Sustainable protein: The bottlenecks that remain, and how they’re being solved

Alternative proteins, despite dominating much conversation in the world of food, remain in their early stages.

While focus on plant-based meat saw a spectacular rise, with sales ramping up before consolidating, fermentation is still rapidly growing as a favoured method of alternative protein production, and cultivated meat, despite recent successes, has yet to be commercially available in most countries.

The Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein, funded by a range of organisations including the Bezos Earth Fund and UK governmental organisation UKRI, brings together key figures from industry and academia, aiming to solve some of the bottlenecks that are still holding the sector back.

At a scientific kick-off event at Imperial College, London, some of the key figures in these fields spoke about its goals and the challenges it aims to overcome.

There are, explains the centre’s director Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro, some overall challenges that apply across the board.

Overall, the main two bottlenecks are price and quality. The price of alternative proteins must be lowered to the point where consumers feel they can afford it, and the quality must be improved so that consumers feel that they will enjoy it.

Thirdly, the centre aims to improve the nutritional value of alternative proteins, which is something that has negatively impacted consumer acceptance in the past.

But there are a range of more specific research aims for each sector in alternative proteins.

Plant-based meatPlant-based and fungal-based meat may be commercially widespread already, but this does not mean that research can’t optimise their taste, cost and functionality.

Bottlenecks remain. The downturn in public interest in plant-based meat, while showing some signs of recovery, suggests that some problems need to be addressed.

The centre has three key goals in its research into plant-based proteins, explains Parag Acharya, an associate professor of food innovation and one of the academics involved in the centre.

Firstly, it aims at improving the taste and texture of plant-based meat whilst remaining at a cost parity with conventional meat.

Cost is an important factor in general, as price is one of the key reasons consumers find plant-based difficult to accept.

It is particularly important in efforts to make plant-based products clean label, as this process often involves finding clean-label ingredients to replace those which are not clean-label. These clean-label ingredients should not drastically increase the cost of the product.

“Can we have cost-effective ingredients when replacing methylcellulose or replacing MSG?” Acharya asks.

Secondly, the centre aims to diversify the functionalities of the products, in order both to enhance nutrition and develop other advantages.

Also read → Find out how soy can be sourced sustainably While it focuses on technical challenges in the creation of plant-based products, the centre will also work with start-ups to tackle bottlenecks that they face.

The third key research goal of the centre, Acharya explained, is helping start-ups to overcome a key bottleneck that they often face to expansion – lack of infrastructure.

The centre will provide start-ups with the infrastructure to test their ideas. “The advantage [here] is that under one roof we have everything,” he explains. Small companies want to move fast, so having all the correct infrastructure in close proximity is a significant advantage to them.

Beyond these three key goals, the centre hopes to overcome some of the limitations in the way plant-based is currently made.

For example, it aims to diversify beyond the key ingredients that often dominate plant-based, such as soya, moving into the use of new protein sources.

The centre also aims to reduce the carbon footprint of plant-based meat. For example, the extraction of the plant protein which is used within the plant-based product uses a lot of energy (and thus has a significant carbon footprint). Acharya stresses that doing away with this energy-intense process of extraction and getting the protein in a different way will cut down on the carbon footprint of the process.

Fermentation-derived productsFermentation, unlike plant-based meat, has been around for millennia. In its traditional form, it is used to create products like sourdough and kimchi. Very few consider it on the cutting edge.

However, alternative meats can be produced through biomass or precision fermentation, more novel ways of developing food.

Biomass fermentation, which is the process when microbes are harvested to produce a food product, is the primary form of development for products such as Quorn.

Precision fermentation, which is growing in popularity among investors, is perhaps the most versatile, as it allows producers to use engineered microbes to create specific ingredients.

Also read → Find out how the investment landscape in fermentation is growingFermentation, therefore, is both very old and, in some forms, still very much developing. Therefore, there are still many reasons to research it.

