We’re back in the world of colour today, or to be more precise, colour-focused biotech.

In this case, Plume Biotech draws on the peculiarities of algae to find a new source for food colours, with some intriguing selling points.

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Plume Biotech shines a new light on adding colour to food

Chemical-based artificial colours have long been unpopular with consumers and health experts. But that doesn’t mean we don’t all want our food products to have an appealing colour.

Enter the growing market for natural food colourings. The problem is, they’re not always easy to integrate into food products. And if you take the colours from food that people could otherwise eat, it raises concerns about sustainability.

“The problem that you have with natural colours is that they're quite difficult to work with. [For example], when you put them in a drink, they might change colour, they might degrade a bit, depending on the pH of the drink,” explains Dr Thomas Burns, CEO and co-founder at Plume Biotech, a startup working on new ways to create reliable, natural colourings for the food and beverage industry.

“We're trying to focus on areas of the colour wheel that people have the most trouble with. So we're developing higher performance naturally based colours and trying to improve the number of different products that can use natural colours and don't have to rely on synthetics.”

Plume Biotech describes its fermentation-based approach as “upcycling”.

“If you take a natural colour from something like a carrot, you're then downcycling that carrot into colouring and essentially animal feed. So you're taking a human product and then turning it into waste and colours,” says Dr Emma Chandler, CTO and co-founder at the startup.

“By using fermentation-based production methods, you're essentially upcycling waste resources into something that then is human grade, and there isn't an issue with land, water, energy, etc. So it's a much more efficient process.”

The story so far

The story behind Plume Biotech began at the University of Sheffield, where Burns was experimenting with different types of algae as part of his PhD. He found some of them produced vibrant colours.

“The colours in plants and algae have a specific use. If you think of chlorophyll in leaves, that’s for harvesting light energy,” he explains.

“Well, it turns out that quite a lot of microscopic plants like algae also have things to complement chlorophyll. They have more colours so they can absorb more light and they can grow more efficiently. 

“So that means if you shine really bright lights on lots of different algae, they tend to change colour, and they may produce lots of different colours, depending on the situation.”

Shining light on algae at an industrial scale, however, is challenging. Burns explains that because the algae absorbs the light, there’s a limit to how much algae you can colourise at any one time. 

But he says Plume Biotech has found a solution.

“We found some growth conditions where we can trick the organism to continue to produce these colours without the need for light. So we do everything in the dark, and it makes it much, much easier to scale up. 

“We can just put it in a big tank and give it some food. In this case, we're using byproducts from industry; some sugary waste that perhaps is just going for animal feed. We're using these waste resources, feeding it to our organisms, and then trying to make new, exciting, high-performance products.”

After identifying a potential gap in the market that his research could serve, Burns gained funding to research potential commercialisation, followed by further grant funding that enabled Chandler to come on board as co-founder of Plume Biotech as a university spinout, and productise the research.

What’s next

Plume Biotech is now a team of four and has partnered with an initial customer to help further develop the commercial offering and scale up from the lab.

“They're really interested in the colours that we can make, and they see the benefits to perhaps using their own wastes that they're producing and then recycling them back into new, more high-performing colours,” says Burns.

“And they're also bringing a lot in terms of identifying what the product should look like, and how it should perform - the different things where we might be able to improve it.”

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