Ep. 170 - Microbial Might: Can MicroHarvest Replace Animals in Pet and Livestock Feed?

SHOW NOTES

What if we could grow nutritious, sustainable protein—not in months or weeks—but in just one day?

This episode’s guest is doing just that. Rather than going big with animal agriculture, MicroHarvest is going small with microbial agriculture. 

A huge number of animals are used to feed both our pets and the animals we raise for food. Kate Bekers, the CEO and co-founder of MicroHarvest, is seeking to change that. She’s running a fast-rising European biotech startup using fermentation to produce high-quality protein from microbes—in just 24 hours. Based in Hamburg and Lisbon, MicroHarvest is on a mission to reshape how the world thinks about protein production. Rather than growing plants or animals, they grow single-cell microbes in bioreactors, yielding a high-protein, micronutrient-rich ingredient that can be used in everything from animal feed and pet food to, eventually, human food.

With 10 million euros raised and hopefully a new 30 million euro round on the horizon, their process is fast, efficient, and radically resource-light—requiring far less land, water, and energy than traditional agriculture. Already able to produce one ton of their product per day, MicroHarvest is proving that microbial protein isn’t just a lab experiment—it’s a scalable, real-world solution.

In this episode, Kate shares what it takes to bring biotech innovation to market, and why she believes protein production should be faster, cleaner, and closer to the consumer. We talk about the company’s entry into pet food and aquaculture, and what the future holds for sustainable protein made from the tiniest organisms on Earth.

If you’re curious about the future of food, circular economies, or how to build a business that’s good for animals and the planet, this conversation is for you.

DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE

• MicroHarvest’s collaboration with VEGDOG on a microbial dog treat.

• You can see patent applications of MicroHarvest’s here and here, which focus on accelerated growth strains, nutrient-rich biomass, and efficient downstream processing.

• MicroHarvest’s Series A round.

• Kate used to work at Bio Base, a CDMO in the fermentation space.

• Kate mentions Project Eden.

• Paul’s commentary on the impact pet food has on meat demand.

MORE ABOUT Kate Bekers

Kate is Co-Founder and CEO of MicroHarvest, in which she brings together her passion for fermentation, excitement for the future of the agri-food supply chain and an intrinsic drive to change the world for the better. Kate has a dual background in biotechnology and business development. She worked as fermentation scientist leading projects at Corbion, and worked on the scaling of biobased processes at the Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant. During her time at Ohly as technical sales and later business development manager she obtained an MBA at Rotterdam School of Management and got a deep understanding of the B2B Ingredients market. In her free time, Kate enjoys traveling to meet up with friends in restaurants and bars, and explore musea and nature. The latter surely includes beaches.

TRANSCRIPT

Paul Shapiro: Hello, friend, and welcome to the 170th episode of the Business for Good Podcast. I'm glad that so many of you got a lot out of the last episode with author and journalist Mike Greenwald about his new book We Are Eating The Earth. I really liked the book and it sounds like many of you did too. In fact, the feedback from listeners was quite positive, which is always gratifying.

One listener Larry in Florida commented that he liked that there wasn't too much technical discussion in the conversation, making it more engaging for him. Well, I hope this episode follows a similar pattern to satisfy the Larrys of the world out there, but no matter what, the technology being pursued by this company is a perfect example of what Mike Greenwald is advocating, rather than going big with animal agriculture, micro harvest is going small.

With microbial agriculture, they're asking the question, what if we could grow nutritious, sustainable protein? Not in months or weeks or years, but in just one day, a huge number of animals are used to feed both our pets and the animals who we raise for food. Cape Beakers, the CEO and Co-founder of Micro Harvest, is seeking to change that fact.

She's running a fast rising European biotech startup using fermentation to produce high quality protein from microbes in just 24 hours. Based both in Hamburg, Germany and Lisbon, Portugal, micro harvesters on a mission to reshape how the world thinks about protein production. Rather than growing plants or animals, they grow single cell microbes in bioreactors, yielding a high protein micronutrient rich ingredient that can be used in everything from animal feed and pet food to eventually human food as well, with 10 million euros raised and hopefully a new 30 million euro round on the horizon.

Their process is fast, it's sufficient. And it is radically resourced, light requiring less land, less water, less energy than traditional agriculture, already able to produce one ton of their product a day. Micro harvest is proving that microbial protein isn't just a lab experiment, it is a scalable real world solution.

In this episode, Kate shares what it takes to bring biotech innovation to market and why she believes that protein production should be faster, cleaner, and closer to the consumer. We talk about the company's entry into pet. Food and aquaculture and what the future holds for sustainable protein made from the tiniest organisms on the planet.

If you're curious about the future of food, circular economies, or how to build a business that's good for animals on the planet, this conversation is for you.

Kate, welcome to the Business for Good podcast.

Kate Bekers: Hi, Paul, great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Paul Shapiro: I am so psyched by what you're doing. When I started reading about it, I was really blown away. I'm a big advocate for fermentation, and I also am guilty because my dog really does not like eating plant-based food most of the time.

