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Yeast

December 1, 2020

Biospringer Unveils Yeast Protein Designed for Plant-Based Alternatives

Biospringer, a unit of the world’s largest yeast producer Lesaffre, announced the launch of a complete protein developed through yeast fermentation this week. The yeast protein has been specifically developed for plant-based cheese and meat alternatives.

The company’s patented protein technology is called Springer Proteissimo 101, and the end product is both vegan and gluten-free. As an ingredient in plant-based protein products, Biospringer believes it has certain advantages over other ingredients. Some grain, nut, seed, and legume proteins can have a chalky or starchy texture. According to Biospringer, one of the best parts of its yeast protein is that it lacks this bothersome texture. Additionally, Springer Proteissimo 101 boasts a 75 percent protein content. For comparison, pea protein has anywhere between 48 to 90 percent protein content, and soy protein is comprised of 35 to 38 percent.

Yeasts are important single-celled microorganisms that allow us to create beloved products like bread, baked goods, and alcohol. And, as we are now finding out, yeast is capable of so many other applications. Perfect Day uses a yeast-fermentation process to create animal-free dairy products and launched Brave Robot ice cream this past summer through the Urgent Company. Motif FoodWorks uses different microbes, including yeast, to develop customizable proteins and flavor elements for plant-based alternatives. In addition to the yeast protein Springer Proteissimo 101, Biospringer has a line of yeasts used specifically to recreate the flavors of cheese and umami in vegan products.

This week, Biospringer is presenting its new yeast protein at Fi Europe Connect 2020, a virtual event that focuses on global food ingredients. Springer Proteissimo 101 is available as an ingredient to food manufacturers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

May 22, 2020

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.

April 24, 2020

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:

  • Does quarantine time mean it’s the smart kitchen’s time to shine?
  • How Scott Heimendinger and Larry Jordan inspired all of us by showing us how to get started building the next big idea in the kitchen.
  • Everyone has begun to think about their food supply. Does this mean consumers will finally embrace smart garden equipment?
  • Speaking of home gardening, Farmshelf debuts their first home unit.

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.

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April 15, 2020

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:

Friends, I learned last night over Zoom drinks that ya'll're baking so much that there's a shortage of yeast?! I, your local frumpy yeast geneticist have come here to tell you this: THERE IS NEVER A SHORTAGE OF YEAST. Here's where I'm a viking. Instructions below.

— Sudeep Agarwala (@shoelaces3) March 29, 2020

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.

March 1, 2019

Newsletter: Yeast Could be the Key to our Plant-Based Food Future — and CBD, Too

Happy Friday from L.A., where I came for a weekend of fancy toast, museum-hopping, and sipping as much green juice as my wallet can handle.

Just a short way down the coast is the headquarters of Beyond Meat, the startup whose plant-based burgers are making their way onto the plates of vegetarians and carnivores alike, including Bill Gates. This week, the Microsoft founder curated MIT Technology Review’s annual list of Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2019, and named plant-based burgers one of his picks. (He has invested in both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods in the past.)

That wasn’t the only news around plant-based protein this week. Impossible Foods announced that it was bringing its famous “bleeding” meat to Singapore!

Impossible’s burgers get their bloody appearance from heme, which the startup’s scientists make through a process that involves genetically engineered yeast. They’re not the only ones using yeast to make better-tasting meat alternatives: New company Motif Ingredients (a spinoff of Ginkgo Bioworks), which just launched this week, uses modified yeast to “brew” proteins intended for use in plant-based foods. This could lead to an influx of new meat alternative startups, as companies would no longer need their own expensive R&D lab and team of scientists in order to develop an animal-free product.

But genetically modified yeast can make a lot more than just protein. This week, scientists from Berkeley announced they had developed a way to use genetically modified yeast to create CBD and THC.

That’s right, the active components of Mary Jane can be grown in a lab. So in addition to bread, protein, beer, and milk, we can now add weed to the list of things that yeast can make. That’s one mighty microbe.

A bloody Impossible burger.

Let’s shift gears a minute to one of our all-time favorite topics: robots. Also pizza.

This week resident Spoon robo-expert Chris wrote about FedEx’s new delivery robot which can navigate stairs to deliver packages — or a piping-hot pizza — to your doorstep. He also covered Basil Street, a company developing automated pizza vending machines that can cook a pie in three minutes flat. In non-pizza robot news, the makers of Julia, a countertop cooking robot, raised an undisclosed amount of funding this week.

