Clara Foods, a San Francisco-based food technology company, has launched the first-ever animal-free bioidentical pepsin for commercial use made without a single animal cell. Clara’s pepsin will be distributed by Ingredion, Clara’s partner for North America.

Clara’s next milestone is the commercialization of the world’s first animal-free egg proteins, positioning the company to become the largest egg protein supplier by 2028 and fundamentally transforming the way the world eats, the company reports.

Disrupting the pepsin market
Pepsin was the first enzyme to be discovered nearly 200 years ago and has been used in products from chewing gum to popular stomach remedies, and all manner of food applications. 

Today it is used as an ingredient in the manufacturing of many modern products consumers ingest daily – and found in the supplement section of almost every pharmacy and grocery store. 

Before Clara, pepsin had been almost exclusively sourced from pig stomachs, requiring more than 100 pigs to produce 1 kg of porcine pepsin.

The company’s proprietary precision fermentation technology creates an animal-free product with animal-derived pepsin functionality and cost-competitiveness. It also provides added benefits of safe and consistent sourcing, quality control, price stability, and vastly increased sustainability. 

The product retains the same functionality users have relied on for centuries – but provides more consistent product purity, safety and availability when compared to current pepsin supply chain volatility by eliminating common factory shutdowns due to animal disease. 

The pepsin supply chain has been negatively impacted by periodic outbreaks of swine flu that reduced China’s pig herd by as much as one-third or 100 million pigs in 2019. 

As the world’s first animal-free pepsin, Clara’s product is also free from antibiotics and hormones. It is also vegan, kosher and halal. 

Developing Food 2.0
“Pepsin was the first enzyme to be discovered, and it’s an honor that after 200 years, we can now introduce the world’s first pepsin – made completely animal-free,” says Arturo Elizondo, CEO and co-founder of Clara Foods. 

The company has been knee-deep in R&D for the last six years, building its technology platform, scaling up, and expanding its product portfolio. 

“Pepsin represents the first of several products coming online, and I could not be more excited. We are creating Food 2.0 and using it to upgrade the food industry, and we’re thrilled to share our breakthrough technology with companies large and small on a global scale.”

Clara’s strategy to accelerate the transition to animal-free proteins is rooted in environmental sustainability. 

Its animal-free pepsin leverages a DNA sequence isolation technology used to make insulin for people with diabetes, rennet for cheese-making, and heme for plant-based burgers. 

Clara’s fermentation technology encodes for the same DNA protein, using fermenters and yeast instead of factory farms and animals to create its final product.

The technology platform also only uses a fraction of the water, land and greenhouse gas footprint compared to the current factory farming model.

“We recognize that animal-free protein is emerging as a consumer value, and we want to provide our customers with a full range of solutions that work across a wide range of foods and beverages,” adds Michael Natale, Ingredion’s global platform leader of plant-based proteins. 

“Our go-to-market teams are excited to partner with Clara Foods to launch this porcine pepsin replacement to our customers.”