Ricky Cassini

Many of the additives used by the food industry to preserve, color, or maximize some properties of what we eat are synthesized from petroleum. Some, such as colorants, have been linked to cancer in animals above a certain dose. They also have harmful effects on the environment. The list of potentially harmful food additives is very long and the majority of the world's population prefers natural dyes, according to a Nielsen survey.

Ricky Cassini suffered one of these effects as a child when he had an allergic reaction. Years later, after graduating in Business Administration from Argentina's Austral University, Cassini decided to found Michroma, a biotechnology start-up to replace many of the synthetic ingredients in food with others of natural origin from fungi. Thanks to this project, the young man has become one of the 35 winners of MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 Latin America 2023 in Spanish.

The key to Cassini's innovation lies in using fungi and gene editing techniques to obtain new substances. The young man has created fungal biofactories to produce natural ingredients thanks to the natural process known as fermentation to replace food additives with "natural products with better properties, more stable, less expensive and more sustainable," as he explains. In 2019, the Michroma project was born, which not only seeks to eliminate petroleum-derived colorants from our food but also synthetic flavors and fragrances.

Cassini details, "We use a platform based on filamentous fungi enhanced with genetic engineering thanks to techniques, such as CRISPR, to create mushroom biofactories. With precision fermentation, we make it excrete a better and more sustainable alternative to current dyes with a competitive market price." This development consumes less water, less land, and reduces greenhouse emissions as it can be produced anywhere in the world, adds the young Argentinean.

His first product is a red dye that improves the properties of natural dyes as an alternative to the petroleum-based Red 40. Michroma's co-founder seeks to expand its production capacity, obtain regulatory approvals in Europe and the United States to launch into the market, and continue researching new natural ingredients that go beyond dyes. Michroma puts the Fungi kingdom at the service of a more natural food industry.