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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

fermentation

HakkoBako is Making Connected Fermentation Chambers for Pros and Home Foodies

While fermented food has long made up an important and tasty part of our diets, this food powered by healthy microorganisms is finding newfound interest nowadays everywhere from the high-end restaurant to the home hobbyist to the food science lab.

However, even as this century old process enters the modern day zeitgeist, there hasn’t been much innovation in the tools in recent decades that help chefs or home cooks try their hand at fermentation. Oftentimes, chefs just use a variety of mason jars and crocks to ferment their food, or just repurpose other equipment, like combi-ovens or dehydrators, to act as makeshift fermenters.

All of which got Hong Kong-based food entrepreneur Tommy Leung asking why there wasn’t more modern equipment to empower the professional or home chef when it came to fermentation. Leung saw an opportunity to create a modern piece of equipment that would enable chefs to have multiple fermentation projects in process at once, where they could manage their fermented food with precise monitoring tools while not turning their kitchens into something resembling an eighteenth-century apothecary’s lab.

The result is HakkoBako, an IoT-connected fermentation chamber for professional food producers. The HakkoBako will have both an app as well as a touchscreen on the front of the device where users can start projects, control temperature and humidity for their fermentation food, and monitor their food with precise data logs of temperature via the app. The chamber, which will have both warming and refrigeration modes, will also have an internal camera to monitor the state of projects. Users will be able to enter and save recipes on the system.

Tommy Leung in front of a HakkoBako chamber

“HakkoBako is building a fermentation chamber that lets chefs create unique and proprietary foods and flavours,” Leung told The Spoon via email. “We are using technology to make the fermentation process easier, faster and with more consistent results.”

According to Leung, the company has developed multiple prototypes that are currently being used by chefs and food developers. They’ve also started to work with a contract manufacturer in China, but the pandemic has made in-person visits to the manufacturer difficult and has put them a little behind schedule on production of the professional unit.

He also told The Spoon via email that they have plans for a home fermentation chamber that they are hoping to launch in the spring of 2021. Targeted at a price point of roughly $200 (versus around $5,000 for the commercial version), the home HakkoBako will allow users to make things like yogurt or kimchi.

Long term, the company also has plans for a fermentation lab that would be a destination for other food innovators. According to a deck Leung provided to the Spoon, the lab will “will provide support, novel ingredients and techniques with on-going testing, recording and development of the chefs recipes.”

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.

Remilk Raises $11.3 Million for its Microbial Fermented, Animal-Free Dairy

Remilk, an Israeli startup that makes animal-free dairy, announced yesterday that it has raised $11.3 million in Series A funding (hat tip to CTech). The round was led by fresh.fund, with participation from CPT Capital, ourCrowd, ProVeg, Hochland, Tnuva and Tempo.

Remilk creates its non-dairy dairy through a process of microbial fermentation. The result is the production of real milk proteins that the company says creates milk that is identical to cow’s milk without the need for any actual cows.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because microbial fermentation is the same process Perfect Day uses to create its own animal-free dairy proteins. Perfect Day, however has been around since 2014, raised $361 million, got FDA approval for its whey-free protein, and has its product to market through the Brave Robot ice cream brand.

Fermentation is a hot topic in food tech these days. In September, the Good Food Institute issued a report calling fermentation the third pillar of alternative protein. As we wrote at the time:

In the last five years there’s been a “Cambrian explosion” of companies in this segment, Nate Crosser, start-up growth specialist at GFI and author of the report, told me in an interview this week. By mid-2020 there were 44 fermentation companies globally working on alternative proteins, up from 23 companies in 2018.

Some of those companies include Change Foods, which is making animal-free cheese through fermentation, and a company called Melibo,which is using precision fermentation to create honey without the bees.

In addition to being a part of the fermentation trend, Remilk is also among a wave a food tech startups coming out of Israel. Companies there are doing really innovative things with plant, and cell-based meat (and chicken) as well as kitchen robotics.

Bee Honey is the Latest Animal-Free Food To Come From Precision Fermentation

Ahh, the magic of fermentation.

Over the past couple of years, the age-old process that brought us beer, soy sauce and kombucha has become suddenly sexy as it’s taken on new power through innovative startups trying to reinvent our food system.

While old-school fermentation continues to be a highly scaled workhorse, a new group of startups now use fermentation in innovative new ways that allow them to replicate proteins and other food compounds normally sourced from animals. In other words, they’re making animal products without the actual animal.

The end-result is products like Perfect Day’s ice cream or New Culture’s cheese that replicate the taste and experience of food produced the old fashioned way, on farms and through industrial production, without the need for animals.

