CEO, Maria Cho, of Triplebar is a guest on The Plantbased Business Hour. She and Elysabeth Alfano discuss the protein supply chain benefits provided by precision fermentation and when scaling will take place.
Specifically, we discussed
- What is Triplebar, and precision fermentation?
- Why is this a critical pillar in the shift of global food systems transformation? What efficiencies does it allow?
- What kind of innovation will we see beyond the science? What applications in food will we see?
- When will this scale and see adoption? What impact will it have on lowering (or raising) the price of protein?
- We saw precision fermentation having a moment in 2019 with Perfect Day and The Every Company. Is this more advanced, differentiated in some manner?
- Is this considered clean protein?
Below is a highlight clip and transcription from our long-form conversation.
Elysabeth: I’d like to bring on the CEO of Triplebar, and if you haven’t heard of Triplebar you certainly will know it deeply and well by the end of today’s conversation. Maria Cho, thank you for being with me today.
For your world of innovation, will we see a Frito corn chip now carrying protein? What will we see with this?
Maria Cho: Potentially. I think what innovation really brings with the ability to make proteins through fermentation and bioreactors is really co-locating the food production to its actual spot. Like Singapore, for example, they have this 30 by 30 goal to make 30% of their protein or food that they have actually in the country of Singapore. I think it’s a goal that I’m not sure they’re going to quite reach, but I love the initiative around it and their government efforts have been really working towards that outcome.
So instead of planting crops, we’re going to have tanks of reactors that are actually making food and purifying it and using a lot of the technologies that are used now to make food proteins, but we’re just going to do that on site. So this is why part of the process of fermentation is to also make sure that we’re growing these organisms or in the case of cultivated meat, growing these cell lines and in low cost food, we call that media for cells. So low cost media that don’t require all these big inputs of components that require corn to be farmed and then harvested and then make sugar and do all of that. We want to work through a process to where that cell is super robust and doesn’t need all of that.
So I think that the future is really the co-location of food production where it’s needed versus kind of import, export, shipping. We saw it even because of the war in Ukraine, right? 10% of the world’s wheat is exported from Ukraine and that’s a problem when there’s a war that’s happening there. So how can we impact global famine? How can we actually create food where it’s being consumed?
I think that’s a really cool innovation, that fermentation and cultivated meat at large really impact us.
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