NEW TECH FOODS

Melt&Marble, a Swedish precision fermentation company that develops animal-free fat ingredients, has announced its move to a new headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The new site includes precision fermentation facilities including molecular biology and microbiology labs, bioreactors up to pilot scale and a food application test kitchen. The facilities will accelerate the development and commercialisation of its fat ingredients.

Melt&Marble has now scaled up the production process for its first product – a solid fat designed to replicate the properties of animal-derived fats for use in alternative meat products – to cubic-metre bioreactor scale. The company said it is now in the process of scaling further, to tens of cubic metres.

The precision fermentation technology allows Melt&Marble to gain precise control of its fats’ composition and properties, allowing it to create ‘designer fats’ from the ground up. This includes dictating the types of fatty acids, as well as how these fatty acids assemble to a glycerol backbone to form specific triglycerides.

Anastasia Krivoruchko, co-founder and CEO at Melt&Marble, said: “In the last months, we constantly improved key performance indicators related to rate, titre and yield, successfully achieving metrics relevant for commercial-scale and demonstrating the scalability of our process”.

According to Melt&Marble, it has secured a partnership that will allow the production of hundreds of kilograms of fat per batch in the coming months. Further expansion potential to tonnes per batch is expected by the start-up in 2025, as it plans an expansion into the US market.

Melt&Marble’s chief business officer, Thomas Creswell, said that the company’s technology is seeing increasing interest from industry players both in Europe and the US, thanks to its ability to fine-tune the composition and properties of sustainable, animal-free fat ingredients.

He commented: “Palatability remains a challenge in the animal-free food space and our fats are an extremely effective way to address that by replicating the taste experience consumers crave”.

“Our new facilities will allow us to test applications and produce samples in-house while our manufacturing partnership paves a clear path to market."

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