Key Takeaways
- Contact BioSolutions' Firehawk Bioherbicide Super Concentrate reaches 87% active ingredient—the highest concentration on the market—enabling 40–50x dilution, approaching chemical herbicide levels.
- The company recently cleared EPA approval for its Super Concentrate and holds full approval from both EPA and California's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) for its Concentrate, with CDPR review of the Super Concentrate underway.
- Combined with magnetic sprayer technology, the super concentrate has brought cost-per-acre down to approximately $60—far below any competing bioherbicide and approaching glufosinate's $30–40 range.
- The company is fully funded by three cornerstone investors—including a billion-dollar Taiwanese strategic partner—and is targeting a major spring 2027 U.S. specialty agriculture launch, with European regulatory submissions underway.
- Glatz's long-term ambition: a 400 million-dollar business capturing 1% of the $40B global herbicide market by 2035, with pre-harvest crop desiccation as the highest-impact target market.
From Glucosamine to Glyphosate Alternatives: The Origins of Contact BioSolutions
Frank Glatz has spent two decades commercializing environmental technologies on a global scale. By his own account, the pattern has always been the same: identify a system causing harm to the environment or human health, find where chemistry and delivery innovation intersect, and build a business around the solution.
His first two ventures were in compostable plastics—supplying organic waste bags for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, converting Nestlé to bio-based packaging, operating factories in Brazil and China. Contact BioSolutions, his third company, started somewhere unexpected: in a bottle of glucosamine.
“If you're a sports person and you have knee issues, you usually take glucosamine tablets. I can tell you they don't work. They end up in the stomach and don't go anywhere.”
— Frank Glatz, Founder & CEO, Contact BioSolutions
One of Contact BioSolutions' original founders had spent decades developing colloidal delivery technologies for the World Health Organization—systems that allow active ingredients to be absorbed through the tongue, skin, or cellular membranes rather than the digestive tract. Applied to glucosamine, this meant liquid formulations that actually reached the joints they were designed to treat. The team later applied the same technology to skin creams, dramatically improving dermal absorption.
The pivot to agriculture came when Glatz began examining the herbicide industry. The concern was not abstract. Chemical herbicides—particularly glyphosate and its close relatives—are applied at enormous scale globally, including in contexts that put residues directly into food. Glatz was especially troubled by pre-harvest desiccation: the widespread practice of spraying chemical herbicides on crops like potatoes, pulse crops, and malting barley as few as ten days before harvest to accelerate drying.
“Where does this chemical herbicide end up? Directly in our food. If you look at potatoes, you desiccate with chemical herbicide, the plants shrivel up. Where do the juices go? Into the spuds. What are we eating? The spuds.”
— Frank Glatz
The question that followed became the founding premise of Contact BioSolutions: could a nature-identical active ingredient, properly formulated and delivered, match the performance of synthetic chemistry—without the residue, the withholding periods, or the soil microbiome disruption?
The Technology: Why Concentration and Delivery Change the Economics
The herbicidal active ingredient at the core of Firehawk is nonanoic acid, a fatty acid occurring naturally in foods humans have consumed for millennia. As a contact herbicide, it works by breaking plant cells and causing desiccation—a physical mechanism rather than the enzyme-disrupting chemistry of systemic products like glyphosate.
Contact herbicides are not new. Vinegar-based formulations have existed for years. The problem has always been performance: without a mechanism to drive the active ingredient into plant tissue efficiently, high concentrations of undiluted product are needed, pushing application costs to $300–$400 per acre—thirty to forty times higher than glyphosate at roughly $10 per acre.
Contact BioSolutions' differentiation lies in two compounding factors. The first is concentration. The company has progressively increased its active ingredient content from an initial 8% formulation to the current super concentrate at 87% active—a level no competitor has reached. Higher concentration enables greater dilution, which directly reduces cost per acre.
The second is delivery. By applying the colloidal delivery technology originally developed for health supplements, the company makes the active ingredient bioavailable at the cellular level on contact with the plant. The result: Firehawk can be diluted 40 to 50 times before application—approaching the 50–100x dilution rates of glyphosate, versus the 5–15x typical of competing bioherbicides.
A third innovation, magnetic-assist spraying technology developed with partner MagrowTec, charges spray mixtures and directs them to the plant rather than allowing drift to soil. This reduces effective spray rates by 50–70%—from the 100 gallons per acre typical of contact herbicides down to as low as 20 gallons per acre in horticulture settings. The combined effect on cost is material: Contact BioSolutions now operates at approximately $60 per acre in its target applications, competitive with glufosinate and far below any other bioherbicide on the market. For a broader look at the crop protection and ag inputs landscape, iGrow News tracks developments across the sector.
