Really exciting news to bring you today, we’ve got confirmation that we successfully removed the herbicide resistance gene from our Fragrant Moss product. This was the final technical milestone to make the moss and now we just have to manufacture enough to distribute to customers which shouldn’t have too many challenges.

In this update we are sharing some changes we’ve made to our fundraising to reflect the increased certainty of getting fragrant moss to market, results of some user testing we did with the moss, some technical details on this milestone, information on the manufacturing process and explorations of some of our planned planter designs.

User Testing in San Francisco

To celebrate we took some of our previous moss strain (which we have a lot of but which has a developmental defect) around San Francisco to get people’s reactions, here’s what they thought:

We were pleased to hear that people consistently described the moss as having a “natural” and “fresh” scent evoking “Zen-like” relaxing feelings. It has an earthy, oriental flavor and was scored on average 7/10 in terms of strength.

This is obviously just a first step, and we’ll need a broader range of flavors, but we are excited about the potential of this product to capture some of the $5.5BN home fragrance market (source: Kline & Co).

Changes to Title III fundraising

Now that we have a moss which meets all scientific requirements, this significantly reduces the risk of getting the product to market. We now need to just grow enough moss to sell and distribute which is a much more predictable timetable than genetic engineering. We have therefore reduced the minimum amount of funding we are looking for to $200k. This will be enough to manufacture the moss and run an initial marketing campaign to sell it. We’ve amended Form C to reflect this.

In addition to this change we’ve added two new perks, at $250 and above we’ll ship you some of the moss from an early production run. $3,000 investment gets you early access to our partner program and significant deductions to revenue sharing fees.

We’ve also included a revenue share for all investors who back us before we hit our minimum as a thank you for being an early mover. Going forward we think this might be an interesting way to fund new product lines, allowing investors to get an early cash return on the products success as well as share in our long term upside.

Results of final experiment

We’ve had some Fragrant Moss for demo purposes for a while, but that moss had a weird developmental issue that caused it to grow in lumps rather than tendrils. We fixed that with our latest strain, and just this week got confirmation that we’ve successfully removed the herbicide resistance gene. Here’s the gel image showing that some of our moss lines no longer have the herbicide resistance gene:

Unless you are a biologist you probably aren’t used to reading gels like this. The leftmost bars are a reference scale to show the length of the PCR output. The next two bars are positive controls, so we should expect the lines there to show the presence of the herbicide resistance gene. The remaining bars (top and bottom rows) are different lines of the moss, you will see some of them have a bar matching the positive control which means they still contain the herbicide resistance gene. The good news is that most of the lines don’t have it — and all we need is one line anyway!

So now we have a moss with our fragrant genes and a nice smell and no herbicide markers and no lumpy growth defect. Herbicide resistance is a problem much like antibiotic resistance and we don’t want to encourage that in the wild which is why we removed it.

What are the next steps?

Right now we have a tiny volume of this moss, as you can see in this image, so the next step is bulking up the material so we have enough to sell and distribute. Each green blob comes from a different line in the gel image.

The first step in manufacturing is to grow the moss up on these agar plates. Once we have sufficient volume we’ll then homogenize the moss, to break it into small pieces, and grow it in liquid culture supplemented with sugar, light and CO2. We are still testing whether to grow in cell culture bags or blood bags: blood bags are much cheaper but we need to see what impact the anti-coagulants have on the moss. Here are our current experiments testing rate of growth based on how much we homogenize the moss:

The final step is plating the results of the moss grown in liquid and letting that grow up to a level we can ship to customers (which will probably take 4–6 weeks). We’ll likely ship the moss on agar plates for people to attach to the planter at home, that way it won’t get squished in the mail. In this image you can see some of our early ‘scale up’ experiments with the wild type moss:

What will the final product look like?

We’ve been exploring designs for what the product might look like for a few months now in collaboration with some great designers. Ultimately we hope that all kinds of creative people and makers will want to partner with us to design their own planters with the moss, but we want to launch with something really iconic that grabs people’s attention. Our intention is not to get into the planter business, we plan to outsource the design and manufacturing of these items and not do it in house. Would love to know your thoughts/comments — which of these designs speaks to you and why?

We started the design process by modifying existing Chia pets. These look cool but we found that they didn’t do a good job of keeping the moss moist as it would tend to dry out. Some people think the Gnome resembles a certain famous biologist…

We also bought some planters on Etsy, like this one; this design is cool because it concentrates the smell in the bowl but also lets it seep out into the room:

We are also partnering with Gingko Bioworks to demo the moss at the World Perfumery Congress in June. Jenny Rodenhouse (jennyrodenhouse.com) has been exploring ideas based on 3D printing a sandstone-like material. It’s pretty amazing to think you could make these in any shape you imagine, first we tested how well the moss grows on some off cuts — it turns out the material is very good at sucking up water and is perfect for the moss:

Here’s her final design for the exhibition in a few weeks, the one on the left is a table mounted display and on the right designed for a wall mount:

Jenny Roadenhouse designs

Last but not least are these minimalist/Zen designs from Ita (https://www.instagram.com/itagrams/). They fit well with the Zen/relaxing feel that the moss creates, but even cooler is that these are all made from fully recycled materials. The rocks might look like rocks, but they are actually made from recycled leaf mulch (the blue one is actually a rock). These prototypes have a plaster binder but the final product will be ‘grown’ with mushrooms. We really like the idea of using biology in the manufacturing of the planter, that it is biodegradable and that it can be made locally (so no CO2 from transporting over the ocean).

Conclusion

Really excited with this result, we finally have an organism that meets our performance and the external regulatory requirements that can ship — this is a big milestone for us and hopefully reduces the risk of the investment for you.

Feel free to jump in the comments section below with any questions or thoughts you have, we’re particularly interested to hear which planters you like.

Antony & the TAXA team.