Novel food

"Globally, our food system is responsible for up to one-third of all greenhouse gases (GHGs), a figure that dwarfs the 3.5% caused by air travel." – The National Food Strategy Independent Review, The Plan, 2021.

To reach net zero emissions targets, significant action is needed. Across global and interconnected food supply chains, climate change, COVID-19, and conflicts are causing significant and lasting impacts on the cost and availability of food.

Novel foods – defined in the UK and EU as any food not significantly consumed prior to 1997, and produced by microbial fermentation or animal cell cultivation – offer sustainable solutions to producing food products using less water, agricultural land and fewer GHG emissions, whilst also meeting the rise in consumer demand.

Building on our biotechnology heritage of fermentation process development and scale-up, downstream processing, engineering design and formulation; our expertise, equipment and facilities enable the commercialisation of your innovative products.

What's challenging about commercialising novel food innovations?

Novel foods have a competitive advantage over agricultural food production in that they do not rely on favourable conditions to produce a high-quality product. However, food-grade facilities that enable the development and scale-up of quality products at high-throughput, come at high expenditure and with risk.

How is CPI enabling novel food solutions?

We’re supporting and enabling the 'alternative protein revolution' by providing access to our food-grade facilities and expertise. We're also optimising carbon- and energy-efficient processes and scaling-up production to an industrial level so new, more sustainable and efficiently produced proteins can reach the market as rapidly as possible.

Cultured meat, also known as cultivated meat, clean meat, or cell-based meat, is produced by growing animal cells without the animal. We harness the latest developments in cell culture to develop animal-free media and bioprocesses to produce muscle and fat cells.

As well as our animal cell culture and biomass fermentation capabilities, we have substantial experience in producing recombinant proteins and other cellular products by precision fermentation.

Our expertise in fermentation and cell cultures is supported by our downstream processing know-how for the isolation and purification of proteins, oils, and carbohydrates. Together with our process engineering experts, we can de-risk through process design, safety and modelling.

Through engaging our biotechnology expertise, we can deliver sustainable, technically and economically viable alternatives to animal-derived food ingredients; from plasmid to PI&D.

Having been awarded a globally recognised certificate for food safety, our partners can conduct extensive consumer testing on their products to ensure the best quality.