Australia has become an incubator for the world’s most innovative foodtech startups.
Some are developing biochemicals for soil and livestock that cut emissions and waste. Others are fermenting animal-free proteins that move away from traditional farming altogether. All draw on synthetic biology for their IP.
We look at how their success leans on Australia’s institutional excellence in biotech research, why they indicate broader potential for biomanufacturing growth in the country, and the bottlenecks to scaling these industries.
Food system innovations
Number 8 Bio is typical of a new generation of Australian biotech startups. Its product BetterFeed is an animal supplement that reduces methane emissions from livestock – one of the biggest drivers of climate change.
So far, cost-effective tech solutions have been elusive. This is despite livestock methane contributing 30% of global warming since pre-industrial times.
Number 8 Bio, however, claims its supplement has economics on its side. Unlike competing supplements, the company claims BetterFeed actually enhances herd productivity. “Our solution redirects energy, otherwise lost to methane, towards [animal] growth”, says its website. The argument is that farmers will want to adopt the product to see these economic benefits, something that will drive uptake enough to meaningfully dent emissions.
Economics is a key consideration on the supply side too. The company outsources chemical manufacturing to large external producers to keep costs to a minimum. Number 8 profits by retaining the intellectual property on using the chemical in ruminants and the precise ingredient combination.
Tech meets policy
Number 8 Bio’s climate-tech chimes with the times. Methane is a huge problem for the Australian agriculture industry, responsible for a little over 50 percent of the country’s methane emissions.
Livestock emissions are a big hurdle standing in the way of Australia’s climate pledge to reduce its emissions by 43% below 2005 levels by 2030. In its search for climate solutions, the government has been backing the methane-tech sector.
By 2025, it had invested $29 million into a competitive grants program designed to drive R&D in the field. Large-scale trials for promising technologies are currently underway, due for completion over the next two years.
Synbio specialist
Functional feed supplements are precisely the kind of specialised, high-value innovations that play to Australia’s research strengths in synthetic biology.
Synthetic biology provides the foundational tech for making renewable molecules that can compete with synthetic chemicals on cost and performance. It is the basic science that underpins bioeconomy development. Australia ranks 7th and 12th globally for its share of highly cited synbio publications and total publications in the field respectively.
Number 8 Bio’s feed supplement is a direct product of this research ecosystem. Co-founders Dr Alex Carpenter and Dr Tom William were both synthetic biologists at Macquarie, the country’s leading university in the field. William was previously the chief scientific officer at the institution’s Austrian Genome Foundry and supervised Carpenter during his PhD.
Sustainable food tech
Methane-reducing supplements are the tip of the iceberg within Australia’s foodtech sector, which is also gaining a reputation for alternative proteins.
The promise of alternative proteins lies in both sustainability and abundance: their aim is to manufacture nutritious food in labs rather than the soil, cutting the land use, emissions and biodiversity loss that accompanies intensive farming.
This is precisely what Australia’s All G says it offers with its lactoferrin – a key baby formula ingredient. Making the substance is usually highly resource-intensive: it can take 10, 000 litres of cow milk to get 1 kg of the stuff. However, All G’s industrial microbes can recreate lactoferrin in the lab without cows, saving on water, land, and emissions.
In its search for sustainable food systems, Australian startups have not forgotten traditional agriculture. At the other end of the food supply chain, Loam Bio is developing custom microbes that boost crop yields and health by improving soil. Startup ThinkBio is also in the business of making biobased products that allow farms to cut synthetic fertilisers while maintaining their crop yields.
Infrastructural bottlenecks
Despite the innovations coming out of startups, infrastructural gaps are hampering more rapid scale-up. As in the EU and North America, one of the biggest bottlenecks for Australian biomanufacturing is a lack of facilities to pilot and demo new products, let alone produce them at industrial scale.
Commercial fermenting facilities are capital-intensive pieces of infrastructure – not the kind that small, innovative startups are capable of founding on their own. All G had to look to Europe for protein manufacturing facilities, for example.
