What Should Consumers Be Asking About Precision Fermentation?

Precision fermentation is a relatively new food technology that is rapidly entering the mainstream. Products such as milk protein, animal fats, collagen, honey, lobster, egg whites and more are receiving hundreds of millions of investor dollars. They are being rapidly commercialized for the mass market without the raising and killing of animals. These products are being marketed to a young consumer base that wants sustainable, climate-friendly foods that buck the system and promise a better tomorrow. But what should consumers being asking about this new wave of food technologies?

Precision fermentation technology is a form of synthetic biology and has been around for several decades. It has only recently being tapped to produce consumables. It typically requires the use of genetically engineered microorganisms, which are cultivated in brewery-style fermentation tanks. The little critters, usually yeast, algae or bacteria, are programmed through a range of in-vitro nucleic acid techniques such as CRISPR, gene editing or cloning. They produce or excrete a particular sellable material, usually edible fats or proteins that are biologically similar to animal products. These end products can be further processed into ingredients or finished CPG items. The FDA’s new National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard would not require these foods to be labeled as GMO because they do not contain the genetically engineered organisms, they are just produced by them. Such products would therefore not qualify for Non GMO Project Verification. Because some may be considered novel foods, it is not clear how they will be labeled or regulated in Europe. And since they are animal-free, they may be considered vegan, but will still need to have the same allergen labeling as their animal-based counterparts.

Because this technology is new and just starting to scale, consumers may still have the opportunity to push for greater transparency. Researchers Julie Guthman and Charlotte Biltekoff describe the marketing techniques of such food-tech enterprises as magical disruption. One the one hand, they intend to replace or compete with the brutality of CAFOs (concentrated animal feedlot operations) and the resulting pollution. But they are also bound by intellectual property regimes that create tremendous value for their founders and investors while clouding potential externalities. With that in mind, here are some conversation starters around precision fermented foods and synthetic biology.

What is in the cell culture medium and what is it derived from? The microorganisms need to eat if they are to grow and produce sellable commodities, like any type of livestock. Is the nutrient bath derived from corn or soy, typically genetically modified to withstand high dosages of herbicides? Are there supply chains in place to provide such nutrient media at scale? What is the caloric conversion and nutrient uptake efficiency of the microbes compared to animal livestock. How much farmland acreage would be impacted? What will be the input costs besides feedstock and how will that impact consumer prices?

How much waste material is produced by such microorganisms relative to sellable product? This includes metabolic wastes, as well as the leftover steep once the spent microbes and consumable material have been filtered out. How will such wastes be disposed of and who is ultimately responsible for it?

How does the energy and resource usage of such products compare to competing animal-based items? Much of the marketing and fundraising for such products revolves around being significantly less harmful to the climate than CAFOs. Precision fermentation requires large investments in concrete, steel, plastic and fossil-fuel dependent electric utilities to maintain the particular environmental settings necessary for the microorganisms to thrive. If the sector wishes to have a significant impact on consumption, they will require the buildout of thousands of fermentation tanks and dozens, if not hundreds of facilities. How will this resource use impact communities already dealing with the environmental racism and colonialism inherent in mining, tech manufacturing and waste disposal?

What kind of testing has been done to understand the potential environmental impact for if and/or when the microbes escape the confines of a fermentation plant, particularly as the technology scales? Can they survive and interact in the variable conditions and ecosystems that exist in the wild? Since some of these organisms are derived from strains that can live and thrive well outdoors, what are the environmental risks? CAFOs have long been linked to the spread of pathogens and pandemics, so will precision fermentation reduce these risks or create new ones?

The biggest set of questions here revolves around ownership, governance and social equity considerations. Just about all of this new food technology is heavily funded by tech oligarchs, venture capitalists, or the occasional celebrity. Bill Gates is just one such example. He made his fortune by enclosing, privatizing and scaling what had previously been mostly an open-sourced, common-pool resource: software.

The investor model here is very Silicon Valley: identify a particular market sector or category and its sales potential, fund the company to offset large losses as it scales, and compete aggressively with the goal of cornering this market as a monopoly or a duopoly. Think: Uber, Doordash, Instacart, Amazon.  The investors throwing billions of dollars at such enterprises are not altruists, even if some are motivated by animal rights or climate change. They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders and are betting on the potentially enormous upside in the enclosure and market domination of whole commodity groups and categories. So, is the value of the enterprise in the finished product, as either a raw material, ingredient or CPG item? Or is it in the process and techniques or the microorganisms themselves? Who holds the patents or intellectual properties? How much of this technology is open sourced? What will be the implications for a single company to own the formula for milk, honey or eggs?

