174. From Beer to Billions: Kevin Wenger Scales Microbes at Lallemand

Kevin I started brewing beer at home, and when I started brewing beer, then I was hooked. It's the gateway to our industry,

Karl Iam. What's going on?

Erum Carl? we've been at this for quite some time here on the podcast. I Grow Everything podcast. We'll talk about how biotechnology is transforming every industry and a part of that. We talk a lot about bioreactors, and my question is, where the heck is my flux capacitor?

Karl I would like to know too, the flux capacitor that I think of is the one that's in back to the Future, the first one, which is a really old movie at this point, and at the end of it, they're feeding the flux capacitor a bunch of garbage.

Erum Yeah. Yeah. I think about that too because we are fortunate in our little tiny part of Brooklyn where we have composting and you know, you're just throwing that compost.

Erum Away, well not away, but into the compost bin and it goes away. but I'm like, can I put that into a bioreactor to make something? [00:01:00] where is it? Like, obviously for the flux capacitor, it's generating fuel for the DeLorean, but I'm like, I want that flux capacitor. And I was thinking about could Carbon Bridge the company we interviewed, a few episodes ago we interviewed Sophia Zoo, who's a co-founder of.

Erum Carbon bridge and they have these miniaturized notebook, size bioreactors. Could that be a prototype for one? But I'm like, let's get one of these going. So if anyone out there making flux capacitors, call us.

Karl Let us know. we wanna know what, you know, what that reminds me of is like, I don't know how much compost New York City generates.

Karl I'm sure we could look it up pretty easily, but. For those who don't know, prospect Park also has a zoo and it's a very small zoo. There's some very cute animals in there. It's a lot of fun to take. your little kids there. I haven't been there in years 'cause now I've got these three boys that are all grown.

Karl But if you kind of walk around it, 'cause there's trails that kind of go around [00:02:00] the zoo. There is a place where the park compost and so there's these huge piles of wood because the park has trees. Bushes and stuff that's constantly being cut down and people recycle their Christmas trees. There's like mulch fest, so they mulch all this stuff and if you walk by there in the winter, the compost is steaming because the piles are big enough and there's this.

Karl Endothermic reaction that's happening. And so as the compost is, turning into whatever it, as the wood turns into compost, it produces heat. So there's always steam coming off of that. And I've seen that that is a way that certain people, heat their houses or they used to heat their houses that way was with compost.

Karl So I find that to be super interesting. But yeah. Let's, let's get the flux capacitor. Just imagine how much. Power we could generate with New York City's garbage.

Erum Yeah. Or with our own garbage, because then we can just take the DeLorean into the future or into the past. Let's [00:03:00] just time travel with banana peels and like empty beer cans. Like that's really all we need. but yeah, I mean, and also I've been listening to some other podcasts. We love the Pivot podcast, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. I know that you listen to it, when you're at the gym, but did you hear their, latest discussion about, AI needing to be regulated?

Karl I didn't hear that, but I know it's been a topic of discussion and I know that Anthropic is being held up as a company that's doing a pretty good job of regulating their Ai. So, what was it that Scott and Kara said?

Erum Yeah, they were talking about some, um, fortunate, really sad stories that happened in the news where, AI had took part in helping an individual commit suicide, or shoot up a school.

Erum It's just really sad. And you know what Kara said that I thought was really important, it's that these are not just cute AI chatbots. It's not [00:04:00] just a chatbot. These are synthetic beings. And companies need to be responsible for their actions, for the actions of these synthetic beings. And when she said that, I got chills because I was like, you know what?

Erum She's right. even if you know, whatever you wanna talk about sentient and what that means philosophically or scientifically, but they're passing the Turing test the original Turing test you like seem very conscious and. They are influencing people to do things, and when you are influencing people to do things, you have to be regulated.

Erum So I just thought that, that word, the synthetic beings word is something that, we all need to understand. And then like the flip side is like, okay, synthetic beings that they cause harm. We need to regulate them. But if they're doing good things and we're like, treating them badly, like there should also have rights.

Erum this is that whole automatic noodle, the book that we read by Anna Lee Neitz, to give them rights. but I just thought it was a, that the commentary that Kara was saying [00:05:00] on the podcast put that in my head about we need to have some regulations and consider these.

Erum AI as synthetic beings.

Karl Yeah, I agree with that a hundred percent. And I just wanted to point out something, friend of the pod who's never been on the pod. Ryan Beco just posted on LinkedIn that he, created really, very quickly a

Karl vaccine design studio in 10 minutes, not using any code. You know, probably using something like cloud code or one of the other coding tools, and it just shows like how powerful that is. Like we are here to talk about. The benefits of biotech and how biotech is impacting other industries.

Karl But a lot of this stuff, people could go ahead and, oh, I designed an mRNA vaccine, but they could turn around and doing something bad. So it's another reason why these tools should be regulated in a way that is smart. The question is who's gonna do it and who's gonna step up to do it.

Erum I think we just get him on the pod. we're good friends with him, so I would, Love to chat with him. He's a great person to [00:06:00] talk with.

Karl Let's get him on here. Okay, so we were talking about podcasts. One Other podcast that we listen to is Paul Shapiro's Business for Good podcast. And we were lucky enough to have Paul on the show many episodes ago, and Paul has been building. The Better Meat Company, which is a mycelium production company in Sacramento, California. We just had a conversation with him, which was so great.

