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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

ginkgo bioworks

Givaudan Partners With Ginkgo Bioworks to Increase Portfolio of Ingredients

This week Swiss flavor giant Givaudan announced it has partnered with synthetic biology platform company Ginkgo Bioworks to develop a new series of ingredients.

According to the announcement, Givaudan will “leverage Ginkgo’s long-established expertise in enabling companies to develop bio-based products to produce a number of innovative and sustainable ingredients through fermentation.”

Ginkgo Bioworks, which gained a national profile over the past year for its work to help accelerate the development of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, will use the same fermentation expertise and synthetic biology “foundry” that Moderna used to help Givaudan map the growth pathways of potential new ingredients. Ginkgo’s fermentation platform, which utilizes a bioreactor system called the Sartorius ambr250, leverages automation to run hundreds of benchtop bioreactors to accelerate the optimization process. According to the announcement, Givaudan will use this system to explore potential scale-up paths for numerous ingredients, including “those that are only available in minute quantities in nature.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Givaudan, the world’s largest flavor and fragrance conglomerate, would embrace synthetic biology as new terrain to explore for flavor development. Flavor companies are, at their core, ingredient hunters, employing armies of scouts and trend watchers around the world to identify new flavors as they emerge. Synthetic biology represents a new way to extract potentially exotic flavors and bring them to market faster in a way that was not possible before.

At first glance, one might ask why Givaudan partnered with Ginkgo and not Motif Foodworks, Ginkgo’s plant-based ingredient spinout. The answer lies in the fact the partnership is centered largely around Ginkgo’s precision fermentation platform, which even Motif relies on for development and scale-up optimization of new ingredients. Ginkgo also makes sense since the partnership goes beyond just food ingredients, as the two will also develop ingredients for other industries such as cosmetics and perfumes.

Motif Foodworks Moves Into New Home To Accelerate R&D Pipeline of Plant-Based Food Ingredients

Motif FoodWorks has a new home.

The company announced today that they have moved into a new 10,600 square foot facility in the Boston Seaport area, sharing a building with the company it spun out of last year, bioengineering platform company Ginkgo Bioworks. The new building includes labs, testing kitchens, and a new office space for its leadership team.

According to Motif CEO Jonathan McIntyre, the move is critically important to the company as it finally gives them their own in-house facilities for the first time, which will accelerate R&D and expand their in-house capabilities to better understand the properties of new plant-based food ingredients.

Up until now, Motif “didn’t have anything, we were a virtual company,” McIntyre told The Spoon. The new building’s “labs are designed for us to analyze food so we understand the kinds of ingredients and processes we need to make it taste better. It helps us discover new ingredients and characterize those new ingredients. And because we have kitchens here, put those into full food forms, and be able to design those foods with the new ingredients, test them, and bring them to consumer.”

Before the move, the company had to rent space at commercial research and university labs to get the work done. Now Motif has their own labs, fermentation tanks, and testing kitchens to help them build ingredient building blocks using the engineered microbes from Ginkgo.

Speaking of Ginkgo, I asked McIntyre why they couldn’t leverage the infrastructure of the company they were born out of and he made it clear that while they do take advantage of Ginkgo’s capabilities when necessary, the type of work the two companies do is fundamentally different.

“Their labs don’t really fit what we do,” said McIntyre. Ginkgo labs “are foundries of DNA synthesis and a bunch of other things. There is a transition between them generating a microbe that is been designed to produce a very specific product that gets transferred to us. In our labs, we have fermenters that grow microbes, allow microbes to produce the products, and then we are able to separate those from the bacteria and start working on those as food ingredients”

McIntyre also made it clear that while the new facilities will help them move towards scaling the production of their ingredients, the new building did not come with in-house pilot production plants. However, he doesn’t rule that out in the future.

“Eventually we’ll be doing more engineering process research, like how do we scale up the production of these things. That will require us to get pilot facilities. We’ll be renting them for a while, and then eventually, probably building our own.”

For now however, McIntyre and the company are just happy to have their own facility, even if it might be a while before everyone can be together.

With COVID, “we’re being extra extra careful about who can come in and how they get come in,” said McIntyre. “We limit the number of non-R&D people here, and even the R&D people only come in when they’re doing experiments in the lab.”

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. 

First Beer, Now Meat: How Yeast Can Help Us “Reinvent Our Food Structures”

Yeast is a hot topic of conversation these days: where to find it, what you’re baking with it, and how to create your own at home.

Sudeep Agarwala, a yeast geneticist at Ginkgo Bioworks, has you covered for that last one. He rose to Twitter fame not long ago after tweeting DIY instructions for how to make yeast out of what’s hiding in your cupboard.

But Agarwala knows a lot more about yeast than just how to hack it to make your own sourdough. For that reason, we invited him to speak at our latest virtual event, From Sourdough to The End of Meat.

Agarwala started off his presentation with a massive timeline outlining the evolution of humans. He specifically pointed to 10,000 BC — the time when we first started to use yeast to ferment food and drink. Our newfound love of yeast completely changed the trajectory of how we ate food, ushering in new foods like bread and beer. “We’re now at an age when we’re thinking about reinventing our food structures yet again,” Agarwala said.

