Michroma—a startup producing heat- and pH-stable natural colors in fermentation tanks—is aiming to address two of the biggest pain points in the shift away from synthetic dyes: performance and supply.
Unlike plant-based colorants that often struggle with stability during processing, Michroma’s fungi-derived pigments maintain vibrancy through pasteurization, baking, and extrusion, claims the firm, which has struck a strategic partnership with South Korean food and biomanufacturing giant CJ CheilJedang to advance commercial manufacturing of its pigments.
Its Red+ color—produced by a strain of filamentous fungus—has greater coloring capacity than beetroot powder, requiring significantly less product to achieve the same results, adds Michroma, which has operations in Argentina and the US.
While its fungus naturally produces pigments, Michroma uses CRISPR gene editing tools to enhance yield and performance. It is also working on fungal strains to produce a wider range of colors including alternatives to titanium dioxide, cofounder and CEO Ricky Cassini (RC) told AgFunderNews (AFN) at Future Food-Tech in San Francisco.
AFN: What’s the rationale for using fermentation vs plant extracts as natural colors?
RC: For us, it’s very important to bring novel natural dyes that perform better than the current natural solutions. Our dyes produced by filamentous fungi produce molecules that are more pH stable and more thermo-stable than current ones we can get from plants such as beets.
To replace artificial dyes, we also need to bring a more robust supply chain, and that’s what we are doing through precision fermentation, but also producing novel molecules that perform better than the current natural solutions.
AFN: Are you just focusing on red colors?
RC: We can produce a wide diversity of colors. We started with red because it is the most used in the food industry. Red is 40% of the food dyes used in industry and where there are some key problems. Red #3 was prohibited [in the US] and Red 40 is getting phased out.
Natural options also fade when you cook them, like beetroot, and for some others such as carmine [a red colorant derived from insects that is not suitable for vegetarian, vegan, kosher, or halal diets], production is very limited, so it’s very hard to scale. That’s why we started with red.
But we can also produce orange and yellow. Those colors [red/orange/yellow, collectively account for about] 90% of the food-based market [for colors]. We also have proof of concepts of other colors such as blues and magentas and we are also producing white [to replace titanium dioxide].
AFN: Has the MAHA movement accelerated interest in your tech?
RC: We have been talking about replacing synthetic dyes for years and many companies have already done so, but the MAHA movement has accelerated the intention of companies to replace synthetic dyes.
I think that there are more than 15 or 20 [large] companies that announced [plans to phase out synthetic dyes] in the last year, including some of the biggest ones in the world, and we believe that that’s going to continue through the year. Most of them are going to do it this year or the following year, which is very exciting, and it’s creating a huge push towards naturalness and a lot of demand for natural dyes.
AFN: Where do you see fermentation-derived colors fitting into the natural colors space?
RC: The biggest challenge is performance because natural dyes have lower efficacy than synthetic dyes that have really tight coloring power. There is also the huge issue of supply, because we depend on agriculture, we depend on insects, we depend on beets to produce tons of product. And the replacement [of synthetic dyes with plant-based alternatives] is not one to one. It’s one to 50, or in some cases, 100 times the amount of biomass we need right now vs the synthetic sources.
Fermentation is bringing a new, more scalable option.
AFN: What progress have you made on the regulatory front to get your colors approved in the US?
RC: We have done a lot of tox studies that are required for filing a color additive petition. Now with the phase out of synthetic dyes, HHS, FDA, also announced that they are going to accelerate the approval of new dyes. In the last year, we got, I think, seven new approvals, while in the last 15 years, we had 10. So the pace is definitely accelerating, and we hope to bring our colors to market [in the US] soon.
AFN: You recently struck a partnership with CJ CheilJedang to advance commercial manufacturing of your pigments, which seems like a powerful way to cross the valley of death in a challenging funding environment?
RC: As a startup, it is very hard to pay for the capex we need to produce at large scale. CPGs require tons and tons of product, and this transition [to natural alternatives] is going to require 20- to 50-fold the amount of material we require right now [as synthetics can be used in smaller amounts to achieve the same results].
To get to that scale, we need to scale up with huge partners. CJ is one of the largest fermentation companies in the world and an investor in Michroma. We have partnered with them for the commercial scale up of these ingredients so we will be able to meet increasing demand.
AFN: Does precision fermentation only make economic sense for very high-value food ingredients right now?
RC: In my opinion, there is a huge opportunity to develop high value ingredients like colors, flavors, and fragrances using precision fermentation. There could also be opportunities to produce preservatives and many more ingredients. So I believe that high value ingredients, high margin ingredients, are where fermentation is going to be successful first, and then we will continue to lower [value products such as] proteins that eventually will be cost competitive, but I think we are not there yet.
AFN: What are the biggest challenges facing precision fermentation startups?
RC: Usually, startups in the fermentation space fail in the first steps going from lab to pilot scale, then pilot scale to industrial scale, because of the [lack of] robustness of the process, not only on the fermentation side, but also on the DSP [downstream process]. That’s why it’s very important to develop the processes from scratch as you are going to scale them, and you need to reach the right titers in order to make it profitable.
But there are also issues if you don’t have the capital to access the large scale, which is very expensive. Finding the right partners to reduce costs while you’re scaling up is very important, because those environments are very, very expensive.
AFN: What technologies are you monitoring in the biomanufacturing space?
RC: I believe there is a lot of potential for continuous fermentation, especially with technologies like ours using filamentous fungi. They could go through a continuous process. Also the product is secreted into the media, so it’s a perfect fit for a continuous process, which could optimize yields, reduce cleaning time and so on. So that’s promising technology.
AFN: You’ve worked with Trichoderma for years. What are the pros and cons of using filamentous fungi versus other microbial hosts such as yeast?
RC: Using filamentous fungi is tricky. You have to pay attention to a lot of things… morphology, rheology while growing the fungi in the fermenter. They’re also harder to edit. But now we have the tools to control those processes and make them more efficient.
They do have some downside, but also a lot more upside, because we can produce much higher titers [than with, say, yeast]. They have great secretion mechanisms which can basically increase their production, the yield of the process, and reduce our costs.
Further reading:
FUL Foods sees surge in demand for stable natural blue colors as MAHA accelerates clean label trend
Fermentation will power next wave of natural colors say startups as FDA targets synthetic food dyes
Phytolon attracts funding from Rich Products Ventures for natural colors via precision fermentation
