EPISODE 71: What are the possibilities for the hybridization of animal and plant proteins?

The below transcript is from Episode 71 of the Trending: Pet Food podcast. Host Lindsay Beaton talks with Henk Hoogenkamp, cofounder and chief product officer, and Martín Salinas, cofounder and chief technology officer about how Moolec Science uses plants to produce animal proteins and what it means for the future sustainability of the pet food space.  You can find the episode at Trending: Pet Food, on SoundCloud or on your favorite podcast platform. This episode originally aired on September 25, 2024.

We want to thank AFB International for sponsoring this podcast. AFB is the premier supplier of palatants to pet food companies worldwide, offering off-the-shelf and custom solutions and services that make pet food, treats and supplements taste great.

Lindsay Beaton – editor, Petfood Industry magazine, and host, Trending: Pet Food podcast:  Hello, and welcome to Trending: Pet Food, the industry podcast where we cover all the latest hot topics and trends in pet food. I’m your host and editor of Petfood Industry magazine Lindsay Beaton, and I’m here today with and I’m here today with Henk Hoogenkamp, cofounder and chief product officer, and Martín Salinas, cofounder and chief technology officer, at Moolec Science. Hi guys, and welcome!

Both: Hello!

Beaton: In case you’re unfamiliar with my guests or Moolec Science, here’s what you need to know.

Henk has a background in biochemistry and life sciences but earned his Ph.D. in regenerative medicine using animal proteins for biomaterials. Since then, Henk has been active in the plant and animal protein industries, mainly focusing on adding functionality to foods.

Martín has a Ph.D. in Biology and is a Chemical Engineer by training. He has experience in the fields of industrial biotechnology, biochemical engineering, and business development. In the Ag-biotech space, he has dedicated the last ten years to the scaling up of the industrial production of animal protein in plants for the food industry.

Moolec Science is a NASDAQ-listed, science-based food ingredient company focused on producing animal proteins and nutritional oils in plants in an affordable and scalable manner. They are most well known in the pet food industry for their high gamma linoleic acid safflower oil and their one-of-a-kind pink soybeans which contain animal proteins.

Henk and Martin’s biotech expertise and how they’re using it to merge plant and animal proteins, particularly in their new “pink soybean,” are why I’ve brought them on today to answer this question: What are the possibilities for the hybridization of plant and animal proteins?

Now this feels like a conversation that needs an origin story. Everyone who listens to this podcast knows I love a good origin story. How did you guys get together and what brought about the idea of merging plant and animal protein?

Martín Salinas, cofounder and chief technology officer, Moolec Science: Before Moolec, I was working for Bioceres, which is the main shareholder of Moolec now. We used to have a molecular farming platform where we produced animal proteins, actually an animal enzyme, through the production of safflower seed for the cheese industry. I led that project. We went all the way from laboratory development to industrial production. We produced and we recovered chymosin, which is an enzyme from the stomach of cattle, that we introduced it into safflower seeds.

That was the very first molecular farming project worldwide to be used in the food industry, particularly to produce cheese. Molecular farming was only known to produce therapeutics, and in the pharmaceutical realm, that's naming the technology, right? “Molecular farm” is playing with the words between pharmaceuticals and farming. That's the origin of the technology. We were a pioneer on using that technology for industrial enzymes.

At some point, Bioceres decided the next step for the technology. We started to talk to Gastón Paladini, the current cofounder and CEO of Moolec Science, who was still the use of new technology for alternative protein. He's coming from a traditional family in Argentina that produces meat products, but he was very interested into the alternative meat, alternative proteins landscape. He started to talk to the Bioceres CEO on the use of molecular farming for new technologies.

Back then, Federico Trucco, who is the current CEO of Bioceres, told me to talk to Gastón and see what we can do together. One of my first ideas was to see if we could use molecular farming to produce growth factors for the cultured meat industry, because the main ingredient to produce meat through a tissue culture is growth factors. Right now, they need to use growth factors from an animal source, and that is counter intuitive for the technology.

