Explore the Agenda
7:30 am Registration & Light Breakfast
8:30 am Chair’s Opening Remarks
Aligning on Risk in Partnerships for Growth
8:45 am Panel Discussion: Balancing Commercial & Scientific Risk to Accelerate Commercialisation
- Outlining what large food companies are prioritising for innovative ingredients to align with their innovation pipelines
- Exploring ingredient and product cost dynamics through the lens of a strategic partnership, identifying where fermentation technologies have the most viability and competitive potential through life cycle analyses
- Discussing real-world collaborations where transformative R&D has complemented corporate goals
9:30 am Navigating the Complexities of Co-Owned Ventures to Safeguard Strategic Partnerships
- Examining the different models of industry stakeholder collaboration to maximise the outcomes for both parties
- Learning from successes and failures to ensure sustained collaboration
- Sharing how to build credibility in relationships between strategic partners
10:00 am Morning Break & Speed Networking
Keeping the End in Mind: Ensuring Scalable R&D
11:00 am Mapping Process Flow to Define Key Parameters that Determine End-Product Quality
- Identifying the key process aspects that drive variability and defining the permissible parameter boundaries at different scales that still create a high-quality ingredient
- Ensuring process design is sufficiently robust to allow for potential ingredient deviation
- Translating lab-based data through to pilot scale to enable targeted experimentation
11:30 am Session Reserved for Tetra PaK
12:00 pm Ensuring Compatibility Between Strain & Process Design to Improve Scalability & Stability
- Matching strain robustness with the expected agitation, aeration, and reactor configuration
- Understanding the impact of changing fermentation conditions throughout scaling on a strain
- Exploring how to co-develop strain engineering and bioprocessing to achieve stable high titres
12:30 pm Networking Lunch
Unlocking Value Through Side Stream Innovation
1:30 pm Enhancing Understanding of Practical & Logistical Considerations of Side Stream Valorisation
Describing the necessary pre-treatment of side streams to make them fermentable, and the energy and infrastructure requirements to achieve this
Understanding how the consistent, year-round availability of the feedstock enables continuous and economically viable fermentation, highlighting strategic alignment with commodity supply chains
Examining how micro-organisms can be flexible to different side streams
2:00 pm Fermentation Meets Regulation: Mapping the U.S. Regulatory Path for Novel Proteins
- Understanding best practices for introducing novel proteins to the U.S. market
- Navigating the technical and scientific requirements to establish GRAS status
- Aligning regulatory strategy to avoid common pitfalls and stay ahead of evolving FDA expectations
2:30 pm Demonstrating Real-World Examples of Side Stream Valorisation to Create New Ingredients
- Ensuring micro-organisms are suited to the substrates of a specific side stream
- Outlining how to tailor the process to create a desirable product
- Exploring regulatory considerations around the labelling of the final ingredient, depending on the inputs, such as of gluten and dairy components
3:00 pm Evaluating the Use of Dairy Side Streams as an Input for Precision Fermentation
- Developing efficient processing and fractionation approaches to extract value from every carbon source of a dairy side stream
- Exploring the potential applications for different proteins derived from precision fermentation, and where it can provide added value
Creating High Value Ingredients Through Precision Fermentation
4:15 pm Selecting High-Value, In-Demand Targets to Enhance Viability
- Understanding the key product characteristics that can be improved through high-value, low-inclusion precision fermentation-derived ingredients
- Characterising functionality effectively to select the correct ingredient for the final product
- Demonstrating both the cost-benefit and consumer demand to warrant an ingredient’s integration into a product
4:45 pm Exploring Opportunities to Improve the Structure & Functionality of Precision Fermentation-Derived Caseins
- Discussing why precision fermentation has, thus far, been unable to replicate bioidentical micelles that enable the formation of dairy structure
- Identifying strain engineering approaches to improve the formation of missing structural motifs
- Supporting the complex protein-folding steps of casein by providing the right mineral composition
- Ensuring the low heat treatment step gives a good surface charge