181. Can Hue Believe It? Gerit Tolborg’s Quest for Pure Color at Chromologics

Gerit [00:00:00] So you have to picture a bucket with water, you put it in the fungi, you stir, and then the water turns to wine from a color perspective.

Karl Hey, Erum, what's going on?

Erum Hey, Karl. Everything's going on. Wow, we came back from SynBio Beta, which has been a whirlwind, and we could talk more about that in our recap episode next week, but I'm still reeling from it. How are you doing?

Karl Well, as you can see above me, there's a SynBio Beta award hanging off the shelf. And we'll talk about it more in our SynBio Beta recap episode. But for new listeners, this is the Grow Everything podcast, where we talk about biology as technology. Erum, you came back from SynBio Beta, but what happened? You got hit by a truck.

Erum Yeah. Yeah.

Erum Not literally, but figuratively in terms of microbes or viruses. I might be sounding a little nasally, but I think between [00:01:00] traveling across the country and maybe not getting enough sleep, I'm okay. I'm excited to be recording with you, and we have so much to talk about. There's been a lot of interesting news. Should we get started?

Karl Yeah. Let's start off with some science news. I chose this particular item because it reminded me of you, and there was news that a new exoplanet was discovered that is molten sulfur with a vast magma ocean. And all the headlines said, "This planet is gonna smell like rotten eggs." But I thought you might be interested because what are the implications for life? What is life like on a sulfur planet?

Erum Well, definitely extremophiles. Venus is also a sulfur-rich planet too, and that's just our neighbor planet. I think this is cool: of course, exoplanets, hello. We know that there's plenty out there to view and see, but they're so far away. I think taking a look at our neighbor planet a bit more closely can unlock a lot of science. It's just, [00:02:00] you don't really hear much about Venus. You hear a lot about Mars, and maybe that's because there's more room for colonizing Mars or inhabiting Mars, but I think Venus needs a little bit more love. I mean, men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Maybe that's why women are always so underrepresented. That's why we're not going to Venus.

Karl That could be it, but it also could be Venus' atmosphere, which is incredibly dense. Doesn't it rain metal there?

Karl I'm pretty sure that a Russian probe was sent to Venus, and when it went into the atmosphere—maybe it landed—and it was destroyed by the atmosphere within minutes. So I think it's very inhospitable to any kind of life, or even to metal tools.

Erum With today's science in materials, we could probably create something that can withstand—was it Vesuvian? The Vesuvian, yeah. The Vesu—the Vesuvian atmosphere. So I think we should take another shot. There's a moon shot, Mars shot, Venus shot. Let's go.

Karl Yeah. So I just looked it up because I wanted to confirm, and the pressure on Venus is equivalent to being about 900 to 1,000 meters or 3,000 feet underwater. So it's capable of crushing conventional spaceships and instantly destroying human life.

Karl So the next piece of news is one of the things we've talked about maybe since the beginning of the podcast: how therapeutic biotech has been in the doldrums of investment. And there was an article that ran this morning as I was putting the notes together for the show that asked, "Is biotech winter over?" And a few episodes ago, I mentioned that this company, Kilara, which had licensed these assets from China, had just gone public. But there were three other IPOs that happened—biotherapeutics companies—in April.

Erum Ablynx Pharma, Hemab Therapeutics, and Seaport Therapeutics all went public. And what analysts are saying is this is a good sign for biotech in general, and that it's gonna catalyze a bunch of merger and acquisition activity. The question is: what's the impact gonna be on industrial biotech? Yaron, what's your take on this? I think it's really kind of interesting to me because I feel like pharma and also, of course, industrial biotech is on this precipice of being done more easily. This is the holy grail with AI and being able to create molecules very easily. And I know we'll be doing this at SynBio Beta recap, but just being able to find drugs in the vast chemical space much more easily, and being able to then use AI to create operations to be able to develop those drugs very rapidly.

Erum So my question is: we have these big acquisitions or IPOs and all this money's going to it. Is it necessary? And I wonder if this activity's happening now because they know the time is going to be up soon, so why not just try to cash out or cash in, however you want to think about it. That's my feeling, only because [00:05:00] we just came back from learning about all this innovation. I mean, I cannot wait to talk about it, but all this innovation leads to being able to develop drugs more easily, even locally, and making them safe and effective and personalized. It just seems that old traditional pharma is on its way out and there's a new wave of being able to make drugs a lot faster, safer.

Erum I think one of the holdups is the FDA, but even there's innovation happening in the FDA to be able to accelerate approvals for drugs and different foods and everything—like all of it.

Erum And for industrial biotech, in terms of being able to have large companies that succeed, that's, I think, a little bit different on the industrial biotech side versus the pharma side because they're just very different worlds. Pharma is low volume and high margin and super highly regulated, where industrial biotech is less regulated, super high volumes.

Erum There's winners and losers there—winners that have withstood centuries, actually. And like, where is industrial biotech? I mean, are we talking about chemicals that are being made?

Erum So we think about citric acid being made—that is a biochemical process and fermentation process. So that's been withstanding and holding down for a long time. I don't know the numbers around it in terms of the market size, and I hope to see more activity and more growth and more unique products being made through industrial biotech.

