180. Fungi in Full Color: Ricky Cassini Reimagines Dye at Michroma

Ricky [00:00:00] We might be eating printing ink when eating one of those packaged burgers.

Erum [00:00:00] Hey Karl, how's it going?

Karl [00:00:00] Things are going great, Erum. How about with you?

Erum [00:00:00] All good. Wow. I'm so excited to be here in our 180th episode of the Grow Everything Podcast, where we talk about biology as technology—and it’s coming for every single industry. What’s going on in your world? You’re taking a trip to Cali, I hear?

Karl [00:00:30] Yeah, so I’m going to California first to celebrate my father’s birthday. My father is turning 94—woo. He’s chugging along, very healthy. If I’m lucky and I’m as healthy as he is at that age, it would be quite amazing. So happy to celebrate my father Albert’s birthday on Friday, May 1st.

Erum [00:00:54] And then we’re going to the SynBioBeta conference—but we’ll be recording this before, so if you’re listening, we’ll have been at SynBioBeta.

Karl [00:01:00] So we are recording this in advance. But Erum, you also did something really interesting: you went to a tasting event. What did you go taste?

Erum [00:01:10] Yeah—yes. I’ve been getting invited to these tasting events by my network, and by coincidence I belong to this social club called the Montauk Club here in Park Slope. And they were like, “Hey, there’s a tasting event. Do you want to go?” And it was all sorts of beverages. It had obviously beer, wine, and spirits, but it had so many new categories because the world of beverage is just insane.

Erum [00:01:40] And I will have to say: the functional non-alc, zero-proof drinks were incredible. The flavors, the range—they had delicious non-alc spirits, wine, beer, and then functional drinks that you would just have in the evening, and the flavor combinations. The benefits, of course—I did feel really good afterwards.

Erum [00:01:59] And there’s just a lot of innovation. Then I think there’s of course a place for biotech to play a role there when it comes to producing these novel ingredients, right? If you want to scale up ashwagandha—I don’t even know what that looks like in terms of today’s standards—but can you produce that through fermentation? Probably. Of course. I mean, we talk about Grow Everything—you can grow ashwagandha perhaps through fermentation.

Karl [00:02:26] Absolutely. It’s a plant. Why not?

Erum [00:02:29] Why not? Yes. What’s that molecule? Across the board, it’s just such a good form factor—not only for unique ingredients, but you need to stay hydrated. You need to consume—if you’re not drinking enough water, but you’re drinking something, right? You’re drinking coffee, you’re drinking tea, you’re drinking something—and just to get nutrients in.

Erum [00:02:55] So from my days of working in digital health, a big thing is medication adherence and having this routine where you’re consuming nutrients regularly to support your health. Drinks are a great way to do that.

Karl [00:03:00] What was the drink that stood out for you? What was the one?

Erum [00:03:05] There’s a couple things I would say stood out for me. ’Cause the first one I tried was this spirits brand called Three Spirit. And they have functional spirits. The flavors were delicious and you can do so much with it.

Erum [00:03:22] You can just drink it straight or mix it with other drinks. The flavors were so rich, and you can add carbonated water to make it more of a drinkable drink. The term I heard is “crushable”—so to be able to crush a drink, I guess.

Erum [00:03:42] And then I would say there’s a company called The Zero Proof and they have many brands underneath them—lots you might be familiar with. But the brand that just swept was called Lapos. And Lapos has non-alcoholic, pre-made cocktails, aperitivos, and wines. And they taste so good.

Erum [00:04:05] And I was just like, “This is so fun.” Everyone there was very bright and nice, and I got everyone’s cards—so I’m like, “Okay, okay—beverage world. Thank you for showing me around,” and seeing what innovations are there to, I think, overall improve people’s quality of life. I mean, I think the zero-proof stuff was incredible.

Karl [00:04:30] Yeah. I had gone to a similar event many years ago where it was whiskey and cigars, and there was probably like 30 or 40 whiskey manufacturers, so I got to see and taste a bunch of whiskeys. That was super interesting.

Karl [00:04:48] But I will say, I have had some of these functional spirits, and I love ’em. I think they’re really great. Some of ’em make you feel a little bit euphoric without feeling high. I really like that. And I just love the idea of things that are much more functional and vitamin-rich, nutritional.

Karl [00:05:10] You mentioned ashwagandha. Why not? I mean, come on. I love the idea of drinking ashwagandha shots.

