Nourish Ingredients CEO James Petrie on the future of hybrid food products and global expansion
After a year of successfully launching two products, Nourish Ingredients looks to what the future holds for plant-based foods and flavour.
20 January 2025
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James Petrie, CEO and Founder of Nourish Ingredients | Phot Credit: Nourish Ingredients
While plant-based meat alternatives have become a market staple, the industry remains ripe for innovation and development. One area in which this is now happening is in the refining of the taste and texture of plant-based alternatives. While studies have shown that choosing plant-based options over meat is essential for saving the planet, consumer uptake has gone down since 2019 when it first began trending.
Looking to solve this problem, is the Australian start-up Nourish Ingredients.
Founded in 2019 by scientists James Petrie and Ben Leita, formerly of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Nourish Ingredients is focused on developing synthetic fats and oils to mimic the taste, texture and smell of meat and dairy.
These are used as an ingredient in plant-based alternatives. This is done through precision fermentation, which uses microbial hosts to produce fats and oils using yeast. “You can do so much with fermentation in terms of the flexibility of the platform,” says CEO James Petrie. “You can produce pretty much anything that you need in terms of molecules.”
Tastilux is animal-free fat made with precision fermentation | Photo Credit: Nourish Ingredients
For Tastilux, the company’s flagship product launched in 2023, Nourish Ingredients uses a natural, non-GMO fungal strain called mortierella, which naturally produces meat-type fats. In October 2023, they showcased Tastilux at SXSW Sydney, where it was dubbed a “breakthrough science and technologies leading the way to a plant-based future”. A year later, the company announced a joint commercial agreement with Cabio Biotech, a Chinese biotechnology company that specialises in microbial fermentation and synthetic biology-based products, to produce and distribute Tastilux to the Chinese market.
This helps with both the costs of producing Tastilux and gives the company an avenue into the Chinese market, which is just beginning to open to plant-based meats. In 2022, Xi Jinping encouraged the exploration of plant-based protein sources to ensure food security during the 13th CPPCC National Committee, and more recently, the China Vegan Society introduced its certification to improve consumer trust. Western brands have also entered the market including Beyond Meat which partners with Starbucks and KFC, as well as Swedish oat drink Oatly, which has targeted high-end coffee shops.
The potential of the Chinese market, and finding the right product or direction to move into that market echoes James’ belief that hybrid food products are an important rising trend in the industry. “This is where we’re starting to add non-animal derived ingredients to make the animal products go further. So, there’s a good example of this in the dairy sector where you have a bucket of milk which can be broken up into cheese, butter, milk powder etc. But for some of those applications, you need more of the animal component, so finding a supplementation pathway that lets you spread out that bucket of milk into even more foods is something that the industry is looking for.” He sees this happening in China as well as the rest of the world as a potentially big growth area. In 2023, a study published by Nature Communications suggested that if 50 per cent of the main animal product (such as pork, chicken, beef and milk) was substituted, it would reduce the loss of forest and natural land almost completely, while greenhouse gases from agriculture and land use would decline by 31 per cent in 2050.
Photo Credit: Nourish Ingredients
James cites climate change, decreasing yields and pressure on supply chains for the interest in hybrid food products. “Certainly that’s where our heads are at,” he says. “It’s not driven by a desire to remove all animal products from the market. But instead look at the market in a way that says, ‘Well, where can our product have the most impact?’ And if you think of impact as creating a climate-resilient supply chain and becoming more sustainable, that doesn’t necessarily mean no animal. What that can mean is the ratio of animal to plant starts to change over time, and our goal is to do that in the most effective way possible.” He adds that the end goal should be the consumer saying ‘This stuff tastes great, or I don’t notice a difference,’ as opposed to ‘I should switch to this because I feel guilty.’ “I think that that pathway has been tried and doesn’t work that well,” says James.
‘Milk’ chocolate made with Creamilux | Photo Credit: Nourish Ingredients
Looking ahead, 2025 will be about commercialisation for Nourish Ingredients, who also have a dairy variation of Tastilux, called Creamilux on the market which gives vegan products a creamy, rich mouthfeel. The company is finalising regulations in their most important markets (China and the United States) and looking to set up a presence in Europe to be closer to their global customers. “We began as a technology company doing cool R&D and building these new types of products, and now it’s about the bottom line, efficient production and supply chains,” says James. Now it’s all about getting this food into people’s mouths, making sure that the products that we’re building are appealing and are hitting those authenticity milestones that we’re seeking.”
Tasting Creamilux at Nourish’s HQ in Canberra | Nourish Ingredients LinkedIn
For James, getting their product out is essential, not just for business but for the environment as well. “For centuries, we’ve been using the same basic types of ingredients for food – and I think that has been appropriate. But as the climate starts to shift, and we start to see supply chains coming under more and more pressure, we have to respond to that collectively,” he says. “I think we’ve got two choices. The first is to reduce the amount of animal product that we consume, and the second is to be more efficient and effective about how we produce that animal-type food.”
Author: Karen Fong
Karen Fong is a Singapore-based writer and editor who has previously spent time in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Canada. She writes parenting, lifestyle and travel content and has worked with publications including The Singapore Women’s Weekly, DestinAsian, Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia and Prestige Hong Kong.
