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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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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.

Solar Biotech Raises $2M for Its Fermentation Tech

Raleigh, North Carolina-based Solar Biotech has raised a $2 million in a debt-financing round from a single, unnamed investor, according to WRAL Tech Wire, which first broke the news. The funds will go towards scaling up Solar Biotech’s renewable-energy-powered fermentation technology, which it licenses to other companies.

That technology consists of what Solar Biotech calls “SynBio Hyperintegration Algorithms.” These allow for customized plant architectures, dubbed “BioNodes,” for each synthetic biology product and can be used for, among other things, functional food ingredients.

The end goal is to provide a platform through which other companies can scale up and get their products to market faster without having to build their own technology platform. Solar Biotech claims its first working prototype, BioNode-1, will reduce products’ time to market “by 10-fold” for “a fraction of current costs.” Practically speaking, that means Solar Biotech wants to help companies get their fermentation products to market in months, rather than years, and eventually days.

It’s an ambitious goal, but one very fitting for the times. Fermentation is widely seen as “the next pillar of alternative proteins” alongside cultured and plant-based protein. 

Fermentation uses microbes to produce proteins and functional ingredients that can be used in meat and dairy alternatives. Unlike the nascent process behind cultured protein, fermentation is more or less a proven process that’s available to food companies now. The challenge for fermentation companies nowadays is more about scale than anything else. 

Fermentation has a lot of potential uses cases, from animal-free dairy a la Perfect Day to alternative bee honey to steak. Solar Biotech joins a number of other companies, including MycoTechnology, Nature’s Fynd, and HakkoBako, in focusing on the actual tech that will make fermentation more widely available at a lower cost. 

MIT Research Opens Up Potential of Lab-Grown Plants

By now Spoon readers are most likely familiar with the idea of lab-grown meat. After all, there are a number of companies around the world tackling the issue. But lab-grown plants? That’s something we haven’t heard as much about. However, it’s an idea that got a little boost this week, thanks to new research from MIT (hat tip: TechCrunch).

MIT News reports today that researchers at that university grew wood-like plant structures in a lab from cells extracted from Zinnia leaves. The process is akin to the way meat is grown in a lab: starter plant cells were placed in a growth medium, and then engineers added different hormones and compounds to “tune” the final structure created.

While still very early on, the results from MIT and continued research could have a potential impact on agriculture and the way food is produced. Just as lab-grown meat looks to create actual meat without the environmental strains of raising animals, lab-grown plants could be raised anywhere at anytime, and require less land and fewer inputs.

This new research is actually coming out at a fortuitous time in the agriculture industry. Indoor farms, or controlled ag facilities, are popping up across the country, changing the way our produce is grown. For instance, the first tomatoes grown in AppHarvest’s 60-acre indoor farm in Kentucky hit store shelves this week. The facility is projected to grow 45 million pounds of tomatoes every year.

What if, instead of just controlling the growing conditions of a plant, they could also control the “manufacturing” of the plant as well, reducing the growth time, or developing different nutritional strains on the cellular level. Those controlled ag companies could truly “control” the entire process of growing food from the ground up.

That is still a ways off, but as we’ve seen with cultured meat, innovation in lab-grown food happens quickly.

Making Honey Without The Bee: A Conversation With Darko Mandich

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that bee colonies are collapsing around the world due to a number of persistent threats such as global warming, pesticides and yes, murder hornets.

And while that may present a challenge to the $7 billion honey industry, the focus on honey production is itself problematic for the broader bee ecosystem, since farmed honeybees compete with wild bees for food and ultimately can hurt biodiversity.

All of which is why a Serbian bee industry executive by the name of Darko Mandich became fascinated with the idea of making honey without the bees. If this sounds crazy to you, don’t worry: Darko’s soon-to-be cofounder, Aaron Schaller, initially thought it was crazy too when they first discussed the idea.

But eventually, Schaller (a molecular scientist from the University of Cal Berkeley) saw the potential in bee-less honey and soon after, MeliBio was born. From there, the nascent startup pitched their concept to Big Idea Ventures and was accepted into the future food accelerator.

Now the company is busy developing its technology to create a honey that replicates the taste, texture and mouthful of real honey, all without bees. As Darko tells me on this podcast, MeliBio is using fermentation to essentially recreate the process through which bees convert nectar to honey. The startup hopes to have its first product on the market by late 2021.

You can listen to the full conversation with Darko Mandich by clicking play below or by subscribing to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and leave a review if you like the show). You can also download the episode directly to your computer by clicking here. And, as always, you can always find more food tech news and podcasts at The Spoon.