We got the idea on producing in plants, right? Let's produce the growth factors in plants. When I started that discussion with Gastón, he understood the technology and said, “Okay, but you are telling me that we can produce other proteins in plants, so why don't we just directly produce animal proteins, like muscle proteins, like blood proteins, directly into the plants?”

I said, “Yeah, we can do that, but we need the right expertise for that.” That is how Henk entered into the story. Lacton has a strong knowledge and strong expertise on the market.

My expertise was on the scaling up of the technology -- from the lab to industrial and more on the engineering processing. But we needed someone to really understand the right proteins for us to produce. This is how we met Henk. We started to brainstorm new ideas and see what is best to start with molecular farming. What is the best crop to produce? What are the alternative proteins that can make sense as a first batch of proteins and products? That's how the three of us cofounded Moolec as a spin out of Bioceres, and we started to work together.

Beaton: What began the conversation, and I'm talking about the birth of the idea of doing something like this. Is it a convenience factor? Are the ingredients superior when they're merged? What made it easier to say, “Okay, let's find a way to merge an animal protein into an oil to then use for cheese.” What was being done before, and what problem does this solve?

Salinas: I will let Henk go deeper on this but let me start by saying that it's all about the bioreaction processing. We want to produce, let's say, animal proteins. What is the most efficient bioreactor to do that? We can just do animal production, meaning the traditional way to produce that protein where you need to feed animals to grow. We can do fermentation, where the actual bioreaction is through a tank, a bioreactor like an agitator, that steers reaction where you need to introduce a culture media and make some modification to yeast or bacteria to produce those proteins. Or we can use a plant as a bioreactor, a crop.

Crops are highly efficient in the way they use energy through the photosynthesis. Photosynthesis -- the way that plants use energy from the sun. They took the carbon source, which is CO2, to produce another molecule. They use an organic compound system, which is highly efficient. When you compare that to a tank where you need to introduce a source of oxygen, a source of a culture, so on and so forth. Then compare with the traditional way to produce that protein.

When you factor in all the considerations in terms of productivity, cost, you can see how efficient it is using a plant. That is the rationale behind why we think molecular farming as a bioreaction system makes sense to produce animal proteins.

We don't think this as a hybrid concept. I will let Henk to go a bit deeper on how we think of the technology.

Henk Hoogenkamp, cofounder and chief product officer, Moolec Science: What Martin is saying is 100% true that plants are super-efficient. Only a small percentage of the sunlight that reaches the Earth is converted through plants into either carbon or nitrogen sources. This is then used in our agriculture system to feed plants. But if you, for example, run a fermenter, you also need to feed a feedstock, which is usually plant-derived, so it makes sense to go all the way to the beginning of when the sunlight hits the Earth. That's where plants play a major role.

At that point in time, if we introduce the proteins or the fast that we want in the beginning of the cycle, we can still run fermentations on the byproducts of the plants that we grow. What we're doing is adding value from the beginning, taking out the value and still having the same byproducts that the regular industry would have to feed, either to animals or bioreaction systems. In other words, we're determining ourselves what our byproducts are going to be.

Let me give an example. Right now, there's a whole lot of soy flour being made as a byproduct from the biodiesel industry. There's just so much right now that there's not enough animals or pets in the U.S. to take all this soy flour. There's too much. We’re overproducing protein, which is counterintuitive, because people are saying we lack protein. But there's enough protein being made, but not enough value to valorize it.

What we can start doing is putting targets inside the soy flour that is already a byproduct and say, “Hey, let's upgrade the byproduct from the beginning and say, this is our new byproduct.” We'll take it out, then we still have a byproduct that can enter the industry from that route. It’s a seismic change of what you can start doing with plants and changing the whole value system without even changing the downstream processing that's available. It’s a tool we have, and we barely started to touch.

Beaton: We're going to stick with the science for a little bit longer, because I'm fascinated by this entire process. When you introduce an animal protein to a plant protein and you use it as a protein, are the two types of proteins compounded? Or does one protein destroy another? Or does it turn into a completely different kind of protein?