Erum Yeah. Yeah. Paul has been a friend of the pod. he listens to the pod. Anytime we, you know, say something that resonates with him, he'll like shoot us an email. And we just wanted to say, Paul, we love you. Thank you so much for being a great friend, and we wish you the best with all of the work you're doing.

Erum We're here for you. We are here for it. You've been super helpful to us and wanna just give a shout out to one of the many guests that have come onto this podcast.

Karl Then the other people that we wanna just do a shout out to are Annie and Everett and actually Kit McConnell of Super Organism. we just had [00:07:00] Kevin on the podcast a couple episodes ago and we went to a networking event to celebrate Annie and Everett joining.

Karl Super organism. So I'm very excited for them. That was a fun hangout, wasn't it? Ro?

Erum Yeah, it was cool. Kate wasn't there, so I was kind of sad that she couldn't make it, but, everyone else was good to meet with them and hang out. The, the place was really cool. It was called The Wooly and so it had pictures of wooly mammos and it was actually really well selected because it did have this biodiversity theme, like that was like native to this, uh, restaurant bar.

Erum And, met some of the founders of the portfolio companies of Superorganism and very interesting. I loved hanging out with people that are like-minded in one aspect. You know, we all are mission driven, especially on the biotech biodiversity side, but also very different.

Erum I had met a gentleman named Alex Logan, who is a founder of a company called Cecil, which is, really about geospatial data and being able to integrate it [00:08:00] into your own software. the way he describes it is the stripe for geospatial data. yeah. Yeah. Very cool. and. We had a great conversation just talking about what's going on in the world and just, being able to build a company in New York.

Erum and, his partner, works in the world of digital health, which was my previous life. I was telling him, about some of the events that I went to and, there was another event that I went to afterwards, which we'll talk about in a second, and he was like, there's nowhere else you could do that but in New York, like you, for you to come to this, you know, biodiversity VC event and then you're going to this other event next, You could never do that anywhere else.

Karl Okay. So I, don't disagree with that. I I was thinking about it as I left the event last night. I was like, this is pretty wild. I think we get a little jaded of it, but then I was looking at, a San Francisco biotech event and I think that San Francisco probably comes close to biotech events the way that we do just [00:09:00] general events.

Karl I'd like someone from San Francisco to confirm that for us.

Erum Yeah, while they talk to Elliot Roth, it sounds like they have a lot of cool events. but there's nothing like New York City. I feel like in sf they're like hustling. They're tinkering. they're trying to raise venture capital and then they go and they go on hikes.

Karl I wanna go on hikes.

Erum Yeah, cool. that's an SF cool thing. But New York is just people talking about their lives. Art, culture, interaction, you global events. And local events and just, I don't know, I'm biased.

Karl All right, so you left the Wooly and you went to another event right after I didn't join you.

Karl Talk about that event a little bit.

Erum Yeah, so, I'm a member of the Longevity Global Network and also, my previous life, the digital health space I worked, in the space is called Age Tech and I was. Talking to somebody on the longevity side, like what is age tech and really technology to help people that are older, [00:10:00] and experience the world through their experience, but leveraging technology.

Erum And so age, tech, group and the longevity global. Came together and they're like, let's have a, a different type of event. And the way that they described it, it was like, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna have this wellness breath work experience. And I'm like, oh, okay. You know, and it's like, it's gonna cost, there's a small feed to get into this space.

Erum And I was like, all right. No, I like breath work. I like wellness. And like, it's different than just a networking event where just a strings and, you know, food and just chit chatting. I'm like, let's do something different. And so I, I pay, I sign up. Then, getting closer to this event. And then I realized this actually at a bathhouse is actually at a sauna.

Erum And I'm like, oh, okay. I'm like, I really don't know about having a networking event at a sauna, and like that's, that's really outside of my comfort zone. But I live outside of my comfort zone. My. Outside of the [00:11:00] comfort zone is my comfort zone now because it's so much, so many great things have happened.

Erum When I touched, I'm like, you know what, what this computational biology meetup at this biotech lab, you know, and then I met you 10 years ago. Gotta go. Yeah, I gotta go. I mean, so I'm like, all right, you know, let me just do it and, and I'll have to say, It could have been a better experience. I met a couple people, and, they were great to talk to, two young women.

Erum but the only, the challenge was, is that they were having this event, but there's also people there that were not a part of the event, and you just didn't know who was who. you know, when we're at events and I see someone by themselves, I will be lying to that person to talk to them.

Erum 'cause if they're not talking to anyone. I'll just talk to them, I like to make people feel comfortable, but I could not do that in this space because what if they were at the sauna just to have their own, schitz thing, you know what I mean?

Erum Like, they're, they're out there. I don't wanna be like. Hey guy with his shirt off. Uh, what, what are you up to? You know, like, what's going on? [00:12:00] And he's like,

Karl because no matter what you say, it's gonna be headed in the wrong direction.

Erum Yeah. I was like, alright. And so I kind of like, there's moments where I was just by myself until these two young ladies came and then there was really cool.

Erum And then I'm like, alright, you know what? It actually is better because, sometimes I'm gonna wanna by myself. I'll just leave. 'cause I'm in my head, I'm like, oh, it's getting hot. And I'll probably just be in there for like 10 minutes. But when I'm with someone else and we're having a conversation, I might be there for 15 minutes and it just goes by really quickly.