Contact BioSolutions Secures EPA Approval for Super Concentrate—A Regulatory Milestone
The path to market for any new pesticide or bioherbicide is measured in years, not months. Contact BioSolutions' development timeline of seven to eight years is partly a story of regulatory navigation. The company has secured EPA approval for its Super Concentrate, while its Concentrate holds approval from both the EPA and California's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR), widely considered the most rigorous herbicide approval body in the world. CDPR review of the Super Concentrate is currently underway.
The company has also received approvals in Australia, where an organic certification was granted two months before this article's publication, and in Japan and New Zealand for non-agricultural applications, with agricultural submissions underway. European regulatory submissions are now in progress, with a projected three-year timeline reflecting EU efficacy requirements across multiple growing seasons and climate zones.
In Australia, Contact BioSolutions is planning a major spring market launch focused on home and garden, municipalities, universities, and specialty horticulture. The company's Australian operations have an existing footprint across approximately 50 vineyards, where the product has been applied over three to four seasons.
What Happens to the Soil: The Regenerative Agriculture Case
One of the more counterintuitive outcomes from Contact BioSolutions' multi-year Australian vineyard trials is what happened the year after initial application. In a large-scale 500–1,000-acre operation where glyphosate had previously been used, switching to Firehawk produced an unexpected result in the second season: more weeds, not fewer.
The explanation turned out to be a positive one. The discontinuation of glyphosate allowed the soil ecosystem to recover. Earthworm counts increased. Bioactivity returned. The weeds that re-emerged were a symptom of a healthier soil, not a product failure.
Glatz points to a practical benefit this creates for regenerative farmers practicing cover crop desiccation: the ability to spray and plant in the same operation. With glyphosate, a grower must wait two to three weeks after desiccating a cover crop before planting a cash crop. With Firehawk, the tractor can roll the cover crop, spray it, and plant directly into it—a practice the industry calls “green planting.”
The company's regenerative agriculture credentials have drawn notable advisory board members, including Gabe Brown, a pioneer of the regenerative farming movement. Contact BioSolutions was represented at a recent American Regeneration roundtable alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative has elevated scrutiny of food system chemical inputs. For more on the sustainability and regenerative agriculture movement, iGrow News covers the sector in depth.
Business Model and 2035 Vision: 1% of a $40 Billion Market
Contact BioSolutions has deliberately avoided venture capital, funding its development through three cornerstone investors: Glatz himself, a wealthy Australian business person, and a Taiwanese strategic partner whose main business generates approximately one billion dollars in annual revenue. That partner's long time horizon has, Glatz says, been essential to navigating a development cycle that most institutional investors would have found difficult to sustain.
The company's U.S. headquarters has recently relocated from Iowa to Pasadena, California—a deliberate move toward the state that produces the majority of U.S. specialty crops. The team has grown to more than ten people on the West Coast, with additional personnel on the East Coast. Manufacturing currently takes place in Thailand, with full EPA approval already secured for U.S. manufacturing, which Glatz expects to activate as sales volumes justify the transition.
Commercial focus is tightly scoped: home and garden users seeking to avoid chemical exposure; municipalities, universities, golf courses, and public parks facing regulatory pressure; and specialty agriculture—vineyards, orchards, nut farms, berry operations—where food quality and soil health are commercial differentiators. Current U.S. activity includes five large-scale, year-long case studies in vineyards, pistachio farms, almond farms, apple orchards, and wine grape production, designed to generate the return-on-investment data needed for the spring 2027 commercial launch.
“It's a $40 billion market. Getting to 1% of that just makes sense—and you have that wonderful combination of a real high-performing product that works for the application, but really benefiting consumers, users, and the environment in a very nice way.”
— Frank Glatz
The Bigger Question: Chemical Herbicides in the Food Supply
Contact BioSolutions exists within a wider debate that is gaining velocity, particularly in the United States. The MAHA movement, growing institutional concern about residues in processed foods, litigation linking glyphosate to adverse health outcomes, and pressure from food retailers and export markets are creating conditions that favor alternatives—if those alternatives can perform and price competitively.
Glatz's framing of the opportunity is deliberately concrete. He is not arguing against the herbicide industry in the abstract. He is pointing at a specific, verifiable practice—the application of glyphosate to pulse crops, potatoes, and malting barley in the final weeks before harvest—and asking whether there is a nature-identical substitute that performs the same function without the residue question.
His answer, built over seven years and three formulation generations, is that Contact BioSolutions now has one. The regulatory system, the investor base, the manufacturing capability, and the agronomic case studies are falling into place. What comes next is a market that is ready to listen.
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Contact Frank Glatz: f.glatz@contactbiosolutions.com
