Cellular Agriculture The Next Generation Proteins?
On 11th of November the SFI community gathered online for the second inspirational meeting: an appetizer on the topic of cellular agriculture. This technology has the potential to transform the current food production industry in a sustainable way.
Recently, more and more startups are initiating inspiring business activities in this field. Three of these gave a pitch about their company and specific focus area within the field of cellular agriculture:
- Fengru Lin and Max Rye presented TurtleTree Labs from Singapore, focusing on mammalian cells to produce milk proteins
- Raffael Wohlgensinger presented LegenDairy Foods from Germany, focusing on clean cheese production through precision fermentation
- Bryan Tracy presented White Dog Labs from the USA, focusing on microbiome-based nutrition through flexible feed stock fermentation
From the pitches we entered different breakout sessions to share our initial thoughts on what role we see for SFI in this field, initial focus areas to realize using this technology in the SFI context, and what the advantages would be for parties to be involved.
A short survey at the end of the meeting showed that all partners were in favor of further action, and most of the partners want to be actively involved. Thus we look forward to do so with your support and active participation in 2021.
Results
Role of SFI
- Connect new initiatives with existing businesses, find synergies
- Unbiased assessment
- Provide proof of concept
- Work together on challenges and building pre-competitive knowledge
Initial focus areas
- Product development, ingredient characterization
- Sustainability analyses
- Going beyond proteins, e.g. carbohydrates, fats, etc.
- Reaching efficient production
- Work together to overcome barriers such as regulatory, labeling and customer perception
Advantage to be involved
- Pre-competitive awareness and coordination
