Metsä Spring portfolio company Montinutra brings SpruceSugar™ to consumers through personal care products
Montinutra partners up with Ole Hyvä Luonnontuote in a new personal care product range that utilises Montinutra’s Boreal Bioproducts® SpruceSugar™ as an ingredient. SpruceSugar™ is an innovative compound made from forest industry side stream sawdust. It can increase the antioxidant capacity in products and provide a natural substitute for chemicals, with even the potential to inhibit inflammations.
Helsinki, Finland (April 26th, 2023) Metsä Spring’s portfolio company Montinutra has partnered with a Finnish producer of natural personal care products, Ole Hyvä, to bring its Boreal Bioproducts® SpruceSugar™ into the consumer market through Ole Hyvä’s new personal care product range. This is the first time that SpruceSugar™ has been used in an application for consumers, marking a significant milestone for the startup.
"We are very happy that Ole Hyvä Luonnontuote Oy is among the first to start utilising our natural raw materials marketed with the Boreal Bioproducts® trademark. By bringing these new biobased ingredients to the market, we also contribute to reducing the carbon emissions of fossil chemicals,” says Jaakko Pajunen, Managing Director of Montinutra Oy.
SpruceSugar™ is a 100% natural hemicellulose extract, obtained from sustainable spruce sawmilling side streams. SpruceSugar™ is an innovative and sustainable ingredient, substituting analogue chemicals and polysaccharides. It has the potential to increase the antioxidant capacity of the product it is used in, and in personal care products such as shampoo, it can help the user’s hair to cope with oxidative stress, for example, from hair dyeing. It also has the potential to inhibit inflammation. Among the Boreal Bioproducts® Montinutra produces, SpruceSugar™ was developed at a record speed – it went from testing phase into consumer product in just 14 months.
All products in the new series are vegan, biodegradable, and contain SpruceSugar™. Elli Unger, Managing Director of Ole Hyvä Luonnontuote Oy, comments on the cooperation:
"Our goal is to develop and offer consumers high-quality and environmentally friendly cleaning products based on nature's biocapacity. We are particularly happy that we can support a domestic innovation that promotes the responsible use of natural resources and respects the well-being of nature. We believe that the cooperation helps us to offer our customers even better and more environmentally friendly products in the future as well.”
With the successful launch of the first product range, Montinutra is ready to sell the product to other natural cosmetic players in Europe. With a rising demand from consumers for natural cosmetic products, the global natural cosmetics market size was estimated at USD 34.1 billion in 2018 and is projected to register a CAGR of 5.1% from 2019 to 2025.
Personal care products are just one potential use case for SpruceSugar™. Montinutra says that it could also be used in larger industrial applications, and it could potentially be an option for the current adhesives market. One example of replaceable products is bio-latex, with a wide variety of applications from paints to glues.
“Metsä Spring is on a mission to seek and support sustainable innovations and technologies that find new purposes and higher value for Nordic wood. SpruceSugar™ is a prime example of how underutilised side streams can be upcycled into a novel product that has a large variety of usage cases,” says Katariina Kemppainen, SVP, Group R&D at Metsä Spring.