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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Air Protein

ADM Partners With Air Protein to Make ‘Landless’ Protein From CO2

Today ADM announced a partnership with Air Protein, a company developing technology to make protein out of thin air, using carbon dioxide as a feedstock.

According to the announcement, the two companies have entered a Strategic Development Agreement (SDA) to advance the development and production of this protein that can be developed without arable land. The agreement leverages ADM’s expertise in nutrition and research and Air Protein’s protein production technology to expand the protein ecosystem and deliver sustainable, cost-effective ingredients for meat substitutes. The two companies will collaborate to build the first commercial-scale production facility for air protein.

The foundation of Air Protein’s protein production methodology (sometimes referred to as gas fermentation) was developed in the 1960s as NASA explored ways to produce food in space. While the technology was shelved for decades, it has been dusted off in recent years as a new cohort of startups has started to explore new ways to create proteins more sustainably.

One of the problems often cited in the alt protein space is an over-reliance on glucose as a feedstock, and many see the development of lower-cost and more sustainable feedstocks as necessary for the continued growth of the industry. Air protein and other companies using gas fermentation technology leverage single-cell organisms to convert CO2 into protein, opening the door to a possibly more sustainable method for fueling future growth in alternative proteins.

Another benefit of gas fermentation is that it disconnects protein production from arable land. Many developing economies neither have arable farmland nor resources to produce cheap and abundant protein; this technology could provide a pathway to produce protein in emerging markets.

Given the company’s size and importance in the global food supply chain, ADM’s entry into the air protein space could be a further validation of this nascent technology. One has to wonder if ADM’s stamp of approval will spur further interest in the technology across the food value chain, encouraging other big food system players to partner with some of the other companies in this space, which include Solar Foods, Deep Branch Biotechnology, and Air Company.

NovoNutrients Raises $4.7M to Complete Its Pilot Program for Alt-Protein Made from CO2 Inputs

NovoNutrients, a company that creates protein from CO2 inputs, today announced a $4.7 million fundraise to complete its industrial pilot program that will capture CO2 emissions from from oil, gas, and cement-related plants.

The round was led by Happiness Capital, a Hong Kong-based venture firm that has previously invested in Redefine Meat, Ynsect, and Beyond Meat. E2JDJ and Marinya Capital also joined the round, which included re-ups from SOSV’s IndieBio and the Grantham Environmental Trust. Other investors include Stanford Graduate School of Business Impact Fund, Purple Orange Ventures, and Joyance Partners.

NovoNutrients feeds the CO2 inputs it collects to naturally occurring microbes via a fermentation process. The resulting proteins have a variety of uses, including as ingredients in meat analogues as well as animal feeds. NovoNutrients says its protein can improve the amino acid profile of food products.

That nutrition element will work in NovoNutrients favor as it continues to develop its air protein and looks to scale production. At the recent IFT FIRST event, panelists suggested that while a lot of the focus in meat analogues right now is on taste and texture, the nutritional profile of proteins will become more important to consumers moving forward.  

Actually getting a product to consumers is still a ways off for NovoNutrients, however. For the time being, the company is focused on showing its fermentation tech can work at scale. The company will co-locate its bioreactors (aka fermentation tanks) at industrial sites that produce high levels of greenhouse gases. 

The pilot project is focused on a 1,000-liter bioreactor. NovoNutrients says it will stand up a 20,000-liter industrial demo in the near future. 

NovoNutrients is one of a few companies now developing novel protein from CO2, hydrogen, and other air inputs. Others include Air Protein, Solar Foods, and Deep Branch. Last year, the European Space Agency started working with Solar Foods to develop the technology for use in space to feed astronauts.

NovoNutrients said today that its pilot project will allow the company to start raising Series A funding later this year.  

Air Protein, GOOD Meat, IntegriCulture Among the Semifinalists for XPRIZE’s Alt-Protein Competition

Nonprofit XPRIZE has announced 28 semifinalists teams that will move forward in the Feed the Next Billion competition. The multi-year competition will support companies developing compelling chicken and fish alternatives that replicate or outperform the real thing in terms of nutrition, environmental sustainability, animal welfare, and taste and texture. 

