Why Partnerships Are Essential in Bringing Innovation to Life: A Conversation with Lars Langhout
Partnerships are essential for startups like ours to grow and thrive. We asked our CEO and Co-founder Lars Langhout why they are vital for us to turn our bold ambitions to reality. Here’s what Lars shared with us:
Lars, what does a successful partnership look like for NoPalm Ingredients?
At NoPalm Ingredients, a successful partnership is grounded in building a win-win opportunity. It means working as a unified team where we are transparent with each other and show mutual respect. We value partners who are aligned with our mission towards a green parallel oil and fat industry and are willing to build with us, not just buy from us.
And how exactly do partnerships help accelerate this mission?
We know that we can’t transform a global supply chain alone. Strategic partnerships allow us to move faster by accessing complementary expertise, infrastructure and markets. Whether it’s scaling production, validating applications or to jointly developing real-world product solutions, partnerships help us de-risk innovation and amplify our impact far beyond what we could do in isolation.
“We know that we can’t transform a global supply chain alone. Strategic partnerships allow us to move faster by accessing complementary expertise, infrastructure and markets.”
What role does co-creation with partners play in your approach?
Co-creation is central in the work we do. We engage deeply with our partners, not just in commercial terms, but throughout product and process development. That means bringing in their feedback early, running joint trials and refining solutions together. It’s an iterative, collaborative process where both sides learn and improve.
Trust must play a big role in those collaborations. How do you build and maintain it?
We believe trust is built through consistent behavior: being transparent, communicating clearly and proactively, as well as making decisions that people can rely on. In all transparency, failures are inherent to scaling a technology and we need to bring our partners along for that journey, and that also means proactively communicating setbacks when things don’t go as planned, to ensure we solve issues together and maintain a strong, efficient partnership.
We invest time in understanding our partners’ needs, challenges and goals. We work hard to create solutions that work well for both parties, for now and in the future.
Can you share how you tailor your ingredient solutions to different partner needs?
Today we are scaling our REVÓLEO™ ingredients as true drop-in replacements to palm mid-fraction fats used in both food and beauty products. In the future we’ll be expanding our fermentation platform to tailor our fats technically, adjusting characteristics like melting behavior, crystallization or mouthfeel. This puts functionality in place that’s currently impossible to deliver from tropical oil crops.
What kinds of challenges do you think are better solved together than alone?
Innovation, scaling-up and market adaptation all benefit from collaboration. For example, overcoming regulatory hurdles, adapting to large-scale processing or educating end consumers are challenges where partnerships unlock real leverage. Working together makes it easier to pilot, iterate and scale with speed and confidence.
Where do you see the biggest partnership opportunities in the next couple of years?
We see high-potential opportunities in co-developing end products with CPG brands, scaling up manufacturing with contract fermentation partners, and building joint sustainability narratives with mission-aligned businesses. The market is ready for better, more sustainable ingredients and partnerships are the key to bringing them to life, faster and more effectively.