Erum [00:05:19] Yeah. Yeah. And lion’s mane is a big one. And there’s also non-alcoholic spirit shops. In our neighborhood, Karl, there’s a new one that popped up called Dry Humor.

Erum [00:05:31] And the one in my neighborhood’s called Minus Moonshine.

Karl [00:05:36] There’s a place up on Seventh Avenue near me that is the first non-alcoholic bar. But the first time I saw that was in Los Angeles, in Chinatown. And I’d gone to Chinatown because I wanted to visit these iconic punk clubs from a long time ago. Those are long gone, but one of them had been replaced by the first non-alcoholic bar, and that was like three or four years ago. So it’s a thing. It’s crazy.

Erum [00:06:10] Yeah, and there’s a bunch. I actually also met a founder who’s going to be opening up a non-alcoholic bar in Bushwick. It’s a trend. I’m really happy for this.

Erum [00:06:25] And also, of course, going to all of the cafes and bodegas around here, you start seeing different drinks show up on the shelves and by our office. I showed you this yesterday: there was this chlorophyll water, and it was this beautiful green color, and I’m like, “Is this gonna taste like grass?” Because I will drink that if it does taste like grass.

Erum [00:06:52] But it didn’t—it tastes like spearmint. It was so refreshing. And I’m sorry if people are salivating and getting really thirsty by this conversation. But it was just such a cool thing to experience, and I would love for more beverage people to come into the world of biotech and collaborate.

Karl [00:07:10] Yeah, let’s do it. So speaking of drinking—alcoholic and non-alcoholic—we are in full conference mode. As we mentioned earlier, we are recording this in advance of SynBioBeta, and so we’re gonna be wrapping up that conference in SynBioBeta 2026. We’re gonna have an episode specifically about that. I’m very excited to have gone—it’s kind of hard to talk about the future past.

Erum [00:07:36] That’s a mental exercise. So keep going, Karl.

Karl [00:07:41] We are looking forward very much to going out and seeing a lot of our friends, many of whom have been on the podcast. The two of us are moderating four panels between us. Erum, you’ve got a really special panel. Why don’t you talk about it?

Erum [00:08:02] So for my panel, it’s going to be about “artificial colors out,” and we’re going to have new colors. And we have some great innovators and those in CPG. So we have a person from Mars Snacking who’s going to be on the panel, who’s been looking at new alternatives and what that means for the world of snacking. It’s gonna be a great panel—definitely going to be talking about that in the recap.

Erum [00:08:30] Karl, what about you? You have three panels, so you’re gonna be very busy.

Karl [00:08:36] I think this might be my record for any conference, to moderate three panels. I feel very humbled and privileged to be able to do this. I’m gonna be running one panel on The Molecule Manifesto—the Advanced Biotech for Sustainability report that came out a couple of months ago and that we recommend that our listeners read. I’ll be moderating a panel on that report and its implications for the biotech industry and for industry in general.

Karl [00:09:08] I’m also moderating a panel on the use of engineered enzymes or designed enzymes, which is something we have talked about here on Grow Everything. Enzymes being the workhorses of the protein world—they do a lot of interesting chemistry, and being able to engineer them can make them more robust, can increase the applications that they’re found in. And I’m very excited for that one.

Karl [00:09:35] And then I’m also running a panel about the dark proteome. That’s probably the most scientifically dense panel I’m gonna run. For listeners who don’t know what the dark proteome is: the proteome happens to be all the proteins that cells produce at any given time. They’re not always producing the same proteins, but they are producing proteins all the time. The dark proteome is really all those proteins that are produced that we still don’t understand—and there’s tens of thousands of them.

Karl [00:10:10] Being able to understand what they are—the implications are profound both from a therapeutic and health point of view, but also from an AI/machine learning point of view. ’Cause biology has its own language and we try to shoehorn the language of computation into biology. So there’s a lot of opportunity there. I think I am gonna be running around a lot. Two of those panels happen one after the other, so it’s gonna be a fun time. I can’t wait to come back and talk about what that looks like.

Karl [00:10:45] Let’s get into the podcast, but before we do, tell us about our new communications partner.

Erum [00:10:52] Yeah, so after SynBioBeta is gonna wrap up, there’s still plenty of conferences happening in the world of biotech, and we want to welcome our new partners, World Bio Markets, who also have a series of conferences throughout the year called Bio Innovations in different parts of the world. We will talk about them some more at the end because they have shared a promo code to attend their conferences. So stay tuned for that towards the end of this episode.

