Australian startup Nourish Ingredients has announced a collaboration with dairy giant Fonterra to accelerate the development of dairy products with fats produced via fermentation.Nourish, which is developing a range of high-impact, low-inclusion ‘animalic’ fats in fermentation tanks, will work with Fonterra on Creamilux, a lipid produced by a genetically engineered microbe that “recreates the rich, creamy mouthfeel, taste and emulsification properties of dairy fat.”As part of their collaboration, Fonterra and Nourish will explore the potential of Creamilux “as a key ingredient to unlock functionality while preserving the delicious taste of traditional dairy” across a range of categories including cheese, cream, and butter.The partners will also explore opportunities where Nourish Ingredients’ fats can enhance non-dairy categories such as bakery that traditionally rely on dairy fats, said Nourish CEO James Petrie, a crop metabolic engineer who worked as a research scientist at Australia’s national science agency CSIRO before co-founding Nourish​ ​with Ben Leita in early 2020.“This collaboration balances our passion for creating innovative ingredients with hard-nosed applications to unlock massive product opportunities. We are overcoming specific animal ingredient bottlenecks to optimize current animal-based food production capacity without losing quality.”Jeremy Hill, chief science and technology officer at Fonterra, added: “Dairy will always be at the core of our business… At the same time, ingredients produced through emerging technologies can work seamlessly in and alongside our dairy products, expanding the range of products and choices we can offer to customers and consumers.”Fats from fermentationNourish is one of a growing number of startups using microbial fermentation to make tailored fats including Yali Bio, Melt&Marble, ÄIO, c16 Bio, Circe, Seminal Bio, NoPalm Ingredients, Zero Acre Farms and Clean Food Group.Other startups are making cell-cultured fat by growing animal fat cells in a bioreactor (Hoxton Farms, Mission Barns​​, Believer Meats);​ while some are playing around with the structure of plant oils through emulsions (Lypid), oleogels (Shiru, Motif FoodWorks), and oil structuring technology (Fattastic).Speaking to AgFunderNews at the recent SynBioBeta conference in San Jose, Petrie said the economics of fats from fermentation stand up if you’re making high-impact, low-inclusion products: “There are some fats and oils in meat and dairy that are really signature that you associate with a well-cooked piece of meat or a dairy product. What we do at Nourish Ingredients is try and ignore all the boring fats which you could otherwise get from plants and focus on the really potent and important molecules we can deliver via fermentation.”Low inclusion ratesHe added: “We have our R&D in Australia and a pilot facility in Singapore that lets us do meaningful quantities for our partners to use in internal testing. For commercial scale production, we’ve already identified partners who can do that for us. But we don’t need huge bioreactors as our ingredients are used at a very low inclusion rate, so we’ve got relatively low-volume fermentation from co-manufacturers, and we then take that material and do some critical value-add steps.”To date, Nourish has raised about US$40 million, he said. “But it is very challenging in the current environment, especially in the alternative protein space, which is getting absolutely hammered

The race is on to develop ‘designer’ fats for the next generation of food products. But will fats oils produced by microbes in fermentation tanks ever be a cost-effective proposition?. The answer, says Australian startup Nourish Ingredients, is that it depends. Attempting to produce a drop-in replacement for a commodity fat such as palm oil using microbial fermentation clearly makes no economic sense right now, says cofounder James Petrie. But if you can produce high-potency molecules that can be used at sub-1% inclusion rates to dramatically transform the flavor and cooking experience of a plant-based burger, for example, the equation is quite different. Nourish Ingredients’ first two ingredients are Tastilux, which can deliver an “authentic animal taste, aroma and natural cooking reactions” at very low inclusion rates in alt meat; and Creamilux, a lipid that “recreates the rich, creamy mouthfeel, taste and emulsification properties of dairy fat.”