Fermentation is Hot

Food companies are answering the growing demand for natural ingredients that are hard to come by, increasingly using the fermentation process.  

A report in Fortune magazine takes a look at how instead of sourcing ingredients from nature, food scientists are creating them through an industrial method that until now, most thought about just in terms of brewing beer. 

Fortune describes how it works: Scientists identify the desired genes in a plant or animal and insert them into a host such as yeast. The yeast is fed sugars and nutrients to stimulate fermentation. Then the yeast and its genes are filtered off, and the desired ingredient is purified out of the remaining broth. 

Neil Goldsmith, CEO and co-founder of Evolva, which provides companies with the yeast for fermentation and can entirely run the process for them, told the magazine, “Fermentation offers a way to make ingredients without being reliant on a challenged supply chain.” 

One example is Perfect Day, the startup non-animal milk company that we introduced you to in our 2017 trends forecast back in December. Perfect Day uses fermentation to make its cow's milk without cows. It 3D-prints the DNA sequence of a cow and inserts it into a specific location of yeast—which it has aptly named "Buttercup." The yeast ferments sugar to make real milk proteins (casein and whey), which are then combined with plant-based fats and nutrients to get milk that's lactose-free. 

Impossible Foods is yet another company using the same process for its cow-free meant, and there are other companies developing more commonplace products through fermentation, like Natur Research and Cargill, both tackling the sugar problem.

Fermentation might just be a huge solution that's not GMO, not artificial and not scary.