Precision fermentation

Precision fermentation is the next evolution of the age-old brewing process behind beer, yoghurt and bread. It’s high-tech and can be used to put yeast or fungi to work to produce complementary proteins and novel food ingredients.

What is precision fermentation?

Precision fermentation involves engineering micro-organisms such as yeast or fungi to produce specific functional proteins, enzymes, vitamins and other high-value ingredients. For example, it’s been used to create an enzyme found in rennet that’s critical for cheese-making to avoid reliance on animal sources. Costs have come down over the years, enabling this technology to produce higher volume, lower-value products like foods and food ingredients.

In recent years, some food companies have adopted precision fermentation to produce what’s called ‘nature-equivalent’ animal proteins or fats, without the animals. This helps to meet the growing consumer demand for environmentally sustainable and ethical foods. Some examples are producing dairy milk without the cows and producing egg proteins without the chickens.

A suite of new food products are now possible using precision fermentation, including:

cow-free dairy milk, ice cream and yoghurt
egg proteins made without the chicken
lactoferrin for use in infant formula
animal-free gelatins.

Why precision fermentation?

The agriculture and food sector is looking for ways to increase sustainability through improvements to existing approaches, as well as exploring entirely new production systems. Precision fermentation offers a complementary, low-footprint food production system by leveraging the fast growth of the microorganisms with minimum input of resources such as water and nutrients in a closed-loop bioprocessing system. This occupies a fraction of the land mass required for traditional production systems. In addition, many R&D activities have been focusing on converting food and agricultural by-products, for example leftover plant material from sugar cane farming, or greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide and methane into useful products using fermentation processes. We ultimately want to see precision fermentation embedded within a truly circular economy and to achieve a carbon neutral production system.

Precision fermentation provides a pathway to production of a wide range of food and nutritional ingredients. This could include ingredients that are difficult or expensive to produce through traditional methods for example, lactoferrin extracted from milk. Precision fermentation could also be used to produce ingredients that have novel functionalities such as proteins with desired flavours, aromas and other properties. Fermentation technology can also be applied to manufacturing mycoproteins as single cell protein sources to complement meat proteins or animal feed. Mycoprotein has been produced and sold as microbial-based meat products under the brand Quorn for decades. The technology is also used to manufacture a range of functional food and beverage products such as low- or no-alcohol wine, or micro-nutrient fortified fermented foods.

We can help companies re-imagine food using our expertise and facilities in precision fermentation technologies.

Precision fermentation and fermentation technologies help us move towards achieving carbon neutral production in future.