Investing in Zero Acre Farms
Replacing a hidden killer – vegetable oils
Vegetable oils massively degrade human and planetary health through inflammatory fat compounds, rampant deforestation, and toxic production processes. They don’t make sense in the quantities we eat them other than the fact that they are extremely cheap.
Global sales of vegetable oils reached $255Bn in 2022¹ and will continue to grow as population increases. USDA research indicated added vegetable oils comprise 21% of the average American’s daily calories.² In any food that you don’t cook yourself, chances are you’re consuming a lot more vegetable oil than you think – it’s used in all forms of food preparation environments from high-end restaurants to quick-serve counters to packaged products.
The most common vegetable oils have relatively high omega-6 fatty acid content, particularly soybean, grape seed, and sunflower oils. This is important. We need an appropriate ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in our diet to balance inflammation in our body (simplistically, omega-6s trigger inflammation and omega-3s reduce). Some acute inflammation is necessary for our body to protect itself, but chronic inflammation in the body contributes to myriad health issues including heart disease, metabolic disorders, diabetes, and cognitive degeneration.³ Excessive vegetable oil consumption in particular has been causally linked to several forms of chronic disease and studies have found it increases your risk of death more than heavy drinking.⁴
The medical community generally recommends an omega-6:3 ratio of maximum 4:1, ideally closer to 1:1.³ ⁵ The typical Western diet is 15:1, in large part due to vegetable oil consumption. Soybean oil, the most consumed vegetable oil in the US, has an omega-6:3 ratio of 7:1. Grape seed and sunflower oil are both >40:1. High omega-6:3 ratios also seep into our animal products through replacement of forage with soybean and corn feed, but that’s a topic for another day.
Vegetable oil crops are also 2 of the 3 largest drivers of deforestation globally. From 2001-2015, 26M acres of forest was cleared for palm oil plantations and 21M for soybean cultivation. Only pastureland conversion deforested more land.
What is Zero Acre Farms?
Founded in 2020, Zero Acre Farms (“ZAF”) recently launched a new type of cooking oil produced through microbial fermentation. In large fermenters, ZAF feeds sugar from non-GMO sugarcane to a microbial culture that converts the sugar into oil. Imagine a Tide pod filled with fat. The culture is pressed to release the oil from the microbes and the oil is then filtered, distilled, and packaged. The ZAF cultured oil is a 1:1 replacement for neutral-flavor vegetable oil in myriad cooking contexts. And the company is not limited to liquid cooking oils – solid and semi-solid products (e.g. coconut oil, palm shortening) can be produced with the same foundational technology.
The Investment Case
ZAF hits the golden quadfecta of parity or better in taste/culinary properties, cost (at scale), environmental sustainability, and healthful nutrition.
Customers of ZAF oil will not have to make any sacrifices on taste, culinary properties, or cost (with sufficient economies of scale) while dramatically reducing their environmental footprint from vegetable oils and improving their nutrition and wellbeing.
Taste/culinary: by virtue of its clean, neutral taste, high smoke point (even higher than soy, palm, canola, and avocado oil), and shelf stability, ZAF can be used in deep fry, stir fry, roast, bake, sauté, dress, spray, brush, and drizzle culinary contexts.
Low cost at scale: economies of scale in microbial fermentation, identified process efficiencies and innovation opportunities, and higher utilization rates will allow ZAF to compete with conventional vegetable oils on cost, especially considering the significant externalized costs of vegetable oil production and consumption
Environmental sustainability: ZAF oil results in 86% less GHGs, 83% less water, and 90% less land than soybean oil.
Healthful nutrition: ZAF oil has an optimal omega-6:3 ratio and is more resilient to fat denaturing.
Perfect team to build this business.
ZAF has the combination of entrepreneurial experience and profound scientific expertise to build and scale cultured oil into a multi-billion dollar market segment.
Co-Founder & CEO Jeff Nobbs is a highly strategic entrepreneur that successfully built both an e-commerce tech business and healthy fast casual restaurant chain. Co-Founder & CTO Stephen del Cardayre is a PhD biochemist with over 30 years of experience in biological fermentation and metabolic engineering, the foundational technologies for the ZAF product. Jay Keasling, the founding father of the field of metabolic engineering, is a co-founder and scientific advisor to the company.
First to market in high-impact commodity.
ZAF is the first to market with a highly versatile and scalable core product that can transform the vegetable oil market across food service, CPG, food manufacturing, and retail buyers. ZAF has a headstart to build customer relationships and process expertise that unlocks potential for rapid scaling and impact.
Sources
1 IMARC.
2 USDA.
3 Healthline.
