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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Precision Fermentation

Belgian Precision Fermentation Specialist Paleo Raises €12m Series A

Belgian precision fermentation company Paleo has secured €12m in a Series A funding round the company announced today. The round was led by DSM Venturing and Planet A Ventures, alongside Gimv, SFPIM Relaunch, Beyond Impact, and Siddhi Capital.

According to the release, the funding will be used to scale up production of myoglobin, a protein that gives plant-based meat and fish alternatives what the company describes as a “real taste” experience. Myoglobin will be used by food manufacturers to create meat and fish alternatives.

“Paleo developed a technology to produce ingredients that lift these obstacles,” said Hermes Sanctorum, co-founder and CEO of Paleo. “Adding our ingredients to plant-based meat alternatives is a game changer that brings the experience of ‘real’ meat. You can smell it, you can taste it, and you can see it because our ingredients provide that vibrant red color that transforms into caramelized brown when you grill it. And no animal is involved whatsoever defining our ingredients as vegan.”

The company says the funding will be used to file for regulatory approval in certain markets and scale up production towards commercial production. The company says plant-based food with Paleo ingredients on the market by 2025.

“The food industry has barely scratched the surface of what is possible with precision fermentation, and Paleo will be at the forefront of this revolution in food production,” said Andy de Jong, co-founder and COO.

Precision fermentation continues to be the most resilient of the alternative protein segments over what is a dark time for many future food startups. The industry, which just saw the creation of its own industry consortium, has gained momentum in recent years as it has proven itself both incredibly flexible in terms of the ingredients it can produce, as well as scalable enough to produce ingredients for mass-market consumer products.

New Culture Believes Its Animal-Free Casein Will Help Grow the Alt.Cheese Market

It might sound like a scene from “Forest Gump,” but consumers love cheese–sliced, diced, shredded, spread, liquid, and chunked. Globally, according to Expert Market Research, we’re looking at a space that reached a value of about $75.46 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.8% in the forecast period of 2023-2028, reaching a value of approximately $109.85 billion by 2026. Any way you look at it, that’s a lot of cheddar.

While David-like com-compared to the Goliath dairy-based cheese world, alternative cheese—that is, “cheese” made without products that come directly from animals—is gaining steam and popularity. Future Market Insights states that the global cheese alternative market reached a  market valuation of $4.3 billion in 2022, accelerating with a CAGR of 8.3% by 2022-2032 to reach a value of $9.6 billion by 2032.

What alt.cheesemakers know is that one of the keys to producing animal-free cheese is the production of animal-free casein. Casein, which predominantly comes from cow’s milk, is a protein that is a critical ingredient in cheese-making. California-based New Culture has a solution that can make casein at scale without animal milk using precision fermentation. The company says its mozzarella will debut at pizzerias around the United States in 2023.

In a recent interview, New Culture told The Spoon about the company and its future trajectory.

How is your company different from Change Foods, which also says it is making animal-free casein?

At New Culture, we’ve proven our ability as the industry leader to produce animal-free casein at scale efficiently. This is critical in enabling us to produce delicious animal-free mozzarella, drive down cost, unlock broad distribution, and succeed in our mission to lead the change to an animal-free dairy future. We’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback from a wide range of chefs, pizzaiolos, and pizza lovers who have been able to enjoy our melty, stretchy cheese cooked in ovens up to 800 degrees.

We’re focused on creating a future with delicious animal-free cheese that positively impacts the environment and the global food system, and we’re excited about the rapidly expanding ecosystem working toward that goal. 

Are you involved in the entire process, including making the cheese or animal-free protein?

New Culture makes animal-free cheese from end to end, producing our animal-free casein protein and then turning that casein into cheese. Beginning with our mozzarella,  we combine our animal-free casein with water, plant-based fat, and a touch of sugar, vitamins, and minerals. We use traditional cheese-making to create the final product. Unlike conventional cheese, ours is free from lactose, cholesterol, trace hormones, and antibiotics.

To make animal-free mozzarella that tastes like the real deal, we use only the best plant-based fats to produce the perfect mouthfeel and consistency and a dash of plant-based sugars to match the sugar content in cheese that comes from animal milk. We also mix good vitamins and minerals such as calcium, vitamin D, and vitamin B to ensure our cheese provides the dietary profile that cheese eaters expect and the nutritional benefits they deserve.