And now, the miracle of precision fermentation is bringing us a new analog for a food that is particularly in peril: bee honey.

A startup by the name of Melibio wants to create bee honey using microbial fermentation technology. The “honey,” which company CEO Darko Mandich says “resembles the taste, the texture, and the viscosity of bee-made honey,” will be made by replicating the process used to create bee honey.

Why a honey alternative? As most know at this point, the honey bee population has been in precipitous decline over the past decade. Climate change, pesticides and, yes, murder hornets all continue to pose a threat to honey bees and the $7 billion honey industry.

Of course, creating biosynthesized honey won’t replace honey bees themselves. The declining bee population remains a problem, especially given the larger role of bees as pollinators To help us there, we may have to rely on technology Hail Maries like robotic bee drones or bubbles to solve the problem.

So how soon will it before we can taste Melibio’s bee honey without the bee? According to Mandich, the company plans to launch their honey replacement sometime next year and that 14 companies have signed letters of intent to use the product.

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An AWS For Protein? Scaling Bio-Manufacturing Platforms To Build Out The Next Generation of Food

But if you want to making a next-gen protein, there’s a good chance you’re going to have to raise millions of dollars in venture funding to build out your own bio-manufacturing factory.

Why? In large part because the platforms for creating fermented or cultured food products products at scale haven’t existed to the same degree that as in other spaces.

However, according to FTW Ventures lead investor Brian Frank, that may soon change. Like me, Frank comes from the world of computer tech where so many startups from the past two decades were built upon the terra firma of technology platforms in cloud computing (AWS), mobile apps (Apple) and social media (Facebook).

So, naturally, when we sat down recently to talk about the launch of his recent fund, I wanted to ask him about who are the platform builders in the world of alt-protein.

He said they are coming.

“In the bio-manufacturing space, we have had that for pharma and therapeutics, we’ve had co-manufacturing, but for food, it really hasn’t existed. And so we’re now getting to the stage where if I’m Perfect Day, and the reason that I raise a ton of money is because I need to build up my own factory because no one’s offering me services or capabilities to build this on top of their platform.

“However, the future that we see is that you can create a platform where people can ride on top of your technology, or you can create the way to allow people to make designer goods so that things can be tailored towards a specific need,” Frank said.

Frank sees these new platforms serving as a couple different roles, the first of which is in accelerating design. Much in the same way a processor design company like ARM Holdings helped an entire industry of computing companies build semiconductors around their intellectual property, new companies with IP and design expertise in key pillars of future food can be used to accelerate design in new ways.

Frank gave Geltor – a company in which he was an early investor – as an example around which a company can leverage in designing new core food components rather than starting from scratch.

“The idea of Geltor as a platform is the idea that they can make proteins, collagen and gelatin to service any number of different needs because they’ve shown they can do it for a couple different categories: in cosmetics, in nutraceuticals, and very soon, you know, in food,” Frank said.

He also pointed to a second group of companies that are starting to serve as infrastructure platforms that new food innovators can leverage as they look bring their products to market at scale. He gave Culture Biosciences – one of the Spoon’s Food Tech 25 for 2020 – as an example.

“Culture Biosciences is basically building out multiplex strain (yeast or bacteria) development rigs that are automated and analyzed,” said Frank. And so if I have a specific need of a strain to do X, they can multiplex and run a bunch of different tests to find the stream that works best. And then they can hand that back to you and say, Here you go, here’s that stream that you wanted that does x and does x at the highest volume or rate.”

Frank and I talked about a whole host of other topics, including the evolution of the future protein space into three areas of innovation, as well as the innovation happening in food packaging. If you’d like to see my entire interview with Frank, Spoon Plus subscribers can just click below. If you’d like to learn more about Spoon Plus, just go here.

New Report Calls Fermentation The Next Pillar of Alternative Proteins

A new report released today by the Good Food Institute adds a third pillar to the alternative protein sector alongside cultured meat and plant-based proteins: fermentation. 

In the last five years there’s been a “Cambrian explosion” of companies in this segment, Nate Crosser, start-up growth specialist at GFI and author of the report, told me in an interview this week. By mid-2020 there were 44 fermentation companies globally working on alternative proteins, up from 23 companies in 2018. 

“I was surprised to see how much traction was behind this segment, in terms of investment in particular,” Crosser said. Cultured meat gets all the press, but in 2019 fermentation-based protein companies raised 3.5 times more capital than cultivated meat companies, and in 2020 they’ve already raised $435 million of the total $1.5 billion invested in alternative proteins. 

