Made in the USA: Building New Supply Chains with Biotechnology
Global trade has facilitated access to low-cost materials that go into products Americans use every day. However, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed cracks in the current model, which heavily relies on international supply chains. That’s where bioindustrial manufacturing – which strengthens supply chains and develops domestic capacity to produce these essential supplies – comes in.
BioMADE members are building this new supply chain by creating alternatives for commodities ranging from fabrics to chemicals to cement, and more. Many of these widely used materials, such as palm oil – which is found in more than half of supermarket items – natural rubber used in high-performance tires, and foods like coffee and chocolate, are currently sourced from tropical regions of the world. As the demand for these products grows, this leads to the degradation and destruction of these rainforests.
These essential raw materials are also subject to price fluctuations caused by weather disasters, plant diseases, rising prices of fertilizers, transportation, and labor costs, and geopolitical events. Shipping products from overseas increases energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Establishing alternative domestic sources of these materials is crucial for meeting the U.S. national security and economic goals.
Biotechnology – used to optimize the organisms used in bioindustrial manufacturing – creates a sustainable way to reduce the environmental impact, improve reliability, and simplify the structure of supply chains for tropical commodities by developing technologies and processes to create alternative domestic sources of these products. Read on for how three BioMADE members – Geno, Kultevat, and California Cultured – are reimagining supply chains for materials traditionally sourced from the rainforest.
Palm Oil
Palm oil is one of the biggest contributors to tropical deforestation. This raw material serves large markets, including food and home and personal care, with demand growing every year. BioMADE member Geno is addressing this increasing demand by manufacturing palm oil replacement products through industrial biotechnology. “We're looking to provide a new type of supply chain enabled by Geno's technology, which will offer traceable, transparent, and responsibly sourced palm oil alternatives to the market,” says Sasha Calder, Chief Impact Officer at Geno.
In 2022, Geno launched a $120 million partnership with Unilever, which was later joined by Kao Corporation and most recently L’Oréal, to scale and commercialize sustainable alternatives to palm oil. Geno’s platform enables the production of custom high-quality and purity ingredients that are traditionally derived from palm oil in engineered microorganisms using large-scale fermentation technology. The goal of this venture is to strengthen supply chain resiliency in the $652 billion home and personal care industries, with the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of palm-derived ingredients by up to 50% with Geno's technology.
The partner companies are working together to increase the global supply of responsibly sourced palm oil. “There's a lot of critical work that is happening on the ground to stop deforestation,” says Calder. “Only around 16% of palm oil is responsibly sourced, but the demand for it continues to grow at an increasing rate.” Geno aims to supplement the existing supply of responsibly sourced palm oil with sustainably made bio-based products.
Natural Rubber
BioMADE member Kultevat is producing domestic alternatives to natural rubber currently sourced from Asia. They developed a technology to produce natural rubber from an engineered strain of Kultevar™ Dandelion by combining plant science, agronomy, and bio-processing technology. With research supported by BioMADE funding, the company aims to completely revolutionize the supply chain by bringing natural rubber manufacturing to the U.S.
Currently, the majority of natural rubber is sourced from Thailand and Indonesia. The trees that produce natural rubber are susceptible to diseases like South American leaf blight disease, which puts the supply chain stability at risk.
“There's a lot to be said about having a domestic source of biomaterials versus materials that you have to send overseas from another country,” says Dan Swiger, President and CEO of Kultevat. “The rubber shipped from Thailand to California takes about 30 days to cross the ocean. If it goes to the East Coast, add another 10 days. These big container ships burn roughly around 64,000 gallons of fuel a day.”
In addition to reducing transportation costs, Kultevat’s platform would secure the availability of an important strategic material essential for U.S. manufacturing. Dandelion rubber has the same desired characteristics as natural rubber, a critical component in tires and other applications. “Our rubber is as good, if not better, than the rubber that comes from rubber trees grown in Southeast Asia and South America,” says Dr. Roger Beachy, Chief Scientific Officer at Kultevat. “And it does not involve cutting down rainforests. Instead, it can be grown on cultivated farmland in the United States.”
Kultevat is engineering dandelion plants to ensure climate resilience of the crops and to enable distributed manufacturing to further secure the domestic natural rubber supply chains. “We're working on developing [dandelion] varieties that can survive and thrive in different environments, wherever the crop might be grown,” says Beachy. “The goal is to make it as easy for the farmers to grow as we can.”
Coffee and Chocolate
Two of the most popular exports from tropical regions across the U.S. are coffee and chocolate, and both products are large contributors to deforestation. BioMADE member California Cultured is revolutionizing the process of chocolate production using cell culture technology to grow cacao plant cells in bioreactors. Their unique technology reproduces the taste and health benefits of cacao in the lab and customizes its formulations for specific applications such as high flavonoid nutritional supplements.
“America and Europe are the biggest consumers of chocolate and coffee, yet none of it grows there. So, we're looking to scale our technology to create local, sustainable supply chains, as well as to work with partners around the world to develop domestic production in their area.”
Additionally, cacao only grows in the equatorial regions. “The climate can’t be too hot or too cold, or too wet or too dry. It just has to be in that perfect Goldilocks zone,” says Perlstein. “Due to flooding and droughts in West Africa and parts of South America, we’ve seen massive collapses within different growing areas. This has caused cocoa futures to go up to 46-year [price] highs, and we’ve seen the price of cocoa go up a significant amount in the past year.”
Chocolate also travels a long way before it reaches the consumer, touching between 5 and 8 locations. California Cultured’s model dramatically simplifies the chocolate supply chain by manufacturing application-ready materials that does not need extensive processing.
Addressing Consumer Demand
These companies are not the only ones looking deeper into supply chain sustainability. U.S. consumers have repeatedly demonstrated that they care about sustainability and traceability as well. “Research shows that people want to ensure that they're purchasing more responsibly sourced products,” says Calder. “Meaning that brands are now more eager to purchase the ingredients that have a sustainable source. We're mindfully building our supply networks to make sure that they can be traceable, transparent, and responsibly sourced in ways that incumbent technologies are often not.”
Products like palm oil, natural rubber, and chocolate have established markets, which provide an opportunity for seamless integration. “We go after existing markets, such as home and personal care, and we believe that that's where you can have the biggest impact as quickly as possible by doing drop-in replacements,” adds Calder. “For example, we've done that already with an ingredient called Brontide, a natural butylene glycol used in products like toothpaste and deodorant, which we've worked on with BioMADE.”
BioMADE’s role is to build an ecosystem that enables members to share their technologies and to connect those looking to innovate and secure domestic supply chains for a wide variety of essential products. Bioindustrial manufacturing can fundamentally re-envision how to produce goods, unlocking a new future where everyday plastics, chemicals, materials, food, clothing, and more are safely manufactured using biology. Producing these environmentally sustainable products domestically will create robust and resilient supply chains, re-shore manufacturing jobs, and make the U.S. more self-sufficient.