The competition, first announced at the end of 2020, is being conducted in partnership with ASPIRE, the project management arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC). Grand-prize winners will not be chosen until 2024. when multiple winners will collectively receive $15 million.

For now, the 28 finalists chosen to continue the competition will have the next year to work with the competition, ASPIRE, and The Tony Robbins Foundation to develop the first iterations of their products. Up to 10 finalist teams will be chosen towards the end of 2022 and will split a “milestone award” of $2.5 million. 

Those 10 finalists will have one last round of competition where they will need to create “at least twenty-five cuts of structured chicken breast or fish fillet analogs of 115 gram or four ounce that replicate the sensory properties, versatility, and nutritional profile of conventional chicken or fish.” One grand prize winner will receive $7 million, with second- and third-place winners getting $2 million and $1 million, respectively.

The 28 finalists chosen this week represent all three pillars of alternative protein: plant-based, cultivated, and fermentation. Some of these companies are better known than others. Eat Just’s GOOD Meat, for example, is the only company in the world that has regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat (in Singapore). MeatOurFuture, on the other hand, is a public-private partnership that is known primarily in South Africa at this point. Others, including plant-based seafood company Brew51 from India, Japan’s IntegriCulture, and Air Protein, are all at various stages of development in terms of their products.

You can read the full list of companies, which span 14 different countries, here.

XPRIZE’s Feed the Next Billion competition was developed in response to the organization’s Future of Food Impact Roadmap, where the organization pinpointed 12 “breakthrough opportunities” that could help build a better food system. Alt-protein is a major area.

No one company developing alternative proteins has yet proven their technology and/or ingredients can feed the next billion. There remain many, many questions around the nutrition of products, the cost of making them, and, for some, whether or not they can ever really be produced at that scale. XPRIZE’s competition will no doubt go some ways towards answering those questions over the next few years.  

Solar Foods Receives €10M to Scale Production of its Protein Made Out of Air

Solar Foods, which literally makes protein out of air, announced today that it has received €10 million (~$11.98 million USD) in funding from the The Finnish Climate Fund. The subordinated load will go towards revving up commercial-scale production of the company’s product, Solein. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Solar Foods to €35 million (~$41.6 million USD).

Based in Finland, Solar Foods uses a combination of captured carbon dioxide, bacteria and electricity to create Solein, which can make multiple food items including alternative proteins. A big promise of Solein’s is its narrower impact on the planet than traditional animal agriculture or even plant-based protein. It doesn’t require land or water, and is not dependent on weather. According to today’s press announcement, Solar Foods said that Solein creates roughly one percent of the greenhouse gas emissions of meat protein and 20 percent of those from plant protein production.

The technology was borne out of research from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and LUT University of Finland. Solein is now in the commercialization stage, and the new funding will be used to build a pilot production facility. The new facility will include a food bar and is scheduled to start operations in early 2023.

The nothingness of air is really turning into something in the alternative protein space. In addition to Solar Foods, the aptly named Air Protein does much the same thing and recently raised $32 million. Deep Branch calls itself a carbon dioxide recycling company because it turns CO2 into protein for animal feed, and recently raised nearly $10 million. And Swedish researchers at RISE have developed technology to turn air into fat.

For more on this nascent science and protein sector, check out our The Spoon Plus Insider Guide to Air Protein.

Deep Branch Raises €8M to Turn Air Into Animal Feed

Deep Branch, which calls itself “a carbon dioxide recycling company,” announced today that it has completed a Series A investment round of €8 million (~$9.5 million USD). The round was led by Novo Holdings and DSM Venturing and also included participation from Total Carbon Neutrality Ventures and Barclays Sustainable Impact Capital. 

The funding will go towards completing Deep Branch’s Scale-Up Hub, a production facility at the Brightlands Chemlot Campus in the Netherlands where the company will make the first pilot-scale batches of its Proton product.