So I hope that you have a solution here to do something not only good for the world, but also make me feel a little bit better. So tell me about what you're doing. You're using a natural fermentation method to convert microbial biomass in a very short time. Into something that actually tastes good in its protein rich.

So, sounds like magic. Tell us why it's not.

Kate Bekers: Yeah, sometimes we refer to it as the micro harvest as magic. So indeed it's a bit of magic, but actually it's not. So what we do is we really go back sort of to traditional fermentation. So what we do is we use AgriFood side streams. So when agriculture products are processed to produce foods and and other products, they have side streams.

And there's a lot of sugars left in those. And those you be used in our bioreactors to grow bacteria. And we use all natural bacteria that you find in nature. Also, the ones that we already eat today in our fermented foods, so we grow them in the bioreactor. And then what we do is we harvest those bacteria, those microbes.

So this is why it's called micro harvests. We harvest them from the bioreactor, so we take them out. And then we really do minimal processing. So we just you know, we inactivate them or kill them, and then we dry them. And then you have like a protein powder, and this protein powder. Is the whole cells.

So it's really biomass fermentation. So we use the whole cells, which means that there's a lot of protein in those cells if you pick the right bacteria with very good composition, very high digestibility. But also because we minimally process, there's still a lot of vitamins and minerals in there. So what you have is like.

When you have animal cells, there's a lot of protein in there, but there's also all these minerals and vitamins and other components in there. So it's very nutritious. Also beyond protein, there's a lot of goodies in there, and that's what we also have, and that's why it's quite different from, for instance, plant protein because there you really isolate the protein from the plants to take out the parts that are not that nice for you for your digestion.

So there you have very lean protein and in our case we have. Very nutritious protein with a lot in there, and also a lot of good tastes. So this is why your dog will love it. While maybe for plant-based protein, he, you know, puts up his nose and walks away.

Paul Shapiro: He does. Yeah. I'm sad to say I'm very embarrassed by this because, you know, he, my wife and I adopted him and neither one of us eat meat.

And so he really picked the wrong household to come into because, you know, he, he just hates plant-based foods. The, you know, I will say one fun fact about him, so. He will not eat plant-based meat for the most part, but he will eat impossible burgers.

And

Paul Shapiro: so that is a really good testament to impossible that they're doing something really good here.

So anyway, yes. So you've made a couple points that I just want to double quick on Kate, because. First of all I have a recommendation. I think that people are more open to eating microbes than they are to eating bacteria. Obviously, you, and I know it's the same thing, but I think, you know, the B word is, is yes.

Something off-put. I don't think my dog would mind it, but I think many people might not wanna feed their dog's bacteria. So anyway, with that said. So you talked about the difference between plant-based proteins and what you call biomass fermentation. I think, you know, to the uninitiated, they're not really sure what the difference is.

Like all of this kind of sounds like plant-based to them, right? They don't know what the difference between precision fermentation or biomass fermentation, and so just. For background, like if you think about, let's say the common ingredient that gets used in plant-based products like pea protein, you're, you're, you're claiming, I mean, you're correctly claiming it.

It's not a whole food, right? Like they have to take the pea, mill it into a flour, then strip out the fiber, strip out the fat, concentrate it down so you get a much higher concentration. Of protein in there, maybe you'll get to like, you know, 50, 60, maybe 70% protein concentrate. But what you're saying is that you're creating a microbial protein that's a whole food, right?

That is nothing stripped out of it at all. So can you explain that a little bit more what biomass means in this context?

Kate Bekers: Yeah, sure. Because how you can see it is that if you have a plant and plant-based protein we, what we use biomass fermentation is sort of like having the whole plant. Instead of just having the protein out of it.

So we have the whole microbiome cell if we want to call it microbe to cell of bacteria of course. Very good point that we can come back to. But it's like having the whole cell, the whole microbiome cell versus having the whole plant cell. The fact is that it's very difficult. To eat the whole plant cell and really get all the nutrition out of it, especially if you look for protein.

So, because the, the protein level in plants itself is often quite low, so you need to eat really a lot of it to have it as a protein source, right? So you need to concentrate it. A second reason why you need to concentrate it is that besides the protein that's in the plants and also some vitamins and minerals that are good for you, there's also a lot of.

Anti nutritional factors, how we call it. So these are components that actually are not good for your digestion. And this is because plants are out there in nature. They want to grow and, you know, prosper. So they don't want to be eaten. So this is sort of their protection mechanism to have stuff that, you know, it's not too good for your digestion.

Now, if you are a cow. And you have four different stomachs. Those anti nutritional factors are really not a problem because they are processed, but for a human, we are not really made for that. So therefore what we do is we really isolate the protein from the plants so that we really get rid of all these anti nutritional factors.

So, works very, very well. The thing is then you also get rid of a lot of goods parts of the plant, so the vitamins, the minerals, et cetera. So you get very. Lean protein, I would say. So that's really the difference.

