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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Change Foods

Change Foods Says Its Alt-Cheese Has A Market Beyond Plant-Based Consumers

As the name infers, Change Foods is poised to take on the world of cheese and go beyond today’s plant-based offerings and craft a cheddar or mozzarella that is identical in taste to a dairy-based product. The trick, company founder and CEO David Bucca believes, is the replication of casein, a dairy protein, that gives the cheese its signature flavor.

Using precision fermentation, Change Foods has a current war chest of more than $15 million from venture firms and food manufacturing companies and collaborations with such giants as Upfield and Mexico’s Sigma-Alimentos. Bucca believes Change Foods will have products on the market in 2023.

Recently, David Bucca spoke to The Spoon about Change Foods’ origins, its vision, and how he hopes to lure current dairy-based cheese eaters to his company’s line of products.

Why take on a market with so many companies already tackling plant-based cheese?

When you look at the limitations of current products on the shelf, unfortunately, it doesn’t cut it for many other cheese consumers in terms of certainly from a functionality point of view, let alone a taste point of view. So, when you’re talking about specifically harder cheeses like cheddars or even a very functional cheese like mozzarella, you expect to stretch and melt and do all of its usual things on a pizza, for example. Then there are clear limitations that you experience with plant-based cheeses.

I think certain products have come a long way, and soft base cheeses and fermented cheeses are all fantastic in their own use application. But you know, they just don’t consider them like cheese for the regular sort of cheese and dairy consumer.

How and why did you move from the aerospace industry to the world of alternative foods?

I was working in the aerospace industry when I started a nonprofit organization called Series Frontier in Australia, which is a think tank and industry accelerator for proteins. And so that allowed me to look at many companies, look at lots of different technologies, and sort of study and evaluate gaps in the market and opportunities. And basically, the conclusion I came up with was that microbial fermentation is such a powerful enabler, specifically when you can focus on specific compounds. One of which was the magic unlock that you find in a dairy engine, specifically, casein.

 So, once I drew that connection, we can recreate the key functional component of cheese and dairy, which is casein using a technology that allows you to produce something bio-identically the same. And suddenly, it was a magical epiphany to say that wow, if we can recreate casein exactly one for one, then there is that whole concept of cheese without compromise.

So, your goal is to provide an alternative to dairy that appeals to more than plant-based or vegan consumers.

It’s change without compromise to the average consumer.

We’re seeing high growth in the vegan and plant-based cheese market, which is fantastic. But for the average mass-market cheese consumer, we need something better. We need something that minimizes that compromise that people have to put up with. And I think this is the, and I can do that.

Your focus is on the casein, so is it the same as casein found in dairy?

The DNA is actually encoded in the gene. So, the gene itself is what we’re using one for, one from basically the same gene that you tell that encodes for the cow to produce casein. So, we take that same DNA, but then we use a microbial host to produce that same protein rather than a cow affected by it. So, we’re creating miniature cows in some sort of way whereby we can target specific compounds of interest, one of which is casein that a case is bioidentical.

Other companies using precision fermentation face the challenges of scale and cost. What’s your approach to those issues?

Well, where we’re at today, we’re at the very cusp of straddling the high-cost sort of existing process to now moving it forward into this new era of cost-effectiveness and scalability. And that’s why it’s a challenge. And the biggest challenge is how do we obviously optimize for this protein or company you’re looking for within the lab in terms of getting the microbes to produce things in as high a quantity as possible. But the second challenge is by leveraging the scales of what is the economy of scale in larger and larger fermenters because that’s truly where you start.

The other key component that drives a lot of that is also the regulatory timeline to produce products at scale and via a repeatable process, to then go through the regulatory approval process with the FDA and get aggressive approval for these specific compounds for use in the food.

If you hope to have products in the market in 2023, what do you have in place today? Something I can hold in my hand?

Yes, absolutely. We have a number of benchtop prototypes.

Lastly, please talk about the impact you believe Change Foods will have on climate change and sustainability through its cheese.

If we really want to solve some of the issues around climate and animal agriculture-related to dairy, then this is why cheese is so important. For example, it requires ten liters of cow’s milk to make one kilogram of cheddar. So, it’s a conversion ratio of 10 to 1. So not only is dairy milk unsustainable, to begin with, but then you can compound that by a factor of ten to cheese.

With that in mind, we have to be strategic about making sure there is no compromise on taste, performance cost, texture, price, and convenience for the average regular dairy consumer.

Animal-Free Dairy Startup Change Foods Closes $2.1M Seed Round

Change Foods, a startup best known at this point for making animal-free cheese via a fermentation process, has closed an oversubscribed Seed round of $2.1 million. Investors include Plug and Play Ventures, Clear Current Capital, Canaccord Genuity, Better Bite Ventures, Jeff Dean, and GERBER-RAUTH, among others. To date, Change Foods has raised $3.1 million in funding, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The company, founded in 2019, has up to now been split between Palo Alto, California and Melbourne, Australia. In the wake of this new funding, Change Foods is setting up a new R&D facility in the San Francisco Bay Area and company founder David Bucca has already relocated there.   

