DAVIS, CALIFORNIA, U.S. — The past fiscal year was a “transformative” one for food ingredient company and agricultural innovator Arcadia Biosciences, Inc., the company’s president and chief executive officer told analysts during a March 27 conference call to discuss fiscal 2018 financial results.

“We delivered significant regulatory, commercial and scientific advancements in wheat, soy, tomato and safflower,” said Rajendra Ketkar, president and CEO. “We emerged as a commercially focused health and nutrition ingredients business serving the food and consumer packaged goods industries. We established the GoodWheat brand, achieved key milestones in resistant starch wheat and established reduced gluten wheat on the commercial track.”

Also during 2018 Arcadia announced a collaboration with Ardent Mills, which Ketkar described as “an exciting development toward the commercialization of our wheat technology.” As part of the collaborative effort, the companies will introduce a patented approach to extend shelf life and improve the taste of whole wheat flour, Ketkar said.

“Ardent Mills is North America’s premier milling company with more than 40 milling operations across the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico,” Ketkar said. “The project with Ardent Mills introduces this trait designed to extend whole wheat shelf life by slowing the enzymatic processes that produce bitterness in whole wheat flour.

“As Arcadia and Ardent Mills formed up partnership, we made this project our first focus because despite how much nutritionists and dietitians have come to understand about the health benefits of whole grains, Americans, on average, consume only one-third of the full daily recommended whole grain. Research by the Whole Grains Council shows that taste is the leading barrier to increase in consumption. Together, we aim to improve the taste of whole wheat by reducing the bitterness caused by oxidation in the flour, and we were successful. Arcadia received a U.S. patent for this extended shelf life wheat, and we are continuing to further strengthen our intellectual property covering this trait.”

Arcadia also completed development of recipes of foods containing GoodWheat.

In the year ended Dec. 31, 2018, Arcadia sustained a loss of $13.48 million, which compared with a loss of $15.707 million in fiscal 2017.

Total revenues totaled $1.464 million, down 64% from $4.026 million a year ago. Fiscal 2017 revenues included $2.042 million in contract research and government grants.

“As we’ve indicated throughout this year, our financial results in 2018 reflect the impact of our transformation from a predominantly research and licensing business model to one of a consumer products health and ingredients model,” said Matthew T. Plavan, chief financial officer. “Revenues from our legacy R&D business model wound down during the year, and our forward expectations for the onset and scale up of new revenues from our nutritional ingredient products over the next 9 to 18 months remains unchanged.”