Do you plan to be B2B or direct to the consumer?

New Culture’s first product is a melty, stretchy, animal-free mozzarella, which we’re planning to launch in pizzerias as our first market. Over time we will develop a complete portfolio of other cheese products, expand into retail (e.g., grocery stores), and sell our animal-free casein to food manufacturers as a B2B ingredient supplier.

How long before you have products in the market, and what will they be?

We are very excited that our first animal-free mozzarella will be available for consumers to taste in 2023. Mozzarella is the most consumed cheese in the US (13 Ibs consumed annually per person – everyone loves pizza!), and we will be the first to market with a pizza cheese made of casein from precision fermentation.

How do you think your product will fare with vegans, given it is animal-free but not strictly vegan?

New Culture cheese is free from all animal inputs and is entirely vegan. We are proud to make a product that vegans and cheese lovers will enjoy. We can do this by producing our animal-free casein protein – the essential protein that makes cheese cheesy – through precision fermentation. Instead of using a cow to produce milk that contains casein proteins, we get mighty microorganisms to make those same casein proteins, but without involving any animals. This food technology has been around for decades and is actually a method already used in the cheese-making process. 

Zero Acre Farms Launches a Healthy Cultured Cooking Oil That Tastes Good and Saves the Planet

By his own admission, Zero Acre Farms founder Jeff Nobbs is a thinking man’s entrepreneur. And while he has taken a somewhat circumventous route to the world of healthy food and environmental well-being, diet and nutrition have always been at the forefront of his life.

“Looking backward, even in middle school, I was, you know, the weird kid who brought in chicken breast and radishes for lunch,” Nobbs told The Spoon in a recent interview. “And because I thought that was just the healthiest thing. And I didn’t drink sodas growing up because I thought they were bad. So why would I do something bad? Even then, it always kind of puzzled me that there was so much conflicting advice regarding diet and nutrition.”

Years later, with e-commerce and food industry successes under his belt, Nobbs’ Zero Acre Farm is bringing to market a cultured cooking oil (actually a multipurpose oil) that checks all the boxes. Not only is it healthier than alternatives such as corn oil, soybean oil, and canola oil, Nobb’s new entry into the market uses less water in its production and engages in no deforestation.

Some of the benefits of Zero Acre Farm’s oil include a higher smoke point than heart-healthy olive oil; heat-stable monounsaturated fats (35% more than olive oil; and low linoleic acid (aka 10x less “bad fats” than even avocado oil). By comparison, one cup of corn oil, one of the more common cooking oils, contains 28 grams of saturated fat and 199 grams of polyunsaturated fat.

Moving from e-commerce Extrabux to starting a healthy restaurant in 2015 in San Francisco allowed Nobbs to tap into his lifelong passion for food and forced him to “turn on the fire hose” and gather as much information as he could from varied sources.

“I did not want to make the same mistakes that others have made and learn from others,” Nobbs said. “So I gathered knowledge from my co-founders and a long list of people that each contributed a little bit. And I kind of take each conversation and create my own mosaic.”

One of the lessons Nobbs learned, which has been steadfast in his restaurant, Kitava, and now with Zero Acre, is that creating good-tasting food is as essential as providing health benefits and helping with climate change.

”We’re not going to bring products to market where people must make a sacrifice or where they feel like to do the right thing to the planet,” Nobbs explained. “I think it’s unrealistic to expect consumers to make a sacrifice on one of those critical areas such as taste, and we focused on that from the start of our product.”

Zero Acre Farms employs a fermentation process Nobbs says is between precision fermentation and biomass fermentation. Using his business acumen to its fullest, Zero Acre uses a third party to produce its product at scale, which the founder states will allow it to hit the ground running with a substantial supply of products.

“We’ve seen some companies start with the new product and have 150 units available for sale. We’re not taking that approach; we’re making thousands of units available for sale, and we’re at a commercial scale,” Nobbs says.

After its launch, Nobbs believes there are opportunities to produce food products—such as snack foods—that use cultured oil and a solid fat variety that could take the place of butter or margarine.