Erum That's where we're looking at: being able to have those stories and bring those people onto the podcast to talk about how industrial biotech is growing. But what about you, Karl? What do you think about this news?

Erum Yeah, I mean, I think a rising tide raises all ships.

Erum Does it, though, in this case?

Karl It's a good question. At the beginning of the Iran conflict, I listened to an investor who had four areas that he was looking at that he said people ignore. One was coal, which I was like, "I'm never gonna touch that." But apparently coal still powers a lot of the world, and it's done in a clean way in some places.

Karl I know that this administration [00:07:00] has been trying to revive the coal industry, so let's put that one aside. I can't remember what the second one was, but the third one was biopharma. And the reason biopharma was on this investor's list is because there's a patent cliff that's happening, and there are dozens of drugs that are gonna come off patent. And as a result, the big pharmaceutical companies need to refill their pipeline. And how do they do that? They do that with biotech companies. And when these biotech companies go public, that makes them more attractive from an M&A point of view.

Karl Now, you're absolutely right, and we talk about it a lot here on Grow Everything, that industrial biotech is a different beast. But the technologies that are used in pharma broadly can be applied in industrial biotech, and you're right about citric acid.

Karl I think the other thing that isn't part of this story is just the fact that there's these conflicts happening around the world, and it speaks to this idea of localization or regionalization, and that's really where industrial biotech shines. We've got this Midwest that produces all sorts of corn and is very agriculturally rich. There's a lot of feedstock. Agricultural waste can be fed to microbes, and those in turn can be turned into chemicals that are broadly used, or also specialty chemicals. My opinion is it's a good thing, and I'll continue to watch it because we do do work in the therapeutic space.

Erum Yeah, absolutely. And this is actually a good segue between our worlds because pharma is a highly regulated industry because we ingest those drugs.

Erum Industrial biotech is used to make different chemicals that we use for products that go on the shelves. But in the middle, you have industrial biotech making food products, and one of the food products that we've been very interested in and have been talking about is dyes, and food dye in particular.

Erum And we're very excited to continue our bio dye series with our conversation with Gerit Tolborg of Chromologics. I am so excited to have this conversation because Gerit has a very great education in fermentation. I personally have gone to Copenhagen and met a lot of biologists, and the way they think is different than the way biologists think in the United States—only because I feel like there's a richer history of biologists there, or I don't know, maybe it's this European–US thing. But you will hear this conversation with Gerit, and you tell us what you think about it. But I'm very excited to have Gerit share her world of Chromologics.

Karl All right. Let's let Gerit take it away.

Karl Gerit Tolborg of Chromologics, we are so happy to bring you onto the Grow Everything podcast.

Gerit Hello. Nice to be here.

Karl So you've had a very interesting journey. You've gone from academic research to starting this company that's focused on colors. That's a pretty big shift. What was the catalyst that pushed you from the lab bench into building a company?

Gerit Yeah, that's a very good question. And I think it was motivated by several things back then. There was, at our university, a lot of [00:10:00] focus on natural colors. The university I did my PhD at was in Denmark. There's a big color house, Christian Hansen, that at the time was trying to make carmine via fermentation, so there were a lot of PhD students in my hallway trying to do that.

Gerit So there was a lot of awareness about natural colors. And then during my PhD, I discovered a complete novel class of pigments that could be produced by filamentous fungi, which then led to some patent filing and an innovation disclosure. And with this, the idea started bubbling up: if there's a pattern, maybe there's a business idea.

Gerit And I started to explore this. And I was also really curious and motivated to actually take something that came from an academic approach and an academic research question into the real world and see if it actually can have an impact on real world problems, and not just an academic question.

Erum Yeah. I love that you were thinking about applications in college and being able to then focus your studies to make this difference, and here you are. And we love having you because, of course, we're having this bio dye series and we want different voices and perspectives from people working in different countries.

Erum And as you know, here in the United States there is this push towards replacing synthetic ingredients with bio-derived alternatives. We're a little late to the game, but from your perspective, do you see this as a gradual evolution here?

Erum What do you see from your perspective outside looking in? Do you think we're really on this edge of changing the food system here with bio-derived alternatives?

Gerit I mean, I think it's great that there's more awareness right now in the US to switching away from synthetic colors towards more natural ingredients, because there are a lot of great natural solutions out there.

Gerit Why should we add artificial ones, right? So I think that's super good.

Gerit Are we on the edge of an ingredient revolution in that sense? Maybe we are, but from my perspective it's more the fermentation part, and it should not stop with colors, right? It should ideally scale into a lot of the different ingredient classes.

Gerit It can be sugars, it can be fibers, it can be colors, it can be flavors. There's so many opportunities. And I think color is a nice example because it's a very emotional topic. Everyone has an opinion. It looks beautiful. So it's something that can easily be used to advocate for change.

Gerit We of course look very much over to the US and see what's happening. I think some of the transition is still based on voluntary commitment from the companies to phase out. Some synthetic colors will be banned very soon, so then food manufacturing companies have to switch away. And we can definitely feel more interest from US food manufacturing companies in being more innovative with natural solutions and seeing what they can use instead of the synthetic ones.