Hoogenkamp: That's a good question. To be very transparent, the way we do it is by changing the instructions we give to the plant. Basically, you're changing the plant’s genetic instructions. You're inserting a gene that codes that protein. So yes, it's an animal protein. It's a protein that we find in animals, but it's made by the plant. We're not putting the proteins inside the plant. We're just telling the plant to make protein with code X, Y or Z. In this way, it's making its own version of an animal protein. It's making its own copy.

Depending on the protein, of course, it should have similar functionalities as the animal protein if you code it correctly. The protein is made in a regular plant, let's say in a soybean, the protein is made because the seed is how the plant propagates. It needs a store of energy, of carbon and nitrogen, so when it sprouts, it can grow. Right now, there is too much protein for the soybean to sprout. It doesn't need all the protein. There's an excess.

What we're doing is telling the plant, “As much excess protein that you have, please divert it towards the protein that we want you to make.” It’s saying, “Okay, I need this amount of protein, this amount of carbohydrates and oils, to do what I normally do, but we're diverting as much of our excess time and energy towards making that and stockpiling this protein inside the seed along with the other proteins.” Because the protein doesn't have a role in the seed, it's not recognized by the plant. It just sits there. It's stored. It's not broken down. It just sits there waiting for it to be used.

Our idea is boosting the function of the derivative of the seed. If you crush the soy seed, you get the oil out, do with it what you want. There's this huge pile of soy flour sitting there, of which 5% to 10% of that pile is animal protein. That's huge, right? It means we're making almost the same amount of animal protein per surface area as we would by feeding the soybeans to animals.

From the get-go, we're a more efficient system. There's no way around it. We're the most efficient way to produce this atom protein.

Beaton: Now going to your pink soybean for a minute. Why soy and why pig protein? Do they work particularly well together? Did you just decide, hey, let's give it a go. Is there something about the genetic structures that makes them particularly compatible? How does that kind of decision get made when you're working on this?

Hoogenkamp: There are two sides to that story. One, there's a molecular biology side. Secondly, there's a product processing side. First, let’s start with the product side. Soy is very efficient. You can grow a lot of soybeans per surface area. It's a nitrogen-fixating plant. The inputs are low for soybeans, and it already has a lot of protein. That means it's easier to divert some of that excess protein it has in the bean towards our target.

There's not a huge penalty that we pay by saying, “Hey, soy plant, make this type of protein.” The soy processing industry is very complex. There's a lot of different layers to it. Once we have our optimized seed, there are many places to plug it. We can go through the regular crushing, we can go through the big guys who have these huge solvent plants, or we could use the seed itself and then process it into all these other types of products, because soy has been highly fractionated in a very standardized way. This type of fractionation does not exist for many other crops. Maybe for corn. For example, for chickpeas, that's a very different discussion. There are not huge plants processing huge amounts of chickpea into a derivative. Soy was the most logical candidate.

Lastly, on market side, soy has already been genetically modified or bioengineered, so there's not going to be a huge resistance from a crop that's never been engineered before. That made us pick soy from the beginning. That doesn't mean that other crops are not being considered for future products. Martín, maybe you could jump into the molecular biology side of why soy? I think that's a good technical indulgence for our listeners.

Salinas: Absolutely. With soybeans, the nutritional profile of soybean proteins is the best crop in terms of nutrition worldwide -- accepted and used in food and feed. We have a lot of understanding and knowledge on how to genetically modify soybeans and how to grow it, how to process it, and the supply chain. That's the pragmatic side.

Soybeans make a lot of sense for how it's been used right now in the food and feed industry and in many other spaces. All the knowledge we have in terms of the genetical background, you can see the amount of different soybean varieties that can be of our interest. Let's say we want to introduce our technology on many different varieties of soybeans. Some of those are reducing oligosaccharides or reducing anti-nutrients with a better profile in terms of the protein content or the fatty acid profile.

It opened many different opportunities to us to play and deal with soybeans compared to other crops. Having said that, we do have in our pipeline other crops and other proteins that we are producing. Right now, this is the one that is closest to market from our side, which is the pink soy. But we do have other crops, and we do have other proteins that are not coming from pigs.