Karl [00:11:25] Excellent. So today’s episode is with Ricky Cassini of Michroma. You might remember that Ricky was on the podcast at the end of 2025 as a winner for the Future is Fungi Awards. And he is another person who is talking about the use of bio dyes—dyes that are produced using bacteria/fungi—to dye food or to dye textiles. We’re excited to continue this series, and I think with that, let’s let Ricky take it away.

Ricky [00:12:05] Ricky Cassini, welcome back to the Grow Everything podcast. We’re so thrilled to have you come back.

Ricky [00:12:11] Thank you so much, guys. I had a lot of fun last time, so I’m happy to chat more.

Karl [00:12:18] Great. We hope we can get into more details than we did last time. So let me kick it off by saying: you brought us in that original episode into a world of 50,000-liter fungal biofactories. And you initially were a strategy consultant and a professor of logistics—but how did you end up running a bio pigment firm?

Karl [00:12:45] And then, for our listeners who don’t know: what’s the difference between a pigment and a dye?

Ricky [00:12:55] I never imagined that I would be running a biotech company, right? But I’m a super curious person. As you know, I come from the business side. I did a business administration degree. I always was interested in the food and ag sector because my dad is a farmer, so I grew up in corn fields, basically, in Argentina.

Ricky [00:13:25] And as I was finishing my business degree, I started getting into startups—everything related to tech sustainability. I became a consultant mainly, working for ag tech companies in Argentina, Mexico, the US, and also was a professor of operations at Austral University where I studied.

Ricky [00:13:55] And one day, there was a talk where scientists were pitching their science ideas, and the title was “How Biotech can Become a Business.”

Ricky [00:14:10] So I knew about the research. I had friends and close people that worked in the biotech sector, but the only thing I knew back then was that they did a lot of experiments that I didn’t understand anything about. It was too complex for me to understand, and I wanted to check what was the impact.

Ricky [00:14:35] And coming from the business side, many times the impact is making money, right? So that caught my attention. So I went there—Saturday at, I think, 7:00 AM. I didn’t have anything else to do. And I went there and met my co-founders. We started the company together.

Ricky [00:15:00] A few months after, they were pitching this idea—same idea: making food dyes using fungi. But they had a lot of trouble on how to make this idea become a real business and take the science out of the lab. And for me, that was my mission since the beginning.

Ricky [00:15:25] At the beginning I offered my pro bono hours as a consultant, trying to help them pitch the idea better, and then they invited me to join this project. We started the company together. The rest is history.

Ricky [00:15:47] But what got my attention—and really made me decide to quit my job at the university and quit my job at the consultancy—was that it could be a really scalable solution that could create a real impact, not only in terms of sustainability and health, but also making money in the meantime.

Ricky [00:16:15] In order to create a really scalable solution, you need to make money and make others make money out of it. And that’s the way to create impact, in my opinion.

Erum [00:16:28] Spoken like a true MBA—you gotta make money. You’re the CEO of business. Love that. That’s the reality.

Erum [00:16:40] And also, just really quick: you could have fooled me that you were not a biotech person—you were not a scientist. You did a great job of really bringing us down that path.

Erum [00:16:54] One of the things—and Karl, I mentioned this—was when we started looking into this world, we were getting a little confused about the difference between what a dye is and a pigment is. Can you share what the differences are?

Ricky [00:17:10] Definitely. A dye is a soluble color—so it’s like sugar in coffee. You dissolve it, right? And in pigment, you don’t dissolve it; it can’t be dissolved. These are very small particles that need to be dispersed—think more like cinnamon in a latte rather than sugar in a coffee.

Ricky [00:17:36] I’m talking about coffee—it’s still in the morning, so I guess that I need one more cup.

Erum [00:17:45] No, that’s great. Thank you so much for clarifying that.

Erum [00:17:55] When we last interviewed you, you had just won the Future is Fungi Award. Now it’s been a few months since you won that award—has that altered your company’s trajectory or opened new doors in the ecosystem? What has changed since then?

Ricky [00:18:15] It has been great to win the award. It gave us a lot of credibility because we went through due diligence with the biggest experts in the fungal world. So they validated our technology—what we are doing is real, the potential of the technology, the stage of the technology. In that way, it provided huge credibility for us.

Ricky [00:18:42] On the other side, it was visibility and networking. Winning the award made a lot of people know about us, recognize us, reach out. We even presented at Davos, which was a great opportunity. So all of that came from the Future is Fungi—of course, the investment as well.

