What we talked about
Ali Wing is the CEO of Oobli, a biotech-powered food company using sweet proteins found in nature to deliver sweetness with far less sugar. In this conversation, Ali explains how certain plant proteins:discovered by scientists and traditionally eaten in regions near the equator:can briefly bind to our sweet taste receptors, telling the brain “we got sugar,” even though they’re proteins, not carbohydrates. That means a very different metabolic impact compared to added sugar.
Show notes
Ali Wing is not anti-sugar:she’s a biologist who will tell you that craving sweetness is “human nature 101,” the evolutionary drive that kept our ancestors alive. What she’s against is the modern food system that has made sugar “recklessly abundant,” and her answer is a class of plant proteins that are a thousand to five thousand times sweeter than sugar by weight, with zero glycemic impact.
What we covered
- Oobli’s sweet proteins work only on humans, apes, and gorillas: they bind briefly to the human taste receptor for sweetness and tell the brain sugar arrived, but because they are proteins and not carbohydrates, their metabolic impact is completely different from any other sweetener ever used in food.
- The average American consumes about three times the daily recommended amount of added sugar:a figure Ali says holds true in Mexico, India, and much of the world:and beverages are the biggest driver, not candy bars, because portion sizes have grown while the sweetness keeps people drinking more.
- Oobli targets 60 to 80 percent sugar reduction in mainstream packaged goods without changing taste profiles, aiming for the “blind taste test” standard: if 19 out of 20 people can’t tell something changed, adoption happens without asking consumers to make a sacrifice.
- Their chocolate bars demonstrate the model: 75 percent less sugar than a typical milk chocolate bar, with a third of the daily fiber per serving:the fiber serving as the bulking agent that replaced sugar’s physical mass, so the bar stays full-size while becoming more nutrient-dense.
- Partnerships with Grupo Bimbo, Mars, and Ingredion (the world’s largest natural sweetener distributor) mean 2026 is the year sweet proteins move from challenger brands into global CPG product lines that reach hundreds of millions of consumers.
- Oobli brews its proteins through fermentation rather than harvesting a difficult tropical crop, which reduces land use, lowers cost, and returns agricultural land to rainforest:the company’s name is inspired by the “oublie” fruit of West Africa, whose local legend says the berries were so sweet villagers forgot their mother’s milk.
About Ali Wing
Ali Wing is the CEO of Oobli, a biotech food company based in Sacramento that produces sweet proteins through fermentation for use in packaged foods and beverages. She also serves on public company boards and advises impact-driven consumer businesses with a focus on the idea that food is health.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliwing
- Website:
Episode 107 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:01) Welcome back to the pre-Vered podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today we’re joined by Ali Wing. She’s a consumer driven CEO and board leader working at the intersection of technology, healthy living, brand building, and brand building. She’s the CEO of Ubli, a company creating sweetness from protein instead of sugar. And she’s known for data driven growth.
digital product transformation and building high performing teams. Recently, Ubli was named Small Business of the Year at the Sacramento Metro Chambers 131st Annual Dinner and Business Award. Ali also serves on public company boards and advises impact driven businesses focused on big consumer problems, especially the idea that food is health. Ali, welcome to the show.
Ali Wing (00:53) Thank you for having me. I’m delighted to be here.
Federico Ramallo (00:56) I’m
honored to have you here today. So tell us what is OOBLY?
Ali Wing (01:00) Well, Ooblie’s
a cool and important company. I’m not the founder, so I joined the founder who started it in 2014 and is a group of scientists who found these proteins that grow in plants.
mostly found along the equator, that are these amazing trickster proteins. They only work on humans, apes, and gorillas. And we eat them, and they momentarily bind almost like a kiss to our taste receptor for that sweet. To tell our brain, we just got sugar. But they’re not a carbohydrate. They’re a protein. So their metabolic impact is completely different than any other thing we’ve ever sweetened foods with.
These guys found it. lot of people had researched them for a long time, but there was really no way to produce them. And that’s where OOBLY comes in, is our technologist said, wait a minute, growing them, they’re a really hard crop to grow. We’ll only make them for the very wealthy, but we need big tools in our toolbox for getting at diabetes and obesity in our food system. And we use too much sugar. Sugar is a miracle crop. It’s important, but it wasn’t designed to be in everything, right? And our bodies are struggling from it. So they said, wait a minute, we could ferment these and make them a replacement in packs.
goods and beverages to sweeten foods and do it in a way that’s a game-changer not just for our bodies but also for the planet because we brew them rather than grow them and that’s what we’re up to.
