Food recoded: advanced biotechnologies for sustainability

It’s true we're talking about biological systems as we have known them forever. Like fermentation, for example, which is a natural process that we’ve been enhancing with technology. During the past 50 years, we've been able to decipher the dynamics of those processes. We’ve found ways to improve them or to intervene – to make them more efficient, more reproducible, more sustainable or faster.

We can now describe genomes, microbes, enzymes, and adapt some of them to make them more efficient. Recently these advances have been accelerated by what we call ‘the omics’. So, genomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics, along with the capabilities to build digital twins of natural processes – to drive them and improve their efficiency.

At this stage, most of these digital twins have operating systems with rules that come from our empirical understanding of the biological processes and ecosystems. Now, we are starting to apply machine learning and AI tools, which can dive into all these data and information and turn them into better knowledge, a stronger understanding. They will enable breakthroughs that humans cannot make by ourselves because of the complexity.

Today, this technology is applied to traditional organic processes like fermentation to significantly improve the efficiency. The next step is to adjust these fermentation processes to create molecules – equivalent of molecules in existing food products – which can be reproduced through fermentation in bioreactors. Through technological processes we can even create the equivalent of an animal molecule.

For instance, we can create casein or lactoferrin – dairy proteins – out of the microbes and molecules. These biotechnologies will be applied in the coming years in preservatives, flavours, colourants, emulsifiers or texturants that are organic, bio-based ingredients. They will be natural instead of being chemical like many of them today.

We are also moving towards more complex ingredients, which require a combination of molecules to form structural ingredients. Over the longer term we may be able to develop and accelerate the reproduction of animal cells in order to build cultivated meat products.

The fundamentals remain the same. We will still have ingredients, a transformation process, and a final product. But the ingredients and the transformation process would be different. We still need farmers – we might just need different inputs. Instead of asking farmers to produce a lot of livestock, we may ask them to grow vegetable products or sugars that will then be transformed into the equivalent of animal products.

So, it's a change, but it's not a destruction. It's an optimisation like we were used to. A 100 years ago farmers used to have a few individual animals, and three or five different crops. In the future, they may be cultivating different types of organic plants to serve those new value chains that will emerge. Actually, it will be most impactful for the processors who are used to using physical transformation processes. They are not yet skilled to deploy biotechnology transformation processes.

But also remember we will not shift from animal to biotechnology overnight, and we will never shift entirely from one to the other. Innovation is and not or. We will gradually see new ingredients emerging that will coexist with existing ingredients.

The other element is that biotechnology can only become mainstream if the outcome is more natural and more accessible. Therefore, the primary production ingredients on which they are built will have more value than today.  That's an opportunity for farmers to recover value in the value chain.

I will make a simple comparison with wheat. We need to store it, which we do in silos. They are inanimate vessels in which we store inanimate produce. Today we have hundreds of thousands of silos, and without them we wouldn't have bread and flour for all the world. This supply chain system has been crucial for food security.

So, if we want to have biotechnology products in the future, we need to build a similar infrastructure. The difference is that for biotechnology we will put ingredients into large vessels where they are transformed into more valuable products. So, this is what we call a bioreactor: a large vessel in which we pour different ingredients and transform them through biological processes.

Those bioreactors can be very big when it will be for commoditised products. Or they can be smaller – and even at the farm – for more local products. Think of it in the way that large beer companies have huge beer bioreactors, while the restaurant next door has small craft beer bioreactors.

Yes, genetic modification of seeds, plants, or biological components is part of biotechnology. The question is how much do you modify them? In 90% of cases we are talking about adaptation. We're not talking about radical transformation. We learned from GMO the barriers from consumers. And we have hopefully learned how to intervene in the genetics of natural products without being as aggressive as GMO. New genomic techniques such as CRISPR-plus can accelerate microbial evolution – to orient their perfection in the direction that we need to make them more efficient.

The first is to act, to take a lead. The future is in the hands of people who invent it. That’s not just words, it's reality. We need to multiply initiatives. We are talking about innovation, which means testing and learning. It means some successes and multiple failures. It means learning by doing, to better understand – and drive the change.

It can only happen if all actors of the value chain cooperate and collaborate. So the second priority is to foster collaboration and synergies. And to support the emergence of consortia of collaborative projects, of shared tools and processes. Sharing experiences and good practices will accelerate the emergence of culture of new food that will be territorialised in Europe.

The one thing I am pushing for is that the biotech and manufacturing acts should be integrated. It means that policies should anticipate how food will be important. The AB4S research shows that over the longer term close to 50% of the added value generated by biotechnologies will come from food and agriculture.

We are talking about a sector – food and agriculture – which has been asked for 50–70 years to increase yield, to reduce cost, to specialise its value chain. The food industry was not a topic of investment innovation. Here is where we need to change the paradigm. We need to reinvest in food systems innovation with an order of magnitude. We need to learn a lot.

Experience has shown me that you can't succeed unless you include consumers. So my priority is to facilitate the creation and the emergence of living labs and spaces where consumers, innovators, scientists can work together – to define and design the future food products that will emerge from their collective reflection.

We need to build this around the consumer. We are at the very beginning of a new era. And as with any emerging innovation, it's driven by technologists and scientists. Over the coming years we will see more consumer-centric approaches overtaking the technicist approach. For that we need living labs.

These regulatory-constrained environments are happening in the Netherlands. They will now happen in the UK at Imperial College and the University of Bath. Since 2024, EIT Food has also been engaged in FEASTS and EPIC Shift, two Horizon-funded food biotech projects that have living lab components.

There are many! In Europe, take the example of GOURMEY. They are the first cultivated startup which has been fighting for approval on every continent. But I can name tens of them. Solar Foods, Onego Bio, Standing Ovation, the list goes on.

In the past century we never saw innovation dynamics like this for food. The early 20th century was super active in terms of innovation. We had the telephone, we had electricity, we had the cars, the planes. But for food, to some extent we still eat today what our grandparents used to eat. It hasn't changed that much. It perfected, it became more accessible or safer. But it didn't change in terms of cultural habits.

Over the past seven years or so, thanks to innovation in technologies and biotechnologies, we are seeing hundreds of new ideas, solutions, products coming into the market. We are at a moment where we have a unique opportunity and Europe is at the forefront of this innovation.