How a dairy additive startup is finding success in precision fermentation by thinking small
Alternative milk has become a key success point of the plant-based movement — a beacon that consumer purchasing behavior can change.
According to the National Consumer Panel, 41% of U.S. households purchased plant-based milk in 2022. Oat milk and almond milk are the most popular.
Turtle Tree Labs is hoping that openness will transfer to cultivated milk, which is created through biofermentation. This milk is not plant based but is instead true milk cells produced by yeast.
The dairy industry contributes about 4% to greenhouse gas emissions, or two billion metric tonnes of CO2, a year. Dairy production uses millions of tons of water annually — a single dairy cow will consume 30 to 50 gallons of water a day while lactating. Feeding and raising cattle, sheep, goats and buffalo requires about 2.5 billion acres of land, almost 7% of the total land on Earth.
The promise of cultivated milk is access to real animal milk with a much lower carbon and landscape footprint while also eliminating the animal suffering that usually accompanies these products.
Turtle Tree’s CEO Fengru Lin got her start in dairy by making homemade cheese. When she met company founder Max Rye, that’s when Lin brought her Google background to the party and big tech got involved. The company has a testing lab in California but partners with contract manufacturers to make its products.
While Turtle Tree’s first focus was a cultivated milk product, the company has pivoted to a dairy additive called lactoferrin. It is selling this additive as an ingredient for adult nutrition in athletic performance coffee company Cadence Performance Coffee and plant-based milk company Strive.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Food Dive: Can you explain how cultivated milk is produced?
Fengru Lin: We take samples of mammary cells, like breast cells, and we can extract them from freshly expressed milk. After we extract these cells, we will multiply the cells and induce them to start lactating. The volumes that are coming out are still in very small volumes. Such small volumes that we were not able to do any commercial analysis on the volume of output. Even in seven to 10 years, I’m not sure it would fit well as a food product. I think it might be better positioned to be a pharma product, supporting at risk or NICU babies.
FD: How did you decide to make the switch from a fully cultivated milk product to focusing on lactoferrin?
Lin: Milk is a very complex fluid. There are over 2,000 different ingredients in it, so even the regulators will need some time to characterize everything in the milk. Although we started the company with the cultivated milk idea, we went to the Fonterras of the world and told them, ‘Hey, we can produce milk. What do you think about it?’
The feedback that we got was, milk is a commodity. The product is $2 to $4 a gallon. You’re not going to be able to get that price point [with cultivated milk] anytime soon. You should focus on the high-value ingredients. So fast forward to today, we are laser-focused on the high-value ingredients that are found in milk. For us, single ingredients at a high value is what makes sense.
FD: That’s the lactoferrin? Why is that such an important ingredient?
Lin: Most of the lactoferrin is in infant nutrition because it has a lot of benefits around gut health, immunity support and regulation. It helps you think better because it’s able to transport iron. It helps your muscles recover better. The first lactoferrin that we’re targeting is actually bovine, the cow, versions. We’re starting off with the adult nutrition market. There is a lot of untapped opportunity for the adult nutrition market. I, myself, take lactoferrin to help with immune regulation. There’s a lot of potential [for lactoferrin] to be the next Omega-3 of the food industry.
FD: How are you producing the lactoferrin?
Lin: Precision fermentation. This technology is being used to produce ingredients for cheese making or insulin for diabetics, and we are using the same method to produce cow milk ingredients. We’re able to engineer different microbes, in our case yeast, and code certain DNA constructs into the microbe. The microbe would then ingest regular sugar and pump out your target protein, just like how an animal would, but without having to go through the animal. And then we separate the lactoferrin out of the fermentation broth.
This process allows us to produce just one protein. It’s a very clean output. And in the food space, everyone loves clean ingredients, so they can formulate and standardize around it.
FD: What’s the business model? And what about pricing?
Lin: We want to enable the different beverage companies and food companies to put lactoferrin into their beverage products. And the end consumer can make a conscious choice to choose those products made with Turtle Tree’s products. It’s business to business to consumer.
[Traditional] lactoferrin comes from cow’s milk. We are aiming to meet, to match market prices which today is about $800 to $1,000 per kilogram. The biggest producers in the world are in Europe, and the biggest consumers in the world are in China. These lactoferrin companies have to valorize the rest of the milk. Once you pull the lactoferrin out of milk, you cannot make milk chocolates or sell it in a carton. So you have to be very thoughtful about how to valorize the rest of the milk.
FD: Is there a goal of making lactoferrin from human milk instead of bovine?
Lin: Yeah, absolutely. That is part of our plan. We’re able to support other proteins, like human lactoferrin, as part of our pipeline. We know for a fact that human lactoferrin would require much more regulatory focus. Because it is a human protein, if the structure is not perfect, it could negatively impact our immune system. So the FDA is very strict about that. There’s a lot of clinical trials that need to be run before.
FD: A lot of meat and dairy alternatives saw an upswing in 2020 and 2021 but have seen downturns in investment and consumer purchasing in recent years. Are you worried about that?
Lin: A lot of the plant-based products, or even cell based products. They are commodity-priced products. It’s going to be difficult to get to price parity with technology. There’s always that price war, and it’s going to be difficult to charge consumers a lot more for the sustainability story.
For us, we were very deliberate in choosing lactoferrin so we can get to a profitability much faster and sooner than the other companies. So yes, I am watching it very carefully. For us, we have a little bit of a different angle. It’s too early to tell for sure if this is the winning solution, but we feel very confident.
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