Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

fermentation

Kernel Mycofoods Wants to Make Affordable Fermented Protein for Emerging Markets

Whether or not you believe plant-based proteins are healthier for you or a way to save the planet, the one thing we can agree on is that they are not cheap. Over at my local Safeway I can buy a six-pack of Impossible Burger patties (24 oz.) for $15.99, or I can by a 10-pack (40 oz.) of Safeway-branded beef patties for $8.99. For families on tight food budgets, that $7 dollar difference is a huge deal.

Based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Kernel Mycofoods is on a mission to bridge this price gap and deliver sustainable, healthy, plant-based protein at an affordable price for people around the world. “We started looking at how could we make a product that was comparable without a price that will exclude the emerging markets,” Kernel CFO Miguel Neumann told me last week by video chat.

As Neumann explained to me, there are plenty of markets around the world clamoring for a plant-based protein option, but aren’t able to sell a $7 burger because people there can’t afford. So Kernel turned to fungi.

The basis of Kernel’s product is the Fusarium venenatum strain of fungi, which has already been approved for consumption by regulatory bodies including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and The European Food Safety Authority. Additionally, Kernel says that growing its protein requires less water and land use than beef, chicken or soy, and produces fewer CO2 emissions than raising beef or chicken.

Using precision fermentation, Kernel is able to transform this fungi into a mycoprotein that it says has a higher protein digestibility-corrected amino acid score than beef, soy and wheat gluten. The company isn’t just fermenting fungi, however. It is also using computer vision and artificial intelligence to adjust the fermentation process to achieve different outcomes for its protein. Neumann told me that they have researchers examining each spore on the fungi on a microscopic level. With that information, they can change certain factors in the fermentation process to change something like the protein’s texture.

Kernel isn’t in the business of creating its own line of myco-burgers, however. “There are plenty of companies that are producing a lot of very loyal customers,” Neumann said. “We can not go into a straight fight with them.” Instead, the company will sell its protein to CPG companies for use in plant-based burgers, crackers and other types of consumer products.

Kernel may not want to fight for marketshare with other consumer brands, but it will be facing plenty of competition in the overall mycoprotein space. Fermentation is a hot technology right now, and there are a number of players using the technology to transform fungi into mycoprotein. Unilever is using Enough’s Abunda mycoprotein as an ingredient in plant-based meat from The Vegetarian Butcher brand. Tyson and Kellogg both invested in MycoTechnologies last year. And Better Meat Co. opened up its production facility last month to create its Rhiza mycoprotein.

Neumann said Kernel should be able to launch at scale in January of 2022, at which point the price should drop from its current cost of $3 per kilo to $1 per kilo. As it grows, hopefully the company can continue to bring those prices down so that more markets around the world do indeed have the opportunity to enjoy Kernel’s plant-based protein.

Nature’s Fynd Raises $350M Series C for its Microbial Protein

Nature’s Fynd, which makes protein from microbes that originated in geothermal springs of Yellowstone National Park, announced today that it has raised a $350 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, with participcation from new investors including Blackstone Strategic Partners, Balyasny Asset Management, Hillhouse Investment, EDBI, SK Inc. and Hongkou, as well as other existing investors. This brings the total amount raised by Nature’s Fynd to more than $500 million.

The company’s protein is called Fy, and it’s a fermented fungi protein derived from the Fusar­i­um strain flavolapis microbe. Because Fy is grown through fermentation, the cultivation of the protein requires less land, water and energy than traditional agriculture. Fy is a complete protein with 9 essential amino acids, and it can be used to make alternative meat and dairy products. In February of this year, Nature’s Fynd announced its first two Fy-based products: a dairy-free cream cheese and a meatless breakfast patty. The company also makes a dairy-free yogurt that was eaten on camera by Bill Gates (a Nature’s Fynd investor) and Anderson Cooper during a segment on 60 Minutes earlier this year.

Fermentation has been dubbed the third pillar of alternative protein, alongside cell-based and plant-based protein. We have seen a wave of startups using fermentation technology to bring variety of animal-free products to market. Perfect Day and Remilk use fermentation to create dairy proteins. Nourish Ingredients ferments yeast to make plant-based fats. SuperBrewed ferments microbes to create a vegan protein powder than can be used in plant-based cheese and milks. And Better Meat Co. recently launched its own fermentation production facility to create its mycoprotein-based Rhiza ingredient.