Federico Ramallo (02:16) ⁓ very interesting.
Right, right. And being able to, you know, we are surrounded by sugar and produce, you know, food that is not healthy for us. So having an alternative, especially for people, I join myself to this group that we enjoy sweet, treats, right?
Ali Wing (02:39) I always tell everybody,
people always think I’m gonna be anti-sugar and I’m not.
Science 101 and biology 101 is we’re all designed to crave sugar. It’s how we survived as a species, right? We had to have this strong desire, which is also why we get easily addicted and eat too much of it, to when it was hard to find roots and tubers in the ground and you had to work for them and we needed that in our diet. And so the biological design is very strong to love sugar. What we weren’t designed for is to have it recklessly abundant in our food system at cheap prices today.
It’s very easy. I always tell everyone, don’t feel guilty about your sweet tooth. It’s human nature 101. But it doesn’t change the fact that your body might be struggling with you eating too much of it, right? So we know the average American, and this is not very different in Mexico, not very different in large parts of the world. India, the world’s largest population is the same.
Federico Ramallo (03:18) you
Ali Wing (03:34) Eat about three times the daily recommended amount of added sugar. And that’s true here. And honestly, that’s just a metabolic challenge for us. That’s why we see, it’s not the only reason we see the growth rate in obesity and diabetes, but it’s a chief culprit.
Federico Ramallo (03:48) Yes, yes. The issue is not sugar per se is, you know, eating too much sugar, right? Yeah. And then we have some, a lot of products that in order to be appealing, they add sugar or they add a lot of salt, right? So, you know, depending on where you are on your stage of life, then, you know, both could be bad, you know. Yeah. So when, when our son was born, we start
Ali Wing (04:10) 100%.
Federico Ramallo (04:17) with my wife we started doing learning about diet and how to eat healthier you know we kind of took seriously the you know we’re bringing alive to the world right so we from that moment we start eating healthier right we were super you know obsessed with you know eating healthy that to the point where the doctor would say give give the baby one you know bottle of milk
And then it was one, you know, and we were so, you know, picky. And then the doctor was like, well, one, but if the baby keeps crying, give him two, right? It’s not a perfect science, right? But doctor, you said one, right?
Ali Wing (04:54) and
It is
hard. The older I get, I always go back and think of my parents and say, you know, the old wisdom is still true. A little bit in moderation, balance, combinations, right? It’s still what we’re trying to accomplish in food, but we’ve modernized food, particularly at a package level, to be so convenient and on the go and on demand. And a lot of the way we’ve done that is to make it very sweet because that’s an immediate thing that our brain says, yeah, we like that. That gives us a lot more.
Federico Ramallo (05:25) Right.
Ali Wing (05:26) And unfortunately, that’s what’s become cheapest and easiest to get your hands on. And so it’s a, I always say, nobody woke up to do this bad thing. It’s sort of a perfect storm of circumstances, which is this biological desire for sweetness, a food system that really wanted to be built around this idea that the customer was always right.
And then our ability to commoditize thing. We’ve now cultivated sugar the world over, which is also what drives some of the climate issues too. We grow it in too many places. It’s a very precious resource. It’s kind of like fossil fuel. We shouldn’t not use it. We should make sure we use it at its highest value. And that means we should produce less and then make it an input into process, not in every one of our.
everyday sweets, right? There’s a better way. And that’s the opportunity I think that is, I always say, the best of marriage of nature and technology that’s in front of us with things like sweet proteins today.
Federico Ramallo (06:19) Right, right. And I like that with Ubly you are doing a for-profit business, but also with a mission-driven statement, right? Which is hard because it is so tempting to say, doing business at all costs, right? But then it feels wrong, right? Or I feel it wrong.
Ali Wing (06:30) 200%.
Yeah,
I’m just a big believer that, you know, the sort of triple win, the triple bottom line is a very achievable thing. And for me, I think I give my dad a lot of credit for this. The generation ahead of me wasn’t.
Federico Ramallo (06:53) Bye.
Ali Wing (07:00) educated and my dad is kind of the one who broke through that. It was mostly a very farming family. But my dad who became an accountant really, really, really loved the park lands. And so he always built his accounting practice around ways to work with the park lands. And he said, you only get one life. Like, so, you know, you can’t divide it and say, I’ll get to the things that are important to the world or important to me later. You really have to design that into your career. And so for me, I’ve never felt like it’s an option to choose.
