Optimising feedstock utilisation for a fermentation-derived palm oil alternative

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Palm oil is everywhere. It's in food, cosmetics and biofuels. It's in 50% of our supermarket products. Palm oil is unique in the vegetable oil market; it melts in your mouth, is great for cooking and is a high-yielding crop. However, palm oil is one of the biggest carbon emitters due to loss of tropical rainforest and peatland to make way for plantations - it contributes over 500 million tonnes of CO2e, over 1% of global emissions, from 19 million hectares of tropical land. It has caused significant habitat loss, including for the Orangutan and Sun Bear, and all too often the smallholders do not receive a fair price for their produce.The UK Government has committed to reaching Net Zero by 2050; 20% of UK emissions stem from agriculture and the food supply chain and these emissions must be tackled if we are to reach these targets.Sun Bear Bioworks is using precision fermentation to make an alternative to palm oil. We are optimising a yeast strain that naturally produces oil, in order to create our oil from food waste quickly and efficiently. Our process saves 5.7kg CO2 and 2000m2 land for every kg of palm oil - a saving in both cases of 80%. We are working with Evolutor on this project to optimise our strain's ability to process low-grade, sustainable feedstocks. Feedstock accounts for most of our process cost at scale, and finding a scalable sugar alternative is vital if we are to create maximum environmental impact. This builds on the work we carried out as part of our Fast Start award, project 10045430 "Alternative feedstock for precision fermentation of oil", which has allowed us to prove expression of key enzymes in our yeast strain for the metabolism of starch.