Erum So like I am getting the full experience.

Karl Yeah. What I was gonna say is, I don't know, an event in Asana does sound like a very West coast thing though. I know the sauna, bathhouse trend, is happening, in New York and London and probably other places right now.

Erum Yeah. Yeah. And I think that was like, it was a lot of Gen ZI was definitely, you know.

Erum On the older side of the people there. so I was like, okay. then there was like a grounding experience and there's this guy who guided us through a breath experience. and then there's music in there and like, the music was really loud, but maybe it was loud for me 'cause I'm [00:13:00] older and so I was just like, okay, all right.

Erum But I went and I'm glad I did.

Karl You did it.

Erum Congratulations. Thank you for Longevity Global and H Tech for inviting me. And, if you could just have had one person say, Hey, longevity global people we're on this side of the sauna, that would've been nice, but hey, whatever.

Erum We did it and it's done. I checked it off my list

Karl all, so that's awesome. Okay, so I'm gonna bring it back to biotech and how biotech impacts all industries. We've mentioned it a couple times before. the advanced Biotech for Sustainability report just dropped this week, and in that report which we were a part of, they validated 300 molecules, 40 chemical families, and came up with four priority targets, which are terpenes.

Karl Peptides, non catalytic proteins and hydroxy acids. And what makes this report different from other reports is that this is an industry led report. It prioritizes it names what needs to happen for [00:14:00] deployment to succeed. It unifies a sustainability in the commercial cases.

Karl It feels like this report is really timely, given geopolitics. there's a lot of uncertainty right now about oil supply and some companies are gonna be very adversely affected by this. So we will put the link to this report in the show notes. We want to have a lot of people read it and, would love to hear what you think about it.

Erum Yeah. Yeah. This was a, really great collaboration. It was good to see, how the sausage is made, and just the different organizations up and down the valley chain of Biomanufacturing. cradle was a part of it, who we had on the podcast.

Erum Arsenal, who's also on the podcast. they were also part of this L'Oreal, a bunch of organizations and one organization and person who's a part of this coalition and process is today's guest, Kevin Winger of lamont.

Karl we're very happy to have Kevin. Weger of La Lamond. He's a biotech r and d leader with 30 years experience and has brought [00:15:00] innovative microbes and enzymes from concept to market. He's currently VP of research and development in Lale

Karl before Kevin was at Lale Mon, he worked at Musoma and Novazymes, which is now Novasis. And, uh, he's very passionate about, fostering collaborations, coaching technical leaders. He was one of the people that was really instrumental in the drafting of this report.

Karl And I met him in Paris, as the report. Experts got together and we had a good conversation there. I thought he would be a perfect person for the Grow Everything audience.

Erum Awesome. So let's talk to Kevin Wenger of Lallemand.

Karl Kevin Weger of Lallemand, we are so happy to have you on the Grow Everything Podcast.

Karl Great to be here. Thanks Roman Carl for inviting me to this podcast. Let's get some background on you and Lallemand. You have a career that spans, enzyme research and [00:16:00] development at novazymes to leading technology development at a company called Mes Scoma, which we wanna talk about.

Karl And now you're really involved in shaping strategy at Lallemand. What was it that made you interested in microbes and fermentation?

Kevin good question. Thank you for that. I came to this industry from a chemistry and chemical engineering background, kind of a traditional chemical engineering.

Kevin And, I always, thought, that, biotechnology would be interesting, but I didn't know much about it. Then when I went to grad school, I took a microbiology course, just basic microbiology. And, I really enjoyed that. I just loved learning about all the different microbes and the different techniques in microbiology and, so that sparked my interest and.

Kevin Also then I started brewing beer at home, and when I started brewing beer, then I was hooked.

Karl There you go. The gateway for many people to microbiology is beer or wine.

Kevin It's the gateway [00:17:00] to our industry, more or less. yeah, so it's a lot of fun and, from there I got just, did my PhD work in fermentation technology.

Kevin So, my interest, just continued to grow from there. A lot of fermentation, research. and, so after grad school ended up, going to Novazymes. and I was, at that time just very interested in fermentation. I was really a fermentation personthey were fermentation company.

Kevin So I said, okay, I'll go work there

Erum That's incredible. It's great that, again, beer is your gateway. That is how we describe what biomanufacturing and, fermentation. being one of those ways to bio manufacture. And thanks for sharing your early career. You enzymes, industrial biotech. and I hate to position it this way, but you've been at it for a while.

Erum So considering all the work you've done back in the day, what convinced you that microbes could be a major industrial platform?

Kevin Yeah. so like I said, I was [00:18:00] really working in fermentation, early in my career. I started working in the fermentation production area, large scale manufacturing of, these enzymes using different microorganisms.

Kevin And one of the things that I saw there, so at that time I was not. That, knowledgeable or skilled in strain engineering topics and genetic engineering bioengineering. So that was a big part of, the enzyme industry back then. But what I saw when I was working in the fermentation area was we had some examples of.

Kevin Let's say traditional enzyme manufacturing that was done not using biotechnology tools. And then we had examples of the same enzyme that was produced using biotechnology tools. and the enzymes that were produced using biotechnology were so much more productive. that I said, oh wow, there's really something [00:19:00] interesting to this technology here.

Kevin I could see that it was just so much more efficient. so that was really what spurred my interest in biotechnology more broadly speaking.

