The Latest Happenings in Food and Ag Tech

Since our update last summer on the latest advancements in technology in the food and ag tech sectors, much has happened in the industry. On a national scale, researchers at North Carolina State University were awarded $30 million from Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos to create a biomanufacturing hub for alternative proteins. Additionally, the FDA reorganization to establish the new unified Human Food Program (HFP), which aims to better equip the agency to regulate the emergence of innovative food technologies, was approved and set to roll out on October 1. Here in California, Mission Barns, a Bay Area company that developed a line of bacon, meat and sausage made from a blend of plant protein and cell-cultivated pork, recently unveiled a new scalable bioreactor in the hopes of increasing production. Companies in the state have also made significant strides in developing vegan alternatives to cheese—and even chicken eggs—as well as ways to protect crops without using chemical pesticides.

Here’s a roundup of the latest news in food and ag tech from Biocom California member companies.

The Next Big Cheese

“Animal-free dairy products” may sound like an oxymoron—or even impossible—but in this new era of crafting vegan food products through precision fermentation, they are getting closer to reality (and to our dinner tables). New Culture has been on a quest to develop an animal-free cheese by using microorganisms to “brew” casein, the protein responsible for giving cheese it’s craveable gooey texture, meltability and pull, then mixing it with plant-based products. Last year, the Bay Area company debuted its dairy-free mozzarella at a special dinner at Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles, an acclaimed restaurant by James Beard Award-winning chef and baker Nancy Silverton. This spring, New Culture’s mozzarella received a (Generally Recognized as Safe) designation by an independent panel of qualified scientific and toxicology experts. The company is also partnering with Silverton to include the cheese on Pizzeria Mozza’s menu.

Breeding Disease-Resistant Crops without GMOs

Canola oil is one of the most commonly found pantry items in American kitchens as its neutral flavor, high smoke point and low amount of saturated fats makes it a go-to for pan-frying our favorite foods. Beyond the kitchen, the oil can used for producing biodiesel, cosmetics and livestock feed—making canola a versatile and sustainable crop. As with all plants, Canola is susceptible to pests and diseases, especially white mold (Sclerotinia), which can greatly reduce crop yields. Cibus, a San Diego-based agtech company, is currently developing a gene-edited Canola plant that will hopefully be resistant to the fungus by using its propriety Rapid Trait Development System.

The platform essentially allows the company to edit a plant’s genome without introducing foreign DNA, distinguishing it from traditional genetic modification (GMO) techniques. The company announced in a release earlier this summer that these newly edited plants will undergo disease-resistance testing in a controlled environment, and notes their research could also be applied to soybean cultivation, which is also affected by white mold. In May, Cibus was named in Fast Company’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies of 2024.

Fun fact: The word “canola” is a portmanteau of “Canada” and “ola” (oil), as the plant was bred at the University of Manitoba in the 1970s. Canola is one of the most widely grown crops in Canada today.

A Global Collaboration for Safer Pest Control

Provivi has made a name for itself in agricultural technology by harnessing nature to keep pests away from crops without the need for using pesticides. Founded by Nobel Laureate Frances Arnold, Pedro Coelho and Peter Meinhold, the company develops proprietary synthetic pheromones—natural chemicals that insects produce—which disrupts insects’ mating cycles and controls their population. Provivi’s pheromones are also species-specific and can be targeted to affect only insects that are harmful. The LA-based company recently signed an agreement with Swiss agtech firm Syngenta Biologicals to collaborate on developing new pheromones to control the populations of two insects in South and Southeast Asia—the yellow stem borer and fall armyworm—which can destroy rice and corn crops. The company notes these insects have spread rapidly in India, Indonesia and Thailand, and that corn and rice serve as a primary food source for more than 3 billion people every year.

Funding Sustainable Companies

The nonprofit Larta Institute is devoted to helping life science and tech startups that are developing innovations in sustainability. Since its founding in Los Angeles in 1993, it has aided more than 5,000 startups. The organization hosts a variety of accelerator programs and earlier this year it announced its second cohort for the Venture Fellow Program—a nine-month program for small companies in Los Angeles and Miami that are working to address climate change in underserved communities in the U.S. and around the world. This year’s cohort include startups that are seeking affordable soil-remediation solutions in agtech, developing ways to covert biogas from landfills into clean hydrogen and are using AI to address water contamination.

An Egg-Cellent Plan

Startups such as Onego Bio have added a new twist to the age-old riddle of whether the chicken or the egg came first. The company developed an animal-free egg white protein, which it calls Bioalbumen, using precision fermentation and microbes from a fungus strain. The Finland-based company has its commercial operations based in San Diego and recently received roughly $15 million in new funding from the European Innovation Council Accelerator program and additional investors. The company says a full-scale manufacturing unit would deliver the protein equivalent of 6 million laying hens and that it plans to complete its GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status this year.

Breathing New Life Into Protein Production

Air Protein is a futuristic product inspired by NASA’s initial research into producing food for astronauts during long-duration space missions. The agency found that the carbon dioxide gas astronauts exhaled could be captured by microbes and then used as nutrients to be transformed into food. The Bay Area-based company’s founders, Lisa Dyson and John Reed, picked up where NASA left off and launched Air Protein in 2019. The company has since developed “air seafood” (scallop and fish) in 2021, holds a patent on meat made from air and last year it opened its first air protein farm in San Leandro. Air Protein was recently named one of America’s Top Greentech Companies in 2024 by Time magazine.

A Quest for Animal-Free Lab Products

Food production isn’t the only area where scientists and researchers are looking for ways to reduce our dependency on animals. Animal-based products, such as fetal bovine serum (FBS), are widely use in cell culture research and Defined Bioscience is on a mission to find new ways to produce the necessary products for research—such as lab reagents and stem cells—that are not animal-based and can perform better than FBS in a wide variety of applications, including for cultured meat production. Its HiDef-ITS supplement uses insulin, transferrin and selenium for the maintenance and growth of a wide variety cell types. Last fall, the San Diego-based company entered a partnership with Cell Culture Collective to distribute its animal- and serum-free stem cell culture products, and it also received a $1 million grant from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine for its clinical-grade PSC maintenance medium for stem cell therapy manufacturing.