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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

honey

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.

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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