21st.Bio’s pilot facility poised to accelerate bioproduction and “change pace” of food innovation

07 May 2024 --- Bioproduction company 21st.Bio has unveiled a new pilot plant facility in its Danish headquarters, designed to support companies in upscaling bioproduction. Combining industrially proven technology with fermentation capacity, the company will help customers get to scale faster in a risk-mitigated and cost-effective way.

The company is focused on enabling its customers to bring more products to market, faster. “The ground will be laid for this in 2024,” Thomas Schmidt, co-founder and CEO, tells Food Ingredients First.

“Our motto is: ‘We make products, not projects.’ We measure our success by the products we help customers bring to market and their impact on consumers, not the amount and value of projects.”

21st.Bio will also continue to expand in its two sites — Copenhagen, Denmark and Davis, California. 

Boosting food business
Schmidt explains that biotech is of paramount importance for the future food industry for several reasons. 

“With traditional agriculture and animal production, we are simply not able to produce enough high-quality food for everyone, and the demand for proteins is expected to double by 2050.”

Precision fermentation enables the production of high-quality nutrition without the animals and with drastically reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and land and water use, he notes.

“With our technology platform now being offered to that market, it is the first time that industrially proven technology is being applied to bulk production of foods. This can radically change the pace at which we can bring new innovations to the market. Applications range from improving the nutritional value, taste, and texture of plant-based products to fortifying virtually any type of food with high-quality proteins.”

21st.Bio’s pilot facility will accelerate the step between internal lab-scale fermentation and large-scale production. 

21st.Bio’s pilot construction and deep experience are ideal for defining the important parameters and equipment needed for optimal large-scale production of proteins via fermentation. This will, on top of the best fermentation protocols, for example also help customers select the best CMO for individual project needs and limit the risk of costly failures. 

With over 3,000 liters of fermentation capacity, the facility offers a full range of capabilities, equipment, and competencies to help customers optimize their own specific processes. The pilot plant is focused on scaling up the production of recombinant proteins and peptides with applications in nutrition, food and beverages, agriculture, biomaterials and biopharma. 

The facility and all processing equipment are state-of-the-art, with much equipment designed for 21st.Bio.The pilot plant is designed to enable strong collaboration between 21st.Bio and customer teams during scaling. The facility is strategically located in the same building as the company’s strain development laboratories, allowing for joint work on further improving the customers’ production strains and fermentation processes. 

Capitalizing on proteins
According to Schmidt, 21st.Bio will offer production technology for a few major proteins like dairy proteins to the market “so that the product innovators and FMCGs can focus on the application development and manufacturing.”

“They will have world-class productivity and quality product at hand, with improved nutritional value and minimized impact on the environment,” he comments.

“Our vision with this pilot facility is to enable many more players to get from innovation to industrial scale production using our production technology. We aim to support global FMCGs to test our production technology at pilot scale and help our customers get faster to market at attractive prices, accelerating their journeys to own production.”

Getting the next step right
In this industry, upscaling mistakes cost a lot of money and time, explains Schmidt. 

“For our customers, it’s all about getting the next step right. The ability to increase productivity when also moving up in scale is what distinguishes good from great.” 

“Our goal with this pilot was to build a mini factory to best prepare customers for large-scale industrial production. We, therefore, wanted the process equipment to mimic what customers will find in their next step with large-scale biomanufacturing — only downsized to a pilot scale,” adds Thorvald Ullum, chief technology officer at 21st.Bio. 

“Our customers work alongside our experts in the pilot plant to test various process aspects as well as build skills and confidence for their own large-scale production.” 

The race for biosolutions
Home to precision fermentation pioneers such as Novo Nordisk and Novonesis, Denmark is a natural leader in bioproduction. Europe has an opportunity to bring this leading technology and know-how to benefit the world. 

We recently spoke with Schmidt about the company granting access to its precision fermentation technology platform to ingredient manufacturers enabling the production of dairy proteins. The platform, developed in collaboration with Novozymes, represents a step forward for large-scale production for manufacturers in the industry.

This move came at the heels of the company’s successful beta-lactoglobulin production scale-up. Beta-lactoglobulin, a key milk protein, is important for the nutritional and textural properties of dairy products.

“21st.Bio is enabling the food industry to get to the next level, with sustainable and cost-effective technology for mass production of proteins,” Schmidt told Food Ingredients First at the time. 

By Elizabeth Green