Provexis (PXS)

PROVEXIS (PXS)

(Enter Alison, dressed as a banana.)

Health food experts are fond of telling us you are what you eat – or drink. I have just been consuming the dietary supplement Fruitflow, which is made from… tomatoes.

MAIN:

Fruitflow is an ingredient developed by Provexis and used exclusively in Sirco, a fruit juice drink.

Although it’s extracted from tomatoes, for some strange scientific reason you can’t absorb it from direct tomato consumption.

Market research shows today’s consumers want to improve their health by means that are… healthy, rather than having to take drugs and Fruitflow is rated as GRAS (pronounce ‘grass’).

That’s the acronym for Generally Regarded As Safe.

It’s designed to thin the blood, improving circulation and reducing the risk of thrombosis – and with half the deaths in Europe resulting from circulatory disease, that’s a big deal.

As the only dietary supplement to have been vetted by the European Food Standards Authority, it currently has no competition.

At first glance, however, Provexis’s accounts don’t look particularly healthy. It made a pre-tax loss of £2.3 million in the financial year to the end of March and its share price lost half its value in May.

The losses are partly down to spending on research and development for a product to help sufferers with Crohn’s disease – approximately 1 in 600 people have it, there’s no cure, and in clinical trials to date the Provexis product has kept patients in remission with no negative effects.

Provexis has also just spent £8 million buying Science in Sport, a company specialising in sports nutrition for both amateur and professional athletes

– just in time for the Olympics.