Fermentation uses microbes to produce proteins and functional ingredients used in animal-free meat, egg and dairy products. Part of the allure to investors is that the technology is “commercializable today,” Mark Warner, a consultant on alternative proteins who specializes in scaling up fermentation commercialization told me in an interview on Tuesday. There are already companies and facilities using similar methods to mass produce enzymes. “The tech is generally proven. It’s the organisms that are being newly introduced.”

Because there are a myriad of organisms and approaches that can be used in fermentation, GFI breaks down fermentation companies into 3 categories in their report: traditional, biomass, and precision fermentation.

Traditional, as its name would suggest, refers to a long-established use of microbes to alter flavor, nutrition or texture—like the lactic acid bacteria used to make cheese or MycoTechnology’s plant protein with improved taste and functionality.

Biomass fermentation is all about mass producing protein. It relies on fast-growing, protein-dense microorganisms like algae and fungi. Meati uses this approach to make its mycelium-based steak. And last but not least, there’s precision fermentation, the process used to make Impossible Foods’ heme protein or Perfect Day’s whey protein. This approach, which can often rely on genetic modification, is used to produce highly functional proteins or ingredients that must be very precise but are needed in lower quantities.

The report is intended to give potential or existing investors an idea of the different approaches and state of the industry, Crosser said. Several major tech and agriculture players are already backing fermentation companies, including ADM Capital, Louis Dreyfus Co., Kellogg, Danone and Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Venture. Meanwhile major food and lifestyle companies like DSM, JBS, Novozymes and DuPont are working on in-house fermentation-derived alternative protein products.

But it may eventually take more than private funding if alternative proteins are really going to disrupt the meat and dairy industries, Warner said. Like with biofuels, alternative proteins may eventually require government funding to really take off.  “From my perspective, [this report] is going to be vital in framing the need for fermentation for investors,” Warren said, “but also public policy and any discussion around government funding.” 

While the entirety of alternative proteins industry is in a race to market, fermentation companies are expected to do more than join the contest. A high percentage of the fermentation segment is B2B, according to Crosser. They’ll be developing the components needed for cell culture and the ingredients needed for plant-based products.  “Their success is going to fuel the rest of the industry,” he said. “Fermentation serves as a force multiplier for the entire alternative protein sector.”

Mushlabs Raises $10M to Scale Up Its Mushroom-Fermentation Tech

Biotech company Mushlabs has raised $10 million in Series A funding for its mushroom-fermentation process that can provide alternatives to traditional meat. According to an exclusive report from AgFunder News, the round was co-led by Singapore’s VisVires New Protein and Switzerland’s Redalpine, and included participation from existing investors Happiness Capital and Joyance Partners. This brings Mushlabs’ total funding to date to $12.2 million. 

The company uses a fermentation process to grow mycelia — also simply known as the root of a mushroom — that can act as a meat replacement. According to the company’s website, that process involves cultivating pieces of mycelia in a controlled environment and feeding them side streams, or waste byproduct from other industrial and agricultural processes that can include sugarcane, rice husk, and spent grain. In bioreactors, the mycelial cells ferment the side streams and multiply, growing a protein-rich biomass Mushlabs then harvests and uses as the main ingredient for its products. 

As of now, the company has not disclosed exactly what materials it uses as its side stream. CEO Mazen Rizk did, however, tell AgFunder that “they could potentially include a wide range of leftovers from farming, foodservice, food processing, and other agrifood segments.” He also noted that the biomass “contains a variety of micronutrients and fibers, some of which have prebiotic properties,” which makes it potentially more attractive than other alt-protein products that contain less-than-healthy food additives to mimic the taste and texture of meat.

Mushlabs joins a growing number of companies using mushroom fermentation as a means of making alternative proteins that can be used in place of meat. In June, MycoTechnology raised $39 million for its mycelia-fermentation tech. Prime Roots uses a process akin to beer brewing to make meat replacement products, including bacon. Biotech company Ecovative is using mushroom roots to improve the texture of alternative meats. And as Spoon contributor Ashlen Weddington can attest, Emergy Foods promises its Meati brand of mycelium-based steak mimics the mouthfeel of whole cuts of meat. 

Mushlabs plans to use its Series A round to increase production and will focus first on the B2B realm. 

Talking 23andMe For Farms, Bioreactors-as-a-Service & Other Crazy FoodTech Ideas With Dave Friedberg

But here’s the thing: most ideas about the future sound a little crazy the first time you hear them.

