“Nobody alone can make a difference,” Nestlé CEO Laurent Freixe told the audience at June’s Bühler Networking Day on meeting business goals sustainably. “We must continue ramping up our work at scale in collaboration with all our private and public sector partners.”
Brands across industries face multiple challenges – reaching stringent GHG emissions targets, enhancing product circularity, navigating tighter ingredient regulations, and responding to growing consumer demand for safe, natural ingredients.
Internal resources alone can’t solve these multifaceted issues. Brands must increasingly turn to their supply chains, building collaborations and seeking innovations that address sustainability challenges across industries and value chains.
Seprify is stepping up to this challenge. Our cellulose platform technology delivers high-performing, sustainable ingredients. At specific grades, these are tailored to the needs of food, cosmetics, and paints and coatings providers.
In food, Seprify offers a safe, natural white pigment with excellent technical performance. In cosmetics, our SPF-boosting ingredient meets the rising demand for natural-origin, microplastic-free formulations. In paints and coatings, we enable major emission cuts and circularity gains – helping brands meet climate goals at scale.
Seprify’s cellulose-based pigment delivers exceptional whiteness, enhances visual appeal, and ensures a smooth, consistent finish in baked goods, sauces, coffee creamers, and confections.
This comes just as titanium dioxide (TiO₂, or E171) – long the industry’s go-to whitening pigment – faces increasing scrutiny. Found in over 11,000 foods and beverages sold in the US, TiO₂ has been classified as 'possibly carcinogenic to humans' by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and the European Food Safety Authority raised concerns about potential genotoxicity in 2021.
France banned E171 in 2020; the EU, Switzerland, Turkey, and others followed. Though still legal in the US, Canada, and the UK, research in 2025 suggests TiO₂ nanoparticles may disrupt endocrine function, and blood sugar regulation. Brands are responding; Mars has removed TiO₂ from Skittles in the US.
Consumer demand for transparency on food additives is further upping the ante on food producers, alongside the Food and Drug Administration’s announcement in April that it is phasing out all petroleum-based synthetic food dyes in the US. This, to the background of increasing scrutiny on ultra-processed foods in general (in which E171 is prevalent) is pushing food producers to find alternatives, and fast.
For the food sector, where a single product can contain multiple ingredients, Seprify is the important white pigment puzzle piece, playing its part alongside other pigments and ingredients.
It is up to brands to scrutinise their supply chains and look to other external innovators for alternatives and optimisations.
Seprify’s cellulose ingredient provides exceptional light-scattering properties, boosting SPF performance while reducing the concentration of UV filters – ingredients that consumers are increasingly concerned about.
In formulations Seprify’s ingredient also lends a luxurious, soft-touch finish, offering mattifying and soft-focus effects ideal for high-end serums, foundations, moisturizers, and lipsticks.
But performance is only part of the story. Our ingredient is plant-based, vegan, microplastic-free, and biodegradable – perfectly aligned with what 85% of global consumers now demand from their cosmetics.
Seprify enables cosmetic brands to formulate responsibly, without compromising on performance or experience.
Seprify’s product offers the paints and coatings industry an impressive white pigment that is a performant alternative to titanium dioxide, enabling them to hit their stringent emissions and circularity goals.
As with the food industry, TiO₂ is a problematic ingredient for the paints and coatings industry. Whereas for the food sector, nuance over its safety and resulting regulation makes titanium dioxide use problematic, for the paints and coatings sector TiO₂’s central weakness lies in its inherently high CO₂ emissions, with very limited scope for getting to net zero, even with future mitigations.
This is a particular challenge for producers who both set and try to reach rigorous emissions targets as they respond to consumer demand for sustainable products, with 78% of people across three continents citing sustainability as an important factor in buying decisions. One such example is IKEA, which has committed to halving its greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030.
Titanium dioxide is no contest for Seprify’s product in sustainability terms. Our recent Life Cycle Assessment helped cut GHG emissions immediately by 20% by optimising post-treatment conditions, and the white pigment now has at least five times lower CO₂ emissions per product compared to TiO₂.
It doesn’t stop there, with projected GHG emissions for Seprify’s cellulose particle production potentially reduced by up to 80% by 2050.
But emissions savings are only part of the paints and coatings picture. Production of TiO₂ relies on ecologically damaging mining minerals, metals and processes. In sharp contrast, the use of cellulose in Seprify’s product preserves natural resources and cuts ecological disruption.
Moreover, Seprify’s pigment also compares favourably to titanium dioxide in other aspects of sustainability – specifically its biodegradability and ability to be recycled without causing impurities in the end-material. This is crucial for maintaining recycled product quality and paves the way for brands linked to the paints and coatings industry to reach their circularity targets and move to fully recyclable and biodegradable materials.
From food to cosmetics to coatings, Seprify’s cellulose platform is a sustainable, scalable, and high-performing solution.
Our goal is clear: help brands comply with regulation, remove problematic ingredients like TiO₂, meet consumer demand for clean-label bio-based products, and accelerate progress toward circularity and net-zero emissions.
With innovation as our constant, Seprify continues to expand into new domains – including replacing forever chemicals in electronics and beyond.
