Dive briefs:
- Perfect Day, a leader in precision fermentation, is launching an enterprise biology business called nth Bio. It will be based at the company’s Salt Lake City hub.
- Finnish egg white protein maker Onego Bio is the first company to collaborate with nth Bio. Onego uses precision fermentation to create ovalbumin, the most abundant protein in that part of the egg. The company will first enter the U.S. market with bakery and confectionery ingredients and protein supplements, and will eventually manufacture branded baking products for consumers.
- Perfect Day, the manufacturer of animal-free whey protein, was one of the first food companies to use fermentation technology to produce naturally occurring protein from another source. The company has raised $711.5 million so far, according to Crunchbase, and has a range of consumer products on the market that use the company’s proteins.
Dive Insight:
When Perfect Day started, co-founders Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi were essentially trying to create a friendlier, animal-free version of real dairy, said the company’s global head of commercials. Ravi Jhala said in an interview. Perfect Day founded his affiliated CPG company, The Urgent Company, to manufacture Perfect Day’s animal-free dairy-based branded products.
The science of precision fermentation is not new, but for many years it has been used mainly in the pharmaceutical and medical technology industries, with very limited use in food until the launch of Perfect Day.
Today, precision fermentation is a field ripe for growth and the science is attracting many new startups. According to the Good Food Institute, there will be 39 companies worldwide specializing in the precision fermentation of food as of the end of 2021, making him 44% of all fermentation-driven alternative protein companies. Nine of the fifteen fermentation companies launched in 2021 have adopted precision fermentation.
Through good science and business decisions, good timing and key early partnerships, including ADM, Perfect Day is now the only brand to use precision fermentation in consumer products. According to Jhala, Perfect Day realized that while it was growing, it could do more to help others enter the space. Finding the type of equipment and facilities needed on a meaningful scale to create precision fermented food ingredients that are subject to a range of food safety requirements from the FDA is difficult and costly. And not many companies have the knowledge on how to do it.
“Perfect Day is here to help companies in the precision fermentation space truly bridge the stock-to-scale gap,” said Jhala. “That’s what we’re trying to achieve. And we want companies to know that their needs don’t have to be fragmented. Basically, this kind of Service essentially lets you go from soup to nuts.”
Perfect Day’s 58,000-square-foot state-of-the-art Salt Lake City facility, where nth Bio operates, should be fully operational by next August, Jhala said.
Onego Bio is a spin-off company from Finland’s VTT Technical Research Center and has been developing precision fermentation technology for several years. Having raised €14.5 million ($14.5 million), the business earlier this month received his latest funding from Finland. Onego Bio and Perfect Day have said the new partnership will result in faster time to market, but have not provided details of the proposed timeline.