IngredientWerks announces successful completion of seed round funding

IngredientWerks, an ag-tech ingredient company developing high value plant-based proteins for the alternative protein markets, announced it has secured its seed round of funding.

"It is with great excitement and appreciation that we welcome to IngredientWerks our founding investors Open Prairie and Arch Venture Partners," said Matt Plavan, CEO of IngredientWerks. "Closing this round, we are well-funded to advance to the next level our pipeline of plant-based, bioidentical animal proteins for the multi-billion dollar alternative protein food market and to demonstrate our solution to one of the greatest challenges facing mainstream adoption of alt proteins – affordable cost with equivalent taste and nutrition to their animal counterparts."

"IngredientWerks is pioneering Molecular Farming to transform major agricultural crops like corn to produce heme proteins such as myoglobin and dairy proteins like casein that are the molecular equivalent to those found in animal meat and dairy," said Jim Schultz, Founder and Managing Partner of Open Prairie. "Moreover, the IngredientWerks' protein production system operates at a cost and carbon footprint well below that of fermentation production, which is capital intensive, operationally complex, and for which very little capacity exists today capable of processing alternative proteins."

Molecular Farming uses plants as "manufactories" to produce high value proteins and achieves an unparalleled low cost of production through the economies of scale afforded by the immense cultivation and food processing infrastructure of traditional farm production in the US.

"Consumer demand for parity in taste, nutrition and cost of alternative protein foods has become clear and now stands between niche and mainstream adoption of plant-based foods," Plavan continued. "For companies offering these important new food alternatives, the production method they choose is one of the most important strategic decisions they'll make – hence, there is an urgency to our mission to raise awareness within the plant-based food space that an environmentally sustainable and cost-effective supply chain capable of closing the parity gap and powering the scale-up of alternative proteins globally exist in IngredientWerks' protein production system."