Nourish Ingredients Teams with Boston Bioprocess to Scale Animal-Free Fats

Australian precision fermentation firm Nourish Ingredients has teamed up with Boston Bioprocess, a Champaign, Illinois-based firm offering process development services for fermentation and bioprocessing from bench scale through to commercialization.

The company is also working with biopharma firm Batavia Biosciences to ramp up production of its animal-free 'specialty fats,' which contain targeted fatty acid compositions and have been engineered to deliver specific functionalities in a variety of food and pet care applications.

Scaling for Commercialization

Nourish has a partnership with Ingredion, which invested in the company in 2022 along with Main Sequence, Hostplus, Horizons Ventures, and other backers in a $28.6m series A round.

The company's technology platform—which produces triglycerides (fats) rather than proteins—utilizes yeast as a production organism, which can be fermented in tanks at commercial scale, said founder and CEO James Petrie, PhD.

"Broadly speaking, this is similar to the way beer and wine is made. However, instead of ethanol as the product, our yeast strains make oil."

— Dr. James Petrie, CEO of Nourish Ingredients

Working with Boston Bioprocess

Asked about working with Boston Bioprocess, Petrie said, "We've developed numerous yeast strains capable of making a range of unique specialty fats. These strains were developed with a scalable fermentation process in mind, but there is still quite a lot of work required to translate what we've demonstrated at small scale to commercial scale."

"Boston Bioprocess plays an important role in this process by helping us refine our fermentation process at bench and small pilot scale by optimizing the key parameters that drive performance at large scale, while preparing us for a successful tech transfer to large scale."

— Dr. James Petrie, CEO of Nourish Ingredients

Applications and Market Opportunity

The specialty fats being developed by Nourish have applications across food, pet care, and other industries. Their precision fermentation approach allows for targeted fatty acid profiles that can deliver specific functionalities not easily achieved with traditional fat sources.

This partnership represents another step forward in Nourish Ingredients' commercialization journey, leveraging Boston Bioprocess's expertise in fermentation scale-up and process development.