A protein-rich breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausages. Or an ice cream and milk shake as an afternoon treat. All made out of thin air.
Finnish start-up Solar Foods is turning sci-fi into reality as it produces nutritiously rich protein – meat, milk and eggs among others – entirely in a lab, using nothing but carbon dioxide as its primary raw material.
Solar Foods is just one of many food tech firms delivering alternative, lab-grown food as they attempt to disconnect food production from energy-intensive agriculture.
The hope is that alternative and sustainable food products will become cheaper and nutritiously superior to traditionally grown counterparts, paving the way for a radical transformation of our food system.
“Advances in synthetic biology and so-called precision fermentation, the ability to programme micro-organisms to build complex organic molecules, could allow us to go much further than plant-based meats, replacing fundamental sources of protein such as soy,” Dr Passi Vainikka, CEO and co-founder of Solar Foods, tells the New Foundations podcast, which is produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit and supported by Pictet.
“(We are) feeding many more with much less.”
Radical rethinking of the global food system, such as Solar Foods’, is critical if the planet were to feed 10 billion people by 2050 while safeguarding natural resources and biodiversity. Already, food and agriculture account for over a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions and over 70 per cent of freshwater use.
Ferming: feeding more or less
Unlike existing alternative meat producers such as Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat, Solar Foods uses no plants to produce its protein. Instead, the firm sources a microbe from nature.
Microbes eat a rich diet of CO2 bubbles, hydrogen and oxygen and grow and multiply in water solution. All the ingredients are captured directly from air.
After this fermentation process is complete, they are dried out.
The result is a nutrient-rich powder called Solein, which contains nine essential amino acids and has a macronutrient composition like that of dried soy or algae.
This is a novel technique called precision fermentation, which combines an age-old process of fermentation – used to make bread and beer – with synthetic biology, engineering and information technology.
“You can essentially make any protein by telling a microbe how to make it, and that's come about due to this convergence of technologies… You could argue a cow is a piece of technology used to make meat and milk, and you're bypassing that in order to make protein just much more efficiently and faster,” Catherine Tubb, research fellow at independent think tank RethinkX, tells the podcast.
“When there's a novel protein that's accepted for food consumption, that's the sign that you can actually make proteins perhaps better than you can get from animals.”
Solein can be turned into meat, milk, eggs and other foods, entirely animal- and land-free in a lab. And its environmental footprint is far superior than that for plants or beef.
It also has an added benefit of increasing the diversity of our food choices by using the variety of 1 trillion non-explored species.
This is crucial given how unsustainably concentrated our eating habits are: humans consume only 200 of 10,000 edible plants discovered and 75 per cent of our food comes from just 12 plants and five animals.
On top of producing animal- and plant-free protein, Solar Foods is developing ways to produce real meat or fish from cells using its primary protein as a medium.
“At the end, consumer would have on the plate meat or fish as before, but how it arrived on the plate has completely changed,” Dr Vainikka says.
Solein-based products are scheduled to hit the grocery aisles by the end of 2022 as the company expects to receive an approval as novel food from the European Food Authority.
Solar Foods has already raised EUR35 million in funding, securing just under a third from Finland’s climate fund, as it aims to disrupt the global meat and dairy industry that has a combined value of an estimated USD2 trillion.
Solar Foods plans to reach the production cost level of around EUR5-6 per kilogram. This compares competitively with average retail price for beef of around EUR3-4 per kg of protein, salmon (EUR7-8) and nuts (EUR11).1
Mozzarella: the new battleground?
Alternative food ingredients and their producers may gain strategic importance in the coming decades as governments, faced with growing population, global warming and urbanisation, intensify their efforts to secure food supply, stabilise domestic food prices and pursue self-sufficiency.
For example, governments may adopt protectionist measures to restrict exports or impose import tariffs on key high-profile ingredients, such as cheese – whose annual consumption in the US has risen 20 per cent in the past decade to around 18kg per capita.2
“This is an ingredient-led business to business disruption,” Tubb says.
Pressure is already growing on governments to review their food security policy after the Covid crisis triggered severe labour shortages at food processing facilities, supply chain disruptions and higher prices.
“In the Middle East and places like Singapore, where food security is much more of an issue, the value for them of this technology is huge,” Tubb adds.
“There are countries that would really benefit from this technology much more than, say, Europe or the US.”
You can hear more about alternative foods on the “New Foundations” podcast: https://newfoundations.economist.com/
