Fungi: Solving the World’s Protein Problem
One company’s waste can be another’s feedstock
As people become more prosperous, they tend to eat more animal protein. As I noted in January, the global population is growing and people are, on average, eating more meat. Modern animal farming practices exacerbate some of the most severe challenges the world faces like climate change, deforestation, and water pollution. The FAO estimates that from 1961 to 2014, global per capita protein supply increased by about one-third [1]while the population increased from about 3 billion to over 7 billion. In order to save our planet, we need to dramatically change how billions of people eat and fungi can play a big part of the solution.
At Prime Movers Lab, we believe that our greatest challenges are our greatest opportunities. Startups developing technologies to use fungi to produce food can help us decarbonize our food chain, increase food security by bringing production closer to consumption, reduce animal cruelty, and do it all for an affordable price.
The first obstacle humanity faces in making this shift is ourselves. Theoretically, everyone could start eating beans, lentils, and seeds. That’s a nice idea for plenty of reasons, but people love eating meat and asking them to change is unlikely to be effective on a global scale. We need to give people a solution that addresses the drawbacks of animal agriculture without compromising the meat-eating experience.
Before we begin, it’s worth pausing to explain what fungi and mycelium are. Maya Schushan Orgad, Ph.D., CTO & Principal at PeakBridge wrote a comprehensive blog explaining this in great detail. In short, mycelium is the network of cells that fungi use like plant roots. They absorb nutrients, secrete chemicals into their environment, and even communicate with each other.
When people refer to alternative protein (or alt protein), they are referring to a broad set of technologies that aim to produce protein in non-traditional ways (read: without slaughtering animals). Here are three of the most common:
- Plant-based proteins are typically based on engineered pea, soy, or wheat protein. The products tend to have long lists of ingredients that contribute to the overall eating experience and are getting better at approximating animal protein.
- Cultivated protein grows just the cells we eat, not the whole animal. This technology has great promise but also has significant technical problems left to solve. It is still far too costly to be a near-term option for mass-market production.
- Fungi or mycelium-based approaches use fungi to grow a product that has a favorable nutritional profile, a fibrous “meatiness,” and can be cost-competitive today.
Fungi serve a critical role in the global ecosystem by decomposing dead plant and animal matter. It is fundamentally a transformer. It begins with one material, works its fungus magic, and breaks the material down into something else. Its ability to transform enables us to leaven bread, make wine and beer, as well as other foods like yogurt, sauerkraut, and kimchi. Many startups are moving beyond these traditional uses of fungi, and are pursuing fungi-based alternative proteins to closely mimic the experience of eating meat. Fungi offer several benefits that make it an especially interesting technology to offer people a compelling alternative to animal-based protein.
Price and Cost of Goods Sold
Fungi’s role as a decomposer gives it a special advantage in being a low cost product. There are strains of fungi that can grow on just about anything. That means one company’s food waste can be another’s input, a commercially symbiotic relationship. One company saves the cost of disposing of waste, another gets free inputs. Ultimately, any protein is going to be compared to the cost of chicken, beef, pork, or whatever else people are used to eating. Products need to be better, cheaper, or ideally both.
Scalability
Cultivated protein companies today produce very small volumes relative to the overall meat industry. Upside Foods recently announced the largest cultivated protein factory in the world, with capacity to eventually make over 400,000 pounds per year. Global meat production is currently on the order of 328,000,000 metric tons per year [2], over 1.5 million times larger than Upside’s future capacity. Fungi fermentation is a well understood process. Quorn uses 150,000 liter bioreactors to produce its mycoprotein [3].
Texture
Both plant-based and cultivated protein currently struggle to mimic the fibrous nature of meat. Mycelium, the main fungal body composed of thin fibers, similar to plant roots, are naturally filamentous (read: lots of fiber). Startups are growing mycelia and developing techniques to transform them into edible products with a mouthfeel similar to meat.
Nutrition
Mycelia are naturally high in fiber and protein and low in fat. Plant based meats are almost exclusively made of pea, soy, or wheat and use long lists of ingredients to alter the textures and flavors. Cultivated protein is simply meat produced in a different method and, as such, will have a similar nutritional profile to its natural form.
FoodHack, the global community for food entrepreneurs and innovators has a comprehensive list of 60+ Fungi Startups. At Prime Movers Lab, we have spoken to many of the people working on developing fungi-based alternative protein and food tech businesses. We expect and hope to see many more.
Fungi have massive potential with applications spanning food, materials, and industrial processes. One of the experts we spoke with compared fungi today to the chemicals industry 100 years ago. There are countless strains of fungi that haven’t been examined and endless optimization that startups will iterate on to make fungi an even more compelling alternative to existing foods and materials.
We look forward to partnering with the next crop of entrepreneurs using breakthrough technologeis to solve global challenges.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and agriculture.
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