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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Biomanufacturing

Jellatech Announces Successful Production of Animal-Identical Cell-Based Collagen

From connective tissue, skin health, lunchroom JELLO, and your inner ear to injections to create fuller lips, collagen is one of a body’s vital chameleons. Until now, the best way to introduce this protein to your everyday health is by eating animal products or substitutes such as Keratin and other amino acid supplements.

Raleigh-based Jellatech has announced the development of a full-length, triple-helical, and functional collagen made from their own proprietary cell lines. Others have worked on a solution to create lab-based collagen, but Jellatech’s stands alone as bio-identical to the animal-based variety.

In a recent interview with The Spoon, Stephanie Michelsen, Jellatech CEO, explained that, like others wanting to make an impact in the alt-protein space, she looked for a white space that was undeveloped and in need of a solution.

“I came across collagen and its roots and gelatin because it’s a unique protein only found in animals. And we use it for such, I mean, a crazy number of different applications,” Michelsen said. “So, I saw it’s going to be a future problem, so let’s try to solve it using cellular agriculture.”

Jellatech’s process differs from the fermentation approach to building alternative proteins. “It’s not fermentation because fermentation is more like yeast or bacteria using big vats,” Michelsen explained. “We use mammalian cells and those cells, so in that way, it’s different.”

Given its role in health and pharma, it’s no surprise the global collagen market size was valued at USD 8.36 billion in 2020, according to Grandview Research. It’s a space that is precited to grow at a 9.0% rate from 2020 to 2028, and much of that growth comes from increasing demand from the cosmetics markets. With that in mind, Michelsen sees pharma as low-hanging fruit and why taking the business-to-business approach is the best way to start.

Rob Schutte, Head of Science for Jellatch, emphasizes that what gives his company an advantage over possible competitors is the two years’ worth of work they put in to build a perfect collagen replica. “We’re thrilled to see that our cell-derived collagen appears bio-identical to collagen derived from animals. Because of this, we have a wide range of exciting applications from biomedicine to cosmetics to food and beverage.”

Jellatech will face the same issues as other companies creating either plant-based or cell-based proteins—cost. The number of bioreactors and the infrastructure to support a complex process can be enormous to build at scale. Without being specific, Michelsen believes that smart growth and innovation can play a crucial role in managing capital expenses.

We hope to do some innovation on our own to try to drive those costs down,” she said. “It’s true; there’s there are a lot of steps to get there. We are soon moving into the pilot and commercial-scale sometime after that. But, you know, I think there are a lot of avenues to explore to be able to cut those costs down.”

Enzymit Raises $5M For Bio-Manufacturing Platform It Claims Can Replace Fermentation

Enzymit Inc., a syn-bio production platform company, today announced the close of a $5 million seed round. The company is creating a new computational design platform based on what it terms ‘enzymatic manufacturing’, which it claims is superior to traditional biomanufacturing techniques utilizing fermentation.

In biomanufacturing industries such as alternative protein, precision fermentation utilizes microbes to act as cell factories to create new and novel products. The microbes are computationally programmed to express these products, but according to Enzymit these expressions often also result in toxins or are not highly productive due to their complexity. Enzymit’s solution involves designing what it calls ‘new-to-nature enzymes’ and using them in what the company describes as a ‘cell-free’ system. According to Enzymit, this avoids the difficulties related to cell-based manufacturing through fermentation.

The company’s computational enzyme design platform utilizes AI to process what it claims are billions of different enzyme structures. An enzyme’s structure defines its function, and Enzymit claims that its AI-driven process will allow it to unlock new functions at a much lower cost than traditional protein sequence research techniques.

“While there is no dispute that humanity’s future relies on biomanufacturing, if we expect to maintain our standard of living in the face of increasing global pressures and growing population, nature hasn’t supplied us with all of the enzymes humanity needs,” said CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Gideon Lapidoth in the release. “This is the bottleneck Enzymit aims to solve.”

