A brave plan to scale up farm-free food

Hello there,

Are you familiar with the world of precision fermentation and how it could be a huge opportunity for the world, by transforming how we make food?

You will be, when you’ve read about what Cambridge-based BravelyCultured is working on in today’s newsletter.

A couple of things before we dive in:

• 👋 A big hello to everyone who discovered us via a mention in the Sunday Times at the weekend. We had a really good day for new signups. The article described us as a “London tech newsletter” but you can be assured that we’ll continue to cover startups from right across the UK (including London of course).

• 🚀 Congratulations to ChipFlow for raising a £1.2 million pre-seed round. You first read about this chip design software startup here on PreSeed Now back in November.

– Martin

BravelyCultured has a plan to scale up farm-free food production with the help of the sea

It’s been called “the most important green technology ever,” and while it’s still at an early stage it’s got huge potential. 

Precision fermentation could transform food production by allowing us to grow food from microbes rather than traditional agriculture. This can lead to, for example, cheese that is identical to cow milk cheese without a cow ever having been involved.

That might sound a bit disconcerting, but what you end up with can be the same or better than what you’d get from a farm.

“One of the big problems with food production is that it contributes a lot of CO2 emissions. And by a lot I mean it's 30% of global CO2 emissions,” says Natalija Stepurko, co-founder and CEO of BravelyCultured, a startup doing pioneering work in the precision fermentation space. Some estimates put that figure as even higher than 30%.

“The problem with food production is, basically, animals. We take proteins and fats from animals; that's what we're interested in, in terms of the food industry.”

But what if you produced those proteins and fats in another way? That’s what precision fermentation can achieve.

“You can take identical proteins that are in animals, insert this genetic information into microorganisms and make them secrete the proteins that are present normally in animals,” says Stepurko.

“So essentially, you can completely substitute animal agriculture with precision fermentation without the loss of nutritional value because you're making exactly the same product, but with drastically reduced carbon and deforestation impact.”