We receive several inquiries a week asking for updates on food and beverage companies that are using Senomyx flavor enhancing technology. The requests are sufficiently regular that a post is warranted to describe the current state of affairs.

Many are aware of what happened in 2010 and 2011. A company based in California developed a flavor enhancing/attenuating additive design that worked directly on the taste receptors of the human tongue.  The additives they developed could make things taste sweet without much sugar, cut the bitterness in some foods, enhance saltiness at very low levels of sodium – you get the picture.  Interesting technology, however, their enhancers were tested in aborted fetal cell lines.  The tests looked for the expression of specific proteins that would mimic taste receptor reaction to the enhancing additives.

Senomyx was quite open about their use of aborted fetal cell lines, openly disclosing this information on their website. Aggressive marketing to food and beverage manufacturers soon followed and some large, household-name companies demonstrated interest early on. The two most notable were PepsiCo and Kraft Foods. PepsiCo entered into a contract with Senomyx to apply the new technology to some of their beverage products. Please see this post written by our founder, Debi Vinnedge, in March of 2011 for details and the chronology.

The awareness that Debi raised in the Spring and Summer of 2011 resulted in Pepsi changing course and Kraft Foods severing all ties with Senomyx – truly remarkable achievements and a true grass-roots victory for the pro-life movement. Unfortunately, some companies were undeterred by the consumer response and continued to work with Senomyx and using their technology. Cadbury Adams and Nestle were among them, and a European company named Firmenich began distributing Senomyx flavor enhancing products to other food and beverage manufacturing companies in overseas markets.

Firmenich viewed Senomyx as a strategic fit for their business and began to work on acquiring Senomyx.  The acquisition was completed in September of 2018 and Senomyx became a wholly-owned operating unit of Firmenich SA.

Firmenich is a privately-held corporation. They have no shareholders and they are not compelled to produce quarterly and annual reports like stock corporations. Any information that is made publicly available is released completely and exclusively at their discretion.

Firmenich acquired Senomyx with their eyes wide open. They saw what happened to PepsiCo, Kraft Foods and Campbell’s Soups. Manufacturer, customer and partner relationships with Senomyx went ‘dark’ during the acquisition process. References to Senomyx customers in marketing materials, websites and other communication media started to disappear – this was Senomyx and Firmenich implementing a risk management strategy.

And here we are today. Questions remain and people legitimately want to know if there are more companies using this enhancement technology. Somebody must be. There are over 130 patents owned by Senomyx and Firmenich for this stuff, and most of the patent filings provide detail on the testing process involving aborted fetal cell lines. Unfortunately, the ownership structure and recent history make it impossible to find reliable and authoritative information on current users.

Firmenich and their customers know that disclosure will be bad for business and everyone in that circle is quite protective of market share.  No one in that value chain is going to release information on manufacturers or product lines and, because Firmenich is privately-held, this information cannot be gleaned from an annual report. I’ve read several of the annual reports, hoping to come across something useful, only realizing at the end that the time was wasted. What passes for their annual report is of very high production quality but the content is nothing more than high-brow marketing and fashionable corporate virtue-signaling.

Here’s the bottom line. There is no reasonable way to develop reliable and authoritative information on current users of this technology. I know that for a fact. I’ve looked and looked and looked. One would have to resort to industrial espionage.

If that is true for Children of God for Life, it is true for everyone else. Regrettably, there are outlets and websites that skip the research part and make sensational allegations, accompanied by long lists and images of familiar products. They do not cite their sources (if they have any) or provide any referential information at all. Some have gone so far as to say that the food and beverage products themselves contain traces of aborted fetal material and that PepsiCo tests bottled water in fetal cell lines. Both of these allegations are ridiculous and irresponsible. The former would ruin careers, set a match to shareholder equity and most likely result in criminal prosecution. The latter is one of those ‘I just don’t have the words…’ things. Testing water in fetal cell lines, or cell lines of any kind, is a waste of time and resources.  Imagine directing highly paid lab professionals to do nothing more than dilute very expensive lab supplies and then pour it all down the sink. That can’t be good for one’s career.

Children of God for Life will not play that game. We will not make empty and unsupported allegations. Some of the information being peddled elsewhere may be correct, but only by accident. Ask them to prove it.

There’s a more recent post on this topic. Please click here to read it.