Karl It is kind of across the board. Erum and I did a taste test a couple of weeks ago to compare naked Doritos and naked Cheetos to the originals, which is a very interesting experience. I know our listeners are gonna get to see what we did with that. And I just sent a picture to Erum yesterday because I was at the pharmacy and they had them both together, and I hadn't seen the naked Doritos or Cheetos in one place except for when Wendy Rome had bought them.

Karl But before we go any deeper, can you help us visualize the products that Chromologics is creating? If someone encountered these in their food, what would they see or taste? Is it different from what they would see on the market today?

Gerit Yes. So one of the big advantages of our product is that you will not taste it.

Gerit It's taste- and odorless, and that's a big plus if you work in the food industry because one downside from some of the natural colors—for example, betanins that come from beetroot, or also anthocyanins that can come from black carrot or kale or different products—is that they are extracted right out of the food product and they have off taste.

Gerit And then if you add them in high amounts to the end food product, then you can taste a little bit of this earthy beetroot taste in your muffin.

Gerit And that's not what you want. So then sometimes food manufacturing companies have to compensate for this off taste, or they have to be biased when they want to switch from savory to sweet applications. And ours is completely tasteless and odorless, so you can add it to both sausage mix, cupcake mix, and candy mix, and you will not taste the difference.

Gerit So that's great. But from a consumer point of view, if you take a red—let's say, a Haribo gummy bear—and you look at it, you could not see what color is in it, right? It could be a betanin, it could be an anthocyanin, it could be a carmine, it could be our tallerine once we are on the market.

Gerit Then you really have to turn the package around and you have to read the label, and then you have to see what it says to really understand what color is in it because a lot of the colors are also mixed to correct a little bit for the color hue. So therefore, to the naked eye, it's difficult to see as an end user what is in the product.

Erum Yeah, yeah, that's a great point.

Gerit The product that we're offering—maybe I can talk a little bit about how that looks.

Gerit So we're using a filamentous fungus and we're putting that in a bioreactor, and then we're fermenting this fungus. And I always compare this a little bit to the Danes in Denmark.

Gerit We have this big company, Novo Nordisk. They make insulin with filamentous fungus, and we are doing a little bit the same, but we're not making insulin—we're just making a red color.

Gerit So you have to picture a bucket with water, you put in the fungus, you stir, and then the water turns to wine from a color perspective.

Gerit So you have this really nice red-wine-looking liquid. Then we have some different filtration steps where the fungus goes off; some impurities we filter away; and in the end we dry the liquid.

Gerit And then we have a very nice red, almost black powder that we then can use to formulate and ship to our potential customers so they can put it in their end product—like their cake mix or their sausage mix, or whatever it is they want to use it in.

Erum Wow, that was a great description. For me, that was very visually accurate. You really did a great job of walking us through that process. And so I do have a follow-up question about this because you said that's like a blackish red color, and I know from some conversations we had, one of the big things when you're making food dyes is vibrancy.

Erum Would you say this is a very vibrant color? Is it comparable in terms of vibrancy with synthetics? Can you share a little bit about the color effect?

Gerit Yes, vibrancy is really important and vibrancy is often linked to purity. So if you have just one color molecule, you have a very vibrant color.

Gerit And I don't know if you ever do watercolors: if you have red, it's really beautiful; then you have green, it's beautiful; and then you mix it, then it's kind of brown and dull.

Gerit So the more different colors you add in, the more dull the color gets in general, or also the more other impurities you have in. So therefore it's always advisable to have a very pure pigment that you then can mix with another pure pigment.

Gerit So you have pure bright red, pure bright yellow; you can mix that together, and then you have very pure orange.

Gerit So because our color is very pure and we only have one molecule, I would say we have a really good vibrancy.

Gerit Compared to, again, the betanin example—because it's extracted from beetroot and you can have it in really different grades. Some just take the beetroot and cook it and grind it and use this; not so vibrant. Of course, you can also extract it out from the beetroot; that's a little bit more cost intensive, but then it's more pure, so the color becomes more vibrant. So that's how much effort you put in to make the color pure, in terms of vibrancy.

Erum Yeah. That's in terms of vibrancy, but there's a lot of parameters which we can talk a bit more about in a bit, like in terms of the thermal stability and the pH stability and all of that. I'm sure you're looking at it all.

Gerit And there, of course, the synthetic colors, they are the golden—they're just perfect, right?

Gerit I've been once visiting a color house where they had all the colors standing in the window in glass bottles: Red 3, Red 40, Yellow—like, I can't remember all the names, but all of them. They've been demonstrating there for 40 years in the sun; they're just beautiful.

Gerit So it's hard to compete with in terms of intensity and stability because they're just really made to last forever.

Erum Yeah. But we don't need food to last forever.

Gerit Exactly. If you're in your doomsday bunker, I think color is the least of your problem.

Erum Right. Exactly. Okay, enough follow-up questions. Let me go to the next question because you're saying "we," you have a team, and I really wanted to understand because you made this leap from your PhD research to then now CEO, where you're raising funding, you've built a team, and you're bringing a product to market.