Paul Shapiro: Thank you. Yeah. The, the way that I think about it, like if, if you take the pea example where you're stripping out the fiber, you're stripping out the fat, you're concentrating that pea protein down into a concentrate or an isolate.

And then with biomass fermentation, it's not really even analogous to eating the entire pea. You're really eating the entire pea plant. The weeds, yes, the shoots, the roots, everything. Right? You're taking every single thing there. And so with that said. The question is, can you get cheaper than plants? Right?

You are making this microbial whole food that you don't have to subject it to all these downstream processes like fractionation, isolation, extrusion purification, ification. Like you're, you know, you're not doing a lot of these downstream processes. It's a whole food. But you do have to run these bioreactors to produce it, right?

So are you cheaper than comparable plant proteins? We can get to animal proteins later, but even comparable, like a pea protein or a soy protein, is your microbial product cheaper than comparable proteins that might get used in pet food or even human food today?

Kate Bekers: Yes. So especially if you look at soy protein, which is like the bulk of the protein that we use, I don't think any technology will ever be competitive with that.

Yeah. So I think we read, all of us need to be realistic, you know, but first of all, it said the scale, you know, you have benefits of skill that a startup can never compete with. Second of all. A lot of agriculture is subsidized, so you're going up with a, with a new technology against half subsidized products.

So there we will not compete. I also don't think so. Yeah, please go ahead. Yeah,

Paul Shapiro: let, let me offer a thought experiment for you, Kate, and tell me if you disagree or agree with it. Soy protein. Yes, it is extremely inexpensive today. But it didn't start out that way. Right. Like soybeans have been selectively bred to be higher and higher yield.

Higher and higher protein. There are subsidies, but, and there is scale, but you know, really we have bred soybeans to be a very efficient crop. Yes. 'cause, because we feed so much of it to livestock. I would imagine that the microbe that you are utilizing has never been subjected to any type of domestication program, let alone one for extraordinarily high yields or efficiencies.

And I, I'm not suggesting that we should wait centuries for this, but I would guess that because microbes replicate so quickly compared to soybeans, at least, that you could do it faster than you would, than it would take for soybeans. And so you were using. I, I would guess a, a microbe that is like a wild microbe basically, that's never been subjected to any domestication program at all.

It's like you're using the soybean from 10,000 years ago. And if you grew those soybeans today, it would be very inefficient, right? It would not be as cheap as the soybeans today. So do you think that there's a pathway toward improving to the point, your process, your strain where you could actually compete with soy is sometime in the future, not today, but sometime in the future?

Kate Bekers: So two parts to that. So yes, we use strains that are coming from nature, but we already picked the ones that are very, very efficient. That's really part of what we do because we know we need to be incredibly efficient. Still to be able to compete with, with, with soy. That's very, very tough. And I also don't see us really as competing with soy.

I really see that if you look at your protein ingredients, you need to make a combination of different products, of different protein sources, right? And where you see plant-based protein is going to be and going to stay a big part of the solution. I really believe that. I also, not saying that plant-based protein is fully off, right?

It's fully wrong. What I say is that plant-based protein really has limitations. It has limitations in a nutritional value and also in tastes and, and, and, and perception. So, and this is where we come in. Right, to really make your, your nutrition and your protein sources really a complete source. So I see it more as a combination in which soy-based protein, p based protein, microbiome based protein, they all have their different roles in that formulation.

Okay. So I think we are already really in, in a, in, in a place where we can definitely become competitive with a number of big protein sources. Also, if you look in animal-based protein, like fish meal and things like that, we can definitely get there. But then you also come, if you compete with fish meal, fish meal has a lot more nutritional value than just soy.

Right? Mm-hmm. So if you look in, in, in nutrition, you make a combination of the plant-based and this animal base because you want to have these extra goodies, you want to have this extra nutrition, and this is where we come in. So I think it's really next to each other rather than competitive.

Paul Shapiro: Interesting.

Yeah, I, I, I definitely agree with you, Kate. I think that the future is going to have a very diverse set of proteins, right? Nobody's gonna only eat pea protein or only eat soy protein, or only eat microbial protein. The question is then how do you produce this so that it actually gets cheaper than some?

Now you're saying you can compete with fish, with fish meal, right? So, you know, huge numbers of fish are fed either to. Farmed fish in aquaculture systems or in pet food or to other livestock like you know, chickens or turkeys and so on. And so fish meal was a huge, huge part of this. And it's also used as a fertilizer.

I remember, you know, so when I was a teenager, I worked on an organic farm and organic farms aren't allowed to use human made fertilizer. So they used fish meal as a as a nitrogen source. And I would just literally have buckets of. Blood that I was just pouring onto these like organic vegetables that made me sick to my stomach.

And, and one reason why I've been a skeptic of organic after this, by the way but if you can get down, you can make a really big dent, right? If you're, if you're gonna replace, let's say, fish meal in certain pet foods or aquaculture feed, or even livestock feed and so on, that's a really big deal.