All of this activity has also helped attract plenty of funding over the past year and a half. According to data from the Good Food Institute and Pitchbook, fermentation startups received $590 million in funding in 2020. In addition to Nature’s Fynd’s haul announced today, last month Motif Foodworks, which uses microbial engineering and precision fermentation to create novel food ingredients, raised $226 million.

Nature’s Fynd said it will use its new funding to expand its production capacity, add new products to its lineup, and set the stage for its international growth.

Meati Raises $50M Series B for Mycelium-Based Meat Alternatives

Colorado-based Meati produces whole cuts of meat alternative analogs from mycelium, and today the start-up announced that it has raised $50 million in its series B round (news from Forbes). The round was led by Acre Venture Partners and BOND, with participation from Prelude Ventures, Congruent Ventures, and Tao Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $109.1 million.

Meati uses fermentation to produce its alternative protein products, a technique that the Good Food Institute calls the third pillar of alternative protein. The company has so far introduced two products, a whole cut alternative steak and chicken breast. The mycelium steak was piloted at a restaurant in Boulder, Colorado last year, and the chicken alternative was only offered to select consumers that applied to taste test it. Through the versatility of mycelium, it is likely that Meati will be able to create a wide variety of alternative protein analogs.

This most recent round of capital will be used to develop an 80,000 square foot production plant in preparation for the startup’s commercial launch. According to the Forbes article, Meati’s goal is to be able to produce enough of its alternative protein in its new facility that would be the equivalent of 4,500 cows in a single day.

The Good Food Institute reported that approximately $1 billion has been invested into companies using fermentation to develop alternative protein. That being said, Meati faces a few competitors in this space. AtLast had an impressive funding round earlier this year ($40M), and is currently developing new alternative protein analogs alongside its existing bacon product. Prime Roots uses fermentation and fungi to craft various protein alternatives, including bacon, chicken, lobster, and beef. Focusing on the B2B realm, Mushlabs also ferments mycelium to create alternative proteins products.

Meati has stated that the commercial launch of its first product will be sometime in 2022. According to an article published on Techcrunch, the first commercial product will likely be a mycelium-based jerky.

Motif FoodWorks Raises $226M to Improve the Taste of Plant-Based Proteins

Plant-based food tech company Motif FoodWorks has raised a whopping $226 million in Series B funding, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The round was co-led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, through its Teachers’ Innovation Platform, and BlackRock. Rethink Food and existing investors also participated in the round. To date, Motif has raised $345 million.

The company says its new funds will go towards three areas: research and development; scaling and commercializing its food tech; and expanding its number of people and facilities.

Through all of these areas, Motif’s underlying goal is to improve plant-based foods by developing novel food ingredients that lead to better texture, mouthfeel, and taste in products. The company does this via a mix of microbial engineering and precision fermentation.

Motif, which was spun out of bioengineering platform Ginkgo Bioworks, moved into its own facility in the Boston Seaport area last year, where it is focusing on R&D efforts. Meanwhile, just last month, the company announced it had acquired extrudable fat technology from private research firm Coasun to use in mimicking fat textures in plant-based meats. Additionally, Gingko is licensing prolamin technology from the University of Guelph. The prolamin tech will improve the texture of plant-based cheese so that it can melt, bubble, and stretch as easily as its traditional counterpart. 

This massive Series B fundraise comes at a time when retail sales of plant-based foods surpassed $7 billion. Even so, there’s room for improvement. Research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and Earth Day Network found that 44 percent of consumers surveyed “don’t like the taste of plant-based foods.” However, two out of three said in the same research that they would be “willing to eat more plant-based foods instead of meat if plant-based foods tasted better than they do today.”

Fermentation technology, sometimes called “the third pillar” of alt protein, is a way to bridge the taste gap between traditional and plant-based meats. Ingredients made with biomass and/or precision fermentation can be combined with plant-based ingredients to achieve the kind of meat and dairy analogues that taste and feel as close to the real thing as possible.

Other companies, including Perfect Day, Change Foods, and Clara Foods are all working towards this goal, too.

Imagindairy Using Precision Fermentation to Create Animal-Free Dairy Proteins

Imagindairy, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup that re-creates dairy proteins without the cow, publicly announced itself and its technology today.