⁓
I believe in building things. I think if you don’t build it for profit, you probably can’t make it big enough to have a big enough impact. And we’re talking about a global epidemic on obesity and diabetes. So this is a big world problem, right? The only way we’re going to have a big impact is to make it scale and accessible. But I think that the reason to work on those big, big swings is because it accomplishes something even more important. And that’s certainly the case with metabolic disease.
Federico Ramallo (07:55) Right, right. And that allows you to build a team that is committed to that mission, that allows you to build better products, services, better everything, and also making a change on society for good, right?
Ali Wing (08:15) That’s right. That’s right. I always tell people too, people always say, it’s hard. I was like, building anything is hard. Breaking through anything is hard. So I’m just going to take it where I know that I always say, I also get the psychic income of doing it for something over time that will be positive. And for me, that’s an important part of my mission, right, is that I do it in those areas. I’ve almost always done it for profit, but it’s to drive a bigger impact.
Federico Ramallo (08:23) Bye.
Right, right. I was talking to a founder, he’s doing filters, water filters, and we were talking about this idea that his company could be a non-profit, but then he would have to spend so many resources and bandwidth just raising donations. Instead, he decided to make a for-profit company where he donates some of the profits.
Ali Wing (08:45) Mm.
Federico Ramallo (09:04) into low-income houses. He has a mission statement towards improving the quality of life of people through water filtering or filtering, things like that. kind of the conclusion we were arriving is this idea that by making it profitable, he doesn’t have to go and raise donations.
he can now have a bigger impact on the mission.
Ali Wing (09:33) That’s right. That’s right. I always say, listen, if you just look at the sweetener market for food and beverage globally, it’s a $120 billion business already. I believe to really become the choice, not just for the few people that are converted, but really I don’t want you to have to intentionally pick me. I just want you to pick food and we taste better. You have to win on taste first and you have to compete at cost. I can do all of that as for profit and make us a better choice.
For me, that is a very, very large self-sustaining business that I can attract capital and have a much larger impact than I probably ever could size a nonprofit.
Federico Ramallo (10:13) Right, right, because now you have the resources to go and pursue the mission, right? Interesting. And what is the hardest part of building a new food company?
Ali Wing (10:17) That’s right. That’s right.
there’s more than one hard, hardest, hard part. So I’ll try to pick what’s the hardest. I would say right now in this moment in time, which is kind of a chaotic world, right? We’re living in a moment in time across a lot of economies. The US is certainly one of those where we have a lot of skepticism around science and there we’re, figuring out how we’re going to manage.
information and we’re going to sort of teach things to people that are complex, right, with the patience to get at complexity. And so my world at its most fundamental level is really a biotech platform. We’re using a biotechnology to bring things that are available from the plant kingdom that we never knew before some of the recent capabilities like CRISPR in the last 10 years and make them accessible at affordable level. So there’s this complicated tech stack. No consumer needs to understand that. But in the
In the world, we’re in the first generation where we’re using biotech to bring it into food and make plant solutions available. And there’s complexity in that that requires patience and an ability to get in to start to educate. And right now we’re operating in a really skeptical world about science. So I would say that’s the macro thing that’s the hardest.
On a daily basis, think the practical thing that’s hard to anytime you’re in food, whether it was biotech, whether it was novel ingredient, whether it was just a new CPG idea, is that you know one person’s taste, you know one person’s taste. We have a lot of choices in food today. So breaking through with something that can really be universally loved and really get at flavor and taste is always the hard part because there’s a lot of different choices in the market in everything in food today.
Federico Ramallo (12:05) Right, right. I believe that there is some emotional connection to flavors, right? I mean, I told you before we started recording that I moved from Argentina to Mexico 17 years ago. And one of the things that I miss the most, know, the second thing, because the first one was meat, of course, but the second one was these, the childhood sweets, right?
Ali Wing (12:28) Hmm.
Federico Ramallo (12:29) that you could go and buy at any place, any convenience store. It doesn’t mean that they’re better or worse, it’s just different. Here they have different sweets, right? It’s a familiarity. So there is some love to that that I have that every time somebody goes to Argentina, I ask to bring sweets, right?
Ali Wing (12:40) familiar.
certain things.
Yeah, I think, I think that’s generally true for food and culture, right? Think about, I say this as an American, this country is a nation of immigrants. So we’re a cacophony of all different cultures, right? So everybody has their history of what those tastes are. But it’s really, you put a spotlight on it when comes to sweets, because just like you just gave the example.