According to the company, one of the first applications of its enzymatic manufacturing platform is to develop a novel process for manufacturing allulose, a calorie-free sugar substitute.

Cultivated Meat Has a Production Capacity Problem. Yossi Quint Has a Plan to Fix It.

Yossi Quint wants the cultivated meat industry to succeed. However, to reach its potential, he thinks the nascent industry has one major hurdle to overcome: a severe lack of production capacity.

Quint arrived at this conclusion while working at McKinsey, where he often worked on projects for clients in the food and beverage industry. During one deep dive into the cultivated meat market, he became convinced that this new form of food production had the potential to be a multibillion-dollar industry, but would never fulfill its potential unless it can increase production by orders of magnitude over its current capacity.

To get there, Quint believed that equipment used to make cell-cultivated meat – giant metal vats called bioreactors – needed to be built specifically for the market. That’s because bioreactors used by today’s cultivated meat producers are usually modified versions of hardware made for the pharmaceutical industry, an industry with completely different unit cost economics than that of food.

Out of this challenge, the idea for his company was born. Ark Biotech is building next-generation, high-volume bioreactors for the cultivated meat industry. I sat down with Quint to discuss the challenges of developing hardware for the cultivated meat industry and where he sees the infrastructure market going in the future. The answers have been lightly edited for brevity.

Why did you decide to start the company?

I was working at McKinsey had the opportunity to work with many different companies. And I had a chance to dig pretty deep into the cultivated meat space and think in-depth about what was needed in this industry to succeed over time—doing everything from consumer insights work to thinking about how to reduce unit economics and scale up. But, as I dug into scale-up, I quickly realized that biomanufacturing will be the bottleneck for this industry to grow. And that there are very few, perhaps no players, out there that are offering sensible solutions for industrial-scale cultivated meat production.

Today we’re seeing lots of companies building their pilot production plants. Over the next few years, as the industry figures it out and moves towards industrial scale, how big do you see cultivated meat bioreactors getting?

In pharma, there’s this trend towards smaller, single-use bioreactors. Single-use bioreactors are bioreactors with a bag inside that you switch out. They are very high OPEX (operating expense), but it reduces the contamination risk. But for the blockbuster drugs, you still have 10,000 to 25,000-liter bioreactor tanks. There’s no reason cultivated meat can’t be produced at that size or even larger.

What are the challenges that need to be overcome to move to bigger bioreactors?

There aren’t necessarily intrinsic issues. There are challenges when you reach a bigger scale; A contamination event has a larger cost because you’d have to throw out the batch, so that’s one reason to think about minimizing the size or guidance or ceiling. But to us, it’s a very simple optimization equation of ‘every batch is worth X dollars, the chance of contamination is y, where along the curve do you want to play’?

There are some thermodynamics, more physics and chemistry elements, such as where can you get the uniformity of the cell culture in the bigger size bioreactor. And that’s uniformity of oxygen, of making sure that mixing works correctly. It’s also making sure that the temperature can be uniform throughout.

A lot of what we’re working on is, how do you design bioreactors in ways that are different than what you’d see off the shelf today or from a specialized company, that could operate at bigger sizes?

Why are bigger bioreactors so important?

We care about size because it’s just a major cost lever. As a CAPEX (capital expense) cost lever and an OPEX (operating expense) cost lever.

Explain what you mean by that.

As a CAPEX lever, you get economies of scale. A lot of the cost of bioreactors is the manufacturing, and just you don’t need twice as many people producing twice the size. Most bioreactors have their own seed train (ed note: seed trains are used to generate an adequate number of cells for the inoculation of the production bioreactor). If you double the size of the bigger bioreactor, you only need half as many seed trains to get the same volume.

On the OPEX side, every seed train has laborers that are working, often 24/7, running experiments, changing parameters. And so, if you are able to double the size or triple or ten times the size, you don’t need ten times the laborers, you might need the exact same number of laborers.

Will all bioreactors be the same?

The bioreactors we’re designing are widely applicable to a very large swath of the industry. There are corner cases, but we’re trying to have bioreactors that will fit 95% of companies.