In a press release emailed to The Spoon, Imagindairy said that its micro-flora, precision fermentation technology re-creates nature-identical, animal-free versions of whey and casein proteins. These proteins can be used to develop analogs of dairy products such as cheese, milk and yogurt. Imagindairy says these analogs will have the same flavor, texture and nutritional value as conventional dairy products, and will also be lactose-free, and won’t carry the environmental and ethical complications around raising dairy livestock.

There is certainly an appetite for animal-free dairy products. Recent data from The Good Food Institute found that U.S. sales of plant-based cheese grew 42 percent over the past year and the category is now worth $270 million. More than 162 million units of plant-based yogurt were sold in 2020, up 20 percent over the last year. Meanwhile, sales of plant-based plant-based ice cream and frozen novelty was also up 20 percent with 88 million units sold in 2020.

Precision fermentation has been called the third pillar of alternative protein, alongside plant-based and cultured meat. Last year, the Good Food Institute reported that there were 44 companies working on fermentation-based alternative proteins, up from 23 in 2018. The best known is Perfect Day here in the U.S., which already has products made with its technology out in the market via the Brave Robot ice cream brand. In Germany, Formo (formerly Legendairy) said it will unveil its first precision fermented cheese this year. And over in the Asia-Pacific region, Change Foods is working on its own brand on animal-free cheese.

In its press announcement, Imagindairy said its technology can be “readily integrated” into existing dairy food production facilities. The company has raised $1.5 million in Seed funding, led by The Kitchen FoodTech hub with participation from the Israeli Innovative Authority, CPT Capital, New Crop Capital, and Entrée Capital.

Geltor Debuts Animal-Free Collagen For Food and Beverage Markets

Geltor, a startup that bioengineers animal-free proteins, announced today the debut of its vegan collagen product called PrimaColl. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, PrimaColl, which the company claims is the world’s first vegan collagen for food and beverage markets, is a nature-identical replica of poultry collagen derived using precision fermentation technology.

Collagen has lots of health benefits for humans and is especially important for us as we age. Because of this, animal-derived collagen, which is sourced from the bones and other byproducts of farmed animals such as chickens and cows, has become a crucial ingredient in food and beverage markets in recent decades.

But for vegans, traditionally derived collagen is obviously problematic. With no true substitutes on the market up to this point, many consumers abstaining from animal products are forced to use collagen “booster” products which claim to help increase human collagen production, but are not collagen substitutes.

Which is why Geltor sees such a potentially big opportunity (and also why the company has raised eye-popping amounts of capital). With traditional collagen being a $7.5 billion market opportunity, delivering the first-to-market natural replica of animal collagen could be a massive opportunity across a number of different products.

“As a next-generation bioactive, PrimaColl was designed for use in ‘beauty-from-within’ formulations,” Geltor CEO Alex Lorestani told The Spoon via email. “And these could take form in anything from ready-to-drink beverages or powder mixes, to collagen-infused snack foods, gummies, and more.”

One of the biggest opportunities will be nutritional supplements. According to the company, while there have been a number of supplements that claim to boost human production of collagen, there are not any widely available replicas of animal-free collagen that include the less common amino acid core of Type 21 collagen.

“Like most collagens, natural production of Type 21 decreases into adulthood,” said Geltor co-founder and CTO Nick Ouzounov in the release. “The functional collagen core of Type 21 was selected in the biodesign of PrimaColl due to its important role in interacting with other collagen types, and signaling activity for additional collagen production.”

According to the release, the company has started production of PrimaColl through a manufacturing partnership with Swiss contract manufacturer Lonza Specialty Ingredients (LSI), and is building inventory this summer with plans for wide commercial availability this fall. The company, which had interest from dozens of companies who got an early preview of the product, already has some partners who are making products with PrimaColl, Lorestani told The Spoon.

The release of PrimaColl is a big milestone for Geltor, a company that was founded in 2015 and was an early member of Indiebio. Like fellow Indiebio graduates Clara and Perfect Day, Geltor is one of a group of companies that have been building animal-identical proteins using microbial fermentation technology.

A Mid-Year Assessment for Alternative Protein

More companies, more investments, and many more scientific breakthroughs. Those are just a few predictions for the future of alternative protein the Good Food Institute (GFI) sets out in its latest State of Industry reports. Three different papers — one each on plant-based protein, fermentation, and cultivated protein — go in-depth into the trends that drove alternative protein in 2020 and what we can expect for the rest of 2021.

