An SRI-led team has succeeded in creating a food product rich in essential nutrients, suitable for quickly scaling up disaster relief in remote locations.
Transporting sufficient food can be a logistical burden for military deployments, disaster relief operations, and humanitarian aid work in remote areas. Currently, these operations rely on Meals Ready to Eat or Humanitarian Daily Rations, which require industrial manufacturing, processing, packaging, and shipping. But soon, nutritious and tasty food will be producible on-site using portable, microbe-based systems.
As part of the Cornucopia program run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), researchers at SRI pulled together a strong team of subcontractors, including Air Protein, Kiverdi, and Nitricity. “The team is developing a deployable food delivery system that creates enough food to feed 14 people per day for over a month,” said Elisabeth Perea, the principal investigator and senior chemical engineer at SRI.
As food developers for the program, the Air Protein and Kiverdi team has produced a pudding sample that contains all of the four macronutrients — carbohydrates, fats, protein, and fiber — as well as the full suite of vitamins and micronutrients. “It is very visually appealing and meets all of the texture metrics of comparable commercial puddings,” said Perea.
“The team is developing a deployable food delivery system that creates enough food to feed 14 people per day for over a month.” — Elisabeth Perea
The project, known as Food from Air for Distributed Rations (or FADR), requires two microbial bioprocess stages to create all of the necessary nutrients. Both bioprocesses consume fixed nitrogen from an innovative, compact system designed by Nitricity, which requires only air and energy as inputs. Carbon is provided in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2) from an exhaust gas stream, inspired by SRI’s decades of experience in the field of carbon capture. The first microbial stage uses a revolutionary AirFermentation™ carbon transformation process, designed by Kiverdi and refined by Air Protein, in which water and energy are used to isolate hydrogen and oxygen to feed to microbes along with the CO2 and fixed nitrogen to produce a protein-rich culture.
The final food product utilizes a portion of that protein as an ingredient, and the rest proceeds into a second stage to feed microalgae cultivated by SRI using a process designed to maximize carbohydrate production. The algae-derived carbohydrates and other essential vitamins and nutrients are combined with the protein and dried into a flour-like nutritionally complete powder, with excess nutrients recycled back to the first step.
“Cooks can take this nutritionally complete powder, add flavors to it, and formulate it into different types of foods,” Perea said. “Food developers at Air Protein and Kiverdi are focused on puddings and jerky-type foods, but the options are pretty broad once you have a good, nutritious powder to start from.”
Kiverdi researchers experimented with using the microbes to create flavors as well as nutrients. The pudding sample, for example, was citrus-flavored thanks to a molecule called limonene produced by some of the microbes. Now in the second stage of the project, DARPA has asked for a neutral flavor food, creating a base that could hold a variety of added flavors. As part of the project, Air Protein researchers will submit details of the process, safety testing, and samples to the Food and Drug Administration so that the powder can be granted GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) status.
After the nutritionally complete powder achieves GRAS status, the team plans to conduct taste tests with the food they produce. In the interim, to confirm that the food is neutral, Air Protein plans to use gas chromatography-olfactometry to separate individual molecules in a food sample and vaporize them for a trained person to smell. From there, the team will adjust the production process to achieve neutrality.
“Smell and taste are so closely correlated that this is the gold standard for analyzing flavors without actually tasting them,” Perea said.
SRI is bringing all of the pieces of the FADR system together to make everything as small and efficient as possible. They are designing collapsible plastic algae bioreactors — one of the largest pieces of the operation — that can be shipped empty and expanded on-site. Ultimately, the system will fit in the back of a compact military vehicle or container and resemble a combination of a microbrewery, algae farm, and commercial kitchen.
“Our goal is to feed people in remote locations on demand, using minimal inputs, and producing as little waste as possible,” Perea said.
To learn more about this project or to work with SRI, contact us today.
Distribution Statement A: Approved for public release, distribution unlimited.