Karl And can you maybe talk a little bit about like some of the challenges that you faced in those early days when it came to. Large scale biomanufacturing, particularly when it came to, these enzyme production plants, you talked about how much more efficient it was, but what else was there that, made it a challenge or made it work?

Kevin Yeah, I, I mean, looking back it was, uh, quite a learning experience working in a full scale biomanufacturing facility, biomanufacturing. Sounds high tech, but it can also be kind of stinky and problematic and difficult at times. And, uh, so, we learned a lot about, what it takes to successfully do large scale fermentation.

Kevin fermentation is. Quite interesting in that [00:20:00] there's so many steps, that have to go right in order to have a successful fermentation. And when you do that at a large scale, you just sort of magnify the, risk of challenges, and all those steps and. so we had some interesting times, a lot of late night phone calls, with different, challenges and problems in the fermentation area, trying to fix those, because at the end of the day, it's a full scale running facility and, it needs to be making the product,

Kevin Reliably. So, yeah, it was a good experience. I would say the overall takeaway is It gave me a good understanding of what teamwork is required. To successfully do biomanufacturing because you have all these tanks with all of the valves leading into those tanks and all of the feedstocks coming into the plant.

Kevin And you have a lot of people, you have 30 or 40 people [00:21:00] running that plant, and everybody needs to be fully trained on, Running their part of the process and everybody needs to do every step exactly right in order for that fermentation to be successful. So it was a real good experience, not only in learning more about fermentation, but also learning the importance of teamwork and training, things like that.

Kevin Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible. 'cause I'm like thinking about. in fermentation you have, your microbe, hopefully just one microbe. And then, you know, obviously if some invaders come in, then you can get, the stinkiness happening and all the things could go wrong.

Erum You get contaminated. but then you also have all these people that need to be able to work together to produce a product. So it's just. this, analogy between, organizing the microbes and organizing people, to really make this work, which I I really appreciate that, perspective you just shared.

Erum So for listeners that are not familiar with lallemand could you tell us what the company produces and sells and who are the primary buyers?

Kevin just to sort of back up a little bit, [00:22:00] Lallemand is a privately held company. It's been around since the early 19 hundreds, and, the core of the company from the early days was Baker's yeast.

Kevin And baking ingredients. so, I'm sure most people are pretty familiar with Baker's yeast and what it does and how it's used, but. The company really grew from that, sort of core, business. And, today, the company, focuses primarily on microbes. So selling living microbes, to other businesses that use living microbes for different applications.

Kevin and also in addition to the living microbes, we sell a lot of, Products, um, like enzymes and nutrients and things like that, that are used in processes in conjunction with microbes. since the early days, We branched out from baking industry into brewing and [00:23:00] wine, sort of all the traditional yeast industries, biofuels, animal feed, plant care, things like that.

Kevin also human nutrition like for probiotics, a lot of different applications for microorganisms and anywhere that there's a. good application or a good business for microbes. We tried to be involved in that.

Karl Now let's, talk about, you had been at a company called MAs.

Karl Correct me if I'm wrong, was acquired by La Lamond and mus scma developed engineered use platforms like transfer, which produces enzymes during fermentation. It increases ethanol yields. What was the key idea that made that commercially viable in, how did that shift the economics and efficiency of byproducts?

Kevin so Mascoma was a biofuels company we were working on. Develop new technology for biofuels and the objective was really to expand the use of biofuels [00:24:00] using microbes and biotechnology. We moved into, the transfer product, type, kind of late in the stage of the company and one of the ideas there was, in addition to.

Kevin pushing new feedstocks for ethanol. we thought we could sort of improve the economy and the productivity of existing ethanol plants. And, the yeast that we developed was a yeast that, Ultimately improved the yield of ethanol. So the amount of ethanol that you get out per the amount of feedstock that you use, this yeast made a significant improvement to that yield.

Kevin And also, it provided enzymes. To break down the feedstock. So the ethanol producers would traditionally purchase enzymes and purchase yeast, and so we developed a yeast that [00:25:00] was, providing both the enzymes and the yeast and an improved ethanol yield. That was our main innovation.

Kevin I would say the thing that enabled that to work that was innovative and new was that we really focused on the industrial robust yeast host, rather than working with a laboratory strain of yeast. so we can dig into that a little bit more, but, Many people work with Croce SE VCA Baker's yeast in the lab.

Kevin but there's many, many, different strains of Sakas SE VCA that are used out there in the industry, and they all have their strengths and there's a tremendous genetic diversity even in that one organism in terms of its capability. So, I think the thing that we did that was unique and different was focusing on that, genetics around the ethanol industry and improving that [00:26:00] rather than starting from a lab strain.

Erum I mean, let's talk about that a little bit more then. Right. You we're talking about not using a yeast in the lab scale. You, engineered the yeast to operate on an industrial scale and that's not a straightforward thing. so can you tell us a little bit more about that? and maybe a moment where something didn't go according to plan, but with this new yeast, but then ultimately it led to better technology or insight.

Kevin Yeah, for sure. that was a brand new kind of product, for the industry at the time. And, for sure it was, not easy to convince the customers to transition from their kind of traditional yeast into this new kind of yeast. So, For sure we had a lot of, provingthat, that new engineered yeast in the industry.

Kevin I would say in, terms of specific challenges. One of the things that we found was when we went from, an initial [00:27:00] scale up. So we scaled up, and we introduced the product and everything went fine. but then when we went from a big scale to an even bigger scale, that was when we started to find some scale up challenges.

