Fermenting Change with Irina Gerry of Change Foods

This week Keith talks to Irina Gerry, CMO of Change Foods and a sustainable foods industry thought leader, using precision fermentation to commercialize a new way of producing real milk proteins and dairy foods with biotech. Irina's also a founding member and vice chair of the board of the Precision Fermentation Alliance.

Together they walk through her interesting (and in some ways improbable) career in grocery and CPG marketing with a background at iconic plant-based brands, including Silk and So Delicious at Danone. Tune in to meet and learn from Irina about the world of Precision Fermentation and Biotech in food.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Keith Anderson: Welcome to Decarbonizing Commerce, where we explore what's new, interesting, and actionable at the intersection of climate innovation and commerce. I'm your host, Keith Anderson, and together we'll meet entrepreneurs and innovators reinventing retail, e commerce, and consumer products through the lenses of low carbon and commercial viability. 

Hi, and welcome to the Decarbonizing Commerce Podcast. I'm your host, Keith Anderson. When I'm speaking to people in the industry, one of the things that I'm emphasizing is that different categories are going to experience a different speed and intensity of change as a result of climate change and action in response to climate change.

And this week's episode is about one of the categories that's already seeing a lot of activity and I think it's going to see Even higher speed and higher intensity change over the coming decade. At last year's Goldman Sachs Global Sustainability Summit, Walmart Chief Sustainability Officer and EVP Kathleen McLaughlin said, "We all know about the 80/20 rule.

In emissions, it's like 99 to 1. You don't need to measure every item to know it's beef, it's dairy, it's electronics. We know what they are." And this week's episode is about dairy in particular, and when I think about some of the alternatives to conventional dairy that are on the market and are on the horizon, I think of a three-legged stool, the first leg of which is plant-based, which is probably the most mature and which I imagine most listeners are familiar with. And plant-based has certainly undergone some setbacks and headwinds over the last few years.

The second leg is cultivated meat, and I, I think, that too has faced some headwinds, both in the US and Europe, despite it being a category that has barely come to market. But just this week, the New York Times had an op-ed on some of the tribulations in that subcategory. But there's a third leg of that stool, which is precision fermentation.

And precision fermentation is, as you'll hear in today's episode, not a brand new technology, but it's a technology that hasn't widely been deployed in the kinds of grocery and food categories that we're going to talk about today. And I, I really wanted listeners of the show to hear from somebody with a perspective on the current and the future outlook for precision fermentation, dairy products.

And so I'm really delighted to have Irina Gerry on the show today. She is a sustainable foods industry thought leader, CMO of Change Foods, which is using precision fermentation to commercialize a new way of producing real milk proteins and dairy foods with biotech. Irina's also a founding member and vice chair of the board of the Precision Fermentation Alliance.

And she spent, a really interesting and in some ways improbable career in grocery and CPG marketing with a background at, iconic plant-based brands, including Silk and So Delicious at Danone, and also has spent time at Procter & Gamble and Deloitte. And I won't keep you much longer because I'm eager for you to meet and learn from Irina, but to me, precision fermentation is such an interesting topic and technology as it relates to this area because, you know, it addresses some of the challenges that some of those other subcategories I mentioned have faced.

And yet there's a long road ahead to drive consumer awareness, understanding, trial, and adoption. And a lot that's happening at retail and could happen at retail as those two examples I shared start to suggest. So this is almost certainly not going to be the last time we cover the topic of precision fermentation, but, it is the first, and I'm really grateful that we have somebody so experienced and thoughtful to review it with us.

So let's meet Irina Gerry, CMO of Change Foods.

Irina, thanks for joining the Decarbonizing Commerce podcast. Great to see you and thanks for being here.

Irina Gerry: It's great to be here.

here Well, you know, this is a topic that, really fascinates me for a lot of reasons. And as I was scoping out who is best positioned to help me and the audience understand it, you sort of rose to the surface.

Keith Anderson: Would you mind just telling us a bit about your background and the work that you're doing now with Change?

Irina Gerry: Absolutely. You know, I started my professional career in consulting. But then during business school, I transitioned into consumer marketing, CPG world. You know, I loved for me, the connection between the product and things you're working on, and just that the tangible product that ends up on the shelf or in your refrigerator and, you know, the combination of the creative and the strategic and the tactical aspects of what it actually takes to make that happen.