Proton is Deep Branch’s alternative protein ingredient for animal feed, and a product that aims to help make the animal farming industry more sustainable. Via a gas fermentation process, the company turns CO2 into a protein ingredient that Deep Branch says is comparable in nutritional profile to fishmeal, which is a standard in the animal feed industry. It is also, the company says, cost-competitive with other types of animal feed on the market.

Batches of Proton will first be validated nutritionally with Europe’s leading feed producers BioMar (a large aquafeed producer) and AB Agri (a poultry feed producer). 

The new funding will also go towards designing the UK-headquartered company’s first commercial-scale production facility. For now, Deep Branch is focused on finding the right location for that facility, with Norway a top contender. The goal is for the company to reach commercial production of Proton by 2023. 

Creating protein ingredients via gas fermentation is small-but-growing space that also includes Air Protein, Solar Foods, and NovoNutrients. Like Deep Branch, NovoNutrients also makes alternative animal feed by turning industrial CO2 waste into protein.  

Deep Branch has also in the past received funding from Innovate UK, Municipality of Rotterdam, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research program.

Air Protein Raises $32M to Make Meat From Air

Air Protein, a company using technology to make meat from elements in the air, announced today it has completed a $32 million Series A round of fundraising. The round was led by ADM Ventures, Barclays, and GV (formerly Google Ventures), according to a press announcement sent to The Spoon.

Air Protein’s approach to alternative meat is fairly unique at this point in the evolution of alt-protein. The company feeds elements found in the air, such as carbon dioxide, to microbes in a fermentation tank. The microbes ingest the air elements and output a healthy protein that then gets texturized and turned into various alt meat products. Though the company has not yet named specific types of meat it is developing, it does plan to create products it will sell directly to consumers (as opposed to selling to other food producers). 

Speaking on the phone this week, Air Protein’s CEO and cofounder Dr. Lisa Dyson told me the company’s technology is “very flexible” in terms of the types of meat it can produce. And since air protein, the concept, requires very few resources (e.g., land, water) to produce, it can be produced virtually anywhere in the world.  

To that end, San Francisco Bay Area-based Air Protein plans to use its new funds in part to launch an R&D lab that will help develop different types of alt-meats as well as scale production. On the phone, Dr. Dyson said the lab will allow her company to “produce and expand” its product line, and that the forthcoming R&D innovation lab will be key to that process. 

Air Protein will also use the new funds to recruit and build up its team of employees.

For now, at least, the company is focused on producing only meat alternatives. As Dr. Dyson explained, the traditional meat industry is one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet, as well as an industry that uses unsustainable amounts of resources like land and water. But demand for meat continues to rise, and with a global population moving steadily towards 10 billion people by 2050, the need for alternatives gets more urgent each year. “We need solutions and Air Protein is excited to be one of those solutions,” Dr. Dyson said. 

She was quick to applaud the efforts of other types of alternative meat production, including plant-based meat, and suggested that due to the sheer amount of demand globally for meat, opportunity exists now and will continue to for many different methods and companies. Air Protein’s high-tech, resource-light method for meat is one way to satiate the planet’s appetite for meat without incurring so heavy an environmental burden. 

Solar Foods Gets $5.2M to Commercialize Protein Made From Air

Finnish startup Solar Foods has been granted €4.3 million (~$5.2 million USD) in financing from government organization Business Finland. The new funding follows a Series A fundraise from September and brings Solar Foods’ total amount raised since the company began in 2017 to €24.8 million (~$30 million USD). 

These new funds will enable Solar Foods to open a new manufacturing facility and, more importantly, start to commercialize food products made from its Solein ingredient, an edible protein made from air and electricity.

To make Solein, also referred to as “air protein,” Solar Foods captures carbon dioxide from the air and combines it with bacteria to form single-celled proteins. The process has some noted advantages over other forms of alternative protein in that it doesn’t rely on irrigation, land, or good weather to function. The company has already demonstrated it can make multiple food products, including alt-meat items, with Solein. Another additional advantage of air protein is that in the inputs — carbon dioxide — are not finite.

Solar Foods’ major competitor in the air protein arena is a U.S.-based company simply called Air Protein, which is developing its own consumer-facing products for retail and restaurant partnerships. Elsewhere, the air protein market remains a pretty niche one, though commercialization of these companies’ products could change that.