Motif Foodworks Moves Into New Home To Accelerate R&D Pipeline of Plant-Based Food Ingredients

Motif FoodWorks has a new home.

The company announced today that they have moved into a new 10,600 square foot facility in the Boston Seaport area, sharing a building with the company it spun out of last year, bioengineering platform company Ginkgo Bioworks. The new building includes labs, testing kitchens, and a new office space for its leadership team.

According to Motif CEO Jonathan McIntyre, the move is critically important to the company as it finally gives them their own in-house facilities for the first time, which will accelerate R&D and expand their in-house capabilities to better understand the properties of new plant-based food ingredients.

Up until now, Motif “didn’t have anything, we were a virtual company,” McIntyre told The Spoon. The new building’s “labs are designed for us to analyze food so we understand the kinds of ingredients and processes we need to make it taste better. It helps us discover new ingredients and characterize those new ingredients. And because we have kitchens here, put those into full food forms, and be able to design those foods with the new ingredients, test them, and bring them to consumer.”

Before the move, the company had to rent space at commercial research and university labs to get the work done. Now Motif has their own labs, fermentation tanks, and testing kitchens to help them build ingredient building blocks using the engineered microbes from Ginkgo.

Speaking of Ginkgo, I asked McIntyre why they couldn’t leverage the infrastructure of the company they were born out of and he made it clear that while they do take advantage of Ginkgo’s capabilities when necessary, the type of work the two companies do is fundamentally different.

“Their labs don’t really fit what we do,” said McIntyre. Ginkgo labs “are foundries of DNA synthesis and a bunch of other things. There is a transition between them generating a microbe that is been designed to produce a very specific product that gets transferred to us. In our labs, we have fermenters that grow microbes, allow microbes to produce the products, and then we are able to separate those from the bacteria and start working on those as food ingredients”

McIntyre also made it clear that while the new facilities will help them move towards scaling the production of their ingredients, the new building did not come with in-house pilot production plants. However, he doesn’t rule that out in the future.

“Eventually we’ll be doing more engineering process research, like how do we scale up the production of these things. That will require us to get pilot facilities. We’ll be renting them for a while, and then eventually, probably building our own.”

For now however, McIntyre and the company are just happy to have their own facility, even if it might be a while before everyone can be together.

With COVID, “we’re being extra extra careful about who can come in and how they get come in,” said McIntyre. “We limit the number of non-R&D people here, and even the R&D people only come in when they’re doing experiments in the lab.”

Jellatech to Make Animal-Free, Cell Culture-Based Gelatin

Most folks are probably familiar with gelatin from making Jell-O as a kid. (It’s fun!) But gelatin is an ingredient actually used to make a variety of food products such as certain candies, yogurts, cream cheese and even wine. The process of making gelatin is definitely not vegan, as it requires the boiling of skin, cartilage and bones of animals. (Not as much fun!)

Jellatech, a startup that just came out of stealth last week, is looking to change that by creating animal-free, cell culture-based gelatin and collagen. In other words, the company grows gelatin, slaughter-free, in a bioreactor (hat tip to CellAgri). Jellatech says that because the company designs, grows and purifies gelatin in the same place, it can better ensure quality, purity and sustainability.

In a world where companies are using labs to create cell-based beef, cell-based chicken and cell-based fish, creating cell-based gelatin seems like a no-brainer.

The knock on those cell-based meats, however, has been whether they will ever reach a big enough scale to bring the cost down enough to make it viable (though others disagree). Additionally, there are regulatory issues and potentially public perception problems around eating “lab-grown” facsimiles of the “real” thing.

In this regard then, Jellatech’s decision to go after an ingredient like gelatin seems like a smart play (Geltor is basically doing the same thing). While it will still have regulatory issues to overcome, it’s not a standalone item that people will eat. Instead, it would be an unsung ingredient that goes into other, presumably more delicious products like gummi bears.

Jellatech has already made a proof-of-concept jelly made from cell-based marine collagen that was processed into gelatin. The company expects it will be 18 months before its first commercial-grade product is available.

Moolec Science Plans to Make Animal Proteins With Soy, Pea & Safflower Using ‘Molecular Farming’

Moolec Science wants to bring sustainable animal protein production to the farm. Not through the cattle pasture or henhouse, but through crops.

Using a genetic engineering technique known as molecular farming, the company believes it can leverage the scale of production of crop farming to create animal proteins more cost effectively than other forms of cellular agriculture – like cultured meat – can do today.

The technique, which uses genetically-modified crops like tobacco or safflower to produce proteins, has been used since the 90s in the pharmaceutical industry. However, using molecular farming for production of animal cell protein through crops for use in food is relatively new and something Moolec’s predecessor company has spent years working on.