While Zero Acre Farms’ product is available today exclusively on its website, in the future Nobbs hopes to bring the product to retail.

Coming Out of Stealth, Paleo Unveils Six Animal-Free, GMO-Free Varieties of Heme

In 2024, imagine walking into Burger King and ordering a mammoth burger. No, not one that is bigger than your head; this Whopper will taste like the extinct proboscideans that roamed the earth millions of years ago. It’s all part of the magic from a Belgium-based food ingredient company called Paleo.

After two years, Paleo has come out of stealth mode to announce its technology to bring the authentic taste and aroma of meat and fish to plant-based meat and fish alternatives with a non-GMO, animal-free heme. As part of that announcement, the World International Property Organization has published Paleo’s patent application, finally allowing Paleo to share details of its precision fermentation technology. 

Hermes Sanctorum, CEO and co-founder of Paleo: “When we set out to create the ultimate animal-free meat or fish experience, we quickly zeroed in on heme. Without exaggeration, we can say that we cracked the code of heme, allowing us to produce GMO-free heme that’s bio-identical to the most popular meats and tuna – as well as mammoth.”

More about the mammoth burger shortly.

Heme, a precursor to hemoglobin, is an essential molecule found in every living plant and animal. In short, it makes meat taste like meat, giving it its mouthfeel and umami sensation. Paleo has created a bio-identical heme that, through precision fermentation, can be adapted to add a specific taste to beef, pork, chicken, and even fish. Heme is essential when it comes to resembling conventional meat products. Heme is responsible for the taste and color of meat. Before cooking, heme will give meat alternatives a red color that turns brown during cooking. Heme also offers superior nutritional value. The iron in heme is easier for the human body to absorb than iron in vegetables.

In an interview with The Spoon, CEO Sanctorum explains the process: “We make the yeast release the protein to the environment, which means you can separate your protein. It’s a pure protein that you have separated from the yeast cells, making it a non-GMO product. We can produce an animal protein identical to what you find in nature but on top GMO-free. So that’s, I think, our unique proposition.”

“It’s like basically like brewing beer,” Sanctorum goes on to explain. “Instead of making alcohol, it makes a protein that you want. Instead of brewing or making wine, it’s producing the animal heme.”

Although the company has been working on its technology since 2020, its patent announcement is a significant step forward that inches closer to realizing a finished product. Sanctorum expects to have market-ready products in 2023, even with the number of steps that need to be tackled. Given precision fermentation at scale is a cap-ex-heavy investment, one reason to share their patent with the world is to attract investors. To date, Paleo has raised $2.5 million in seed funding and $ 2.5M in seed funding and is working on a Series A round to bring its products to the market and broaden its portfolio. 

Another issue is the breadth of products. The ability to create a variety of hemes may sparkle in a press release, but, as Sanctorum acknowledges, focusing on one area to start is a more prudent approach for a young company. Part of that B2B process is working closely with prospective customers. “A lot will depend on demand from our clients,” he said. “We are talking to big and small food manufacturers like small ones, and it will be all about testing those heme proteins and to see how they behave in their commercial recipes.”

Opening its technology kimono also brings potential challenges for Paleo from other companies working on similar approaches. Impossible Foods filed a lawsuit against Motif Foodworks, claiming the company’s HEMAMI protein derived from precision fermentation infringed on Impossible’s patent for making plant-based burgers containing 0.1% to 5% heme protein. Sanctorum calls the legal battle a “side event” and refuses to let it impede his or Paleo’s vision moving forward.

Back to the mammoth burger. Creating hemes for popular foods of today’s world is obvious, but reaching back hundreds of centuries—the question is why?

“Well, it was basically it started as a challenge to us,” Sanctorum said. “I mean, we were thinking, okay, if we can make the obvious ones, can we do that for an ancient protein that doesn’t exist anymore?”

Perhaps the better answer is, why not?

Mars Teams Up With Perfect Day to Launch Animal-Free Chocolate Bar

Today Mars announced the launch of a new animal-free chocolate under the brand CO2COA. Developed in partnership with precision fermentation specialist Perfect Day, the chocolate is available today via the product’s new website.