But there are a few bioreactor designs that we’re working on because if you’re doing a scaffolding system, that likely looks very different and you’ll need a very different looking bioreactor if you’re doing suspension cells. And so we are designing different bioreactors to fit those different use cases. Things like media or animal type. are heavily impactful to the parameters of the bioreactor, but we don’t think that changes the core bioreactor design.

The models will depend on their production methods. And it could be that you actually have two models, you have one model, where their cells are still growing in suspension, then you might want to then get a formed product and move into a second bioreactor. So there’s a number of companies that will have two production bioreactors today.

In the future, what does the cultivated meat industry production look like? Is it highly centralized, or does each city have its own ‘meat brewing’ center?

If I were to say 10 years, it’s still gonna be highly centralized. We’re gonna have megaplants. There’s just so many efficiencies that you get at scale.

Will they be regional?

It could be regional. It just depends on how big we want to go. I don’t think there’s gonna be one plant that supplies the US. It could be two or three plants in California that are very big the same way AB InBev has just a handful of massive plants.

Can you explain why bigger production plants are better?

One of the reasons that I think bigger plants make sense, at least as an interim step, is that we really think about the COGS (cost of goods sold) in a very deep way, a lot of which is like how do you get really cheap access to whatever the basal medium is. And to get really cheap access, you probably want to be located near where corn is shipped in, or whatever your other big ingredients are. You want to be near rail lines. You just want to get those economies of scale on the upstream. You also want to be co-located near cheap energy and preferably renewable energy. And so when you think about some of the inputs that you want, and just OPEX, and also where there is available labor, it’s harder to see a world in which you have a small production plant that’s in a skyscraper in New York.

Thank you for your time.

You’re welcome.

Kaffe Bueno Wins $2.8 Million Grant To Build the World’s First Coffee Biorefinery

According to CarbonBrief, coffee has a larger carbon footprint per kilogram than fish, poultry, or pork. At the farming stage, it’s one of the top seven agricultural drivers of global deforestation, according to the World Resources Institute. Then there are emissions associated with processing and transportation. And once coffee grounds end up in landfills, they release methane (a greenhouse gas) as they degrade.

Danish biotech startup Kaffe Bueno wants to make the coffee supply chain more environmentally friendly by giving those used grounds a second life as food, nutraceutical, and personal care ingredients. The company announced this month that it has secured new support for that goal: The team received a $2.8 million grant from the European Innovation Council, which it will use to construct its first—and the world’s first—coffee biorefinery.

Kaffe Bueno partners with a transportation service that collects spent coffee grounds from commercial and industrial businesses. Via a fractionation process, those spent grounds get broken down into different compounds.

The company’s first two products have applications in both the food and personal care industries. There’s KAFFOIL, an oil that can be used as a flavoring agent and preservative; and KAFFIBRE, a gluten-free “coffee flour” that can be used in baked goods, confections, and snacks.

In addition to selling its products directly to manufacturers, Kaffe Bueno offers a private label service with customizable formulations. The company partnered up last year with Danish hotel chain Sinatur Hotel & Konference to collect spent grounds from different hotel locations, and then return them to the hotels in the form of upcycled personal care products.

The Spoon reported last year on Kaffee Bueno’s $1.3 million seed funding round, which the company used to begin scaling up production of its coffee-based products. Now, with the European Innovation Council grant funding and biorefinery construction plans, the company should be on track to unlock further production capacity and seek out new partnerships.

Brave Robot Launches “Climate Hero” Cake Mix Made With Animal-Free Whey Protein

The Spoon has been following Brave Robot’s animal-free ice cream journey since The Urgent Company launched the dessert brand last year. Since then, the company has introduced ice creams in a range of flavors, from hazelnut chocolate chunk to blueberry pie.

Last month, Brave Robot made its first foray out of the ice cream space to debut its Climate Hero Super Cake mix. The team is using the same cow-free whey protein ingredient that supplanted milk in its ice creams to replace the equivalent of three eggs in each box of the yellow cake mix. With this new offering, Brave Robot is demonstrating the ability of animal-free dairy proteins to mimic an expanding range of indulgent foods.