Kevin And, we started to find that the yeast strain that we had developed did not perform quite as well as what it did in the lab. And so then it was the challenge of figuring out, okay, what is the cause of that? Challenge. And, as you can imagine, when you scale up to very large scale, you know, a lot of things change.

Kevin You've got new substrates coming into play. You've got new manufacturing facilities coming into play. You think you're starting with the same strain of yeast, but suddenly it's behaving different when it comes out of the plant. And, we had to do a lot of, Investigative work to figure out, what that problem was.

Karl and just to keep on that, thread, when you were selling this new strain, could you not make the argument that it was gonna be cheaper because the clients didn't have to buy the [00:28:00] enzymes that they traditionally would buy?

Kevin Absolutely. That was a key part of the, selling process was to point to the value and say, okay, this new yeast is gonna make your product cheaper. It's gonna improve the productivity of your plant. That's the value that we're bringing. the one thing to keep in mind is that, it's relatively small, we're talking about, Up to 1%, improvement in the cost. which when you multiply it over billions and billions of gallons is a huge value. but it's still a relatively small improvement. So The yeast has to be performing very optimally in order to see that little 1% gain. and the plant has to be out running with it very optimally in order to get that value.

Kevin So it has to go out there and perform without any compromises, without any problems, in order for the customer to see that value. so. That was a very involved process to bring that product to market and to, do the trials at the [00:29:00] customers, to show them, that there's the value in the product.

Erum I have a quick follow up question too. you're mentioning, the challenges from going up to a large scale to an even larger scale. And that there's some problems that arose, but specifically what were those problems? Was it, something where. You had to rethink what the feed stock was or the bioreactor or all of those things.

Erum The timing did it have to be like right, rather than these larger tanks, we have to do, a lot of smaller tanks. We'll have to kind of get a little bit more idea because this is kind of the biggest question, right? I was like, how do you scale up bio manufacturer? So I'd love to hear a little bit more specifics around that.

Kevin Yeah, yeah. When you're faced with a problem like that, everybody, I immediately starts looking for a single smoking gun. Like, okay, there's one nutrient that's a problem, or there's one particular part of the process that's a problem. or it's, the genetics of the strain that you've constructed.

Kevin Does it somehow have some genetic elements that are, causing this problem? And, [00:30:00] uh, what we found in that case was. really a, combination of genetics and environment, that created an issue, for our product. And, we were able to by studying the genetics of our yeast very closely. Able to understand when the problem was occurring and so be able to monitor the problem, which is, the key at least to getting a handle on any problem is can you at least sort of see when the problem is happening?

Kevin so we were able to monitor that and, we also did find some nutritional things with the substrate that, again, we could not completely control, but at least have a handle on and be able to control enough to make a. reliable products. So yeah, it was about a solid year of a lot of lab investigations and troubleshooting, things like that till we got a complete handle on it.

Kevin And for sure over time as we've brought out, More improved versions of that product, we've been [00:31:00] able to address the genetic issues and, be able to avoid further problems like that. So it was, really related to the fact that that was a. First of a kind product that we had to go through all that.

Karl Yeah. I love that story because it touches on a bunch of things that we get to talk about here on Grow Everything. But one thing that stands out to me is the, fact that you can make a 1% improvement, which just multiplies as you go across a process. and in many cases that 1%. Improvement really can translate into, millions of dollars, downstream.

Karl LA Laman has worked on technologies that allow yeast to not only fer permit traditional sugars, but more complex ones from biomass like Xylose. How important is that kind of metabolic flexibility for the future of, Bioproducts and Biomanufacturing?

Kevin For sure. That's, extremely important. That's been a.

Kevin big part of our r and d efforts over the last, 15 years at [00:32:00] least. And, there's not so many applications of XYLOSE as a substrate today. but, I think that if the industry is gonna grow to the scale that we all envision that it can, we're gonna have limits on the feed stocks for the industry we probably won't be able to, displace petroleum and replace all chemical manufacturing using just glucose or sucrose, pure glucose, pure sucrose as, the feedstocks for fermentation. So we need to basically expand the range of sugars and, feedstock inputs that, that we can use for biomanufacturing. So things like xylose and other biomass derived sugars are gonna be an important.

Kevin part of the mix in the future for sure.

Erum so over the years you've watched industrial fermentation expand from fuels into food materials and specialty ingredients. So from your vantage point, how has the role of [00:33:00] microbes in manufacturing evolved?

Erum No pun intended.

Kevin Yes. so many things are starting to happen. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, scientists, businesses are starting to recognize the potential, for microbial products. And, you just see so many things coming out now, you know, the out mycelium based materials and, fermented proteins and, things like that.

Kevin It's just amazing, that the array of products that people are, are working on. and some, will succeed, some will fail, but, everybody's trying a lot of different things right now.

Karl Kevin, you had mentioned that, you know, Lamond has this long history start off in yeast and, fermentation across industries, baking, brewing, and today, selling microbes to different industries.

Karl But thinking about the legacy of the company, how does that shape the way the team today approaches innovation?

Kevin [00:34:00] It's a great question. you know, I think the fun thing to see is that. Whenever people talk about new biotechnology applications, they always refer back to these traditional fermentation applications.