But how are you making it? You mentioned, Kate, that you're using agricultural side streams. What are they, like? You're saying they're side streams, agricultural processes. What are the side streams that you like to use? What is your microbe like to eat?

Kate Bekers: Yes. So that's a very important question and actually something which very core also to, to our strategy.

So agriculture sidestream. So these are really sugars that are left in residues that come from processing agriculture products. So this can be an example is the sugar industry, where, for instance, in Europe we use sugar beets to produce sugar. Right. So they harvest the sugar beets, then they liquefy that, and then they crystallize the sugar from it.

And then you get these nice wide crystals of sugar that we put in our coffee and in, in other foods. But at some point, so these, these sugar beets, they have a lot of other stuff in them, right? There's minerals and all kinds of stuff. There's color. So at some point it doesn't work anymore to make these very white, nice crystals.

So then there's a lot of. Stuff left liquid stuff, but there's still a lot of sugars in it. They just cannot get this white sugar out of it. So this this sidestream, this is called molasses, and this, for example, we can ferment on this molasses and really use the sugars that are still left in there. The same if you process corn, you know, and you get the starch out of it.

There's still a lot of parts left with still a lot of carbon in it, a lot of sugars in it. You know, that's that go to animal feed or to or, or to waste that we can also use. So. The nice thing about our technology is, is that we're not like a one trick pony. So we can use different, a AgriFood side streams, different types of sugars.

And I think that's very important because you know, in the Northern Europe we have sugar beads, but in other parts of the world, they don't have this right. And we really want to be able to produce more regionally. So what's very important is that you can use different types of aru size creams, whether it comes from sugar beets with sucrose, which is one type of sugar.

Or it comes from corn with more the starches, another type of sugar or further down the line, even the sugars that are in the leaves of plants and things like that. Right. Which, which, which is again a different type of sugar that we can ferment all of those and that really allows us to, to produce in different places in the world, but also.

If you have an AgriFood side stream, you know, there's, in agriculture, nothing is wasted. There's always a role for everything that, that, that, that comes out of it. So, and at the moment that you start. Upgrading it and bringing more value to it. It can be that the pricing of this raw material changes, right, because suddenly there's more value to it.

So if you really want to be economically sustainable, you need to be able to switch the side streams that you have to make sure that you can always have very cheap acro food side streams. And that's really one of the parts. Optimizing that where you can really decrease your costs yeah. Moving forward.

Sure.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. So, you know, just like with animal agriculture in these types of biomass fermentations, oftentimes the greatest driver of your cost is your feedstock. And so what the microbes eat is driving the cost. If you're using molasses, obviously that's extremely inexpensive, that's great. But just like in animal agriculture, if you change the feed of the animals, you do get different.

Nutritional properties, right? Like if you change the feed, you still are gonna get chicken meat, but it's gonna be a different, slightly different type of chicken meat depending on what you feed them. If in one case you're feeding molasses and in another case, let's say you're feeding corn dextrous, does it alter the final product, like your final product?

Is it identical no matter what the eat, or are there changes to the nutritional components or other factors that actually. Might be important.

Kate Bekers: There will always be some changes. So one of the things, for instance, that we do when we harvest the microbes from the bioreactor, we don't want to use a lot of water to wash the biomass and wash all the components that are still from the feed in the, in the medium, how we call it.

So, because she feeds like the, the whole property, we don't wash out. So there's always like. Leftovers of your substrate, of course, to a very low extent, right? So there's always some of that. And that can influence, for instance, also taste, not just traditional profile. So that is something that we're really focused on.

But and also we have certain solutions for, but the main, like the bacteria that we grow, these microbes because it's just really biomass that's there. And because we really control the way that they grow. We really see that even if we grow them on different side streams that the composition is really comparative.

So there's really not a large influence. And of course this is key and this is something that moving forward during this softwares, it's always a quality check that we need to do. But because of the way that we control our systems we can really manage that. Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: Cool. Okay, great. So, let me ask a provocative question of you.

Like what? What's the actual moat for you here, right? Like what's the actual IP protection? So you're feeding moola access to a particular microbe that is a wild strain of microbe, and then you're selling the whole biomass. So I presume that you have some patent protection, or at least you filed for patent protection.

What is the key core innovation that you're doing that you will be protected by? Protected from competitors?

Kate Bekers: Yeah, so it's really so we use natural bacteria, so it's very difficult to patent those because everybody owns them. You own them. Our neighbor owns them, you know, I own them. So you cannot, it's difficult to patent those closely.

Impossible. So what we really have is more like a, a a, a a process patent, which really protects us in the way that. We grow the microorganisms and the then the composition of the biomass that comes out of it. So that's the way that you can protect it. And then of course we build patterns around that.

Really protecting different parts and applications of what we do. A large part of it is how we protect our, our technology is also trade secrets. So really the details on how you run a fermentation in the way that we do it the, all the process parameters and, and how you keep your biomass stable, for example, et cetera.

