Zoom Q&A interface at the bottom of your screen. After the presentation, we'll open to your questions. With that, Peter, I'll turn it over to you.
Thanks, Alex. I appreciate everybody's time today, I really do. I think I get the honor of starting out representing the company to say that it's a huge day for Cibus, because we're in the agricultural gene editing space, and literally just hours ago, in the EU Parliament, they adopted new legislation that essentially, I'll go into a little bit of detail, but essentially, they now look at gene editing in the EU as indistinguishable from what occurs in nature and plant breeding programs, and will be regulated as such, which really opens up a whole sector and the ripple effect is enormous for us, for our potential products, and the future for the company. A very exciting day for us. This is hot off the press, you guys get to hear it first.
The reason why I'm so excited about that is because at Cibus, we do see ourselves changing the speed and scale of plant breeding. Gene edited crops and crop traits, and our sustainable ingredients business are really the foundation of what's just occurred today in understanding that the ability to create a new characteristic in a crop or a new trait, as we call them, provides value not only to our investors, but also value to the farmers in improving and creating every acre to be more productive in agriculture. Obviously, there'll be some forward-looking statements and disclaimers today. I know you've all read these many times. The exciting news I also get to share is that when you look at our management team on the slide here, we've got many, many years of experience in ag with myself, Carlo, Greg, Noel.
We've also got a new addition to the team, in the last couple of weeks, Craig Wichner. Craig and I have been serving on the Cibus board together for some time now. He joined last year in November. It was just recently announced that he is joining the team as our Chief Executive Officer. I couldn't be more excited about that. I will return to my role as President and COO of the company. This really typifies where we are as an organization and an inflection point for the company moving into commercial and product sales. Craig has got a great background, including in regenerative agriculture, and organic agriculture, and spent his career, particularly the last 17 years, really understanding how to bring great technology into agriculture and sees the Cibus gene editing technology as one of those great tools for the future.
Very happy for Craig to join and what I see as a strengthening and a great addition to our management team. Let me jump into what distinguishes Cibus in 2026. On the back of the news today, I think this is really important. If there's a few things that you hear from me today that are really important is that this changing the speed and scale of breeding allows our partners to accelerate traits to market. What our business model is is a collection of annual royalties. Seeds around the world are a huge royalty business, as you add new characteristics to large crop acreages, sorry, changing the speed and scale of that is really important. What we've been able to develop at Cibus is a proprietary single cell delivery system that you can not just do some simple traits, but complex traits.
Things like disease resistance, which I'll talk about, is a complex trait. You make a number of edits, often in a number of genes, that allows you to take it into the plant breeding programs with a speed and scale never before had. What's also important is we're non-transgenic. We're a non-transgenic step in the process. Our methods are distinguished and therefore embrace the new global regulatory path, led by the EU today, but also opening up global markets. This is really a global market opportunity. Thirdly, the commercial paths for us are clear and faster to market as we leverage our technology and partners' elite genetics. What's important about that is to get material to the market, you have to be in the best genetics because it has a whole lot of other characteristics, including yield, and other disease resistances that you're additive to.
When you lock into the plant breeding process with elite genetics, you can get products to market very quickly. Just on this slide, it's really cool to show that on the right-hand side in this little picture here of unedited rice, on the left-hand side and then edited rice. This is after spraying with herbicide. You kill all the weeds, and if you don't edit it, or have it unedited, you kill the rice as well. On the right-hand side, if it's edited, you kill all the weeds and not the rice. This gives farmers a great advantage, and the ability to do this at scale and speed is really important. The big idea behind this is because what's happened in the past with GMO is it took 12 to 16 years on the GMO path to get products into the market.
Remember, we're non-GMO, we're a completely new technology that is faster to market. Even traditional breeding would take 12 - 15 years, this is the speed of this process is extraordinary. We're living at a time where constraints on crop and food production are clearly increasing with climate change. The challenge of using less chemistry to control weeds or using less chemistry to control diseases is really a major focus. I mentioned Craig with his work in regenerative agriculture. This is a way of working more closely with farmers to be more sustainable in their agricultural practices. You'll hear more about the fact that we very much focus on productivity traits. Just jumping to our mission. The trait development is really materially decreasing the development timelines.