Ricky [00:19:10] The Future is Fungi people—the group—is doing a great job and is rocking it, and they are becoming the number one organization in the fungal world.

Karl [00:19:28] One of the things that you’ve spoken about is the so-called food contradiction: everybody wants to eat healthy, but we’re eating tons of petrochemicals. In your view, is the slow adoption of bio-based colors a failure of the science, or is it a failure of creating ecosystems or supply chains with buyers that support that science?

Ricky [00:19:58] I’m wondering if we should consider “bio-based” also the current natural from plants—plants, insects, right? If we do consider that, they are quite successful in terms of revenue: 60% of the food dye market is natural overall. The other 30–40% is synthetic/artificial, and the main reason is not because of the volume or tons—it’s the dollar value—because natural dyes are really expensive, and the synthetic ones are really cheap and are widely used.

Ricky [00:20:35] And there are some challenges in the current natural industry because natural dyes are quite unstable. They are very expensive. Supply chain–wise, they are a nightmare. We can dig into what’s the supply chain of, for example, insects that grow in Peru in a small desert—it’s very hard to produce them. It depends on climate conditions. So it’s really a nightmare.

Ricky [00:21:08] And not taking into account sustainability: we might think that petrol-based dyes are really bad in terms of health—and there are many concerns related to those—but in terms of sustainability, they are better than current natural options, because they are super efficient in terms of the resources used to produce them.

Ricky [00:21:35] Natural dyes require a lot of water, land, pesticides, and the efficiency of production is really low. We need to produce tons and tons of beets in order to produce some grams of color.

Ricky [00:22:02] Because of all of that, there are many challenges, and CPG companies don’t buy natural only—they also want reliability in the supply chain.

Ricky [00:22:16] What is good about fermentation and what we are doing is that fermentation becomes more like manufacturing rather than farming. It’s a really cool advantage of this technology, and I believe it’s the future of ingredient production—especially high-value ingredient production like colors, flavors, fragrances, and more.

Erum [00:22:46] I really love that perspective of farming versus manufacturing.

Erum [00:22:55] Another reason why we wanted to have you back on: there are a lot of regulatory tailwinds for you—synthetic dyes are being legislated out of existence, and there’s a push this year, next year. Natural dyes are expensive, but beyond cost, what are the gaps that have prevented plant-based alternatives like beet root from winning? How has the shifting regulatory landscape accelerated your timeline too?

Ricky [00:23:25] Beets have done quite well and are probably the most used natural botanical colorant. But it has some problems as well. It’s around 80 times more expensive than synthetic dyes, and that’s not taking into account thermal stability—because if you try to make a red velvet cake with beet root juice, it fades away because it’s not thermally stable.

Ricky [00:23:55] pH stability is also a challenge, and supply chain reliability. Those are the biggest challenges with these plant-based options. Some of them also have a vegetable flavor to it because they come from plants.

Ricky [00:24:15] Then other solutions like insect-based ones—besides the challenges in terms of supply chain—also have religious issues: they are not kosher, halal, or even vegan/vegetarian. So they have other limitations as well.

Erum [00:24:40] I hear you about the thermal stability. It was my son’s birthday last week, and I definitely do not want to use synthetic dyes for his cake and all the kids that were there. He really wanted a rainbow cake because he’d seen it at someone else’s birthday, and in that birthday they used synthetic dyes and it was like—this is not natural.

Erum [00:25:10] So I basically told him, like, we can’t do that. But what we could do is create a funfetti cake. I bought these naturally colored sprinkles and I put it into the batter, and he helped me. We baked the cakes, we frosted it, and we also used dye for the frosting.

Erum [00:25:36] And when it was time for the birthday and we cut through it, there was no color in it. It was such a disappointment to him because he had this vision, and I made this promise, and he put the sprinkles, and he’s like, “What happened to the color?” So—womp. But that’s a real story for you.

Ricky [00:26:05] That’s sad. Yeah, that happens, sadly. I hope to send you a package of Michroma’s color as soon as we get approval.

Karl [00:26:18] Yay. Yeah, I would love that.

Karl [00:26:24] You talked a little bit about price, and I want to ask a price question because we know big CPG companies are pretty secretive about ingredient prices—even when you’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement with them. But when you were first starting out, you could go on Alibaba and order food-grade dyes, and the prices are all over the place: $12 to like $40 a kilo, $130 to $160 a kilo. Looking at that, was there a moment where you feared that those kinds of prices would make the math for you impossible?