So that's how we protect what we are.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, cool. That definitely sounds good. And of course there are lots of companies that don't have any patent protections that still do you quite well. So it sounds like on your downstream process, like you have some core innovation there. Let's talk about Kate, the actual use of the product, right?

Yes. So you, you did a recent partnership with Veg Dog for palatability results for dogs. This is a very is very parochial, interesting to me as somebody with a dog who just. He does not like to eat many things. I, I'm just humiliated by his dietary behavior. What happened? So tell us, you know, for, for Americans who don't know who Veg Dog is, what is Veg Dog and what happened in this test?

Kate Bekers: Yeah, so we, we make this protein. Powder you can say, right? And that protein powder can then be included in foods or also in animal nutrition, for example, pet food. So it can be as, as a protein source used in there. So we are working with global tier one brands. To, you know, to implement this product in, in their, in their in their products.

But of course, this is something that has very long sale cycles because it's a novel, what we say, complex ingredient, because it has all these goodies. So they need to do a long testing and application testing, especially in these, in these larger companies. So. What you can do is with a fast mover, which is more like a startup type.

You can go through this process a lot faster, right? This is the power of startups. So you use the power yourself, but also in, in your market. So VED Dog is a company based in Munich, in Germany, and they are a D two C PET foods companies. So they have a website where they where they sell their, their products and they really focus.

On vegetarian and vegan pet fruits, right? So this is really the core of what I want to do. And they have great products that are very well received. But they also, they really want to be front runners in innovation. So in the very beginning, we came, it, I think it was one of our first contacts that we have in the pet food industry because, you know, you know, there are front runners, they want to do the vegetarian foods.

So, you know, they are our perfect customers. So you start talking to them like, Hey, what do you want? What do you need? Could we be a solution? So they were really, really like one of the first conversations that we had in the pet food space. They were super enthusiastic and about the idea and wanted to test.

So they were also one of the first ones to start looking at it and testing it. Once we fully had the product there, assured everything, you know, the product was fully safe. And then so they were also the first ones to then launch a product. So it's a dog treat. And this was really amazing because.

We had the production up and running. I think just before Christmas in November. And then also the certification and the registration of the products that we can actually sell it into the industry. So everything in order. And then at Christmas we set together like, okay, what can we do together?

And then in May, we already did a soft launch. Of a dog treats at a very big European pet food fair. So this was really, really exciting because those are the speeds, you know, you can only do with, with startups. And that was very, very received. We also did some research about consumer perception. So indeed you call it bacterial biomass, micro biomass, fermented biomass, very important.

Yeah. And then after the soft launch at at this event. They really took it into production. So now it's it's available on their websites as a dog treats. And actually at the moment it's not because it's sold out. So that was really, really cool. So it's very nice because the dogs love it, but also the dog owners or dog parents, they also really love it.

So that's very, very excited and a very big proof point for us. Yeah,

yeah, very.

Kate Bekers: And when we launched this, we did it also. We, of course we wanted to demonstrate because it's a new ingredient, so you need to make sure, how do you communicate about it, but also proof that it's a good ingredient, right? A nutritional value we can show, but do dogs love it?

So we've done palatability trials. So what we did is that we had dog treats where we had one dog treat with with chicken meal in it, and one dog treat where we replaced 10% of the chicken meal with our products. With our microbiome protein, with the same nutritional value. And then what we really saw is that there was a stronger preference for the treats with our product in than for the original one.

Wow. And this is very, very exciting. And now we have repeated this actually also for cats, which are even more picky than your dog. I, I, I assume. And even with cats, we see the same thing. So that's very, very exciting because. As you mentioned, a lot of dogs and certainly cats don't like to eat plant-based protein.

But our product, they love it. Yeah. Nice. And they can get enough of it.

Paul Shapiro: How, how nice. That's very cool. So you mentioned it's replacing some chicken meal. Good for chickens. What's it called? So, you know, we're, we're calling this quote your product. We're calling it microbial protein. Yeah. But if I were to go to, to veg dog and order their product, once it's back in stock, what will the ingredient deck say?

What is your product actually called On the ingredient list? Yeah, it'll say

Kate Bekers: fermented protein.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. Just fermented protein. Fermented

Kate Bekers: protein. Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: A mystery protein. We don't even know. It's just fermented protein. Okay. Yeah.

Kate Bekers: But I think the, the, it's, it's, it's interesting to, to have it like that. So I think both microbial protein and fermented protein work really, really well.

If you use fermented protein, it really connects back to what we already eat. You know, we already eat a lot of microbes, a lot of bacteria, because they are present in our yogurt, in our kimchi, in certain beverages, right? So we already eat them, right? This is traditional, version of traditional fermentation that we've been doing for centuries, even before we knew what it is, right?

So we really go back to that. Not too specific high tech GMO or anything. It's really related to that. So I think because it's related to debts. It's also much better perceived than some things like cultivated meat or something like that.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, and I, I think about this quite often as somebody who has a, a passion for microbial fermentation is how people thousands of years ago figured this stuff out.