So, you know, I jumped in, kind of both feet in and, and spend some time at P&G, the big training ground, and then transitioned into food, and worked on Silk brand for over five years. I actually came in when it was still WhiteWave Foods. So it was a private, you know, smaller company out of Boulder, Colorado.

And then during my tenure there was acquired by Danone. So I kind of have a large blue chip, smaller, you know, acquisition, type of experience. And then was working a lot on the innovation, actually a kind of a long range innovation and discovered this new technology called precision fermentation, and we'll dig into that, and saw such tremendous potential that I actually took a leap and, and joined a tiny, tiny startup, was a third person to join the startup to commercialize that technology. So now I've been an entrepreneur for over three years, really working to not only build, you know, this company, but also this new technology and essentially a new category within food.

So that, that's been my journey in a nutshell.

Keith Anderson: Well, maybe that's a nice springboard to get into what precision fermentation is and, you know, why it's so helpful for the, the broader challenges that you're working on.

Irina Gerry: Yeah. You know, actually before we dive in what precision fermentation is, let's talk maybe a little bit why that even matters. I think it's helpful for people to know the context. So, you probably, you know, I'm assuming you talk a lot about decarbonization and a lot of people know about energy, right?

But food is right up there, after energy, is the second biggest sector to decarbonize. And when you look at food, every way you slice that, you come up against animal source products as the number one category within food that needs decarbonizing, and cows tend to be by far the biggest slice of that pie, given the fact that they produce a lot of methane, naturally, and the fact that they just require a lot of resources, right?

It takes about three calories in, sorry, a hundred calories in to get about one or three calories out in terms of meat and, you know, a hundred calories to 17 calories in terms of milk. So it's a kind of inefficient way of using resources that also happens to be very carbon intensive. And so when I looked at that and, you know, working on plant-based, alternatives was obviously a huge and important part of the solution, right? We could say, "okay, well, if animal based foods are problematic what can we do?" Right? Because we still want to enjoy the foods and the recipes and kind of have the experiences that we have with animal products, but maybe we need some other ways of doing that.

And so focusing on plant-based made a lot of sense at the time. And, you know, I, I'm sure you probably have tried silica products. I've been, you know, a huge fan before I even joined the business, and obviously worked on it. For, for a number of years with, with a great degree of passion because I felt like it offered both a much lower carbon footprint, but also, you know, a great product experience.

However, what I found is that there's some categories where it really works, like milk, I think does a great job and we have a lot of options. And there's some categories where it's very challenging, like cheese, right? Where the product just doesn't deliver. And the more I dug into it from kind of an R&D perspective, "why does it not work as well?"

What I realized is that milk proteins have very particular structure, very particular function, right? At, when you look at it kind of at a food science angle, and that it's really hard to replicate it with plants. And this is how I kind of landed on researching and looking into, "well, what's, what else can we do, right? What other technologies and alternatives exist?" 

And so I found precision fermentation. So let me kind of explain to you what it is. Precision fermentation is different than plant-based because 

we're not actually using plants as the source of ingredient, but rather we're using microorganisms as tiny machinery to produce the exact same molecules that, say, a cow would.

So double clicking on that, it's, it's a combination of, you know, traditional fermentation, so what you already kind of know and love beer, kombucha, yogurt, microorganisms doing the work, but combining that with biotechnology right? Now, where we have, you know, an intersection of genetic engineering tools, AI, CRISPR, et cetera, where you can actually program the microorganisms, right?

It's not new, we use that in medicine, we use that in, in various other industries where, you know, we create vaccines this way, we create insulin this way, but it's combining that and taking that into now saying, "okay, well, if we could make any molecule, why not a food molecule? Why not a milk protein?"

Right? So it's kind of extending this technology into food and what gets me kind of excited about it is that obviously because you're using microorganisms and not macroorganisms, your climate footprint is drastically smaller, right? Not only in terms of carbon, water, land use, et cetera, but you're producing the same exact thing.

So the analogy I like to make is kind of solar to fossil based energy, right? It's the same energy. You flip the lights and it's bright in the room, but it's made through a different technology that's more efficient.

 And that's probably the closest analog, because these microorganisms get, you know, get programmed essentially to produce milk protein.