For its part, Solar Foods said it expects its manufacturing facility to be operational by 2022. The company said its next step is to “finalise funding for the demonstration factory investment.” It is due to set the official location for that factory in the coming weeks. 

Deep Branch Secures €2.5M to Scale Up Production of Novel Protein Using CO2 Inputs

Alternative protein company Deep Branch has secured €2.5 million (~$2.9 million USD) in new funding from the European Investment Council (EIC) Accelerator to scale up production of the company’s novel, single-cell protein called Proton. The funding will be used to build a production facility in the Netherlands that the company hopes will be operational by Q2 of next year, according to a release sent to The Spoon.

The announcement comes just months after Deep Branch secured government funding from the UK through an organization called the UK Research & Innovation (UKRI), which funded nine projects to the tune of $30 million to help advance zero-emission farming and greater food sovereignty within the UK.

One of those projects is REACT-FIRST, which is a consortium centered around Deep Branch’s technology that creates protein using CO2 inputs from industrial emissions. Deep Branch, which has developed an animal feed formula using its novel single-cell protein that has a nutritional profile similar to that of fishmeal, was working with nine other partners as part of REACT-FIRST to create a sustainable protein research and production value chain.

With today’s news, Deep Branch is expanding to mainland Europe as part of an effort to accelerate the scaling of production for the company’s novel protein. The new funding will help the company build out a production facility at the Netherlands-based Brightlands Chemelot Campus, a European hub focused on providing space and infrastructure for circular chemistry and chemical processes. The new facility will, according to the release, “enable Deep Branch to scale up increasing production to enable animal feed manufacturers to expedite performance testing of the new protein.”

“Brightlands Chemelot Campus is the ideal location for our Scale-Up Centre, and there is a clear alignment between our goals and the facility’s overall ambitions for CO2 recycling and sustainable hydrogen use,”said Deep Branch CEO Peter Rowe in the release. “The industrial site gives us the ability to scale up quickly and has room for a large-scale production facility as well as the raw materials to create Proton. We have access to everything we need.”

Deep Branch will be working with feed producers BioMar and AB Agri as part of the scale up and optimization.

“Setting up the pilot plant represents an important next step in finding the perfect recipe for Proton that meets the requirements of feed producers,” said Rowe.

Deep Branch is one of a small cohort of new startups that have launched over the past few years focused on developing protein using a process called gas fermentation. (Check out Spoon Plus report on the topic here.) Others include Air Protein, Solar Foods and NovoNutrients. Last year, the European Space Agency started working with Solar Foods to develop the technology for use in space to feed astronauts.

Solar Foods Raises an Additional €15M, Closes Series A Round

Solar Foods, an air-protein company based out of Finland, announced this week it has closed out its Series A round with €15 million (~$17.8 million USD) in new financing. The investment was led by Fazar Group with participation from Bridford Investments Limited, Agronomics Limited, Lifeline Ventures, and CPT Capital. It brings the entire Series A round to €18.5 million, and Solar Foods’ total funding to $24.9 million (USD).

The company says this new funding round will enable it to move forward with the commercialization of Solein, its edible protein made from air and electricity. Also known in the food tech vernacular as “air protein,” this approach involves capturing carbon dioxide from the air and combining it with bacteria to form single-celled proteins.

Solar Foods plans to produce its own consumer-facing food items out of this protein, and is building out a new production facility in order to do that. The new funds will go towards making that facility, which Solar says is in the permitting stage, a reality. Per this week’s press release, this forthcoming facility is “designed to include the Solein Experience Hub and a future-food bar to provide citizens with an entirely new level of transparency in food production.”

Sci-fi as it may sound, there are are some benefits to protein made from air that make it a noteworthy new entrant to the alt-protein space. For starters, it doesn’t use any finite environmental resources like land or water, nor does it rely on animals in any way. It can also be produced anywhere in the world, including tough arctic or desert climates, because the processes isn’t dependent on outdoor elements.