Beaton: We talked a lot about, why soy, why pig protein?

Hoogenkamp: We must be truthful, right? We took the sequence from a pig. There’s an online database you can look in and say, “Hey, what type of proteins can we find that have been sequenced, that have been characterized and well understood?” This sequence encodes for that specific protein. The sequences, they're not that different between pigs and cows and other animals used for livestock. Of course, if you go towards the avian side, it starts to differ a bit more, right? The protein starts to diverge. Then you go towards fish, it gets also a bit more different, but they're very conserved.

These proteins have a function in our soybean. What we're doing is making a protein called myoglobin. This protein is meant to carry oxygen and hold oxygen, take it from the hemoglobin and deliver it to the rest of cells. This function doesn't really change; the code doesn't change significantly.

We tend to say myoglobin, because people are going to wonder, “Where did they take the sequence from?” In this case, we took the sequence which inspired on the pork sequence, but it might as well have been the beef or the chicken. There's no real difference from a functionality perspective. It still binds oxygen, it still turns red. It's almost the same.

This brings us into the regulatory part. When you make a novel protein inside a crop that we all eat, we want to make sure the protein we're making has already been present in our diet for a long time. We’ve been eating pork, we've been eating beef, we've been eating chicken, so any of these proteins made in this plant should be something that has been in our diet. In this case, we went for pork.

Our second project is a pea project. There we took the sequence from beef, from cattle. What are we going to start doing next? Is it going to be chicken? Is it going to be -- doesn't really matter because it's all about the protein functionality. Truth be told, the sequence doesn't make the protein. The plants that make it are more important.

What I'm trying to say is, for the regulation side of things, we try to be very sensitive. We want to be very truthful about it. It’s up to the technology and the regulators in the future to try and place it properly to our customers to say how we do it. But we're all big about transparency. We've always said, “Yes, we're doing bioengineering.” We're not trying to cover it up, where we talk about it actively, but that also means we need to be truthful about the sequences that we use from the beginning. Nothing to hide.

Beaton: Let's talk about regulatory. I imagine it's a unique path. Just because it's not every day a regulatory entity gets put in front of them, “Hey, we have a soybean. Guess what? It has, pork protein. Give it a regulatory pathway.”

What was that like for the pink soybean in particular? Have you guys had to do this before? Was it something that you've done with other ingredients, so you already knew what to do? Or were there any unique challenges with this product?

Salinas: That's a great question. We do have experience in the past going through regulatory agencies with safflower producing chymosin for the cheese industry. We got that approval in different countries. There are many things to consider here, because the regulatory pathway in most countries, including the United States, already exists.

You have productivity technologies. Conceptually, those technologies are different to molecular farming, but the underlying technology is the same. They genetically modify a crop just for the crop to improve its productivity. Then you have gene editing. There are other technologies that may not be considered as GM, but there are a lot of GM out there, soybean, mainly. Those crops have already been approved, have already been through a regulatory pathway.

The regulatory pathway already exists. It’s a matter of understanding the concept, where we are not looking into the plant itself as trying to make it more productive in terms of the kilos or the yield, in terms of pounds per acre. It’s a matter of using the plant as a bioreactor.

At the end of the day, we want to recover something out of the plant instead of commercializing the plant. That's the conceptual difference between molecular farming and productivity technologies in agriculture. It does raise some new concerns in predatory agencies, going around the idea of a closed-loop system, where you can find your soybean in a place that you don't want that soybean to be and it’s commingling with other soybeans. That’s where the agencies will put in a lot of focus on seeing our approach to mitigate or minimize that risk as much as possible.

The pathway already exists. As Henk mentioned that we did have our regulatory status review for our soybean through the USDA. We already went through the agency and got our approval. Now on the production side, it’s more about the quality. We still have strict stewardship, strict identity preservation protocols, for the sake of keeping the quality of our material, trying not to get commingling with anything else. At the same time, just to make sure that the industry knows what we are doing, how we do it.

