New Zealand-based Leaft Foods, a startup scaling the production of RuBisCO protein from alfalfa, has announced a strategic partnership with Tokyo-based Lacto Japan, an ingredients distributor that works with leading players in the Japanese food industry.
“It is not every day that you discover such an exciting new protein,” said Takeshi Shimizu, general manager Oceania at Lacto Japan. “What impressed us most was not only the protein system itself, but the fact that we have been able to work with it in a range of promising applications from the start.”
The companies are now engaging with several Japanese players in plant-based foods, bakery products, and sports nutrition categories, with a goal to build a business worth tens of millions of (US) dollars over the next five years.
Scaling up production
One of the most abundant proteins on the planet with digestibility and functionality rivaling animal proteins such as egg and whey protein isolate, RuBisCO is found in every green leaf, from duckweed to sugar beet. Despite its ubiquity, however, it has not become the plant protein of choice for the food industry… yet.
Founded by John and Maury Leyland-Penno in 2019, Leaft Foods extracts RuBisCO from alfalfa, and is “now at what we call commercial demonstration stage where we’re producing tens of tons of material per month,” according to CEO Ross Milne, a chemical and process engineer with a background in scaling large-scale manufacturing projects.
“In the next few months, we’ll ramp that up to hundreds of tons per month of products, including our protein concentrate, which has over 80% purity, emulsification, gelling, and foaming characteristics, and an incredible flavor profile, which is what’s essential to gain traction in the ingredient space.”
As a source material, alfalfa is “incredibly abundant,” notes Milne. “We can grow 18 tons of dry matter per hectare of land, and nearly six tons of protein per hectare, which enables us to create an efficient business with a very clear line of sight to a profitable, scalable business, and we imagine that over the coming decade, we will see RuBisCO play a very prominent role.”
He adds: “RuBisCO is just the most phenomenal protein in terms of its nutritional properties, its amino acid profile, its digestibility, and its functionality. And we get value out of 100% of the raw material, so we’ve commercialized all the co-products as well as the protein and we have contracts in place for those, which allows us a lot of opportunity to focus on RuBisCO.”
AloJapan.com