The Urgent Company was created by Perfect Day, an alternative protein manufacturer that produces real dairy proteins using precision fermentation. (You can check out The Spoon’s in-depth coverage of the company’s protein tech here.) The Urgent Company uses those precision fermented proteins to develop innovative food products, like the Brave Robot brand of desserts.

“The goal of Brave Robot is to raise awareness of the climate challenges we face today in a really fun way that makes it more tangible to make a difference,” Brave Robot’s President August Vega told The Spoon this week in a Zoom interview. The Urgent Company estimates that a pint of Brave Robot ice cream represents 34% less greenhouse gas emissions than a pint of traditional dairy ice cream.

In launching the Climate Hero Super Cake mix, the team wanted to bring that same sustainability innovation to a category that hasn’t changed much in recent years: “The cake aisle in the grocery store has been ripe for disruption,” Vega said. “There hasn’t been a lot of innovation, even in the premium space. And so it was just a natural next step.”

The company’s in-house research and design team spent about six months developing the recipe for the new cake mix. Perfect Day’s animal-free whey protein plays a key role in the formula: The protein ingredient contributes foaming, water binding, and elasticity properties. It helps the cake to rise to the right height as it bakes, and to achieve the right texture.

The Spoon was sold on the texture of Brave Robot ice cream, and according to Vega, the Climate Hero Super Cake recreates conventional cake texture just as accurately. “The whey protein provides the fluffiness, moistness, and tenderness that you would normally get from animal products,” she said. “You’re really not missing animal products at all, which is pretty interesting when you’re looking at baked goods.”

In the new cake mix, the team wanted to create a versatile product that consumers could play with. “The more you can interact with your consumers and have them be creative with your product, the better,” Vega said. “There’s a variety of things that can be done with our cake mix: like over the weekend, I made an apple cake using our mix as the base.”

Brave Robot is promoting the product on Instagram as “a cake mix that makes more than just cake.” The team is also sharing recipes that use the cake mix as a shortcut to baking ambitious desserts—like whoopie pies with vegan vanilla frosting, and peanut butter-swirled brownies.

Along with cutting out the need for animal products, the Climate Hero Super Cake cuts down on single-use plastic packaging: The mix comes in a compostable pouch made from sustainably-sourced wood cellulose and other bio-based resins.

The team is currently focused on direct-to-consumer sales through the Brave Robot website. In the future, Vega said, the team will seek out other distribution channels (including partnerships with retailers) to make the product more widely available.

As for the future of Brave Robot, Vega said we can expect to see further indulgent innovations coming out soon. She couldn’t provide details on exact product categories—just the tantalizing hint that they could be “anything that you can have fun with and have a little moment of indulgence with, all while learning how to be more conscious of natural resources and our planet.”

Researchers Use Bacteria To Transform Plastic Into Edible Protein

In 2018, the equivalent of about 3.5 million dumpster trucks’ worth of plastic waste was produced in the U.S. alone, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the problem, driving increased demand for single-use plastic packaging and personal protective equipment.

Advances in microbiology suggest that bacteria and fungi could someday help us to tackle the problem of plastic waste. A 2020 review of this science identified some microorganisms capable of degrading different plastics (like a bacteria strain—found in the stomach of a waxworm—that can break down polyethylene, the most commonly used plastic polymer).

Two U.S.-based researchers have taken the idea of biological plastic recycling a step further. Not only are they using microorganisms to break down plastics; they’ve created a bio-based process that turns plastic waste into edible protein powder.

Ting Lu and Stephen Techtmann—professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Michigan Technological University, respectively—collaborated on the process. The researchers are using both naturally occurring and engineered microorganisms to metabolize plastic waste and turn it into food.

