Doubling Down on Animal-Free Dairy, Fonterra Looks to Advance Superbrewed Food’s Postbiotic Cultured Protein

New Zealand dairy giant Fonterra is exploring how US biomass fermentation startup Superbrewed Food’s Postbiotic Cultured Protein can complement its dairy portfolio.

Fonterra, the world’s largest dairy exporter, is continuing to explore planet-friendly ways to make dairy and other foods as it seeks to shrink its sizeable climate footprint.

The dairy cooperative has penned a multi-year deal with Delaware-based Superbrewed Food, which uses biomass fermentation to make its flagship Postbiotic Cultured Protein.

Biomass fermentation involves using the rapid growth rate of microorganisms to produce foods high in protein. Unlike precision fermentation, the microbial biomass left over after the fermentation process ends up being part of the final product itself.

In the partnership, Superbrewed Food’s biomass protein platform will be combined with Fonterra’s dairy processing, ingredients, and applications expertise to create additional functional biomass protein. It comes weeks after the latter collaborated with Australia’s Nourish Ingredients’ precision-fermented Creamilux fat to create dairy and non-dairy products.

What attracted Fonterra to Superbrewed Food’s protein

Superbrewed Food came out of stealth in March 2021, taking inspiration from the gut microbiome of herbivores like gorillas and elephants. Founder Bryan Tracy and his team used anaerobic fermentation technology (an environment without oxygen) to search for a microbe that could help create an affordable protein with high nutrition values.

The startup settled on the Clostridium tyrobutyricum strain, which has a “neutral taste, minimal colour, excellent pH and temperature stability, and good functional properties”. The Postbiotic Cultured Protein is a whole food ingredient, instead of a protein isolate, and contains over 85% protein, with a high content of essential and branched-chain amino acids.

The ingredient is rich in iron, zinc, phosphorous and vitamin B12, and can be used both as a replacement of or complement to animal and plant proteins in multiple food and beverage applications – think plant-based meat, baked goods, confectionery, sports drinks, snacks, and dairy or non-dairy products.

Fonterra’s interest lies in complementing its dairy portfolio. The cooperative has hailed the functional and nutritional attributes of Superbrewed Food’s protein, which recently received the ‘no questions’ letter from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), paving its way for market entry stateside. (The startup has filed for novel food approval in the EU, the UK and Canada too.)

The link-up with Fonterra “recognises the value in bringing Postbiotic Cultured Protein to market”, Tracy said, labelling it as “a pivotal step towards expanding our offerings of biomass ingredients that further contribute to sustainable food production”.

Superbrewed Food has additionally demonstrated that its tech platform can ferment other inputs too, and will look to develop biomass protein solutions by fermenting multi-feedstocks. This includes Fonterra’s lactose permeate, a byproduct of dairy processing, which can gain added value by being converted into sustainable protein.

The US startup has also partnered with French dairy giant Bel Group to create dairy analogues, and German manufacturing leader Döhler to produce its Postbiotic Cultured Protein on a commercial scale, targeting a launch in the first quarter of 2025.

Fonterra looks to lower emissions amid greenwashing accusations

Chris Ireland, general manager of innovation partnerships at Fonterra, said Superbrewed Food’s “cutting-edge technology aligns with our mission to provide sustainable nutritional solutions to the world and respond to the global demand for protein solutions, thereby creating more value from milk for our farmers”.

That sustainability aspect is key. Fonterra, which makes up 30% of global dairy exports, is why New Zealand is the world’s top dairy exporter. It is also the country’s worst polluter, emitting over 26.8M tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2023.

This inflates the dairy industry’s carbon footprint in New Zealand, where 380 litres of milk is sold in supermarkets every minute. Agriculture as a whole accounts for half of the country’s emissions.

And while Fonterra has pledged to cut its emissions from dairy by 30% by the end of the decade, it has faced accusations of greenwashing, with a recent investigation showing that the cooperative spends over five times its R&D budget on marketing and public relations, which often portrays New Zealand dairy as climate-friendly.

It also puts nearly $100M less into its sustainability efforts, and even these seem to be more focused on energy efficiency and fossil fuel use instead of tackling methane, despite the latter being directly responsible for three-quarters of New Zealand’s food emissions.

Fonterra is also the lead named entity in an ongoing climate change trial as part of a case brought by a Māori leader against a group of dairy and fossil fuel operators.

That said, the Superbrewed Food deal is one of several moves Fonterra has been making to decarbonise. Apart from the Nourish Ingredients partnership, it has its own precision fermentation venture in collaboration with DSM-Firmenich Venturing. Called Vivici, it earned self-determined Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status for its animal-free beta-lactoglobulin (a whey protein) in the US in February.