And then you use that milk protein and you could make a variety of products. In our case, you know, cheese was kind of the, the big, product to go after because there's such a massive gap in terms of nutrition, in terms of stretch and melt and kind of the consumer experience that is holding it back. And so it's newer word, I guess, in, in the ecosystem, precision fermentation, but that's essentially what it does, right?

It's using microorganism to make the exact same ingredient in a very specific and precise way and deliver a massive climate benefit in the process.

Keith Anderson: That was very clear. I do have some follow up questions.

Irina Gerry: Please.

Keith Anderson: So is it, it's something distinct from cultivated meat, which is another term, 

Irina Gerry: Mm hmm. 

Keith Anderson: you hear a lot about, is it not?

Irina Gerry: Yes, it is. So, Cultivated Meat is kind of a different pillar, I call it, of kind of this big technology evolution. In cultivated meat, you take an actual biopsy, usually from a live animal, right? It's a tiny brick, they don't, you know, it's not harming the animal in any sort of major way, right? But you take an actual cell biopsy where you get a number of cells, and then you place those cells inside what, you know, in the industry, it's called either a cultivator or a bioreactor, and you feed them nutrients.

So you're essentially replicating a process that happens inside the animal, right? Because when the cells are inside the animal, they get nutrients delivered to them, you know, through blood flow, and then they grow and they replicate. And what you're doing is you're taking that outside of the animal, because you could deliver the key nutrients in a more efficient way, and you're only growing the cells that you want to grow. So instead of growing, say, the entire cow with the hooves and, you know, the skin and everything else and the organs that we don't tend to eat, you can just grow the muscle tissue, right?

You can just grow a particular part. And again, the the difference there, you're taking cells and you're replicating the entire cell, and you will be eating the entire cell, right? In precision fermentation, you're still working with cells, but you're not actually consuming the cells. You are consuming the product of the cells.

So think of it as one is the product, the other one is the machinery. It's kind of how I would delineate the difference. And the other big difference is obviously when you replicate the whole cell, you get all of the biochemistry of the cell, right? So all of the various components that are naturally there.

When you're using precision fermentation, it's kind of like a sniper rifle technology. You're producing a very specific molecule almost one at a time. So if you think of the difference there, obviously, it's going to have a nutritional difference. It's going to have, difference in terms of the level of complexity, right?

Growing cells is much more complex than growing microorganisms that crank out just the one particular compound that you need. And the other difference I would say is, you know, the use of genetic engineering. I know it's a hot topic and a lot of people have opinions about it. What I would say is while genetic engineering is used in the process, right, so those cells are programmed using genetic engineering techniques, the product is not genetically engineered, the protein itself, because it's exactly the same kind of a copy replica of a milk protein.

And at the end of the fermentation, you filter out your chosen protein, so milk protein using filtration, much like you would in the dairy industry, right? That's how you get to a whey protein. You filter it out from, from milk, and you discard the organisms that made it. So that would be kind of the two big differences in those two technologies,

Keith Anderson: So, I think I understand you that, with precision fermentation, the microorganisms do the work, the output is the protein. What is the input?

Irina Gerry: The input is the, so the microorganisms themselves, right? So you, you take the microorganisms and you do a, you know, kind of a programming program where you get these special microbes, right, that now when fermented will crank out milk proteins. And the inputs are very simple, right? When you look at biology at a biochemistry level, you need a source of carbohydrates, you know, a few vitamins and minerals in a particular conditions, right? So temperature, acidity, presence or absence of air, et cetera. And so the, the precision part of this is controlling for all of these different components, right? The exact nutrient mix, the exact temperature, the exact timing of fermentation, et cetera, that kind of takes what you know as traditional fermentation, beer, right? It's more of a wild process, right? Where you take the microbes, you throw in, you know, the yeast, the sugar, and, and you kind of spin them around at a certain temperature, but you dial it in in a much more precise way. And again, the product is the filtered component, not the entire fermentation broth.