Erum What part of your story do you think really resonates with investors, and what draws people to actually join you in your journey?

Gerit I think it's a problem that a lot of people can relate to. As we talked about before, colors are emotional. If I present the problem: "We have carmine in your food products that's from insects. Is that really what you want to eat?" Everyone is like, "Ah, yeah, no, that's not what I want to eat."

Gerit And so I think it's really easy to get emotional in this regard. Then it's a very tangible story, so it's very like from the bioreactor into a powder, into a food product. And then I think our product works really well in a lot of applications.

Gerit So there's a clear product–market fit already where we can clearly pinpoint some categories where it works really well. So I think that's interesting both for the investors, of course, but also for people like my core team.

Gerit We really built in, I think, 2021, 2022, and then I think also as a consequence of this kind of quiet COVID purpose crisis everyone had. So we had a lot of people who had jobs and then were thinking, "Ah, what am I doing with my life?" I want to feel some purpose, and I want to do something cool where I can have impact and fast decisions.

Gerit And I think there we really recruited some fantastic, extremely talented people who left the security behind and just went on an adventure with us.

Gerit I think that was a very special time around there, 2021, 2022, where people really were looking for purpose—maybe more than they're doing now—because I could imagine people now look more for security and safety. The world is an unsafe place. We don't know what will happen, right? Maybe keep your cards close.

Karl We're talking about vibrancy of color, we're talking about coloring food, and we started to touch upon this idea that you eat first with your eyes. So colors in foods are often underestimated because it shapes your perception and even how you trust a food and even how you taste it.

Karl How do you think rethinking color through biology can change the way we experience foods?

Gerit Yeah. I totally agree with you that color is super important in the food products and it's often the forgotten ingredient that doesn't get enough credit because it is the main purchase-decision driver.

Gerit Like if the food doesn't look nice, you don't even pick it up from the shelf, right?

Gerit Ideally, I would say that for the consumer, it shouldn't matter where the color comes from. We as the manufacturers have to make sure that the color is safe and that the experience of the color is good—so that the color is stable, that it doesn't do anything that it shouldn't be doing—and we from a manufacturing site can guarantee stable supply, high quality control, and all of these things.

Gerit The consumer at the end should just be enjoying the muffin, knowing that everything that's in the muffin is safe and should not negatively impact the experience.

Gerit By using bio-derived ingredients—if we now link the bio to fermentation—I often see fermentation as a good tool to democratize the supply chain because everyone can have a fermenter. It's not everyone, but you can position it globally. It's not one place in the world where there's this raw material. You can make supply chains less sensitive. You can localize the production. So it's independent of seasonal variations. Now with climate change, it's a big topic.

Gerit So I think fermentation can be really helping to even allow that there is enough for everyone to even have food, right? Because the discussion about food experience is also a very privileged one.

Erum You're speaking our language. It's so great to hear you say it because we do talk about this a lot throughout the podcast and all our episodes.

Erum And we're meeting for the first time, and it's just so wonderful to hear. Sometimes, Karl and I feel like we're in our bubble, and you're still part of this bubble—you're just in a different country—but it's so great to hear and so refreshing to hear.

Gerit That's at least a lot of the considerations that we are having, and how I also present this to the investors, and why I think fermentation is such a great technology that we should explore and bring out to everyone and educate everyone about the potential it has.

Erum Yes. You're saying it so succinctly.

Erum So you are in Europe, and earlier you were talking about manufacturer's responsibility to keep our food safe, but it's also our governments and regulatory to ensure that the manufacturers are having safe practices.

Erum So can you tell us a little bit about the perception and regulation of biomanufactured colors in the EU versus the US? I'm sure you're comparing the two. Can you give us a bit of a comparison?

Gerit That has been the biggest challenge for Chromologics: to make sure that we can, at some point, get our ingredients through regulatory and approved so we can actually bring them to the market.

Gerit And when we started Chromologics, I really felt like the US regulation is way more flexible and open-minded than the European regulation, where Europe—old Europe—haven't allowed a new food color in ages. Do they even know how to do that? But I can feel that's really been shifting now.

Gerit So I really feel that the European Union has woken up and has seen: okay, in order to allow innovation, in order to tap into the green transition and accelerate this, we have to be more open-minded. So I think that's really good for us.

Gerit What I love about the FDA is where you can have pre-submission meetings with them. You can have a dialogue. We can present our case, our data. They can give us feedback.

Gerit Even the FSA is doing that now. So they have opened up for a procedure that also in Europe you can apply for pre-submission meetings, which I think is great.

Gerit And I think they should learn from each other, the two agencies, because at the end of the day, all we want is safe food product. The way to this cannot be so different, right? It's the same datasets they require. It's the same data they want to look at because I have to show my product is safe.

Gerit So I think it's really these small things that sometimes make a difference. I think they're maybe not so different than they sometimes set out to be because at the end of the day, it's the same data they want to see, and it's small differences.

Erum So you're saying it's the same now, and you said before it might have seemed easier to get a biomanufactured color in the US, but still challenging in the EU.

Gerit It's still challenging in both places because still the test battery of studies you have to provide is quite comprehensive. And for a small startup, it's a lot linked to capital and risk and really long, difficult, complicated studies.