Federico Ramallo (12:53) Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ali Wing (13:13) Sweets are also, they’re not just culture, they’re also tied to tradition and celebration and intergenerational time. Like everybody has a favorite memory of something they ate that their grandma made, or there’s always the thing you had for a birthday party, or you have a celebration and those almost all had sweets in them.
And they’re not just tied to culture, they’re tied to happiness and celebration, right? So they’re very nostalgic. And a lot of ways we’ve tried to address, hey, let’s try to fix things that are too sweet and have them.
remove them is kind of feels lecturing and it’s sort of like it feels like it’s sacrilege to our, I’m not, know, but I’m still gonna love my grandmother’s recipe or I’m, you know, you wanna be able to hold on to those things, particularly in this world, right? We need those cultural reminders about what made us who our families are or everything else. And so I think with sweets, everything you said is true in food and culture, but it’s even more in sweets, cause it’s tied to tradition and nostalgia and family.
Federico Ramallo (14:10) Right.
Yes. And the it’s a personal treat that you can have with yourself. Right. So yeah. Now.
Ali Wing (14:16) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Think about, I know you have a son, think about the milestones
of birthdays, right? And there’s traditions already in your house, right? And there’s things you celebrate with, with food, right?
Federico Ramallo (14:25) Right.
We gather every night to have dinner. Most of the ceremonies are around food in the families.
Ali Wing (14:36) Yeah, absolutely.
Every holiday is, every celebration is. Even when we mourn people it is. So it’s so tied to moments that are culture, right? So yeah, yeah, sweets are a big, big player in that.
Federico Ramallo (14:41) Right.
And in Mexico and all Latin America, think that happens. There is this idea of food equals love, right? So, you know, regret.
Ali Wing (14:58) yeah, that’s, I will
say that’s not used to La Tame, that’s not unique. ⁓ We always talk about, you know, my friends, my best friend’s Jewish, the Jewish mother, right, loves through feeding. The Catholic mother loves through feeding. Like it’s very, it’s most cultures really love through food.
Federico Ramallo (15:02) Thank
Yes, yes. I’ve been doing intermittent fastening and my, you know, the grandmas in the family were like, you’re not eating, you’re not eating, you have to eat and they will bring me food, know, sneak me food in, right? and I mean, I know that we’re doing it out of love, right? But it’s like, I’m following a schedule, you know, don’t give me temptations.
Ali Wing (15:32) Yeah.
Right. Totally. Totally.
Exactly, exactly.
Federico Ramallo (15:45) Right.
And then on the other hand, I think that we have the opportunity to change our behaviors. Right. In my family, we used to drink coke every single day. Right. Until eventually we learned that we shouldn’t. Right. In there is a town, I don’t know if you know, a town called San Cristobal de las Casas, where they drink 2.2 liters per day of coke. They only
Ali Wing (16:10) No, because…
Federico Ramallo (16:12) They only
drink coke. They don’t drink water. Right. And that’s what they’re used to. Right. So and now with my family, with my parents, we stopped drinking any any any colas. Yeah. It gets to a point where we we can just enjoy a little bit, but then we don’t. And my son, we never gave him sweets until the first year. Any sugar?
Ali Wing (16:22) less.
Federico Ramallo (16:36) until the first year. And now he, when I give him some sweets, he tastes a little bit and that’s it, right? He’s like, it’s too much, right? So I think that there’s hope that we can learn new flavors.
Ali Wing (16:50) I do, I do. think there’s complexity in that. always say one of things I’m most proud of as a mom is I have a really, my son eats a lot of colors and he eats meals, not snacks, right? So, and he’s a good eater that way. But drinks is a tricky one and it’s a global issue, right? And even though I think colas are probably the spotlight example that we talk about, the reality is, if you look at daily added sugar in our diets, which is really the metabolic disease problem,
The sort of 800 pound gorilla of the problem is beverages. And in those, it runs the gamut. We do sweet teas in the US with too much sugar. We do alcohols with too much sugar. We do mocktails with too much sugar. do, and again, it’s not because anybody sort of.
woke up to be build a bad industry. It’s that it’s very easy to over drink a beverage, right? Like you can consume a lot more. That’s why everything’s become supersized or you can get the larger size. It’s really the portions because they’re a great taste and in a small amount, like think about the original Coca Cola sized bottles. They were little, right? And that’s not how anybody drinks them anymore. So it’s actually the quantity. But
Beverages have been really, I think, changing. I mean, they’ve sort of been the big export in the world that I think is the leading indicator of metabolic disease just based on the way we have consumed our calories. So I think you’re really smart with your family to be doing that. I was lucky. I always said, my parents were like…
farm to table people because they were farmers and we didn’t have a lot of money so we didn’t have sodas because they viewed that as expensive. So I didn’t grow up, I’m rare as an American at my age, just didn’t grow up with a soda habit and we just never have been those drinkers but it was largely because that was sort of expensive when I was little, right? And the beauty is, know,
Federico Ramallo (18:36) Right.
