Clara Foods escapes the scale up Valley of Death

Simply the best, and the biggest. The inability to scale up kills the competitiveness of many new technologies. Not so for Clara Foods with their partnership with Anheuser-Busch InBev’s ZX Ventures new BioBrew division. Add the immense fermentation knowledge of AB InBev, the world’s largest brewing company, and you’re talking million litre outputs all day, everyday, everywhere. At this scale, Clara’s  egg white product would be cost competitive with the more than $200 billion global conventional egg market.

The big advantage here is that AB InBev has food experience. This means that, unlike a BioPharma approach, they produce food grade products, not highly purified medical grade products. Food grade products aren’t lower quality, they’re just fit for purpose. Who cares that 1% of a food grade product is a harmless impurity? But for medical applications this impurity could be disastrous.

Clara Foods CEO Arturo Elizondo wants to “create a future where the most sustainable ingredient is also the most delicious, or the one that has the healthiest nutritional profile or just has a better texture and mouthfeel… That way, it’s truly an uncompromised experience, but where the products really compete in their own right.”

That’s the ultimate way of creating lasting change, simply be the best product out there.