Keith Anderson: Got it, got it, that clarifies. And you said something in the setup that I think was really important, which is some of the, you know, products on the market today that are positioned as alternatives or substitutes, you know, meet some of the criteria, maybe in terms of resource intensity, but I, I tend to think of, especially in food, although it's, it's a framework that's extensible to a lot of categories, some of the other, you know, components of the value equation as being in food, does it taste, as good or, better, you know, secondly, texture, thirdly, nutritional profile, and, and fourthly, you know, what's the price and how does it compare to what I'm used to paying? So maybe we can spend a few minutes just unpacking, the sort of current and maybe the anticipated future competitive dynamics in a sense of some of these precision fermentation offerings on those dimensions.

Irina Gerry: Which one do you want to talk about next or first, I guess?

Keith Anderson: Well, I mean, taste, if I'm understanding you, I'm guessing is almost indistinguishable. If it's the same, same protein derived a different way, is that fair to say? Mm

Irina Gerry: That's, that's the biggest unlock, right? And that's why I got excited about this because dairy is obviously a massive category and, and as we said, you know, milk is, you know, plant-based milk has been around for, for a while. It's an established part of the category. Other segments are much newer, right?

Whether it's cheese, whether it's yogurt, creamer, etc. And when you look at the dairy industry, right? Only a fraction of that is actually sold as, you know, your liquid milk, right? Your milk you buy in the grocery store. A lot of it is those kind of secondary processed foods like yogurt and cheese and ice cream.

But then there's also a massive part of that, that's ingredients that are in the food system that you don't necessarily maybe notice or think about, you know, starting with the most obvious, you know, isolated dairy protein, whey protein, we all, you know, are buying tubs of that now and adding it to our smoothies, but there's also, you know, dairy proteins in all kinds of foods, right, to add nutrition, to add a particular mouthfeel or flavor, that have really all been processed and, you know, repackaged in a way that is, I call it kind of like under the surface dairy, but it's actually a massive component of our food system. And so you could think of application of this technology kind of up and down that ladder and the further, up you go, the easier it is to replace it because, you know, if we're just talking about milk protein, then it becomes a one for one replacement.

Like, think of your nutrition bars. Right, whey protein to whey protein is a direct replacement with no taste or texture difference versus if you think about, you know, cheese and yogurt and ice cream, there are other things in it. Of course, there are fats, there's, you know, other components that may be slightly harder to replace one for one.

And so your taste might vary a little, but I would say, you know, when looking at cheese and that was the problem I was highly focused on, There's such a huge gap that is specifically unlocked by the protein itself, and that's what the struggle has been. And I actually worked on a So Delicious plant-based cheese while at Danone and having access to, you know, some of the best resources within the R&D and ingredient sourcing, it was just still really hard to deliver on consumer expectations with plant proteins alone.

So that's where I say the unlock is, is huge, right? If you look at yogurt, same thing. Dairy yogurt has a high amount of protein. That's what gives it the creaminess, the texture, the nutrition that people love. And that's, this is the technology that allows us to do that in a much more sustainable way.

So I would say from a taste perspective, am I going after, you know, the Parmigiano Reggiano with all of its complexities and, you know, traditional processing and artisanry? No, but I could do probably a heck of a job with, across the other components of, of cheese business, right? Where it would be nearly indistinguishable.

Keith Anderson: And as part of the precision, is it possible and do you think that it's likely that there will be any, engineering of the nutritional profile, as just an example, you know, after recent conversations with my physician, I'm, I'm avoiding saturated fat when I can, so is it realistic to expect that, a precision fermented cheese might have a reduced, saturated fat level?

Irina Gerry: Yeah. So that's interesting what you're asking, right? Because when you look at, again, milk, cheese, yogurt, et cetera, it's not just protein. There's fats. Well, saturated fats is a huge part of that, right, cholesterol. The benefit of working with microorganisms is that it's kind of ingredients up rather than milk down.

When you think of how you make cheese, you take milk, you remove 90 percent of water, and then you coagulate it and you remove, you know, whey proteins, etc. You're working ingredient down. So you're kind of stuck with the saturated fat and the cholesterol and the hormones, everything that kind of tags along from milk.

With precision fermentation, you're going to ingredients up. So we're not replicating cholesterol. We're not replicating saturated fats. We're not replicating a lot of, you know, obviously the, the, the naturally occurring hormones that come with dairy milk product. We're just focused on protein. So you could see how it allows kind of this designer food, in a way, where you could say, "well, I want all the protein, and maybe I want more vitamin B12, and maybe I want the calcium, right? But I don't want the cholesterol, or I want less saturated fat." You, you might end up with some saturated fat, because even if you use plant-based sources, for example, coconut milk is still a source of saturated fat.

