A food tech startup based in the Netherlands is making honey by replacing the bee’s stomach with synthetic biology tools. The Rotterdam-based Fooditive is producing bee-free honey by enzymatic fermentation.
Credit: Sergey Tolmachev / Alamy Stock Photo
Honey has been a prized food since ancient times. A complex blend of sugars, mostly fructose and glucose, and small amounts of other sugars, proteins, amino acids, vitamins and minerals, honey is a $8.94 billion market, and its popularity continues to grow. But over the last decade, honeybees (Apis mellifera) have been hindered from making this natural product by disappearing grassland, herbicides and climate change, and as a result, production has been declining. Now Rotterdam, the Netherlands-based company Fooditive thinks it can take the pressure off bee farming by providing an alternative, made in fermenters, that mimics and performs like traditionally made honey.
The company started researching honey when creating a fruit-based sweetener based on peels, the side streams of apple and pear industrial products. Two years later, that feedstock gave rise to bee-free honey.
The system replicates the metabolic processes in a honeybee’s stomach. The scientists first identified an enzyme responsible for converting plant-based nutrients into a honey-like substance. They then engineered Escherichia coli to produce that enzyme, and use it to catalyze the breakdown of sugars into a product with the texture, taste and viscosity of honey. In bee-made honey, the nectar affects the color of the honey. Fooditive keeps its fruity-tasting honey transparent as it plans to sell it to food companies as an ingredient.
The team is now looking to create the next version of the honey by replicating the amino acids found in natural honey. Fooditive’s CEO Moayad Abushokhedim says: “We have the sweetness, the texture, the taste, but we don’t have the great health benefits.” They plan to launch their product into the market in two years.
This is not the first time a bee-free honey has been made. Students at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology won an iGEM competition when they made a synthetic vegan honey using Bacillus subtilis bacteria engineered to secrete a target enzyme that mimics the bee’s stomach environment. In 2019 MeliBio, a San Francisco-based company, starting selling a plant-based honey that uses fructose, glucose, organic acids and polyphenols to mirror the makeup of honey made by bees. It has recently joined Pow Bio from Berkeley to create a bee-free honey pilot project using precision fermentation to produce high-value proteins and enzymes. It is expected to become commercial in a few years.
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