Ali Wing (18:38) It’s like everything. It’s fine to have one once in a while. It’s everything in a little bit of moderation and understanding that most of those drinks are the equivalent of eating a very sugary dessert.
Federico Ramallo (18:48) Right, right. With my son, we do, I like to cook with him. So we build our own ice cream. ⁓ Although everyone say, well, we also buy, you know, store ice cream, right? But we do cheese and blueberry and cheese. Beautiful. ⁓ And he loves it. So, you know, we do it together and…
Ali Wing (18:55) That’s fun.
that’s fun. That’s great.
Federico Ramallo (19:13) Because I’m doing the intermittent fastening, now I can have the luxury of eating a little bit more ice cream because it’s kind of okay, right? And it’s, yeah, yeah, and we did it, so we know what we put in it, so it’s not over-processed, right? ⁓
Ali Wing (19:21) right? You can have it which is allowed.
Right, right.
We used to call blueberries when my son was little. I also have an only son. We used to call them nature’s candy. they’re nature’s candy. I do think to your question though that can we get change? I do think we can. And I think we can be mindful and raise kids exposed to very different parts of the palette. But we also have to recognize through most of the world, that’s a…
Federico Ramallo (19:36) Right.
Ali Wing (19:55) That’s an upper income luxury to say. And a lot of the world is dependent upon what is packaged foods, which is why I’m so committed to say, and that’s why I get so excited about sweet proteins.
If we’re gonna interrupt what’s now metabolic disease covering a lot of generations, right? I have to also meet people where their mouth is already. And that’s one of the things I get so excited about with sweet proteins is they can deliver the kind of sweetness that you are getting in a soda, but for, you know, one one thousandth of the amount of content and they’re a protein, not a carbohydrate. So if I can give somebody the taste where we always say that the ultimate standard, right, is that
I don’t usually try to get to zero. Zero is kind of part of the problem too, as we associated zero with healthy. And actually, food shouldn’t be zero. It should have nutritive value. But if we will typically get, let’s say, 80 to 90 % of the sugar out of it, our goal is that if we blindfolded 20 people and we gave them all the the taster’s choice, that 19 out of 20 couldn’t tell we did something to it. So we could try to get to unrecognizable reduction. And if we do that, we know.
The more people we can meet with taste where we don’t have to ask them to make a change, the more we’ll get, you know, we’ll get faster adoption to better health. And so that’s also, I think one of the big opportunities of sweet proteins is we do have many generations that already have established tastes. We have to help them try to get to healthier.
Federico Ramallo (21:21) You have to meet them where they are. Yes. And you don’t have to be 100 % the same experience, but if you are 90, 95%, then that’s good enough, you know, to bring people in towards eating healthier. Yeah.
Ali Wing (21:24) Yes.
I think
that’s right. That’s what we’re hopeful for and excited about with the technology, right?
None of that means I don’t think that if you have a choice to give your kid a candy bar of blueberries, give them blueberries when they’re little, it’s a great thing to develop their palate, you know, because we can teach them to desire less of it, right? They’ll always fundamentally desire sweets. But you don’t have to set the standard as cake and ice cream. You can also stand it as an apple and berries, right? And it’s a very different sweetness level. And I’m hopeful for that. But I’m also pragmatic to say there are places in the world in every one of our countries, including here, where
there’s food deserts and they don’t have as much access to fresh and fresh has become more expensive than some of the packaged. So we have an obligation to get packaged goods more metabolically friendly.
Federico Ramallo (22:26) Right, Yeah, and particularly people with little time or in the US, not having a car becomes an issue, right? So being able to provide healthy alternatives become much more important, yeah. I’ve been trying to find some alternative to chips because I have a…
Ali Wing (22:36) Totally.
I agree.