But it's different than dairy fat. So it kind of gets complex, but also interesting and promising, right? Where you could say for your particular needs, you might be able to find the cheese that still has the same protein content or more, but a lot lower saturated fat and no cholesterol. And I think that then starts to create a, not just the taste value, but also now a nutrition value, which is, you know, kind of the second thing you mentioned, like, what about the nutrition?

And I think that's really, really fascinating. The third thing I'll put to you, and that's more of a future, but replicating is just the beginning, right? To say, "hey, we just want to make the exact same molecule. And we wanted to replicate the familiar cheese mozzarella," but because it's designer, we could say, "what if we made it better, right? What if we remove allergenicity?" How many kids are allergic to milk protein? What if we're able to remove that, but still deliver the nutrition? What if we improve the calcium carrying capacity and deliver more calcium than dairy could? That opens up an entirely new spectrum of nutrition. That's not just parity, but actually better.

Keith Anderson: That's an interesting, interesting point. So I think we covered taste. I think we covered texture. I think we covered nutrition. You know, now we start to get into, position in the market. And, you know, when I listen to some of the comparative advantages in terms of resource, resource intensity, less water, less land, less energy, you know, on the surface, my guess would be economics might have some advantages, you know, help, help us think about where the technology is, on the maturity curve. You know, it feels to me just as an observer, like we're subscale at the moment, I don't see a ton of these products dominating the categories that we've been discussing, but, you know, where do you think we are on that maturity curve and, and how quickly are we going to scale it?

Irina Gerry: We're definitely subscale, right? So again, as I mentioned to you, the precision fermentation as a big platform technology has been around since the 80s, right? It started in pharma. This is how we produce 99 percent plus of insulin today. You know, a lot of the latest vaccines are produced that way. Drugs, pharmaceuticals.

So it's been used there first because it's, you needed, you know, fewer proteins or ingredients per unit of fermentation, right? So as the tech was expensive and it was still small scale, it was economically viable in pharma and not in other industries, right? But then we, it went into materials, right?

Biofuels. It's now used in cosmetics and when you think about it, it's kind of the unit economics are, we usually do it in, you know, dollars per kilo of product, of fermentation product, right? And so you may have started at a thousand dollars a kilo in pharmaceuticals, and then it's maybe viable, you know, 200 a kilo in cosmetics.

But if you look at food, you need to be in kind of the, the 10 to 20s range. We're talking commodity dairy, right? So if we're trying to say whey protein, casein protein, which are available to buy from a cow today, that's where you are. You're kind of in these, you know, 10 to 20 dollar range. There are obviously companies working on that, but that's going to take some time to get to that level.

However, what I'll tell you is the cost curve reduction pattern is following other patterns that we've seen with technological development, right? Whether it's genetic sequencing, your computing power, et cetera, that continues to develop and as these price points get unlocked, we're seeing these Technologies enter into the categories.

So, say, between cosmetics and, you know, exact dairy, commodity dairy, there's also, you know, adult nutrition, baby formula, medical nutrition. So food, but maybe specialty kind of food where there's a willingness to pay for a particular ingredient that maybe delivers a greater value or greater purity that you can get in market today.

So I would say commodity dairy, we're definitely still sub scale, but I believe that this industry is headed that way within the decade, right? So the projections, I would say that by 2030, these products would be competitive with commercial dairy.

Keith Anderson: In some ways that's sooner than I would have anticipated, just based on how, you know, some of these emerging technologies and, building the distribution channels, driving awareness, trial, all those things, so many of these industry shifts that feel like overnight changes, you know, take decades in some cases to play out, so that's really interesting. Are, are there, markets globally or, individual grocers, restaurants that are particularly, aggressive in, in supporting or pursuing this?

Irina Gerry: I think the climate conversation is happening in many markets today. Right? So if you look at, you know, the United States is obviously one of the world's largest, economies and polluters and a big consumer of animal products, right? Our per capita consumption of animal products is far and away higher than everyone else.