If you think about those 10- 16 years for GMO, if you're wanting new products on the market or new traits to resolve a problem, you really need to do it a lot faster. Being able to rapidly address those changing needs is what Cibus is all about. The other thing we've done is the core technology that we call Rapid Trait Development System, RTDS, allows you to do it in elite genetics, and that can save many years of getting a product into the market. As you saw in the last slide, we can do it in this 3- 5 year timescale. Being time-bound and predictable in this process is absolutely critical for the future of putting traits into the market. That has been our mission here at Cibus.
Let me focus in on why we see ourselves as a leading gene editing and agricultural trait company. Right now, we're laser-focused on getting products into the marketplace. We're working with the major crops rice, canola, and soybean. We've got great seed company partners. Some of the ones listed here are associated with rice and soybean, as well as canola. Nutrien, Interoc, Fedearroz are well-known in the seed business. GDM is one of the largest soybean seed producers globally. Albaugh's a great chemical company, and FLAR also with CIAT in Latin America. When you hear about our work in Latin America, Fedearroz, Interoc, and CIAT are the key players there. The traits we're going after is what we call weed control, or managing weeds in crops is absolutely critical. It's a little bit like an operating system on a computer.
Understanding that is a herbicide tolerant trait. As I showed you that little image on the slide earlier where your edited rice, you can spray the herbicide, kill all the weeds and not the rice. As diseases, giving disease resistance, using less fungicide. Fertilizer is very current right now. Farmers have had a real struggle with getting fertilizer and paying as much as 3 - 5x the price recently. Using less fertilizer is really good for sustainability, but also the farmer profitability. Agronomy, we've got traits that preserve yield and help farmers with their elite genetics, make sure that they increase their profits by having improved yields or protect the yields that they have got. Finally, we are also working with a number of funding partners, including the U.K.
The department here has funded some innovation after they went through the EU had just done in the regulatory framework. We've also got a rice partner with RTDC, which is an Asian-based company, helping us fund work in rice. Then in our sustainable ingredients programs, which I'll talk a little bit about, we have a large CPG working with us. What is the gene-edited system we use? It's called the Rapid Trait Development System, as I mentioned. It's a combination of advanced gene editing technologies that is covered by over 500 patents, and in the last couple of years, really complemented by AI tools. Fundamentally, we go through this process of discovery of a trait identification, understanding which edits we need to make to provide a new characteristic in a plant.
We take elite germplasm or the best genetics from seed companies that we get from the customer, and we make the edits in single cells that we're able to, once they're edited, through cell culture, grow plants back into the lab, but then also into the greenhouse and the field, and then we test and license that. That's the system. It's a very complex system, which we've applied what we call our Trait Machine to, because we have a number of steps that are now automated as we've improved not only the AI front end, but also the cell culture work that we do, which is now unique to Cibus. We use this single-cell system, the world regulatory agencies have really embraced us.
This map, very detailed, I'm not going to go through each country, but the global movement to regulate genetic crops to the same as conventional varieties for planting, import, and export is something that we've been working through for literally 15 years. We've had great success, and the world has recognized that regulatory policies need to be in place for improving innovation in seed genetics. This is exciting that this map now is nearly all green. We'll have to change the map after today's decision to also include a darker green for the EU here, which is going to be exciting for us. Let me jump into some of the traits that we're actually commercializing in the near term. It's really important that people do understand gene editing industry is actually happening now, and now today more than ever.
We're currently laser-focused on two product areas, I'm going to go into the rice productivity traits first, and then I'm going to jump to sustainable ingredients because we have a biofragrance, some natural replacements for synthetic or high-cost fragrances using a yeast platform. Some people may ask, "Well, I thought you were a plant-based company." Well, we use yeast as a surrogate system to understand some of the genetics in plants that we're going to target for traits. What we discovered was along that path, the yeast that we work with produces oil at a very high efficiency. We discovered that there was a number of fragrances we could go after. I'll talk a little bit about the scale-up on the commercial opportunity there.
We also, in crops, also are looking at sustainable ingredients like lauric oils, with regards to producing and leveraging some of our work in our soybean platform. Let me jump to rice first. It is the second-largest global seed market. There's over 400 million acres globally. This gives you an idea of sort of the target geographies we're going after. Starting now in 2027 in Latin America, late next year, and then moving to the U.S. in 2029. These are large acreages. I know just under 200 million of these acres in four regions. The value here is extraordinary. Just in the two trait areas that we're targeting in rice for weed management. These are two herbicide-tolerant traits where farmers can plant them and spray the herbicide, less herbicide, and still control the weeds.