Solar Foods’ main competitor right now is a U.S.-based company simply called Air Protein that uses a similar approach to creating, uh, air protein. Unlike Solar, however, Air Protein is exploring B2B partnerships in foodservice along with retail opportunities. 

All that said, the air protein space is so new it will be a little while yet before we’re buying energy bars, powders, and other items made with the stuff. For its part, Solar Foods says it expects its production plant to be operational by 2022, and to commercialize Solein in the fourth quarter of that year. 

At last check, the whole of the alternative protein space has received over $1 billion in investment so far in 2020, with over $907 million going to plant-based protein and more than $290 million to cell-based protein. Air protein does not yet have its own special designation as a cateogry. But if companies like Solar can reach their milestones around commercialization and get their products onto consumers’ plates, that could change, and sooner rather than later. 

The UK Launches Nine Ag and Food Tech Projects, Including ‘Air Protein’ Consortium Called REACT-FIRST

Today the United Kingdom announced a total of nine projects that will receive a total of £24 million (~$30 million USD) in funding to help accelerate the advancement of zero-emission farming and greater food sovereignty within the UK.

The organization leading the overall effort is UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) under what is called the Transforming Food Production challenge. Per today’s announcement, the challenge “aims to set food production systems on the trajectory to net zero emissions by 2040 producing food in ways that are more efficient, resilient and sustainable.”

One of the new projects that will receive funding is called REACT-FIRST, a consortium led by air protein startup Deep Branch Biotechnology. REACT-FIRST will build a scalable route towards protein generation using CO2 inputs and a process generally described by the industry as gas fermentation. The initiative will be comprised of 10 industry and academic partners that will essentially build out a research and scale protein value chain around Deep Branch’s technology.

This value chain and its various partners will look something like the graphic above, which was provided by REACT-FIRST. In this new scaled value chain, Drax, a single-site renewable energy generator will provide captured CO2 and Deep Branch’s technology will convert it to into a novel single-cell protein called Proton.

From there, the Proton SCP will either be converted to fish or poultry feeds with the help of BioMar (large aquafeed producer) or AB Agri (large poultry feed producer). Researchers from the University of Stirling and Nottingham Trent University will work on nutrition assessment. Retailer Sainsbury and others develop ways to scale the production of this new feed.

Deep Branch is one of a small cohort of new startups that have launched over the past few years focused on developing protein using a process called gas fermentation (check out Spoon Plus report on the topic here). Others include Air Protein, Solar Foods and NovoNutrients. Last year, the European Space Agency started working with Solar Foods to develop the technology for use in space to feed astronauts.

Other projects within this broad initiative from the United Kingdom include everything from autonomous robotic farming systems (Robot Highways led by Saga Robotics) to hydroponic grow systems (Production at the Point of Consumption led by Evogro) to new algae grow systems for food production in deserts (AGRI-SATT led by Feed Algae). Each project consists of a funding for research and a variety of partners to help accelerate the time to market and scaling of the technologies.

SKS 2019: The Key to Sustainable Protein Might be Fermentation, not Plants

When you hear the term alternative proteins, your thoughts likely jump to plant-based foods, or maybe even cultured meat.

But there’s actually a third way to create high-protein meat alternatives without plants by leveraging a relatively old technology, and that is fermentation. At SKS 2019, Dr. Lisa Dyson of Air Protein, Perumal Gandhi of Perfect Day, and Morgan Keim of Motif FoodWorks discussed how their companies are using genetically engineered microbes to ferment sustainable, highly customizable proteins.

If you’re intrigued by all the buzz around the alternative protein space, it’s worth watching the whole video below. (You get to learn how Air Protein makes protein from air, c’mon.) Here are a few takeaways from the conversation:

Fermented protein is super sustainable
Plant-based protein is certainly more environmentally friendly than animal protein, but fermented protein has the potential to be even more sustainable. Dr. Dyson noted that their protein is made using only energy (which can come from solar or wind) and elements of the air. Bonus: unlike farming, it can scale vertically, is independent of weather conditions, and makes protein incredibly quickly.

