Fermentation

In addition to being products themselves, ingredients made with fermentation can be used for plant-based or cultivated products. Increasingly, we may start to think of plant-based, fermentation-derived, and cultivated products as an intersecting venn diagram rather than as three distinct categories. 

For plant-based meat, eggs, and dairy, traditional fermentation can help optimize the digestibility, taste, texture, and nutrients of existing plant-based ingredients. Ingredients made with biomass fermentation or precision fermentation can also be combined with plant-based ingredients to make better plant-based meat. 

On the cultivated meat side, precision fermentation can help efficiently produce nutrients and growth factors for cell culture media. Furthermore, proteins such as collagen or fibronectin produced through fermentation may serve as key animal-free components of scaffolding for more complex cultivated meat products.

Alternative protein production is generally much more efficient than conventional meat production. The different types of fermentation offer several unique advantages that can further increase the efficiency of the alternative protein sector as a whole. 

Traditional fermentation can help us make better use of existing ingredients.

We’ve used traditional fermentation to transform foods for millennia, and this relatively straightforward use of fermentation has the power to help us make better use of the food already at our disposal. For instance, JBS brand Planterra Foods ferments rice and pea protein with MycoTechnology’s shiitake mycelium for their plant-based meat. 

Further, we can minimize food waste and transform low-value agricultural sidestreams into nutritious and delicious food using fermentation. The company PLANETARIANS uses traditional fermentation to improve the digestibility, taste, texture, and nutrients of pressed sunflower cakes—the byproduct of oil extraction. 

Biomass fermentation is one of the most efficient ways to produce lots of protein. 

The microorganisms used in fermentation reproduce and grow very quickly. The doubling time of these microorganisms is hours, compared to months or years for animals.

Bioreactors are also very space-efficient. When facilities are scaled up, fermentation can produce many tons of biomass every hour.

Many of these organisms are incredibly high in protein content. For species used for biomass fermentation, protein content is more than 50 percent by dry weight. Compare that to about a quarter for conventional beef. 

Fermentation’s efficiency has many benefits 

Like plant-based and cultivated meat, fermentation-derived protein is better for the planet, people, and animals. 

Mycelium, microalgae, microbes, and fermented plant proteins can provide the sensory experiences and positive nutritional aspects of animal products but without undesirable substances, such as cholesterol, antibiotics, and hormones.

Efficient protein production is good not just for human health but for planetary health. This efficiency reduces pollutants and GHG emissions and saves water and land, allowing our food system to be much more sustainable.

Fermentation can also utilize feedstocks that are low-cost industrial or agricultural side streams or waste streams. This lowers both variable and external costs associated with production, such as transportation of inputs. Feedstock diversification will enable local production that leverages readily available feedstocks without long-distance shipping.

Despite microbial fermentation’s long history in food and industrial biotechnology, tremendous potential for innovation remains untapped. Opportunities for advancing fermentation can be segmented into five key areas spanning the value chain: target selection and design, strain development, feedstock optimization, bioprocess design, and end-product formulation and manufacturing.

Although a number of organisms are already used by the fermentation sector, most possibilities have not been fully explored. Existing lines can be further modified for greater efficiency or target specificity. For example, cells can be optimized for production of the desired target molecule via selection and/or engineering.

Fermentation occurs in a bioreactor. The design of the bioreactor plays an important role in the overall efficiency of production, and there are many new bioreactor designs being explored and many more that can and should be explored.

As part of final product formulation and manufacturing, the whole-cell biomass or fractions thereof can be harvested to produce ingredients for alternative meat, egg, or dairy production. Alternatively, a specific target expressed by the cells can be isolated and purified for use as a high-value functional ingredient. The range of options is only now beginning to be explored.