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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Geltor

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.

Jellatech Raises $2M for Its Animal-Free Collagen and Gelatin

Jellatech, a company making animal-free gelatin and collagen ingredients, announced today it has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding. Green Queen was first to break the news. The round included participation from Big Idea Ventures, Sustainable Food Ventures, Iron Grey, YellowDog, 7 Hound Ventures, Capital V, Sentient Investments and Bluestein Ventures. 

Raleigh, North Carolina-based Jellatech came out of stealth mode in November 2020. The company grows gelatin and collagen in bioreactors, rather than sourcing those ingredients from the bones and skin of animals and fish. The company says it does not need to ship animals anywhere or slaughter them in order to develop its products. Rather, it uses animal cells to grow the collagen and gelatin.

Once inside a bioreactor, these cells produce the collagen, which can then be isolated and used in a range of different products in the food, skincare, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals, to name just a few areas. As Green Queen points out, plant-based alternatives like pectin or agar haven’t yet been able to replace traditional collagen and gelatin because of their limited functionality.

Jellatech’s cell-cultured method isn’t completely animal free, since animal cells are required. However, as noted above, the cell-based method doesn’t require ant animal slaughter. 

Geltor is another company developing alt-gelatin, albeit via an entirely different method. Geltor uses microbes to “grow” collagen and its constituent proteins, including gelatin, via fermentation.

Both startups aim to decrease dependence on the traditional collagen/gelatin market, which Jellatech says is worth $3.5 billion dollars is expected to grow 9 percent annually.  

Funds from this pre-seed round will go towards further developing products for the food, skincare and medical industries. Jellatech also said its first samples will be sent out by the end of April 2021.  

Geltor Raises $91 Million To Accelerate Time to Market for Biomanufactured Products

Geltor, which helps CPG brands in a variety of verticals such as cosmetics and food, is looking to scale up its biodesign capability to help these companies find more sustainable, animal-free alternatives for food and cosmetic items while also accelerating their time to market.

“We do two things,” CEO Alex Lorestani told the Spoon. “Building a portfolio of ingredients that can help brands right now, for products they’re building in the next six to 12 months. And then partner with folks that are thinking about solutions that they’d be bringing out in the next, you know, two, three years.”

Most biomanufactured products usually take a really long time to design and bring to market. Vaccines are a good example of this, where half a decade is considered fast to develop a highly scaled product with millions of units.

“Historically biotechnology has been really good at delivering on the timescale of pharmaceutical products, like many years, and that just doesn’t work for consumer product companies,” said Lorestani. “Their development cycles are fundamentally different.”

According to Lorestani, Geltor will invest the money largely in new people. “The number one thing that we invest in are the folks that develop technologies that can help us serve more and more customers with more sustainable ingredients,” he said. “We want to be able to do that faster and for more customers. That’s what we’re using the capital for.”

Geltor is part of a nascent group of companies such as Gingko Bioworks (and its spinout Motif Foodworks) that are raising significant amounts of funding to build the capability to rapidly develop engineered microbial ingredients and scale the biomanufacturing of products built around these ingredients. The transition from an industrial-centered food manufacturing to one which utilizes fermentation and other biomanufacturing processes will take time, but investors seem bullish as they start to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into these companies.

I asked Lorestani where he thought biomanufacturing was in its development and he pointed to the early days of another science discipline which is a foundation for much of today’s industrial-based food manufacturing.

“It’s like 1900 in chemistry,” he said. “I think that we’re at the very early stages. It’s going to be 100 year cycle for biology to really become and lead as the way that supply chains and lots of other things, get get built and delivered.”

Spoon Plus subscribers can see my full interview with Alex Lorestani in the video below. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geltor Partners with GELITA to Make Animal-Free Collagen, Eventually for the CPG Industry

With Halloween coming up, there’s a chance you might find yourself snacking on some brightly-colored gummy candies (my personal weakness) over the next few weeks. Though the candies may be delicious, the process for making gelatin involves grinding up assorted animal parts and is … not super appetizing.

