California-based startup Ruby Bio is planning to introduce fermentation-derived emulsifiers by next year as an alternative to palm oil and petrochemical-based additives, according to an AgFunder News (AFN) report.
The company’s yeast strains – licensed by the University of California Davis – produced unusually high titers, the 8 May report said.
Fermentation titer measures how much product a process yields per litre of broth, with higher numbers translating directly into lower production costs.
Ruby Bio’s goal was to reach cost parity with conventional synthetic emulsifiers and reaching fermentation titers exceeding 100gm/litre was a “milestone” towards reaching commercial scale production, AFN wrote.
“To our knowledge, we are the only fermentation-derived emulsifier portfolio platform in the world,” Pavan Kambam, the company’s chief technology officer, told AFN.
Brands are under pressure to remove “chemical-sounding” ingredients amid concerns over “ultra-processed” foods, according to Kambam.
Ruby Bio uses yeast to convert sugar into high-value products. The yeast secretes the emulsifiers outside the cells, eliminating the need for the cell-disruption step required in many fermentation processes.
As the emulsifiers – glycolipids combining fats and sugars – separated naturally from the fermentation broth, recovery was also simplified, Kambam explained.
“We stop the fermenter, let it settle, decant from the bottom and remove any residual water. That’s literally our downstream process at scale,” he said.
“We can also use very cheap feedstocks such as crude glycerol, crude lactose from dairy side streams or waste molasses from the sugar industry.”
Ruby Bio had joined the BEAM Circular Accelerator in California to test a series of agricultural residues such as almond and walnut shells as feedstocks, Kamban added.
