating? What does that mean? “Yesterday I had a group of foreigners visiting us here. They started talking about carbohydrates and sugars. ‘Hey, that’s my theme,’ I thought. This is when I like to explain the difference between glucose and fructose.”
Big strawberry
There’s a lot of “missionary work” involved in Nolet’s mission. “To the woman in the cafeteria and the man in the supermarket I say: ‘You sell a bottle of fruit drink with a big strawberry on the label. Read what one of these bottles contains. That’s when I take out my bottle with better nutritional values and show them the difference. Two or three decimal places after the comma and two decimal places before the comma.”
And for the record: the average Joycie is one-hundred percent fruit and vegetable juice. “This isn’t juice,” he responds immediately. “Take an apple, for example. The most important part of the apple is the skin; this is where the important substances and fibers are that help boost resistance.”
The innovative heart of the process—the one that ensured Nolet’s spot as finalist for the Top Sector Innovation Prize in November—is the high quality. “We want to improve quality throughout the chain. The raw material has to be better, the processing needs to be designed in such a way that we aren’t destroying important ingredients. And then there’s the composition. You can subject one piece of fruit or vegetable to temperatures of a hundred degrees for two hours, and nothing will happen to it. But there are also products that destroy everything after only one minute of high temperatures. We tinkered a lot with that mix. Our products also have to have a good shelf life, and we have to prevent bacteria from the field from getting into them. Ultimately, you get a bottle that is incredibly healthy.”
Croutons: another challenge
Nolet knows what he’s dealing with. People are bombarded with healthy products. He wants to use data to prove that they are healthy. Apart from the research at Maastricht University, he claims to have performed many blood tests for customers. “I want to see what our mixes do for people in the summer, and then in the winter. It’s all trial and error and a lot of tracking and analysis.”
Raymond Nolet says that the most major innovative discovery is processing bioactive compounds into granules. This makes it easier for people to ingest them, such as in the form of croutons or bars. The bars are already here, but he calls the croutons a different challenge. “I haven’t been able to make them the way I want yet, but I do have high expectations for them. People want to stay healthy and young longer. This why we are doing this. Not based on a gut feeling, but with data and statistics instead.”
