Many of the additives used by the
food industry to preserve, color, or maximize some properties of what we eat are
synthesized from petroleum. Some, such as colorants, have been linked to cancer
in animals above a certain dose. They also have harmful effects on the
environment. The list of potentially harmful food additives is very long and
the majority of the world's population prefers natural dyes, according to a
Nielsen survey.
Ricky Cassini suffered one of these
effects as a child when he had an allergic reaction. Years later, after
graduating in Business Administration from Argentina's Austral University,
Cassini decided to found Michroma, a biotechnology start-up to replace many of the
synthetic ingredients in food with others of natural origin from fungi. Thanks
to this project, the young man has become one of the 35 winners of MIT
Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 Latin America 2023 in Spanish.
The key to Cassini's innovation
lies in using fungi and gene editing techniques to obtain new substances. The
young man has created fungal biofactories to produce natural ingredients thanks
to the natural process known as fermentation to replace food additives with
"natural products with better properties, more stable, less expensive and
more sustainable," as he explains. In 2019, the Michroma project was born,
which not only seeks to eliminate petroleum-derived colorants from our food but
also synthetic flavors and fragrances.
Cassini details, "We use a
platform based on filamentous fungi enhanced with genetic engineering thanks to
techniques, such as CRISPR, to create mushroom biofactories. With precision
fermentation, we make it excrete a better and more sustainable alternative to
current dyes with a competitive market price." This development consumes
less water, less land, and reduces greenhouse emissions as it can be produced
anywhere in the world, adds the young Argentinean.
His first product is a red dye that
improves the properties of natural dyes as an alternative to the
petroleum-based Red 40. Michroma's co-founder seeks to expand its production
capacity, obtain regulatory approvals in Europe and the United States to launch
into the market, and continue researching new natural ingredients that go beyond
dyes. Michroma puts the Fungi kingdom at the service of a more natural food
industry.
