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By Taylor Hinds
In the past 6 years since we published Rethinking Food and Agriculture, a lot has changed in the precision fermentation industry. For starters, the name “precision fermentation”, or PF for short, is now the accepted terminology across the industry which was not the case in 2019. Startups have come and gone, rebranded and changed their names. They’ve banded together in industry coalitions, and joined “Big Food” companies in partnership. A myriad of products have been approved by regulatory bodies, trialled, and sold to the public in the United States, and around the world. And the industry has received billions of dollars in funding, facilitating its transition from R&D to scale up, with several companies breaking ground on new facilities worldwide each year.
But It hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows. Recently, funding has dried up and it has become more and more difficult for companies to meet their scale-up goals and to stay afloat in this economy. Despite ongoing challenges, precision fermentation is still the exciting, disruptive technology that it was in 2019, and it is worth a look at the progress that has been made so far.
Two years ago we published a Periodic Table of Precision Fermentation as part of our follow-up work on the disruption of food and agriculture. The goal was to track as many commercially available PF products in an easy, visual, accessible way so that people in the industry and outside it can keep up with all the innovative uses of this exciting technology. One of the most exciting prospects about precision fermentation as a technology has always been its versatility. The ability to use microbes to produce complex molecules - proteins, fats, fibres etc. - means that there is a whole world of product markets ready to be disrupted.
In the food section there are, of course, the dairy proteins that are leading the charge in terms of regulatory approvals, scale up and general excitement. I wrote about those in detail last year on the RethinkX blog. The two main dairy proteins being produced for food are whey (beta-lactoglobulin) and casein. They are being used to make direct commodity dairy products like milk and cheese, and also as ingredients in other food products like chocolate, protein powder, and baked goods.
Egg proteins, like ovomucoid and ovalbumin, are another very exciting category of proteins that have hit the market in recent years. Especially because eggs have been a highly volatile commodity for the past couple of years due to the bird flu that has ripped through the United States, and the rest of the world. From a purely economic perspective, a stable supply of egg protein is an incredibly valuable and timely addition to the market, particularly for food products that use egg protein as an ingredient. They get the same functionality and flavor profile (or better, given the customization potential of PF) with a product that does not ebb and flow based on a highly contagious virus.
A very recent addition to the periodic table is monellin, one of five sugar substitutes featured on the table. Monellin is a sweet protein. It is two to five thousand times sweeter than sugar and can be incorporated into foods to reduce their sugar content while keeping the sweet taste. These sweet proteins, including brazzein and thaumatin, are found in nature in exotic fruits in very small concentrations, so it makes a lot of sense to produce them through precision fermentation instead of farming or foraging the fruits. Rebaudiosides, which are glycosides found in the stevia leaf, are very popular sweeteners that are also being made with precision fermentation. The off-taste of stevia is a common complaint, but companies are producing several different rebaudiosides compounds from the same leaf with a cleaner taste.
Allulose was recently added to the coming soon section, and this is the only one of the sugar substitutes that is actually a sugar. Allulose is found in very small amounts in some sweet foods like raisins, figs, and molasses, but it has fewer calories than sugar while being just as sweet.
The idea behind all of these sugar substitutes is to create ingredients that are low-calorie, sweet, and great-tasting, but don’t have the same health drawbacks that sugar and artificial sweeteners do. Consumers have made it clear that they want to reduce their sugar consumption, likely to avoid things like spiking blood sugar and insulin, cavities, obesity and more.
Pigments have been making headlines recently as the synthetically produced and carcinogenic red dye number 3 is (finally) being removed from the US food supply. The food industry will be looking for good red 3 alternatives that are good enough and cheap enough for food, cosmetics and materials, without any health risks. Carmine, an ancient bright red pigment, is a great option. It was historically sourced from crushing up cochineal insects - lots and lots of insects but can now be made through precision fermentation. Other PF pigments like anthocyanin for the red-blue range and carotenoids for the red-yellow range, both of which were previously extracted from fruits, vegetables and other plants are available as well. By making these pigments through PF, there is a cheap, safe, efficient, cruelty-free, petrochemical-free ingredients for food dyes that are effective, and allow us to have brightly colored foods without the nasty side effects.
A precursor to indigo fabric dye, Indican, is only in the “Coming Soon” section of the periodic table, but will be really exciting once it is launched commercially. The largest use of indigo is to dye blue jeans and other materials, but both versions of indigo dye that are currently widely in use have serious environmental drawbacks. Synthetic indigo contains harmful and toxic chemicals that leak into the environment through the production process, and natural indigo, extracted from a plant leads to deforestation, water waste, soil degradation and a loss of biodiversity in the areas where it grows. Precision fermentation is well suited to produce natural indigo as this would eliminate all the toxic chemicals in indigo dye while maintaining the low cost, stability and abundance of synthetic production.
Vitamins and supplements, or “nutrition”, is a very popular category for new startups producing PF proteins and other molecules because they are a logical way to sell concentrated functionality. One of the most exciting things that advancement in information technologies, like AI, machine learning and high throughput screening, is that it gives producers the ability to analyze different compounds within natural products - plant and animal products - and discern where key positive functionality is coming from. They can also discover new compounds that we didn’t even know existed in nature because they occur in such small amounts and zero in on the unknown, beneficial functionalities that occur when you concentrate them. Then with precision fermentation we can make just that isolated protein - or one that matches its functionality, and take it directly in a pill, powder or beverage form to get the concentrated benefits without having to consume large amounts of the whole product. Because of course we tend to find that the proteins that occur in the low to very low concentrations are the ones with the biggest benefits.
