In part two of our gallery of highlights from FoodNavigator-USA's recent trip to Israel, we profile startups exploring everything from upcycled yeast proteins and carob to antimicrobial proteins. Best viewed on a laptop!
At Prevera, said co-founder and CEO Gal Shamri, “With very small amounts of essential amino acids, and very short proteins, we have efficacy [against pathogens such as E.coli, Salmonella and Listeria], and when we eat foods [containing these anti-microbials] our digestive system just breaks the proteins back down, so it doesn’t affect our microbiome.”
As for efficacy, he said, “We are as good as or in some cases better than current solutions that are not clean label. And we are higher in efficacy than herbal extracts such as rosemary extracts and we don’t have the negative sensory impacts.”
He added: “The company was established two years ago, so the first year was about developing a proof of concept, the second year we developed a submission for the food market specifically, and now we are doing application tests with potential partners. Next year we aim to do scale up and regulatory and we plan to have the first products in 2024.”
How the anti-microbials would be labeled on food labels is not yet clear, he said: “My dream is that there will be a new category of food protection proteins, not ‘preservatives’ so this can support clean labels.”
‘Molecular farming’ startup Pigmentum, founded by Tal Lutzky, is producing a variety of high value food ingredients from casein proteins to vanillin in indoor growing systems using lettuce as a host, which grows more rapidly than soy and corn (the hosts of choice for some other startups in the field) and presents fewer regulatory issues and allergen concerns given that it can grow indoors, he told us.
But what kinds of yields can lettuce produce? “We currently get around 7g per kg per kilogram on a fresh weight basis, but our goal is to be around 2%, which is 20g per kg, which is pretty high," said Lutzky.
While testing microbial strains as hosts for high-value ingredients can be done pretty rapidly, the breeding process for plants such as lettuce can also be pretty efficient, claimed Lutzky.
“With plants, when you produce the first event of the transgenic plant you get a lot of different events, so each event gets the transgene in a different place on the genome, so we're trying to work out where is the best place to put it to get the best yields. And then you create seeds from the best performers and you create another generation.”
Pigmentum’s technology is founded on the inducible mechanism in transgenic plants. This means that the plant gene – which Pigmentum encodes to produce specific compounds – is ‘fully silent’ until it deploys an external agrochemical signal, he said.
“Our plants gain biomass and grow in natural, high rates. Only when we implement our agrochemical via an irrigation system or spraying do the plants respond with the hyperexpression of a specific desired compound.”
As for bioengineered labeling – which is triggered in the US if there is any detectible modified DNA in the final product – Pigmentum’s first products may trigger it, he said: “Our first product may contain some detectable modified DNA.”
In the best-case scenario, Pigmentum hopes to commercialize its first ingredient in 2025, said Lutzky, who is currently finalizing a seed round of funding.
Green Onyx is one of a flurry of companies growing the fast-growing bright green aquatic plant lemna (a.k.a. duckweed). But unlike companies attempting to sell powders or proteins, it is focusing on growing it as a fresh product – with a shelf life of six weeks - in small-scale closed, sterile, compact machines (whereby partners would grow it under license), said CRO Ben Kidron.
Yeap makes protein from upcycled yeast, “the best nutritional protein that doesn’t require extensive agriculture land usage, is resilient to extreme climate events and has no production limits,” said co-founder and CEO Jonathan Goshen.
“We are producing a protein from yeast that otherwise would be thrown away or converted to animal feed – so sources could include breweries or lactic acid production. We convert it into a functional concentrated protein using a patent-pending process that basically involves extraction, concentration, and drying that would be listed on the ingredients list as ‘yeast protein.’”
He added: “The first product is a functional concentrated complete protein [powder] that has multiple applications with a high PDCAAS [0.94] and a neutral flavor. It’s not one of the top allergens, and it can work in everything from cream cheese and ice cream to egg replacement in baked goods, condiments, protein bars and meat analogs. It also has the ability to work in high acidic environments.”
On the manufacturing front, he said, “We are already on a scale of hundreds of kilos per year and in q1 we will be working with co-manufacturers in the US and Europe."
CarobWay plans to commercialize a variety of ingredients from carob, said co-founder and CEO Udi Alroy, who says he already has commitments from buyers and hopes to bring the first products to market in 2024.
“We're looking to use 100% of the carob, including locust bean gum [from the seeds of the fruit], but most of the business is in the fruit, which contains sugars and fibers and polyphenols.
“It generally takes four to five years [for carob trees to start yielding fruit] but if you really spoil the tree we think it could be a lot quicker than that,” added Alroy, a food industry veteran who formed the company about two and a half years ago.
“We planted about 40,000 trees last year with the idea to get to 500,000 trees; the orchards are designed to be the most effective for mechanical harvesting with a computerized irrigation system, because we have to be extremely economical. We chose the Israeli type of carob which is suitable for our needs.
“There’s a shortage of carob, so we have to secure long term agreements and secure the supply chain. Our solution is to be vertically integrated. So we go to growers, tell them you grow the carob using our high-yielding seedlings, and we’ll give you a 10-year agreement at a fixed price, and they sell everything to us. We then produce our own carob products and sell them as food ingredients.”
InnovoPro - which has developed a suite of functional chickpea ingredients including protein concentrates, textured vegetable proteins, and egg replacements – has just struck an exclusive commercial distribution partnership with Ingredion (which invested in InnovoPro at the beginning of this year), whereby Ingredion will distribute its chickpea protein concentrate in the US and Canada. Check out part one of our gallery of Israeli startups