While Mars already offers a range of vegan chocolate bars, this is the first bar from a major candy brand that replaces animal dairy with identical proteins produced through precision fermentation. A German startup by the name of QOA announced last year they are using precision fermentation to develop new chocolate, but their focus is on replacing cocoa rather than animal inputs. The Mars deal follows an announcement made by Perfect Day and Betterland Foods in March of an animal-free chocolate bar.

The new candy is available only via a new website and “while supplies last,” which tells me Mars is trialing the concept before committing to a longer-term product launch (and rollout at retail). It’s reminiscent of the toe-in-the-water that Starbucks took with its testing of Perfect Day’s animal-free dairy. My guess is the company will keep a close on customer response and, possibly, eye a wider rollout in time if the response is positive.

For Perfect Day, the Mars deal is yet another in a growing list of partnerships the company has inked with consumer-facing brands to utilize their animal-free dairy in products such as gelato, chocolate milk, and protein powders. The company also continues to periodically add new products under their own consumer brand subsidiary, Urgent Company, adding protein powders late last year and acquiring another ice cream brand, Coolhaus, to add to their ice cream lineup alongside Brave Robot.

SuperMeat Believes An Open Source Approach to Cultivated Meat Will Benefit All

Lab-grown or cultured meat is a sexy topic that fulfills the dream of healthy eating while saving the planet’s precious resources. Most of the headlines focus on the companies in the four corners of the world waiting for regulators to wave the checkered flag. The more interesting story—at least for those who enjoy looking under the hood—is in the processes, supply chain, and partnerships vital to this promising industry.

To understand the drill-down of what it takes to go from harvesting animal cells to creating consumer-facing products, it’s valuable to speak with visionaries such as Ido Savir, CEO of Israel’s SuperMeat. In addition to his knowledge of cultivated meat, Savir’s background in IT provides him with a panoramic view of the infrastructure needed to build a successful B2B company.

While it might not qualify as an awe-inspiring announcement, SuperMeat recently received a grant from the Israeli Innovation Authority to establish an open-source high-throughput screening system for optimizing cultivated meat feed ingredients. As an analogy, think of it as a system that ensures cows or chickens receive only the best quality feed to produce larger quantities of high-grade meat or chicken. But there is a significant difference.

Savir explains that animals are inefficient producers of their products. “It’s just done more efficiently (in cultivated meat),” the SuperMeat CEO told The Spoon in a recent interview. “In traditional meat production, 70% to 80% of the cost comes from the feed, and animals are just not very efficient conversion machines.” To put it into perspective, the cost of animal component-free (ACF) feed can make or break those vying to play in this space.

Rather than compete with consumer-facing brands such as Future Meat, Eat Just, and Mosa Meat (to name a few), SuperMeat is taking a B2B approach. Working with established meat and poultry providers to build production facilities where companies with existing supply chains can quickly enter the future of the alt-meat market. SuperMeat has announced deals with Germany’s PHW Group and Migros in Switzerland. The Israeli firm is in discussion with potential U.S. partners to reach the stateside market by the end of 2023.

The decision to build a platform for cultivated meat rather than build its own consumer brand directly results from Savir’s tech background, and it is also why the new feed screening system is in the open-source approach. “From my background, and I really believe in open source, and I really believe in sort of a platform approach that can help bring not just one company but the industry forward,” Savir stated.

Also, speaking to his tech background, it’s clear Savir has learned the relationship between capital expenditures and profit. It’s not about cost; it’s about having the right model.

“The way I look at this, and it doesn’t matter how much the infrastructure costs,” he said. “What matters is how efficient and the return you can get from that money. Right. And if you can get that return in a reasonable time, it makes sense, no matter what the cost is. We have our cost of goods models that demonstrate that that makes sense.”

A trip to SuperMeat’s facility in Israel will yield more than a view of lab equipment and many steel fermentation tanks. The facility includes a small restaurant-like space called “The Chicken,” where potential business partners, consumers, and others can taste the lab-grown animal protein. Savir says it’s more than just a pretty place to show off.

“We’re trying to do things a bit differently,” Savir said. “We thought it was important for us and our potential clients, which are food companies, to have that full transparency and traceability.”

