Nestled between a motorcycle repair shop and a martial arts school in a south Bloomington warehouse space sits a different kind of business from its neighbors.
Symbio Bioculinary does not concern submission combat or landscaping businesses. It upcycles food waste to tackle the over 30% of meals thrown out in the United States.
The idea came to founder and CEO Elliot Notrica in his prior career path as a chef, where he saw food waste firsthand. He said chefs take unused food and put it in other dishes to cut down on waste.
“[I] got interested in how we can take the solutions that chefs were implementing at a very small size and allow them to be implemented at a larger scale,” he said.
Notrica is not a typical high-tech entrepreneur. For starters, a few years into the new company and Notrica is still in college. He’s a senior biology major at Illinois Wesleyan University [IWU].
Notrica started Symbio three years ago but only set up his new lab at the end of last April. The process is one which requires some patience, because Symbio has no example to follow from.
“It’s hard. The science that we’re doing, the processes that we’re trying to implement are hard to implement,” Notrica said. “They’re very complex systems, the engineering of these organisms is very complicated.”
Understanding those complex systems involve a liquid chromatography mass spectrometry machine, a fridge set to negative 80 degrees Celsius, a rotary evaporator, an incubator, a centrifuge, and more — all contained within Symbio’s laboratory.
In a demonstration, Notrica used a rotary evaporator to extract the sugars and enzymes of an organism. Using an alcohol solution, the evaporator applies a negative pressure and vacuum to the organism resulting in a new solution with sugars and enzymes which can now be used by some of the other machines in the lab to see how they can be engineered for a new substance.
All the lab machinery and samples Symbio has are in the name of creating new systems in existing food production systems. Notrica said the process of food production in the U.S. is linear, it goes from formation to use to the trash. Symbio wants to create a circular process of food production instead.
“Our systems take the excess that’s produced and used our engineered organisms to convert it into an edible upcycled additive or an edible upcycled ingredient,” Notrica said. “Our systems are installed onsite so companies don’t have to haul off their side products … and [we] ideally produce an ingredient that can be used onsite.”
Notrica said the company’s early successful products made from food waste are the excess bread loaves and bread dough from a bakery in St. Louis into a sugar syrup to sweeten new baked goods.
“…and turn it into a sugar syrup, and when this sugar syrup is added as a sweetener back into the bread, it increases the shelf life, it increases the sensory attributes of the actual item,” he said.
The shelf life is improved when the added sugars help to keep the starches in the dough from collapsing in on themselves.
Notrica said the bakery used to spend $30,000 a month in getting rid of its excess dough. Symbio gets a cut of that, and ongoing consulting fees to make sure the process stays pure.
Petrick Idea Center
One of the first people to see the vision of Notrica’s idea was John Quarton, former director of the Petrick Idea Center at IWU. Quarton retired about four months ago. Quarton was first made aware of a freshman’s idea to help eliminate food waste in October 2022.
"And at that time, I could see he was mature well beyond his years, and that he had this vision, and this strive and this intelligence that blew me away for an undergrad, a freshman,” Quarton said. “I’m like … you’re representing this Gen Z group who want to be their own boss, who want to help solve problems that they feel in some cases we haven’t solved.”
Quarton said Notrica’s connections across the world, from Japan to England and back to Central Illinois, fuel him. The connections inspire him in his mission to eliminate food waste.
Quarton said an idea such as Symbio requires the right type of person to lead, who can make or break the mission. He said Notrica is the exact right type of person in this case.
“There could be some amazing technology or science, something patentable that really makes something distinct and that’s true, that exists, but what makes those things happen is the person behind the idea,” he said.
Quarton said Notrica embodied that mantra and had the confidence he needed.
“He had this confidence about him and [was] just a sponge. Wherever we connected him, wherever we pointed him to community members, alumni, he would always take the time to meet, be appreciative for having had the chance to meet people that had experience that he could draw from,” said Quarton. “He just absorbs it and processes it faster than most anyone I’ve met in my life. He’s just one of a kind.”
Quarton said Notrica took advantage of funding opportunities like the Titan New Venture Challenge at IWU. He said Notrica even spoke of not entering one year because he wanted to give other students a chance to win.
Funding opportunities and meeting alumni was the primary way Notrica overcame the barrier of funding a lab, according to Quarton.
Notrica referred to funding a lab as “horribly expensive.” The chromatography and mass spectrometry machine alone costs $70,000.
Quarton said the funding difficulties could have been a possible reason for Notrica to have pursued an institution with better research capabilities than IWU, but he chose to stay.
“So, providing that type of highly technical equipment and resources at a liberal arts institution may have been a little bit of a stretch, but he found a way to make it happen,” he said. “We found through connections and local real estate that helped him find a place where he could call home … here we’ve got him in Bloomington.”
While Notrica came to Bloomington from St. Louis, Quarton wanted to seek out way to keep Symbio in Central Illinois despite its funding and research challenges.
Since Quarton is retired, he no longer supports Notrica and Symbio through IWU’s Petrick Idea Center, but he said he remains one of the company’s biggest supporters.