Like, they obviously didn't know about microbiology, they didn't know about microbes. They just figured out how to make beer and yogurt and cheese. I mean, it is. It is truly mind blowing to think about what you would have to figure out in order to make that happen. So EE, even just with cheese, like you'd have to domesticate cows.

You'd have to have. Milk, and then you'd have to store the milk in a calf's intestine, which has redit. And there's, you know, there's another way to get redit back then, and then you'd have to say, oh, this like, curdled disgusting mass looks like something good. You know, let's try and eat it. Yeah. Right. I mean, it is just a, a, a wild, wild.

Thing that happened here. O okay. You're talking about pet food, dog treats, aquaculture. You're, we haven't really talked about human food. Is that because there's some regulatory barrier for you? Do you not have regulatory approval as a novel food in the eu? Like, what is the actual barrier? Why aren't we talking about putting this into our food?

Kate Bekers: Yes. So definitely what we want to do is also produce a product for human nutrition. But indeed there's different regulatory trajectories for that. So we are in the, in the process of also getting regulatory approval for human nutrition. So that's definitely part of it. But for us. Animal nutrition was easier, faster.

And as a startup, you need to go to market fast, especially now in 2025. There's no time to wait. You need to build your business and, and your revenue. So this is why we started in animal nutrition, but in human nutrition it works just as well. Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: So help me understand, 'cause I, I don't have great familiarity with the EU regulatory landscape for animal based, for, for animal foods.

That is,

yes.

Paul Shapiro: So. In the US if you want to introduce a novel food for humans, you're supposed to file for a grass notice or generally recognized as safe notice with the with the Food and Drug Administration. Yeah. But if you wanna do a novel food for pet food, it's hard. You have to go through something called afco and do all these safety trials and it's like a state by state process.

It's a very difficult thing, is that not so in Europe you can just, you know, without going through any regulatory body, put a new, a new ingredient into pet food.

Kate Bekers: So it's not without any regulatory approval, but it's, it's, it's easier. So what you have in Europe, if you have, you have the feed material register and you need to list your products in there.

And then the different countries of the EU can ask questions about the safety of your products. And, and if you then cannot prove this with a hundred percent, that it's a hundred percent safe, you're kicked out of the list and it is very, very difficult, difficult to come back on. So what we have done is that because we're doing, of course, you want to be a hundred percent sure that everything you put out there is safe.

So that starts with selecting the right microbes, the right bacteria, that's that, have that. That you are sure that it's safe. Also analyzing if there's any potential for them to becoming unsafe under certain conditions or anything. So you can really check the whole genome to check is there any potential in there or not.

And you do all kinds of analytical tests. You do. So we didn't do red studies because we try to avoid this, but with cell lines to really check, okay, what's the effect? So you do a whole bunch of, of tests to assure that it's safe, and based on that information, you then you can then list it. On the food register, and then if there's any question, we have the full doche that we can show.

Okay, guys.

Paul Shapiro: Got it.

Kate Bekers: This is safe. Yes. And then this is also used for the whole process for Novel Foods, which goes via fsa. So this is the European food Safety Authority. So they really evaluate the whole doche and really deep dive and make questions. Yeah. So while. In, I think in the US maybe it's for human nutrition a bit easier than for animal nutrition.

I think this is a bit the other way around in Europe. Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. It's one of the most remarkable things about the US system. What you just said is accurate, that it's a lower bar to get into human nutrition than animal nutrition. Yeah. And I, I think, you know, part of it is that a lot of people may feed their pet the same food.

Every single day. Right? Like, you're not gonna eat as a human the same food every single day. But the dog food or the cat food, it may be the only thing that animal ever eats. And so there's like this higher bar to ensure that it is safe and nutritious for them. Exactly.

Kate Bekers: And that holds both for the ingredients as well as for the final foods, right?

Yeah. Because for human nutrition, we have such a diverse diet, so there's no. It doesn't say like in a, in an apple, there needs to be this level of vitamin C, right? Yeah. But in a pet food, you really need to be very strict within boundaries, because if something is missing and they eat the same thing every day, it's very fast that there's a deficiency building up or something is too much, you know, that accumulates and that it brings problems.

Right. So this yeah, I can, I can understand. That's for sure. Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: And, and shockingly, by the way, just a, a tangential point from what you just said, it, it actually is true that Apples and other produce are generally speaking less nutritious today than they were 50 years ago. It's, it's it's very sobering like to see how much like iron you get from produce today compared to eating the same amount of produce 50 years ago.

So anyway, that, that's pretty sobering. So, so then, correct me if I'm wrong, but I presume then that you have regulatory authority. To sell your product in the EU for pet food, but not yet in the us. Is that right?

Kate Bekers: That's correct, yes. Okay. Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: All right. Well I'm excited. Maybe I can get an illicit sample of it here and then we can see what my dog Eddie says.

'cause it'd be a great spokes dog for you. If he ends up liking it, I can assure you. If he doesn't like it, we won't tell anybody. Don't worry. It just between us.