This summer, Lu and Techtmann received Merck KGaA’s Future Insight Prize, which recognizes groundbreaking science and tech solutions to humanity’s greatest health, nutrition, and energy problems. The researchers were awarded €1 million for their work. According to a press release from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, they plan to use the funding to make their process entirely bio-based; to boost the nutritional profile of the resulting protein powder; and to adapt the technology to work on a wider range of plastic polymers and other non-edible waste.

“When I first started my own lab at Illinois, I wanted to work on something that’s both intellectually challenging and societally impactful. Food generation is such a topic,” said Lu in the university’s press release. “As bioengineers, we are called to use science and technology in service of humanity by improving human health and nutrition. It’s a real privilege to use my knowledge and to partner with other researchers to tackle harrowing issues.”

Lu and Techtmann’s process brings together the worlds of microorganism-based plastic recycling and food industry precision fermentation. The big question is how the resulting protein powder compares to the products on the shelf today, and whether consumers would opt for a food product derived from plastic.

What Does a Cultivated Meat Plant Look Like? Take a Video Tour of UPSIDE Foods’ New Production Facility to Find Out

According to the Good Food Institute, there are approximately 70+ companies working on cultivated meat services, inputs, and end products. At this time, Singapore has been the only country to offer regulatory approval for the commercial sale of cultivated meat, and Qatar is expected to be next to do so. Despite this, several companies in the cultured meat space have opened up state-of-the-art facilities to develop their alternative meat products in anticipation of receiving regulatory approval sooner than later.

One of these companies is UPSIDE Foods (formerly Memphis Meats). Last week, UPSIDE Foods hosted a ceremony to celebrate the unveiling of its 53,000 square foot Engineering, Production, and Innovation Center (EPIC for short). The center will be used for the production of cultivated meat and the development of new types of meat and product formats.

It’s easy enough to find Youtube videos about how plant-based meat or real hamburger is made, but because the cultivated meat industry is so nascent, behind-the-scenes looks at this industry have been harder to come by. Until now. UPSIDE Foods shared a video tour of the inside of its EPIC facility. Take a look:

UPSIDE Foods Grand Opening

The front of the facility hosts a kitchen for hosting tastings of cultivated meat. There are areas dedicated to the milling and mixing of cell feed, as well as areas for packaging and testing products. Products will be tested for safety and quality in EPIC’s quality assurance facilities. UPSIDE has also provided an office for federal inspectors to oversee every process, which is required in all meat and poultry processing facilities in the U.S

UPSIDE’s innovation center will employ about 50 people throughout different departments, including maintenance, production, quality & food safety, engineering, and plant management.

Less than half, or only about 40 percent, of Americans are willing to try cultivated meat. Hopefully, allowing consumers to get a glance into cultivated meat facilities might help them warm up to the idea of this alternative protein.

Want to see a cultivated meat facility in action for yourself? UPSIDE will begin offering in-person tours at its Emeryville, California facilities in January 2022.

The Week in Food Tech Funding: Culture Biosciences & Tufts Nab Funding as Interest in Scaling Cell Ag Grows

Over the past 12 months, money has poured into cultivated meat startups as venture investors, celebrities, and governments look to get in on what many believe is the next big thing in alternative protein.

However, as the excitement grows, some are taking a harder look at how to scale the production of lab-grown meat to make a dent in the larger animal-based meat market. According to one estimate, the industry will need up to $30 billion invested in cell-based/fermentation production capacity if the alternative protein market hits just 11% of total meat consumption by 2035 and significantly more if consumer adoption exceeds expectations.

Much of that $30 billion will be directed to capital investment in building out long-term production capacity. However, before we get there, the industry first needs to invest in organizations building the necessary technology and production platforms to enable scale-up. This week saw two significant investments intended for just that: Culture Biosciences ($80 million) and Tufts University & partners ($10 million).

Culture Biosciences helps companies developing future food products with its bioreactor-as-a-service platform. The company introduced its first product a couple of years ago, a cloud-connected benchtop bioreactor service for cell-culture and bioprocess development. With their new round of funding, Culture looks to move beyond the bench with cloud-connected 5L and 250L bioreactors-as-a-service that will help firms optimize for pilot scale bio-manufacturing.

