The £50,000 Mistake That Led Me to a World-Exclusive Postbiotic Deal – Interview with Alastair Jessel
Alastair Jessel is the Founder & CEO of The Postbiotic Company, the team behind AYA BIOME™, and Director of Battersea Park Clinic. After nearly two years of setbacks, failed deals, and reformulations across three countries, he secured world exclusivity on a clinically studied fermented turmeric ingredient that reframed what he thought a postbiotic supplement could be.
In this interview, he talks through the science that convinced him, the partnerships that fell apart and the ones that held, and what it actually takes to bring a health product from research to shelf.
Alastair Jessel, Founder, CEO, and Director of The Postbiotic Company Ltd
What first convinced you that postbiotics were worth building a company around?
The gap between what the probiotics industry promises and what it can actually deliver. Live bacteria have to survive stomach acid, bile, and shelf storage to do anything at all, and a huge proportion simply don't make it. Postbiotics sidestep that problem entirely: you're working with the beneficial compounds bacteria produce during fermentation, which are stable, standardisable, and don't rely on colonising a gut that may already be inhospitable to them.
Once I understood that distinction, probiotics started to look like a promise and postbiotics like a mechanism. That's the difference between marketing and biochemistry, and it's the difference I wanted to build a company around. I'd spent enough time around the wellness industry through the clinic to know how much of it runs on the former.
Postbiotics gave me something I could actually stand behind clinically, not just commercially, and that mattered more to me than getting to market fast with something easier to explain.
What makes fermented turmeric fundamentally different from the turmeric or curcumin supplements consumers already know?
Most curcumin on the market is fighting its own worst property: it's barely absorbed by the body, which is why so many brands bolt on piperine or lipid carriers just to get a fraction of it into the bloodstream. AYA BIOME Fermented Turmeric takes a different route. We ferment Bhutanese Curcuma longa with a specific bacterial strain, Lactobacillus acidophilus IL-058, registered with Japan's RIKEN Institute, and that fermentation process transforms the compound itself rather than trying to smuggle the original past the gut wall.
It's patented under FR2201333, and it's been studied in three separate human RCTs, including trials looking at metabolic and gut health outcomes. So the comparison isn't "our turmeric versus their turmeric", it's a fermented postbiotic compound versus a raw plant extract with an absorption problem. Those are different categories of ingredient, even though they share a name on the label.
What did the 33 pages of clinical trial material show you that made you say yes to world exclusivity so quickly?
Honestly, it was the trials themselves more than any single number. I've seen plenty of "clinically studied" claims in this industry that turn out to rest on one small, unreplicated study. This was different, three separate human RCTs, run independently, converging on the same ingredient. That kind of consistency is rare, and when you've spent years reading supplement science with a sceptical eye, it stands out immediately.
It wasn't one impressive result I could cherry-pick; it was the accumulated weight of properly conducted research that made the case for itself. By the time I'd finished going through the material, the question wasn't really "Should I sign this," it was "Why would I risk someone else signing it first?"
I flew to Dubai with that conviction already formed, and the exclusivity contract felt less like a leap of faith and more like the obvious next step after the evidence had done its job.
Where do you think the supplement industry still gets gut health wrong when it comes to probiotics and postbiotics?
It sells survival as if it were efficacy. Most probiotic marketing relies on CFU counts on the label, as though a big number guarantees a big effect, when the real question is how many of those organisms are still alive and active by the time they reach the gut, and what they actually do once they're there. That's rarely disclosed, because it's rarely favourable.
Postbiotics get their own version of the same problem: brands borrow the credibility of "postbiotic" as a category without the ingredient-specific research to back it up. Fermentation alone doesn't make something clinically meaningful, the compound produced, the strain used, and the dose all matter enormously, and most labels give you none of that detail.
I hold my own products to the same standard I apply when I write about competitors on Substack: name the strain, cite the trial, show the mechanism. Most of the industry would rather you not ask.
How do you decide when emerging wellness science is strong enough to build a product around?
