NEW TECH FOODS

Swiss food-tech solutions company, QL AG, has teamed up with Ginkgo Bioworks to develop new dairy proteins made using precision fermentation.

QL AG plans to use Ginkgo's expertise in strain engineering across various chassis organisms to advance its goal of providing high-quality nutritionally equivalent dairy proteins.

Roger Föhn, CEO and co-founder of QL AG, said: "Dairy proteins derived using fermentation have advantages across many key dimensions, including taste and texture, as well as the fact that they have no arable land requirement and a lower water requirement. By accessing Ginkgo's platform, QL AG can help reduce the cost of producing dairy proteins with fermentation. We are excited to pursue our goal of making a quantum leap in alternative agriculture by leveraging Ginkgo's unique capabilities in producing strains at high titers and scaling fermentation processes."

Kalpesh Parekh, VP of business development at Ginkgo Bioworks, added: "Dairy proteins provide an exciting opportunity to leverage our platform, as they have traditionally presented product developers with significant challenges around protein productivity, economics and functionality for efficacy across different applications".

"We aim to solve such challenges with our deep expertise in protein engineering, novel bioactivity and biochemistry identification, high-throughput expression, functional studies and scale-up capabilities. We are so excited about QL AG's mission, and can't wait to further grow our capabilities in the precision fermentation space by working with such an innovative partner."