Ricky [00:27:05] It is very interesting, and it’s a great question because it’s very complex to understand this industry. You have to talk about what’s called “cost in use,” right? It can be very cheap per kilo, but it can be very expensive for the application or for the final cost.

Ricky [00:27:30] Like Erum’s case—she applied some, I don’t know, maybe beet/radish color to the cake, but she would have to add it like maybe 100 times more for the color to stay red.

Ricky [00:27:46] This is very similar to the paint industry. You can buy cheap paint and you can do like five layers and maybe still show the color behind. Or you can buy a very expensive one and maybe with one layer it’s fine. In this case, it happens the same with colors.

Ricky [00:28:10] Every color molecule’s concentration would change from one product to the other, so there is a lot of confusion. And I think it partly comes—intentionally—from ingredient companies also, because they try to differentiate their product from their competitors’ product.

Ricky [00:28:35] Everyone is saying “luteins,” “beet root,” but they want to differentiate it somehow. And if they are diluting a little bit their color with maltodextrin, for example, maybe they can sell it cheaper. And if they can sell it cheaper—at least per kilo—maybe a user will think, “Oh, this is cheaper per kilo, I’m going to use this,” but in terms of inclusion, it will have to be higher.

Ricky [00:29:05] So it’s very important to compare apples to apples. In reality, synthetic dyes are really cheap, but natural dyes are really high-value pigments/colors.

Ricky [00:29:23] Especially the ones that we are producing: for example, when we compare our colorants to the ones coming from the botanical industries like beet root, ours has 58 times more coloring power and also more pH/thermal stability. So it doesn’t fade away, and you don’t have to compensate for that.

Ricky [00:29:50] So our colors have a much higher coloring power. They can be sold for a much higher price per kilo, but the cost in use—the final cost for the CPG company—will be the same or lower.

Ricky [00:30:15] And yeah, answering your question: the fear was real when I didn’t understand anything about this industry. It was quite hard to see the prices of Alibaba and then see the cost of production at industrial scale using huge facilities to produce these type of products. But we do have an advantage on these specialty ingredients—especially on the natural side—that are really, really high value. And I think they are the future of fermentation because of that.

Erum [00:30:48] That’s really fascinating. And of course, you learn more as you talk to your customers.

Erum [00:30:58] We want to know: what colors are you starting out with? Are they similar to the synthetic—are they more vibrant perhaps? What is the color spectrum that you can make? Are they primary colors? Can you create mixed colors? And can you make black and white?

Ricky [00:31:25] We started with red. Red is the most used color in the food industry—about 40% of the food dyes industry is red. And the natural solutions have many problems: betalains (beet root, radish), carmine—they have problems in terms of performance, supply, and cost. So that was the sweet spot for us—where to start.

Ricky [00:31:55] But we can also produce yellow and orange. That’s about 80% of the food dyes industry. Most of the food we eat looks warm, and that’s why we add these warm-looking colors.

Ricky [00:32:15] The rest: we also have other colors like blue, magenta, but they are more on the proof-of-concept stage, and we haven’t dedicated a lot of resources because how small is the market on that side?

Ricky [00:32:33] And regarding white and black: black, we haven’t produced it so far—it’s not on our pipeline yet. I know there are some solutions like charcoal, or ink from squid.

Ricky [00:32:50] But we do produce white. It was part of our objective to replace titanium dioxide. Titanium dioxide—it’s not a synthetic dye, it’s not artificial—it’s a mineral dye. It has been prohibited in Europe and it’s also being reviewed by the FDA. There are several states also in the US that are trying to prohibit (or have prohibited) titanium dioxide. So we see that as an important replacement in the pipeline. We are quite advanced on that.

Karl [00:33:25] Can you describe what those performance pains are? You talked about thermal stability—I would think that would be one, but are there others?

Ricky [00:33:40] Thermal stability is one because food goes through processes—cooking, baking, caramelization, extrusion. Extrusion requires a really high temperature for a short period of time, and that’s for cereal, for example, or pet food. So being thermally stable is very important when talking about food applications.

Ricky [00:34:10] Another aspect that is very important is pH stability. Food is very diverse: you have some sodas that are between 2.5–3 pH, some others like yogurts that are between five and seven, depending on the yogurt, and some others that are on the higher end—maybe eight. And some vegan products go up to nine in their production process.

Ricky [00:34:40] So you need a color that is still red across the whole pH spectrum. With betalains or anthocyanins, the color changes—it turns more purple or more yellowish—which is a problem.

