The latest white paper from the Food and Beverage Accelerator (FaBA) says a federal Minister for Food and a National Food Plan are necessary if Australia’s food industry is to meet the challenges of supply, nutrition, access, and climate impacts to its food system. Its recommendation is the third in 12 months.
FaBA’s call is one of eight recommendations it makes in Precision Fermentation: A Future of Food in Australia. In looking at Australia’s future food system, the accelerator’s focus is on the role precision fermentation could play, arguing it is a “transformative opportunity to strengthen food systems, foster economic growth, enhance environmental sustainability, and boost food security”.
FaBA director, Dr Chris Downs says, “Precision fermentation represents a promising approach, alongside conventional food production, for the future of Australia’s food and beverage industry.
“This technology can enhance and diversify our food supply – imagine microbial strains precisely engineered to yield high quality protein. We are on the brink of producing tailored, sustainable food sources.”
Based at the University of Queensland (UQ), FaBA works with companies across plant and animal industries that are investing in R&D on new ingredients, foods, beverages, and production and processing innovations, connecting researchers with companies from start-up to multinational scale.
Downs says research plays an important role in meeting future food challenges. “We must innovate and transform the food system if we are to address some of the greatest challenges of our time.”
Whitepaper lead author and FaBA program lead, Innovative Ingredients, Professor Esteban Marcellin, echoed Downs, saying Australia is “on the brink of producing tailored, sustainable food sources”.
The need for a plan
The paper’s eight recommendations including establishing common international standards, boosting investment in large-scale manufacturing, and standardising methods to assess environmental impacts.
“Our primary recommendation is to develop a National Food Plan that would unify efforts in regulation, innovation and promotion of precision fermentation,” Marcellin says.
“This approach would enable streamlined approvals, better integration with traditional agriculture, and a coordinated strategy to build a robust industry.”
At the end of 2023, the House Standing Committee on Agriculture handed down the report from its inquiry into Food Security. It made 35 recommendations stemming from its remit to look at how Australia’s food security could be strengthened and safeguarded, focusing on production, supply chains and key inputs, climate change, biosecurity, and food insecurity.
Its primary recommendation was to create a National Food Plan. Its second recommendation was to appoint a Minister for Food. Third was to establish a National Food Council. Soon after was a recommendation to implement measures to facilitate innovation in the production of food.
These recommendations are echoed in many of the 125 submissions to the current inquiry by the House Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Resources into Food and Beverage Manufacturing in Australia.
The potential of precision fermentation
Marcellin says precision fermentation is a “transformative opportunity to strengthen food systems, foster economic growth, enhance environmental sustainability, and boost food security”.
“Fermentation has been used for centuries to create staples like bread, cheese and beer. Precision fermentation builds on traditional methods, offering the potential to develop entirely new ingredients, flavours and tastes.
“This technology can enhance and diversify our food supply – imagine microbial strains precisely engineered to yield high quality protein,” he says.
More than 70 authors from industry, government and academia contributed to the white paper, exploring areas crucial for industry growth, including regulatory needs, sustainability, economic impacts, and ethical considerations.
The paper says tools that were developed for cell engineering and large-scale fermentation to tailor cellular production systems are being leveraged by researchers and the food industry to enable the synthesis of food ingredients that “promise greater sustainability and healthier, tastier, more nutritious products”.
While precision fermentation originated in the 1970s, it was adopted primarily by pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Food processors became more interested in the late 1980s, but it has been focused on creating enzymes that are used to produce food, not actual food, the paper explains.
“What’s new about the current push for precision fermentation is its application to large-scale production of structured proteins and the manufacturing of tailored ingredients to enhance food and beverage properties,” it says.
But in outlining innovations in the field, the authors stress “consumer acceptance is paramount”.
“The benefits of the ingredients must be realisable beyond economic factors, such as enhanced functionality, sustainability or nutritional benefits. Educating consumers about the safety and benefits of these products is essential, which can be enhanced by understanding the historical introduction of precision fermented ingredients into commercial products (e.g. ice structuring protein) and the strategies used to highlight their safety and efficacy.”
The scale-cost paradox
Paper author UQ School of Chemical Engineering and lead, Premium Food and Beverage Program at FaBA, Professor Jason Stokes, says the standardisation of equipment and processes as much as possible is key to reducing upscaling and product purification costs.
The white paper looks at the scale-cost paradox and how it remains a “critical” challenge in scaling precision fermentation processes.
“Essential for successful commercialisation is the need to establish the benefits of the ingredient for its intended application and then effectively translate those benefits into positive commercial outcomes.
“The dilemma arises when companies have potentially viable unit economics, but only if they can operate at significant scale. Achieving this scale presents a catch-22 situation: startups struggle to finance large-scale production facilities without demonstrating substantial market demand, yet they cannot effectively compete or prove market viability without the economies of scale that come with larger production capacities.”
The paper goes into possible solutions including utilising existing precision fermentation resources that exist in other food production settings and developing a centralised database to catalogue under-utilised facilities.
The whitepaper is here.