The other thing I mentioned, which is also important for regulatory agency, is that the proteins we are dealing with have a large history of use in humanity. We have been eating these kind of animal proteins for thousands of years. There is a history of safe use. Our role for the regulators is to show that this protein is the same as the one that would have that history of use. If we demonstrate the soybean’s proteins are the soybean’s proteins and these new proteins are just like the one in the animal, the pathway is quite straightforward.

Hoogenkamp: The last part of that is allergenicity. In the early days, we considered working on dairy proteins and working on egg proteins. These proteins are regarded as major allergens. When we decided to work on myoglobin, we were asking, “Okay, are there any known allergies towards myoglobin or other blood or potentially muscle proteins?” This seems not to be the case. Of course, by definition, any protein can be an allergen to something. Then again, our own bodies are built out of these proteins. They're not well-documented cases for meat protein allergies, other than people being bitten by the lone star tick or what have you, that's a totally different case.

In this case, working on non-major allergen proteins makes it a bit easier to go through the regulatory stages and scale our way to open field production. Because, yes, we need very strict identity, preserved platform, and we're part of the stewardship programs that are required. But in this case, we need to reach the same scale as regular soybeans to make sure our ingredients become scalable and affordable.

That's the main part of the question. We've spent a couple minutes now talking about technology, but the reason to do this is to be able to make enough of your targets in the lowest cost but also the lowest impact manner to the planet, because that moves the needle in the bottom line. It's not making a fancy protein in the super expensive bioreactor to service and very niche pet food market in LA. That's not going to change things. It’s going to push things the wrong way.

We want to make sure we can develop new ingredients that could push the cost down instead of up. That means we need to rescale. Working with the regulators, respecting the compliance and making sure that we do everything that we can to make sure we comply with the industry and what they're currently doing is all a prerequisite to be able to meet these low cost or affordability targets.

Beaton: Because we're talking about scaling up, that was going to be my next question. How do you scale up something like this? Do you guys have virgin fields that you plant your own soybeans in? Do you go to soybean farmers and say, “You want to try something new and cool?” How does scaling up something like this work?

Salinas: It's a great question. As Henk was mentioning, for this to make sense, is a matter of scale. We need a lot of farmers to be involved. It’s not something we can do in our backyard or our own Moolec field. It's something that we need to involve growers into the equation. The way we involve growers into the equation is with our identity preservation program. Our program has a way to involve our growers into the equation with a system to make them motivated for producing our crop.

The other way is for us to see what the right variety is where we need to introduce our technology. Growers want to produce the soy that yields good in that area. From our side, that is a breeding program where we need to say, “Okay, let's say we want to produce our soybeans with growers in some specific states.” We need to look at the best varieties that perform in that state and just do a breeding program that will help and motivate the growers into our identity preservation program.

Those two aspects are important for the scaling up. To have as many growers as possible in the different territories where want to plant our soybeans and produce our ingredients by having a good identity preservation program with good incentives to growers. Plus having them producing good quality in terms of the seed and genetical background.

The last thing I would say on the scaling up is coming back to something that Henk mentioned on the process. Infrastructure already exists because we're using soybean. We're doing derivatives from soybeans. The crushing industry for soybeans, we can use that infrastructure. There is no need for us to go into a new technology to recover our proteins. We can just use what’s there. That's a huge upside. We don't need any downstream, we don't need a purification system. It's basically using the crushing opportunities, the crushing industry, which already exists, and we already have access to.

Beaton: Let's say you successfully scale up. You are mass producing this product. What does that look like in a formulation? Obviously, this is a pet food focused podcast, so pet food formulations -- a lot of them use soy already. What are the implications for a formulation, and how do you sell it to formulators as an ingredient. I know you said it's not a hybrid ingredient, that you consider it an animal protein, correct?

Hoogenkamp: Alright, so there’s a lot to unpack. It is an animal protein by definition because it's a protein found in an animal, but it is made by the plant. You could say it's a plant-based animal-inspired protein, or animal-derived protein. It’s the functionalities, and that's why we can get into the first part of your question now as well, but first I'd like to make the statement that we're not pet food experts. We're relying on the industry to come to us and say, “Hey, you know, this is interesting. This is what we use it for. What can yours do?” We're not the experts there. We're just trying to show the industry how efficient we can make animal protein. Then the question becomes, okay, why and which animal protein?

