Australian startup Nourish Ingredients has announced a collaboration with dairy giant Fonterra to accelerate the development of dairy products with fats produced via fermentation.

Nourish, which is developing a range of high-impact, low-inclusion ‘animalic’ fats in fermentation tanks, will work with Fonterra on Creamilux, a lipid produced by a genetically engineered microbe that “recreates the rich, creamy mouthfeel, taste and emulsification properties of dairy fat.”

As part of their collaboration, Fonterra and Nourish will explore the potential of Creamilux “as a key ingredient to unlock functionality while preserving the delicious taste of traditional dairy” across a range of categories including cheese, cream, and butter.

The partners will also explore opportunities where Nourish Ingredients’ fats can enhance non-dairy categories such as bakery that traditionally rely on dairy fats, said Nourish CEO James Petrie, a crop metabolic engineer who worked as a research scientist at Australia’s national science agency CSIRO before co-founding Nourish​ ​with Ben Leita in early 2020.

“This collaboration balances our passion for creating innovative ingredients with hard-nosed applications to unlock massive product opportunities. We are overcoming specific animal ingredient bottlenecks to optimize current animal-based food production capacity without losing quality.”

Jeremy Hill, chief science and technology officer at Fonterra, added: “Dairy will always be at the core of our business… At the same time, ingredients produced through emerging technologies can work seamlessly in and alongside our dairy products, expanding the range of products and choices we can offer to customers and consumers.”

Fats from fermentation

Nourish is one of a growing number of startups using microbial fermentation to make tailored fats including Yali Bio, Melt&Marble, ÄIO, c16 Bio, Circe, Seminal Bio, NoPalm Ingredients, Zero Acre Farms and Clean Food Group.

Other startups are making cell-cultured fat by growing animal fat cells in a bioreactor (Hoxton Farms, Mission Barns​​, Believer Meats);​ while some are playing around with the structure of plant oils through emulsions (Lypid), oleogels (Shiru, Motif FoodWorks), and oil structuring technology (Fattastic).

Speaking to AgFunderNews at the recent SynBioBeta conference in San Jose, Petrie said the economics of fats from fermentation stand up if you’re making high-impact, low-inclusion products: “There are some fats and oils in meat and dairy that are really signature that you associate with a well-cooked piece of meat or a dairy product. What we do at Nourish Ingredients is try and ignore all the boring fats which you could otherwise get from plants and focus on the really potent and important molecules we can deliver via fermentation.”

Low inclusion rates

He added: “We have our R&D in Australia and a pilot facility in Singapore that lets us do meaningful quantities for our partners to use in internal testing. For commercial scale production, we’ve already identified partners who can do that for us. But we don’t need huge bioreactors as our ingredients are used at a very low inclusion rate, so we’ve got relatively low-volume fermentation from co-manufacturers, and we then take that material and do some critical value-add steps.”

To date, Nourish has raised about US$40 million, he said. “But it is very challenging in the current environment, especially in the alternative protein space, which is getting absolutely hammered. And frankly, that might be appropriate because I think it was so overheated… that it was probably unhealthy for the market.

“What we’re seeing now is a pullback, both on the investment but also on the way in which companies are spending and the approach that they’re taking towards being more collaborative with others and I think that this is a healthy shift.”

Watch our recent interview with James Petrie at Nourish Ingredients at SynBioBeta 2024: