Pivoting from Plants-to-Food to Plants-to-X – What’s the future of Ag?

Reaction from the stakeholders

Perfect Day CEO and Co-founder Ryan Pandya: “We use fermentation to make the foods people love while delivering the same taste, texture, and nutrition as conventional dairy without the environmental, food safety, or welfare concerns. But that’s just the start. By working with food and dairy companies to bring a new category of animal-free products to market, we’re building a next generation supply chain to provide more nutritious, scalable options globally.”

Nature’s Fynd CEO Thomas Jonas: “Fermentation is rapidly becoming the number one technology in terms of investments towards new proteins. Fundamentally, the rationale is simple: Fermentation is just more efficient, and markets hate inefficiencies.”

GFI Associate Director of Science and Technology Dr. Liz Specht: “Fermentation is powering a new wave of alternative protein products with huge potential for improving flavor, sustainability, and production efficiency. Investors and innovators are recognizing this market potential, leading to a surge of activity in fermentation as an enabling platform for the alternative protein industry as a whole. And this is just the beginning: The opportunity landscape for technology development is completely untapped in this area. Many alternative protein products of the future will harness the plethora of protein production methods now available, with the option of leveraging combinations of proteins derived from plants, animal cell culture, and microbial fermentation.”

GFI Executive Director Bruce Friedrich: “Fermentation’s ability to efficiently produce protein could help feed the world, significantly alleviating global malnutrition. Fermentation could enable companies to meet the growing demand for high-quality protein at a cost that is competitive with or lower than that of animal products. Microbes and fermented plant proteins can also provide the sensory experiences and full nutritional profiles of animal products but without the range of external costs that come with industrial animal production, from massive contributions to climate change to growing antibiotic resistance and zoonotic diseases.”

CPT Capital Investor Rosie Wardle: “Given the breadth of applications, we believe that fermentation could solve many current challenges faced by alternative proteins. On the one hand, biomass fermentation can create nutritious, clean protein in a highly efficient and low-cost way. On the other hand, the potential for precision fermentation to produce value-added, highly functional, and nutritious ingredients is very exciting and could revolutionize the plant-based category. From an investment perspective, we are very excited about the white space opportunities in this category, and we are actively looking to increase our investments in the space. This new report from GFI is the first comprehensive overview of fermentation for alternative protein applications and should be required reading for everyone who wants to create a more efficient and less harmful global food system.”

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