Lessons from the Kitchen: LanzaTech downs a protein shake; their new markets, and Scooby-Doo

LanzaTech is back in the news with a budding venture based in manufacturing single-cell protein — usually a side product — as the main product for a new set of biorefineries they have in the pipeline. Plus, an ultra-low carbon footprint compared to business as usual. It’s not strictly a protein shake, but protein is giving LanzaTech a shake, in a good way.

But, let’s look a little deeper. If an idea no matter how impossible to sustain was a good one because it was sustainable (only) in an environmental sense, we could just all stop eating. So, we need to look for sustenance as well as sustainability. As Fred Jones put it in Scooby Doo, “Looks like we have another mystery on our hands. OK, gang, let’s split up and look for clues.”

Myself, speaking of sustenance, I’ll head for the kitchen. I think you’ll find, as I have in observing this industry, you learn an awful lot about the bioeconomy at scale by looking around in a kitchen. Here are some kitchen rules that are useful to me, perhaps you too.

Six Rules from the Kitchen

Rule One. Start with someone to eat the meal. Doesn’t matter how tasty the pasta if there’s no one at the table, hungry, wallet full, likes pasta, no gluten allergy. In industrial biotechnology, this means finding a willing customer with an unmet need. 

In this LanzaTech instance, yes, the world is replete in protein. Low-carbon, almost none of it. Decarbonization is not quite up there with hunger or thirst as a driver, but it’s in the ballpark if you have a Net Zero commit and no way to achieve it. So, this is customer-based innovation. 

Rule Two. No matter how tasty a rabbit stew you might make, first, you gotta catch your rabbit. In the bioeconomy, that means start with the feedstock. Has to be Sustainable, Affordable, Reliable, Available, Low-carbon, Efficiently Extracted. That’s SARA LEE and Nobody Doesn’t Like Sara Lee, as the old commercial said.

So, what hasn’t changed in this evolution of the LanzaTech story is the feedstock, CO2 may not be as big for them as CO — but, it’s part of the everyday feedstock set. More importantly, it is the foundational basis of the company. 

Yes, I heard the synbio Sirens sing it, too:

Biology’s the answer, baby baby,
AI is huge, don’t mean maybe,
Fund my endeavor, Zymergen forever,
it’s all Moore’s Law, and blah blah blah.

Odysseus learned to avoid being lured to his death by Sirens, you can too, put wax in your ears, and repeat after me: LanzaTech is about the death of waste carbon and only the death of waste carbon; it’s haute synbio, yes, but that is the means, not the end.

Rule Three. “Cookery is not chemistry, it is an art” So said Marcel Boulestin, the legendary cookbook author. You need a proper kitchen and a good chef, even more than you need a breakthrough recipe. If you can’t manage your temperature, the meal’s headed for disaster. If the person at the pan lacks savvy, it might end up looking like the picture in the cookbook but, as Phyllis Diller observed, “it will taste like the pages”. 

In the LanzaTech example, you’ll see buried in a quote from CEO Jennifer Holmgren the following: “with our existing bioreactor technology, and our years of operating experience, we have developed a path to mass produce protein from CO2. For two years, we’ve operated a pilot facility to prepare for commercialization.” Existing, experience, scale, preparation, those are my four takeaways from that. 

Rule Four. “The chief thing to remember is that all these soups … must be made with plain water.” That’s Boulestin, again — he railed against the use of pricey meat stocks, costing the soup a fresh pleasant taste and damning the economics.

Looking at LanzaTech, let’s emphasize the use, again, of the two cheapest feedstocks there are or ever will be, water and CO2. Starting from anything but waste, and aiming for “affordable, scalable, sustainable”, you will get two of the three and no more, and speaking of songs that the Sirens sing. you might be singing too:

“Off, off, off, to Washington we go,
Give me handout, President Joe”.

If you are affordable and scalable but not sustainable, you’re the problem and not the solution. If you are scalable and sustainable but not affordable, you’ll never find a customer. If you are affordable and sustainable but not scalable, you will never move the needle on carbon.

Rule Five. The sharpness of a knife is about concentrating force, says here, more or less. So, let’s consider the problems of diversification, a/k/a the dispersion of force. Powerful biotech platforms get lots of interesting and tempting phone calls. A hundred CRADAs later, the companies often crater. 

What went wrong? It’s not diversification per se, it is diversifcation that disables a company’s ability to concentrate force. Gordon Ramsey used to always hector folk on Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmare: simplify the menu! But it was less about menu length than the bizarre, bewildering complexity that comes with it, the loss of ability to deliver a consistent experience and to communicate clarity of purpose to customers and team. Companies have to build confidence in everyone around them, never freak out the team under any circumstances, especially those with checkbooks. Yes, there’s no I in TEAM, as we have heard, but as Scooby-Doo might have put it, there’s no RUH-ROH in TEAM either. 

