New Culture’s Post

🧀🤝 NEW CULTURE AND CJ CHEILJEDANG PARTNER TO LOWER PRODUCTION COST OF ITS PRECISION-FERMENTED CASEIN New Culture, the first precision-fermented casein producer approved for sale in the US, is amping up its efforts to make cost-effective animal-free proteins through a manufacturing deal with CJ CheilJedang, which is also an investor in the US startup. The collaboration is focused on achieving commodity pricing for New Culture’s first product, a precision-fermented mozzarella made for pizzerias. Following a pilot partnership last year, the cheese will debut at Nancy Silverton’s Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles later this year. “Bringing our animal-free cheese to pizza lovers everywhere means producing it at a large enough scale and low enough cost so we can compete and win on product performance,” said New Culture co-founder and CSO Inja Radman. This is why teaming up with CJ CheilJedang, which has 10 manufacturing facilities in seven countries with millions of litres of fermentation capacity, was key for the alternative protein business. “CJ is the world’s largest producer of bioproducts made from fermentation. They operate at massive scale with some of the most sophisticated assets on the planet that produce products at commodity prices,” New Culture co-founder and CEO Matt Gibson told Green Queen. Backed by the likes of Kraft Heinz, SOSV and CJ CheilJedang itself, the company brought in $25M in a Series A round in 2021, and now hopes to strengthen its manufacturing position and path to profitability. “At New Culture, our goal is to build an enduring business that can span decades in order to have as much positive impact on the dairy industry as possible,” said Gibson. Australian-American startup Change Foods, Austria’s Fermify, Indian player Zero Cow Factory, and Paris-based Standing Ovation are working on precision-fermented casein too. Nobell Foods and Finally Foods are using molecular farming to produce the protein, while New York-based Pureture and San Francisco startup Climax Foods are producing vegan casein. #GreenQueen #altprotein #futurefood #precisionfermentation #innovation #foodtech

New Culture—a startup making #casein proteins via #precisionfermentation to create #animalfree mozzarella—has announced a strategic partnership with Korean biomanufacturing giant CJ CheilJedang, giving it access to “some of the largest and most sophisticated #fermentation facilities on the planet.” CJ CheilJedang, which invested in New Culture in 2022, is the world’s largest producer of bioproducts made from fermentation, and will help the San Leandro-based startup “unlock commodity pricing” for casein from fermentation without having to invest tens of millions in capex, claims cofounder and CEO Matt Gibson. “CJ has a range of world-class bioprocess assets in several countries around the world. We are working with them to understand which sites could be the most cost-effective to run New Culture’s process in order to produce our animal-free casein at the lowest price possible.” While some commentators have questioned the commercial viability of precision fermentation for some ‘commodity’ dairy and egg proteins, Gibson said New Culture had been “able to achieve technical metrics unheard of for animal-free casein and has demonstrated a robust, reproducible and de-risked bioprocess at scale.” ADM, another investor in New Culture with experience in large-scale industrial fermentation, has also been “a terrific partner for us and is an important part of New Culture’s scale-up journey,” says Gibson. “The dairy industry is so large though that even if we were to work with both CJ and ADM at their massive commercial scales in parallel, we’d be net margin positive and producing millions of pounds of cheese, but still only scratching the surface of the $9bn US #mozzarella market.” #foodtech #syntheticbiology #biomanufacturing SynBioBeta AgFunder

Huge congrats to Matt Gibson, Inja Radman and team at New Culture on your partnership with South Korean biotech giant CJ CheilJedang to reduce costs of animal-free mozzarella for pizzerias. #animalfree #vegancheese #fermentation #precisionfermentation

🤝 New Culture has partnered with South Korea's CJ CheilJedang 🍕 The partnership will focus on reducing the cost of New Culture’s #animalfree casein protein, unlocking commodity pricing for its first product, mozzarella 🗣 New Culture’s co-founder and CSO, Inja Radman, said: “Our partnership with CJ CheilJedang facilitates access to some of the largest and most sophisticated fermentation facilities on the planet to truly transform the dairy industry". 🧀 The partnership is set to strengthen New Culture’s manufacturing position and path to profitability for its animal-free cheese products #precisionfermentation #altdairy #cheese #US #SouthKorea #novelfood #dairyalternative  #CJCheilJedang 🧫 Read more on The Cell Base 👇 https://lnkd.in/efrCzMnv