Kevin People always say, oh yeah, you can make this new product like we've always made beer or like we've always made yogurt And that's all true, but it's true that those legacy applications are still happening too, and are big businesses and, and growing areas. And so I look at the traditional industries as a fantastic starting point.

Kevin these are places where we know microbes are doing an important job today in important products. And what can we do to. Bring more science to the knowhow because a lot of the traditional applications have just evolved over time as people do trial and error, and they find these different, fermentation applications.

Kevin but what can we do to bring more science to it and what can we do [00:35:00] to improve those microorganisms, and expand the, use of those products? One example is we made the sour VCA yeast for making sour beer. So, that's, uh, a new innovation that we brought to the table also relatively recently.

Kevin it's a single yeast that enables you to make a sour beer. Instead of doing two fermentations, a beer fermentation and a sour beer fermentation, you can do it all in one fermentation using one yeast.

Erum the Brooklyn Craft Brewers, thank you for that. Sour Beers is so popular here.

Karl Yeah, I think they do s what is it? Sour Beer Month or Sour beer Week. Some of the bars do, um, I think September, late September, October is, a lot of the bars doing craft beer feature the sour beers.

Kevin Yeah, It's one of those things, you either love it or you hate it.

Kevin some people taste a sour beer and they don't want to have anything to do with it again, and other people love it. It's funny how people react to it.

Karl Yeah, I'm, I love [00:36:00] it. Yeah. Yeah.

Erum I think it depends on like the flavor profiles of course. And like some brands can do it well, others, not so much.

Erum Right. So it's always. About the flavor profile. And I think, if you get introduced to the right one, then you're just like, okay, I'm a fan. Otherwise, it's like, hmm, stay away. but I think that's the beauty of microbes, right? and obviously there's a lot of other factors, you know, when think of the feedstock and, process.

Erum But, that's the beauty of fermentation, right? To be able to control or work with not control. Work with the microbes to be able to impart flavor and mouthfeel and all the things that, we love with fermented drinks and food.

Kevin Yeah, that's right. And one of the challenges of the traditional sour beer has been, it's kind of been a natural fermentation sometimes, which is hard to control.

Kevin And so then you can get this sort of. Yeah, veering into weird flavors. and that was one of the things that we thought would be, interesting, for [00:37:00] people to use the sour vca is that'd be a lot more controllable, easy to control, rather than doing a. A wild or a bacterial fermentation.

Erum And speaking of wild microbes, we were talking earlier that, Congress just passed the America's Living Library Act of 2026. And what this would do would be to direct the government to sequence and catalog the genomic data of microbes, fungi, and plants and animals across US public lands and.

Erum They wanna take that data and make it AI ready and publicly accessible. So for a company like Laman, which has spent so many years curating and working with microbial cultures, what does a move like This mean? Does a public genomic library of America's wild microbes change what's possible for fermentation and making different bio products, and does it feel like government is finally catching up to what the industry has known for a very long time?

Kevin I heard about this act just recently and that sounds [00:38:00] very interesting. I think, it's gonna be important. The accessing of genomic information is really key to our r and d process at Lamont for sure. we've been over the years curating physical samples of different microbes and using that as a

Kevin data storage, a data warehouse for, biological information. But increasingly we also use, genomic information from databases to, kind of initiate and work in the r and d process. So. It sounds exciting, what's being proposed, basically because it'll increase the amount of genomic information that's out there.

Kevin And, there's al already a lot of genomic information available to our scientists. But the more genomic information that can be put out there, it'll definitely advance scientific process over time. It sounds very interesting. I think, the Human Genome Project was [00:39:00] sponsored by the government, in some way also.

Kevin And, this seems analogous to that. and it's create seems to have a potential to advance the science in our area quite a bit.

Erum Yeah. And you know, one of the things that's really interesting and is that, There's trillions of microbes in the world that's what's proposed, right?

Erum The people have done modeling and suspect that that's the number of different species, which I know species is also a very interesting categorizing for microbes. 'cause microbes evolve very quickly and change very quickly. But, you know, some. Friends of ours, ginger Dozier, Mike Dozier, bio Mason had been looking at this, very closely in terms of what does that micro verse look like?

Erum And from their efforts, they looked at all these databases and it's really like 0.0001% of microbes have been, studied and not, you know, not even to talk about their genomic data sets being, Extracted or, defined or used. So there's a lot out there and I always wonder, you know, what's [00:40:00] that new wild microbe that can make that new wild beer or drink or something that we're like, oh my gosh, this beer tastes like roses.

Erum You know, like truly, without having to add roses or something, so. Unheard of. but we found it because it was in a geyser at Yellowstone Park Camp. It's like, what? So very exciting.

Kevin Yeah. It's truly stunning the amount of biological potential there is out there in the world. And. It does happen a lot.

Kevin And when we're thinking about new products, you think about the metabolic pathway that we could use to create that product. And we say, oh, wait, yes, we could do that, but there's this missing activity that doesn't seem to be present in any strain that we know about. And so let's go search for it. And that kind of information being further unlocked can lead to new products being made for bio manufacturing for sure.

Karl Yeah, it's super exciting. La Lamond has been fermenting with yeast, bacteria, you know, on this industrial [00:41:00] scale, and now you're sitting in a coalition with L'Oreal and Ionic trying to unlock commercial scale. Biomanufacturing, what's the through line for Lamond and why does this problem feel urgent to you personally?