If you’re curious about how yeast will shake up our food system, you should watch the whole conversation. You can find the recording here. Here are a few big takeaways (featuring a guest appearance by yours truly!):

Yeast could mean the end of meat
Ginkgo Biowork’s spinoff company, Motif Foodworks, uses microbes like yeast to create the flavor elements that can better mimic meat. According to Agarawala, technology can help make meat alternatives taste even more like the real thing.

Only recently, said Agarwala, has yeast technology evolved to the point where it actually has a shot at replacing the key flavors of meat. “I may get in trouble for saying this,” he said. “We’re on the verge of eliminating meat from our diets altogether.”

Yeast isn’t the only microbe out there
“I love yeast, but there are other microbes that are working for us as well,” noted Agarwala. He pointed to air protein, which can sequester carbon from carbon dioxide, as well as microbes that can fix nitrogen. These technologies leverage microbes to not only produce an output, such as protein, but also reduce the ecological cost of creating food.

Algae and bacteria are also able to make other foods (like your kombucha SCOBY). “There’s a whole microbial world sitting in your kitchen cupboard,” Agarawala pointed out.

What about my sourdough starter???
Bread makers, don’t worry — Agarwala had plenty of insight into how we’re all working with yeast during the pandemic. But he also had some thoughts on why sourdough starters could be an important tool for the future of fermentation in general.

“Yeast is a technology,” he said. “Maybe now that we’re seeing this technology growing on our counters, it is going to be more comfortable to think about, ‘What else can this technology do for us?'”

Perhaps since we’re all obsessed with yeast now, consumers will be more open to new foods grown from microbes — such as meat — down the road.

Our next Spoon Virtual Event is on May 28th at 10am PT, where Spoon founder Mike Wolf will speak with the Design for Food team at IDEO about how we design for a more resilient food system in a post-COVID world. Sign up here.

The Food Tech Show: The People Are Growing Yeast and Plants at Home Episode

It’s a very specific cultural moment when a Twitter thread about deriving yeast at home from the skin of fruits goes viral, but here we are.

The Spoon editorial team got together this week to discuss said Twitter thread from a Ginkgo yeast geneticist Sudeep Agarwala. We also chatted about a few other stories, including:

As always, you can find the Food Tech Show in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can also download this episode to your device or just click play below.

If you’d like to join the Spoon editorial team next week when they record the podcast, our next live podcast recording on Crowdcast is next Tuesday at 10 AM PST. You can sign up here.

Can’t Find Yeast? This Geneticist Says There’s a Solution Hiding in Your Cupboard

Obviously, Americans are baking a lot of bread right now. Don’t believe me? Just look at the aisles of your local grocery store — nary a packet of yeast to be seen.

According to NPR, sales of baking yeast were up 647 percent during the week ending in March 21, and 456 percent the week following. But if you can’t find those elusive packets to make your loaves/waffles/focaccia rise, don’t despair! One geneticist has a solution.

Sudeep Agarwala, a geneticist specializing in yeast for biotech company Gingko Bioworks (the parent company of alternative protein company Motif Foodworks), posted a tweet at the end of March that made a pretty bold claim:

If you’re an adamant baker, you likely know where Agarwala, is going. In the tweet thread he goes on to describe how to make your own sourdough starter using dried fruit (which is covered in natural yeast!), water, and flour. If you follow the instructions correctly you should be able to have your own burbling sourdough starter in two days.

For those of us who have been on Instagram lately, the fact that you can make sourdough starters at home is not exactly ground-breaking news. You likely know someone right now who is giving you updates on their starter’s progress — maybe you’ve even got one going yourself! Agarwala’s tweet also gives tips on how to experiment by adding wine or beer to tweak your starter’s flavor profile, or incorporating breadcrumbs to keep the starter fed when you can’t find flour.

What was more surprising from Agarwala’s tweet — and our subsequent phone conversation — was his broader take on bread’s role in the current pandemic.

“Yeast is technology, flour is culture,” Agarwala told me, as things turned anthropological on our call. “I can tell you the technology, but the actual cultural reasons being all of this… that’s a much bigger question.” His take? We’re baking so much bread because it’s familiar and comforting; “bread returns us to our childhood.”

Well, at least some of us. Agarwala did note that the fact that everyone in the U.S. seems to be using their fermentation skills to create bread right now is, well, a little basic. “There are plenty of other things that can be fermented — lentils, oats, rice,” he said.

Maybe as the rising mania around homemade bread starts to overproof and fall, we’ll see consumers begin to experiment making fermented comfort foods from different regions around the world. The next hot “it” food flooding your Instagram could be Indian dosas, thin pancakes made of fermented lentils and rice, or injera, the spongy Ethiopian flatbread made from teff flour. “Now is the time for all the multiculturalism we’ve been harvesting to take precedence,” Agarwala told me. “It’s exciting.”

Bonus? These dishes don’t require flour — another sought-after ingredient that’s nearly impossible to track down at your local grocery store.