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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

new culture

With Production Milestone, New Culture Eyes Price Parity for Its Animal-Free Mozzarella

New Culture, a company that uses precision fermentation to make animal-free casein, says it has reached a new manufacturing milestone that enables it to produce enough casein for 25 thousand pizzas worth of cheese per manufacturing run.

This new production milestone, which the company achieved through partnerships with external manufacturing partners, pushes the company’s production capacity far beyond its earlier development volumes and, according to New Culture, puts it on a trajectory to reach price parity with factory-farmed cheese within three years.

The push for a more environmentally friendly dairy has resulted in several startups chasing animal-free casein, which gives cheese its stretchy, melty properties. While there are a number of plant-based mozzarella cheeses on the market, New Culture’s mozzarella is the first made at production volume with animal-identical casein, the protein that gives cheese its melty, stretchy properties. In addition to actually tasting like cheese, New Culture and other makers of precision fermentation-created casein (like Change Foods and Standing Ovation) also promise that their animal-free cheese will be free of lactose, antibiotics, and cholesterol.

Looking forward, New Culture hopes to produce enough casein for more than 14 million pizzas’ worth of cheese and has plans to expand into other cheeses. If the company can reach its promise of price parity, it should be able to carve out a nice slice of an alternative cheese market projected to hit $9.6 billion by 2032.

ADM Partners With New Culture as Part of Growing Buildout of Alt-Protein Production Infrastructure

ADM, one of the world’s largest food processing companies, has inked a deal with New Culture, a startup developing animal-free cheese utilizing precision fermentation, to offer joint product development and scale-up commercialization services.

The deal will help New Culture scale up production of its animal-free casein (casein is the protein that gives cheese its stretchy and melty goodness) as it eyes the commercial launch of its animal-free mozzarella in 2023.

From the release:

The partnership will also include collaborations to advance the commercial scale-up of New Culture’s animal-free casein and dairy products. ADM’s global manufacturing assets and expertise will accelerate New Culture’s efforts toward commercializing their animal-free mozzarella in the U.S. food service market, beginning with pizzerias in 2023. As New Culture grows its commercial footprint, ADM’s production capacity for both fermentation and dairy operations will be made available to meet the demand for New Culture’s melty, stretchy cheese.

The partnership marks the latest in a flurry of new initiatives by the food processing giant to position itself as a scale-up partner for alternative protein startups. Earlier this month, the company announced a joint venture with Asia Sustainable Foods Platform (a subsidiary of Singapore conglomerate Temasek) called ScaleUp Bio. The new company will work A*STAR’s Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation (SIFBI) to provide a lab for precision fermentation and scale-up services. ScaleUp Bio will provide access to 100L fermentation tanks for testing and optimization of future food products and high-scale production capabilities through access to a new facility with a 10,000L fermentation capacity.

The New Culture and ScaleUp Bio deals follow an announcement of ADM’s $300 million investment to build an alternative production center in Decatur. That move followed the acquisition of Sojaprotein in 2021. The company has said these two deals will increase its alt-protein production capacity by 30%.

ADM’s push into alt-protein scale-up services is part of a larger trend by big food to build-out infrastructure for the growing alt-protein industry. Beer giant AB InBev’s BioBrew, a division of the company’s ZX Ventures that provides scale-up for alt-protein startups, is working with Every Company (formerly Clara Foods) to help scale up its precision fermentation-derived egg products. Bitburger, a German-based brewery, is providing precision fermentation production capacity and sidestream byproducts as inputs for development of Mushlab’s mycelium-derived proteins for alternative meats.

Increased investment by big companies like ADM, AB InBev, and Bitburger is just the beginning of what will likely be a multi-billion-dollar alt-protein infrastructure build-out by big food over the coming decade. The Good Food Institute has said $27 billion is needed to meet demand by 2030 for plant-based meat alone. The tally will certainly be much higher when factoring in other alt-protein variants manufactured using cell-cultured and precision fermentation techniques. These investments come as a new wave of biomanufacturing startups building next-generation production facilities continue to pop up and receive funding.

