Public Funding for 3F Bio Ltd

STARS x University of Leeds Better Food project is to develop, test and commercialise an innovative plant-based burger with similar properties to beef burger for the plant-based and flexitarian market, using latest technologies from food chemistry, plant proteins and value-added food processing. The beef burger is one of our most loved foods, 85% of all meat consumed in the UK comes from factory farms, an unethical and outdated, environmentally harmful industry. The percentage of plant-based consumers is still very small at less than 4% so we therefore require plant-based alternatives to match all consumers' expectations, including those who enjoy meat, for a delicious burger.

This project addresses the global challenge for food sustainability and more specifically protein sustainability by demonstrating the process for continuous fermentation of protein as an integrated zero waste process within a first generation biorefinery. The process demonstrated from this project will create protein from carbohydrate, converting low cost grain feedstocks into high quality protein using a natural fermentation process that has substantially lower land and water use, and lower carbon emissions than the production of animal protein. The innovative process integrates two discreet processes to achieve the core benefits of lowest cost feedstock and zero waste, resulting in the lowest cost source of protein. This project will demonstrate integrated continuous process operations at lab scale, in order to develop the technology and provide commercial performance demonstration and scale-up information necessary to support a commercial investment proposal. The opportunity to substitute meat with a low-cost sustainable protein will offer major potential for sustainability improvements in feeding an expanding global population and meeting future sustainability challenges. In the context of a growing population which will approach 10bn by 2050 and with increasing per capita demands for protein, this provides a genuine solution to the demand for protein which already totals >300M tonnes per annum.