See video of the makeshift eatery below:

World's First Cultivated Meat Blind Tasting Full Reel

Meati Adds Steak Filets to Its Roster of Mycelium Alt-Meats

Meati co-founder Tyler Huggins radiates the right blend of entrepreneurial enthusiasm and practical knowledge to catapult common mushroom threads into a popular staple for healthy consumers. Huggins walks the walk as a visionary in the future of food space with a diverse background that includes a stint as a field biologist for the U.S. Forest Service, a research engineer, a consultant in the wastewater industry, and a co-founder of a healthy snack company.

“I really dedicate my life to harnessing nature’s power and beauty and then guiding it to help produce sustainable food,” Huggins told The Spoon in a recent interview.

With initial success from the launch of Meati’s mycelium-based alt-chicken and alt-beef cutlets, the company has announced a new product, Meati Steak Filet, which will be available on May 23 directly to consumers through the company’s website. Four steak filets, which should be prepared much as one would cook a steak, will sell for $35.

Like other Meati offerings, the steak fillets are a whole food rich in nutrition. A single serving has only 0.5g of fat and zero cholesterol. It is 120 calories along with 14g of protein, 9g of dietary fiber, and a host of micronutrients such as Riboflavin, Niacin, Folate, Vitamin B12, Zinc, and Copper.

The fermentation process from mushroom roots to the finished product has evolved to become a smooth, sustainable effort, but years of hard work are behind Meati’s success.

“There was a lot of trial and error. We spent over two years and millions of dollars of government grant money to figure out the cultivation and the fermentation part of this process,” Huggins explained.  
And then it was, how do you take all these mushrooms and actually make meat out of it? That was a whole other couple of years because what we do is we make sure we ensure wholesome nutrition. The mushroom roots are actually alive during the entire process. We gently form and orientate the root structure in different ways to mimic different muscles and give you different textures.”

Huggins said that Meati is in the midst of a significant physical expansion, but in doing so, the company looked at other industries for ways to scale without reinventing the wheel. “We looked into other industries and found several analogs. Our existing processes are already scaling, and we said, okay, we’ll take one from here and another from food processing. And we’ve created this unique sort of hybrid of industrial processes where we don’t need some sort of technological breakthrough to be successful.”

The future for Meati includes testing retail distribution in the second half of 2022 and a continued effort to create a brand sanction between itself and the countless other alt-meat products. Beneath it all, Huggins’ passion for delivering a clean, healthy, nutritious product is his and Meati’s north star.

“I look at nature as sort of a toolbox, you know,” Huggins said. “Three billion years of evolution have designed all sorts of different tools. And I believe that most of our problems can be solved by looking into nature because nature’s problem is already solved.”

Melt&Marble Raises €5 Million For Fermentation-Derived Fat That Tastes and Melts Like the Real Thing

In the first wave of plant-based “meat,” the marketing challenge was about convincing customers that giving up meat needn’t create a hole in their regular diet. For the Impossibles, Beyonds, and others, developing a reasonable, tasty facsimile to the beef or chicken experience got them into millions of homes and in demand on grocer’s shelves. For plant-based meat products to become a savory choice rather than a substitute requires innovators to “kick it up a notch.”

 While the horse race to alt-burger dominance is on, off to the side, innovators have been working on plant-based beef fat that would offer the mouthfeel and umami taste to a host of faux meat products. Included in the alt-beef fat space is Swedish company Melt&Marble which secured a €5 million Series Seed financing round to scale-up production and expand its team.

 Melt&Marble uses precision fermentation to create its plant-based beef fat. Like others in the alternative protein, dairy, meat, and seafood world know, precision fermentation is a robust process but requires a lot of capital to build a proper scalable infrastructure. CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Anastasia Krivoruchko told The Spoon that her company is currently at a lab-scale but will start scaling up in the coming months. It will still be a couple of years until it is fully industrial scale.

Dr. Kriviruchko believes the opportunity for Mouth&Marble is now and in the future based on conversations with plant-based meat providers. “We have talked with many companies about the challenges they are facing with their existing fats,” she said. “When designing our yeast strains, we have been looking into the structure of beef fats and asking ourselves what elements are important for overcoming these challenges. Our prototype has a similar mouthfeel and melting profile to beef fat, which is extremely important for replicating the taste of beef.”

This begs the obvious question about the health-related issues, such as high cholesterol and heart disease, that come with consuming “real” beef fat. Dr. Kriviruchko says such concerns are not present with plant-based beef fat.

“Generally, our fats don’t contain cholesterol, trans-fats, and contaminants. With our technology, we could also potentially integrate healthy bioactive fatty acids into our fats, and this is something that we are keen to explore,” Melt&Marble’s CEO explained.

Melt&Marble’s technology platform was spun out from research work conducted over the past decade by co-founders Dr.  Krivoruchko,  Dr.  Florian  David, and  Professor  Jens  Nielsen at the Chalmers  University of  Technology in  Sweden.  Lever VC led the latest round; an early-stage venture capital firm focused on technologies and brands in the alternative protein space. Lever has previously invested in Good Plant, The Good Spoon, A Dozen Cousins, and others.

If it appears that plant-based beef fat (and other related healthy fats) is a niche market, the number of trailblazers in this emerging sector speaks otherwise. Among Melt&Marble’s competition are Meat-Tech, Mission Barnes, Nourish Ingredients, Hoxton Farms, and Cubiq Foods.

According to Grand View Research, Inc., the global plant-based meat market size will reach $24.8 billion by 2030. A likely scenario, familiar to most emerging tech markets, will be when a few of the best alt-beef fat companies survive by being purchased by either a mega food processor such as Tyson or Cargill or merge with a plant-based market leader like Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat.

Israel’s Remilk Heads to Denmark With Plans for Precision Fermented Milk Production Facility

The challenge for companies focused on developing fermented alternatives to milk-based products that come from cows is to replicate the scale of a dairy farm. A large farm can have up to 15,000 cows, while a small farm will have between 1,000 and 5,000 animals. Cows are milked two to three times per day, with each producing between six and seven gallons daily.

Do the math, and you understand the enormous task facing this new breed of innovators in the alt. dairy space. Among companies in this space, the race is on to build out giant fermentation facilities to meet the potential demand. Remilk, a Tel Aviv-based firm using yeast-based precision fermentation to create a non-animal milk product, announced it would go big in tackling future production needs by securing 750,000 square feet at Kalundborg Denmark’s Symbiosis Project. The company says construction will begin by the end of 2022.

“Remilk has already started high-volume production in several locations around the world. The Danish facility will be our first fully owned facility, and production at this facility, the largest of its kind in the world, will begin as soon as the build-out is complete,” Remilk CEO Aviv Wolff told The Spoon. “Remilk is committed to reinventing the dairy industry in a kind, sustainable way. Eliminating the need for animals is the only way to supply our world’s growing demand without destroying the process.”

While Wolff didn’t provide specifics, he said that Remilk is working with leading consumer brands to craft recipes made with Remilk and believes the end products resulting from those collaborations will be available to consumers soon.

Wolff points to Remilk’s ability to create sustainable animal-free products that do not compromise on taste. Rather than compare his company’s efforts to competitors such as betterland farms, Wolff thinks his competition is milk and milk products that have been around for more than 10,000 years.

“To a large extent, we benchmark ourselves against traditional dairy proteins because that’s what we are looking to replace,” Wolff said. “Remilk can seamlessly replace cow-milk-based ingredients in consumer products because Remilk has the same characteristics, nutrition, and flavor profile with the advantage of being non-animal, thus free of lactose, cholesterol, hormone, and antibiotic residues.”

Remilk is far from alone in the world of precision-fermented dairy. Others include Real Deal Milk, Change Foods, Imagindairy (also in Israel), Formo, and betterland foods. A list of plant-based milk startups would be run several pages.

Fermentation May Be Centuries Old, But It’s Attracting a Whole Bunch of New Money ($1.69 Billion to Be Exact)

You know what they say: everything old is new brewed again.

At least that’s true when it comes to fermentation, that ancient food and beverage production process that is currently an overnight sensation. It is going well beyond the time-honored probiotic-rich staples of sauerkraut, kefir, pickles, miso, yogurt, and kombucha. The process of fermentation is being utilized in the creation of alternative, sustainable proteins to take the place of meat, eggs, seafood, and dairy. And it’s projected to get even more significant in its scope and revenue.

Data in The Good Food Institute’s 2021 State of Fermentation Industry Report points to the growth of fermentation as a traditional means to create probiotic-rich foods and plant-based products. According to the report, a total of $1.69 billion was invested in 54 fermentation-based startups in 2021.

