From cocoa butter to palm oil, global supply chains for fats and oils are under mounting strain, buffeted by price volatility, sustainability concerns, and tightening scrutiny around deforestation, biodiversity loss, and labor practices. For the food industry, what was once a relatively cheap, reliable input is increasingly becoming a strategic headache.
Enter Abydos Bioscience, a newly formed startup in Buenos Aires, Argentina, taking a less-traveled path in the race to produce fats from fermentation. Rather than using yeast or microalgae, the company is working with oleaginous bacteria—which it claims are more productive, and capable of feeding off a broader range of feedstocks. Moreover, the science behind its approach has been decades in the making, even if the company itself is barely out of the gate.
AgFunderNews (AFN) caught up with cofounder Karina Amado (KA) to explore why Abydos is initially targeting cocoa butter replacement, how its team is tuning bacterial strains and processes to dial in specific fatty acid profiles, and why Argentina’s biodiesel and ag-processing industries offer a strategic advantage on inputs.
AFN: What problem are you solving?
KA: We want to make supply chains more sustainable, resilient and efficient. Price volatility is a huge issue for CPG companies. But there are also other considerations around these oils [that Abydos is looking to replace] around sustainability, child labor, deforestation and biodiversity loss. But the most urgent issue is to solve the price volatility, which is now the new normal.
AFN: There are several startups now making fats via fermentation – what’s special about Abydos?
KA: We are the only company in the world leveraging oleaginous bacteria as a microorganism [to produce fats that can replace tropical oils]. Bacteria are more efficient than yeast or microalgae in the production of lipids, which means more oil in less time, so more productivity.
AFN: If bacteria are more efficient at producing lipids, why isn’t everyone using them?
KA: Our CSO Héctor Alvarez, PhD, was the scientist who discovered that bacteria could accumulate lipids while doing his doctoral studies in Germany. He was originally working in bioplastics but changed [his focus] when he discovered a particular strain of bacteria that could accumulate up to 70 or 80% of lipids.
30 years on, he continues to study this microorganism. So during these 30 years, he has been a researcher here in Argentina. The rest of the science team also knows this microorganism very well [CTO Ana Arabolaza, PhD and COO Martín Hernández, PhD]. I was looking for an idea and they were looking for an entrepreneur who could help them turn their science into a business, and that’s how we formed the team.
AFN: Are you genetically engineering the strains to optimize them?
KA: We have compiled a collection of 50+ strains of oleaginous native bacteria. We have the capacity to do genetic engineering, and at some point we might do it, but right now, we are using non genetically modified strains.
But what we are optimizing if you like is the recipe, getting the delicate relationship between nitrogen and oxygen in order to have the maximum capacity of oil production. And then finally, the downstream, when you obtain the lipids from the biomass, there is also optimization there. So when we say optimize, in our case, we’re optimizing the process by which we produce the oil.
AFN: What levers can you pull to tailor the fatty acid profile of the lipids?
KA: Our science team has matched very thoroughly what type of feedstock goes with what type of strain to produce a certain type of oil and fat with a certain fatty acid composition.
We started working on palm oil because we thought, okay, palm oil goes virtually into everything, right? However, it’s very difficult for the technology right now to catch up with nature, because palm oil is a very cheap commodity. So we pivoted, changed the feedstock and changed the strain, and started work on [producing fats that can replace the higher-value fat] cocoa butter, as our strain naturally produces lipids with high levels of saturated fat.
AFN: How close is your first product to cocoa butter?
KA: Right now we’re performing functionality tests. But not only is its fatty acid composition almost identical to natural cocoa butter, but the functionality is coming through very well. The melting point of cocoa butter depends on where it comes from, but in terms of melting point, in terms of crystallization, and in terms of the solid fat content, our butter is coming back as very similar in our preliminary tests.
We haven’t yet [validated] the functionality at industrial level, but we’re working [on doing this] with one of the top tier CPGs in Latam, which has a lot of different chocolate and confectionery applications.
AFN: Is it a problem for some customers that you can’t label your product as ‘cocoa butter’?
