Food Companies Team Up To Make Plant-Based Foods With Fermented Fats

A Swedish start-up called Melt&Marble is teaming up with Finland's largest milk processor, Valio, to create plant-based foods using precision fermentation to produce animal-free fats. The fats are made using engineered yeast cells that can turn natural sugars into fats, with specialized enzymes determining properties such as saturation and chain length. The collaboration aims to improve the texture, juiciness, and structure of plant-based alternatives, offering consumers tasty options that rival traditional animal-based products.

In addition to food products, the fats produced by Melt&Marble can also be used in personal care products, solving sustainability issues of most commercially used fats. The company is part of the EU-funded Delicious project, which focuses on microbial fermentation and bioinformatics to develop improved plant-based dairy products. Other companies, like Savor backed by Bill Gates, are also exploring novel ways to produce fats, such as creating butter molecules chemically identical to dairy butter using carbon dioxide and hydrogen.