I had known about Friedberg for some time, in part because was the founder and CEO of agtech’s first unicorn in the Climate Corporation, a company that sold to Monsanto in 2013 for over $1 billion.

More recently I’d been tracking his progress at the Production Board, a company that is essentially an idea incubation factory for food, bio and ag tech concepts. The group is run by what Friedberg describes as “operators more than investors”.

The Production Board company portfolio is strung together by something closer to a grand unified theory about how the world should work rather than any sort of single investment theme. This theory, which Friedberg articulates in a manifesto on the Production Board website, reads as much like a science fiction short story as it does an investment guide and is centered around how the world’s existing food and agricultural production systems are antiquated relics of an inefficient industrial production processes that have taken root over the past couple centuries.

I sat down for a (virtual) meeting with Friedberg recently to talk about how the Production Board works and the progress he is making for upending some of the antiquated food and ag systems. We also talk about Friedberg thinks the future of food could look like ten years or more in the future.

You can see some excerpts from our interview below. In order to see the full interview and read a transcript of our conversation, you’ll want to subscribe to Spoon Plus.

Friedberg on how crazy it is we aren’t harnessing the full technology development to address our problems around food and agriculture:

If a Martian came down to planet Earth and they look at the way we’re doing things they would say, “that’s a little bit crazy. Not only that, but it’s crazy that you guys do things the way you do them given all the technology you have. You can do crazy shit as humans. You can like write DNA and you can like ferment things in these tanks and make whatever molecule you want. And you can pretty much print anything anywhere using different chemistry.” It’s ridiculous that the systems of production operate the way that they do.

Friedberg on the idea behind Culture Biosciences, a company he describes as an AWS for Bioreactors:

If you fast forward 50 years, Tyson Foods and these feedlots and cattle grazing, I mean, it’s so fu**ing inefficient it’s just unreal. It’s mind blowing how much energy and money and CO2 is part of the system of producing meat and animal protein. And we have the tools to make animal proteins and fermenters, so if you could have a fermenter in your home, and it just prints meat when you want it, I think that would be pretty cool. Technically the science is there, the engineering isn’t. And that’s the thing: with a lot of these things, the science is proven, but a lot engineering work still to do. But it’s, it’s feasible. All these things are feasible.

Friedberg on how the Production Board germinates ideas that ultimately become one of their portfolio businesses:

We do primary research, we spend a lot of time with scientists and researchers and identify new and emerging breakthroughs in science and technology. We also spend time in the markets we operate in: food, agriculture, human health, increasingly looking at things like energy materials. And then we try and identify what’s a better way of doing this thing in this market?

So using all these new breakthroughs using all this new science, using all this technology that might be emerging, how can we do something that can transform one of these markets and really do a 10x on it? If it’s not a 10x, if it’s just a 5% better model or a 10% better model, it’s not worth doing. If we can 10x the market – reduce cost or energy by 10 times – then it becomes kind of exciting. And so that’s how we kind of think about operating business opportunities.

The full interview and transcript are available for Spoon Plus customers. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

Perfect Day’s Ice Cream, Made with Animal-Free Dairy, Debuts in SF

Perfect Day, the company which uses fermentation to make animal-free dairy from microbes, announced its first official retail partner today. The startup is working with Smitten Ice Cream in the Bay Area to create a line of ice creams — dubbed Smitten N’Ice Cream — featuring Perfect Day’s fermented protein. Perfect Day provides the flora-based dairy base, while Smitten develops the flavors and churns the pints.

N’Ice Cream is available in four flavors: Brown Sugar Chocolate, Fresh Strawberry, Root Beer Float and Coconut Pecan. Those in the Bay Area can do a socially distanced pick up of Smitten N’Ice Cream pints from Smitten Ice Cream stores for $12 each, or order them for delivery for $13. Consumers on the West Coast can also pre-order a four-pint bundle of N’Ice Cream for delivery. Orders will ship on May 15 and cost $52.00 plus shipping.

You might recall that Perfect Day has already tested its flora-based dairy in ice cream. Last July, the company did a limited-edition sale of 3,000 pints available through its website and sold out.

I was lucky enough to sample Perfect Day’s flora-based ice cream last year and thought it was nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. One thing I was curious about at the time was labeling. What language would Perfect Day use to communicate that its dairy was animal-free but made from microbes, not plants?

At least with the N’Ice Cream partnerships, they’ve decided to add “Perfect Day clean-label base” to the ingredient list of each co-branded. The pints are also labeled “vegan” and “lactose-free.”