Federico Ramallo (22:50) So what I’ve done is, in my house, we’ve done availability, right? We basically got rid of all the food, the junk food and all the sweets. And then if they’re not there, then we don’t eat them, right? And then when we want, we go and buy a little bit, right? And that way…
Ali Wing (23:09) Right. That’s good. It’s
moving away from snacking to making your meals be, you know, really give you satiation.
Federico Ramallo (23:16) Right. But then I am running an otherland community. So I have my dog. And then we go off-road. We drive for seven hours to a beautiful spot. Right. And then what happens is that sometimes you want to snack in the process. So I replace the chips with
with dried meat, right? So I make my own dehydrated meat and no salt, no anything, just the meat. So it’s full proteins and it’s going from carbs to protein. yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s, yeah.
Ali Wing (23:48) That’s good.
That sounds like a true Argentinian.
I grew up,
so my husband teases and tells people that I’m a squirrel. For me, I like nuts, right? I’m always grabbing nuts. So he says I have a squirrel diet with my amount of vegetables and nuts. If I need a snack, like something in between, you always will have in my bag some almonds, some mixed nuts, some something where I can have a small amount, because it helps me with that protein loading and the satiation.
Federico Ramallo (24:11) you
Right, right. Yeah, and as you said, this, you know, just having good enough to satiate the need, right? Yeah. So where can people find OOBLE products?
Ali Wing (24:37) for sure.
Well, we’re in the first sort of…
First generation ever of these novel proteins, right? So the company was started in 2014. got our first, every protein we bring to market, we have about a dozen on our platform and about four that are ready for commercialization. Each one of those has to go through regulatory approval for safety in every country they show up in. So in the U.S., we have the highest level safety recommendations on four proteins. We now have those, we’ve started expanding a lot in Latam, so we have those approvals in Guadalajara.
and in Colombia. I mean, we’re in about 12 countries of international expansion right now. And those countries don’t yet have their first products because they actually just got approvals in the last few months. But we’re working with companies on their products all over the world.
In the US, there’s about four or five, what we call challenger brands that are like, there’s a company called Hero Breads, who’s, know, there are hundreds of millions of dollars and they’re protein forward bread that is trying to really disrupt bigger bread players, right? And they have several of their products that are now protein sweetened, or there’s a new,
energy drink called Brez that has protein sweetening in it. And so we have several of those challenger brands in our markets. We offer really just so people can taste sweet proteins. We have a chocolate line.
Our milk chocolate is 75 % less sugar than a typical milk chocolate bar and a third of your daily fiber per serving. And our dark chocolate is 90 % less sugar. We have great reviews, but you can get that at Amazon and online. We don’t really want to be a chocolate company. We just sort of make it available so you can taste what protein sweetened is. But the big projects we’re working on are with people like Grupo Bimbo was our first global partnership. And we are in the middle of working on several very large lines for them, one for the US, some in Mexico, some in Colombia.
We have Mars as a large partner in the world and we are working on a chocolate.
line on their new snacks division, several lines, and then of course they have gums and mints. So they’re looking at sweet proteins in a lot of applications and we’re busy in those, but they haven’t launched yet because really last year was the first year they could actually start working with them. And then last winter we just announced a global partnership with Ingredion, who is the largest sugar alternative stevia formulator and distributor
and they are now bringing sweet proteins into their work because they’re the biggest natural sweetener alternative. But there are certain things that we can help them make their solution more available to more categories. And we think round out some of what they’re trying to accomplish. And so we’re very excited about that partnership. They’re a global player and they’re now working with very large companies all over the world. So 2026 is a big year for us because we’ll go from smaller companies that are
in the headlines with better for you, healthier products, but not the global big ones to having some of the first products in market from the very large ones that have been working on new formulations for the last year.
Federico Ramallo (27:42) Very interesting. So we can order online the Oblio chocolates to try it. And then we’re going to see Oblio embedded in Bimbo products and other big brand names. Very interesting.
Ali Wing (27:48) You can. Yep.
Yeah, our real
goal, we make great products. We can make almost any type of products. Proteins work in every type of product category. But our real goal is to really help global CPG companies rethink the way they sweeten packaged goods. If you look at most packaged food or beverage, it’s not one sweetener. It’s usually a system of sweeteners. And our goal is to take that
$120 billion market and say every time they start to build a sweetener system in a packaged good, they should start with the base should be protein. And then they can do some of the other taste profile things they want with under the sweeteners, but a lot less because on average, we should be able to deliver without changing their taste profile, 60 to 80 % reductions. And that’s a game changer for food.
