Anjie Liu: The Founder Who Wanted Her Onions Back

The test meal was a small serving of caramelized onions. Anjie Liu had not eaten them on purpose in years, and she had spent a long time building the powder she had just stirred into them. “I waited for hours afterward, holding my breath, and then the next day too,” she writes in her founder’s note. “I was shockingly fine.” Most people with a sensitive gut know the other version of that evening, which is why the sentence lands. Liu is the co-founder and chief executive of Kiwi Biosciences, the small Boston-area company behind FODZYME, and her whole company is an attempt to make that plate of onions repeatable.

The diagnosis“No garlic, no onions, no fun”

Her story starts where a lot of gut stories start: with pain nobody could explain. “I would have stomach pains after eating and went to the doctor, who then referred me to a specialist, which is the typical IBS journey, because no one has an idea of what is wrong with you,” she told TechCrunch in 2021. The diagnosis, irritable bowel syndrome, came in 2015, after what she describes as years of unexplained abdominal pain and several hospital visits, and it arrived with a plan attached: the low-FODMAP diet, which removes the fermentable carbohydrates found in wheat, beans, dairy and, most painfully for anyone who cooks, garlic and onions. Her summary of it is six words long. “No garlic, no onions, no fun.”

The part of her account that readers with IBS tend to recognise is what came next. “It worked, technically,” she writes. “My symptoms went away but so did my enjoyment of food and all the social activities surrounding food.” Menus became a source of stress. Travel turned into logistics. She tried the things people try, the probiotic strains, the prebiotics, the off-the-shelf enzymes, and has been blunt about how that went, telling FODMAP Everyday that she had “spent hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on products that gave me hope but ultimately didn’t do anything for me.” That sentence is a useful one to remember, because it is the standard she later had to hold her own product to.

The resumePhysics, comparative literature, and one stubborn question

Liu is not a doctor or a dietitian, and she has never presented herself as one. She graduated from Harvard College in 2017 with a joint concentration in physics and comparative literature, a pairing she has described to Harvard’s Innovation Labs as the point: “a multi- or interdisciplinary aspiration was very much a part of me before Kiwi Bio.” The question she brought to the problem was a physicist’s kind of question. Lactose intolerance has had an answer for decades, an enzyme that does the digesting the body does not. Why was there nothing like it for the fructans in garlic, onion and wheat, which humans do not break down at all?

She pulled together microbiologists, enzymologists and gastroenterology researchers, and, after what she calls months of outreach and interviews, a co-founder, David Hachuel. “We started as our own guinea pigs,” she has said. The company went through Y Combinator’s summer 2021 batch, announced a $1.5 million seed round that October with a little over 600 customers, and picked up two scientific advisers whose names carry weight in this field: William Chey of the University of Michigan and Thomas Wallach of SUNY Downstate. Forbes put her on its 30 Under 30 list for food and drink in the 2024 class. The team is still about ten people.

The productWhat the powder does, and what it does not

FODZYME is a tasteless powder that gets mixed into or sprinkled onto food. It contains three enzymes: fructan hydrolase, for the fructans in garlic, onion and wheat; alpha-galactosidase, for the galacto-oligosaccharides in beans and lentils; and lactase, for dairy. The first of those is the new part, since lactase and alpha-galactosidase have been on pharmacy shelves for years. A kit runs $79.99 on the company’s site, and the product has been name-checked once in The New York Times, in a dietitian’s list of over-the-counter enzymes alongside Lactaid and Beano.

What makes Liu easy to write about is how plainly she describes the edges. The blend does not touch polyols, the sugar alcohols in mushrooms, avocado and stone fruit, and she says so with feeling: she is sensitive to them herself, “especially mushrooms, which I miss the most (they turn me into a human blimp!).” The company says it is working on that. It does not address excess fructose either, and because the fructan enzyme works by turning fructan into fructose, Liu has cautioned that people who are extremely sensitive to fructose may find it is not the right fit. One more piece of fine print worth knowing: the product carries Monash University’s low-FODMAP certification, which, in Monash’s own words, means it “has assessed this product as being low in FODMAPs only.” It certifies what is in the jar. It is not a verdict on how well it works.

The evidenceA ladder, climbed in public

Here is the thing we most admire about this company. Supplement brands, as a rule, do not publish. Kiwi Biosciences has now done it twice, in a peer-reviewed gastroenterology journal, and has registered a third study that could prove it wrong. The first rung was a bench study. Published online in October 2022 in Gastro Hep Advances, with Liu as third author, it ran the enzyme through a laboratory simulator of the human gut and found that 1.125 grams of the powder converted 90 percent of a 3-gram dose of purified inulin to fructose within 30 minutes. No humans were involved, the substrate was a purified fiber and not a plate of food, and the company paid for it, all of which the paper states.

The second rung is this year’s news. In February 2026 the same journal published the first human data on the product: a four-week, open-label study of people who had bought it online, analysed by investigators at SUNY Downstate. Of 118 participants with diagnosed or suspected IBS, 78 percent reported at least a 30 percent improvement in bloating and flatulence, and 65 percent in abdominal pain; nobody reported an adverse event. The authors are careful about what that can and cannot mean, and we will be too. There was no placebo group, in a condition where placebo responses run high. The participants were paying customers, which the paper itself says brings “likely a strong bias toward perceived efficacy.” Only about one in nine people who started the survey finished it. Kiwi funded the work, two of the authors are its employees and a third is a shareholder. Liu is not an author. The paper’s own conclusion is the right size: “a promising first report,” with “further research” needed.

That further research is the third rung, and it is already under way. Back in 2022, asked what she would say to people who wanted more rigorous trials, Liu answered that the company was “working on designing protocols for randomized controlled trials.” In May 2026 it registered one: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover study in an estimated 150 adults with self-reported bloating, due to finish collecting data in late October. For context, the independent evidence on enzymes of this general kind is mixed. A 2018 Monash trial found alpha-galactosidase eased symptoms in IBS patients who were sensitive to the carbohydrates it targets, while a smaller 2021 Swedish trial found it no better than placebo, and no placebo-controlled trial of a fructan-digesting enzyme in people with IBS has been published yet. A small company choosing to run the experiment that could embarrass it is rarer than it should be. We will report what it finds, whichever way it goes. (For how we read enzyme claims in general, see our digestive-enzyme fact-check.)

The disclosure mapWhere her interests sit

Liu is co-founder and chief executive of the company that sells the product described here, with the financial stake that implies. Both published FODZYME studies were funded by Kiwi Biosciences and carry company employees or advisers as authors; the papers disclose this themselves, and we have linked them so you can read the statements in full. She is a founder with a physics and literature degree and a diagnosis, not a clinician, and nothing in her story is a substitute for a conversation with your own doctor or dietitian about a low-FODMAP diet, which is meant to be done with guidance. What her story is, is a good one: a person who got the standard advice, found that it worked and still cost too much, and spent the next several years building the thing she wanted and then putting it in front of reviewers. Gut Health Times has no commercial relationship with Kiwi Biosciences and takes no affiliate commissions. This profile is educational, is not medical advice, and was prepared without input from the company.