It’s more efficient, too
One of the perks of fermenting protein is you can get really granular about which molecules you want to create, eliminating waste. “If you just want one part of, say, a dairy molecule, why create the whole thing?” asked Keim onstage. “Why not just make the one part you actually need?” Having that sort of control over the protein leads to more efficient R&D processes for all sorts of animal alternative products.

Fermentation isn’t *that* out of this world
Dr. Dyson noted that growing protein from fermentation “may sound like science fiction,’ but it’s actually quite close to our current standard methods of growing many staple foods — including yogurt and beer.

Gandhi echoed this sentiment. Perfect Day, which dubbed their proteins “flora-based” after the microflora used to create them, noted that fermenting protein isn’t anything new. “We’ve been using it for 40 years now,” Gandhi said. “We’re just applying [the technology] in a new way.”

Watch the full video below to learn more about what Keim called “the next generation of what non-animal foods will be.” It’ll make you rethink the protein on your plate.

SKS 2019: Growing Protein: The Emerging Food Tech Ingredient Market

SKS 2019: 3 Things We Need to Create New and Better Forms of Animal-Free Protein

The future of alternative proteins is about way more than plants. That was the main takeaway from a talk my colleague Catherine Lamb hosted this morning at The Spoon’s SKS conference in Seattle.

Joining Lamb onstage were Dr. Lisa Dyson, cofounder and CEO of Air Protein; Morgan Keim, the Corporate & Business Development Manager of Motif FoodWorks; and Perumal Gandhi, cofounder of Perfect Day. All three are experts on the white-hot alternative protein space. All three run companies that are creating new forms of protein, using not animals or plants, but microorganisms, technology, and — in one case — the air itself.

Onstage, the three of them and Lamb discussed some elements we need more of to make alternative proteins more widely available to the average consumer and care for the planet at the same time.

1. Better Production Methods
As Dr. Dyson outlined in her talk, traditional protein, whether derived from animal or plant, requires land. As the recent burning of the Amazon forest illustrates, this way of farming is not sustainable for either the planet or the 10 billion people expected to be on it by 2025.

Air Protein’s solution is to remove land from the equation. Using a technology originally developed by NASA, Dr. Dyson’s company created a closed-loop system to feed microorganisms carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and nitrogen to create a carbon fermentation process that makes proteins.

You can read an in-depth profile of how the technology works here. Onstage, Dr. Dyson focused more on the possibilities a company like Air Protein could introduce into the food system, like saving land and preserving natural habitats. For example, a traditional soy farm would have to be the size of Texas to produce as much protein as an Air Protein farm the size of Disney World can make.

2. More Ingredients
Motif FoodWorks also uses a fermentation process to, as Morgan Keim explained onstage, create better versions of animal-based foods we know and love and, in many cases, are loathe to part with, doomed planet or no (ahem, cheese).

At SKS, Keim noted that one of the keys to making alternative protein more widespread is finding and including the kinds of ingredients that will help it function just as real meat (or egg or dairy) does. For example, is there something that can be added to alt protein that will help it maintain the right color once it’s in the form of a burger patty and cooking on the grill? What ingredients could make alternative proteins as digestible as their animal counterparts?

Motif is currently using custom microbes to try and answer some of these questions. As Keim noted during the panel, the possibilities are practically limitless with the right mindset.

3. Transparency
But all those custom microbes and genetic modification processes have to be disclosed to consumers, something Perfect Day’s Gandhi discussed onstage.

Perfect Day, for example, makes a point of calling out that its products are “flora-based” — that is, they’re made from genetically modified microflora (a.k.a. bacteria). But as Gandhi explained onstage, even when discussing GMOs, people are actually more receptive to the product when you don’t try to hide information like that. If companies can effectively explain to the average consumer (read: not vegetarians or vegans) why and how a product like flora-based ice cream is better for them, people will generally be more open to the product.

That’s the hope, at least, and so far over the last few years, consumers have shown an increasing appetite for alternative forms of proteins, even those with genetically modified elements. We’ll be digging more into this movement towards over the next day and a half, so stay tuned for more on new forms of proteins and the role they’ll play in our future food system.