Seems like there’s a lot of really exciting innovation a-brewing in the world of food robotics, eh? If you want to join the conversation, we’re having a Slack Chat dedicated to the topic of automation in food TODAY at 10:30 a.m. PST. Experts from Byte Foods, Augean Robotics, and Kiwi Technology will be joining, and it’s sure to be valuable and, most importantly, fun. Sign up for our Slack Channel (it’s free and super easy, promise) to join. See you then!

Still can’t get enough robots? (We can’t, either.) Our food robotics and automation summit ArticulATE is happening April 16 at General Assembly in downtown San Francisco. If you want a teaser, this week we spoke with Linda Pouliot, CEO and founder of Dishcraft Robotics (yep, she’ll be at ArticulATE!), about what sort of kitchen tasks robots are suited for — and which ones are best left to humans. Early Bird Tickets for the summit are on sale now — get ’em while they’re hot.

With that, it’s time to eat tacos until I can’t eat tacos no mo. Peace.

Catherine

February 6, 2019

Three Companies Feeding the Global Protein Frenzy with Microbes, Air, and Yeast

With the population set to skyrocket to over 9 billion by 2050, companies are scrambling to find new ways to feed our demand for protein in a sustainable (read: non-animal-based) way.

Many are turning to plants, transforming them into everything from burgers to yogurt to scrambled eggs. But when it comes to protein, there are several companies thinking outside the plant kingdom and turning to surprising sources to create these energy-packed building blocks:

Microbes

Sustainable Bioproducts has developed fermentation technology based off of their studies of the extremophile microbes (which can thrive even in, er, extreme conditions) in Yellowstone’s volcanic springs. The company’s scientists replicate the microbes in labs and feed them starches and glycerin. Out comes protein. The microbes’ output is meant to be a versatile building block — it can be savory or sweet, liquid or powder — which can be used to make meat or dairy alternatives.

The protein may come from a lab, but Sustainable Bioproduct’s technology is very different than cellular agriculture (the science behind cell-based meat), which uses animal tissue.

Earlier this week, the Chicago-based company announced a $33 million Series A funding round, led by Silicon Valley-based venture fund 1955 Capital with participation from the venture arms of Archer Daniels Midland and Danone, a climate-focused tech fund backed by Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and others. But don’t rush out to purchase microbe protein just yet — according to the Wall Street Journal we’re still a few years away from sampling Sustainable Bioproducts’ protein.

Yeast

Similar to Sustainable Bioproducts, Perfect Day uses a sort of fermentation process (feeding sugar to genetically modified yeast and bacteria) to create protein. Only instead of making a versatile building block, they’re focused on two very specific proteins: casein and whey, which are two main “ingredients” that make milk taste — and function — like milk.

Combined, the two create a cow-free dairy product to be used to make everything from cheese to yogurt to ice cream. In 2017, Perfect Day pivoted from a B2C to a B2B model, and at the end of last year, the startup partnered with Archer Daniels Midland to scale up the implementation of their technology. Their first product will be whey protein, slated to come to market in the next few years.

Image Credit: JAA TÄMÄ KUVA

Thin Air (sort of)

Before founding Finnish company Solar Foods, researchers from Lappeenranta University of Technology and the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland created a single cell protein in a lab using only water, electricity, carbon dioxide, and small organisms in the environment.

Solar Foods recently snagged €2 million (~$2,273,000) in funding from Lifeline Ventures, and is working with the European Space Agency to create a bioreactor that can make food in outer space to feed colonies on Mars. On Earth, the bioreactors could be a new food source that doesn’t put stress on our existing systems.

We don’t know exactly what Solar Food’s protein could be used for (Meat alternatives? Protein shakes? Soylent-like complete meals?), but the company has indicated it expects commercial protein production to start by 2021.

—

No question — the concept of making protein out of microbes or literal air is fascinating. But as with cell-based meat, I have to wonder about the energy costs — and the cost costs. How much energy does it take to run these new protein sources? And how long will it take before creating protein out of these sources is cost-competitive with making protein from plants?

Of course, if climate change severely reduces agricultural input, as some are predicting it will, then growing soy and wheat might be a lot trickier, and we might have to turn to making protein from the air, extremophile microbes, and animal tissue in a lab. But in the nearer term, these technologies have the potential to feed areas that don’t have access to legitimately delicious plant-based foods — or are struggling to produce enough food, such as communities affected by famine or drought.

It’ll likely be a while before we see (or taste) this technology in our homes or on our grocery shelves. Until then, we’ll have to feed our hunger for sustainable protein with plants. Good thing there are plenty of options.

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