MET2FOOD

As the global population continues to grow apace (by a further 25% to 2050), the demand for food will increase. Traditional, agriculture will struggle to fulfil the demands made upon it. Pressure will come not only from the number of people needing to be fed but from other related issues, such as land use change to accommodate more agriculture, increased water use, chemical use, increased eutrophication of water courses, loss of biodiversity and damage to precious topsoils.

To address this, several approaches which look to change the course of both food (and feed) production and consumer purchasing habits are being explored. One such approach is to use microbial cell factories to produce nutrient-dense, high quality food/feed ingredients. Microbial food products have the potential to help transform the global food industry away from resource inefficient production, which pollutes and denudes the environment, towards production of highly nutritious food in scalable, fully controlled, contained and monitored, fermentation processes.

This project will seek to both improve the process efficiency and sustainability of microbial food production and expand the market opportunity by developing new product streams.

The project will develop novel processes for the production of microbial biomass from sustainable feedstocks. Microbial SCP is naturally high in protein and to increase its value as a food ingredient, processes will be developed to generate a soluble protein isolate fraction for use as a food ingredient, with the insoluble fraction for use as an animal feed ingredient. The soluble protein fraction will be assessed for valuable properties such as gelling, foaming and binding, for replacement of animal-derived proteins in meat-free products. The insoluble fraction will be assessed as an animal feed ingredient for farmed fish and piglets.

The outcomes of this project will be the development of new processes and technologies to produce novel, nutrient rich, microbially-derived food and animal feed products. The processes developed will be resource efficient, reducing CO2 emissions, with low water and land usage requirements compared to traditional agriculture. The processes will be highly scalable and non-seasonal, using technology that can be deployed anywhere.