The laboratory making cheese - or something like it - from food waste

Vayu Hill-Maini's lab has created a new cheese, or at least something that tastes like cheese, but is actually made from food waste.

The bioengineer, who runs a lab at Stanford University in California, is experimenting with fermentation using fungi.

"One of the most amazing things that we found recently is that we could take waste and add a few other ingredients in a fungal fermentation and create this delicious cheese that is like a Pecorino or Parmigiano," he says.

Fermentation is a biological process whereby organisms convert carbohydrates like starch or sugar into substances like alcohol, without using oxygen.

Perhaps the best-known examples of fermentation are in baking and brewing, where yeast breaks down sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide.

But it's not just wheat flour, or barley that can fuel fermentation, all sorts of substances are suitable - in biology those fermentation hosts are known as substrates.

With the latest biotech tools, companies are taking by-products of the food industry, that are currently discarded or have little value, and using fermentation to turn them into something useful.

UK-based Fermtech is transforming cocoa shells, which are normally thrown away, into a cocoa powder substitute, using fermentation.

"If you were to sniff a bag of cocoa shells, you would be really struck by the intense chocolatey nature of it," says Andy Clayton, Fermtech's CEO.

He says it's a shame that by-products of the food industry are composted or burnt, rather than using microorganisms to break down the hard bits of the plant and make it bioavailable for humans, while retaining the flavours.

Utilising a broader palette of substrates can save money, help the environment, and expand flavour.

Take peas. Protein makes up about a quarter of a pea, and pea protein has become an increasingly popular source of plant-based protein.

That makes "a perfect substrate for fermentation," according to Bosco Emparanza, the CEO of Spain's MOA Foodtech.

His company gathers data on environmental conditions and available substrates, and sequences the genomes of microorganisms appropriate for the food industry.

With that data, MOA has trained an AI to work out what combinations of substrates and microorganisms would achieve the best yields.

Emparanza marvels at the speed of such AI-driven fermentation design.

"When we started the company, we were able to develop one bioprocess in two weeks," he says, referring to the use of living cells to generate a product.

"Nowadays, the platform can develop 300 bioprocesses per hour."

Using that tech, MOA Food