Cargill to Open World’s Largest Gas Fermentation Facility

Cargill Inc., Calysta Inc., and several other third-party institutions announced plans Tuesday to build the world’s largest gas fermentation facility in Memphis, TN to produce Calysta’s FeedKind protein ingredient for animal feed.

“With a proven and proprietary fermentation platform, Calysta is introducing a scalable and disruptive protein source critical to meeting the needs of a growing global population. Partnering with Cargill, a leader in fermentation and protein production, and others to invest in the establishment of the venture as the first U.S. manufacturing plant to commercially produce FeedKind protein in the aquaculture industry at commercial scale,” said Alan Shaw, Ph.D., president and chief executive officer of Calysta, in a statement. “This venture is an important first step to deploying this technology globally.”

The new venture will build and operate the facility on Cargill’s 89-acre site on President’s Island, near Memphis. Cargill said it expects the new facility to be operational in late 2018, with an initial output of 20,000 mt per year of FeedKind protein that will be ramped up to 200,000 mt annually as the plant moves to operating at full capacity.

75 permanent jobs will be created when the plant first opens, Cargill said, and expand to 160 employees when it is fully operational.

FeedKind is a new, proprietary feed ingredient produced with the “world’s only commercially available” validated gas fermentation process, and is aimed as an alternative to fishmeal for use in aquaculture industry. The feed ingredient will be jointly marketed by Cargill and Calysta around the world.

Calysta opened an R&D and market introduction facility in the U.K. in September 2016 to produce samples of the feed ingredient.

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