SPECIAL STORY FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE December 2022 47 mains fully committed to supporting our agriculture and aquaculture customers with ingredients and technologies for sustainable animal farming and feeding. We are excited by the opportunities that additional protein production technologies like cultivated meat can offer. However, it is important to realise that the emerging cultivated protein industry must install an enormous amount of bioreactor capacity before any meaningful meat or seafood volume can come from these new production methods. This requires significant capital investments and time, especially in today’s challenging economic environment. We view alternative proteins in general as an opportunity to provide more protein to a growing population which allows expanding the overall protein production without further pushing the planetary boundaries. Can cellular agricultural products or alternative proteins contribute to the sustainability of livestock or animal nutrition industry? For example, could such products be an alternative as an animal feed ingredient? We need to distinguish cultivated meat, i.e. making meat through culturing real animal cells, from other alternative proteins, e.g. produced via microbial fermentation or insects. Culturing real animal cells is applicable for human food or pet food only. As cultivated meat is real meat, it is not sensible to apply it as feed ingredient for traditional animal-based meat production. In contrast, microbial fermentation or insect-based production of alternative proteins is highly relevant for creating more sustainable options for livestock or aquaculture feed. As an example, Nutreco's aquaculture business Skretting is collaborating with eniferBio to test their low-carbon, high-protein novel raw material made through microbial fermentation. The Finnish biotech start-up was the winner of the 2020 Nutreco Feed & Food Tech Challenge. Skretting puts strong efforts into exploring alternative proteins for feed in line with their sustainability ambition of including 5-10% of novel ingredients into their feed formulations by 2025. Anything you want to add… At Nutreco, our message is clear: to succeed in Feeding the Future in a sustainable way we will need to produce protein from more and more varied sources – animal as well as alternatives, using fewer natural resources. And we will need a fundamental shift in how we think about the consumption, production and waste of food, at an individual, community, national and global level. We are here to support the protein producers of the world in our shared ambition of Feeding the Future. About Susanne Wiegel Susanne is Head of the Alternative Protein Program at Nutreco NuFrontiers, the strategic innovation and investment department of Nutreco, a global leader in animal nutrition and aquafeed. The aim of NuFrontiers is to accelerate technological change to enable 'Feeding the Future' and to identify, develop and invest in next-generation sustainable products, models and services throughout the feed and food protein value chain. Susanne dedicates her time to building an investment portfolio of alternative protein start-ups and scale-ups and exploring business opportunities for Nutreco as a cell feed supplier to the cultivated meat and seafood industry. Before joining Nutreco, she worked as deputy head of business development at a leading European biopharmaceutical company and in strategy consulting with McKinsey&Co. Susanne holds a PhD in biochemistry.
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