White label products, and the remaining R&D dollars will be spent on campaign promotion and marketing.
Then there are legal issues. Sourcing the raw materials for the brand name can be expensive. The patent itself can be a sticky pill, as it's one of the longest standing legal precedents in the world. However, legal cases aren't without flaws. And this is one of those cases where we know it's possible to win, but it's hard to know how.
The last thing we can say right now is that the CEO of the FDA decided it was important to have this GMO label on the label. So we should not be surprised if there will be other E.coli bacteria strains available that are also genetically modified in a way that is very similar to this one. Even if it's not the most refined form, we would still have a lot of R&d dollars on the table to figure out how to improve this flawed product.