NEW TECH FOODS

It’s easy to get caught up in the news and activities of the industry’s global giants, but what about the smaller firms pushing boundaries with bold ideas? In this instalment of start-up spotlight – which celebrates lesser-known companies and their innovations – we speak to Shen Ming Lee, co-founder and CEO of Terra Oleo.

What inspired the founding of Terra Oleo, and the specific gap you saw in palm oil and cocoa supply chains?

The founding team’s complementary strengths in science, industry and strategy inspired Terra Oleo’s mission to reinvent how fats and oils are made. We set out to address the core issues in conventional palm oil and cocoa butter supply chains – rising costs, supply volatility, high carbon emissions, deforestation and poor traceability.

Terra Oleo offers a sustainable, efficient and reliable alternative by using precision fermentation to produce application-ready, tailored lipid ingredients directly from abundant upcycled byproducts in Southeast Asia.

Why did you decide to target cocoa butter and palm oil derivatives as your first products?

Cocoa butter and palm oil derivatives are the high-value downstream segments of the palm and cocoa value chains. By targeting these broader, premium segments, we can achieve economic feasibility early on and accelerate our go-to-market strategy as a young biomanufacturing company.

Your platform uses precision fermentation to turn agro-industrial waste into tailored lipids. Can you explain how it works?

Terra Oleo harnesses precision fermentation, a commercially scaled bioprocess, to convert low-cost agro-industrial waste into customised lipid ingredients efficient and precisely.

1. Upcycled feedstock: First, we upcycle readily available agro-industrial waste streams in Southeast Asia as low-cost, sustainable feedstock for our yeast.

2. Proprietary yeast strains: Using advanced metabolic engineering, we designed lipid-producing yeast strains that can generate customisable, functional fats and oils.

3. Scalable fermentation process: These yeast strains are cultivated in fermentation tanks, where they grow and naturally accumulate target lipids.

4. Extraction of lipid ingredients: The target lipids are then extracted and purified from the yeast cells, becoming high-value functional ingredients for various industries.

What makes your technology different from other fermentation-based fat alternatives being developed?

Our proprietary yeast strains directly produce palm oil derivatives and cocoa butter, instead of crude palm oil (low-margin commodity) which is usually what other fermentation-based fat alternatives try to replicate.

Furthermore, our technology leverages deep expertise in strain engineering to produce ingredients directly to customer specifications, removing costly intermediary refining and processing.

Chocolate and baked goods rely heavily on cocoa butter and palm derivatives – how close are your ingredients in performance and taste?

Our Cocoa Butter Equivalent (CBE) is already exhibiting the key properties and specification of conventional cocoa butter. They exhibit butter-like physical properties, have a cream or pale-yellow appearance resembling raw cocoa butter and remain solid at room temperature and melt above 30°C.

What’s the biggest technical or regulatory challenge you see ahead for bringing your ingredients into food markets?

The biggest regulatory challenge is the costly and time-consuming path of getting pre-market approval across markets for our CBE ingredients which rely on non-conventional oleaginous yeast. The biggest technical challenge is often maintaining consistent results and derisking at every stage of production scale-up.

Palm and cocoa have huge land-use and deforestation footprints. How much environmental impact can Terra Oleo’s platform realistically remove from these supply chains?

This is a complex question with many dependent variables. Our focus is on producing the high-value, scarce downstream fractions of palm and cocoa supply chains – the most carbon- and cost-intensive segments to produce, as many palm oil derivatives come from the scarcest parts of the fruit.

By using precision fermentation to expand the supply of these scarce lipid fractions, Terra Oleo can reduce pressure to expand plantation land, helping mitigate the land-use and deforestation impacts traditionally associated with palm and cocoa production.

Anything else you'd like our readers to know?

As Terra Oleo enters its next phase, we welcome engagement with potential partners in the oleochemicals and specialty fats sector to sample our ingredients or co-develop customised lipids that are sustainable without compromising performance.