In Finland, Montinutra Oy, a biotechnology start-up and portfolio company of Metsä Spring, the venture capital arm of forest industry major Metsä Group, is partnering with compatriot cosmetics company Ole Hyvä Luonnontuote Oy (Ole Hyvä) in a new personal care product range that utilizes Montinutra’s "Boreal Bioproducts SpruceSugar" as an ingredient.
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Montinutra has partnered with Ole Hyvä to bring its Boreal Bioproducts SpruceSugar into the consumer market through Ole Hyvä’s new personal care product range.
This is the first time that SpruceSugar has been used in an application for consumers, marking a significant milestone for the startup company.
We are very happy that Ole Hyvä Luonnontuote Oy is among the first to start utilizing our natural raw materials marketed with the Boreal Bioproducts trademark. By bringing these new biobased ingredients to the market, we also contribute to reducing the carbon emissions of fossil chemicals, said Jaakko Pajunen, Managing Director of Montinutra.
Derived from spruce sawdust
SpruceSugar is a 100 percent natural hemicellulose extract, obtained from Norway spruce (Picea abies) sawdust, a sidestream from sawmills.
The extract is an innovative and sustainable ingredient, substituting analog chemicals and polysaccharides.
It has the potential to increase the antioxidant capacity of the product it is used in, and in personal care products such as shampoo, it can help the user’s hair to cope with oxidative stress, for example, from hair dyeing.
It also has the potential to inhibit inflammation. Among the Boreal Bioproducts Montinutra produces, SpruceSugar was developed at a record speed – it went from the testing phase into a consumer product in just 14 months.
Vegan, biodegradable, and contains SpruceSugar
With rising demand from consumers for natural cosmetic products, the global natural cosmetics market size was estimated at US$34.1 billion in 2018 and is projected to register a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.1 percent from 2019 to 2025 according to market research firm Grandview Markets.
Our goal is to develop and offer consumers high-quality and environmentally friendly cleaning products based on nature’s biocapacity. We are particularly happy that we can support a domestic innovation that promotes the responsible use of natural resources and respects the well-being of nature. We believe that the cooperation helps us to offer our customers even better and more environmentally friendly products in the future as well, said Elli Unger, Managing Director of Ole Hyvä Luonnontuote.
With the successful launch of the first product range, Montinutra is ready to sell the product to other natural cosmetic players in Europe.
Cosmetics only one application
Personal care products are just one potential use case for SpruceSugar, and Montinutra says that it could also be used in larger industrial applications.
One example of replaceable products is bio-latex, with a wide variety of applications from paints to glues.
Metsä Spring is on a mission to seek and support sustainable innovations and technologies that find new purposes and higher value for Nordic wood. SpruceSugar is a prime example of how underutilized side streams can be upcycled into a novel product that has a large variety of usage cases, commented Katariina Kemppainen, SVP, Group R&D at Metsä Spring.
