Public Funding for Carbon Trust Advisory Limited

"There is increasing demand for nutrient rich foods, with more of the world adopting meat and grain rich diets, and the world population expected to grow 25% by 2050\. The ability of traditional agriculture to meet the growing demands for meat and grain is uncertain in a world expected to face significant climate change. Microbial food products have the potential to transform the global food industry, producing highly nutritious food in scalable fermentation processes. This project will seek to both improve the process efficiency and sustainability of microbial food production and expand the market opportunity by developing new product streams. The project brings together Calysta, producers of FeedKind single cell protein (SCP) animal feed, produced by fermentation of methane utilising bacteria, New Food Innovation, Perlemax, The Carbon Trust, Leeds University, and Pontus Research, who will collaborate to develop more sustainable processes, new products, and assess these as feed and food products The project will develop novel processes for the sustainable production of microbial biomass, including; microbubble technology for improved mass transfer; the use of novel microbial consortia and; the simultaneous fixing of emitted CO2 in a linked microbial process. The processes currently used for the production of the animal-feed approved FeedKind will be fully evaluated, producing a roadmap for the rapid development of high-quality food-grade processes for the production of nutrient rich foods. FeedKind microbial SCP is naturally high in protein and to increase its value as a food ingredient processes will be developed to generate a soluble protein isolate fraction for use as a food ingredient and the insoluble fraction for use as an animal feed ingredient. The soluble protein isolate fraction will be assessed for valuable properties such as gelling, foaming and binding, for replacement of animal-derived proteins in meat-free products. The insoluble fraction will be assessed as an animal feed ingredient for fish and piglets, where it will also be assessed for improvement of animal gut health. The outcomes of this project will be the development of new processes and technologies for the production of novel nutrient rich microbial food and animal feed products. The processes developed will be resource efficient, reducing CO2 emissions, with low water and land usage compared to traditional agriculture. The processes will be highly scalable and non-seasonal using technology that can be deployed anywhere."