SUMMARYPrecision fermentation and cultivated meat companies are turning microorganisms and animal cells into factories that produce dairy proteins, egg proteins, cocoa, palm oil, and meat without raising entire animals or crops. The Good Food Institute surveys the sector alongside firms such as All G Foods, Formo, Onego Bio, The EVERY Company, California Cultured, Solar Foods, Meatly, BlueNalu, SuperMeat, Mosa Meat, Liberation Labs, and HydGene Renewables, reflecting a shift toward industrial biological manufacturing.
The Good Food Institute lays out the state of the industry of precision fermentation and cultivated meat.
For most of human history, if we wanted a biological product, we had to grow the entire organism that produced it.
Want milk protein?
Grow a cow. Feed it for years. Give it land and water. Keep it alive, healthy and forcibly reproducing.
Or you could do what All G Foods and Formo are doing: use precision fermentation to produce the proteins that give dairy its functionality, without needing the cow.
Want egg white?
Breed billions of chickens.
Or program microorganisms to produce egg proteins directly. Onego Bio and The EVERY Company are doing exactly this, producing functional egg proteins through fermentation rather than hijacking a bird’s reproductive system.
Want cocoa?
Grow a tree in a narrow climatic band around the equator. Wait years for it to mature. Hope the weather cooperates (it usually doesn’t.)
Or, as California Cultured is doing, grow cocoa cells in controlled conditions and produce cocoa without being entirely dependent on plantations thousands of miles away.
Want palm oil?
Plant millions of hectares of oil palms.
Or use yeast. Clean Food Group is making palm oil through fermentation, taking microorganisms and turning them into biological factories capable of producing ingredients traditionally extracted from crops.
Want protein?
Grow wheat. Grow soy, ship it across the world. Grow an animal and feed the crops to the animal.
Or, in the case of Solar Foods, take carbon dioxide, electricity and microorganisms and produce a protein, straight from air. Their process uses hydrogenotrophic microbes to convert CO₂ and electricity into single-cell protein, Solein.
Want meat?
Breed an animal. Grow an entire skeleton, brain, digestive system, immune system and reproductive system. Keep it alive for months or years. Then slaughter it because you wanted the muscle and fat.
Or, Meatly, BlueNalu, SuperMeat and Mosa Meat are just growing the cells we actually want. Remove the extraordinarily complicated biological middleman and cultivate meat directly.
Companies like Liberation Labs are building industrial scale fermentation capacity for this new generation of biological manufacturing, while HydGene Renewables is developing biological shortcuts to produce hydrogen for biomanufacturing.
All these things are part of the same technological shift. For most of human history, biology was something we farmed.
Now it is something we can manufacture*.
*Or working on it anyway…