The second investment isn’t a traditional venture investment, but the $10 million USDA funding award to Tufts University for a cultured protein center of excellence is a vital investment nonetheless. In partnership with others, Tufts will lead an Institute for Cellular Agriculture to develop foundational technologies and processes to enable the cultivated meat industry to progress towards scaled production. The foundational work done by this organization will include everything from research on next-generation cell-culture medium to the development of education and leadership programs for the cultivated meat industry.

As companies try to take cultivated meat from the lab to the manufacturing plant, some question if cellular agriculture will ever be able to scale upwards cost-effectively and safely enough to justify all the investment. While we won’t know the answer to this question for a few years, it’s an encouraging sign that investments are being made to address the next big challenge in cellular agriculture.

And now, the rest of this week’s funding news:

Food Supply Chain

TrusTrace – $6 Million: TrusTrace, a Sweden-based startup building food supply chain traceability software solutions, has raised a $6 million Series A funding round. TrusTrace uses blockchain, AI, and bots to track products as they navigate their way through the supply chain. The company claims to have 8 thousand suppliers and 250 thousand products on the platform. My guess is TrusTrace and other traceability platform players are getting lots of inbound inquiries as everyone from ingredient and component suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers are trying to figure out how to work through the great 2021 supply chain disequilibrium.

Plant-Based Food

Grounded Foods – $2.5 Million: Plant-based cheese maker Grounded Foods has announced a $2.5 million raise. The company, founded by the husband and wife team of Shaun Quade and Veronica Fil, makes cheese products with hemp seeds and cauliflower. Grounded is already in 160 different retail locations today and plans to use the funds to expand further in the US and to set up for expansion into Europe.

Ag Tech

Kuva Space – €4.2M ($4.9M): Kuva Space, a provider of realtime agricultural data using space-borne hyperspectral camera technology, has raised $4.9 million. The company plans on using the funding to launch a constellation of six-unit nano-satellites to gather imagery in the 400 to 1,100 nanometer band. The company provides data that helps farmers optimize fertilizer and irrigation needs, optimal harvesting times, and early-stage pest or plant disease detection. With its second generation satellites, the company plans to expand its carbon monitoring capabilities.

Food Waste

Orbisk – €2.4M: Orbisk, which provides professional kitchens with automated analysis of food usage and associated waste flow using machine vision and AI, has received a €2.4 million grant from the European Commission’s European Innovation Council (EIC). The data from Orbisk’s analysis allows customers to adapt processes and purchasing to better manage and reduce food waste. Orbisk won the EIC funding with a pitch for its ‘Binspector’ project, under which the company will invest in dynamic AI models to increase accuracy and rapid adaptation in international menus, as well as further development of its food management algorithms.

Fish Tech

OptoScale – $4.1m (£3m): Optoscale, which makes machine vision and sensor technologies real-time monitoring of fish farm stock, has raised £3 million led by SWEN Capital Partners. The Norway-based company says it can analyze up to 200,000 fish per day using its technology, which compares with 50 to 100 fish using traditional analysis methods. Optoscale, which currently operates in Norway, Canada, and Scotland, plans to use the money to expand operations to Australia, Chile, and Iceland.

Restaurant Tech

ResQ – $39 Million: Well that was fast. After raising $7.5 million in a June seed funding round, ResQ, which provides a software platform for managing restaurant repair and maintenance tasks, has raised a $39 million Series A. Through their platform, restaurants can request, manage, and pay for a service, as well as manage the documents for these things. ResQ also connects restaurants with a network of contractors able to perform those services. The company’s list of available services includes HVAC, refrigeration, electrical, janitorial, plumbing, pest control, grease trap cleaning, preventative maintenance, and most anything else needed to keep a restaurant kitchen up and running. Since its seed round, the company has said its customer base has grown from seven states to 36 in the US. They plan to use the funding to grow their team by 400%.

