Interview with Rosan van der Glas: How Can We Meet Product Expectations with REVÓLEO™?

Meet Rosan van der Glas, NoPalm Ingredients’ Product Developer. With a strong background in R&D and a passion for building more sustainable food systems, Rosan plays a key role in unlocking the full potential of REVÓLEO™, our fermentation‑based oil platform. She explores how its unique properties perform compared to land‑based and animal‑derived oils across food and beauty applications.  

How does your professional background contribute to the mission of NoPalm Ingredients?

I’ve always been driven by my ambition to make the world a better place. My background is quite broad within R&D, but product development has always been my focus. Before joining NoPalm Ingredients, I worked at Foodvalley, where I connected companies working on sustainable food innovations. That role got me even more excited about innovative technologies and my role in building more sustainable food systems. 

That’s what brought me to NoPalm Ingredients. Here, I get to dive deep into how our fermentation‑based oil can replace land‑based oils. I show that biotech ingredients offer a real solution for lowering food products’ footprint. Being able to contribute to that gives me energy and confirms I’m exactly where I want to be. 

What were your thoughts on NoPalm Ingredients’ oil when you first started working with it?

I was immediately impressed that we had a semi‑solid fat to work with. That’s actually quite unique. In the Netherlands, most land-based oils are liquid, and the only solid fats you typically see are animal‑derived, like butter or tallow. As a product developer, I know how important solid fats can be. They influence, for example, the mouthfeel and creaminess.

“The idea that we could create a sustainable alternative that is naturally solid at room temperature really excited me.”

When developing formulations for food and cosmetics, what factors are most important for meeting market expectations?

For me, the most important factor is being able to reliably predict how our ingredients will perform in a final product. This is essential when we work with potential partners, as we want to give them confidence, show what our oil can do, and support them in creating the products consumers expect. 

Because we’re developing an alternative to land‑based oils, the variety of applications is incredibly broad. Palm oil alone is used in around half of all supermarket products, so it’s simply not possible to test every single application one by one. But what we can do is build a strong understanding of how our fermentation-based oil behaves across groups of applications. 

“What’s exciting is that we consistently see a high similarity between our oil and traditional land-based oils. Sometimes the formulation needs a small tweak, and other times our oil performs even better when we compare it to the original land-based oil or animal-derived oil. The key is to position it correctly when we compare it to palm, shea, almond, or even petrolatum for cosmetics, for example.”

To do this, we use model applications. These help us evaluate structure, texture, firmness, creaminess, mouthfeel, and more. These models don’t guarantee performance in every possible product, but they give us a strong starting point and a clear direction when exploring new formulations. Every time we validate a new application, we add to our knowledge and confirm again that biotechnology-based ingredients can truly meet, and sometimes exceed, market expectations. 

Can you share a success story or surprising insight from working with REVÓLEO™ in applications?

In food, we’ve been testing REVÓLEO™ Soft in bakery applications and found unique features in bread quality together with an external partner where our oil behaves almost like a fat combined with an emulsifier. Discovering something unexpected like that certainly opens new, exciting possibilities. Like the finding that our oil worked remarkably well in margarine, which is known to be a more challenging end product. 

In cosmetics, something that was exciting for REVÓLEO™ Silk was seeing industry experts try it on their skin. Experts repeatedly reported it gives a unique skin feel by quickly melting on the skin, spreads easily, and doesn't leave a greasy residue but rathera velvet afterfeel. 

Every new application teaches us something and brings us one step closer to transforming how products are made. 

What upcoming projects or innovation areas are you excited about?

I’m really excited about the deep dive we’re doing into the crystallization behavior of our fats. When fat goes from liquid to solid, it forms a network of crystals. The type of crystals determines how it behaves in different applications. The more we learn about this, the better we understand which recipes our oils are naturally suited for. It’s a fascinating puzzle that opens up a lot of opportunities. 

Something else I am looking forward to is working directly with industry experts, restaurants, and chefs. I strongly believe in co‑innovation. Where we bring knowledge about our oil, chefs bring expertise in specific applications. Working side‑by‑side allows us to create products that perform in the way chefs and consumers would expect. 

Longer term, I’m excited about expanding our portfolio with new types of fermentation‑based oils. Exploring where the biggest opportunities lie will help us make the most meaningful impact. It would be interesting to further explore oleochemicals, derivatives of our oil. This could unlock an entirely new set of applications for the beauty industry, where safe and sustainable alternatives to land-based derivatives remain a big challenge.