Right now, we have myoglobin, which basically is colored because of it attaches to heme, which is a bioavailable form of iron. That's an obvious advantage, that we have higher amounts of iron than a regular soybean There are other advantages. The way the myoglobin behaves, what it can do, how it gels, how it's digested. There's a nutritional aspect, there's a coloring aspect, there's a technical aspect from a formulation perspective, giving specific textures. Maybe there's a palatability aspect to it as well. Cats and dogs can discern between a plant protein and an animal protein in terms of olfactory perception.

Lastly, if we start talking about other proteins that we're looking at, it's not always about how the protein is in this native state, but how the protein decomposes. If you start fermenting it or if you start digesting it, what type of peptides do you form? Many of these peptides, even humans are trained to recognize fermented foods as nutritious or very rich foods. That's why we like umami. That's why we like MSG. They're available, they're savory. Animals have this as well. They're trained to recognize some of these breakdown products or these protein derivatives.

That means future proteins that we can work on are not only about the native protein, but about anything else that you would normally do with a food. Would you dry it? Would you fry it? What happens to that protein? How does it break down? How does it decompose?

The last aspect of animal proteins is that main difference between animal proteins and plant proteins. The function of animal proteins is a bit more varied than plants. Plants can rely on carbohydrates or structure. They can rely on cellulose and lignin to provide strength to their tissues. Humans don't have that. Humans do everything with minerals, proteins and fats. There's a bit of carbohydrates and form of glycans in our bodies. They don't have a structural role -- I mean, arguably, they do, actually -- but not the way the plants do. That means there is a whole category of animal proteins that provide tensile strength or compressive strength. You could say collagen or keratin. These are all very highly insoluble proteins that only animals make, and there's nothing like it in the plant kingdom. That means there's also a new layer of functionality that we need to start looking into if we wanted to start making new types of biomaterials or other types of functionalities that we just can't do with plant proteins or plant fibers.

That's how we want to approach the pet food industry and actively start looking for partners to ask, “Okay, what do you need addressing? You know, what is something you'd love to use, but it's now becoming too expensive for you to use, or it's not available in the right amounts, or is not available in the right spec or grade?” That's the discussion we always have with potential customers and partners in this.

Salinas: Let me add a bit on how we approach our customers in pet food. We do have a great entry point to customers in pet food. While we are focusing the conversation on the Piggy Sooy, we have a safflower-producing GLA (high-gamma linolenic acid) fatty acid that has a lot of benefit, is well established in many different trials, that has a lot of benefit in pet food.

Our main clients for GLA are pet food companies. We’ve already entered the industry, into the pet food realm, through GLA, which is more known in that space. While we discuss GLA and how Moolec can collaborate with them, we can say, “Okay, we also have this product that can enhance the properties of soybean protein through animal proteins by adding more function as an ingredient to the industry. Let's explore that as well.” GLA is our entry point into the pet food industry. It has a lot of benefit, well established, and we have had lots of conversations within the pet industry.

Hoogenkamp: To build on top of that, to show how efficient plants are, the GLA that we're making is probably twice, or maybe three times, as high as any other source that we can find. What you're doing is telling a plant, “Please make more of this specific fatty acid.” You’re in a very powerful position, because if you can tell the plant to make a specific fatty acid, everywhere there's a fatty acid, there's always a press cake that's left over.

So that opens the whole question, “Hey, what else do we put in the press cake?” If the fatty acid is paying for the press cake, then we can start driving more value out of the press cake by putting other proteins or other types of targets that we'd like to make or identify with in that press cake. To say, “Hey, this is a very affordable source of that target. It's there for free now because it's already been paid for by the other mainstream.”

Once you start tailoring specific plans with targets that you want, you can get more value from the same plants, from the same surface that you're already growing to plant for. We’re able to send specific targets to specific parts of the plant. Theoretically, you could send it to the leaf, you could send it to the flower, you can send it to the root, stem. That means when you harvest the safflowers or the soybeans, you can physically remove the parts from each other which have that specific target, then process it in a way where you extract it to attractive concentrate without using high-tech downstream equipment.