As we’ve written before, investment in alternative protein topped $3.1 billion in 2020, which is more than three times the amount raised by the sector in 2019. Driving those investments are, says GFI, numerous developments across the commercial landscape, investments, scientific and technological developments, and regulatory and government activity.

The State of Industry reports cover the obvious developments, such as the world’s first sale of cultivated meat and plant-based meat’s $7 billion in retail sales. But more interesting now is what we can expect in the future — that is, for the remainder of 2021 and on into the next few years. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of those developments:

Expect lots more pilot production environments for cultivated meat. Reaching pilot scale could be seen as the step that bridges a company’s proof-of-concept phase with its commercial phase. GFI notes that at this stage, companies would be producing “hundreds or thousands” of metric tons of cultured meat. (Millions would be required for a company to scale to an industrial level.) Reaching pilot scale would mean being able to supply “a limited number of high-end restaurants in the coming one to three years.” (Read more on why restaurants are critical to cultivated meat’s growth.)

As GFI points out, multiple companies are now transitioning into this pilot-scale phase, including BlueNalu, MosaMeat, and SuperMeat. The latter even turned its pilot production site (pictured above) into a restaurant where consumers can taste the company’s cultured chicken in exchange for leaving detailed feedback. Elsewhere, Aleph Farms and MeaTech 3D plan to have facilities running by 2022 and Avant Meats recently announced a pilot production facility for Singapore. UPSIDE Foods, formerly Memphis Meats, has also just broken ground on a facility.

Cellular agriculture will become its own field of study. One PhD candidate at Tufts University noted that we can expect cell ag to get its own degree program at universities, and have a “separate and distinct curriculum.”

Fermentation production will increase. “If we believe in the projection of 25%-30% CAGR, then for fermentation to even maintain its share of the market, there is a need for a 10x+ increase in capacity by 2030,” Jim Laird of 3F Bio states in GFI’s fermentation report. Of course, needing to increase and actually doing it are two different things, but one of the advantages of fermentation is that it is already seen as a ost-competitive, scalable, and validated process. Many, including the GFI, have begun calling it the “third pillar of alt protein.”

Meanwhile, a number of companies, including Solar Biotech, MycoTechnology, and Nature’s Fynd are developing technologies and processes that will make fermentation even more cost-effective, which could in turn increase companies’ ability to produce.

Fermentation could “revolutionize” the entire alt-protein landscape. It has the potential to influence other areas of alternative protein. As GFI’s report notes, “Fermentation can enable a new generation of proteins, fats, and other functional ingredients that combine with plant-based and cultivated components to create biomimicking whole-cut meats, egg replacements, animal-free dairy proteins, seafood products, and more.” 

Along those lines, the next few years could see hybrid blends of meat, where fermentation-derived protein could also include plant and animal cell components. Fermentation is also already part of a number of other “alt” products besides meat, including cheese and bee honey.

More restaurants will go plant-based. We’ve been mulling the future of the plant-based restaurant for a while. Now that the world is beginning to come out of its various stages of lockdown and people are returning to dining rooms, there’s an enormous opportunity for plant-based foods to take center stage at restaurants. More restaurants will move to full plant-based menus, such as those seen from Canada-based Copper Branch and, most recently, Eleven Madison Park in NYC.

Plant-based chicken will be a big part of this shift. Right now there’s a distinct lack of choices, both in restaurants and grocery stores, when it comes to poultry. Expect this to change rapidly, starting with restaurants. 

This is by no means an exhaustive list. It is also important to keep in mind the many challenges the alt-protein sector still has to face, from improving the taste and texture of plant-based meat to bringing down the cost of cell-culture media. There are also heaps of regulatory approvals to be obtained before many of these companies and solutions can actually reach consumers.

Some of these challenges will be solved in 2021; others are years away from solutions. But if there’s one overarching takeaway we can glean from GFI’s report trio, it’s that everything — from number of companies to production levels to investment dollars — is going to increase astronomically this year for alternative protein.

More Headlines

MeaTech 3D Will Produce Cultivated Fat, Whole Steaks at Its Forthcoming Pilot Facility – The Israeli bioprinting startup this week announced a pilot production facility where the company will scale up production of its cultivated fat and continue work on whole cuts of cultivated steak.