I look for replication before I look for excitement. A single promising study is interesting, not actionable, it's the difference between a hypothesis and evidence. What I want to see is the same effect turning up across independently run human trials, ideally with a clear, plausible mechanism behind it rather than a correlation dressed up as a cause.
I also weigh how the ingredient is manufactured and whether that process is protected and reproducible, patented, GMP-certified, traceable, because science that can't be consistently delivered at scale isn't a product, it's a paper. I check it against regulatory reality early: MHRA and equivalent bodies internationally will not be impressed by a compelling story if the substantiation doesn't hold up.
If the evidence clears all of those bars, replication, mechanism, manufacturability, regulatory defensibility, that's when "interesting science" becomes something I'm willing to put my name and capital behind.
When the Japanese team dismantled your original recipes, what did they understand about postbiotic formulation that you had initially missed?
I went into that relationship thinking I understood the postbiotic landscape reasonably well. I didn't. I'd visited an olive and pomegranate plantation as part of the due diligence, but nobody had connected that to a wider postbiotic portfolio, I had no idea they were also working with fermented natto and fermented matcha, ingredients I hadn't even considered as postbiotics at all.
Once I saw the breadth of what they'd already developed and researched, several of the ingredients I'd built my original formulations around looked thin by comparison, reasonable choices made with incomplete information, not bad ones.
What they understood that I hadn't yet grasped was that postbiotic formulation isn't just about picking one strong fermented ingredient; it's about how a small portfolio of them can work together, each backed by its own research. That reframed the whole project for me, and it's part of why the eventual range looks so different from where it started.
After investing roughly £50,000 into a deal that ultimately disappeared, what made you commit again rather than walk away from postbiotics?
I'd already committed close to £50,000 buying stock ahead of an earlier launch, based on a deal that fell through before it reached shelf. That's the kind of loss that tests whether you actually believe in what you're building or whether you were just chasing the last opportunity.
Then I saw the fermented turmeric data, and any temptation to walk away disappeared. The science was simply too strong to ignore, even with an expensive lesson still sitting in a warehouse.
I made the decision to keep going, and I'm still working through that original stock now, at heavily discounted prices, rather than pretending the setback didn't happen. I'd rather be transparent about that than airbrush it out of the story, it's part of why I trust the current formulation as much as I do. It survived being tested against a real financial loss, not just against my own optimism.
You say people reveal themselves when something goes wrong, so how has that principle changed the way you choose business partners?
I watched it happen in real time with the factory owner in Mexico who strung me along for months about producing the previous postbiotic at discounted prices in his facility, only for it to emerge that he'd quietly gone with a different buyer altogether. That told me everything I needed to know about how he operated under pressure, and none of it was said out loud, it was just shown in the delay and the eventual silence.
What changed things was watching the opposite happen almost simultaneously: the Japanese ingredient owner, who'd seen exactly what I'd been through with Mexico, told me he was genuinely frustrated on my behalf about how it had played out, and he made the case that because I already had the clinic, I was better placed than anyone to bring the turmeric to market properly.
He shifted his allegiance to me because of how the other situation had exposed character, not just capability. Now I watch far more closely for how people behave when a deal gets difficult, not just how they pitch it when it's easy.
After eighteen months of setbacks, three-country supply chains and several reformulations, what would you tell someone trying to bring a health product from idea to shelf?
Build in far more time and far more scepticism than feels reasonable at the start. Coordinating manufacturing, ingredients, and regulatory requirements across multiple countries, in our case spanning Bulgarian production, a Dubai research partnership, and UK compliance, means every delay compounds, and something will always take longer than promised.
I'd tell them to verify everything a supplier or partner tells them independently rather than taking assurances at face value, because the people who cost you the most time are rarely the ones who say no outright, they're the ones who keep saying yes without meaning it. I'd also say: let the science, not the sunk cost, decide when to reformulate.
I rebuilt recipes more than once when better evidence or better ingredients emerged, and each time it delayed launch further, but the alternative was shipping something I couldn't defend. It's slower than anyone wants, but a product you can stand behind is worth more than a product you rushed to the shelf.
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