Precision fermentation in active nutrition: Interview with Ben Kane

On September 10, 2025, Nutritional Outlook hosted The Outlook on Active Nutrition, a one-day conference featuring leading experts, informative presentations, and engaging panel discussions exploring the key trends and developments in active nutrition.

Live from The Outlook on Active Nutrition, we asked Ben Kane, president and co-owner of PricePlow, what he sees as the biggest trend in active nutrition.

Ben Kane: I'm Ben Kane. I'm president and co-owner of PricePlow, a leading media company in sports nutrition and active nutrition. Right now, the biggest trend that I'm seeing in active nutrition is precision fermentation. It's the type of manufacturing where companies can make ingredients, basically using yeast and genetically coding them to make any sort of ingredient that they want to make out of it. A great example of this is effera from Helaina in Manhattan. They're making a bioequivalent, a human milk protein, like from breast milk, called lactoferrin.

But this technology could be used as a platform to make almost anything. NNB is also making salidroside, which is a common part of Rhodiola that helps deal with stress and focus. But companies could use this to make a very pure version of all sorts of different bioactive compounds that typically you need a lot of, maybe, herbs or any sort of extract to create. It's much more friendly for the environment because you don't have to do a lot of these processes, and you can just use yeast to make a very pure version of it. The possibilities of what you can make from it are endless, and I'm really excited for the future because of the amount of clean ingredients that we can make and bring it all to market in a different way.