Maybe in a few years you’ll be able to snack on gummies made from gelatin that’s derived not from animals but from fermentation. San Leandro, California-based company Geltor is currently using microbes to “grow” collagen and its constituent proteins, including gelatin.

The startup raised a $18.2 million Series A round last year and stated a goal of launching its animal-free collagen in the food industry by 2020. According to Food Navigator, yesterday Geltor got one step closer to that goal. The company has partnered with industry collagen maker GELITA to commercialize its animal-free collagen in supplements, like vitamins and skincare products, which will be for sale next year.

Geltor will also launch its animal-free collagen in other verticals too — namely the CPG industry. Referencing the GELITA partnership, Geltor co-founder Alexander Lorestani told Food Navigator: “This is the first step, but we’ll continue to look ahead to the broader food and beverage industry to strike partnership there.”

Geltor is one of a group of Silicon Valley startups making animal product alternatives through fermentation technology — that is, creating new proteins using genetically engineered microbes. Perfect Day makes animal-free dairy and Clara Foods is tackling eggs, starting with egg whites. Motif FoodWorks and Air Protein (formerly Kiverdi) are leveraging fermentation to make a broader range of alternative proteins for food usage.

Geltor may be launching in the supplement industry, but its technology could have a widespread impact in the food space. In fact, a surprising amount of everyday products contain gelatin or collagen, from broths to canned beans to caesar dressing. “We’re building the business to broadly serve the CPG industry,” said Lorestani in the aforementioned article. Which means in a few years, the process to make your gummy candies, not to mention a lot of other staple foods, could be a lot more appetizing.

This Startup Just Figured Out How to Create the Perfect Vegan Gummy Bear

For hundreds of years, humans have used gelatin to create consumer goods: as a cooking agent, in medicines and cosmetics, and as an essential element of candies like marshmallow and gummy bears.

Trouble is, making gelatin basically involves dropping the skin, bone, and connective tissue of animals into acid or alkaline baths—a process that doesn’t exactly line up with today’s rising standards for cleaner eating.

But don’t give up on those Haribo frog candies yet. Geltor is currently at work engineering a solution for those with a sweet tooth who prefer not to eat acid-dipped horse bones. The company programs microbes so they produce produce collagen—from which gelatin is made—via a fermentation process, leaving out the animal parts altogether.

Geltor grows the microbes in large fermentation tanks in its San Leandro, Calif. facility. The microbes, which naturally produce protein, are given instructions in the form of DNA sequences to create the collagen.

“Recombinant proteins are critical to the post-animal economy,” Geltor CEO and founder Alex Lorestani said in an interview last year. “They are also difficult and expensive to manufacture.” Lorestani believes his company’s platform can help build the necessary proteins for animal-free gelatin at a lower cost than was previously possible. Food manufacturers might then be able to seriously consider gelatin alternatives in their foods that can mimic the form and consistency of the real thing without having to include animal parts in the process.

The gelatin market is right now close to $3 billion. At the same time, however, there’s rising demand for alternative forms of gelatin that don’t rely on animal proteins to produce. It’s not just vegans causing this demand. Those with religious restrictions around food have to steer clear of some gelatins (namely, pork-derived gelatin, which is neither halal nor kosher). And there are concerns about animal diseases making their way into gelatin-based candies (BSE, for example).

While there are some substitutes already available on the market—pectin, agar, guar gum—anyone who’s ever tasted a “vegan gummy bear” knows it’s notoriously difficult to replicate the real deal.

Geltor’s platform addresses this very issue. The big question is whether it can do so at scale.

Lorestani and Co. say they are about five years from producing their gelatin in commercial-sized quantities for food industry buyers, though they reportedly already have a long wait list of potential buyers. The company also has to consider regulatory issues—namely, proving their product is a safe alternative.

Right now there’s not much in the way of competition. That will undoubtedly change over the next five years, since it’s more than just the candy makers need gelatin to make their products. Once the pharmaceutical and personal care companies get onboard, expect to hear lots of noise coming from this corner of the biotech world.

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