Memphis Meats Rebrands as UPSIDE Foods, Announces Cultured Chicken Product – The company rebranded and also announced that its first consumer product, cultured chicken, will be available to customers this year, pending regulatory approval.

Solar Biotech Raises $2M for Its Fermentation Tech – The Raleigh, North Carolina-based startup will use the $2 million in a debt-financing round to scale up its renewable-energy-powered fermentation technology, which it licenses to other companies.

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. 

Clara Foods Teams Up With AB InBev to Make Animal Protein at Scale

Alt-protein maker Clara Foods announced this week a partnership with ZX Ventures, the innovation arm of beer brewer AB InBev, to “brew” animal-free protein at a large scale via fermentation, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Clara Foods, which was founded out of the IndieBio accelerator, has been using precision fermentation for years to develop animal-free protein, including an animal-free egg white. But a major challenge is producing such proteins at scale — that is, in large enough amounts to realistically compete with the traditional animal protein industry. 

AB InBev, of course, is no stranger to fermentation at scale, it being the largest beer brewer in the world. The partnership with Clara Foods will combine AB InBev’s “centuries of expertise in scaled, food-grade fermentation and downstream processing gained from large-scale brewing processes” with Clara’s technology to develop more sustainable protein at scale. 

Speaking in the press release, Patrick O’Riordan, founder and CEO at BioBrew, a technology platform venture in ZX Ventures, pointed out that meeting the future food demands of the planet will require cross-industry collaboration that marries the old with the new. In this case, fermentation, a centuries-old process, will get combined with novel technologies from Clara. 

Scalability is key to the advancement of any alternative-protein right now. For Clara Foods and ZX Ventures’ BioBrew team, the goal is to produce alt protein — in this case egg whites — at a similar scale to beer brewing. Since brewing beer and fermenting protein aren’t quite the same thing, O’Riordan noted, in an interview with Food Navigator, that the technology for egg proteins will “probably be an adaptation of existing technology” currently used in beer-making.  

CEO Arturo Elizondo told The Spoon earlier this year that the company hopes to go beyond egg white replacements. “We wanted to have a real kick ass platform that is not just a chicken egg plant protein platform, or an egg protein platform, but a true animal protein production platform, so that we can flex in and out of different products,” he said. 

So far, the company has launched an animal-free pepsin. Other future products include an egg protein for beverages and the aforementioned egg white replacement.  

Meanwhile, the Clara Foods partnership is AB InBev’s first-ever with a food company, though it’s not likely to be the last.

MeliBio Raises a Sweet $850,000 Pre-Seed Round for Bee-Less Honey

MeliBio, a startup that makes real honey without the need for bees, announced today that it has raised an $850,000 pre-seed round of funding. Investors in the round include Big Idea Ventures, Joyance Partners, 18.ventures, Sparklabs Cultiv8, Sustainable Food Ventures, Capital V, angel investor Courtney Reum and two mission-driven family offices.

Founded in 2020, the Berkeley, California-based MeliBio uses precision fermentation, synthetic biology and plant science that replaces bees as the medium for making honey. The result is a “honey” that has the same taste, texture and mouthfeel of real honey without any harvesting from bees.

MeliBio is among a number of startups using precision fermentation to recreate familiar foods. Change Foods is making cheese from fermented microbes. Perfect Day is re-creating dairy proteins for foods like ice cream through precision fermentation. And Mushlabs is using fermentation to turn mycelia into a meat alternative.

The reason for all of this activity is to tackle the needs of feeding a growing global population while reducing the environmental impact that can come from traditional agriculture. Additionally, these new fermentation techniques could cut down the production time it takes to make these foods because you aren’t relying on traditional animal or crop growing cycles. MeliBio says its approach can help save 20,000 wild and native bee species that are essential to Earth’s flora and fauna.

According to the press announcement, MeliBio says it will supply food service companies with its plant-based honey as an ingredient. The first such product will be soft launched by the end of this year to its first customers. The company expects to expand its commercial product rollout in the first half of 2022.

To learn more about MeliBio, check out the recent podcast we did with MeliBio CEO, Darko Mandich at the end of last year.

Nourish Ingredients Raises $11M for Fermented Plant-Based Fats

Australian startup Nourish Ingredients, which makes plant-based fats, announced today that it has raised $11 million (USD) in initial funding. The round was led by Horizon Ventures and Main Sequence Ventures (a venture firm founded by Australia’s national science agency).

