Globally, palm oil production exceeds 75 million tonnes annually, so the race is on to find nature-identical oils that don’t have the environmental impacts that come with harvesting palm.

GrainCorp Ventures has recently invested in Levur – an early stage start-up that’s developing novel alternatives to palm oil via synthetic biology.

Based out of Macquarie University in Sydney NSW, the team at Levur have cracked one piece of this puzzle by designing a system that guides yeast to produce oils through a process similar to brewing beer.

Levur CEO and Founder Tom Collier says the Levur team are at the forefront of a new era of sustainable ingredient production.

“Ingredient production has remained largely unchanged for decades, but we now have the tools to harness biology with precision,” says Tom.

“At Levur, we’re using advanced strain engineering to create high-performance ingredients that fit seamlessly into existing supply chains, without the environmental trade-offs of traditional industries like palm oil.”

GrainCorp Head of Investments Jordan Jeffery says this technology is an exciting step forward in the oils industry.

“Our teams are committed to reducing environmental impacts across the supply chain, as well as using sustainable and fully traceable ingredients – Levur’s technology ticks all of these boxes,” says Jordan.

“Levur’s solution has the potential to meet these needs at scale, so we’re excited to support them in bringing their innovation to market.”

GNE Research & Development Manager Sara Labaf is passionate about the use of the precision fermentation technology Levur is using to create products like margarine and baby formula more sustainably.

“As palm oil is one of the most widely used oils in the world, it’s exciting for us to be working on sustainable alternatives alongside Levur, including OPO,” says Sara.  

“OPO is a specialised ingredient that’s used in baby formula and we’re currently assisting Levur in a grant application to help them kickstart this work, enabling them to get their technology to market faster.”

This investment marks our third Ventures project this financial year, alongside Calice and BioScout – two start-ups that are set to benefit growers via the use of AI and data modelling.