Forever Harvest
Producing fruit without trees, vines or bushes.
Forever Harvest is commercialising Plant & Food Research’s intellectual property (IP) on in vitro production of fruit and nut tissues. Researchers are finding innovative ways to grow fruit without traditional trees, vines, or bushes - using lab-grown plant cells instead.
The work is designed to address the challenge of feeding the world and communities in dense urban populations while maintaining the health and biodiversity of our environment.
Plant & Food Research Senior Scientist Dr Jan Grant says a fundamental problem in supplying fresh produce in the future will be the need for more land to grow more food, which is at odds with the need to protect tracts of land to assure environmental health and biodiversity that are vital for primary producers.
Plant & Food Research are exploring controlled environment agriculture for perennial crops. The work asks questions like ‘how can we create smaller more compact growing systems?’ Dr Grant expanded the idea to – what if we forget about the plant altogether and found a way to produce just the fruit?
Global research is investigating ways to produce coffee and cocoa using lab based cellular technology and a variety of companies are working to commercialise lab-grown meat and seafood. However, no one was looking at the possibilities of producing fruits and nuts to build a food production system for the future.
Scientists at Plant & Food Research leapt at the opportunity to explore possibilities with their Food By Design programme, which is funded through Plant & Food Research’s internal Growing Futures™ investment of the MBIE Strategic Science Investment Fund.
The work involves both the production of cell-based foods and developing methods to produce the food at a commercial level. They are not seeking to replicate an entire fruit or a nut but are working to produce an ingredient that has the taste, nutrient, aroma and texture profile of the original product.
The science behind the work starts with adding mashed tissue from the edible part of the fruit or nut to an agar plate impregnated with growth medium. From this a ‘callus’ forms (a mass of plant cells that form when plant tissue is cultured in a lab in the right conditions). To amplify production, the callus is then divided and replated. This step can be repeated many times.
Another method for amplification is putting parts of the callus in a liquid growth media for cell proliferation. The liquid media is then filtered off and just the cells are left.
Multiple calluses are then filtered to remove the agar and growth medium, leaving a colourless paste consisting of living cells. It is important to note the final product is ‘live’ with the same nutritional and taste benefits of fresh produce.
The cell pastes can be used in a variety of ways – on their own, as well as incorporated into other products. For example, living cell products could be used to create highly nutritional fruit juices which are unable to be produced from powders or ‘dead’ cells. Researchers are currently working with cells from blueberries, apples, cherries, feijoas, peaches, nectarines and grapes.
Plant & Food Research are working within the accelerator programme run by Sprout Agritech. From this, they’ve formed the start-up Forever Harvest. The Sprout Agritech partnership is building relationships to aid commercialisation of the IP from the work.
The work originally started with the idea of creating consumer goods or supplying food manufacturers with an ingredient. They’re now looking to commercialise the food production system – providing big brands with the IP and capability to produce their own living cell ingredients. Plant & Food Research’s Commercialisation Manager Mick Riley, said work was also underway to scale up production and build the required infrastructure. They envision a callus would be used to batch-produce the product in bioreactors.
The research has already produced IP, and they have conducted taste-tests with some of their products. In most cases the cells have a similar aroma and taste to the plant grown produce, and now they’re working to refine the textures. Dr Grant said, “In the middle of winter, I opened a plate, and it smelt like tree ripened peach – this sold me.”
For many the idea of lab grown produce is a difficult one to accept – especially for New Zealanders who’ve had the good fortune not to live in deserts or vast cities with little to no productive growing land available. Canvassing at the start of project showed the Southeast Asian market is very receptive to future foods like this to address fresh food supply into the future. Benefits for New Zealand include high value commercialisation opportunities while supporting the vision of New Zealand as a food technology Hub.
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