Ricky [00:35:00] Other aspects that are important are coloring power (related to cost), light stability, and flavor/odor—whether you are adding flavor or not. Those are important factors when it’s a food product because you consume it.

Ricky [00:35:25] And then I would say it’s more on the labeling side and supply.

Karl [00:35:40] Synthetic dyes are labeled by color/number—Red Dye 3, Yellow 4—and natural dyes are called things like beet root extract or turmeric for color. How does your bio pigment show up on a product label?

Ricky [00:36:02] In the US, you have the certified colors that are synthetic-based dyes—Red 3, Yellow 5—all those. Those are being phased out.

Ricky [00:36:18] For companies like us using novel natural solutions: they’re not only phasing out synthetic dyes, but they’re also accelerating the approval of novel dyes. They have approved around four new dye applications in the last year, which is great, and they’re going to use AI now to review applications, which is very exciting.

Ricky [00:36:44] In terms of labeling: we are not in the batch-certified colors, so we avoid those labelings. We fall into the same category as beet root, radish, carmine, and all the natural solutions. The labeling really depends on the FDA approval and the specific use, but it has to be understandable for the consumer. It will be a similar idea to beet root extract—but from fungi, basically.

Erum [00:37:20] Interesting—because this is like a new class of colors, so they have to come up with the name.

Karl [00:37:27] For cosmetics, they already have INCI, and it can be a very long ingredient name on a label. Will it be something closer to that?

Ricky [00:37:40] Hopefully we’ll have a labeling that’s attractive for the consumer, but still resembles where it’s coming from. According to our consultants, we can work a name that is both attractive and doesn’t have to be super long or complex, and resembles the source of the ingredient—that it will be fungi or mushrooms. The decision will come from the FDA. We will work with them, and as we are going through the regulatory process, we are also working with CPGs to come up with the best name that still fits the regulations and the aim that the FDA has in terms of naming for novel products.

Erum [00:38:25] And Karl, just to clarify on the INCI thing: that long INCI label that has to have the organism name in it is if there isn’t a high purity from the process. So if it’s super pure, then they don’t need to have that long name—it could just be the name of the actual end product.

Karl [00:38:45] Yeah. And I think it’s above 80 or 90% purity.

Erum [00:38:55] Next question is probably a tough one to answer, but I’m gonna ask it anyway: which food category are you targeting first and why?

Ricky [00:39:10] As I mentioned before, pH stability and thermal stability are very important aspects when talking about food applications. In our case, our colorant is novel—it’s not like beets, it’s not like radish or carmine—and it does have better pH and thermal stability. So we can apply to a wide diversity of food applications: dairy products because we can go through pasteurization without any problems; meat; bakery; and even snacks, because of the thermal stability.

Ricky [00:39:45] And then we could expand beyond human food applications to also pet food, for example, or pills/vitamins in the pharma industry that are also colored by synthetic dyes these days. Producing an ingredient is quite cool because you can apply to a wide diversity of industries—it’s kind of unlimited what you can do with these type of products.

Erum [00:40:20] Is there a place where you’re doing a go-to-market—are you going to start with yogurts? Are you approaching those companies, or is it more that you’re working with a distribution company and it’s up to them where they’re selling?

Ricky [00:40:40] We start where stability is the bottleneck. We know there are other solutions from nature, but they have those problems. So we start where that stability is a problem, and we will work with ingredient companies to distribute this product.

Ricky [00:41:00] And in some way, we won’t know where it’s going to be applied, because we will sell it as an ingredient and they could use it for different applications that we don’t control. That’s the beauty of the product: it has such a great performance that the viable applications are quite diverse.

Karl [00:41:25] When we talked to you last time, you mentioned interest from the aquaculture industry specifically for coloring salmon. Now that you’re in this scaling phase, what’s the most surprising industry that has reached out to Michroma?

Ricky [00:41:40] I have another cool example. It might be even weirder than the salmon industry: the packaging industry—especially the packaging of burgers. I won’t name the brand, but the cardboard package that famous burgers come in—they use printing ink, right? And that printing ink leaks into the food product, and that has happened many times.

Ricky [00:42:10] So they were looking for natural solutions for that leak, or to be less concerning for customers.

Erum [00:42:25] In our previous conversation, you mentioned you started partnering with organizations—specifically CJ, which is the global fermentation giant. How has that been going? Was this always your intention to partner with fermentation companies versus building your own tanks?