Provides us some trait royalty fees as much as $30-$50 per acre per year. Remember, this is a seasonal business, every year we'll be collecting royalties. Just on the 5 million-7 million acres that we're looking at right now, we see over $200 million on an annual royalty just in the areas that we're looking at in Latin America. When you expand that out to Asia and India, the numbers grow substantially on the number of acres, not so much the dollars per acre, but the acres. We're excited to work with a group called AgVayā for India, and we've got a lot of interest there. That's a huge 120 million-125 million acre market. In Asia too, even just outside of China, we see around 60 million acres and we're working with a partner there.
Just to summarize a little bit on where we are on that product. We've got 7 partners now across the Americas, as well as now working with India and Asia. We also can do the development in 12-15 months from getting their germplasm and getting it back into their hands as opposed to the 12-15 years of traditional breeding. We're on track as we go through the regulatory advancement in these geographies, progressing through the approval processes for 2027. This is the starting point of building out those royalties. The targeted path to commercialization looks a little bit like this, and I'm not going to go into much detail because I've just talked about it a lot.
Really where we are in 2026 is this trait and chemical registration work for 2027 launch, then U.S. here in 2029, and then a little bit further out with Asia, and then India to follow on behind that. To give you a little bit more detail, because we're right in the middle of this, is we've just handed back lines back to Interoc. They're doing registration and testing right now. The expansion starts in late 2027-2028 on those 5 million-7 million acres. The U.S. becomes available in 2029 and beyond with India. You can see there's a number of steps in this process that we've mapped out very carefully as we build that opportunity.
Now, let me flip a little bit to the sustainable ingredients, because I think this fragrance work is really interesting, and there's some of the near-term revenue in the second half of 2026. The consumer preferences are changing right now for sustainable ingredients and really the better-for-you products. Having a natural source of fragrance is something that these large consumer products goods companies are really looking to put into a lot of their billion-dollar products. What we've done last year was we did the initial scale-up work. We've done the partner validation now work with two of our fragrances, BioRose and BioPeach. We got some nominal payments in the Q4 2025, and we're building to commercial scale in the second half of 2026.
Beyond that, as I mentioned, the platform expansion is looking at how we do some of these other sustainable ingredients like lauric oils in crops as we expand into the future. The size of this, really, this slide is really just to talk about the size of this opportunity. What we see here in three to four fragrances is an annual revenue potential of about $20 million-$40 million annual royalty. It's part of the $65 billion market. We see there's a number of other fragrances that we could also expand into. Talking about expanding, just as I finish out in the last few minutes of this presentation, I wanted to talk about what the expansion opportunities are for Cibus.
In reality, what I've just described to you is a technology that has the speed and scalability now that can address some of the major constraints in major crops like rice and canola and soybean. What's the future look like? For us, when you have the ability to regulatory agencies around the world are opening up these markets. They're recognizing that gene editing is the same as traditional breeding. It also now, because of the knowledge base we have, we understand what edits we need to do, particularly in these productivity traits in these areas that I have on this slide. Weed management, again, that's controlling weeds through herbicide tolerance, reducing fungicides, disease resistance. Better plant characteristics, improving yield or protecting your yield. One big one that I love here is reducing fertilizer.
We've actually done some work, and have licensed the option to license technology out of John Innes Centre in the U.K. A lot of people don't understand that when farmers spray fertilizer, often as much as 60% of that fertilizer is not utilized by the crop. Unfortunately, it gets into runoff and gets into waterways. One, it's expensive. Two, it's not that great for the environment. Being able to reduce the need for the fertilizer, but also when the fertilizer is there, it's utilized more efficiently, is really important. Reducing insecticides, also a crop protection area that we see in the future for Cibus. Let me give you a little bit of idea of where we are in this process. We've done a lot of traits here with rice and canola, where we've had successful edits, greenhouse, and field work.
Again, the field work on the right-hand side of the slide, you can see unedited versus edited herbicide-tolerant trait in canola. We're progressing well in soy. We're building that model out right now, but we're really laser-focused on getting rice to market first and some of these traits in canola in behind that, heading to areas of the world like Europe, North America, and Australia. In summary, what I hope you've heard clearly from us, or from me today at least, is that the global regulatory is a huge driver in opening up markets right now. We're changing the speed and the scale of crop breeding. We're in a business of annual royalties, and those annual royalties are large and driven by agriculture and our sustainable ingredients. That we're starting the commercialization path right now with initial launch in 2026 of fragrances, and 2027 and beyond in rice.
