Koji es Transformación

Worldwide, the protein industry is in a transition process between the offer of industrial meat products, which have a highly negative impact on the environment, and new options based on plants and biotechnological offers such as cultivated proteins, where these options have been used to compensate for the problems of an industry with great challenges but also with great economic opportunities.

However, in countries like Colombia, we find 100% natural proteins such as beef from regenerative systems, which manage to address the problems of climate change by capturing carbon in pastures, however, there is a lack of innovation in the region, as only 0.56% of the GDP in Latin America is invested in innovation, research and development. These proteins need an injection of innovation and marketing to keep up with the new world-class alternatives. That is where our Koji Burger project comes in, an alternative that improves the flavor, texture, and juiciness of sustainable raw materials thanks to an aging process that is unique in the world, to prepare the national meat industry to compete in the world.

With Koji Burger as a prototype, we realized that other food value chains need to stay up to date with the challenging future, as the world needs to produce 70% more food by 2050 in order to feed an estimated population of 9 billion people. Currently, these food value chains face global warming and traceability issues, affecting the coffee and cocoa supply. With this scenario, food value systems must change, that's why we are developing a biothecnological process that faces the main food production, enhancing meat, coffee and cocoa quality with koji, adding value to the final product while we are more efficient in the use of land, time and fermentation process.

With regenerative agriculture and fermentation, we design and develop food products that bridge producers and consumers to make a lasting impact on our food systems.

We have started in one of the most problematic food chains, livestock farming, in which we use regenerative livestock production, a system that allows us to capture carbon in the land in an organic way, regenerating the soil and protecting biodiversity. This production system is 100% grass-fed, free of hormones, agrochemicals and synthetic fertilisers. We transform this source with biotechnology, having aged beef burgers using the Japanese fungus Koji (A. Oryzae). We are pioneers in the application of the koji in meat, having a food product with a naturally enhanced flavour (umami), more juicy, tender, digestible and efficient in protein availability and absorption than normal meat, being this a scalable process, protected by trade secret. This process has allowed us to understand the critical variables of the koji fungus to use it in other feedstocks as we are doing in poultry and pork production, under the same regenerative and innovative principles.

However our vision is long-term, we are setting a goal to transform multiple food value chains, like the fermentation of coffee and cocoa. The proximity and diversity of raw materials is a great differential compared to our competitors since we are located in Colombia and Latin America as a global food pantry. In this way, we are focused on developing products that can save our planet, by working on massified value chains such as meat, coffee and cocoa, providing food-consciousness in an available way and driving the competition to transition to sustainable production models.

Our purpose is to have a three-way impact on consumers, producers and the planet, starting with Colombia and Latin America. Currently there are around 200 regenerative beef farms in Colombia but there are over 600.000 producer families where the regenerative model can be implemented, in an agricultural market of over 2.5 million producers. With our first goal to reach a 1% share in the meat market (Market Value: US $16M) and 0.5% in the coffee and cocoa market (Market Value: US $5.7M) we aim to drive a faster transition towards regenerative production models by promoting changes in consumer behaviour. In this way, we will not only be providing convenient, delicious and conscious food products for consumers, but we will also be supporting livestock, coffee and cocoa farmers in the region while we are regenerating our planet through clean food systems.

Additionally, there are very few food-tech companies in Latin America, but the region has great potential to deliver more value, which is why we also want to impact the entrepreneurial, innovative and technological ecosystem in the region, and support more people that want to venture into businesses that address the environmental problems we are facing today.

The larger part of Colombians have bond to agricultural communties, and myself and my co-founder Laura are no exception. With families that have worked the land we are very fortunate to have an education and we have shared the same vision: the future must be driven towards creating models for the regeneration of our agri-food system. That is why we decided to take action ourselves, in search of making businesses that save our planet. This shared vision of creating a global change represents a long-term commitment and a way to give back to our families that thanks to their hard work have given us the possibilities to have formal education and look for new horizons.

We are a team that shares and lives this challenge of changing our agri-food system complementing our knowledge and passions, I am a Chemical Engineer and have experience in R&D for CPGs and Engineering Design in the AgriFood sector who knows about processes and products and whose passion is to ferment the future.

Laura Daniela on the other hand, is a businesswoman woman knows about marketing and commercialization and her passion is to communicate and make it visible that we need to promote a change that can impact consumers worldwide, in order to have more conscious food for everyone. She has experience leading digital channels in one of Colombia's biggest CPGs and her family comes from a farming background where her passion for transforming the agri-food context in Colombia was born.

Additionally, we met eachother at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where our professors and mentors have direct contact with producers thanks to extension programmes and while we have been developing our technology and products it is thanks to the feedback from our mentors and network that we have gained insights from producers and the Colombian agricultural landscape.

We selected the Pilot Stage because we have worked with one regenerative beef supplier to develop our products and launched Koji Burger in September of 2021, from that date until today we have sold our products directly to consumers in the Slow Food Earth Market in Bogotá and also through our own channels like E-commerce with sales in 2021 of 1k USD, 2022 with sales of 3k USD and a growth for 2023 to 10k USD thanks to a 17k USD grant that we received from Entrepreneurs Organization. We now have our own R&D and production facility and have tested our technology in pork and chicken for Koji Burger and have done the initial trials for fermenting coffee and cacao.

