2nd Nature Named to TIME’s List of the Best Inventions of 2026
Recognition highlights the AI platform behind 2nd Nature's work to discover, develop, and deploy naturally sourced
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CINCINNATI, Oct. 15, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — 2nd Nature, which discovers, develops, and deploys next-generation natural ingredients, has been named to TIME’s list of the Best Inventions of 2026. TIME recognized AgWastePortal™, the company’s AI platform, in the Agriculture category.
AgWastePortal™ in TIME Best Inventions of 2026
Today, TIME reveals its annual list of the Best Inventions, which features 300 extraordinary innovations changing our lives. To compile this year’s list, TIME solicited nominations from TIME editors and correspondents around the world, paying special attention to growing fields—such as health care and AI. TIME then evaluated each contender on a number of key factors, including originality, efficacy, ambition, and impact. Read TIME’s write-up on AgWastePortal here, and see the full list at https://ti.me/best-inventions.
The food and beverage, home and personal care, and wellness industries need ingredients that deliver specific functions, meet consumer expectations and work at commercial scale. Whether the goal is to reduce sugar or sodium, add fiber or replace a synthetic ingredient with a naturally sourced alternative, finding promising chemistry is only the beginning. Performance, production cost and reliable supply determine whether it can become a practical option. Traditionally, taking ingredient discovery to commercial reality is a difficult challenge, time consuming, and costly.
2nd Nature has built an AI platform, AgWastePortal™, to bring together ingredient discovery, process development and scale-up with the goal of making the entire process network easier. Partners can start with a function they need or a feedstock they want to understand. AgWastePortal maps compounds in a feedstock and identifies those that could deliver the desired function. It focuses on feedstock derived from agricultural, fermentation and dairy side streams. From there, it develops production methods, evaluates commercial feasibility and advances promising ingredients toward scale-up, regulatory evaluation and supply planning.
“Sometimes the query starts with a function a manufacturer needs. Sometimes it starts with a feedstock no one has looked at closely,” said Dr. Effendi Leonard, co-founder and CEO of 2nd Nature. “Our AI tool helps connect the two and turn the result into a process that can go into a commercial production at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional ingredient discovery R&D.”
About 2nd Nature
2nd Nature discovers, develops, and deploys next-generation natural ingredients for the food and beverage, home and personal care, and wellness markets. The company’s AI platform, AgWastePortal™, combines discovery with process development to turn promising compounds into practical ingredients. Partners can begin with a function they need or a feedstock they want to explore, with development guided by performance, production cost and supply requirements. TIME recognized AgWastePortal™ in the Agriculture category of its Best Inventions of 2026 list. FoodNavigator named 2nd Nature one of its Top 30 World’s Food-Tech Innovators of 2025. Learn more at 2ndnature.bio.
Media contact
Christina Ra
christina@2ndnature.bio
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