Kevin We view Biomanufacturing as key, to our business, so for sure. Being able to bio manufacture large scale low cost microorganisms has been key, to the development of the Laman business so far. And we view that as being a core part of our business going forward. So, we kind of look at, anything that's being bio manufactured, we could play a role in that potentially.

Kevin we use the analogy of an iceberg quite a bit, when we say that our existing business and the business that we know about in biotechnology. industrial [00:42:00] biotechnology, being basically just the tip of the iceberg. So it's what we can see today, but we know that there's, 90%, still is under the water.

Kevin And, so we're out there, looking to explore, all the potential, that can be part of our future business.

Erum so you're saying, and we also know this and feel this very intimately from this podcast, is that there's a lot of opportunity out there and one of the, outputs of this coalition is a report called The Molecule Manifesto, which looks at four molecule families that they believe are ready to scale the priority molecule families that are ready to scale.

Erum What was Lale Man's read on those choices? Were there any surprises?

Kevin Yeah, first of all, it's, amazing that you can pull together like a group of experts from, all these different, big companies and startups and, people who are very knowledgeable in the industry without.

Kevin [00:43:00] Too much trouble come up with four priorities, out of all the possibilities that are out there in the world. So it's pretty amazing, from that point of view that, the team was able to agree so clearly on the different, molecules. I think what the coalition has come up with in terms of the four categories, if I could name them, maybe the terpenes, hydroxy acids, peptides.

Kevin Non catalytic proteins are the four key areas. And, I would say no, those are all good choices. no big surprises there for us. We're, we're present in, most of those areas, in one way or another. so we see those as, interesting areas for a laman as well. If I was gonna give a read on those things, I would say, our, focus as a company, where we think we can bring the most value is in more specialty products.

Kevin So products that have a unique activity, a [00:44:00] bioactivity. Things like that, that, are large scale, but not at the super large scale, not commodity products, commodity chemicals. So, from that point of view, I would say, probably Lallemand, little most more interested in the peptide area and maybe the terpenes things are things that are a little bit more specialty type.

Karl So, looking ahead 10 or 20 years, what advances in fermentation or synthetic biology do you think will most transform how we produce fuels, food ingredients, or chemicals?

Kevin That's a great question. 10 or 20 years is a long time. Things are changing really fast every day from what I see. are, technology for, engineering things, doing synthetic biology, moving DNA around making genetic modifications is pretty mature. What still needs to advance quite a bit is the basic knowledge of, the DNA code [00:45:00] and,

Kevin The, uh, metabolism that's happening, in all kinds of organisms. So I do believe that, you know, what will be more transformative is this idea of, having a digital twin of a cell, where all of the knowledge of. Metabolism in genes, is incorporated in a, high data based model that one can use to, make changes, in the model and understand what's going on, much more quickly and low cost, than doing trial and error in the lab.

Kevin so yeah, I think that will rapidly, Be deployed and, start to, increase the rate of innovation in the industry. And the, you know, what the industry really needs, I think is, you know. Lower product development cost, because if we want to bring out all these different molecules, the cost of development of each product and molecule has to be lower than it is today.

Kevin so [00:46:00] at the end of the day, if we can be able to develop these products quicker with a lower cost, that's gonna move things forward quite a bit.

Erum Yeah, well said. I mean, the digital twin, creating that cell, the simulations, doing things in silico. Very exciting stuff. again, we have people on the podcast that spoke to this, which is, you know, very upstream.

Erum But it's great to have someone that's really making the products that are near the la large scale tanks actually producing at scale. So I really wanna thank you for sharing your perspective. Appreciate that. Okay, so now we're at the part of the interview where we like to have a little fun, ask very, very friendly questions.

Erum we call it the quickfire round. So are you ready for this, All right, here we go. Here we go. Okay. one thing, microbes do better than humans.

Kevin So many things to choose from. At first, I was gonna say die, but that's not, very positive, but I, I'd say work together in harmony.

Karl what is a [00:47:00] fermentation superpower you wish that microbes had tomorrow?

Kevin I would say that we could do everything anaerobically doing anaerobic fermentation is so much easier.

Kevin and reduces your operational and capital costs by a huge amount. So anaerobic everything.

Erum Oh, love it. Anaerobic everything. sounds like a. book or we're gonna have to use that.

Kevin Everything is anaerobic. Yeah.

Erum Oh yeah. There we go. That's, that's your podcast. Yeah. Okay. one industrial process that biotechnology should replace next.

Kevin I keep thinking about water treatment. Like I know there's some, bio processes, but I think there seems to be just so much more huge potential both in wastewater and clean water or drinking water treatment, where biotechnology could be a lot more precise than it is today.

Karl What is the most underrated microorganism in biotech?

Kevin I think, you know what I'm gonna say on this one, it has to be Es Sarah, VCA, the champion, [00:48:00] the sugar loving beer yeast. It's so, so diverse and so capable in so many ways.

Karl Yeah. Aren't if they're like a yeast, database that's produced in Belgium given their tradition in, brewing.

Karl I'm sorry. I, I like, I know we're doing the quick fire, but I had to mention it.

Kevin Yeah. there's quite a few ones and it's when you overlay the genetics of the ones that are used in beer baking wine, it's just amazing what the diversity is out there that's humans have created over the years.

Kevin Amazing,

Erum Final one. If microbes could manufacture one impossible product tomorrow, what would you ask them for?

