Mozza Foods targets late 2028 launch for soybean-grown casein

California-based molecular farming startup Mozza Foods aims to launch its first dairy proteins from soybeans in late 2028 pending approval from USDA to grow the GM crop and from FDA to sell the extracted casein proteins.

While early players in the animal-free dairy space fueled by sizable checks from VC firms were under pressure to get consumer products onto the market and sell the concept of cow-free dairy to shoppers, Mozza has always had a clear-eyed view that this is a b2b play that will take time, says cofounder and CEO Adam Tarshis.

Dairy buyers, says Tarshis, are looking for two things: pricing at or below what they are currently paying, and security of supply. ESG goals and animal welfare benefits are a nice-to-have, but not the primary motivator.

With this in mind, Mozza Foods has been laser focused on improving expression levels of casein proteins in soybeans and leveraging existing dairy filtration infrastructure to keep processing costs to a minimum, says Tarshis, who has been working with cofounder and plant geneticist Cory Tobin PhD since 2018 to hone the tech.

Mozza has conducted three years of field trials in multiple US states and is targeting a key technical milestone by the end of this year: 7g of casein protein per 100g of soybeans, says Tarshis, who says the firm is currently at 4g but has doubled expression levels annually for the past four years.

Lower capex and opex vs precision fermentation

Provided expression levels are good, he said, the basic economic argument for molecular farming for dairy proteins versus biomanufacturing is clear. Rather than spending millions on precision fermentation systems, which come with costly downstream processing costs, Mozza can tap into existing infrastructure for growing and processing soybeans.

“We’re a molecular farming company because that’s the only path we see that gets us to cost parity without having to build hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure.”

As for scaling, which is costly and not-always-linear in biomanufacturing, it’s mainly a case of distributing more seeds to farmers and adding more acreage, he says. “The capex required for the DSP [downstream processing] components are a lot less because we can leverage existing soy and existing dairy infrastructure.”

Casein micelles enable functionality and cut DSP costs

Unlike some competitors that produce individual casein proteins, Mozza’s soybeans produce micelles (spherical structures aggregating casein proteins that occur naturally in milk) directly in the seed. This gives the protein the functionality formulators want but just as importantly means the casein can be more easily separated from soy protein during downstream processing, says Tarshis.

“If you work with individual casein proteins, they’re roughly the same size as soy proteins, and it’s very challenging to separate two things that are roughly the same size. By producing this big casein micelle, not only do we eliminate a processing step after extraction, but we can use standard dairy filtration equipment that separates big stuff from small stuff. That’s one of the biggest advantages we have on cost.”

The firm is currently producing three of the four casein proteins (alpha S1, beta casein, and kappa) although it can produce all four, says Tarshis. “We found over lots of testing that you don’t necessarily need alpha S2.”

Valorizing the whole bean

When it comes to monetizing all parts of the bean, soybean oil from beans modified to produce casein can still go into the market as it is so refined that no casein proteins are present, he says. The soy protein fraction, which generally goes into animal feed, can still enter this market if it has trace levels of casein protein, meanwhile.

“Casein is actually a more beneficial protein for animals than soy and so there’s no barrier for our co-products,” says Tarshis.

For the casein protein itself, the level of purity required by the market depends on the product, he says. “Certain products like spray cheese already have soy in them, so it’s not as big of an issue [if there are traces of soy protein in with the casein protein]. That’s also true for a lot of QSRs using cheese for pizza as some pizza crusts and sauces already have soy in them for example.”

Identity preservation

While molecular farming for dairy proteins is not without headaches—the FDA has warned about allergen management in this space, for example—Mozza has spent years developing an identity preservation system called Grain Track to track and trace beans from the field to the end customer, says Tarshis.

“Mozza is as much a crop segregation company as it is a seed engineering company, which is where my background in software and hardware design comes into play. We have to be able to segregate the crop from the commodity supply chain. We’ve spent as much time developing crop stewardship programs and the technology to remove the human element from that process as we have on the seed engineering side, and we’ve shared that journey with FDA and USDA over the last five years, which is one of the reasons they’ve been so supportive.”

The regulatory path forward

Mozza—which has raised about $24 million to date from backers including Stray Dog Capital and Alumni Ventures—has already submitted a petition to the USDA and expects a response in the next few months, while a GRAS submission to the FDA is planned for the middle of next year, says Tarshis.

“For USDA, they want to know if your [GM crop] poses a plant pest risk. Since we’re growing milk proteins, we feel confident that they don’t pose this kind of risk, so we hope to have USDA approval for growing our seeds in fields this year and then approval to sell next year.”

As for end customers, he says, “We have deep relationships with most of the major dairy manufacturers in the US and Europe and we’re expanding those relationships into AsiaPac now. They are all highly interested in alternative sources of casein as long as the economics makes sense.”

Getting past the finish line in alt protein

Mozza is currently raising a $4 million extension round on its Series A, “which gets up to cost parity,” says Tarshis, who acknowledges the “flight of capital from the [alt protein] space, largely because of the lack of exits, and because it takes time to change massive food systems.”

He adds: “Everybody’s excited about the new sparkly shiny thing, which was crypto and is now AI. But with the limited capital that is still available in the space, it’s more important than ever to use it for technologies with the ability to undercut the cost of dairy or meat—in our case dairy proteins—on a timeline that makes sense.

“It’s never going to be as fast as everybody wants, but we’re getting very close now, which is why we think it’s really important that dollars are spent on technologies that can scale without needing governments to get involved to fund the type of infrastructure that’s needed.”

The technology is there to reduce our reliance on animal agriculture, he says. “But it requires capital, and that capital is retreating just as many companies are getting close to the finish line.”

What is molecular farming?

There are varying definitions, but companies deploying plant molecular farming are typically genetically engineering plants to make them produce something they wouldn’t typically make (vaccines in tobacco, growth factors in barley, dairy proteins in soybeans, chymosin in safflower, HMOs in tobacco or soybeans).

Rather than modifying the plant to confer a beneficial agronomic property such as disease resistance or improved nutrition (purple tomatoes), molecular farming companies use plants like bioreactors in order to produce specific high-value ingredients.

In recent years, multiple players have emerged producing so-called “animal-free” proteins through molecular farming, which they argue is more sustainable, ethical, and potentially more efficient than industrialized animal agriculture.

Players to watch in the molecular farming space include:

Dairy proteins: Mozza Foods, Alpine Bio (US), Miruku (New Zealand), Veloz Bio (Spain), Plantopia, Finally Foods (Israel), Kyomei (UK), Aspyre Foods (South Africa)
Growth factors: Bright Biotech (UK), ORF Genetics (Iceland), BioBetter (Israel), Tiamat Sciences (USA), Core Biogenesis (France)
Meat proteins: Moolec Science (registered in UK)
Egg proteins: PoLoPo (Israel), Veloz Bio (Spain)
Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs): Totality Biosciences (US)
Misc – incl sweet proteins, Mogroside V, enzymes, albumin: GreenLab (US), Elo Life Systems (US), Forte Protein (US)
Vaccines, therapeutics: Baiya Phytopharm (Thailand), Protalix Therapeutics (Israel), Bio Applications (Korea), KBio (USA), Eleva (Germany), InVitria (US), Agrenvec (Spain) Diamante (Italy)