Ricky [00:42:50] I never understood how companies could raise hundreds of millions of dollars to build plants without validated demand. That surprised me when I entered the venture capital world.

Ricky [00:43:10] I always kind of rejected it also for our company. We partner with CJ to create the biggest impact possible all around the world, scale up fast, and be lean in terms of CapEx.

Ricky [00:43:28] We know at some point in the future it might make sense for us to build our own plant, but after demand is proven and we can take debt to do it. It doesn’t make sense for us to take that risk when there are wonderful partners like CJ that can produce the product for us. So we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We can scale up with them.

Ricky [00:43:55] Partnership is time compression for a startup, which is highly important. We don’t want to reinvent manufacturing if someone else has already done it and it’s world-class. So we can work with them and scale up with great partners like CJ.

Karl [00:44:20] As you produce more and the stakes get higher, what do you think is going to be the biggest pressure on Michroma? Will it be logistics, feedstock, transparency of the food value chain, or expectations of the CPG industry?

Ricky [00:44:40] I believe the biggest pressure is time and capital. We know we can unlock all those challenges—fermentation has a lot of advantages. Our processes at industrial scale—we have made a lot of progress optimizing that process at that scale. We know it works. We know it’s profitable.

Ricky [00:45:10] But we still have the regulatory bottleneck, and that will take time and money. Novel ingredients don’t move at SaaS speed. You have to prove performance, scaling, manufacturing partnership, de-risking, regulatory, quality documentation—a lot of progress that you need to make in order to take this to market.

Ricky [00:45:38] But if we are successful, and we have the time and resources, then the potential is really high. But the path is long for biotech startups and for investors. It’s something that you need to choose—you like it or you hate it—but it’s long-term.

Erum [00:46:05] Visioneering question: what does the future look like five to 10 years from now? Michroma has succeeded—tell us what you can imagine the future being with the products you’re putting out into the world.

Ricky [00:46:20] I think you will still see bright colors in the aisles, but they will come from microbes—they will come from fungi—because it will be a much more reliable way, a scalable way, more cost-efficient, more sustainable way of producing food dyes with better performance. And it fits where the market is going, where regulations are going, and what the consumer wants.

Ricky [00:46:50] But I think we are not going to change what people want to eat—we are changing how the ingredients are made. So the aisle itself doesn’t look futuristic; the supply chain does, which is replacing agriculture with fermentation plants.

Karl [00:47:20] We’re gonna move into the quickfire round, Ricky. I’ll kick it off: if you could brew a food-grade color that doesn’t exist in nature, what would it be?

Ricky [00:47:32] A food-grade fluorescent pigment. I would love to have something fluorescent that is still healthy and it is not synthetic.

Erum [00:47:45] What is one old-world supply chain trick that you learned from your days as a logistics professor that has saved Michroma?

Ricky [00:47:55] If I have to say one word, it’s Gantt.

Erum [00:48:00] What’s that?

Ricky [00:48:03] Microsoft Project and Gantt—for project management.

Karl [00:48:08] Gantt charts.

Erum [00:48:12] Oh my gosh. That’s spoken like a true consultant.

Karl [00:48:20] What’s the biggest reason food companies are still afraid of the word GMO?

Ricky [00:48:27] Lack of marketing.

Erum [00:48:31] Oh, I agree with that.

Karl [00:48:34] Yeah, a hundred percent.

Erum [00:48:40] Ricky, thank you so much for joining us again on the Grow Everything podcast. It’s so exciting what you’re doing. It’s absolutely needed, and it’s going to be necessary this year and next year—we have to transition out of synthetic dyes and use more natural dyes. I cannot wait to try them. Once you get up and running and sending samples, I’ll be waiting by my mailbox for that.

Erum [00:49:10] We’re gonna have you back on as things progress for you and you get more colors and continue to change the world. So thank you so much for joining us.

Karl [00:49:25] Thank you, Ricky.

Ricky [00:49:28] Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I would love to be here again at some point in the future, and I will definitely send a box of our colorant as soon as we get approval for your next kid’s birthday.

Karl [00:49:50] Erum, what did you think of that episode?

Erum [00:49:55] I loved it. It was great to reconnect with Ricky and see the progress that he’s made since we first talked to him after he won the Future is Fungi Award. I learned a lot from him. We talked to him off the record as well, and just how he’s navigating this world of food dyes, which is complex—on the regulatory side, on the tech side, on the consumer side. And he’s navigating it beautifully.

