SBIR Phase I: Mining microbial diversity to culture new categories of cheese and other sustainable foods

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The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to build a more sustainable food system by crafting cultured foods leveraging microbial diversity. Growing awareness of the environmental and health toll of animal products has persuaded many to seek plant-based foods, but the search is often curtailed by unappetizing and expensive products. For example, cheese is one of the best-loved foods in western cuisine, but by weight it has a carbon footprint larger than chicken or pork and contains lactose, which two-thirds of people cannot digest. To date, plant-based cheeses have failed to achieve anything similar to the rich depth of flavor associated with dairy cheeses. The proposed project will build a platform to rapidly develop novel cultured foods from sustainable ingredients. The proposed project will systematically mine microbial biodiversity for new strains usable in creating cultured foods. A key technical hurdle to inventing new cultured foods has been a lack of tools to profile complex microbial communities and chemical mixtures. Using high-throughput methods from microbial ecology and analytical chemistry, this work seeks to rapidly evaluate microbes for their potential to create compelling flavors. This is an iterative process involving the identification, isolation, optimization and combination of microbial strains that are compatible with to process of making high-quality, plant-based cheeses. The primary goals are to craft a new category of hard, aged cheeses that captures the complexity and addictiveness of dairy cheese, while requiring far fewer natural resources.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.