 

How New Culture and Moolec Science Are Growing Cow-Free Dairy Proteins

Most of today’s vegan cheese startups face the challenge of reproducing cheese using ingredients like plant-based oils and nut milks. That’s no easy feat, as unique dairy proteins are responsible for some of the taste, stretch, and melt properties of cheese.

But alternative cheese may soon be getting a tech upgrade. A handful of startups have developed cow-free processes for replicating those key dairy proteins. Last week, The Spoon got on Zoom with the CEOs of two of those companies—New Culture and Moolec Science—to ask about the state of alternative cheese technology.

New Culture & precision fermentation

When California-based startup New Culture set out to develop a better alternative cheese, the company’s founders surveyed a range of processes that could be used to grow dairy proteins. Company CEO and co-founder Matt Gibson says that precision fermentation stood out because the technology had already been used by the conventional dairy industry at commercial scale.

“It’s a process that has been done time and time again,” says Gibson. Precision fermentation is used today to produce chymosin, a cheesemaking enzyme. “And that means that all those risk factors that come with anything that you scale up have really been eliminated. It’s a tried-and-true method of going from a small fermentation shake flask of say 50 milliliters to a large fermentation tank of 200,000 liters.”

In New Culture’s fermentation process, microbes are genetically edited to convert sugar into a dairy protein called casein, which makes up about 80% of the protein content in cow’s milk. To grow the protein at high volumes, the microbes need to be kept at a certain temperature and pH, and fed sugars at a specific rate.

According to Gibson, another advantage of using precision fermentation is that the regulatory process is relatively simple. This is partly because the dairy industry has set a precedent for using precision fermentation, and partly because New Culture is using the process to create an existing protein rather than a new ingredient.

“So there’s no concern from a regulatory point of view about the fact that you’re using genetic engineering,” he says. “You go through the regulatory process to show that the process you’re using—like what you’re feeding your microbe—is safe and stable. So the regulatory process is expected to be very smooth sailing.”

New Culture expects to complete the regulatory approval process next year. The company’s flagship cheese will be mozzarella, which they plan to launch as a branded product in restaurants in late 2022. In particular, Gibson says the team has its eyes on the pizza industry, which is a huge consumer of mozzarella, but has been held back from using alternative cheeses because today’s plant-based options don’t stretch well or tolerate the high temperatures in pizza ovens.

Casein is the foundation for all kinds of cheeses. Someday, the company could add other bacterial cultures and age their casein curd base to create blue cheese, brie, and other varieties. For now, they’re focused on building scale and getting their mozzarella onto menus.

“To quickly transition away from animal-derived cheeses, you need a technology that can scale quickly and get costs down quickly,” says Gibson. “And that’s what precision fermentation ultimately allows you to do.”

Moolec Science & molecular farming

Moolec Science, headquartered in the U.K., is taking a different approach: The company grows animal proteins using molecular farming. Last year, The Spoon reported on Moolec’s success in producing the cheesemaking enzyme chymosin (mentioned above) in plants.

Molecular farming solves the problem of scaling up in a different way from precision fermentation. Through molecular farming, says company CEO and co-founder Gastón Paladini, Moolec can take advantage of existing agricultural infrastructure for production purposes. “There’s nothing better than low-tech farming to produce at an enhanced scale and low cost.”

In molecular farming, crops are genetically modified to produce a target molecule. The Moolec team matches the target molecule with a host plant, creating different plant-molecule combinations for different applications. The company’s proof-of-concept chymosin is grown in safflower plants; its next products, meat proteins, will be grown in soy and yellow pea plants.

Moolec is a spinoff of Bioceres Crop Solutions, an agtech company. The team at Bioceres spent over a decade building the tech platform that Moolec now uses for molecular farming, says Paladini—“from the laboratories and construction design to the new genes, new seeds, field trials, farming, and harvesting.”

While precision fermentation companies can scale up using models created by the conventional dairy industry, Paladini says that the scale for molecular farming already exists. “There aren’t many precision fermentation tanks out there to produce alternative protein right now, so the industry needs to build new fermenters,” he says. “With molecular farming, we could use the same lands that are currently used to grow animal feed right now. You only need to switch the seeds.”