Federico Ramallo (28:42) wow.
Right, because now you can keep providing the same flavor, you don’t have an adoption issue and you get the benefit of being able to provide healthier food.
Ali Wing (28:56) We don’t really need packaged foods to be zero sugar or zero calories, right? We need them to be more proportional, right? So I always come back and say, listen, if you can take three quarters out and keep the taste, isn’t that a huge win?
It’s a huge win. Now there are lots of product categories like our chocolate where we can go to 90 % reduction or sometimes even 100. But the average one, if I look across large companies, is we can deliver 60 to 80%. We can make it affordable for them to do that, which it’s only gonna work if they can maintain their prices, right? And that is this big benefit because every, you know, it’s cutting in half what somebody’s eating’s amount of daily sugar at a minimum. That’s a big deal.
Federico Ramallo (29:41) Right, right. And I think I mentioned it before that companies in order to provide a healthier option, they say low fat, but what they actually do is increase salt, right? Which, you know, it kind of works, but then, you know, you have other side benefits that are not good. you know.
Ali Wing (30:05) I think that’s so one of the cool things with sweet proteins, and I think you know this, but when they’re found in nature, they’re anywhere from a thousand to five thousand times sweeter on a weight-weight basis than sugar. But when we manufacture them, we’re generally manufacturing to about a 500x to a thousand x, but that means on average you’re going to have one 500th or one 750th of every amount you have to use. So it’s a huge reduction, right?
The reality is, is different than a lot of those examples where you have to add in things. We kind of, if you think about just mass, because that’s the weight of sugar, we sort of give you the sweetness and have taken a bunch out of the product. So you have room to put it in. So the example I would give you, we can help be the pathway to more nutrient dense, why we’re also reducing sugar. The good example is our chocolate bars. A typical size of a chocolate bar, 50 % of it is really the bulking that the sugar does, right? And I’m not going to be able
to take out 90 % and give you half the size of chocolate bar and have you happy, right? You still want the full size, right? So what we have to do is then, all right, so what are we going to bulk with? And I can’t put in something that’s also going to be a backdoor to diabetes, right? That would be bad on me. So we actually use a fiber bulking. That means every time somebody has a serving of our chocolate bar, you’re having one or less than one gram of added sugar, and you’re having three, a third of your daily fiber.
So you can also add in nutrient density where we need it in foods, right? Because that sugar was giving you roundness and mouth feel, but not giving you fiber, right? So it’s a big opportunity. think that’s one of the, always view that as kind of the and. You can be excited across the board about just sugar reduction.
But in this world, think of what’s going on in the US with the spotlight on Maha and GLPs and nutrient density. it’s not exactly the package I’d love to see it have as the conversation, but we’re actually having a good conversation about food is health. And the US hasn’t been very good about that conversation, right? So it’s a conversation that’s in an unusual package, but we’re having it, and that’s a good thing. What we’re really talking about is how do we make every bite count more, right? Well, that’s nutrient density.
So part of that is the more you’re adding things in, like you’re trying to have more fiber filled, you’re trying to have more protein, the more most of us are going to want sweeteners in it because it’s a change to taste. And when you load things up with protein, most people want sweeteners. If you look at most of the package bars that are protein forward, they’re full of sweeteners. So it’s really to do one, which is to…
make it more nutrient dense. In packaged goods, you’re going to have a demand for more sweetening. All the more reason we need sweet proteins that will reduce the metabolic load of that and allow you to get to that nutrient dense packaged good. So I’m very excited, but it’s kind of an and part of our business.
Federico Ramallo (32:50) Right, right. And I think your strategy of going, working with current food manufacturers in order to improve their product, I think that that’s a great idea. I hope that through this podcast and people can know about what you guys are doing because that way we can achieve both
you know, on the demand side as well, if people request, you know, having more protein in their sweets, then, you know, companies are going to reach out more to you guys, right?
Ali Wing (33:24) Yeah, well, I appreciate that. I really do. We need this opportunity to get education on proteins. Most people think that the only role proteins do is build muscle. But there are these unique proteins that were found largely along the equator that also can be a source of sweetening. Protein sweetening is a huge unlock for all of us on health and our sweet tooth.
Federico Ramallo (33:34) Right.
