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here is no escaping the fact that animal agriculture is bad for the environment and that the food production system is going to sustain a growing global population. Global analysis
has shown that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, they use 83% of farmland and produce 60% of agriculture’s emissions. In short, it is inefficient and unsustainable. The food industry is all too aware of
this, and is ploughing huge resources into the development of plant-based foods and technologies that have the potential to reduce reliance on animal agriculture. However, predictions of meat and dairy alternatives displacing demand for animal products haven’t quite materialised. Oliver Zahn, founder of California startup Climax Foods, believes this is because so far, the alternatives are “pretty lacklustre”. “Usually they don’t taste like animal
products. They don’t have the same texture, they don’t have the same functional characteristics when you heat them, and they don’t have the same nutritional value,” he said, addressing delegates at the Future of Nutrition Summit at Fi Europe 2023. Broadly speaking, two strategies are dominating advancement in this space: using trial and error approximation to develop products that closely resemble their animal-derived counterparts and using precision fermentation to grow cultured meat or dairy.
The problem with ‘band-aid’ products The problem with the former approach, according to Zahn, is that in trying to recreate the functionality of the animal product, companies usually end up with what he refers to as a “band-aid” product. “They end up piling band-aids on top of one another. They might add flavours, then gums, and in the end, they still don’t manage to recreate the actual functionality,” he said. He gave the example of casein, a dairy ingredient whose breakdown functionality is difficult to replicate. “If you try to recreate the melt and stretch functionality of casein through a mix of ingredients that aren’t animal-derived protein, you will never end up with the same outcome. It may melt but it won’t melt in the same way,” he said.
Is identical a must? Turning his focus onto cultured meat and dairy, Zahn questioned the assumption on which this approach is based, namely that the products created have to be biologically and chemically identical to their conventional equivalent. “The notion that you have to recreate the animal product identically is an interesting route to explore, but ultimately the only thing that matters is that it behaves in the same way. It does not matter whether the protein from which ‘melt and stretch’ is derived has the sequence of casein in it. A human will not look under the microscope. No human cares. No human will ever care,” he said. So how should the food industry be approaching the development of foods that can replace those produced by land-based agriculture?
Another formulation strategy is ‘deep plant intelligence’ According to Zahn, a better way is leveraging the largest resource of edible protein, lipids, and biodiversity on earth, namely the plant kingdom. This was the premise on which Zahn founded Climax Foods three years ago. “The plant kingdom is so overwhelmingly large and complex that no company to date has dared to explore what we in data science call the ‘global optimum’ of what you can accomplish in terms of recreating any desirable food functionality,” he said. “Climax Foods is a data science company leveraging deep plant intelligence to unlock food products that are tastier, healthier and more sustainable.” He said the key to unlocking this potential is to harness the intelligence of both humans and machines. “There is a limit to what humans can imagine. There is also a limit to what
Fats continue to be a top ingredient
that consumers look at on the nutritional label, beat only by sugar in terms of top nutritional information sought”
machines and AI can imagine. The beauty of our model comes from the symbiosis of the two forms of intelligence,” he said. He added: “And this is what we’re learning
every month in our lab: how we can harness the intelligence of humans and machines simultaneously to speed up the product development process and answer the question of how we can replace animal products in a zero-compromise way more quickly.” Capturing the human interaction with food through machine analytics The starting point for this was to collect data on what makes cheese and other animal products behave the way they do in order to provide its AI-driven platform with a set of labels from which to learn. “In supervised learning, you have a bunch
of outcomes that are predicted by a bunch of inputs. So you need a comprehensive set of labels and features to be able to recreate these outcomes,” he explained. With no existing data available, the
company developed a comprehensive set of assays that characterised the human interaction with food – in other words, how
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