Another Australian company may become part of the solution. Cauldron builds biomanufacturing facilities and has already set up a fermentation demo plant in Orange, New South Wales. It is in the process of building a bio-fab in Mackay with support from the Queensland Government. In 2024, it received $4.3 million from a government Industry Growth Programme to build fully-automated fermentation tech.
Cauldron’s expertise is also in demand internationally. In 2024, the US Department of Defense awarded the company $1.76M to plan a commercial-scale plant in the US. This indicates the potential for Australian companies to play a bigger role in building cross-border biobased supply chains across Western countries.
Regional governments get involved
While national biomanufacturing capacity still needs development, bioenergy is already an indelible part of the Australian economy at a regional level.
Australia’s biomanufacturing industry is currently dominated by bioenergy, with New South Wales holding most capacity. The provincial government has even listed biofuels as one of their six key industries.
The scaling success that biofuels have seen in New South Wales holds lessons for the other biomanufacturing sectors. It points to the crucial need for local government policy if biobased chemicals and materials are to become a bigger share of the national economy.
Queensland already leads the way on biomanufacturing initiatives, with its Biofutures strategy and roadmap since 2016. This plan includes but is not limited to biofuels. It has so far supported biomanufacturing projects and businesses, while also completing the essential task of mapping biomass feedstock supply, sites, and infrastructural gaps.
Untapped sugar waste
Australia also holds great potential for circular biomanufacturing industries.
If the push to build circular manufacturing comes from any legacy sector in Australia, it will likely be the sugar manufacturers. Australia is among the leading global exporters of sugar, producing 30 million tonnes of sugarcane in 2023. Much of the country’s domestic waste comes from the industry.
In 2022, the industry published a collective vision of transforming their waste into high-value products using synthetic biology tools. Biofuels, bioplastics, and alternative proteins were some of the end products the industry envisaged.
Harvesting and processing sugar yields large amounts of inedible byproducts, many of which can be processed into industrial chemicals and materials. These products can often replace fossil-based chemicals in industry and consumer materials.
Australia’s sugar waste-to-chemicals pipeline is gaining some momentum already. The MacKay biomanufacturing facility being built by Cauldron sits in the heart of Australia’s sugar-growing territory. This co-location could spark a regional supply chain by reducing transport and input costs.
Applying synthetic biology to upcycle their own waste is an attractive revenue-earner for Australia sugar producers. Many are facing financial pressure from falling global sugar prices and natural disasters that have damaged crops. From this point of view, circular biomanufacturing has the potential to buffer Australian industry from external stressors like these.
Growing demand is key
To build large supply chains, research capabilities are not enough. Government policies are also needed to support young biobased startups and boost demand for their products.
The Australian government has established some policies favourable to scaling biomanufacturing. Biotech featured in the 2022/23 government List of Critical Technologies, including synbio and biological manufacturing. This recognition should drive more federal funding into the sector.
Yet there are also limits to current federal policy. The flagship industrial policy of the Australian government – Future Made in Australia – emphasises liquid biobased fuels but not higher-value products of the kind flourishing among domestic startups. Boosting demand for non-biofuel biochemicals thus remains the biggest task for federal policymakers.
The surest way to grow biobased demand would be to place biomanufacturing at the centre of national economic security policies. Incentivising consumers and industry to buy biobased products should sit in a broader drive to secure Australia’s supplies of food, fertiliser, and medicine over the long term.
This national self-interest could prove the biggest and most reliable spur to biobased scale-up in coming years: methane-reducing additives, cost-effective proteins, and synthesised nutrients can all serve as pillars of food security on a resource-constrained planet.
Australia is particularly vulnerable to climate-driven resource insecurity, with the country’s agriculture hit by acute heatwaves in recent years. An orderly, planned transition to biomanufactured supply chains could become one of its best chances of weathering the century of climate change.
