In November 2022, the human population of Earth surpassed eight billion people. The increase from seven billion to eight billion people has occurred over the past 12 years, and the global population is expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050. While total consumption of protein will continue to increase, a shift in types of protein consumed is expected, due to both demographics and consumer trends; worldwide milk consumption, however, is expected to increase by at least 1.5% per year through 2030. Innovative ideas are needed to provide protein and other food ingredients for a growing global population, while adhering to new constraints on water availability and carbon emissions. While fermentation has been used as a food technology by humans for millennia, over the past century a new type of fermentation –precision fermentation – has been developed that takes a “brewing” approach to manufacturing food ingredients. Over the past decade, this approach has been applied to generate animal proteins, without the use of animals. In a precision fermentation approach, a genetically-engineered yeast is developed to produce any protein of interest, e.g., whey, casein, egg white proteins, gelatin, or even muscle protein. This new flavor of fermentation offers a way to produce familiar animal proteins with less water, energy, and land use compared to animal-reliant methods. Producing food proteins by fermentation also promises increased food security (any protein may be produced anywhere, with less vulnerability to supply chain disruptions or weather stresses). However, this technology faces considerable hurdles, including yield requirements for profitability when producing commodity food proteins, as well as current shortages in available fermentation capacity, especially in North America. This talk will cover methods and challenges of precision fermentation and describe how Synonym, Inc. is addressing the need for fermentation capacity through a novel combination of design and infrastructure financing.   Speaker: Jeremy Chignell, PhD