Nourish Ingredients has developed a proprietary yeast fermentation process that recreates the molecular structure of animal fats without using animal products. Additionally, Nourish’s process does not use existing materials such as coconut or palm oils, the harvesting of which is controversial because of the resultant deforestation and unethical labor practices.

In addition to being potentially more environmentally friendly, Nourish says that it’s fermentation process allows it to create flavor profiles and mouthfeel that more accurately mimic animal proteins such as seafood, pork, beef and chicken products.

Fermentation has been called “the next pillar of alternative proteins,” alongside cultured meat and plant-based proteins. We’ve already seen fermentation tech being applied in variety of ways including bee-free honey, animal-free cheese, and sausage patties.

At the same time, we’ve also seen a number of startups creating ingredients that help enhance non-animal proteins. Hoxton Farms is cultivating animal-free fats, and Swedish researchers are using electricity and carbon dioxide to turn air into fats.

According to a recent report from Boston Consulting Group and Blue Horizon Corporation, the market for alternative proteins is projected to hit $290 billion by 2030, but that ambitious figure comes with some caveats. First, alternative proteins much reach price parity with traditional animal meats, and there are a number of startups tackling that issue. Equally as important, however, is that alternative proteins must reach taste and texture parity with animal meat as well. If Nourish Ingredients’ technology works as promised, it will help alternative protein companies do just that.

SuperBrewed Foods Uses Fermented Microbes to Create High-Protein Plant-Based Alternatives

The Good Food Institute called fermentation the “third pillar” for alternative proteins, and $435 million was invested in fermentation companies in the first seven months of 2020. Fermentation itself is not a new technology and has been used since B.C. times to produce beloved products like beer, cheese, sauerkraut, and yogurt. This process can be used to modify the flavor and texture of plant-based ingredients to make them behave more like animal-based ingredients. An emerging start-up in the fermentation and alternative protein space is SuperBrewed Food, which ferments microbes to create a vegan protein powder that can be used as a key ingredient in plant-based cheese spreads, milk, and yogurt.

Bryan Tracey, the CEO and Founder of SuperBrewed Foods, was focused on how a gorilla is an herbivore, but could somehow bulk up to have such a large body mass on diet consisting of only plants. The answer was found in its gut-lining; a certain microbe in herbaceous animals allows them to thrive on a plant-based diet. “We went searching into the microbiomes of many different animals and found what we like to call the protein specialists, which are helping you digest the food that you eat to deliver you the nutrition that you thrive off of,” Tracey told me by phone last week.

The original microbe discovered by SuperBrewed was extracted from the gut lining of an undisclosed herbivore animal, and then multiplied using plant-based sugars to feed the growth. SuperBrewed Food uses a low-cost anaerobic environment to grow its bacteria, which is the same process that beer breweries use. Once the bacteria is multiplied, it is washed, separated, and dried to create SuperBrewed Food’s protein powder.

The company is focused on appealing to both flexitarians and vegans, and one appeal to its protein is the B12 content. Vegans typically have to take B12 supplements, but a single teaspoon serving of the protein powder contains 25% of the daily recommended serving of B12.

SuperBrewed Food sent me some prototypes to try that showcased the applications of its microbe-based protein. I sampled three plant-based cheese spreads made by Superbrewed that used its protein, and I was pleasantly surprised by the fluffy texture and creaminess of the cheese spreads. Other vegan cheese spreads I’ve sampled are dense or gummy, but the SuperBrewed spreads had a texture similar to whipped cheese spreads I ate in my pre-vegan days.

In 2020, companies using fermentation to produce alternative protein products raised a total of $837 million in capital, so there are certainly more players emerging in this space. Perfect Day produces flora-based alternative dairy products by fermenting yeast. Nature’s Fynd applies fermentation to a microbe that was originally extracted from the geothermal pools of Yellowstone National Park, and recently unveiled its first product line that incorporates its proprietary Fy Protein. Change Foods uses a process called precision fermentation to create alternative dairy products and is currently developing mozzarella and cheddar.

To date, SuperBrewed has raised $45 million in capital from private investors. The company is about to open its first round of funding to outside investors and will use this to launch its first products in the market in early 2022. The first products brought to market will be plant-based cheese spreads, cream cheese, and hard cheese.