Ali Wing (33:45) And my hope is people really do get exposed to that and we are on that journey of education. That’s also the nuance. A lot of people think we’re not a good source of protein loading. So just because something has protein sweetenant, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get bigger muscles. And I say that because remember, only need one one thousandth of the amount of sugar. So you’re always going have a very small amount in. It’s different than non-nutritive sweeteners. They’re inherently not nutritive. Protein is. We’re nutritive. We’re just going to use tiny.
amounts. So we work really well in all foods, but people particularly like us in protein loaded foods because we don’t, you know, then they don’t have to understand why the protein wasn’t a lot of protein. Sometimes we’ll affect one gram of protein on a product. But think of us as protein sweetening. And it is the first time in the world that the everyday person has heard that proteins can sweeten and they do more roles and just build muscle.
Federico Ramallo (34:39) Right, right, very interesting, yes. And we can enjoy sweetness with a little bit less of guilt, right?
Ali Wing (34:46) Totally, totally.
Yes. The beautiful thing about sweet proteins, and we’ve done a lot of clinical work on this, have a very, we’re very committed. I came out of healthcare technology to do this role, so I’m really committed to the scientific side of what’s going on with our bodies. But.
We don’t have any glycemic impact, so no blood sugar increases in any part of the digestion because the way proteins work is they unfold and denature so they don’t trigger that interaction all the way through digestion. you have those…
ability to trigger your blood glucose levels all the way into your gut and we just don’t because that’s not our protein has unfolded and denatured and Then we have to account for what’s in the gut and we are fully digestible so the part of the problem in today’s world with prebiotic probiotic all of our focus on the gut is that we’ve been loading a lot of things that weren’t natively in our diet and they’re small molecules and they absorb in our tissue and they create a lot of noise for different people and everybody’s kind of personal
system is a walking, talking fermenter, and they’re out of balance, right? That’s what’s going on. Proteins don’t digest that way, and our proteins definitely fully digest, which means they don’t, by virtue of being a macronutrient, they’re different than a small molecule that can’t be absorbed into the tissue, and they’re not what’s a source of being eaten in the gut microbiome, right? And that’s where the balance changes. So we’re also very preventative to gut microbiome issues.
Federico Ramallo (36:10) Interesting, interesting. And I’m also hearing that you can now enjoy suites while doing keto.
Ali Wing (36:19) Yes, you can. Yeah. I mean, we’re very, we’re keto friendly. We’re not protein loading, right? We are natively protein, but we’re not going to add a lot to your protein load.
Federico Ramallo (36:21) very interesting.
Ali Wing (36:31) But we ride along well with that because we’re not providing a contra of high sugar, which you don’t want in keto either, right? So we’re GLB friendly, we’re nutrient dense friendly, we’re keto, we kind of fit with every trend, right? And the beautiful thing is, is we’re only working in, these are plant proteins that villagers along the equator in places like Southeast Asia and Western Africa have been eating these for years. That’s how we came up with our name.
if you don’t know. So, Ooblie is a fanciful name, it’s made up, but it’s inspired by one of the berries that one of the sweet proteins come from. It’s called the Ooblie fruit and it’s found in West Africa and they speak French in the local villages around the equator there.
And uble means forgetfulness and the local sort of colloquial story about finding these berries, which they didn’t find very much because they’re at the top of the canopy, was that they were so sweet they would forget their mother’s milk. So we named our company inspired by the story that it’s so sweet you can forget your mother’s milk. mean, that’s sort of where the origin story comes from. And we, of course, needed to make it a more…
easy to pronounce phonetically around the world word, we’re sort of, love the story of it, of locals eating. And we like the idea that people have been eating it for a thousand years.
Federico Ramallo (37:50) Right, right, it conveys the ethos of your company. Amazing. Ali, we are running out of time. I truly appreciated you being here today. I think what you’re doing is amazing. Any final remarks before we wrap it up?
Ali Wing (37:54) Yes, yes.
I just want to say thank you. Thank you for…
putting a spotlight on proteins that sweeten and the ubeli sweet proteins specifically. We think it’s a really important tool in the toolkit for helping our food system become healthier, but also available to everybody. So not just for the really wealthy, right? We think that combination is important. And I’m really proud of the fact that it’s also really good for Mother Earth. We help make, we take a load off the planet by brewing these and fermenting them, kind of like we do wine and beer, rather than growing them, because we reduce the amount of land
And we give back a lot of land from sugar production into the rainforest where we need Mother Earth to breathe. So it’s really a reduction of land and water use.
Federico Ramallo (38:45) haven’t even talked about that. That’s amazing! Yeah. Thank you very much Ali for being here today.
Ali Wing (38:51) Thank you.