GILROY, Calif., U.S. — Front Range Biosciences®, a leading agricultural biotech company that specializes in tissue culture propagation of high value crops, is pleased to announce it has finalized a contract with Frinj Coffee, a leader in specialty coffee breeding and production, to provide 5 million coffee plants from FRB’s Clean Stock® program over a course of 5 years.
Concurrently, FRB has signed a lease agreement with Eurofins BioDiagnostics, a leading testing laboratory for seed and plant health, animal agrigenomics and probiotic ID services, for a 4,346 sq. ft. facility in Gilroy, Calif.
Through its Clean Stock program, FRB will maintain Frinj Coffee’s library of unique coffee varieties and provide millions of disease-free wholesale coffee plants. The new facility, where FRB will propagate these coffee varieties, includes a 3,000 sq. ft. greenhouse, tissue culture labs, a clean room, storage, and office space. Dr. Cecilia Zapata, FRB’s Vice President of Nursery, will manage the facility.
“While we have developed the first industrial scale tissue culture production process for cannabis, we look forward to leveraging our experience and technologies to support production of other key crops,” said Dr. Jonathan Vaught, CEO and Co-Founder of FRB.
“We have a strong infrastructure in place in the Gilroy facility, which includes trained personnel, state-of-the-art equipment and a strong vendor network. We are excited about the direction FRB is taking, broadening our portfolio to include strategic crops like coffee, as it is an instrumental step in our expansion into the California market.”
Although the coffee industry has a $100 billion market size worldwide with $50 billion in the United States alone, it is highly underserved market with respect to agricultural technologies like tissue culture.
Generating large quantities of uniform, genetically identical, and vigorous coffee plants that enable large scale production of high quality coffee beans has always been a challenge for coffee farmers because coffee is an extremely challenging plant to propagate and grow.
In addition, climate change is leading to more unpredictable and growing conditions and increased pressure from pathogens, making technology improvements that mitigate the risk of crop loss increasingly valuable. FRB’s Clean Stock nursery program provides farmers a competitive advantage with a reliable and clean foundation to build their production upon.
“The demand for specialty produced coffee is growing rapidly. It is becoming increasingly important that the quality and quantity of the plant material keep up with this demand,” said Jay Ruskey, CEO and Founder of Frinj Coffee. “FRB’s Clean Stock program will enable us to provide Southern California farmers with healthy and high yielding clones of our selected coffee cultivars.”
About Front Range Biosciences
FRB is an agricultural biotech company that specializes in tissue culture propagation of high value crops at industrial scale to improve consistency and efficiency for crop production. FRB also has an advanced breeding program for identifying and improving commercially relevant traits. FRB is located in Lafayette, Colorado. For more information on Front Range Biosciences, please visit http://www.frontrangebio.com.