Erum [00:50:30] I give Ricky a lot of credit because his background isn’t in the deep biotech sciences, right? He came from the world of strategy and logistics, but by all intents and purposes, he speaks like someone who really gets biomanufacturing—as if he was a scientist.

Erum [00:50:55] And he’s consistently framed Michroma from day one as a company that is focused on scaling, getting the margins correct, and looking for real market adoption—not just technical novelty. Ricky is on the case, and I’m so excited to continue speaking with him and also share the recap from our conversation at SynBioBeta.

Karl [00:51:25] One of the things that Ricky brought up that I think we’ve talked about a lot is this idea of natural versus synthetic. Things are not as simple as that. Natural gets a lot of play, but what really is natural? It’s complicated. We’d like it to be simpler.

Karl [00:51:48] But today, many of the natural colors in the market are produced from plant sources, and that’s not really sustainable. We need the land to grow food, and we need land that we can just let nature have some space. So I’m glad that Ricky brought that up as well.

Erum [00:52:12] And it’s not just about sustainability—although that’s a great box to check off. This is also about performance. Those natural colors that are made from plant extracts don’t necessarily perform well.

Erum [00:52:30] He talked about pH stability, thermal stability, coloring power, vibrancy, flavor neutrality—all the things that are challenging for natural dyes to achieve, but that bio-made, bio-manufactured, fermented via fungi or via bacteria can produce those performance characteristics. And product/market fit—performance—always trumps sustainability. But if you can do it all, which oftentimes biology can, then we win.

Karl [00:53:05] Going back to what I was saying about farming for colors: one of the things that people don’t get about precision fermentation is it really allows you to scale up the specific product that you need—you don’t need to grow a whole plant.

Karl [00:53:23] With Ricky and what they’re doing at Michroma, they’re using red. They’re creating a red, which is a color that has a lot of major pain points. We’re seeing that Red Dye 40 is being banned by the end of 2026. Food manufacturers have to look for new alternatives that are not synthetic, and so red is an obvious color to start with. Being able to put that into a supply chain that is fermentation-based means that it’s gonna be much more available than depending on plants.

Erum [00:53:55] This is not just about removing bad ingredients—it’s about building better-performing, scalable, economically viable ingredients that companies actually can adopt and consumers want. Great conversation to continue our bio dye series, and we have new guests coming up.

Erum [00:54:15] Our next conversation as part of the bio dye series is with Gar Berg of Chronologic. So stay tuned as we continue going down this rabbit hole of colors.

Karl [00:54:30] As we sign out: we are going to have a SynBioBeta recap episode coming on. If you want to hear about the latest deals, innovations, and even microbes or manufacturing plants that are coming online, stay tuned for that.

Karl [00:54:52] After that, we are going to be doing a live podcast at New York Tech Week, where we’re gonna be talking with Robling about AI-powered engineering from scratch. That’s gonna be a live demo, and we’ll put the link to that demo in the show notes.

Karl [00:55:15] We’re also in the process of planning a live fundraiser at Genspace, a community lab where Erum and I met several years ago. That’s a beachhead for teaching people about biotechnology at the community level—a really important place and a nonprofit that we support actively.

Erum [00:55:45] And also, as we mentioned at the top of this episode, we wanted to welcome World Bio Markets as a partner of ours. We’re very excited to be working with them because World Bio Markets is focused on creating commercial connections and partnerships to advance industrial biomanufacturing.

Erum [00:56:10] We are going to be going to the conference happening in September in Omaha, Nebraska, but they do have one coming up in The Hague in the Netherlands in June. If you want to attend the one in Europe in The Hague or come meet us in Omaha, you are welcome to attend.

Erum [00:56:34] World Bio Markets was generous enough to create a promo code for our listeners. The promo code is Grow Everything, and you’ll get 25% off. So that’s very generous, and we’re very excited to be able to offer that to our listeners.

Erum [00:56:55] Best thing to do: if you’re interested in the space, come learn about it. Talk to people that are building the new bioeconomy. If you do have a company or a business in the space, there’s no better way to create commercial activity and partnerships than meeting people in person at these types of conferences.

Karl [00:57:25] All right. Thank you for tuning into the Grow Everything podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out. We do respond, and we love when our listeners ask us questions or comment on our episodes. Our contact information is in the show notes.

Karl [00:57:48] And don’t forget to subscribe and like our Substack. Let’s grow.

Erum [00:57:55] Let’s grow.