Moolec is a spinout of Argentina-based bioscience conglomerate Bioceres SA, which has already developed a technology for producing an enzyme used in the production of cheese called chymosin. While chymosin originally was produced through traditional animal agriculture (it’s found in the intestines of cattle and goats), in recent decades cheese producers have sought more sustainable approaches such as fermentation-based production of chymosin. The technology developed by Bioceres – and now Moolec – is a hybrid approach that enables them to produce the same animal-cell chymosin through plants like safflower.

The process to create chymosin originally developed by Bioceres was patented in 2015, and the company already sells the enzyme to cheese processors in markets across Europe. By spinning off Moolec, the creators of the technology hope to now extend its use to create recombinant animal proteins through new crops like soy and pea.

“Molecular farming is not yet a fully explored technology in the alternative protein space,” said Moolec CEO Gastón Paladini in a Zoom interview with The Spoon. “We do all the science up front from the lab to use genetic engineering to express animal cells.”

I asked Paladini why the company decided to create a new company separate from Bioceres, a well-resourced corporation publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. He told me the founders, including the CTO Martin Salinas who led the research into the chymosin through safflower, felt a new company would bring focus and help them build out their technology.

“We started thinking about how we could use all the experience and R&D from all these years to explore new products for this new alternative protein space,” said Paladini.

There’s no doubt that the team also sees opportunity in a white hot alt-protein space where venture capitalists are looking for any new spin on alternatives for traditional industrial farmed animal protein, in part because there is huge demand for plant-based proteins for use in making alternative meat products.

The company sees two crops in particular that they are excited to extend their process for animal-cell protein through plants: soy and pea.

“Soy and pea isolates and concentrates are the stars in a plant-based landscape,” said Paladini. “They are the main raw material to make plant-based products. We are actually doing the same process but with animal cells inside.”

However, unlike the company’s safflower-based products, which they can derive revenue from immediately, the development of the newer product lines will take some time. According to Paladini, they expect that the new proteins expressed through molecular farming to be on the market by 2025, slowed in part by the long approval process required for genetically modified food products.

2025 is a ways off, but Paladini said the company will be able to start to monetize alt-based animal proteins sooner. They have already started working on another process to bring the same animal proteins to market sooner through precision fermentation.

Spoon readers may know that precision fermentation is the technology that the Good Food Institute (GFI) sees as the bridge between the current plant-based alt-protein market and the world of lab-grown meat, where technology is more nascent. Unlike lab-grown meat that uses in vitro animal cell cultures, companies like Perfect Day and Geltor engineer microbes to produce protein that is essentially identical to that produced by animals.

The technology is already producing proteins at scale and the GFI expects the cost of precision fermented proteins will be lower than that of animal-produced proteins.

For Moolec, its fermentation technology also is just a quicker route to market, and embracing both approaches gives them an intermediate term (precision fermentation) and long term (molecular farming) monetization strategy, something no doubt important to investors.

And having a diversified revenue strategy makes sense for a company looking to raise capital. While Biosceres pre-seed investment gave them enough to start the company, Paladin told me they plan on exploring capital markets immediately to secure a seed round in 2021.

“Hopefully we could go to our seed round very soon so as to expand our lines and also to explore new proteins,” said Paladin. “The idea is to probe what we’re doing, and at the same time to go to the capital markets and some strategic partners to start building this new adventure.”

Paladin believes part of the company’s appeal to investors is due to the fact that’s while it technology is new and cutting edge, it could help secure a future for the oldest producer in the food ecosystem – the farmer – going forward.

“The technology is quite straightforward in the end because we aim to bring farmers back to the equation,” said Paladin. “Because we put all our science up front, but at the end the biology, the sun and the land do the rest. We are using all the efficiency of the plants of a very low tech, a non tech-technology.

“This is farming.”

DouxMatok to Scale Production of Its Sugar Tech in N. America with Lantic

There’s good news for people in the U.S. who like sweets but want to reduce their sugar intake. Israeli startup DouxMatok announced today that its not-a-sugar-substitute will be mass produced by sugar manufacturer Lantic here in North America starting next year.

As you are probably well aware, we eat a lot of added sugar in our foods here in the U.S., and that is a problem. Too much sugar can have deleterious effects on the body including heart and liver problems.