Quarton said he plans to continue supporting Notrica and helping him connect and grow his business.
Fermentation and implementation
The idea is popular among food producers, too. Notrica said companies will usually find him first, looking for a way to better utilize their waste. Symbio is then able to be a part of both the creation and implementation of the new food system.
“We’re able to build these systems around the excess infrastructure that they already have, and then it’s kind of a single purchase of the system and then we will help throughout the operational life of that system to ensure the organisms are safe and operating at optimal efficacy,” he said.
The main organism Notrica uses to make the new food cycles possible comes from a Japanese company which has been around since before Christopher Columbus sailed the oceans blue for the shores of North America. The organism is a fungus from the Aspergillus genus.
“It originated in China in the 16th century, but it’s been used in Asia for thousands of years. If you’ve ever had soy sauce, you’ve eaten our organism,” he said. “So, it’s used to produce soy sauce, it’s used to produce sake … it is the national organism of Japan.”
Notrica gets the type of mold form a partnership with a company first started in 1480 and has been owned by the same family for nearly 600 years.
The species of Aspergillus Symbio uses is known as Aspergillus oryzae. It is used in their sugar syrup made from leftover bread dough.
“We use a computational pipeline to synthetically engineer the enzymatic activity of these organisms to act specifically on whatever the item is,” Notrica said. “So, in this case of the syrup system, we’re taking the excess dough and engineering these organisms to produce enzymes that will go and hydrolyze the amylose and all of these other starches to produce specific types of sugars.”
Symbio also uses other fungi like yeast and bacteria in their process. The fungus and bacteria help Notrica use his other relied on food science, the process of fermentation.
Fermentation is the process by bacteria or fungus to break down an organism into something new. The process is common to make foods such as yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut, beer and sourdough bread.
With the combination of fermentation and engineered organisms, each project Symbio undertakes follows the format of finding the best way to create a new additive for their clients to utilize. Notrica said each food sample is unique to each product and requires different steps and processes.
“And by breaking the compounds into small pieces and accelerating them super hard and shooting them at a sensor, we can tell what the identities are,” said Notrica. “So, we’ll do a DNA sequencing, we’ll do a tabelomic annotation, then we will do Crispr or other kinds of genetic engineering techniques … we try to do the smallest amount of actual alteration to the sequence.”
Another of Symbio’s products is working to take advantage of the extracted antioxidants from the husks of cocoa beans, which has similar health benefits to olive oil. During the chocolate making process, the husk is otherwise discarded or used for animal feed.
“What we’re working on right now is extracting these oils from the cocoa husk and then producing a cocoa butter substitute with the same functionality and the same sensory attributes as the butter itself,” Notrica said.
The industry possibilities go far beyond just bakeries and chocolate factories, as Notrica said the technology could expand to many kinds of food waste. As of right now, with a team of three, the demand is real. Notrica said Symbio is hiring, and they need to hire different kinds of workers.
“The work that we do here is super interdisciplinary … everything that we do we’re doing chemistry, biology, engineering, food science, food safety,” he said. “The ability to interface successfully with lots of different scientific disciplines is huge for the type of work that we do, especially at this early of a stage.”
Intersecting sciences
Notrica said Symbio is hiring for biologists, chemists, engineers, food scientists and more.
As for some chemistry knowledge, Notrica is covered by Nikolai Valencia, technical sales and development lead. Valencia graduated from Saint Ambrose University with a degree in chemistry and found Symbio soon after graduation.
“I was more than happy that it was a startup, because I knew it was going to be kind of a fast-paced environment and I was already aware it was going to be … not a set schedule for my duties,” Valencia said. “This lean more towards like a research lab where there is something new to do every day.”
Valencia was happy with where Symbio was in its progress, because he craved the faster paced environment compared to an analytical lab. He likes that every day is different.
“What I do in a regular day, it goes from doing paperwork or building a procedure, reaching out to clients, doing a first outreach for a project or a new proposal to doing some testing for a specific project or do some initial valorization from food waste,” he said.
Valencia said he does not have much interest in the biology which Notrica and his coworker Omar Santoyo work on. For his chemistry work, he said he brings a new perspective on how to test new samples.
“We’ve done fats, oils and grease extraction…that’s an idea I brought here based on my past experience,” he said. “Having me from the chemistry background and them on the biology side really gives us different points of view to target the same problem or issue we have.”
In his everyday work, Valencia recognized some small victories at Symbio. One of the best successes the company can have in a day, he said, is just making contact with a new client.
“Since this is a really novel type of business or way of handling waste, it’s nice, it’s really motivational to see people that get interested,” Valencia said. “That they are interested and they’re willing to spend the time, the resources, and their energy more than anything to keep collaborating.”
Valencia said connecting with a new client is about building a mutual relationship to help solve their specific food waste issue.
However, not all the work is for profit or to sell to a client. Sometimes it is a small side hustle, like a vinegar made from garlic, just for mom.
“So, I made this balsamic maybe three years ago, and she says it’s like the greatest thing eaten, so I have to make a lot of it now for her,” he said.