Gerit But the EU actually amended their regulation for food additives—so colors—last year. So they actually went a little bit more open-minded and had a more flexible approach. So they actually changed a little bit and opened up.

Gerit One difference that I can still really feel is genetic engineering, where there is a big bias in Europe that it's dangerous or unpreferable, or still looked upon very skeptically. Whereas I think in the US, it's way more accepted as one tool in order to get to where we want.

Gerit Chromologics: our product is a non-GMO product, so everything we do is bioprocess engineering, so that it's not a problem for us per se, but I can feel when we have the different discussions also in working groups for the FDA or the FSA, that always pops up.

Erum Engineering the fungi is like engineering the factory, and it's not going into the food because you're filtering it out. I think that's a big clarification.

Erum Even when you talk to consumers, they're like, "Oh, GMO." Yeah, maybe you don't want to eat GMO—even though you do. I have a lot of people—it's hard to avoid. And what is that? But it's also like what we talk about here on the podcast: when we're talking about fermentation and engineering microbes, then we're engineering those microbes to make ingredients oftentimes, and then we filter out the microbe, and then you have the product that the microbe made because you engineered it to make it.

Gerit Absolutely. And you have to show that it's separated, and there's different requirements for your process design and all of that. But it's just in Europe: I feel like the second you click on GMO, then it's like this extra tab of all the extra things you have to provide.

Karl Yeah. I mean, we have 50 years of consuming GMO products on a mass scale, particularly in corn, and it continues to be safe, generally. I've noticed some people are allergic, but that's a different story.

Karl But you said this beautiful thing earlier about fermentation really functioning as a way of shrinking supply chains and even democratizing supply chains. And you guys are taking fermentation and turning it into a scalable production for natural pigments.

Karl So what's the biggest challenge you've had in moving from those lab conditions—you said like a bucket—

Gerit Two-liter, tiny little, two-liter reactor, maybe half a liter, yeah?

Karl Yeah, going from a two-liter reactor to industrial scale: thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of liters.

Gerit I think the biggest challenge for us was really thinking about the downstream, because no one in academia ever thinks about the downstream. Everyone is just like, "Upstream titer, blah blah blah, how does the process look?" And then you have, like, what's the downstream? Yeah, we don't know—because in the laboratory, you have this tiny column, you run it over, you have the product, everyone's happy. But of course you cannot do that when you have 100,000 liters.

Gerit So I think that's a big challenge. And then, of course, cost. I think that's really also something that was often forgotten by bioindustrial food companies in the last couple of years: they thought fermentation and sustainability is enough, but also to really make sure that your COGS are there where you need them to be in order to be cost competitive.

Gerit So keep that in mind when you design your process: at the end of the day, you need to make money.

Gerit And of course reproducibility: it's easier to have a reproducible process at two liters than if you have 100,000 liters, and you have also less waste at two liters if you realize something goes wrong, right?

Gerit And I think it's also just the more unit operations you have, the more error traps you build for yourself because things can go wrong.

Gerit So I think in the beginning, when we engineered this super fancy process with, "No, you do this, and then you do this, and then you do this," that makes a lot of sense from an academic perspective when you have a 500-milliliter reactor, but then when you go to a CMO and say, "This is my process," then they just laugh at you and say, "Yeah, you forget this. We have one feeding line. Here's the pH. That's what you have."

Gerit So I think really adopting this industrial mindset and being more pragmatic and actually looking at what is out there, because ideally I want to have this process with my process description, I can go to every CMO in the world and say, "Listen, this is my process. Can you run it?" And they say yes. Because the second I need to customize, that just means expensive.

Gerit So I think that is something that a lot of companies probably learned the hard way. Also, we had to swallow a pill or two and had to redefine our process so that it would fit the CMOs. Luckily, our fungus is a very forgiving workhorse and quite flexible when it comes to this.

Erum Yeah. I'm glad you brought up the conversation about costs. And I think this is why we've been really interested in bio dye, because the alternative is expensive, right?

Erum So you have synthetics, then you have the plant-derived colors, and then you have whatever derived from microbes—that world.

Erum And so I think there's so many—and I hate to say this word because everyone says it—but the tailwinds are all there for bio dyes.

Erum Then I would just love to know: you've done the cost modeling. Where do you see the cost in comparison to synthetics versus plant-derived colors? Is it in the middle? Is it still comparable to plants? Is it getting too close to synthetics? We'd love to get your perspective since you've done this.

Gerit Yeah. I think synthetics are just crazy cheap. It's just hard to beat. I mean, it's maybe not impossible once you actually have fully scaled.

Gerit I mean, you know, fermentation is also a game: tapping into economy of scale. If I just run one bioreactor because I just launched my product, I will probably not be there. But if I run, like, every other week and I really scale it up and have a lot of volume, maybe I can get there. So that's something that should be explored.

Gerit When it comes to the other natural colors like betanin and anthocyanin and carmine, usually we like to talk about cost-in-use. So that is a term that describes how much of color do you need to add in the food product to have the color that you want. And that again links back to color intensity.