Recently, a couple of high functionality dairy proteins, lactoferrin and osteopontin, have been introduced by PF companies for the supplements and sports nutrition markets, with the former being available now. Both lactoferrin and osteopontin occur in very small amounts in milk and have incredible health benefits for adults and babies alike, so using precision fermentation to produce them is a no-brainer. Efficient, low-cost production opens up markets that would have never been possible by extracting and concentrating these products from milk. Eventually the goal for these is to be incorporated into infant formula to help babies for whom breast feeding is not an option get the human milk proteins and compounds that they need for optimal nutrition.
Beta glucan is one of the most recent additions to the periodic table in the supplements section and is an ingredient for those who want to support gut health, inflammation, healthy aging and stamina. Layn Natural Ingredients, which has recently commercialized a beta glucan ingredient that improves on the natural version which can be extracted from oats, yeast, algae and mushrooms, by making it more bioavailable and more effective for the people that take it.
Perhaps unlike beta glucan, Omega-3 fatty acids are very well-known health promoting compounds. Found usually in seafood and fish, it can be difficult for people who do not want to or cannot consume seafood products to get enough. They are present in some plants including seaweed, chia seeds and flaxseed, but it is much less bioactive than from animal sources. Natural fermentation pathways exist for some microalgae species, but adding the genetic engineering element to these and to fungi mean that they can become powerhouses of fatty acid production. This will totally change the game for plant-based seafood products and for vegans, vegetarians and those allergic to seafood in terms of access to high quality, bioavailable omega-3s.
The cosmetics market is a playground for precision fermentation. Just like with supplements, the name of the game is functionality, and end products are often expensive, which makes it the perfect market for many precision fermentation producers. One of companies in the space very early on, Geltor, produces various types of collagen proteins and elastin that can be added into cosmetics to improve youthfulness in a myriad of ways (skin firming, elasticity, brightening, smoothness, softness, reducing redness etc.).
Another very trendy cosmetic ingredients, retinol (anti-acne, anti-aging), which is most commonly made synthetically, can also be made through PF. Producing natural retinol (through PF) makes it less irritating to the skin, longer lasting and more stable. Hyaluronic acid (hydration, roughness, firmness) used to be extracted from animal tissue (chicken combs) - much like collagen. Producing it through precision fermentation opens up the market to a much wider variety of products because it can be made in significantly higher volumes, is less expensive, and crucially for cosmetics - is cruelty free.
There are many exciting novel food technologies but at RethinkX we focus primarily on precision fermentation because it is the more disruptive technology on all fronts. It is an established technology so people have been consuming products made in this way for decades; this is just the first time it has become cheap enough to imagine use cases in food. The falling cost, combined with the versatility and customization potential, and the fact that the proteins can be made identical to those found in nature are just some of the many reasons. All of those reasons can be found in Rethinking Food and Agriculture - available for free on our website.
That is not to say there isn’t anything interesting happening with these other technologies in 2025, there absolutely is. Many cultivated meat companies have now overcome some of the major hurdles we were hearing about in 2019, namely they produce cell media without using fetal bovine serum and can create a reasonably sized 3D product. They have brought the cost of production down significantly, and there have also been a couple of regulatory approvals, including in the United States. The US saw its first cultivated meat products for sale as part of a trial in 2023 - and Upside Foods, the company behind it, plans to have cultivated chicken shreds for sale in restaurants in the the US by the end of 2025. Across the pond, the first cultivated meat based pet food is already commercially available which is very exciting. With less regulatory hurdles to overcome, the pet food market is a great place to start selling cultivated meat so that they can refine their process and scale up. Especially in a market where they can supply a premium product at premium prices.
Biomass fermentation has seen some excellent innovation as well. Several companies, like Nature’s Fynd and Solar Foods have shown natural microbes can produce very high quality protein ingredients at reasonable costs, and have put products on the market. Solar Foods in particular has shown that gas fermentation - which uses electricity and carbon dioxide as a feedstock - can eliminate one of the biggest inputs to precision fermentation, sugar. And, Quorn, in the UK, has demonstrated unequivocally that biomass fermentation can operate at large scale and successfully over the long term in the consumer market.
At RethinkX, we firmly believe that precision fermentation is a powerful, transformative technology that will disrupt the food industry and change the world. Despite the challenging economy, we would love to see funding from venture capitalists pick up, and for governments around the world to see the potential and invest in the scale up of the industry through either funding or access to debt. Acknowledging that protecting IP is fundamentally for growing companies in a competitive landscape, we would also love to see the industry eventually adopt an open source, open access approach to producing food.
Most of all we are excited to see what sort of new products and ideas PF producers come up with over the next few years to solve problems in markets around the world, and across all industries. Precision fermentation is such a versatile technology, and the possibility space is endless.
Get in touch if you would like to be featured on our Periodic Table of Precision Fermentation.
Read our Food & Agriculture report to understand more about Precision Fermentation.
