The plant-based protein market has two new contenders with the launch of the first products from food-tech startup Nature’s Fynd: dairy-free cream cheese and meatless breakfast patties, both made from a fungi protein with roots in Yellowstone National Park’s volcanic springs.
The crux of Nature’s Fynd—which was founded in 2012 and has so far raised a collective $158 million to create its fermentation technology that turns the fungi into protein—is what it’s named Fy, the fungi-protein derived from a microbe called Fusarium strain flavolapis. Mark Kozubal, the company’s chief science officer and cofounder, discovered that microbe on a research trip to Yellowstone, where he was looking for extremophiles (microorganisms that can survive extreme conditions that would be inhospitable to other life-forms) as part of work supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA.
“It’s an organism that is a master adapter,” says CEO and cofounder Thomas Jonas. “It has adapted to this incredible environment, and what it’s had to do—which is something that I think is very relevant to where we are today—is that it has learned to do more with less. It’s learned to adapt to an environment where there were very limited resources.”“Five years ago we would have been having a very different challenge than we do now, because consumers are used to probiotic yogurts, they’re used to kombucha, they’re used to seeing plant-based take off,” says CMO Karuna Rawal. “All of that bodes well, for the time is now to change how we eat if we’re going to do something about climate change and the impact on our planet.”
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