Alex Crisp, host of Future of Foods Interviews, talks to Maija Itkonen, CEO and co-founder of Finnish precision fermentation company Onego Bio, about manufacturing real egg white protein, entirely without the use of chickens, which as Maija explains, are the most abused animal in the world.
“I think that this way of producing this protein in the bioreactor, that’s kind of the real factory farming”
Onego Bio produces Bioalbumen, which the company says is bioidentical ovalbumin, the most important protein in egg white, delivering the nutritional and functional qualities of traditional eggs. The product was a winner in Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Awards, with Bioalbumen named the Winner of the Food category and a Finalist in the Agriculture category.
This April, the company raised $40 million in one of the largest Series A rounds in the Nordics, with the fresh funds being invested in the commercialization and manufacturing of Bioalbumen – exciting times are certainly in store for Onego Bio.
Below is a short clip from the podcast.
Alex: I wrote an article about male chicks. The slaughter of male chicks at birth because they are not useful for laying eggs. There are hundreds of millions of male chicks slaughtered every year. I was wondering whether it was a welfare problem which drove you to start up this company called Onego Bio or whether there was a food problem which you thought needed fixing. What was the drive?
Maija: Yeah, Alex, unfortunately, I think that I would rather be the male chick that is being slaughtered from day one than being this female chicken who needs to be there for around 72 weeks. The practices are extremely cruel. Most of these birds are living with bone fractures their whole life. Almost 100% of these birds have bone fractures because the people are putting them to give eggs far too early.
People always want to be more efficient, how to get more eggs. This started thousands and thousands of years ago. The birds were just giving you maybe one egg per month or so. Now they get one per day which comes with some consequences. The welfare of the birds is extremely low. I would say that that’s really the most abused animal on this planet. And I mean, these practices include things like forced molting, sleep prevention, squeezing too many birds in a very, very narrow space. I would rather be the male chick.
It’s very nasty and at the same time, we’re still having these problems of how to make it more efficient. Well, this is the solution. I always say that I think that this way of producing this protein in the bioreactor, that’s kind of the real factory farming. You actually don’t need the animals for that you just have this super-efficient process where nothing needs to suffer.
Alex: Do you think that the message isn’t really getting out about how badly chickens are treated?
Maija: You know, there are a lot of articles about that. And I mean, I’m actually quite happy to see that there are a lot of these like super-neutral articles about those things. So not only this activist mode, because this is not always the right way. There are a lot of messages about that just circulating. But, you know, I think that people are more or less just thinking that there’s nothing to do. You know, like if you just have to somehow survive, this is the most popular protein in the world. So it’s very difficult to imagine how we could live without that.
Then you have even more burning problems to say that you have to have avian flu. So the avian flu comes like you have a farm of five million birds, and then one of them has avian flu. So you just get rid of all of them all. So these things are just almost like more burning issues in a way, that these basic issues are forgotten sometimes.
But I also see that my philosophy is always that when there’s business in place, you know, when there’s a better solution that somebody can earn money from, that always helps. So that’s why we created Onego.
Alex: Yes. Okay. Obviously, there’s a lot of industrial use for eggs, right? There’s a lot of eggs used in baking and various things, which is, I suspect, what you are going to be feeding your products into or selling your product more on an industrial level, rather than in a domestic way.
Maija: About one third of the eggs are going to industrial use. So basically, one in three eggs is going to be either used in liquid format or powder format, or somehow a further processed format in the industrial applications. So there’s like all kinds of bakery products, all kinds of formed products and oven dishes, like candies, like condiments, snack products, like battering, for example, just a simple battering for all kinds of things, even that, like huge amounts of these ingredients.
So I have to say that I think that egg is exactly like you say, it’s kind of this hidden, you know, it’s like, we don’t even recognise it’s there unless we have an allergy. Many people say, you absolutely know once you have the egg allergy, you know that it’s in most of the products by just having these simple functionalities, to control the moisture in the products or having a certain type of a bite resistance or crunchiness or all of these things. So it’s there for these characteristics of the end products that we don’t necessarily even think we’re eating eggs.
This is a link to the full interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/R2XeTHoIPXg?si=iZP6PoLIZtppk2HY
This is a link to the audio interview: https://rss.com/podcasts/alexcrisp-futureoffood/1533805/