Kate Bekers: I'm, I'm very sure you will like it. Okay. So no worries.

Paul Shapiro: I, I, I, I admire your confidence. So Kate, how much money has the company raised from inception to present?

Kate Bekers: Yes. So so far we have raised a bit over 10 million euros. Okay. So we have been supported by Food Labs, which is a Berlin food tech investor very renowned from, I always say from day minus one. So they were there from the very, very start and really helped building the company. And then around two and a half years ago, we raised our series A.

And this was done with AOR as a lead investor. So we're a very renowned European Impact fund together with Happiness Capital from Hong Kong. We also have an investor from Portugal on board because the company's based in Hamburg, Germany, and Lisbon, Portugal. And they have a fund really focused on aquaculture and sustainability in there.

And one of the partners is a very very good and renowned. Person in, in biotech. So that's always good to have on board investors that understand what you're doing. Yeah. And then we also have the venture arm from, from Bitburg Simon Capital on board. So they really understand processing and production.

So yeah, we have a very we were very lucky with our consortium. We really could choose. We were oversubscribed, so that's really great. Yeah, so that's where we are so far. Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: What, what year did you raise that series A in?

Kate Bekers: That was in 2022.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. Yeah. So presumably you're gonna have to raise again soon.

Yes. If you haven't raised in three years. So how much do you need to raise and what's the use of funds are you seeking to build your own manufacturing fermentation facility? Are you seeking to use contract manufacturers? Like how much money do you need to actually get beyond a pilot scale of production to actually supplying in the commercial realm and making a really big dent in the amount of, let's say, chicken meal or fish meal that's used in the industry today?

Kate Bekers: Yeah, so we've already surpassed the pilots stage. So we're now working with a contract manufacturer with who we can produce up to one ton of product per day. So that's really already at a significant rate. And I think that's. For an industrial biotech company, I think within four years to getting to that stage is quite a thing.

Yeah. I'm quite proud of the team for achieving that, and this is really because from the very, very start we've been focusing on scaling because, as you say, to really make a dent or to do something. You need large volumes. And even customers, if you want to work with larger customers, even for a trial, they already need hundreds of kilograms or tons.

So with a pilot, you cannot cut it, right? You cannot even start developing your customers. So this is why from day number one, we focus on scalability and why we now already have a contact manufacturer. So that's really our sort of phase one to work with the contact manufacturer. Great. But because the way that we, we use current day biotech equipment, but we run it a bit differently.

So to do that with a contact manufacturer really in an optimized way so that we can really have minimum costs, that's very, very difficult. So this is indeed why we want to build our first own production facility so that we can really leverage the process technology that we have in-house. So we're focusing to build that in Europe, in our own backyard because that's always good for your first own production facility.

And that we will do in, in partnerships either you know, with raw material suppliers or in industrial parks, or it's going to be your Brownfield. And what we really, what we need for that to build a 15 kiloton facility that we have, that we are now designing what we need to raise on the venture capital side to enable that.

That will only be a small part of it, plus all the runway that you still need because you have some revenues from a contract manufacturer that's not gonna sustain a whole company. So in total, we're going to raise for our series B 13 million. Okay,

great.

Kate Bekers: Yeah, and we're in the process of doing that, so you know, we're already making very good progress there.

So I'm very happy with new partners that are onboarding in that. Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, great. Well, exciting. Well maybe you'll find some new partners who are listening to this episode right now and may want to get in touch with you and we'll certainly include in the show notes for this episode at Business For Good podcast.com.

Await to get in touch with you, Kate. Okay,

Kate Bekers: wonderful.

Paul Shapiro: You have been building this company, I, I agree. For, you know, getting to one ton of microbial product per day. After four years, being in startup land is a very rare thing for biotech startups, right? You have, I mean, we, we've had biotech startups on in this show before who have been around for 10, 15 years who have never sold a gram of product ever.

So you know, their investors believe in them but they are. Taking a, a lengthy time in order to come to commercialization, and that's oftentimes the norm with biotech, whether in pharmaceuticals or in food and so on. But you've gone very fast. So let me ask you, Kate, are there any resources that have been helpful for you that have helped you to go so fast in your journey here that you would recommend for others as something that they might wanna check out If they're interested in doing something good in the world, either through fermentation or otherwise?

Kate Bekers: I think it's really about the mindset in the company. First of all, so the, the idea for micro harvest and to really focus on scaling and on process before optimizing the products. So this is really something, normally it's the other way around, right? This really comes because. It really comes from the need in the market.

So I'm a bio technologist by background, but I moved into the business side of things and started working in the B2B ingredient space. So there I was not selling alternative proteins with something related to it. So, you know, often the topic comes up because it's a hot topic. So you talk about it with your customers, what's going on.

And what I heard time and time again from customers was really that they're saying like, okay. We need new protein ingredients because we need more sustainable ingredients. Also, certain markets grow faster than their raw materials, right? Aquaculture is growing, but fishmeal is is stable at best, so. There needs to be new ingredients because with plant-based proteins alone, it's not gonna cut it.