So I think the conversation on climate is highly relevant. We're seeing markets that have maybe Less access to land resources that are very, very open minded to this. Place is like Israel, places like Singapore, where there's not a massive land, right? Because we talked about carbon, but land use in animal agriculture is a huge topic.

You know, globally speaking, we use about a third of ice-free land on this planet just to feed the animals. That'd be a third. And, and the demand for animal products is projected to go up about 70%. So at a planetary scale, that's an unfathomable equation, right? We're just, we're out of earth to, to do it, to produce animal products the way we've been producing them.

But when you scale it back to even individual country levels, you're seeing that some countries are saying this is an unsustainable way, an unsustainable technology, and we are land short anyway. So it creates a much bigger openness to this technology. And the third pillar, I think, of geographies I would point out is those that are water stressed.

And actually that's going to start including the United States. Colorado on, you know, west is extremely water stressed and guess who the biggest consumer of water resources is? It's animal agriculture and it's predominantly cows. So when we look at what's happening in California and, you know, Arizona, Nevada, et cetera, you can't ignore the cows as part of that equation.

And so that's becoming a topic. Obviously anywhere in the Middle East is another great example where they do have land, but you know, not much water and a population that continues to demand higher quality, you know, animal type foods. And so we are then seeing kind of a third wave of interest from those countries as well, and then I would add on a layer of what we call food security, and I know it's probably a bit further into, you know, off of people's mind and in kind of US retail, but food security in the next decade is going to become a topic. I think we've all had a taste of that with, you know, the Ukraine crisis and crops and oils, et cetera, between climate instability and political instability.

I think that's going to be an increasingly important topic and being able to localize supply chain of important food ingredients like milk proteins is very appealing. So when I look at it globally, I, I see kind of several concentrated hot markets where those factors come together. And I think U.S. is one of them.

Absolutely.

Keith Anderson: It's interesting that you highlight the stability and purity of supply. I think in my first wave of inquiry in this whole space, I saw a huge amount of energy and focus on the decarbonization side and mitigating additional warming and emissions. But increasingly, what I see the retailers in particular talking about is whether it's localization or other strategies for stabilizing supply chains, which to me is, is sort of the adaptation side of the coin.

I, I think it's going to be a growing focus and in some ways, easier for companies to prioritize in the near term, because if they're already experiencing material disruption, as they did from the pandemic, as some retailers are openly stating, they are from more extreme weather and, you know, crop yields and, and quality are more volatile than

Irina Gerry: And pricing fluctuations, right? When you look at big impacts, and again, let's just look in the U. S. on, in one hand, it We feel food secure because it's such a massive country with so much farmland. But on the other hand, we are seeing huge water stress across the southern half of the United States. We're seeing huge heat stress coming from the heat waves, right?

It impacts our corn belt. Guess where corn goes? Guess where soy goes? It is all part of animal feed, so it's an upstream impact to the supply chain. We're not as food secure as we feel today, and when we go to these global markets, again, they're not either. So I would say food security, again, maybe not top of mind, but, but will be, rather rapidly and the benefit of these ingredients, because they're identical, they, it's kind of a plug and play, right?

So if I'm making nutrition bars with whey protein, I could source whey protein and be subject to market price fluctuations of global dairy market, or I could potentially have a, you know, a facility in the Midwest that produces it that's independent of, you know, water, climate, heat, stress, et cetera. 

Keith Anderson: Hey folks, this is the part of the show where we say thank you and see you soon to the general audience, plus and higher tier members of Decarbonize.co, stay tuned for the rest of the episode.

Well, this has been fascinating and informative. Really appreciate you joining the show. If people want to learn more about Change Foods or get in touch with you, where would you send them?

Irina Gerry: I would send them on, on LinkedIn, I guess. I'm, I'm, a frequent user. I love the platform. So find me there. 

Keith Anderson: Perfect. Well, thanks again, Irina. 

Irina Gerry: Thank you so much. 

Keith Anderson: Thanks for listening. I'm Keith Anderson, the executive producer and host of Decarbonizing Commerce. Sonic Futures handles audio, music, and video production. If you enjoyed the show, we'd really appreciate it if you took a moment to subscribe and leave a review or share it with a colleague. For the full episode and more member exclusive insight and analysis, join the Decarbonizing Commerce community at Decarbonize.

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