In the case of LanzaTech, they’re scaling a product which was a by-product, anyway. Turns out, some customers want the by-product, protein, and don’t have a use for the primary product, the fuel or chemical. It’s a diversifcation that does not disperse force — instead, the scientific team is seeking out a modification to the organism to do something it can do, but needs to do more of. The force of the scientific effort is still concentrated; scientific teams are always, always working on yield, anyways. No Ruh-Roh. The knife remains sharp, and will cut well. 

Rule Six. Move carefully when taking hot food out of the oven, says here.   Spinning like a breakdancer when moving hot pans, that’s the path to pain and suffering.  So, let’s consider the problem of how to pivot, safely. The usual Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone synbio pivot — the fuels company that migrates to chemicals, or beauty products, or vegan foods, to fossil methane as a feedstock, to name a few classics, is too often taken too late in the cycle. Exhausted investors, skeptical customers, smaller markets, entrenched competitors. All the factors that led the company’s founders to not pursue that line of business in the first place, still there. 

What has changed is not the road to hell, but management’s tolerance for walking it. The usual temptations apply: chasing fads, hyping the biology story, ignoring formulators, downplaying barriers, pie in the sky forecasting, taking on debt like the Titanic taking on seawater, and so forth. Confucius put it best, long ago: “Wherever you go, there you are”. When the problem is management, there’s nowhere to run.

Back to LanzaTech, the scientific pathway for this new market entry was laid down some eight years ago, it was on a bench, like a chef designing a new plating before the customer rush starts, set aside for the right time, experimentation and failure at bench-scale costs you little. You can breakdance a little on a bench in the cool of the morning, there’s no one to burn. And, those little discoveries might out to be huge when applied at the right time in the right way, turns out.

So, Six Rules from the Kitchen, a place we all recognize, and perhaps we see some valid comparisons between what we learn there, and how it works in industrial biotechnology. 

Now, let’s cross over to the fine details of this move forward. As earlier mentioned. LanzaTech is expanding its biorefining platform to produce LanzaTech Nutritional Protein as the primary product. What’s that? LNP is a microbial protein that is a nutrient-rich alternative to plant and animal-based proteins. Good news from the Department of Footprints, LNP is said to use “a fraction of the land and water resources that traditional protein sources require.”

The scale-up 

LanzaTech is evaluating potential sites, in collaboration with several Partners Without a Name, for the 0.5 to 1.0 MT of LNP per day, due as soon as 2026. Commercial facilities are in the design shop to scale 100X, to more than 30,000 metric tons per annum, by 2028. That’s enough protein to feed 800 thousand people. So think, one San Francisco per facility.  My, my.

Trials and partners

The company is in the process of completing trials and testing in animal feed and pet food, and is underway with completing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Generally Recognized as Safe certification process for human nutrition formulations. To date, the Center for Aquaculture Technologies has successfully tested LNP for fish feed applications, and  and human food and beverage innovation firm Mattson completed thorough protein characterization and food prototyping for dish concepts such as smoothies, dairy-free cheese, and bread.

LanzaTech has also partnered with the U.S. Navy Research Lab on a joint research and contract development project jointly funded by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, the Office of Naval Research, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to evaluate the viability of creating nutritional proteins on military platforms. We’ll see what cattle ranchers have to say about that, one of these days.

Thoughts about the economics

This next link isn’t directly related to LanzaTech, so approach with care, but we have some 3rd party evidence from our friends in the Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant community that is related and interesting. They prepared this article: Single-Cell Protein Production from Industrial Off-Gas through Acetate: Techno-Economic Analysis for a Coupled Fermentation Approach, and it’s here, Caveat emptor, or rather caveat lector (let the reader beware).

Reaction from the stakeholders

Dr. Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech: “Building on the expertise of our commercially operating core gas fermentation process, LNP represents a natural expansion of our business,” said . “By coupling a new microbial production strain with our existing bioreactor technology, and our years of operating experience, we have developed a path to mass produce protein from CO2. For two years, we’ve operated a pilot facility to prepare for commercialization, and in the process, we’ve partnered with leading brands and food testing organizations for rigorous analysis and prototyping of nutrition applications.”

Dr. Matthew Yates, Research Biologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. “We are excited to collaborate with LanzaTech on this groundbreaking extension of their carbon recycling platform. Together we are exploring the biomanufacturing potential of a nutritional protein product made from CO2 extracted from seawater. Integrating LanzaTech’s gas fermentation technology with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s Seawater Carbon Capture Process presents a valuable opportunity to develop a unique capability to meet the nutritional needs of soldiers and sailors across the Joint Forces while simultaneously enhancing the resilience of military operations in an evolving geopolitical landscape.”

The Bottom Line

Rooby Rooby Roo! There’s nothing like food to attract Shaggy and Scoob’s attention. Margins can be very pleasing. Comes down to execution, and we’ll know more soon.

More on the story here.