MINIM
A smiling bakery owner hands a cupcake to a happy customer across a display counter filled with fresh breads and pastries

Know exactly how much gluten is in your product, at the touch of a button

Minim Science is building the world’s first portable Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) sensor to provide you and your customers quantitative certainty of the presence of gluten in your products.

Dr. Frank Wilczek

“Minim Science’s breakthrough technology applied to food safety has the potential to change the world.”

Dr. Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize in Physics
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A smiling bakery owner hands a cupcake to a happy customer across a display counter filled with fresh breads and pastries

Know exactly how much gluten is in your product, at the touch of a button

Minim Science is building the world’s first portable Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) sensor to provide you and your customers quantitative certainty of the presence of gluten in your products.

Dr. Frank Wilczek

“Minim Science’s breakthrough technology applied to food safety has the potential to change the world.”

Dr. Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize in Physics
Sign up for updates

01·The problem

Fresh loaves on a bakery bench

33,000,000Americans live each day with life-threatening food allergies.

But the food safety system is completely broken for both businesses and consumers.

For Businesses

  • Limited option for on-premise testing or validation
  • Costly to use third-party laboratories
  • Most businesses simply don’t test and live with liability risk

For the Allergy Community

  • No choice but to be their own food safety inspector
  • Survive through a patchwork of online research, questioning servers, reading labels

Minim Science exists to provide businesses with on-premise, near-instant detection of food allergens, starting with gluten. This enables businesses to open completely new growth channels.

02·The science

EPR Technology

Advanced defense sensing technology applied to food safety
Advanced sensing technology. The same physics the Department of Defense uses to detect covert nuclear activity — now applied to food safety.

The technology behind the truth.

The United States military uses Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) to detect a single atom of plutonium buried in a grain of soil, measured in parts per trillion.

One atom.
In a grain of soil.

Minim Science uses the same technique to detect a single atom of gluten, even at levels as low as one part per million. Instead of costing millions of dollars, that military-grade precision becomes available to every bakery, restaurant, food supplier, and manufacturer at a cost they can manage.

03·How it works

The physics of certainty.

Minim Science has developed a proprietary process that leverages EPR to identify gluten in baked goods with unprecedented quantitative certainty.

  1. 01

    Paired electrons

    In almost every molecule, electrons exist in pairs, spinning in opposite directions and canceling each other out magnetically. Those paired electrons are invisible to our sensor.

  2. 02

    Creating an unpaired electron

    Minim Science manufactures an unpaired electron using a monoclonal antibody specifically engineered to find the target amino acid pattern. For gluten, that pattern is found in wheat gliadin, rye secalin, and barley hordein. When the antibody binds to gluten, the complex becomes heavier and moves more slowly.

  3. 03

    Microwave sweep

    Inside Minim Science's sealed chamber, the device sweeps a microwave signal across a range of frequencies. At the exact resonant frequency of the aligned electrons, they absorb that energy, and the device measures that absorption across the full sweep to produce a spectrum.

  4. 04

    Quantitative result

    Our software reads the shape of the measured spectrum, calculates the fraction of antibodies in the slow-tumbling bound state, and maps that fraction to a precise gluten concentration.

04·The number

Gluten content now has a number.

Foods are labeled “gluten-free” but that really means “gluten minimal.” The FDA allows a product that does not exceed 20 parts per million to still be “gluten free.” For the first time ever, that number can be quantitatively determined on premise and provided to your customer.

Today's Tests

“Gluten-Free”

Which really means “gluten less than 20 parts per million.”

Minim Measurement

16.0ppm

Your gluten number. Precise. Verified. Trustworthy.

0 ppm
20 ppmFDA “gluten-free” threshold
20+ ppm

05·Why physics

We did not invent a better gluten test strip. We invented a different kind of truth.

Chemistry

The old approach.

Every allergen test that existed before Minim Science has been built on the same fundamental approach: trigger a chemical reaction and look for a color change. Antibodies attached to enzymes that generate a visible signal when they find their target.

Chemical reactions are imprecise. In a food sample containing hundreds of compounds, the reagents interact with everything simultaneously. The test is corrupted before the results reach the person doing the testing.

Physics

The Minim Science approach.

Physics is clear. Black and white and objective. The measurement depends on the fundamental magnetic properties of the gluten molecule. Not on a chemical reaction.

A direct physical measurement, immune to the rest of the sample, with a quantitative reading down to one part per million.

06·Our story

From a parent’s fear to a company’s mission.

Nine years ago, Minim Science Co-founder and CEO Jason Lee learned that his son had a severe peanut allergy. Not long after, his daughter was diagnosed with the same allergy.

As Jason navigated the daily reality of keeping his children safe, he began to see a fundamental problem: people with food allergies are forced to be their own advocates, investigators, and food-safety experts to determine what they can eat.

Together with Dr. Nate Newman, one of the world’s foremost experts in microwave, photonic, and high-speed applications, Jason founded Minim Science to change that. By bringing advanced science out of the laboratory and into the food safety system, Minim Science is building affordable, science-backed technology that enables the businesses producing and serving food to take responsibility for knowing what’s in it.

07·The people

The people building Minim Science.

Scientists, engineers, and operators united by a single conviction: everyone deserves to know what is in their food.

08·Careers

Build at the crossroads.

At Minim Science, we are building at the crossroads of biochemistry, physics, and applied science to unlock enormous value for underserved populations. We are looking for mission-driven builders who are highly entrepreneurial, inquisitive, and willing to create something out of nothing.

Send us your resume: careers@minimscience.com

Updates

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