Kevin Really the single use plastics. And I think that's such a opportunity. We have polyethylene that just lasts forever. and we have paper that only lasts five minutes. We need to come up with a material that lasts the right amount of time.

Kevin And I think biotech has the. Untapped potential to do something there.

Karl That's so great. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for coming on [00:49:00] the Grow Everything podcast. This has been such a nice conversation. Really appreciate it.

Kevin Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. really, it's great to meet you guys and, you're doing such a great job talking to everybody in the industry.

Kevin Really enjoyed this.

Erum Awesome.

Karl All right, Carl, what'd you think of that episode?

Karl I mean, the great thing about Kevin, as so many people we talk to is it starts with beer. And I don't think [00:50:00] Kevin and I have had a beer together or the, you know, so when we get to see him, I really wanna drink a beer with Kevin.

Erum But what are you guys doing in Paris?

Erum We guys were drinking wine.

Karl We went out once and had wine the night before to kind of all get to know each other and had like an icebreaker. so there was. You know, bottles of red and white wine depending on what people ordered, which was very good. But being into beer and beer inspired fermentation and then moving to large scale industrial manufacturing and him tying that back to the work that microbes do, I think is super inspirational and I think something that people that listen to this podcast can really relate to.

Erum Yeah. And then just, it's so interesting because he's been a part of this world for. Many decades and he's seeing how the industry has evolved. he's seen it all. And I loved how he was talking about some of the challenges and like, it's not never just one thing. There's always multiple things that can happen.

Erum and there's a technical challenge, but then of course, you have [00:51:00] to, work as a team and you have to be able to work collaboratively to troubleshoot something together. And especially when it comes to things like straight engineering and, creating a scaled up fermentation, process.

Erum And so, It sounds like, he has a great team that's working with him to, scale up all sorts of things. I mean, it was great to hear about what Lale Man does and that they've been around for a very long time. and that they're, what? They're in Montreal. So that's also very interesting that they're, you know, our friends to the north.

Karl Global HQ in Montreal, but with offices all over the world and, I love that he said that they have like different yeast strains for beer. Again, going back to beer, but then he also talked about how they integrated specific enzymes into yeast to squeeze out a 1% gain, which really becomes something significant at that billion gallon scale.

Karl And I think it's something we talk about a fair amount, and we did during the interview, that people don't realize how much value you can [00:52:00] generate just by improving a strain's productivity by 1%. What it reminds me of is the. Episode we just had last week with Liz at Endo Lth talking about being able to get 10% more copper out of those heaps, you know, and that's a significant amount of copper.

Karl So Kevin also embodies that.

Erum Yeah. Yeah. And you talked about different types of feed stocks, primary, here in the US we have sugar from corn. And talked about more complex sugars like XOs. But then we talked a little bit about where we can get some more inspiration, especially with the new America's Living Library Act coming online.

Erum So we mentioned that and how that could provide more genomic resources to, when it comes to scaling biomanufacturing. Beyond just using glucose and sucrose, but maybe different microbes different plants to really create a whole new, biomanufacturing paradigm.

Erum think the close out talking about Kevin and what Lale Mon is doing.

Karl I think anybody that's in this industry has to be [00:53:00] very future focused. we all live with one foot in the future? you and I, we started off talking about the flux capacitor and we're definitely thinking several decades in the future. Like, what does Biomanufacturing look like in 2050?

Karl But Kevin mentioned it, he was talking about digital twins of cells. We don't have working digital models of cells yet, though it does seem like we're getting there very closely with ai. He talked about anaerobic everything, dreams and using microbes to rethink big systems like water treatment.

Karl And then, this idea of truly lifetime single use materials. That to me. again, reminded me of Julia Marsh. I feel like I'm, I'm going back with our old podcast episodes today, but, single use materials that really have the right kind of life cycle, as opposed to, I'm thinking about my AirPods because I'm gonna replace 'em.

Karl You know, I've been using my air. I've got two sets of AirPods. I've got like a drawer full of these. Plastic, electronics that no longer work, like shouldn't the lifecycle be built into [00:54:00] those so that they biodegrade at a certain point?

Erum Yeah, absolutely. I hope so. Come on, apple. If you're listening, Tim Cook, you know, I know you're a listener of this podcast.

Erum Let's get on that. But now what a great episode. I mean, I'm gonna, Keep an eye on La Laman. I'm so happy that Kevin Wenger were in his orbit and we loved speaking with him and continue to learn what's going on in the world of industrial biotech and biomanufacturing. So, very cool episode. Carl, we have some things going on.

Erum Yeah, so, we're going to be doing an event at DC Climate Week. we will provide the details on that in the next couple weeks, but, so on April 23rd, we're gonna take the Grow Everything Podcast down to Washington, DC for. DC Climate Week, we're gonna be doing an event called Grown Not drilled, biomanufacturing in the race to remake everything.

Karl Should be very exciting. We'll provide more details on that over the next couple of weeks. if you wanna [00:55:00] meet us at Symbio Beta, we're going to be there in San Jose at the beginning of may. Use promo code, grow everything for a discount. And thank you for tuning into the Grow Everything podcast. Find us on all streaming channels.

Karl People do text us questions, and we do answer. You can find all our contact information in the show notes. Subscribe to our substack and make sure you watch like and subscribe on YouTube.

Erum that's a pod. Bye. Let's grow.