Much of the food industry is already heavily consolidated among a handful of oligopolies. Less than 4 companies control greater than 75% of market share in numerous grocery categories, from soft drinks to cereal to toothpaste. Will investors clamor for quick returns through mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures with “strategics”, aka, the incumbent CPG and supply chain oligopolies? This absorption pattern has been common in the Natural/Organic foods sector for the past two decades, where many once socially conscious and edgy brands took on growth capital and were eventually bought out by the conglomerates they set out to disrupt. Are there any market signals that such food-tech enterprises intend to break from this system and build something more economically diverse and decentralized?

This leads us to questions of how food technology feeds into racialized capitalism. White people own over 98% of agricultural land and make up over 84% of food executives and over 70% of VCs. Yet the food industry is extremely diverse among the rank and file, from farmgate to retail. How diverse are the leadership teams, boardrooms, capitalization tables and investor pools of precision fermentation enterprises? Are any of these companies worker cooperatives or employee owned? Will this new food technology slow down, reverse or accelerate racial capitalism in the food industry?

When you consider that up to 75% of food retail workers are food insecure due to low wages and high costs of living, or that hundreds of food processing workers died from Covid-19, what substantive changes will this technology bring to a food workforce that has tremendous turnover, low morale and a growing sense of injustice with the way they are treated and compensated? We were promised that GMOs, which are now in more than 75% of processed foods, would feed the world, yet they can’t even feed grocery clerks.

And workers’ struggles for labor rights are now in the headlines. Unions have historically been the surest path to a good life for workers. How many such companies would be willing to ratify collective bargaining contracts with their workforce and not use union avoidance firms? Is that even a possibility given the antipathy to organized labor campaigns in the tech sector and throughout food retail and CPG, despite overwhelming public sentiment in favor of unions? 

The life cycle research around precision fermentation shows extremely favorable positioning against CAFO systems that exacerbate climate change. But these studies should also consider the growing category of humanely raised, carbon neutral, Biodynamic and Regenerative Organic dairy products. Nor do they compare to the burgeoning sector of agroecologically produced foods that produce impressive yields, integrate humanely raised livestock, demand land reform and require greater social equity. 

Agroecology is a rights-based process that can’t be flipped to a strategic buyer. Such projects are usually under resourced but scalable and replicable. Many are cooperatively owned and managed and rooted in Black, Indigenous and non-settler colonialist worldviews. Some have been skeptical about recombinant food technologies and genetic enclosures. A few of the more well known examples include members of HEAL Food Alliance, as well as Soul Fire Farm, Sicangu Food Sovereignty Initiative, Virginia Free Farm, Regeneration Farms, Tierre y Libertad Farm, and New Roots Cooperative Farm.

And agroecological projects are backed up over 40 years of field research documenting high yields, nutrient density, shared wealth creation, lower agrichemical use, more humane production and processing, and biodiverse soils that sequester carbon and reduce flooding and runoff. Isn’t that worth attention and investment? 

There are record levels of VC “dry powder” out there, most of which will be destined for high-risk ventures in the hope that a handful go buckwild. In a capitalist economy, what gets funded is what gets established, particularly with millions of dollars of marketing and advertising to engineer demand. So, picture this. For every high-risk food-tech investment dollar deployed, a matching amount is either invested, donated, or gifted to organizations who are building soil, increasing nutrient density and enabling greater food and land access. Or diverted into decentralized processing, refrigeration and frozen foods infrastructure, or forecasting, logistics and delivery technologies that could mitigate food waste and eliminate food insecurity. And maybe the carried interest of successful food-tech ventures should be taxed to fund a just transition for the farm and processing workers who will be laid off and displaced by the growth of precision fermentation ventures. Considering the astronomical failure rates of food and beverage startups, a food-tech reparations model may actually be a safer bet across the board.

This begs the question of whether it makes sense for the food industry to replace one capital and resource intensive system for another, albeit sans animal cruelty and seemingly more climate friendly. Precision fermentation, or synthetic biology, is a clever food-tech. It will hopefully be far less destructive than conventional agriculture, but that is a low bar. Perhaps what consumers really need is a new food paradigm.