DouxMatok’s technology aims to reduce our sugar intake without sacrificing the taste of sugar. But the company is not creating a sugar substitute. Instead, its approach is to make sugar more efficient when it hits our tongue. It does this by attaching sugar molecules to another edible substance. Originally, the company used silica, which, as we covered back in 2018:

[Silica] has lots of nooks and crannies that sugar molecules can fill. The sugar-packed silica diffuses more efficiently on our tongues, so food companies can use 40 percent less sugar in their products, without sacrificing the taste.

Since then, DouxMatok has updated its technology, replacing silica with an undisclosed odorless, calorie-free mineral that the company said is more effective.

The result, according to DouxMatok, is that food companies can still use sugar in their recipes, they just don’t need to use as much.

DouxMatok signed a similar deal with European sugar company Südzucker back in 2018. With today’s announcement, DouxMatok’s Incredo Sugar, as it is branded, will be made available at industrial volumes for food companies here in North America. Lantic is only handling the manufacturing and production, with DouxMatok doing all of the sales and marketing of its Incredo Sugar.

DouxMatok is one of a number of companies taking a technological approach to fighting the scourge of sugar. Nestlé has a process that restructures sugar particles to maintain sweetness at lower volumes. Joywell is creating plant-based alternatives to sugar through fermentation. And Nutrition Innovation creates sugar with a lower glycemic index through different refinement processes.

As someone who enjoys a fun-sized Snickers (or two) as an afternoon pick me up, these types of sugar improvements can’t come soon enough. DouxMatok says that products using its Incredo Sugar will be on store shelves here in the U.S. by the second half of 2021.

UPDATE: This post originally stated that the new version of DouxMatok’s sugar uses a clean label fiber. This fiber-based version is actually still under development, and the mineral-based product will be what hits North America.

Atomo Raises $9M in Seed Funding for its Molecular Coffee

Atomo, the Seattle startup that re-creates coffee on a molecular level, announced today that it has raised a $9 million in seed funding from S2G Ventures, AgFunder, Bessemer Venture Partners and existing investor Horizons Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by Atomo to $11.6 million.

While Atomo’s molecular coffee was started in a lab, it certainly isn’t lab-made coffee. The company’s formula uses a combination of upcycled (vegan) ingredients that go through various biochemical and thermal processes to recreate the look, taste, smell and mouthfeel of coffee. The result, according to Atomo, is a smoother coffee that is less bitter.

In addition to the funding itself is what the funding will go towards. Atomo is building out a pilot production facility in Seattle that when opened in 2021 will be capable of producing thousands of servings of its coffee per day.

There are three phases on Atomo’s roadmap. The first phase, which the new facility will be producing, is a concentrate that will be used in ready-to-drink cans of Atomo cold brew coffee . The second phase involves using the concentrate as well as a grounds product in something like a Keurig style cup. The final phase will be using 3D printing to create an Atomo “bean” that could be used in grinders.

Atomo isn’t the only company looking to recreate drinks on a molecular level. Endless West makes whiskey, wines and sake spirits by deconstructing the originals and reassembling them.

The coffee industry is getting pinched from both ends during this pandemic. The virus is impacting the labor force in places like Brazil from being able to pick beans, and it is causing shut downs of cafes, which are big buyers of coffee. Just as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat could potentially bring stability to production of (plant-based) “meat” that avoids the wild swings of pandemics, the Atomo’s production capablities could potentially do the same for coffee.

We’ll have to see what the company brews up next.

SOSV and Mayfield Launch the Genesis Consortium to Aid Pre-Seed IndieBio Startups

Yesterday, venture fund SOSV announced a partnership with Mayfield to create the Genesis Consortium, which will invest alongside SOSV into pre-seed-state companies participating in SOSV’s IndieBio accelerator.

IndieBio is perhaps best known for helping startups with extremely disruptive concepts and technologies across multiple industries, including food. Memphis Meats, for example, was one of the earliest movers in the cell-based meat space. Geltor is developing non-animal-based protein for to create gelatin for foods, medicines, and cosmetics. 

That level of scientific and technological disruption, however, requires more time, funds, and faith to bring to fruition than would be the case with other kinds of tech companies. That’s one reason many bioengineering-focused startups get stuck, IndieBio’s Po Bronson told me this week. “To really translate the work of scientists often takes years, and we are often speeding that up at the pre-seed stage in our accelerators,” he said. “What we’ve found is that if we could deploy a little more money there at that pre-stage it can help the startups have the runway, time and get more data to prove that they’re really worth the seed funding.”

In other words, the conundrum is that firms typically want companies to show them results before they invest, but companies need the cash in order to get those results.