C3 – $10 Million: Virtual restaurant/host kitchen platform company C3 has raised another $10 million in strategic funding from Swiss private capital firm, Lurra Capital, just a few months after it had raised a $80 million Series B. C3 (short for Creating Culinary Communities), works with kitchen operators (host kitchens) to fulfill orders for virtual restaurant brands. As of mid-year, the company operated about 40 virtual restaurant brands. The company plans to open 1,000 virtual brand locations by year’s end and has plans to open 12,000 globally by 2023.

Food Robots

Future Acres – $1.7 Million: Farm robotics startup Future Acres has raised $1.7 million via equity crowdfunding on Seedinvest. The company makes a self-driving robot called Carry that utilizes GPS and computer vision to navigate around the field and haul up to 500 pounds of produce. The company, which has raised a little over $400 thousand in pre-seed funding, plans to use the funds for product development, payroll, marketing and operations.

Video: Melibio’s Darko Mandich on Making Honey Without the Bees

Honey is a$7 billion industry. While honeybees themselves are not in danger (at least today), the focus on honey production is problematic for the broader bee ecosystem since farmed honeybees compete with wild bees for food and ultimately hurt biodiversity.

All of this is why a Serbian bee industry executive named Darko Mandich became fascinated with the idea of making honey without bees. His company MeliBio uses precision fermentation, synthetic biology, and plant science that replaces bees as the honey-making medium. The result is a “honey” with the same taste, texture, and mouthfeel of natural honey without any harvesting from bees.

Since the company recently released its first plant-based honey, we thought it would be good to catch up with Darko to talk a little about his honey and how he got the inspiration to start the company.

Making Honey Without Bees With Melibio

Podcast: How Kingdom Supercultures is Using AI to Create a New Generation of Novel Ingredients

Last week, Kingdom Supercultures, a company that assembles new novel combinations of naturally-occurring microbes into a new class of ingredients called supercultures, announced a $25 million funding round. The new funding round comes after a $3.5 million round the company raised in 2020.

Unlike many computational biology startups that have emerged in recent years, Kingdom doesn’t use precision fermentation technology or genetic engineering to build its new ingredient building blocks. Instead, the company is applying artificial intelligence and statistical analysis to analyze a massive database of existing cultures to discover new and interesting potential microbial combinations that provide new functionality, flavors, and more.

“What we’re building is really trying to recapitulate what we already find in nature,” said Ravi Sheth, who sat down for the latest episode of The Spoon podcast with cofounder Kendall Dabaghi.

To do that, Kingdom has assembled what the company claims is the world’s largest biobank of cultures in the world. The goal, according to Sheth, is to create a much faster path to discovery than traditional microbiology.

“It’s not dissimilar from a farmer cultivating different crops and choosing the best ones and putting them in the right places in the field and growing them and delivering them,” said Sheth. “In a very similar manner, we’re looking to nature embracing and learning from everything that natural biology has to offer. And we’re applying cutting edge kind of approaches in science and technology and computation, to then select them intentionally, really accelerate this process that we’ve already been able to do as a society.”

In a way, the company’s fusion of advanced computational techniques with culture development is largely a product of the two founders’ backgrounds. Dabaghi co-founded a cybersecurity firm in the early 2010s which used advanced computational technology to scan websites for security vulnerabilities. Sheth was on a more traditional microbiology academic track, pursuing his Ph.D. with aspirations to become a professor. However, the two met at Columbia University and, after working on different research projects in the area of microbiome, started to discuss ways to work together.

“I knew that I very much wanted to try to build a skill set that was at the intersection of both computation and microbiology,” said Dabaghi. “Which I think is reflected also in Ravi’s background and the way that we think as a company, which is that we don’t want to repeat a lot of the manual microbiology approaches that have been that have been like the primary focus of industry for the last like 50 years, but instead to use all of these new advances in computation, artificial intelligence, different statistical approaches to basically then be able to scan through all these microbes in different potential combinations and a much more efficient manner.”

