Introducing Capacitor
The first comprehensive and free database of global biomanufacturing capacity
by Alex Jaffe for Synonym
Today, we’re joining forces with The Good Food Institute, Blue Horizon and Material Innovation Initiative, to launch Capacitor (www.capacitor.bio) — the first comprehensive and free database of microbial fermentation facilities worldwide.
Our goal with Capacitor is to promote the growth of biomanufacturing by making it easier for synthetic biology companies to find the production resources they need to bring more bioproducts to market.
Companies that need fermentation capacity can now search Capacitor’s growing list of facilities to find and connect with ones that meet their needs. Users can refine searches by location, scale, bioprocess, feedstock and more. They can also browse facilities on an interactive map of the world.
If you’re looking for microbial fermentation capacity, we invite you to visit Capacitor.bio!
Why we’re developing Capacitor
There’s a fast growing ecosystem of companies using biology to produce the things we consume — from the food we eat to the materials we use to the energy powering our world. These new bioproducts require far fewer carbon resources than products made with chemical synthesis or animal-agriculture and as a result, have the potential to create a more sustainable manufacturing economy.
It’s exciting to see the first biomanufactured consumer products come to market. We love animal-free macarons, bio-based fiber hoodies and fermented chocolate milk and want more innovative products like these! But that can’t happen until we address the immediate need to develop more industrial biomanufacturing capacity. Without it, these companies won’t be able to manufacture products at scale to meet consumer demand.
The Boston Consulting Group and Blue Horizon highlighted this exact biomanufacturing capacity bottleneck in a recent study. They found demand for fermentation-based, alternative food proteins will surpass 15 million metric tons by 2030. Whereas, experts estimate there are only ~10 million liters (not tons) of capacity currently available to meet that demand. This means we need at least 1000x more microbial fermentation capacity to keep up with future demand. And this doesn’t even account for the capacity needed to manufacture non-food bioproducts!
Building new fermentation capacity will take time and Synonym is working quickly to solve that problem. In parallel, we also want to find solutions that promote biomanufacturing right now. That’s why we’ve developed and are releasing Capacitor.
As we talked to the synbio community, it became clear that finding technical details about existing fermentation capacity was more difficult than it should be. Facility listings were only available in disparate databases, which made finding viable production partners time-intensive and expensive. It’s a pain point for the industry, so we went out and aggregated all the key facility specs into a single directory that is now easily searchable for free.
We aspire to create solutions that help the biomanufacturing industry achieve commercial success. That’s why we’ve teamed up with a group of powerful knowledge partners — The Good Food Institute, Blue Horizon and Material Innovation Initiative — to provide the biomanufacturing ecosystem with a resource to help tackle some of these challenges and do everything we can to help these companies scale.
A bit more detail on Capacitor
At launch, Capacitor offers details on more than 100 facilities globally. We will continue to add details to existing listings, as well as add new facilities to the platform and hope to ultimately create the most comprehensive database of available capacity in the market.
Capacitor’s initial scope is focused on microbial fermentation, which represents one of the most mature and standardized biomanufacturing processes. We will keep a close eye on broader industry trends and hope to expand scope in the future as other bioprocesses, such as cultivation, move toward to commercial scale.
If you have a fermentation facility and want to list it in Capacitor, please let us know by filling out this web form (should take less than 3 minutes!). The more robust the database is, the more useful it will be to our users looking for capacity.
How Capacitor fits in with Synonym’s overall company vision
Synonym is accelerating the world’s biological future by developing, financing and building commercial-scale biomanufacturing facilities for startups to Fortune 500 companies. As we shared above, we will need dozens of commercial-scale facilities to produce bioproducts in quantities that will allow them to reach cost parity with legacy, animal-derived and petroleum-based products.
We hope that Capacitor will raise awareness around the capacity shortfall in biomanufacturing and catalyze increased investor, governmental and consumer interest in closing this infrastructure gap.
We look forward to hearing your feedback about Capacitor. If you’d like to get in touch, please reach out to our team at capacitor@synonym.bio.
For future Synonym updates and our thoughts on biomanufacturing, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter (@SynonymBio and @CapactiorBio)!
