Protein and food production can be ethical and sustainable by harnessing the power of ancient microbes and using innovative techniques in gaseous fermentation.
The Jooules way of producing proteins is unlike anything you’ve seen before. Our proteins are not produced by growing animals or crops in vast open fields, or harvested from our oceans. Rather, our microbes are our cell factories which we host in stainless steel bioreactors where we feed them a stream of greenhouse gases and green hydrogen.
An overly abundant resource that is the primary contributor to climate change, and often a result of food production, with up to 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions globally being attributed to producing food. We can capture CO2 emissions directly from key industrial sources before it even has a chance to enter into the atmosphere, and we use that as a food source for our microbes.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It’s all around us, it’s our oceans, our lakes, and our streams. We extract hydrogen from water using renewable electricity and this becomes an energy source for our microbes.
The energy behind our protein is clean, green, and efficient. We power our process with renewable energy.
Fermentation is a process that has been utilised for thousands of years in food production from baking bread to making beer or yoghurt. Many of the foods we consume today have undergone some form of fermentation. Our fermentation process follows a similar path, but our microbes consume gases instead of sugars.
Our microbes are the key to unlocking protein potential. They have existed on earth for billions of years and can be found in a number of inhospitable environments, from places as diverse as Japan, Iceland, and the Azores. We have chosen them for their specific capabilities to power our process.
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We take our optimised microbial strains and prepare them for the fermentation process.
Our microbes are released into our bioreactors and in a process called fermentation convert the primary feedstocks of CO2 and Hydrogen, along with some trace nutrients, into proteins.
When our microbes have produced enough biomass, we extract it from the bioreactors. We then apply downstream processing treatments including; filtration, purification, concentration, and finally drying to produce the final product.
Our microbes have existed on earth for billions of years and can be found in numerous inhospitable environments.
Microbes are tiny living organisms that are not visible to the naked eye. They can have a major impact on our everyday lives. There are many different types of microbes, from archaea to bacteria, to yeasts. Each microbe has a different role to play to keep the planet and life on it functioning.
Jooules’ microbes of choice are bacteria. We have carefully selected our bacterial strains for their unique natural capabilities and created the ideal environment to enable them to grow rapidly to produce proteins. These bacteria also can produce other valuable nutritional molecules for us. To encourage them requires a bit of training and modified environmental conditions.
Unlike yeasts, which are used in bread or beer making, our bacteria consume CO2 as their food source, not sugars or carbohydrates. We are taking the world’s most abundant and problematic greenhouse gas (CO2), feeding it to our bacteria which in turn produce highly nutritious proteins.
