This New Animal-Free Ingredient Company Just Raised Another $27.5 Million In Funding

Motif Ingredients, the company launched by synthetic biology firm Ginkgo Bioworks, announced today it has raised an additional $27.5 million in funding. The food ingredient company’s Series A extension was led by global growth equity firm General Atlantic with participation from CPT Capital. Now rebranded as Motif FoodWorks, the company starts today with a new name, a new website and several new additions to its leadership team.

Launched in February with $90 million in financing from investors that include Fonterra, Louis Dreyfus Company, and Viking Global Investors, the company combines molecular food science with Ginkgo’s synthetic biology platform to produce a wide range of ingredients for enhancing plant-based foods.

Boosting The Taste And Nutrition Of Plant-Based Foods

The company has around fifteen products in the pipeline today, says Motif CEO Jon McIntyre, each of which is designed to boost either functionality, taste or nutrition, or maybe all three of these at the same time if the company gets lucky. Though all of these products are currently under development and therefore not yet public, here are a couple of examples, at least in general terms.

One promising category is the replication of certain beneficial milk proteins. “There are quite a few important nutritional ingredients that are found [only] in...human breastmilk,” says McIntyre, and if Motif could replicate those components in a new ingredient, it could then sell it to an infant formula company to make a formula that’s even closer to breastmilk.

The company also has its sights set on a healthier (but still tasty) plant-based burger. Explains McIntyre, if Motif could design an ingredient that does “a better job of maintaining the proper structure of fat,” companies like Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat could use that ingredient to reduce the amount of fat in their burgers without sacrificing flavor. “Our goal would be to kill two birds with one stone,” he says, “improve the taste experience and reduce the amount of fat.”

Smoothing The Path To Regulatory Affirmation

McIntyre has been Motif’s CEO only since February but, prior to that, he spent almost ten years working in different divisions of research and development at PepsiCo. He was eager to take the helm of a food ingredient company from day one.

“[It’s a great] chance to build a company from scratch,” he says, especially one with a mission like Motif’s, “trying to...reduce the amount of animal-based ingredients...and help people try to consume a more plant-based diet.”

The company has also added several executives to its leadership team this financing round, including Janet Collins, who previously worked for the pesticide industry association CropLife America. “She’s kind of a unicorn,” says McIntyre, of Collins, since she has experience in meat, dairy and agricultural biotech. Collins will now lead Motif’s regulatory affairs department, navigating each of the company’s ingredients through the regulatory approval process.

Getting FDA approval for novel food ingredients can be tricky, as Impossible Foods learned when it encountered difficulties with its heme. Each of Motif’s products will need GRAS, or “generally regarded as safe,” affirmation, and McIntyre says it’s important the company gets the process right from the outset.

“Being transparent and getting all of that done right is critical,” McIntyre says. And there’s international regulation to consider too, which is particularly important given the huge swaths of plant-based sector growth these days worldwide, especially in countries like China and India.

‘We’d like to make food more nutritious’

The challenge is more than just regulatory, of course, says McIntyre, because Motif also needs to make sure that the naming and labeling of these ingredients makes sense from the beginning, perhaps avoiding a ‘lab meat’ to ‘clean meat’ to ‘cultured meat’ kind of story. “How do you brand and label these things...in a way that’s not confusing to the consumer? And really explains what...we’re providing to them and what is the benefit?” 

McIntyre is a food industry veteran, so he’s seen what happens when food companies don’t get it right. “We’re trying to approach this in a very different way than it’s been approached in the past,” he says. But how exactly will that work?

“My first objective isn’t to talk all about technology,” McIntyre explains, “but to talk about [questions like] what are the important problems we’re trying to solve? What are the benefits to consumers and customers? And then be transparent about what we’re doing, and...let the consumer uncover these things in a way that they can understand them themselves.”

“In the past, there was a lot of talking down to consumers [and] telling them why they shouldn’t be concerned,” he says, adding “I think that’s the wrong dialogue.” For Motif, McIntyre says, it’s important to set out what the company wants to achieve, not just what the technology can do. “We’d like to make food more nutritious, we’d like to have less impact on the environment [and] we want...a plant based diet to be an exciting opportunity where the food tastes wonderful and great.” 

Not everyone sees plant-based diets as an exciting opportunity. Some farmers have grown particularly angry about what they see as overly aggressive marketing from plant-based companies like Impossible Foods, whose CEO recently boasted about putting farmers out of business. But McIntyre says there’s no need to put down farmers in the pursuit of a more plant-based diet. “I personally don’t believe animal agriculture is going to go away,” he says. In fact, the animal agriculture industry is trying to become more sustainable too. “What we’re trying to do is create options,” says McIntyre, “with technology that allows food companies to be able to create great products that are [also] more sustainable.”