Bioceres has an existing network of growers in Latin America and the U.S., which is helping Moolec to expand its operations.

The regulatory process for molecular farming is relatively complicated, requiring both USDA and FDA approval (while the precision fermentation process requires only FDA approval). Moolec is currently working its way through the regulatory process.

Moolec’s process involves farming genetically modified crops on a large scale, a controversial practice in some regions. Paladini says that the team plans to take an active and transparent approach when it comes to communicating with the public about GMOs.

“We believe that we need to inform, educate, and promote the benefits of GM techniques, when they’re used for a good reason,” he says. Toward that end, the company is working on building an NGO in collaboration with scientists and industry representatives. The organization, GM4GOOD, will “promote the benefits of using science and GM techniques.”

Moolec is currently working with R&D departments at CPG companies to develop end products using its proteins. The team plans to re-launch its plant-derived chymosin later this year, and to introduce its alternative meat proteins in late 2022 or early 2023.

Both New Culture and Moolec can leverage knowledge from previous applications of their technologies, and both companies will face challenges as they build up scale and work toward regulatory approval. And there are questions to ask about both companies’ processes: about the energy intensivity of protein extraction, for instance, and the land use implications of growing animal proteins in plants at scale.

But both companies’ uses of technology to produce native dairy proteins mark big steps forward for alternative cheese. The next wave of cow-free cheeses will likely be more versatile and convincing, and more attractive to restaurants and CPG companies.

New Culture Raises $3.5M Seed Round for Its Lab-Grown Cheese

New Culture, a company making cheese through genetically engineered microbes, has closed a $3.5 million seed round of funding led by Evolv Ventures, the venture fund of Kraft-Heinz. Bee Partners, Mayfield, CPT Capital, Boost VC, and SOSV also participated in the round.

Started in New Zealand and recently relocated to San Francisco, New Culture makes animal-free cheese not with plant-based ingredients but with biotechnology in a lab. As my colleague Catherine Lamb explained when she spoke to New Culture this April:

As of now, there aren’t any plant-based options that can mimic casein [a milk protein] well enough to fool anyone. So New Culture’s team decided to make it themselves using something called “recombinant protein technology.” The company uses genetically modified microbes — like yeast — and “trains” them to produce certain proteins, like casein. The team then adds water, plant-based fat, sugar, and minerals to the casein, which creates something that acts and tastes a lot like milk.

New Culture just graduated from the IndieBio accelerator in San Francisco, a program, whose past participants also include companies like cultured meat company Memphis Meats and Finless Foods, which makes cell-based fish.

They’re not the only company out there attempting to make animal-free dairy products out of more than coconut or soy. Perfect Day, who partnered with food processing company ADM in 2018, uses similar technology to create dairy proteins without any actual cow involved. Currently they operate under a B2B model, selling their product to CPGs. The company also recently did an initial product launch of an ice cream made with their flora-based milk.

New Culture, on the other hand, is targeting high-end restaurants as a starting point to launch their cheese. But while the company did a taste test at the IndieBio demo day, there’s no actual cheese yet available to the public. As Lamb points out, the company has a ways to go before it reaches that point. New Culture said in this week’s press release that it is looking to set up an R&D and fermentation facility as well as further expand its team with this seed investment.

Want more on alternative dairy products? Perfect Day cofounder Perumal Gandhi will be speaking at this year’s SKS North America, which takes place October 7–8 in Seattle. Snag your tickets here.

New Culture is Developing Creamy Mozzarella Cheese Without the Cow

If you’re seeking out plant-based dairy, odds are you’ll be able to track down pretty tasty vegan versions of yogurt, milk, butter, and ice cream. But the Holy Grail of dairy alternatives, which at least this writer thinks has yet to be cracked, is vegan cheese.

New Culture, a New Zealand-based company that recently relocated to Silicon Valley, is trying to make an animal-free cheese that tastes just as good as the real thing. Only instead of turning to plants, they’re using biotechnology to reverse engineer cheese’s main ingredient: milk.