The company plans to bring its first product — animal-free cheese — to market in 2023.

Precision fermentation is one method within the larger fermentation category. For Change Foods, involves fermenting microorganisms such as yeast or filamentous fungi with sugar to produce the cells for specific functional ingredients — fats, vitamins, flavoring agents, and enzymes, to name a few. (Precision fermentation is also used to create insulin.) Perfect Day and Impossible Foods are examples of major alt-protein companies that use this process to get their products.

An animal-free cheese made via this method has the potential to be one of the first animal-free cheeses to appeal to the non-vegan crowd. Up to now, numerous companies have tried their hand at plant-based cheeses. Few have gotten the flavor and texture close enough to the real thing to win over masses of consumers. Motif Foodworks, the food tech spinout of synthetic biology company Gingko Bioworks, is the other notable company developing cheese products through precision fermentation. 

Traditional cheese requires a significant amount of land and water to produce, puts it right up there with meat in terms of food items consumers should ideally cut back on or find outright replacements. To realistically counter that, alternatives will have to taste less like cashew or legumes and more like actual cheese. Precision fermentation may eventually be a highly efficient way to do this at scale, hence new investments like this one now going towards the space.

Change Foods Raises $875,000 for Its Precision Fermentation Cheese

Alternative protein company Change Foods has raised $875,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed round of funding, surpassing its initial target of $600,000. Green Queen Media was first to break the news. Participating in the round were Twitter’s Asia-Pacific VP Maya Hari, abillionveg founder Vikas Garg, game developer Tom Crago, and existing investors Newstead and Klar. 

Change Foods plans to use the funds to scale up its precision fermentation technology, which the company is using to develop an initial prototype of an animal-free cheese it says will look, taste, and cook like dairy-based cheese.

Most alt-cheese products currently available still fall well below the bar in terms of replicating the real thing in terms of taste, texture, and functionality. That’s largely because those products don’t contain the casein compound, which is found in cow’s milk and is an essential ingredient of cheese. To get that compound and others, Change Foods genetically modifies microorganisms and ferments them with sugar in a process known as precision fermentation. 

Speaking to Green Queen, Change Foods founder David Bucca said better precision fermentation technology could lead to a less vulnerable dairy supply chain, since products can be made locally, have a longer shelf life, and don’t require cold chain infrastructure to transport. 

Fermentation has been called “the next pillar” of alternative protein alongside plant-based and cell-based proteins. Precision fermentation is one method within that larger fermentation category, and is also used by companies like Perfect Day and Impossible Foods. 

To start, Change Foods is developing mozzarella and cheddar cheeses, though it plans to branch out into other dairy products in the future. The plan is to sell products via B2C channels by 2023. 

In the meantime, Change Foods will also use some of the pre-seed funding to expand its core team. It also has ambitions to raise a $4 million seed round in 2021.

Change Foods Creates Cheese Through Fermentation

Add Change Foods to the growing list of companies using fermentation to recreate dairy products without the cow. The company’s headquarters are based in Palo Alto, and it is currently in its R&D phase at its Australian subsidiary. To learn more about their product, I spoke with David Bucca, the Founder and CEO of Change Foods last week.

Bucca has worked for companies like Boeing, Hemple, and Hungry planet; after transitioning to a plant-based diet, he wanted to start a company that addressed the issues of climate change and animal welfare. To start Change Foods, Bucca brought on co-founder and now CTO Associate Professor Junior Te’o from the Queensland University of Technology to develop the fermentation techniques.

To create its cheese, Change Foods uses a fermentation technique, called precision fermentation, that is actually used to make insulin and animal-free rennet. Change Foods takes a variety of microorganisms (including yeast and filamentous fungi), genetically modifies them, and then ferments them with sugar. In turn, this produces key compounds like casein that are nearly bio-identical to those found in dairy and then can be combined with plant-based ingredients to create different products. The production cycle takes about one week to complete.

Companies in the plant-based cheese space are using cashews, legumes, and tapioca as the key ingredients in plant-based cheese products. However, for those who are omnivorous or flexitarian may not find that these alternative cheeses get the flavor, texture, or “meltability” right. Companies that create a hybrid dairy protein and plant-based cheese may be the solution to these particular consumers. San Francisco-based start-up Perfect Day ferments microbes and released a flora-protein based ice cream through the brand Brave Robot. Legendairy in Germany also ferments microbes and created a prototype for feta and mozzarella.

Change Foods is focusing on creating cheddar and mozzarella cheese, and the initial products will be priced about the same as artisanal cheeses. The company aims to be at market by 2022.