QL AG, an innovative food technology solutions company, today announced a new collaboration to develop dairy proteins with Ginkgo Bioworks, which is building the leading platform for cell programming and biosecurity. QL AG will tap into Ginkgo’s extensive capabilities in strain engineering across multiple chassis organisms to support its goal of providing the market with high-quality nutritionally equivalent dairy proteins.
The dairy industry faces significant pressures as climate change continues to lead to a reduction in arable land and water. Across the world, supply chain disruptions are increasing input costs and consumers are seeking out more healthy, tasty, sustainable, and affordable food options and alternatives to animal agriculture. As a result, the alternative dairy market has grown by tens of billions of dollars in recent years. Yet, current dairy alternatives still fall short of consumer criteria on critical factors like taste and texture.
“Dairy proteins derived using fermentation have advantages across many key dimensions, including taste and texture, as well as the fact that they have no arable land requirement and a lower water requirement,” said Roger Föhn, CEO and co-founder of QL AG. “By accessing Ginkgo’s platform, QL AG can help reduce the cost of producing dairy proteins with fermentation. We are excited to pursue our goal of making a quantum leap in alternative agriculture by leveraging Ginkgo’s unique capabilities in producing strains at high titers and scaling fermentation processes.”
“Dairy proteins provide an exciting opportunity to leverage our platform, as they have traditionally presented product developers with significant challenges around protein productivity, economics, and functionality for efficacy across different applications. We aim to solve such challenges with our deep expertise in protein engineering, novel bioactivity and biochemistry identification, high-throughput expression, functional studies and scale-up capabilities,” said Kalpesh Parekh, Vice President of Business Development at Ginkgo Bioworks. “We are so excited about QL AG’s mission, and can’t wait to further grow our capabilities in the precision fermentation space by working with such an innovative partner.”