One thing has changed from Perfect Day’s launch last year: its price point. Last year’s limited-edition ice cream cost $60 for three pints (plus almost double that for shipping). At $12 a pint, their new price point is much more reasonable, and on par with some of the fancier vegan ice creams on the market. The lower price could be because Perfect Day teamed up with Smitten to actually produce and package the ice cream, instead of doing it all themselves.

The N’Ice Cream launch comes just a few weeks after the FDA officially approved Perfect Day’s flora-based protein as GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe). When I spoke with Perfect Day co-founder Ryan Pandya after the news broke, he told me that the company had “numerous product launches” coming up with partners “across different product categories and channels.” He also noted that COVID-19 had not dramatically altered any of these timelines.

Add to that Perfect Day’s $200 million in funding, and my guess is that we’ll be seeing flora-based dairy show up in a lot more than just ice cream very soon.

Dye Another Day: Michroma Makes Sustainable Food Coloring through Fungi Fermentation

Be it Red 40 or Yellow 6, food dyes are hiding in a surprising number of food and bev products on your local grocery shelf. Sometimes these dyes are made from natural ingredients like beet juice, turmeric, or even bugs (which means they’re not vegan, and also kinda gross). But natural dyes aren’t as vibrant or heat-resistant as their artificial counterparts, which are typically made from petroleum (also gross).

Michroma, a new company currently participating in science accelerator IndieBio, is out to recast the food dye industry. The startup is developing a platform to create dyes through fermentation, specifically mushroom root fermentation. Michroma scientists use CRISPR to edit the genes in particular strains of fungi so that when they’re placed in a bioreactor they secrete vibrant, colorful dyes.

Ricky Cassini and Mauricio Braia founded the company a year ago in Argentina before moving to San Francisco for IndieBio. Cassini, who is the CEO, told me over the phone this week that Michroma has raised $250,000 from IndieBio and previously raised $200,000 in Argentina.

According to Cassini, Michroma’s fermentation process could usher in a more sustainable production method for food dyes. In addition to being free from stuff like petroleum and crushed-up bugs, Michroma’s dyes are incredibly scalable to produce since the funghi require very little light, space and energy. Cassini also told me that their fermented dyes are significantly more heat-resistant than plant-derived natural dyes.

Michroma is currently focused on developing red dye. The company can already make orange and yellow. Next up it’ll tackle blue, green and black food colorings.

For now, the startup is creating dyes at a lab scale and, according to Cassini, their products are already cost-competitive with plant- and insect-based dyes. Michroma will sell its dyes B2B to large food corporations (as well as cosmetic and pharma companies), but that won’t happen for a while yet. Cassini said that since their technology is new for food dye, they need to go through something called a “color additive petition” to have it recognized as safe to eat. That could take up to two years. By that time, Cassini said that the fermented dyes will cost around the same as those made with petroleum.

However, he’s hoping that it won’t take a full two years before they can start selling. If he’s right, maybe soon you’ll be able to scan the back of a bag of Dorito’s and see “fermented dye” listed instead of, you know, petroleum and bugs.

Lab-Made Cheese Maker Legendairy Raises $4.7 Million

Legendairy Foods, which ferments microorganisms into cheeses with the same process used for making insulin, has raised $4.7 million from a group of investors that include German drugs and tech company Merck KGaA (not to be confused with the American drug company, Merck) and UK-based investment company Agronomics.

The Berlin-based startup told Bloomberg it has already created prototypes of mozzarella and ricotta. The company’s process involves mixing microorganisms and sugar, fermenting them into milk protein and creating dairy products such as cheese. It also plans to integrate plant-based ingredients into its products.

“The food industry has crossed an inflection point — for the first time in human history, we are capable of producing real dairy products without the need of breeding and raising animals,” Raffael Wohlgensinger, co-founder and CEO of Legendairy, said in an investor release. He added that the company will “fully leverage our core technology and bring our delicious, animal-free cheese to market in the coming years.”

Legendairy, which says it is Europe’s first cellular agriculture company developing lab-grown dairy products, joins a growing group of startups dedicated to removing animals from the process of creating milk. Perfect Day, which this month raised $140 million in Series C funding, creates dairy products with genetically engineered microbes and plans to sell its products to foodmakers. Another company that creates dairy from genetically engineered microbes is New Culture, which closed a $3.5 million seed round. It plans to sell its cheeses into high-end restaurants. Meanwhile, TurtleTree Labs is creating milk in a whole different way: actually growing mammary gland cells in a lab to produce milk.

It’s clear that in the coming years, there will be plenty of options besides nut- and soy-based milk and cheeses for those who forgo animal-derived dairy products.

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