Other data from GFI’s report:

  • Fifteen known startups dedicated to fermentation for alternative proteins were founded in 2021, along with new suppliers focused on fermentation-enabled alternative protein ingredients.
  • Eighty-eight known companies are now dedicated to fermentation-enabled alternative proteins, increasing 20 percent from the number of known companies in 2020.
  • 2021 saw the first growth-stage fundraising in the fermentation industry, including three deals >$200 million.

It’s important to understand that fermentation is not a single process but is three separate processes. Traditional fermentation (used to make pickles, kombucha, and sauerkraut) uses live organisms (such as the fungus Rhizopus to make tempeh or a SCOBY to brew kombucha) to modulate ingredients to create a product rich in flavor and texture. One established company, Miyoko’s Creamery, uses fermentation to make its line of alternative protein dairy products.

 A second process, biomass fermentation, takes advantage of the properties of certain microorganisms that quickly create large quantities of protein. The resulting protein can be used as a standalone product or an ingredient, which is the focus of most companies in this area. An example of a company employing biomass fermentation is SACCHA, a  German company using spent brewer’s yeast to create an alternative vitamin-rich protein that can be used to develop animal-free metal. Colorado-based Meati Foods uses mycelium (a mushroom root) to create a fibrous material that resembles meat.

 Precision fermentation, the third method, is perhaps the segment in this area with tremendous potential and is a focus of major investments. In precision fermentation, microbes create “cell factories” to build specific functional ingredients. Precision fermentation can produce enzymes, flavoring agents, proteins, vitamins, natural pigments, and fats. EVERY Company is an example of this process in which precision fermentation creates a substitute for traditional egg whites.

The GFI chart below shows the different types of fermentation as they relate to alternative proteins and highlights different possible products enabled by each.

One of the most significant stumbling blocks for the more advanced fermentation methods is the buildout of large-scale facilities to tackle production. A growing number of companies are in the process of recently completing or midst such construction, which points to 2023 as a timeframe in which production could begin to fulfill a growing market.

GFI’s report points to these as examples of completed projects and ones in the process of buildout:

  •               The Protein Brewery, Netherlands, completed 2021
  •               The Better Meat Co., California, completed in 2021
  •               Nature’s Fynd, Chicago, targeted for 2022-2023
  •               Mycorena. Sweden, expected to be completed in 2022
  •               Solar Foods, Finland, to be completed in 2022        

 With all the noise about the more advanced forms of fermentation, the value and growth of products in the “traditional fermentation” space have been overlooked. The kombucha market has skyrocketed with a focus on health, especially during the COVID-19 scare. According to Absolute Reports, the global Kombucha market size is estimated to be worth $2.1 billion in 2022 and is forecast to be $6.1 billion by 2028, with a CAGR of 19.7%.

 And an old fermented standby, sauerkraut, also brings in big dollars. According to Verified Market Research, the sauerkraut market was valued at $8.7 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach $14.1 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 5.74% from 2020 to 2027.

As Future Food Companies Look to Grow, A New Crop of Startups Lend a Hand on Biomanufacturing Scale-up

While companies creating precision fermented and cell-cultured food products continue to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, the reality is their products are still years away from making a significant dent in the overall consumption of a growing global population.

The primary reason for this is that these products still aren’t being produced at nearly the scale they need to feed billions of people. Some estimates have put the biomanufacturing capacity needed by 2030 at 10 billion liters in order to meet the projected demand for fermentation-based animal proteins.

The good news is that a growing number of companies are building out technology and services platforms to help these companies move towards scaled production. One such company is Solar Biotech, which makes customized plant architectures to help future food and other companies scale up their biomanufacturing capacity. The company has been working with startups such as Motif Foodworks and TurtleTree Labs to help them develop their product and move towards higher capacity production.

With Motif, Solar helped them move into pilot production manufacturing for their new plant-based meat ingredient building block, HEMAMI. In partnerships like this, Solar will assist a company with technology transfer of their early products towards higher-scale manufacturing using what it calls its SynBio Hyperintegration Algorithms (SHAs). The end result of its proprietary algorithms is creating customized and modular production facilities built around what the company calls BioNodes.