Thanks to the grant that we recieved in 2023 by Entrepreneurs’ Organization, we realised that the growth and impact of our solution can reach more people in an accelerated way through strategic partnerships and allies. We see Solve as a gateway to a broad network of impact oriented mentors and partners that can help us overcome the barriers that we currently face, those being centered in the measurement of the impact of what we do, the logistics of growing a FoodTech company with the lack of biotechnological infraestructure and proper distribution channels in Colombia and finally, being a very technical and product oriented team, we feel that through support in communications and public relations we can improve our marketing strategy and be open to external investors as we do not have the knowledge to structure a formal investment round at this moment.

We see the transition to a sustainable food system that encompasses producers, consumers and the planet with technological innovation. Based on our work in developing more sustainable proteins with the help of regenerative livestock producers we have found that our innovation lies in a holistic approach in which thanks to biomimicry more regenerative livestock and agricultural producers can be part of innovative food value chains that provide products aided with biotechnological processes that meet the demands of a more conscious consumer, thus future-proofing traditional food value chains starting with beef, pork and poultry and with a vision to impact coffee and cacao as well.

This can change the landscape for producers that currently have pressure from plant-based and cell agriculture trends worldwide and also need biotechnology by their side to provide for their families while being part of the change that the world need for our food system.

At Koji we source raw materials from current regererative agricultural producers at fair prices.

We transform the raw materials into innovative food products thanks to food design and biotechnological processes that are more efficient than what is currently avaible in the market.

Conscious consumers buy our transformed food products benefiting from the enhanced flavor, digestibilty and other nutritional values while being ethically sourced and traceable.

This cycle generates what we call food value-chain empowerment, driven by consumption of innovative food products in beef, pork and poultry, that help the transition of livestock and agricultural producers to regenerative systems.

All in all, it is thanks to our in-house processes we can innovate in other food value-chains such as coffee and cacao, driving a faster transition to a sustainable food future for all.

Have full codification of our products in the main retailers in Colombia. / We just close an alliance with a current startup that will help us in the codification and distribution of our products in a national level.

Transform 1000 tonnes of meat (beef, pork, chicken) from regenerative sourcing by 2030. / We have transformed 0.6 tonnes of beef 100% regenerative, we measure this with the amount of products sold.

Transform 200 tonnes of coffee and cocoa from regenerative sourcing by 2030. / We are in validation process of these products.

Be part of the 1% for the planet movement, investing 1% of our revenue in climate change solutions.

Be a B-Corp by 2026.

Our solution is powered by two core technologies, biomimicry in the form of regenerative agriculture from the producer side and biotechnology in the form of koji-based fermentation in order to transform the regenerative sourced raw materials and enhance flavor, texture and other attributes with more efficient processes than what is available in the market today.

Taking Koji Burger as an example, we source regenerative beef that thanks to sustainable farming practices captures carbon in the Colombian grasslands and we age it with a koji-based fermentation process that is 90% more efficient in terms of time and needed infraestructure compared to Dry Aged Beef thus enhancing the flavor and texture of grass-fed beef in a way that can be scalable in the form of burger patties. Our aging process has been also tested in pork and poultry, two protein sources that are not usually aged but that also need a faster transition towards regenerative models driven by consumer demands.

These novel fermentation processes can also help enhance and unlock new and bold flavors in coffee and cacao, that coupled with our knowledge in CPGs and marketing can drive an accelerated growth in consumer demand and thus in sustainably sourced production.

2 full-time staff

2 part-time staff

4 Years

In our startup, we've established inclusive policies to ensure a welcoming environment, supported by open communication and accessible opportunities for all team members. Despite our small size, we celebrate diversity and strive to minimize barriers to opportunity, fostering a culture where every member feels valued and included.

We currently have two main lines of revenue, sales revenue from our food products sold directly to the consumer, such as our meat products (Koji Burger) and ferments (Tropical Koji), which have a gross margin between 40% and 60%. In addition, we are developing a line of meat aging and fermentation services for restaurants, which has a profitability between 50% and 60%.

Our monetisation is through the sale of innovative products directly to consumers through digital (E-commerce) and physical channels (specialised retailers). We also provide fermentation innovation services to producers or actors in the agri-food chain for B2B channels (restaurants and hotels).

All is supported in sourcing from regenerative producers and paying fair prices for their raw materials.

Our main source of financing is through direct sales of our products, either through online channels (e-commerce), retailers or HORECA channel. The balance of these channels allows us to have an optimal cash flow for our daily operations. We seek funding through Grants to invest in experimentation, innovation and development in order to accelerate our growth and expansion.

To date we have sold approximately $14,000 dollars and have had $17,000 dollars in grants. This has allowed us to have our own facility/lab, we have been able to experiment with our fermentation processes on 4 different raw materials and we have been able to grow our production capacity for the challenges of the future.

To reach our goal of selling $21.5 million by 2030, we need not only financial support to enable us to grow further, but also as much networking as possible from more people who want to join in the shift to more sustainable food production systems.