Gerit So our color is extremely intense. So maybe you just add a tiny bit and it's crazy red. And with betanin that you just extract from the beetroot, you want teaspoon, another teaspoon—then okay, now finally you're there. So the kilo price is maybe a lot less, but the cost-in-use price will be a lot higher because you have to add so much.

Gerit And then how the value chain for colors also really works is: you can have the raw material—like the bulk color—extracted from the beetroot or direct from fermentation, and then you actually add the value by formulating it, drying it on specific carriers, how your customer wants it, under concentration that your customer wants it.

Gerit Does it want a powder? Does the customer want a liquid? Is it for a water-based application? Do I need to formulate it so that it fits a fat-based application?

Gerit So these are all the tips and tricks that then add that I can sell my product for a lot more money, as if I would just buy it on Alibaba when I just buy one ton of carmine directly from the container in Peru.

Karl I'm glad you brought that up because that was one of the places Erum and I were like, "How much do these things cost?" And then you go to Alibaba and you see there's this huge range: a dollar a kilo to $1,000 a kilo, depending on what you're buying.

Gerit You wouldn't know how much time I spent tracking shipping out and in of Peru and how much the tanker was validated to understand what the real value of carmine.

Gerit Because you don't know, and no one tells you. Put your Sherlock Holmes hat on and then find some tracking data from shipments from Peru. So I think it's some ride back we did this. I think now we have a little bit better network so we can get more information.

Gerit But if you just get started and no one tells you what the pricing data is, I mean, that's one way to start.

Erum Yeah. We have another friend—someone we'll have on the podcast soon as part of the series—who the number one thing they're thinking about is just the cost, because they have these conversations with potential buyers and the cost conversation comes up and it's very black and white.

Erum It's like: is it this price or not? And it's like, well, wait, it can't be black and white. I get it. That was a little pun on colors. I'm making myself laugh. But anyway, it's a very complex conversation when you're talking about colors and cost.

Gerit Of course. And it doesn't just end with the volume. What's the deliverable time? What is the packaging size? How much do you want to buy? Of course it's cheaper if you buy 10 tons than if you only buy 500 kilos. So there's just more to it than just the actual kilo price.

Gerit But of course we do know that we have to position ourselves in a way that will be cost competitive to some of the solutions that are out there.

Gerit We do know that we probably can have some value pricing in some applications because we offer something that the existing colors are not offering, but we're also aware that it's the food industry we're talking about. Margins are not gigantic.

Erum Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more about the applications, and where you're targeting, and maybe what types of companies you're talking to, and then also what products you're working on to go towards the markets that you want to go towards.

Gerit Yes. So when we started Chromologics in 2020 and had our first investment, I was pitched as: "This is the color for your plant-based application," right? Super hot, plant protein, everyone loved it, huge forecast for revenue in plant-based protein.

Gerit Yeah, I'm not doing that so much anymore. So that has cooled down a bit.

Gerit Luckily, our color also works really well in meat applications. And in the European Union there's a big rule now that they have to phase out nitrate in processed meat products. Unfortunately, the meat industry educated the consumer to think that fresh meat is pink, so now they have to find a way how to make the meat look fresh, even though they cannot add so much nitrate anymore.

Gerit And that's also really a space where we can add a lot of value.

Gerit So all kinds of applications like salami, chorizo, mortadella, injecting hams—all these kind of products—it's really interesting because it's also healthier then, right? Because nitrate is really bad and is carcinogenic.

Gerit Then we also work really well in bakery applications—so everything that has to be heated up and baked. So in general all types of processed foods: exposure to heat, exposure to temperature, exposure to extrusion products. And then we link a little bit back to the plant-based proteins.

Gerit Again, dairy works really well—plant-based dairy, strawberry milk. Huge trend in the US, not so much in Europe, but our color works really well.

Gerit So yes: we will not launch in beverages. That's something that we deselected because we don't see that the performance is good enough to live up to the very harsh criteria of the soft drink industry.

Gerit And because when we file FDA, we have to really make a tradeoff in what categories to file for and whatnot, because we cannot go over something that's called the ADI—the average daily intake—for the average person. So it's a kind of a game to see where do I really work well as a color. Then I will go into this category, but then I maybe have to deselect some others.

Erum So your north star is in the food world, minus the soft drinks. Have you experimented with other markets?

Gerit We are kind of really putting our fingers out a little bit to the cosmetic industry because I think that could also be really interesting.

Gerit Fermentation-derived ingredients are also there of interest. So that's something that we are looking into right now. We have really good proof-of-concept data for everything that's lipstick, blush—so these multifunctional color sticks. I'm not super good with the cosmetic lingo yet.

Gerit But I think that's something that we look into because if it's safe to use for food, I think the next step is also naturally to look into: can we use it for cosmetics?

Karl We talked a little bit about labels, clean labels.

Karl How do these ingredients show up on a label? What does the EU require you to say, and how do you get consumers to trust what they're seeing if they see it on a label?

Gerit Yeah. So in Europe, we will have an E-number because it's a food additive. So then the food manufacturer can decide they want to put the name on, or put the E-number on.

Gerit We always like to say an E-number is never bad. It's just a description of an ingredient that's in your food.

