Draft:Mycorena

Mycorena AB is a Swedish-based food tech company founded in 2017 specialized in fungi fermentation and in the sustainable development and commercialization of mycoprotein-based products. The company's signature product, Promyc, was launched in 2019 as an ingredient in a variety of vegan food applications.

History
Founded in 2017 by Ramkumar Nair, Mycorena secured its initial funding in late 2018 and has since raised over 35 million euros, including 24 million euros in what was the biggest to date Series A funding round for an alternative protein company in the Nordics.

Mycorena's demonstration plant in Gothenburg, named the Mycorena Innovation and Development Center (MIND) opened in 2019 and includes the company headquarters, a fully food-grade certified fermentation facility, innovation and R&D labs, a development kitchen, and a pilot line for end-consumer food product production. When MIND was expanded in 2022, it became Europe’s largest demo production facility. The expansion resulted in the company receiving 'Gothenburg's Company Prize' the same year, a prize that has been awarded to successful companies that are run and developed in the Gothenburg region by Näringslivsgruppen (Business Group) Göteborg & Co since 1994. Besides MIND, the company initiated the construction of its full-scale production factory in the city of Falkenberg back in 2021.

Products
Mycorena's first product was launched in 2019, branded as Promyc, and is a fungi-based food ingredient designed with the intention of being used in partnership with other food manufacturers to develop and commercialize new food products, including but not exclusively, in the development of meat and fish analogues and meat enhancers. This strategy has translated into the launching of multiple products for the European market in partnerships with other companies including the 3D printed salmon-like fillets of Revo Foods, a variety of vegan hybrid products with Peas of Heaven, and Promyc Nuggets with the Sweden's biggest retail chain ICA Gruppen.

In October 2023, a partnership between Mycorena and Atria Sweden was announced. The partnership is said to drive a joint development and commercialization of a new generation of sustainable and nutritious mycoprotein-based products, such as sausages, hamburgers and cold-cuts.

The same year, 2023, Mycorena launched Mycolein, a fungi-stabilized fat product with reduced fat content and similar properties to animal fat but better nutritional content.

Sustainability
Experts from the Research Intitutes of Sweden (RISE) developed a calculation tool predicting that the planned scale-up of Mycorena's technology would avoid the release of 4 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalents by 2030. This would be achieved by replacing animal-derived protein with mycoprotein and a reduced need for land-intensive agriculture, freeing up an area equivalent to over four times the size of Gotland, Sweden's biggest island. Mycorena's CEO and founder, Ramkumar Nair, together with the authors from RISE, presented these numbers and Mycorena's operation at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Egypt.

Side-streams & Circular Solutions
Mycorena has in the past collaborated with other companies in attempts to turn side-streams into valuable and sustainable protein. In a collaboration with the Swedish bread manufacturer Polarbröd, Mycorena has fermented mycoprotein on bread and dough waste. The collaboration started after Mycorena received Polarbröd's 'Outstanding Reward' in 2021.

The company is also in a collaboration with Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) and Berte Qvarn, in which the latter contributes with agricultural side-streams. The collaboration is part of the European Innovation Partnership projects and is financed by the Swedish Board of Agriculture and the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development.

Resource Efficient Food Production in Space
As of 2024, Mycorena is one of the eight finalists in the NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge, a 4.5 million dollar competition designed to find strategies on how to fill feeding gaps for crews of astronauts on manned-missions of 3-to-4 years with no chance for resupply. The technique used for this competition takes the resource efficiency even further as side streams from the process, like carbon dioxide and fermentation liquid, is used as sources of nutrition for other parts of the system.