You're basically determining what byproducts you're going to have in your process. That means from the same area, from the same land that you're focusing on to grow the oil, the protein, you’re getting all these other intended side streams. That's what's going to lower the overall cost of the system.

Beaton: I want to jump into what might be a little bit of a gray area. It's kind of a wild time for alternative proteins right now, because there's a lot of science going on that's creating a lot of different things. I know this is not an issue that is just in the pet food industry -- I think it's a conversation that's being had in the industry overall -- but cell-based meat production has started quite the conversation about whether that counts as it being vegetarian, whether it counts as something that vegans could eat. It is very much being had in the pet food industry, because there are vegan pet food companies. Some of them have partnered with cell-based meat production and scientists to bring that in, having decided from an ethical point of view that that is vegan because an animal is not being harmed. The primary vegan ethos -- sustainability and care for animals and care for the planet -- nothing is being violated by this kind of thing.

Now, I know your product is different, but there is a lot of science involved, and it is kind of emerging of the two worlds in a nontraditional way. Where does it sit in that conversation right now? Could a vegan company use it for tofu? Or is that a question that is still being worked out? I know there's probably not an easy answer, because these conversations are still very much being had in the scientific world, to say nothing of the consumer world.

Hoogenkamp: That's actually a very good question. Part of it was answered in your intro. It all boils down to the definition of that specific subgroup of consumers, or people. Again, we're trying to be sensitive to religious concerns. We're trying to be sensitive to other types of lifestyle concerns, but it always boils down to definition. The definition is not set by us. I can say, “Oh yeah, it is vegan. There are probably more parts of the animal going into the ground as manure or the bean is animalistic.” It's not. It's a funny one.

If somebody was a long-standing vegan, if they decide, “No, it's an animal protein, I don't need it.” Then by all means, they don't need to call it vegan. We're not trying to convince these people to change the diet of their dogs and cats. We’re trying to bring down the cost of something that's functional. Eventually, it's money that talks. Not only money, but availability.

Now, I have an old friend, and he has a hot dog factory just outside New York. They used to make all-beef hotdogs for the Jewish and Muslim communities. Suddenly there was spike in popularity for fajitas. He said, “Wait, I cannot buy my meat to make my hot dogs because the fajitas are pushing up the price.”

The same is happening in the pet food industry. There are people competing for offal or byproducts, and now there’s more competition for these products. What are they going to use? It’s not only about affordability, but is there going to be enough of it?

I would rather formulations become vegan or plant-based or a hybrid type of combination where we combine plant and animal proteins. But let’s at least make the fundamental formulation as plant-based and functional as possible.

People can decide if we want to use soy or wheat or chickpea to build the base and anything else that is available in the market at a low-price that we can add into the formulation, then everybody is a winner. Sustainability is a winner. The buyer’s a winner. The final consumer is a winner. There is no drawback to this technology.

Beaton: Is it a conversation that you're having with potential clients? Are they asking that kind of question, or is this question more of an individualist, ethical question that a consumer reads the press release that you guys put out? And it's very accessible, it's very high level. Obviously, when you're speaking to a potential client, you're going to get way more into the science of it. But for the average layperson, do you feel like the conversation is more happening out there in the consumer world than in the business world?

 Hoogenkamp: It boils down to affordability. What type of consumer are we talking about? People that are probably the loudest are the ones that usually have the most means to afford a specific lifestyle for them or their pets. Having a pet shouldn't be a class thing, right? If you have a pet, you should be able to take care of it properly, and you shouldn't feel bad that you're not able to buy vegan dog food or organic-massage beef from a ranch in Hawaii. People shouldn't feel bad about the things they buy for their pets. They should feel good about it, but it still needs to be affordable.

I think 95% of the consumers in the global population, they're not worried about these things that are huge topics in the media. They're worried about, can they feed their family? Can they feed their pets? Is it bad for them? That's where most people are stuck on this planet. We need to realize that. I think that's where the consumer discussion comes into mind. Who is the consumer for this technology?

