Project description
Precision-fermented fats for a sustainable future
The global food system heavily relies on animal-based proteins, which occupy 77 % of agricultural land yet only provide 17 % of the world’s calories. This dependence on animal farming is a major driver of ecosystem destruction, biodiversity loss, and over 15 % of greenhouse gas emissions. However, plant oils and fats fall short of replicating the flavour and functionality of animal fats. The EIC-funded Melt&Marble project aims to solve this problem with a groundbreaking, scalable technology platform. Specifically, it uses engineered yeasts to produce animal-like fats with superior taste, functionality, and lower saturated fat content. The goal is to scale up the technology to meet the growing demand from alternative meat producers.
Objective
Melt&Marble (M&M) is a Sweden-based company that specializes in developing exceptional fats for plant-based foods. The origins of our company trace back to Jens Nielsen's Systems and Synthetic Biology group at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Currently, more than 60% of dietary proteins are supplied by animals whose farming takes up ~77% of all agricultural land despite supplying only 17% of the worlds calories. Dependence on animal proteins leads to ecosystem destruction, biodiversity loss, and >15% of GHG emissions. Though there are alternate meat and dairy options available, the plant-based oils and fats used in plant-based meat and dairy analogues simply cannot compete with the functionality and flavour of animal fats. We have created for the first time, a scalable, precision-fermentation-based proprietary technology platform using engineered yeasts that produce animal-like fats with superior functionality and flavour that customers are demanding. The fats have lower saturated fats levels (40-60% vs. 90% of coconut oil) and better functionality than coconut oil to impart a better taste to meat and dairy analogues. The entire technology platform is scalable due to the existing and outsourced fermentation infrastructure.
The fats are customizable to various food and non-food applications and will benefit the alternative meat producers within the EU and globally. Our technology is protected by a robust IP strategy and patents. We have 10 granted patents and 2 pending patents across 5 patent families and the innovation stems from 2 crucial components protected by these IPs that allow us to efficiently produce highly tailored fats.
We have already scaled up our first product to pilot scale (TRL 5). Within this project, we will improve our production process, scale up further to demo scale, and conduct extensive application tests. This will allow us to advance to TRL 8 and significantly de-risk our investment case.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- agricultural sciencesanimal and dairy sciencedairy
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteins
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologybioprocessing technologiesfermentation
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.3.1 - The European Innovation Council (EIC) Main Programme
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) HORIZON-EIC-2024-ACCELERATOR-02
See other projects for this callFunding Scheme
HORIZON-EIC-ACC - HORIZON EIC AcceleratorCoordinator
413 46 Goteborg
Sweden
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.