Giving Compass' Take:

• Ginkgo Bioworks, the biotech company that spun out the new startup, Motif Ingredients, aims to make more plant-based products that will replicate the taste, texture, and nutrition of animal-based products. 

• What are some challenges that this start-up might face? What are the reasons we need more people to adopt plant-based diets? 

• Here are some plant-based foods that are more than a fad. 

It took Impossible Foods years–and deep expertise in biotech–to develop a plant-based burger that looked and tasted like beef. Other companies, like Just, also have multimillion-dollar labs. But a new startup now wants to make it easier for the other companies to enter the world of plant-based or cell-grown meat, dairy, and eggs.

“There’s a clear trend of consumer interest in alternate proteins and animal-free versions of fish and burgers and chicken nuggets and all of these things,” says Jason Kelly, the CEO and cofounder of Ginkgo Bioworks, the biotech company that spun out the new startup, called Motif Ingredients.

The startup will work with Ginkgo to identify ingredients, including vitamins and proteins found in foods like milk or meat, and will then produce them with engineered yeasts and bacteria in a fermentation process similar to making beer. This type of work is difficult for a startup (or even an established food giant) to do on its own.

The company will work on solving challenges such as replicating the taste, texture, and nutrition of animal-based products. If a particular plant protein isn’t a “complete” protein, meaning that it doesn’t provide all of the amino acids needed in the human diet, Motif can make a complementary protein, for example, to make the final product healthier. It will work both on ingredients for plant-based versions of meat and dairy and “cultured meat” grown from animal cells in bioreactors.

“I think what we’re seeing is just a broad awareness among investors that a squeeze is coming,” says Kelly. “There are going to 10 billion people on the planet. We just need a lot more protein than we have right now, period, from just a global nutrition standpoint.

Read the full article about making a plant-based diet by Adele Peters at Fast Company