These 10 Women Are Re-Imagining The Future Of Food With The Help Of Synthetic Biology

What if we could end world hunger, pack more nutrition in every meal, develop infant formula that mimics the composition of human breast milk, and even treat chronic diseases with food, without placing an undue burden on our environment?

This vision is within reach: all it requires is putting synthetic biology to work. Scientists and entrepreneurs are already developing drought-resistant crops, antioxidant-laden tomatoes, animal-free hotdogs, and other ingenious solutions to help feed the growing population. But there is more work to be done. This is why food tech companies that use synthetic biology to fix the shortcomings of our current food production systems are springing up like mushrooms.

These ten inspiring women – many of whom will be speaking at the SynBioBeta conference later this month – are transforming the most fundamental aspect of our life, food. Thanks to their incredible efforts, we can begin to re-imagine food that is healthier, more nutritious – and better for the planet.

Niyati Gupta, CEO and Co-founder, Fork & Good, Inc.

Fork & Good is pioneering a new way of producing our meat. The idea for this company was born when the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Gabor Forgacs, met Niyati Gupta, Fork & Good’s co-founder and CEO. At that time, Gupta was the CEO of ComCrop, Singapore’s first rooftop commercial hydroponic farm that grows vegetables in the middle of a bustling metropolis. Turns out, growing cell-cultured meat is a lot like hydroponics: it is all about solving the issue of scale and profitability.

Fork & Good set out to solve the biggest challenge to cultivated meat production: making it affordable for everyone. It received the first patent in the cultivated meat space and has been operating in Brooklyn, New York, since 2018. Their first product – pork without the pig – proves that you can make tasty, nutritious meat without the animal in a scalable, sustainable, humane, and cost-effective way.

Francia Navarrete, COO and Co-Founder, Protera Biosciences

Protera is a biotechnology company that uses deep learning algorithms to design high-value proteins and enzymes for food. One of their first offerings is a protein called Protera guard™ that extends the shelf-life of packaged bread to replace chemical additives.

With its main lab in Chile and headquarters in Paris, Protera is solving the food production challenge on a global scale by making healthy, safe foods from responsibly produced and clean ingredients. Its co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Francia Navarrete has received the Inspiratec Prize for women founders leading STEM companies in Chile and is an active advocate for women and girls in STEM.

Jasmin Hume, Founder and CEO, Shiru

Jasmin Hume founded the biotechnology startup Shiru to make delicious, nutritious, sustainable, and scalable ingredients to help food companies develop new plant-based products in no time. A 2019 Y Combinator graduate and previous associate for VC firm Lux Capital, Hume understands that progress in this area is moving quickly and was able to get Shiru up and running in less than 12 months during the pandemic. Their first product, OleoPro™️, is a plant-based fat ingredient that can give you the same flaky crust as butter but with 90% less saturated fat and a much better sustainability profile than coconut or palm oils. Better for you – and for the planet.

Maricel Saenz, CEO & Founder, Minus Coffee

For many of us, giving up a morning cup of coffee is close to impossible – even after becoming aware of the detrimental environmental impact of coffee production. Minus Coffee has created a clever way out of this dilemma for people who are obsessed with coffee and the planet. Its founder and CEO Maricel Saenz is from Costa Rica and claims to be “obsessed” with creating delicious and sustainable coffee – made without the coffee bean. You heard it right: Minus’s bean-less coffee will get you caffeinated and satisfy your tastebuds, without the negative effect on biodiversity that growing coffee has.

Lisa Dyson, Founder and CEO, Air Protein

What if I told you we could make food out of thin air? During the 1970s space program, NASA scientists explored a way to feed astronauts on long expeditions by transforming elements from the air they breathed into protein. The idea did not take back then, but in 2019 Lisa Dyson brought this SciFi concept back to life by starting a company called Air Protein. By combining synthetic biology and food tech, this World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer company makes meat from elements of the air, which makes their product the most sustainable meat alternative on Earth – or in space.

Dyson is not only the CEO of Air Protein, she is also the founder and Chair of the Board at Kiverdi, a biotech company working to make the circular economy a reality by making goods from carbon dioxide. She was named Top 100 Female Founders by Inc. Magazine in 2019, and I cannot wait to see what else she has in store for us.

Christine Gould, Founder and CEO, Thought for Food

Christine Gould is a thought leader in food-tech innovation. As the founder and CEO of Thought for Food, an accelerator of food systems transformation, she works with startups, companies, investors, and creatives to come up with cutting-edge solutions, pilot and scale new initiatives, and inspire people to think outside the box when it comes to food innovation. In her previous life, Gould had led external affairs, public policy, and corporate affairs at multinational companies, startups, think tanks, and industry associations. To top that, Gould was recently appointed by the UN Deputy Secretary-General to serve on the Advisory Committee for the UN Food Systems Summit.

Kasia Gora, Co-founder and CTO, SCiFi Foods

An MIT grad, Kasia Gora has spent more than a decade working at the most cutting-edge, fast-growing synthetic biology companies before starting her own. SCiFi Foods is a food tech company that combines cultivated meat with plant-based ingredients to make burgers “shockingly close” to the taste of conventional beef (their own words). SCiFi Foods is not making any compromises: they want their product to have with the same taste, texture, and nutritional value as conventional meat – without the animal cruelty or environmental impact.

Stephanie Michelsen, Co-Founder and CEO, Jellatech

Stephanie Michelsen made the 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science list, and it was not by accident. In 2020, she founded Jellatech together with a group of innovators, dreamers, and entrepreneurs and has been leading the B2B biotech business ever since. Jellatech is producing animal-free collagen and gelatin for food, pharma, and cosmetic applications with the help of synthetic biology. And it just announced the successful development of a bioidentical human collagen made from its proprietary cell line using bioprinting which could potentially be used for tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and other biomedical applications.

Sandhya Sriram, Group CEO and Co-founder, Shiok Meats

Shiok Meats is reinventing seafood with cultivated crustaceans. They are delicious, sustainable, and healthy shrimp, lobster, and crab substitutes. Based in Singapore, Thailand, and Australia, this cellular aquaculture and cell-based meat company was started by Sandhya Sriram, the Group CEO and co-founder. Under her leadership, the first cultivated seafood and meat company in Southeast Asia and the first cultivated crustacean company anywhere in the world has raised over $30 million in funding since 2018.

Sriram was recently named one of the Forbes Women in Tech and was selected for the 2021 Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst program.

Monica Bhatia, Co-founder and Co-CEO, EQUII

Monica Bhatia is the co-founder and co-CEO of EQUII, a food tech company with the goal to make nutrition easy. She studied at the Indian Institute of Technology and worked in the biotech industry for over 20 years, focusing on sustainability. Out of that experience, EQUII was born. The company uses fermentation to make bread – but not in the conventional way, like making sourdough. They are using synthetic biology to enhance bread’s nutritional profile by converting grain starch to protein.

These are just some of the examples of how synthetic biology is transforming food by making it more nutritious, more accessible, and sustainable. Many of these products are already on the shelves, so go ahead and give them a try.

Thank you to Katia Tarasava for additional research and reporting on this article. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta and some of the companies I write about, including Protera Biosciences, are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference and weekly digest.