Alongside the industry heavyweights famed for pioneering the plant-based category, smaller businesses with big ambitions are also championing the future of sustainable, animal-free food. The Plant Base’s new Start-up spotlight feature will put a well-deserved focus on these earlier-stage businesses, celebrating new plant-based innovation.
This month we speak to Hermes Sanctorum, CEO of Paleo, an innovative company using precision fermentation to create animal-free, species-specific myoglobin proteins. The company even managed to recreate the heme protein of a mammoth, an animal no longer in existence on this planet! Read on to find out more.
Can you outline the company’s core objectives and long-term vision?
We use precision fermentation to make highly functional ingredients to create a real meat experience. We strongly agree with the analysis that in order to convince more people to reduce meat consumption, you need to make a great alternative. To do so, we develop myoglobins that exist in actual conventional meat.
From a practical point of view, you can dream about everyone becoming vegan but it needs to work, you really need to address people’s needs and what they treasure. The meat experience is part of it, so we address it in a different way.
We are developing a B2B company, so we produce a highly functional ingredient – myoglobin – and our potential clients can manufacture their final product using it.
How is Paleo innovating in the space?
As far as I understand it, we are the only company that develops myoglobins that are identical to what you would find in meat, of different species, and then as a GMO-free product.
That last part is important. I know of course that there are other players that try to make proteins in an intracellular way, but we make sure that our ingredient does not contain any recombinant DNA and that’s an important one for European markets.
Then, of course, you have the portfolio of different myoglobins that we are developing, including the mammoth one – that gets the strongest attention! We of course focus on other myoglobins, but the mammoth is a showcase of what you can do, you can even make an extinct animal protein – what better way to prove that we are animal-free?
Why the focus on myoglobins?
Myoglobins are present in a very low concentration in conventional meat, but it is a really powerful ingredient and it has that same effect in plant-based food. There are also differences among myoglobins from different species, so it’s a really interesting protein. It was an obvious choice to work with.
There are other parts that also matter in that meat experience that are complementary to what we are doing. For instance, there are a lot of companies now that focus on animal fats through precision fermentation or cultured cells. I don’t consider those competitors. We are all complementary to making a fantastic product to decrease meat consumption.
How does your fermentation process work?
We make sure that our yeast perform under extracellular secretion. That’s how we make sure that the protein is outside the cells, then we separate the yeast cells and the myoglobin in a rather easy way. You don’t have to go through expensive purification steps to make sure that all kinds of debris is out of it, or especially recombinant DNA, so in the end we have a very pure myoglobin that is of great interest to the industry.
What challenges have you faced?
Commercially there is a great interest in our myoglobins, there is a lot of interaction with potential clients. The biggest black box, in fact, is the regulatory framework.
I call it a black box because there is regulation but we are not 100% sure how long it is going to take to come out of it. I’m quite sure that in the end our myoglobins are safe and will be authorised, I don’t doubt that. The time is a big question mark – I get that question a lot of course, when will we be commercially available. That will depend on the regulator.
We are currently assessing which region to start in and which track we are going to follow.
What are your plans for the future? What do you hope to have achieved?
Our major goal is to decrease meat consumption, so that means that Paleo, together with other companies should have a great commercial activity, our ingredients will be manufactured in a lot of products for the whole world.
That’s the major goal for me. Of course I have investors on board who also have financial expectations, but for me that’s the long-term view of the company – it needs to have a positive impact on the planet.
What is your biggest achievement so far?
From a technological point of view, I am of course proud of the fact that we are able to recreate that mammoth protein, especially as a GMO-free product. When we started to develop that process, we really didn’t know whether we could do it.
The more financial part is that we managed to close a venture round in economically difficult times. We did an investment round in February this year with some really highly recognised parties like DSM-Firmenich Venturing, a major player in the ingredients business, and Planet A Ventures. They asked for an independent lifecycle analysis and made sure that we had the positive impact that we claimed. If the LCA was negative, they wouldn’t have made the investment, so that was quite a credibility check for us.
DSM-Firmenich would never have invested in us had they not tasted our product and it hadn’t been good! They are tough in their expectations, but it makes you proud. It truly works, and deserves the investment and potential that we see.
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