Gerit And I think for the US, it would just have the ingredient name because they don't run the E-number.

Gerit But you cannot say "no colors" because you would put colors in, but you can have the "all natural" claim for your product, for sure.

Erum How do you imagine it showing up on the label? Because that's something that I've been thinking about because, you know, obviously when you see the natural color on the label and it says beetroot, turmeric, it all sounds super healthy.

Erum But when it comes to filamentous fungi, how do you see the color showing up? Is that something you guys have discussed?

Gerit Yeah, so we have discussed and also talked about it. And right now, the name of our ingredient would be tallerine. So that's the name that would pop up on the label.

Gerit It's not up to us alone to decide what the name is because the FDA and the FSA have a say, because it's not completely free game. You cannot just call it whatever.

Gerit So I think there are some pretty defined rules. And then I think it's important to educate the consumer what it actually is.

Gerit And I think to your point: beetroot and turmeric—yes, you can say that, but you can also only say that if you have so much impurities in your product that you actually took beetroot. If you extract the betanin out of it, then you have to say betanin, or in Europe E162.

Gerit So there are also some clear rules: when is it still the beetroot? And do you add the beetroot for the flavor, or do you add the beetroot for the nutritional value, or do you add the beetroot for the color?

Gerit And especially the FSA here is really trying to define that more clearly because people push the boundaries. They add the beetroot for the color and then it's clean label even though it isn't. So I think now we all have some kind of responsibility to say what it is.

Erum Yeah, I hear you. Because there's this drink here in the US called Poppy, and I'm a big fan of their rose drink, which is pink. And it says beetroot extract, and that's a soft drink. So I'm just wondering.

Erum When I went to a beverage expo yesterday and there were all these non-alcohol functional drinks, everything was like beetroot extract, spirulina extract for their colors part of it. But I also then I wonder—because this is the term that I think sounds okay—yeast extract. But yeast extract: can it be that? I mean, people are using yeast for bread.

Gerit Yeah, yeah. And yeast extract— isn't that also this funky Marmite product that people in Australia eat?

Karl Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Gerit I think yeast extract is pretty well defined what it is, right?

Erum Trying to figure it out, but we'll see what the regulators come up with too.

Gerit I think maybe the extract would be a nice add-on to our word also. I think that's something we have to discuss with the FDA also, and I'm sure they have an opinion.

Erum Like, they have to also consult consumers, right? Because you don't want a weird word that they're like, "Ugh."

Gerit Yeah. And that's the balance between what will consumers accept and what would the FDA accept. So there we have to find the right middle ground for the naming. But it's something that we've considered on and off several times.

Erum Yes. Well, we're talking about the naming, what things can happen in the near term, but let's think about 10 years ahead. What do you think bio-based colorants will do, and how will they play in the global food system? What needs to happen to make them the default rather than the alternative?

Gerit Yeah. So I really hope that by then we have regulatory approval in both the US and Europe, and maybe even the rest of the world, so we can really use our colors globally.

Gerit And that in general there will be a better acceptance for fermentation-derived ingredients and there also will be a better supply chain for fermentation that everyone can use and kind of produce in. So it's not the special interest ingredient, but actually something that's accepted and well recognized by everyone.

Gerit So that there's no need anymore to grow tomatoes or beetroot or any kind of food products to make colors because we have smarter ways of doing this with fermentation.

Gerit And then we can use the farming space for something else—to actually grow real natural food for people they can eat for nutritional purposes.

Gerit And that has always been our ultimate vision: to find a better, more effective way to make natural colors instead of extracting it out from food that people could potentially eat.

Karl Yeah. Let's not grow tomatoes for colors. We only grow them for salsa and pasta.

Gerit I know a lot of the types of food they grow is also overengineered and can operate it to the extent that they make a lot of color and they don't taste well, but it still takes up farming space.

Gerit With climate change accelerating and also the geopolitical situation maybe not being super relaxed in 10 years—hopefully it is—I think we have to really rethink how can we make sure everyone has enough to eat. And I think fermentation can play an important role there.

Karl Absolutely. Well said.

Karl All right. So we're gonna jump into the quick-fire part of our podcast. This is kind of fun. We're each gonna alternate a question, and hopefully you'll give us a short answer which we'll respond to and go on to the next one.

Karl But let me kick it off. Gerit, what's your favorite color to work with and why?

Gerit Always red because it's basically the color I work with all the time.

Erum Weirdest place you ever thought this could use better color?

Gerit Hmm. I actually have a childhood memory there, and I don't know if you all saw this in the US, but in Germany at some point—I'm from Germany originally—Heinz launched a green ketchup.

Gerit It tastes exactly the same as the red one. My mom bought it and it was just awful. We put it on top of pasta and the pasta was green, and I was like, "This is disgusting. I don't want to eat it." But it didn't work. So no to green ketchup. It tastes the same, but your eyes cannot unsee it. It's just so bad.

Erum Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And I think they also came up with the purple ketchup, and it's just—yeah, I don't know. But there's a lot of innovation that needs to happen in the condiments space. I feel like it's a great form factor to deliver vitamins and nutrients to children. Side story—we can talk about it later.

Karl If fungi have personalities, which one are you working with right now?