That’s where the Genesis Consortium comes in. To be clear, this is not a new fund, but rather a “small pool of money,” in Bronson’s words, to help pre-seed-stage companies at IndieBio develop their ideas and technologies. Currently, IndieBio funds about 50 startups with $250,000 each annually. Beginning in 2021, the Genesis Consortium plans to increase that number to $500,000 for each pre-seed startup, according to SOSV’s press release.

As far as the kinds of companies it will invest in, Bronson told me they will continue to work with startups trying to advance entire industries, including food, through science and technology that address both human and planetary health, and the connection between those two areas. These are not incremental technologies that iterate on existing concepts. Instead, these startups are typically rethinking entire industries.  

And while extra funds are an important part of the package these pre-seed startups will get, they’re not the only tool necessary for turning an idea into a business. Especially when it comes to areas like engineering biology, translating an idea into an actual business is where a lot of companies get hung up. A group of scientists must learn how to communicate their ideas and business in a way that can resonate with not just potential investors but also future markets.

“You cannot just be a scientist. You have to be leading a movement in your space and that means communicating and learning to translate,” Bronson explained. He adds that the IndieBio program is “really good” at getting companies through this particular hurdle through its training.

Getting companies over that hurdle is something IndieBio is known for and will continue with the Genesis Consortium. The hope is that through the initiative, a greater number of visionary VCs and corporates will be able to invest in the kinds of ideas that might not otherwise receive the attention (and money) needed to translate them into businesses that can fundamentally change markets.

TurtleTree Labs Raises $3.2M Seed Round for its Cultured Human Breast Milk

Turtle Tree Labs, a Singapore-based startup that creates milk from mammalian cells, announced yesterday that it has raised a $3.2 million seed round of funding. Green Monday Ventures, KBW Ventures, CPT Capital, Artesian, and New Luna Ventures all participated in the round.

As we’ve covered previously, TurtleTree Labs uses cellular agriculture to grow mammary gland cells in a nutrient rich bath that actually lactate milk. This company is initially focusing on re-creating human breast milk, and will follow that up with cow milk. Because they are creating milk in the lab, scientists can alter the milk to give it different attributes like higher or lower fat or cholesterol.

When we spoke to TurtleTree at the end of 2019, the company had plans to debut its first glass of human breast milk in Q1 of 2021 and enter the market at the end of 2021. We don’t know if the COVID-19 pandemic has altered any of those plans, but in its funding announcement, TurtleTree said that the Singapore government has been supportive, allowing the company to continue its work apace.

Cultured breast milk seems to be a pretty hot space right now. TurtleTree’s funding comes just a week after BIOMILQ raised $3.5 million for its cultured breast milk solution.

It’s not hard to understand why cultured human breast milk is attracting funding. It has the potential to provide a healthier and more environmentally friendly option for women who are unable to produce enough breast milk on their own because of biological or environmental reasons.

That is still years away, however, as companies like TurtleTree need to continue development of its product and scale up to make its milk more affordable. This new round of funding will definitely help that.

No Whey! A Rundown of Alternative Cheese Startups

With summertime here, vegans across the country will be grilling up sizzling Beyond and Impossible burgers . While the burgers themselves may be delicious, there is still a deficit when it comes to non animal-based cheese they want to melt on there.

But the days of lackluster vegan cheese will soon be a thing of the past, as there are a number of startups working on non-dairy cheese — and raising millions to do so. Here’s a list of companies rising up to the cheese challenge:

  • Heartbest is a Mexican startup that recently raised $2 million for its plant-based cheese that uses ingredients like amaranth, quinoa and peas.
  • GOOD PLANeT Foods makes plant-based cheese from coconut oil, potato starch and natural flavorings and is widely available at retail locations like Walmart, Costco and Whole Foods . The company raised $12 million last month to expand production.
  • Grounded Foods uses cauliflower to create cheeses like camembert guyere and roquefort, and is part of the Big Ideas Ventures alternative protein accelerator.
  • Noquo Foods has ditched traditional plant-based ingredients for its product and instead relies on a “stable matrix” of legumes to better replicate cheese. The company raised $3.6 million at the beginning of this year.
  • Legendairy Foods ferments microbes in a process similar to creating insulin and has already created prototypes for mozzarella and ricotta. The German company raised $4.7 million in funding last year.
  • New Culture is also creating mozzarella cheese in the lab, using “recombinant protein technology” that also uses genetically modified microbes to make milk protein. It raised $3.5 million last year.
  • Perfect Day uses fermentation of microbes to recreate cream cheese and feta in the lab and has raised $201 million in funding so far.

Though most of these startups won’t save vegan bbqs this summer, saying (non-animal) cheese, please, is something they’ll definitely be able to do in the not too distant future.