e math is stark: High-end food ingredients and other "fine chemicals" can "command prices of the order of $10–10,000 per kilogram, compared with around $1 per kilogram for biofuels," Nature reports.
And Evolva's product will not be competing with the vast amount of cheap imitation vanillin that now floods the market. Its yeasts create a compound that replicates the vanillin found in real beans—and thus will compete directly with the premium-priced natural vanilla market now owned by farmers in places like Madagascar and Mexico.
The meeting focused on language—the industry should avoid phrases like "synbio" (too close to "sin").
"These additives can be swapped for those extracted from nature and still legally be called natural because they are made by living organisms (typically, yeast)," Nature reports. And you likely won't know it when you buy a pint of high-end ice cream from a company that uses it. Since the synbio ingredients "will be added after the yeast has been removed," Nature reports, "the ingredient itself need not be labeled in any particular way."
According to the trade magazine Chemical & Engineering News, the ubiquitous petroleum-derived artificial vanillin fetches just $10 per kilogram, while "vanillin made in a way that can be labeled natural can cost hundreds of dollars per kg."
Meanwhile, the industry, which trumpeted its aspirations to take over the energy market, has suddenly gone shy as it sets its sights on fancy ingredients. While major technical hurdles have kept the industry from making cheap biofuels, the Nature piece pithily summed up the main obstacle the industry must overcome before it can dominate the ingredients market: "consumer rejection." In short, people might prove to be creeped out by test-tube vanillin and demand the old-fashioned kind instead.
In response, the industry seems to be resorting to a bit of rhetorical engineering. Earlier this year, the watchdog group Friends of the Earth got hold of a leaked agenda of a planned closed-door industry meeting on how to sell the public on synbio as the "foundation for the future of sustainable food." The group publicized the meeting and asked to attend. The industry initially demurred but ultimately invited FOE to send a representative.
Dana Perls, FOE's food and technology campaigner, accepted the invite and filed this report of the event. She writes:
Topics not discussed included risks to the environment; potential impacts on hundreds of thousands of small, low-income farmers; the lack of independent, transparent health and environmental assessments; and the lack of federal and international regulations. When I brought up these glaring omissions, my concerns were generally dismissed.
Instead, Perls reports, the meeting focused on language—the industry should avoid phrases like "synbio" (too close to "sin") and "genetic engineering," and focus instead on terms like "fermentation derived" and "nature identical.”
In a future post, I'll look at some of the concerns raised by Perls and ignored by the participants.