Today Nosh.bio, a Berlin startup developing ingredients from fungal biomass for animal-free food products, announced a partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks.
Companies developing animal-free protein still face challenges in creating tastier, less processed, and affordable alternative-protein products. Nosh.bio has built a technological platform that uses fungal biomass to create animal-free, single-ingredient animal meat alternatives from mycoprotein for human nutrition.
For meat alternatives, red meat — like a juicy steak — remains the most challenging product to be developed, and current alternatives contain many ingredients and chemical additives.
Nosh.bio aims to leverage its highly efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective production process to create a single-ingredient, animal-free product that tastes and feels just like red meat, while being healthier than an animal product.
The company is developing a technological platform to produce a new class of highly functional food ingredients. Its technology allows ingredients to be produced at price parity with animal products.
Nosh.bio is part of a growing number of companies focused on meat-free alternatives, and raised €3.2 million Seed funding in April in a round led by Earlybird.
Ginkgo Bioworks has developed a platform that screens for protein-producing fungi strains with superior sensorial profiles. Nosh-bio aims to use this to produce a mycoprotein that delivers a rich, savoury, and natural meaty taste when used in food products.
To enable this advanced alt-protein product, Ginkgo aims to discover and deliver a strain of fungi with higher native proteins to achieve the rich meat taste, juiciness, and colour that Nosh.bio seeks.
To do so, Ginkgo plans to execute a mutagenesis and screening campaign with its proprietary encapsulation and screening technology (EncapS), which can make it possible to search through up to 1 million strain variants in a single run and select the best-performing candidates for further development. Using such an improved strain can help Nosh.bio develop a mycoprotein superior in taste, colour, performance, and nutrition.
According to Tim Fronzek, CEO and Co-Founder of Nosh.bio:
"Nosh.bio is eager to enable the transition from animal-based to animal-free products. Our affordable, high-quality plant-based ingredients can build a product that's even closer to meat in taste and texture than alt-protein options currently on the market.
What really excites us about partnering with Ginkgo is their accelerated screening technology that can help us pinpoint and develop a super 'meaty' mycoprotein."
Kalpesh Parekh, Vice President of Business Development at Ginkgo Bioworks shared:
"We're thrilled to partner with Nosh.bio and help level up the alt-meat protein industry to deliver sustainable products that taste closer to real meat than ever before.
Our proprietary encapsulation and screening technology can expeditiously deliver valuable insights that enable our partners to optimise their R&D efforts and overall product."
Lead image: Nosh.bio. Photo: Uncredited.
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