Fermenta Biotech Limited and VIT Vellore have entered into an exclusive licence agreement to advance a new technology for Vitamin B12 enrichment, opening a potential new pathway for fortified food and nutrition products.
The collaboration brings together VIT Vellore’s research capabilities and Fermenta’s expertise in nutritional ingredients, with the technology expected to move into application development, nutritional validation and regulatory assessment.
Commenting on the milestone, Prashant Nagre, Managing Director, Fermenta Biotech Limited, said: "Fermenta’s collaboration with VIT Vellore brings together scientific depth and industrial capability with a shared purpose: to make nutrition more meaningful, relevant and accessible. This technology opens a differentiated route to Vitamin B12 enrichment and extends Fermenta’s food fortification capabilities beyond customised vitamin and mineral premixes.
"It also reflects a larger ambition of translating emerging nutrition research into scalable solutions that can become part of everyday foods and, over time, contribute to better nutritional outcomes. Our focus will now be on advancing this technology towards practical, market-ready applications with the potential to support improved nutritional outcomes.”.
At the signing and exchange of the exclusive licence agreement, G . Viswanathan, Chancellor, VIT, said: "This MoU with Fermenta Biotech Ltd is a significant one and it reflectsVIT’s long-standing commitment to transform academic learning into a solution provider for real world challenges especially in healthcare industry. I am confident that this MoU will contribute to India’s capabilities in nutritional science and also fight against micronutrient deficiency.”
The next phase will focus on developing applications, validating their nutritional performance, assessing final Vitamin B12 concentrations and completing regulatory evaluations before commercially viable solutions are developed for relevant food applications.
The technology could have applications across FMCG, food and nutrition, nutraceuticals and broader health-related products. Fermenta plans to leverage its manufacturing and formulation capabilities to scale the technology into accessible premixes and fortified food solutions.
The partnership highlights the growing role of industry-academia collaborations in converting emerging nutritional research into scalable products aimed at addressing micronutrient deficiencies.