KA: It depends where the CPG is based and what products they are making. In some markets there are strict standards of identity around chocolate for example [that require the use of cocoa butter], but companies have a real problem with the volatility of prices [for cocoa products] so they’re all looking at alternatives.
For example, Pladis [a confectionery and snacks company that owns United Biscuits, Ülker, Godiva Chocolatier and DeMet’s Candy Company] is already stepping away from calling some products chocolate, so I think there’s a trend there.
The other day I was also reading a very interesting article about this famous Dubai chocolate everybody’s going crazy about. You could argue that it’s not about pistachios at all, it’s about the fact that companies are trying desperately to diminish the amount of chocolate. The more filling, the better, because they don’t have to use so much chocolate.
AFN: What other markets are you targeting?
KA: The bulk of cocoa butter goes into the food industry, but the cosmetics angle is very interesting, so the next product in our pipeline is going to be directed towards the cosmetics and personal care industry. The nutraceutical market is also an interesting segment for us.
We are also looking at using bacteria to make milk fats that are similar to the fats in breast milk.
AFN: What is your business model?
KA: In the case of cocoa butter, we expect to sell it directly to customers, but we also plan to do custom oils for some CPGs, so we would have licensing agreements in place for those cases.
AFN: What is your manufacturing and scale up plan?
KA: We don’t expect to be making any CapEx investments in the short term. We expect to have a partner, a CMO or CDMO to help us scale. There are those that help you optimize the process and become partners, and there are others where you basically give them the recipe and they follow it. We haven’t decided which approach we will choose yet, and it will depend on the cost.
AFN: What feedstocks are you using?
KA: Bacteria basically eat anything, so they have these metabolic capabilities enabling them to degrade a wider range of feedstocks than yeast, which translates into lower input costs and better unit economics for us. Argentina, where we’re based, is one of the major exporters of biodiesel, so we can use glycerol [a byproduct of the biodiesel production process] for example.
We can also use whey from the dairy industry, or basically anything that has sugar in it such as byproducts from fruit juice production. Basically, there are a lot of companies that we’ve been talking to that are desperate to get rid of these side streams because they have to pay to get rid of them. Residue from the olive oil industry is also very interesting for us.
AFN: How have you funded the business so far?
KA: We only started in April 2025, so we’re just a baby company! Our first check came from Big Idea Ventures, who were big supporters. We just completed their acceleration program and opened our pre-seed round for $750,000 during our demo day in Paris. So right now we’re in the middle of fundraising.
What I’ve seen is that investors have become crazy strict about what they require from you. I think sometimes they forget we are a pre-seed company. You hear all the time, you’re too early, you need more commercial traction, which is a little bit frustrating for us, because we’re just starting and we need capital to advance the science and test things.
But we have a robust technology, and we have a science team that has been working on this for years in academia, even if we only just incorporated the company, and that’s something investors look at, because at this [early] stage, the team is everything.
Sometimes people ask me, Well, what if competitors start using these bacteria? But they don’t have 30+ years of experience working with them, so we have a significant head start.
AFN: Given yeast is better understood, could using bacteria make life more difficult from a regulatory perspective?
KA: From a regulatory perspective, yeast are the safe way to go and I would be naive to say using bacteria won’t be a hurdle, because no one else is doing this yet.
AFN: What are your immediate priorities?
KA: The first priority is to file our first US patent, because the US will be our first market. We also want to present a dossier to the FDA to obtain [GRAS] approval for our first product, which will be a cocoa butter equivalent. And after that, we’ll look for partner CMO with which to scale our technology and start selling our product.
Further reading:
California Cultured breaks new ground with patent on cocoa butter via plant cell culture
🎥Savor unveils first-of-its-kind ‘butter’ made without cows, plants, or microbes
Clean Food Group acquires 1M-liter fermentation facility to fast-track yeast oil production
🎥 Checkerspot teams up with Huvepharma to produce human milk fat analog at scale
Fats from fermentation startup Nourish Ingredients establishes global commercial hub in Leiden
Terra Oleo emerges from stealth with fermentation platform to make high value fats with microbes
