Arcadia Biosciences Inc Company Profile

We, a corporation formed in 2002, are an agricultural biotechnology trait company engaged in the development of traits that improve food, feed and fiber crops and enhance the value of the resulting agricultural products. Our customers include seed companies who incorporate these traits into their elite varieties to increase the value of a crop for farmers, as well as food and feed companies who make products that increase the choices and nutritional value of foods for consumers.

We are focused on two distinct areas of the agricultural supply chain:


Improvement of crop yield by mitigating the impacts of abiotic stresses such as drought, heat, nutrient deficiency, water scarcity, and soil salinity. These stresses are prevalent in most agricultural environments with varying degrees of severity and often have material consequences on crop production, quality, and farmer incomes. Our traits have been introgressed into several crops, including rice, wheat, and soybeans, and we have demonstrated significant yield improvements in multiple years of field testing. In addition to improving the efficiency of agricultural productions, these traits also have the potential of reducing the impact of agriculture on the environment by lowering water requirements and reducing the occurrence of excess nitrogen runoff from intensive farming.


Enhancement of the nutritional quality of crops by changing the compositional quality of oilseeds and grains. We currently produce and market the SONOVA® brand of oil containing Gamma Linolenic Acid (GLA), an omega-6 fatty acid derived from safflower. We recently received GRAS notification (generally recognized as safe) from the FDA for use of SONOVA GLA safflower oil in medical foods and nutritional beverages, which we expect will expand the market for this product. In addition, we are in late stage development of Resistant Starch (RS) wheat, a product with twice as much fiber content as conventional wheat. This and other wheat quality products in our pipeline are being developed using our non-transgenic TILLING technology platform.

Our business model is to access trait technologies that have already achieved proof of concept whether in a public research program or with commercial partners. We further develop these technologies by optimizing their function and validating their performance through intensive field trial testing in multiple crops under varying growth conditions, thereby better establishing commercial viability for resulting products. We then license our technologies to major seed and consumer product companies who perform additional testing and product development and, where needed, generate the requisite data to support regulatory submissions and approvals. License agreements with our partners may include financial and non-financial milestones. When products containing our traits are commercialized we will receive a share of the revenue. In select instances, we also work with our commercial partners to make the regulatory filings required to support commercial launch of the traits in order to increase our share of the revenue.

We use both genetically modified, or GM, and non-GM technologies to develop our traits. This approach allows us to select the most appropriate technology for development of a particular trait, crop and market. However, a key component of the development cycle of GM traits is that U.S., or in some instances, global deregulation of the trait by one or more regulatory agencies may be required. As there continues to be a significant debate about the role of GM traits in agricultural crops, we have seen this issue begin to impact some regulatory agencies which exercise control over the pace of deregulation of products, thereby allowing commercialization. We have recently experienced delays in the review of many of our high value traits principally due to inaction from these government regulatory authorities. For example, in India, where regulators have not approved field trials for testing of GM traits for the last two years, we estimate the impact to trait development and crop commercialization timelines of our license partner in India, Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company Ltd. (“Mahyco”), could be at least two to three year delay.