You can hear my full conversation with the cofounders of Kingdom Supercultures on the latest episode of The Spoon podcast. Just head over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or just click play below.

Clara Foods Becomes The EVERY Company, Launches Animal-Free Egg Protein

Clara Foods, one of the early pioneers building nature-equivalent proteins using precision fermentation technology, announced today it is rebranding to the EVERY Company and is launching its first animal-free egg product called ClearEgg, an egg protein product targeted at the protein beverage market.

The new product, ClearEgg, will be sold through EVERY’s strategic partner Ingredion, a Chicago-based ingredient solutions conglomerate. EVERY describes ClearEGG as a product that “enables brands to add a nearly tasteless protein boost to hot and cold beverages, acidic juices, energy drinks, carbonated and clear beverages, as well as snacks and nutrition bars. Proteins by EVERY will support label claims including kosher, halal and animal-free.”

The rebrand is a familiar path many startups take as they transition out of an early company name which serves them well during the product development phase. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of Hampton Creek’s rebrand to Just (later Eat Just).

“Our new branding, EVERY, conveys our vision to fundamentally transform the food system for the 21st century so that every human, everywhere can enjoy the food they know and love without harming our planet or animals in the process,” said Arturo Elizondo, EVERY Company CEO.

The launch of ClearEgg is a big milestone for one of precision fermentation’s early pioneers. The company, which launched as part of IndieBio’s first cohort, has been working on creating an egg replacement since 2014 after cofounders Elizondo and Dave Anchel struck up a conversation at a conference. It wasn’t long after that first conversation before the two were working on their idea for using microbial fermentation to create eggs without the chicken.

The ClearEgg protein is just the first attempt by EVERY to crack the animal-free egg market. When I talked to Elizondo earlier this year on the Spoon podcast, he told me the eventual goal is to release a nature-equivalent egg white, diversify into other types of egg types outside of the chicken, and even create a platform that enables entirely new products.

“We’re truly entering the age of molecular food,” said Elizondo. “Not just molecular gastronomy, but instead how do we leverage the molecular element of it in producing the next generation of ingredients to build food 2.0 with new textures, new properties, new flavors that are not even possible to achieve right now with our current animals as a technology?”

A Cuppa Joe Grown in a Lab? That’s Right, Cell-Cultured Coffee Is Now a Reality

Cellular agriculture has given us hope about the future of sustainable meat production, but what about coffee? After all, many of us (this author included) would happily give up that great steak or burger to make sure we get that first cup of coffee in the morning.

Well good news, caffeine addicts: A research lab in Finland announced they have made coffee using cellular agriculture techniques. According to an article today in Phys.org, the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland “is developing coffee production through plant cells in its laboratory in Finland. In the process, cell cultures floating in bioreactors filled with nutrient medium are used to produce various animal- and plant-based products.”

The process by VTT includes establishing the cell lines in the lab and then transferring the cell cultures to a bioreactor where they produce biomass. Once harvested, the biomass is roasted into something resembling the coffee we purchase from the store.

“In terms of smell and taste, our trained sensory panel and analytical examination found the profile of the brew to bear similarity to ordinary coffee,” said VTT Research Team Leader Dr. Heiko Rischer. “However, coffee making is an art and involves iterative optimization under the supervision of specialists with dedicated equipment. Our work marks the basis for such work.”

While we’ve seen a few startups such as Atomo working on building “molecular” coffee, those approaches use upcycled plant-based ingredients with similar compounds to coffee beans. VTT’s research project is the first example we’ve seen of cellular agriculture techniques used to replicate coffee bean cells in a bioreactor.

Whether it’s cell-ag coffee beans or derived using molecular magic, discovering new approaches to create coffee is urgent given the state of traditional crop farming. Mega-producers like Brazil face severe droughts due to climate change, which has resulted in big jumps in coffee bean prices.

But don’t expect coffee from a bioreactor to show up on store shelves anytime soon. First, researchers must figure out how to scale the process, and regulatory approval would be needed.

You can see the full article on Phys.org here.