The opportunity of expanded business can enable a future pipeline that we see potentially generating royalties in excess of $1 billion every year. With that, I will thank you very much for your attention. Hopefully, you've garnered how excited I am today about what's going on in our regulatory world, but also the future for Cibus. I'll hand it back to you. Thanks, Alex.
Absolutely. Thank you, Peter. I want to underline something you spoke about earlier, which is today's EU decision. For a block that was sort of the first to regulate what they called at the time GMO crops, to now wholeheartedly endorse your next generation approach, could you talk a little bit about how that came to be briefly, and then also sort of your realistic path and timeline to royalty-bearing traits in European fields?
Yeah, look, thanks, Alex. I think that it's important to understand the context of the EU because Europe in general has been the sort of the gold standard in regulatory, in crops, and crop genetics. In early 2000s, in and around the time that Cibus was actually started, GMOs were essentially banned. That's not just in Europe, that happened in other countries around the world. It's taken a number of couple of decades for technology to catch up, but also the framework in Europe to recognize that what we do is not GMO, that what we do is editing just like happens in nature, so nature-based products, what happens in traditional breeding programs. It went through a number of phases of the courts and lobby groups. Back in 2018, we thought we'd made a big progress.
Advocate General had written a large report, a science-based report, and then the European Court of Justice went a different direction. It's taken since 2018, the last, what now is close to eight years to get to where we are today. It has the ripple effect of other countries around the world who've been watching this closely and developing their policies with an understanding of how Europe is going to go forward.
Very helpful. Thank you. We have a question about revenue. I think you spoke a lot about expansion opportunities. Could you talk about what level of expansion and overall revenue would be needed to reach profitability for you guys?
Look, right now we've shared in our latest quarterly report that we're in a sort of around a $30 million burn right now. That's a net burn after some of our R&D revenue. We see ourselves in the next two years to actually, as the revenue starts to build forward, that that's where we'll end up in profitability. We've reduced our burn a lot by being more efficient, and really being laser-focused on the products we have in hand. By the time we get our fragrance work done and we build our rice markets in that 2028, 2029 timeframe, that's where we see the growth from there.
Makes sense. Peter, could you talk a little bit, as revenue grows, there's a question about the royalty liability and how that comes into play and how it'll be repaid.
Yeah, it's a little frustrating. The royalty liability is not exactly clear on some of our sheets, on our balance sheet, that it really is a future royalty. It's only triggered once we make over $50 million in royalty, and it's only on agricultural products like crops and traits, and it's not on our fragrance business. It is as a capped percentage, just like a license would be through a university. It's not a current liability, it's a future liability we paid out as we have future royalties come in, and it's a small percentage of those royalties.
Great context. Thank you. As we're coming up on time, maybe we could summarize, for investors who might be new to the company or even new to the ag tech industry more broadly, why should they be thinking about Cibus now as a great time to invest?
I think one of the things about a technology like gene editing, you spend a number of years perfecting it. It takes a while. Sometimes you're ahead of the curve. Right now, Cibus is, 2026 is all everything is working for us with regards to the regulatory framework now as a global opportunity. This industry is just starting. We're so prepared with our seed companies and our abilities to do it at speed and scale, that it's just opening up the door for us to build those annual royalties, but also build wonderful products that farmers are going to make every acre more productive. That profitability will be shared between the seed company, ourselves, and farmers. The numbers are huge. The trait business right now globally is around $12 billion. We can be a big part of that, because it can grow from there.
Because that's just with traditional breeding and GMO traits right now. Just remember, GMO traits were developed in the '90s, and they still collect around $4 billion a year just on one trait alone. They've been doing that every year. It's a very long-term royalty that you can build on now because of what gene editing brings at the scale and speed and the complexity of what you can do. It really can be an exciting future for us.
That's great. Well, thank you so much for sharing. Thank you for your time, and also thank everybody listening for spending time with us today as well.
No, thank you, Alex. Look, thank you everybody. Today is particularly we expected this was the day that the European Parliament was going to adopt this new legislation. It's been great to be able to share with the team here at Sidoti and everybody listening in. I thank you all. It's upward and onward for us here. It's a very exciting moment for Cibus. Thank you.