Alternative Protein Fundamentals Programme

Policy & Entrepreneurship Track

Week 3: Fermentation

Microbes have long been a part of food production. Whether in the brewing of beer or the leavening of bread, yeast has been part of our food system for millennia. More recently, production of rennet (used to coagulate milk in cheesemaking) has been achieved by inserting the chymosin gene into yeast, so we no longer need to harvest this protein from the stomach lining of young calves.

This session aims to introduce you to fermentation for alternative protein applications and highlight the immense potential for microbes in this field. We cover traditional fermentation, biomass fermentation and precision fermentation and the relative roles that they can each play in replacing proteins from animals.

Core Material [~2hrs 15mins]

Discussion Prompts

General:

  • Define traditional, biomass and precision fermentation in your own words. In what ways are they similar to each other and in what ways are they different?

  • Fermentation is described as an ‘enabling technology’ for the alternative protein industry. What does this mean?

    • Last week we discussed some properties that consumers might value in meat (cost, nutrition, texture, appearance, taste and smell). To what extent could fermentation technologies be used to improve each of these?

    • To what extent do you agree that fermentation technologies are enablers rather than providing standalone products?

  • Hybrid products combine different alt. protein technologies. Imagining how these technologies could develop in the future, what would your ideal hybrid product be composed of? Think big!

  • To what extent do you think the long history of fermentation to produce food makes modern fermentation-derived alt. proteins more acceptable with consumers?

  • The first lecture mentioned that Superbrewed Food use a bacterial strain for protein production. To what extent do you think this will have a different consumer perception to fungi? How transparent should companies be with consumers about the microbial species that they are using?

Fermentation at Scale:

  • Of the ‘guiding principles’ for scale-up in the paper, were there any that stood out to you as particularly important? Were there any risks that you hadn’t considered before?

  • [For anyone with a more technical background] consider the scale-dependent fermentation parameters (table 2 in the paper). Which of these do you anticipate being the most important or difficult factors to overcome as the process scales?

  • What are the pros and cons of building your own facility vs partnering with a contract manufacturing organisation (CMO)?

  • Financing the construction of pilot, demo and commercial scale plants requires huge amounts of capital. Which institutions or mechanisms do you foresee being able to finance these kinds of projects?

  • Very few commercial-scale fermentation facilities have been built during the past few years (most capacity built 20-50 years ago). Why do you think this might be?

  • We appear to be running into a capacity bottleneck for fermentation at commercial scale. What can be done to avoid this? Think about your field of expertise and what solutions you might be able to bring to this problem

  • Much of the commercial fermentation capacity is taken up by companies manufacturing chemicals or pharmaceuticals. What can the food industry learn from these sectors and in what ways might they differ?

Further Resources

General

Regulation

Commercial