Clean Food Group’s Alex Neves on ‘a new era in biotechnology’

He shares this vision while surveying its 12-acre production site in Knowsley, Liverpool, acquired from administration-stricken omega-3 oil maker and supplier Algal last month.

Here, it produces oil and fats that go into cosmetics. But Neves wants to go far wider, into food and petfood. He anticipates the day when “we can go into our local supermarket and buy products with our fats in them”.

Crucially, Clean Food Group isn’t dealing in your ordinary oils and fats. Rather than being pressed or processed from crops, they are made from fermented yeast. That process can produce everything “from liquidy oils through to semi-solids and hard fats”, says Neves. And, unlike regular oils and fats, they are free from the hazards of faraway farmers, volatile markets or deforestation.

The proprietary yeast “naturally produces a pocket of oil in it, a bit like an oil seed”, Neves explains. The qualities of their output – from consistency to mouthfeel – can be controlled depending on “how we’re doing our fermentation and what we’re feeding our yeast”.

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The result is that practically any desired style of oil or fat can be produced at commercial scale using existing food-grade infrastructure. At Knowsley, for example, “there’s a million litres worth of fermentation capacity, which is thousands of tonnes of oil. And we can easily grow that by four to five times,” Neves says.

The Knowsley site – a former Tate & Lyle plant – has undoubtedly been a coup. Production at the scale required to make a mark typically “either means working with contract manufacturing organisations, which can mean losing an element of control and can be costly, or building in-house”. By acquiring the facilities, Clean Food Group has “leapfrogged the traditional, capital-intensive path from lab to pilot to demo to new-build commercial plant”, Neves says. “This facility could quite easily cost over £100m new and taken five years to build.”

It means the company has become “the world’s largest manufacturer of yeast fermentation-derived sustainable oils and fats” almost overnight, Neves says. “We feel that we’ve been put into a leadership position.”

Scaling up

The concept of using yeast to make oils is not a new one – there are records of the process dating back to 1878. Since then, its possibilities have frequently attracted attention, especially during periods of unstable supply chains or soaring commodity prices.

But scale has been limited until recently – scuppered by production problems, regulators and a return of cheaper, traditionally farmed alternatives. Today, “the knowledge we have with regards to scaling these technologies is so much better”, says Neves. And demand is high, fuelled by issues with traditional oils.

Neves has experienced these issues first-hand at Scratch Meals, a chilled convenience food manufacturer he co-founded in 2009. “Cost and security of supply were real issues – climate change affecting yields, market volatility,” he says. “All of this was affecting tropical oils like palm oil, and continues to.”

Clean Food Group is also benefiting from growing demand for more sustainable products. Its yeast can be fed on food waste, and the oil can be used as a direct replacement for carbon-intensive and often environmentally damaging crop fats like palm oil, cocoa butter and rapeseed oil.

The process can “offset thousands of hectares of potential land for growing and tens of thousands of tonnes of CO2 emissions”, Neves says. “We had the commercial insight, and what we’re doing is the perfect technology solution for that challenge.”