In the field of precision fermentation, for example, the centre will explore how dairy proteins, lipids and micronutrients can be produced sustainably, explains Tom Ellis, professor of synthetic genome engineering at Imperial College London and a key figure behind the centre’s fermentation research.

In biomass fermentation, the centre will look for underutilised fungi that can be used to develop good meat alternatives.

“There should be fungi out there that are ideal for us, and we might be able to use those to achieve better textures and . . . make whole cut meat alternatives in far more approachable manners.”

Even in traditional fermentation, the centre has goals. It will study fermentation systems seen in kefir and kombucha, says Ellis, in order to understand how to add value to improve the “conversion of plant-based matter into palatable food.”

The centre will also explore cheaper feedstocks, in order to cut down the costs of the process.

It will look at the potential for the creation of hybrids between biomass and precision fermentation.

Finally, it will explore upscaling the production of alternative proteins using fermentation.

The centre must also overcome bottlenecks in the sector. For example, points out Barbara Navé, project leader at BASF, one issue the industry faces is the cost of the raw materials, particularly in precision fermentation.

These costs are driven up not only by the prices of the materials themselves, but also the long distances which they must travel to reach their destination. Thus, the centre must explore how to optimise this area.

A key bottleneck in fermentation is upscaling. (Extreme Media/Getty Images)Another bottleneck is scale, says Patrick Boyle, CSO at biotech company Ginko Bioworks. Fermentation-derived products are very difficult to test at low volumes, and it is difficult to get hold of the quantity of the materials necessary to test effectively.

“Food scientists typically can’t work with a few micrograms of material, they want grams or kilograms . . . It is essential for these companies to be able to provide testable material to their partners for development.”

Cultivated meatRight at the cutting edge – effectively a food of the future from the perspective of most ordinary consumers – is cultivated meat. As a nascent industry, it still faces many of the challenges that any emerging technology has to deal with.

Cultivated meat, according to Natalie Rubio, co-founder of cellular agriculture company Deco Labs, faces several key bottlenecks.

One difficulty faced by the sector is keeping down the cost of ingredients in the cell culture media (the nutrient-rich liquid in which cells grow).

Quite often people use animal serum in the media, Rubio points out, in the initial research stages. But this is costly, at around $200 per litre, and thus very difficult to scale – and you need around 10 litres to create one kg of meat.

The cost of the media has already been substantially reduced. Serum-free media has already been developed, as have substitutes for other costly elements such as recombinant albumin and growth factors. But there is still a significant ways to go. “The next step is looking at the list of ingredients in the serum-free media and start tackling the most expensive ones.”

Also read → Find out how cultivated meat can grow its own growth factorsThe price of cultivated meat is still far away from achieving price parity with regular meat, explains Rubio.

Another challenge is creating scaffolding, which is used to provide the cultivated meat with structure, in order to create whole cut products. Integrating the scaffolding with scalable bioprocesses, explains Rubio, is the key bottleneck in this area.

While you can do a lot at a lab scale, she suggests, there are not currently bioreactors available where one can integrate the scaffold with the reactor in order to scale.

However, the biggest challenge faced by cultivated meat, she suggests, is that the sector started out using pharmaceutical production systems, and must transition into food grade production systems if it wants to scale up.

Will Milligan, founder and CEO of Extracellular, agrees. “The tricky thing is moving to a manufacturing process that really works with this industry,” he says.

AI will be used extensively by the centre (Paper Boat Creative/Getty Images)Use of AIThe centre is also working with Imperial X, Imperial College’s AI centre, to ascertain how AI can aid the development of alternative proteins.

“What we have been doing is scoping at which points in the value chain, in the research side, in the process side, AI can play a big role,” the centre’s director, Ledesma-Amaro, explains.

AI, he says, can take many roles in the research, including in cell design, cell selection, food characterisation, and the link between cell organism and final properties. It can even guide how the process is optimised for cost-effectiveness, such as which feedstocks are used.