The partnership worked so well for Motif in developing its HEMAMI product line that the company recently extended its collaboration with Solar.

“The continuation of our partnership will help secure the infrastructure needed to build out Motif’s pipeline of future products,” said Jonathan McIntyre, CEO of Motif FoodWorks, of his partnership with Solar. “Companies like Solar Biotech are an essential link in the move to create a more sustainable food-supply chain that has a positive impact on people, animals and the planet.”

Pow Bio is another company that brings scale-up expertise to new food startups. Pow helps startups building alternative proteins with the necessary fermentation capacity and infrastructure to help move their product concept off the bench and into production scale.

“We have a complete fermentation lab that scales and can take you from a flask you can hold in your hand to 1000L liters of fermentation capacity, which covers the entire ‘pilot’ stage of scale-up,” said cofounder Shannon Hall.

Pow helped alt-cheese startup New Culture take its early lab work and scale-up for pilot production. Before New Culture worked with Pow, their product cost roughly $100,000 to produce a kilogram of cheese. After working with Pow, the company’s product has dropped significantly and is approaching price parity with traditional cheese.

And then there’s Culture Biosciences, a startup that investor Dave Friedberg has described as an ‘AWS for bioreactors’. The company initially started with cloud-connected 250mL stirred tank bioreactors for fast-cycle bench development as a service, and in October of last year took on funding to expand and build out 5L and 250L bioreactors to help move from bench to pilot-scale production.

“Through Culture, we now have the option of a one-stop-shop for bench-scale testing and pilot-scale production,” said Ranjan Patnaik, CTO of alt-egg startup The EVERY Company. “We can develop a process with Culture and easily make a large batch of material. Other benefits include accelerating product pipeline development, data-driven, and lower-risk scaling, and saving them time and money required to build additional fermentation capacity.”

As innovators in the future food industry work on developing their products, these three companies look to play a pivotal role in helping them make the leap. But these three aren’t the only ones, and I expect to see more startups emerge to help fill the biomanufacturing commercialization gap for future food products as investors realize the future food industry doesn’t lack for good ideas, but what it does lack the scale-up and production capacity needed to feed billions of people by 2030.

Real Deal Milk Hopes To Use Precision Fermentation To Make Animal-Based Dairy Obsolete

When asked if it’s possible to fully replace animal-based dairy, Zoltan Toth-Czifra, the founder and CEO of Real Deal Milk, doesn’t hesitate. “I think the question is not if, but when?” he told me.

I had caught up with Toth-Czifra this week to learn more about his Barcelona-based company, which uses precision fermentation to create bioidentical milk proteins. The company, which Toth-Czifra founded in February 2021, is currently in its research and development phase and was recently accepted into the Pascual incubator program, an incubator program focused on innovation in the dairy industry is run by a large dairy producer.

“It signals that traditional dairy is also looking where we are looking,” says Toth-Czifra. “They see where things are headed and maybe see the future in cellular agriculture, and they want to be part of it. They want to invest in it.”

Real Deal Milk uses precision fermentation technology to “teach” yeast strains to produce bioidentical milk proteins. Dairy milk consists of proteins, sugars, fats, and water, and according to Toth-Czifra, the proteins are the most difficult to replicate. Therefore, the company is focused on replicating whey and casein proteins that can be used in various dairy alternative applications such as milk, cheese, butter, ice cream, and more.

Precision fermentation start-up Perfect Day unveiled the first animal-free whey protein powder last week. Change Foods is another company that also uses precision fermentation to create dairy proteins to be used in cheese. According to Toth-Czifra, there does not seem to be another precision fermentation company focused on dairy proteins in Spain. There are a few others dispersed throughout Europe, like Formo in Germany.

Dairy farming releases large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, such as methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide. With the imminent threat of our planet warming due to the greenhouse gas effect, dairy products are often demonized for their high emissions. In regards to climate change, Toth-Czifra said, “I feel climate change is one of the most recognized brands, but with no product.” However, many products are a response to climate change, such as alternative dairy products.

Real Deal Milk’s first product will likely be cheese. The company’s long-term vision is to replace dairy across all categories, including cream, milk, milk powder, and ice cream.