Beaton: This is kind of going back to a 101 question after everything we've been talking about, but does the soybean taste any different from regular soy? Is there enough in there to taste it? I know there’s enough in there to change the color, but I know that's genetic coding and things like that. Does the taste change? Does the texture change anything from an ingredient perspective?

Hoogenkamp: We're just about to start testing those things. We're about to harvest our first seeds from the field. This will give us enough seeds to start doing these trials. Before, all the seeds that we grew had to be planted again to make more seeds. We're not able to taste a lot of these seeds now and in a meaningful way. Hopefully we can come back on in a year from now and then tell you a bit more about that.

Beaton: I want to wrap up by talking about the future, because it sounds like, based on what you just said, you're on the cusp of some exciting stuff in terms of trials and figuring out more about what you can do with this protein and what this protein has to offer. What are your hopes? What's next with this product and with your trials? What are you expecting to see? What's the next big challenge, the big opportunity on the horizon? Tell us what you're looking forward to.

Hoogenkamp: Let me start here, and then I'll let Martín jump in. What we hope with these trials is to be able to calculate how much animal protein we can make per input. We want to prove how efficient the system is, because efficiency means affordability. Efficiency means potential to market. If we're efficient from the get-go, there's more chance that the technology will find this way into a large part of the industry.

In a month from now, we'll be harvesting the beans, and the first data will come and how many beans can we make per acre? How much of the protein can we make per acre? How much do we need to put in? If we scale this up, how much would it cost to make one ton of our soybeans or one ton of that specific target? Once you put out those figures, that will open a lot of doors, because people will see the true efficiency. Again, that’s what we're all about, efficiency.

Salinas: The only thing I would add in the mid- to long-term vision is we hope to take on new proteins and new crops that we can enhance plant-based protein properties. We do know some of the challenges of the plant-based industry, and we think this is the way to overcome most of those challenges.

In terms of the organoleptic properties, it can be healthier than it is right now. Usually plant-based ingredients are not as -- or plant-based food products are not as healthy as they’re supposed to be. Our intention is to overcome those challenges by adding more proteins, adding more crops and increasing our pipeline of products.

Beaton: Does adding animal protein or asking the plant to make animal protein increase the bioavailability overall of the soybean? Because I know plant proteins and animal proteins are processed differently in the body. Does it affect that at all? Or does the body treat it inside as two separate proteins?

Hoogenkamp: That really depends on the processing, because plant proteins, yes, they are treated differently, but sometimes the digestion is more hindered by anti-nutritional factors, more so than the protein itself. We still need to deal with the same anti-nutritional factors that the soybeans have, so we need to process them in the same way. I guess that's it. The digestibility is part of our myoglobin is going to be probably the same digestibility of regular myoglobin along with the other soybean proteins that are there.

Beaton: I want to thank you both so much for coming on today. My colleagues and I knew as soon as we read about your pink soybean that I had to have you on so that we could introduce this concept to the pet food industry and just talk about this incredibly innovative way to provide protein. I'm thrilled that we were able to connect.

Before we go, I want to do a little plug. Where can people find more information about what you both are doing and about Moolec Science?

Salinas: We're a public company, so there is a lot of information in our website. Go to moolecscience.com, that's the best place to get information from our side. You can reach out to us at [email protected] as well. We usually connect to the community through that email address. Through our website and through that email address, you can reach out to us, and we'll be happily answering any extra further comments.

Beaton: Excellent. That's it for this episode of Trending: Pet Food. You can find us on petfoodindustry.com, SoundCloud or your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow us on Instagram @trendingpetfoodpodcast. And if you want to chat or have any feedback, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to drop me an email: [email protected].

And of course, thanks again to our sponsor AFB International, the premier supplier of palatants to pet food companies worldwide, offering off-the-shelf and custom solutions and services that make pet food treats and supplements taste great.

Once again, I'm Lindsay Beaton, your host and editor of Petfood Industry magazine, and we'll talk to you next time. Thanks for tuning in!