According to New Culture’s founder Matt Gibson, there’s a good reason that we haven’t yet been able to make dairy-free cheese that would fool anyone: the cheesemaking process super complicated.

Broadly speaking, milk is made up of water, fats, sugars (lactose) and proteins (casein + whey). When acid is introduced to the milk the proteins coagulate and bond to make water-resistant micelles, which are basically curds. Smoosh those curds together and you’ve got the makings of cheese.

But without casein, it’s really, really hard to make a cheese that tastes, cuts, and melts like the real deal. “Proteins are what we love about dairy cheese,” Gibson explained me over Skype.

As of now, there aren’t any plant-based options that can mimic casein well enough to fool anyone. So New Culture’s team decided to make it themselves using something called “recombinant protein technology.” The company uses genetically modified microbes — like yeast — and “trains” them to produce certain proteins, like casein. The team then adds water, plant-based fat, sugar, and minerals to the casein, which creates something that acts and tastes a lot like milk. “From there, it’s a pretty standard cheese-making process,” said Gibson.

First up, New Culture will be tackling mozzarella, which Gibson called “the gold standard of cheese.” I’m partial to a sharp cheddar myself, but this makes sense from a proof of concept perspective. Mozzarella doesn’t have a whole lot of flavor to hide behind, so it’s a good blank canvas to prove just how good New Culture’s technology is. Gibson’s goal is to make a product that’s good enough to stand on its own on a cheese plate, not just as a melted pizza topping.

New Culture’s animal-free mozzarella.

The company has got a ways to go before they’ll get there. As of now, they haven’t even made cheese from their own proteins yet. While they’re making milk through the aforementioned recombinant protein technology, they haven’t made enough proteins to do their own mozzarella R&D. So for now, New Culture is also purchasing pre-made casein micelles to supplement their development efforts.

The six-month-old startup is currently in science accelerator program IndieBio. Gibson told me they hope to have a cheese sample made with their own proteins ready for Demo Day on June 25.

New Culture isn’t the first company to use this type of technology to make cow-free dairy. Most notable is Perfect Day, a Berkeley-based startup that is also creating milk proteins in a lab by creating casein and whey with genetically modified microbes.

But where Perfect Day is targeting a B2B market, selling their “dairy” to big CPG companies, Gibson said that New Culture will have more of an Impossible Foods model. He plans to debut their cheese in a San Francisco high-end restaurant to validate the product before expanding into more mid-range food spots and maybe even retail. Gibson wouldn’t commit to an exact timeline, but said they plan to do their first taste test “at least 18 months from now.”

The thing is, Perfect Day — which has been around 5 years longer than New Culture — initially also had a B2C go-to-market strategy. However, in 2017 they pivoted to a B2B model so they could focus their efforts on R&D and also scale more quickly. They’re currently partnering with ADM to debut a whey protein powder, so that strategy seems to be paying off.

I wouldn’t be surprised if New Culture makes a similar pivot down the line. For a company that hasn’t even successfully developed a product, it’s pretty ambitious to say that they’ll have their own branded line of cheese in a restaurant in a year and a half. It’s also just a huge lift to simultaneously develop a product, create a brand strategy, and forge restaurant and retail partnership.

Sure, cheese is more expensive than milk or yogurt and they’ll be debuting at a fancy restaurant, so their price point doesn’t have to be super low. But eventually it will have to be, especially if they want to capture the attention of flexitarians.

New Culture is also working with a pretty lean team and comparatively little funding: as of now it’s just Gibson and two other founders. The company received $250k from IndieBio as part of the accelerator and has already raised an undisclosed amount of funding from “an international VC firm” over the past few months.

Regardless of whether they end up changing go-to-market strategies, New Culture is still getting into the dairy alternative space at a good time. Consumer demand for plant-based dairy is on the rise: according to Research and Markets, the global dairy alternative market is projected to reach $26 billion by 2023. And while Perfect Day may have a head start, there’s plenty of space for two (or more) players in the alt-dairy space. Especially if it means better tasting dairy-free cheese.