Many Polyphenols have direct and specific powerful health benefits. And most are not nutritional. That;s right, they are called non-nutritional compounds. In a world obsessed with providing everyone enough nutrition, we may be selling our health short.

Caffeine is the most used non-nutritional compound. For a long time, food researchers felt anthocyanin was the most important. Nicotine is perhaps the most obnoxious. For a couple of decades, researchers pointed to a polyphenol called resveratrol in wine and still credited it with many health benefits.

In recent years, many superfruit researchers have narrowed in on flavonols as perhaps the secret sauce to fruit’s health contributions. Several dozen have been identified and extensively researched. The main foods with high density of flavonols are berries, apple, grape, tea and cocoa.

The contributions of these complex polyphenol profiles have earned most fruits with a long list of historically recognized health benefits. The wild blueberry, the #1 superfruit in the world, is recognized as contributing positive health benefits to defend against six of the top 10 health pandemics in the world. These polyphenols are powerful health aids.

Polyphenol is a complex word and often used synonymously with other complex words phytonutrient and phytochemical. “Phyto’ simply means green. There are over 8,000 different types of polyphenols, many with even more complex names. To simplify things, we refer to the value of polyphenols as the ‘goodness’ of fruit.

Problem
The problem we are solving is our body’s ability to absorb the goodness of fruit. What is called bioavailability. The goodness in fruit, like all plants, can be incredibly valuable, indeed critical to the human body. And yet the goodness is not that easy for the body to absorb.

Ironically, we work with fruit because it:

• Has the most plentiful goodness
• Some of the most valuable (richest) goodness
• It’s the easiest plant from which to extract that goodness.

And yet, at the same time, the complex chemical structures of raw fruit inhibit our body’s absorption of goodness. For instance, to separate the goodness from the skin of most fruits, your body needs an enzyme that is not as prevalent in today’s modern diet.

Vision
Clever believes solving the absorption problem (called bioavailability) of fruit’s goodness will change the world. Change the world understanding of nutrition absorption. And change the world by creating a sufficient supply of critical non-nutritional compounds. a supply that can be economically manufactured and shipped anywhere in the world.

The aim of our proprietary fermentation technologies is to improve the bioavailability (absorption) of fruit’s goodness. To turn goodness to greatness. To create the compounds known to protect the body from inflammation, and improve cell, gut, skin and brain health.

Fruit Waste
Fruit farming also has the unglamorous notoriety as a large waster of rare communities like water and earth nutrients. The structure of the fruit industry is centered on delivering to your shopping basket a perfect whole natural fruit. Like a beautiful fresh apple.

Unfortunately, that industry’s design creates a lot of waste. In most juradictions that is 25-35% of the annual harvest. In some jurisdictions it is as high as 65%.

We are not referring to loss of fruit in the supply chain. We refer to farm loss. Fruit that for any number of reasons never leaves the farm.

Clever wants to rescue that fruit. We focus on the superfruits of the world, where the goodness of the fruit is richest and most valuable to humans. Ironically, most of the fruit to ugly or not ripe enough for stores, has more goodness than perfectly ripe fruit.

The world has over 1 billion people with not enough to eat. Not enough nutrients is the cry from those fighting for food insecurity. But it is the lack of non-nutrient compounds in the diets of those starving that is making the suffering worse.

GHGs
Population forecasters suggest we have an additional 2 billion people coming. Farming makes up 25% of greenhouse gasses (GHG) emission. To use the same farming practices to feed the next 2 billion will make GHG reductions impossible.

Solving the bioavailability of superfruit’s non-nutrient compounds, and leveraging the fruit waste, solves a lot of problems and has generous economics to support the effort.

Partners
Clever business model is to work with farmers and growers associations to find value in their farm loss fruit waste. Clever’s objective is to create products at least 5x more valuable than the original fruit. See our Product & Partner Page for more.

These smaller molecules are called metabolites and there are over 200,000 different types of metabolites. The more scientific term is microbial metabolite. Metabolites are primarily stored in our colon and make up most of what is referred to as our gut microbiome.

These metabolites come from our food. They play critical roles like feeding the brain , forming new cells, managing cellular connections and communication. They keep us alive.

Production of metabolites can be thwarted by pathogens found in our food systems or viruses like covid. This is commonly referred to as inflammation. The body can suffer greatly if it is deficient in a specific metabolite. It can also suffer if a specific metabolite is out of balance with other metabolites.

Yes it is complicated and yes it is new. But this approach to health will change everything we know about personal health and every part of the drug, nutraceutical and food industry we invest in and rely upon.

Phenolics
Fruits are full of food compounds that are antioxidant or anti-inflammatory. When our bodies transform these compounds, they are called phenolics.

Phenolics are a critical class of metabolites that underpin our immune system. Phenolics both protect the body and fight inflammation. Or as we like to say, they supply the deficiency and fight the underlying inflammation problem.

Products
Clever’s ingredients are designed to bring the body’s microbiome back into balance. The product does so by ensuring a sufficient supply of specific metabolites. WIth so many different superfruit and so many different fermentation microbes there are few limits to what can and will be created.
One could just eat more fruit.The difference is our fermentation can guarantee a specific supply of key metabolites and phenolics. Whereas normal digestion is often twartfted by digestional tract issues and/or the body lacks important enzymes to manage the biotransformation.

Metabolite deficiency is the real home of degenerative disease. It is unlikely fermented products will ever stop active cancers, but they can STOP them from STARTING..

Our fermentation technology enhances the bioavailability and potency of superfruit goodness. Our technologies create designer arrays of metabolites that are well-researched and have historically accepted beneficial health effects.

Fermentation Microbes
Each fruit and indeed each variety of fruit has a distinct goodness profile. At Clever, we are focused on superfruits. We design fermentation microbes (yeasts, bacteria and enzymes) for each fruit and target specific metabolite profiles.

In this way, we can design ingredients for specific use cases. We have done most of our early science with the world’s #1 superfruit the wild blueberry. We have chosen age-related cognitive design and obesity as the target use cases for this fruit.

We are interested in the highbush blueberry for diabetes and the cherry for pain. In each case, the superfruit we have selected already has a historically accepted health benefit recognized by the regulators for the use case we target.

We are not asking fruit to do more than it can or more than it has historically done. We are simply taking the goodness of the world’s greatest fruit, and designing a fermentation approach to give it a chance to show off its greatness.

Economics
Our ingredients are super concentrated byproducts of the world’s greatest superfruit. A very small dose will do the job. Fermentation is not an expensive process dependent on large volumes of human input. The microbe does the work. Superfruit waste, farm loss, has an economically attractive supply chain. Products can have tremendous health impacts.

Check out of Partners – Product Page to learn more.