Our products
Plant-based meat and fish alternatives today are stuck in an "uncanny valley" of tasting almost like meat or fish but not quite. Consumers are interested in trying meat and fish alternatives but are not convinced by the taste.
Paleo offers a compelling answer to this challenge, with its portfolio of animal-free heme proteins that are bio-identical to beef, chicken, pork, lamb, tuna (and even mammoth).
FAQ
Everything you wanted to know about Paleo, precision fermentation and heme proteins (but were afraid to ask).
The flavor and texture of meat and fish are deeply embedded in human culture. At Paleo, we focus on the fundamentals of what makes the "real" meat or fish experience, the same one our hunter-gatherer ancestors were already having.
Paleo develops animal-free ingredients for meat and fish alternatives. We reverse engineer what makes fish and meat so delicious, and we produce bio-identical animal compounds by precision fermentation using yeast cells, without ever touching an animal.
Cheese, bread, beer, wine... All delicious products made by fermentation. This technology used for over 10,000 years relies on micro-organisms to produce food of improved taste, digestibility and shelf-life. At Paleo, we combine modern precision biology techniques with the age-old fermentation process. In essence, we teach the microorganisms, in our case yeast cells, how to produce large quantities of bio-identical animal heme proteins for us.
Heme proteins are naturally found in the muscles, hence in fish and meat. An atom of iron bound to the heme group in these proteins helps bring oxygen to muscle cells. We owe the red color of raw meat and the brown roasty color of cooked meat to this heme iron! Heme proteins are also an excellent source of iron in human diets. This is because iron in heme form is much easier to for us to absorb than free iron.
Our animal-free heme proteins are bio-identical to those found in fish and meat. And our animal-free heme iron is as bio-available as heme iron of animal origin.
Through precision fermentation, we are able to instruct our yeasts to produce bovine, lamb, tuna or any other heme protein most appropriate for meat or fish alternatives. But, who decided that one could only mimic products made from the few animal species consumed in modern times?
This is why we decided to reconstitute the heme protein from the oldest DNA sequence to date - the million year-old steppe mammoth. Making heme proteins from an extinct species is the ultimate proof that we can produce animal proteins without ever touching one.
Our heme proteins are GMO-free.
We use yeasts only as a processing aid to produce our heme proteins, and then cleanly separate them from the final product.
Precision fermentation uses only a fraction of the land, feedstock, energy and water required for animal farming, while emitting far less greenhouse gases. No need to use toxins, antibiotics or hormones.
At Paleo, we optimize our process development by leveraging data from our proprietary Life Cycle Assessment model, ensuring a minimal environmental impact.
As a B2B company, we will provide our highly pure heme proteins as food ingredients to manufacturers of meat and fish alternatives across the globe. If this is you, and you are looking to improve your product, get in touch with us!
Paleo's heme proteins platform is the most advanced on the market today, and will be available for manufacturers shortly. Contact us if you want to try out our heme proteins.