Gerit You know the people that you read and then they say, "I don't like drama," but they secretly love drama? So I feel that's a little bit our fungi. In nine of 10 cases, it's perfectly well and it's chill and easy going, but then this one time, you know, it escalates.

Karl If Chromologics had a signature house color, what would it be called?

Gerit We have only red for now, and red is our focus, and now we actually renamed the color also to Tellurin, but in the very early days the color was called Chromo Red, and that would be our house color.

Erum Anyway, Gerit, this was such a great conversation. I learned so much. Thank you so much for illuminating the world of color. It's so fascinating. We really do believe that it is the ingredient that can really usher in the world of volume manufacturing many ingredients. So thank you so much for coming on the Grow Everything podcast.

Gerit My pleasure. And it was nice being here and nice talking to you. A lot of good questions, and I hope we could elucidate people on fermented colors a little bit.

Karl [00:45:00] Erum, you did such a great job introducing Gerit. Why don't you kick off your thoughts on this interview?

Erum I loved it. Again, Gerit just has such a great mind of biology and business, so it was wonderful to hear her commentary and how she presented Chromologics. And the whole idea is that color is not a trivial ingredient. It's so important to our everyday consumption of food, and we might take it for granted, but when it's gone, you notice, right?

Erum So color's important because it shapes trust, appetite, purchase decisions long before taste ever enters a picture. So I really appreciate that. What do you think, Karl?

Karl It's totally true. I think about it from a food label point of view when I walk down the shelf, or when I'm looking at the food. I think about the fresh fruit aisle and then the meat aisle. I'm definitely looking at the color of meat, and so that definitely impacts my perception of those foods.

Karl But she made a really strong case for fermentation, not just as a production method, but more of a strategy for supply chains, which again is something that we really think a lot about: what is the impact of localization that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode? What can you do to localize production? What can you do to make color manufacturing more resilient, more distributed, and less dependent on agricultural land? Because today, many colors that are used are synthetic and they're very dependent on oil and petrochemistry.

Erum Yeah. And another key insight, of course, is when it comes to this battle of what type of ingredient wins—we're talking about food dye here, but this can be the case for any other ingredient—is it's not just that biology sounds better, right? Like, "Yay, it's biology, it must be safe," which that's not the case. There's a lot of bad biology out there. Poison ivy is biology. We don't be eating that stuff.

Karl Snake venom.

Erum Yes. We have a long list of bad biology. Maybe that's an episode for us.

Erum But we're talking about performance here, and this is a drum that we will beat continuously: biology not only can have some sustainability wins, but it also has performance wins.

Erum And what Gerit really did a good job of walking us through is: what are the performance wins for food color? Vibrancy is very important, formulation flexibility, scalability, and ultimately it's the cost-in-use. So you can buy dyes in the barrel, but the actual concern is: how much do you need in the product? And if you have a very vibrant color, you can just use a little bit of it to get the performance you're looking for, the color you're looking for.

Karl The other thing that she mentioned, which I think is often neglected, is what does it take to commercialize these products? We've mentioned it before: downstream processing, which is the purification of an ingredient, is actually one of the costliest parts of any biological process. So anything you can do to decrease downstream processing impacts your bottom line.

Karl The other thing she talked about was regulatory pathways, and we've seen it in the US that there is a group of anti-GMO activists who say that even though the colors that are produced—the end ingredient—is natural and might be something that's found in beetroot or turmeric, the fact that it's produced in fermentation puts it in a different category, and there's been some serious pushback around that.

Karl So understanding the regulatory pathways and being able to navigate those is one of the keys to commercialization. It's also a key to labeling. These things matter just as much as the science.

Erum Yeah. So I loved this conversation, and this puts an end to our bio dye series part one. We will continue this series in a few weeks.

Erum Next week we will have our official SynBio Beta 2026 recap episode. So definitely stay tuned for that. Prepare to hear about all the innovations, all the people that we've met, and everything else that has to do with biology and business. So stay tuned. And what else do we have going on, Karl?

Karl So for those of you who are in New York City during NYC Tech Week, on June 3rd we will be doing a demo with our friends from Roebling. They've been on the podcast twice. And we'll be talking about AI-powered engineering from scratch. The details will be in the show notes. So if you're in New York City, please come and attend.

Karl We're also planning a live fundraiser at Genspace, where Erum and I met about 10 years ago. It's a great organization, and as the details come together, we'll make sure to share those with you. Anything else, Erum?

Erum Yes. One more thing. So now that SynBio Beta wrapped up, we have another conference that we're so excited to promote: the World Biomarkets BioInnovations Conference. And they have two conferences this year. One is going to be in Europe at The Hague in the Netherlands in June, and also one in Omaha, Nebraska in September.

Erum And we would love to meet you in Omaha. We won't be going to the one in Europe, unfortunately. But for either of those, feel free to attend, and you can get a 25% discount with the promo code GROWEVERYTHING.

Karl Excellent. So thank you for tuning into the Grow Everything podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please do reach out to us. We love hearing from our listeners. Our contact information is in the show notes. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack. Please like and listen and share.

Erum Awesome. Let's grow.