Fermatics is a start-up that brings to the market high-value molecules made through a fermentation technology. How has Fermatics grown in the past year?

Rather than pursuing various molecules in our pipeline, we decided last year to focus on the lowest hanging fruit, a product with high market demand, where our technology is a real differentiator, and that can generate revenue quickest. The challenge was commercialization: while we are good at the strain engineering technology using E.Coli bacteria and we can model the bioprocess, we did not have the means to upscale. Thankfully, we were able to complete this missing piece of the puzzle by finding a partner, a large MNC that can bring production to an industrial scale. The product we identified is the fragrance of raspberry, used in both flavor and fragrance industries.

Can you give us a sense of the timelines before the product is brought into production?

We are now working on fine-tuning the technology so that we can soon begin to upscale it. In biotech production, it is not so easy to make exact predictions around engineering and upscaling. Unlike chemical commodities where the molecules are fixed, bacteria are living entities and react with a degree of unpredictability. However, we constantly are working on optimizing the product further and bringing the price down.

What are the commercial and sustainability competitive advantages of your product?

Our product is the essence of raspberry. The molecule itself is not complex and is already available in the market, but the uniqueness of the product lies in the racemate, which is a mixture of two equal quantities or two molecules with mirrored molecular structures. The racemate cannot be separated (in a cost-competitive manner) using petrochemical synthesis, which means the essence will not be pure because the (S)-enantiomer has a more unpleasant taste, somewhat earthy rather than fruity, and that remains in the end product. Our USP is that we only produce the (R)-enantiomer with the raspberry essence. This purity is what the flavor and fragrance industries are striving for.

How is the “30 by 30” government strategy incentivizing the food start-up scene?

The food startup scene in Singapore is dynamic and rapidly growing. As a mentor for young startups, I see many start-ups coming up, and the food sector is buzzing with new technologies. While at the moment we don’t have a scale-up facility for our technology, this is about to change as A*STAR is partnering with Temasek to establish a new Food Tech Innovation Centre in Singapore. This will accelerate the development and commercialization of food technologies. Besides food ingredients like we have, there is also a lot of interest in alternative proteins obtained through fermentation. Singapore has one of the largest libraries of microbes and this allows innovators to test with different microbes. Overall, the ecosystem in Singapore with regards to food developments is highly exciting and, in my opinion, unique from a global perspective. In the future, the main food developments will be driven from Singapore.