So they really said, okay, we need to integrate new protein ingredients. But for such large companies, this takes a long time, right? So if they want to integrate something, it takes a couple of years. The thing is that if they just want to start developing with it and do the first production trials, they already need is hundreds of kilograms or tons, and then.

You say like, there's a, in indeed there's a lot of startups that develop like an amazing and specific and, and imp perfect product, but it takes. Five, seven years in the lab and then two years piloting, and then they're very proud. They have 15 kilograms, 50 kilograms, but company, those companies still cannot do anything.

So this was a big frustration that I heard a number of times, and this is why I started Micro Harvest. So really in the mindset of the company, what we did was really focus on process. Then further optimize your product. But first, get your process there, get your scalability there. Ensure the robustness of your process that it ended, it's scalable.

And within that process, then optimize your products. Right. Of course, we were also very lucky because we didn't need to optimize after that a lot. So there was lucky shots with a, with a, with the microbes that we chose. But that's really a different way so. One thing that we, that we really did was already very early on, work together with the pilots facility because of course to do that yourself is is very tricky.

So, and I used to work in a pilots facility, so I used to work in Belgium. You have to bio base or pilot plans. I used to work there, so I don't know very well. And what I did is that at the moment that the first scientist started in the lab we didn't have a process yet. We selected a strain that we thought was good.

We didn't have to process it up yet, but after two weeks of him in the lab, I already booked the pilot plant facility. Because if you first, if you normally book a pilot plan facility, it takes a couple of months before you get the slots. And that was still a time that it was very, very busy. So the lead time was sort of six months, and I thought if we first fully develop a process and then schedule the pilot plan, then we have a delay of six months.

And I didn't want that because I wanted to scale as fast as possible. Of course, you knew need to do that with the pilot plant that is open to take on a project like that. And because I knew the bio pilot plant and also their way of thinking, they actually also helped us getting the process immediately from the start designed in a way that it's really industrial relevance.

So, you know, so really working together in an early stage with an external provider for scaling helps helps a lot. Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. Well that's helpful. We'll, we'll link to Biobase so folks can check them out as well. In the show notes for this episode at Business for Good podcast.com.

Finally, Kate, are there any companies that you wish existed that don't yet exist or maybe could exist in a better form than what people are doing today? Anything you wish people were doing?

Kate Bekers: Yeah, I think so. One of the, one of the things that we're really looking at with Micro Harvest is really sort of rethinking industrial biotech technology, right?

I think if you enter a bioprocess technology facility, it often looks like it's in the eighties, right? And there hasn't been. That's big innovations in there. And this is something that when I was studying that's a while ago already sort of like. You know, ignites me or it it's me. Like, okay, but where's, where's the innovation in there?

And there's a, a real good reasons why we don't see a lot of, in why we haven't seen a lot of innovation, right? Industrial biotech in general. You work with something that's alive with high risk. So we don't want to change that much because it involves a lot of risk of your, your process changing while margins are already not as in, in, in pharma.

And also. You know, you need CapEx. So you build something that needs to last for 20 years. So it doesn't really help to then after five years as a completely new technology setup because you make yourself redundant. So there's a lot of reasons why that's not happening, but I think there's really opportunity.

We are in 2025, there's new material sciences, there's modeling that, so there's a lot that can be done. And part of, of, of what I think is that in, in bioprocess technology, it's a lot. Bioprocess technologies that look at it. With all the history that's, you know, there was not that much innovation and then sometimes very exotic mathematician or a chemist comes in and looks at it and gives some input.

But I think we can really look very much broader in looking at technologies from different industries and how they can help in biotech. And I think there's really a lot that can be done there. One example that's not for biotech, but that is in the more, in the plant-based solutions and products for that is for instance, a company called project Eden.

So they have a technology where they use technologies from the textile industry. To make like the fibers that they use normally for textiles, but they use it for plants to make like fibers so that it can really bring very good structure into foods. So really taking a technology from another industry and putting that in, in, in the food industry, in the food technology.

And I think this is something that is, that is very exciting and what needs to happen a lot more to bring in a lot more diverse perspectives into your innovation.

Paul Shapiro: All right. Well that's exciting. And I definitely am gonna check out Project Eden. That sounds pretty awesome. But Kate, I am rooting for your success.

I can't wait to try some of your fermented protein. Again, we're not gonna name it just any fermented protein. And I, I kind of like fermented microbial protein, by the way. I think it has a nice little ring to it. People, you know, sounds like a probiotic. You know Exactly. It might be good for you. So you've gotten a lot of my marketing suggestions here already.

For there you go. I'll be honored if you use any of them. But Kate, thanks so much for all you're doing. It's exciting and you're definitely on the forefront of creating a fermentation fueled future where we can slash humanity's footprint on the planet and feed ourselves and all the animals in a far more sustainable way.

So thank you very much.

Kate Bekers: Thank you so much, and it was great talking to you.