LiDestri Foods and Drinks, the largest private label and food contract manufacturer in the US, and Fermentum, a leading fermentation capacity expert, have announced a joint venture to solve the bottleneck for precision fermentation capacity and support the growth of industrial biotechnology in the country.
As part of the collaboration, LiDestri Foods will provide Fermentum $8.5 million in financing for leasing and construction. Fermentum will run a facility at Eastman Business Park in Rochester, NY, with 510 thousand liters of precision fermentation capacity and robust commercial scale downstream processing already installed.
The site, which is operational and available immediately, has the necessary equipment, including tank capacities ranging from 400 L, 20 thousand, and 70 thousand liters, to scale ingredients from the lab to pilot and commercial scale fermentation. According to the companies, it will be the US’s first commercial-scale precision fermentation facility.
Getting proteins out of the lab
According to Giovanni LiDestri, chairman of LiDestri Foods, this new capacity will help the precision fermentation industry expand and produce animal-free proteins and consumer products that are not reliant on fossil fuels. “The resulting products and foods have a much smaller carbon footprint, which will help slow climate change,” he said.
Another company working to commercialize precision fermentation on a large scale is Liberation Labs Holdings, which recently broke ground for its first commercial-scale biomanufacturing facility in Richmond, Indiana.
“We could not have hoped for a better, more capable partner. Innovation is in LiDestri’s DNA, and their unsurpassed resources, ability to execute, as well as national reach, packaging, distribution and import/export abilities will provide the precision fermentation industry the ability to get out of the lab, and compete in the marketplace at scale,” said Phillip Johansen, CEO at Fermentum.
