‘Chicken’ nuggets and cream ‘cheese’ grown in trays. Are you ready for alternative proteins made from a volcanic microbe?

CHICAGO — A food tech company operating in the shadow of Chicago’s old Union Stockyards has developed a new kind of animal-free protein that it, and its big-name funders, believe can help feed the world’s growing population while fighting climate change.

Nature’s Fynd, which opened its headquarters and production facility last month, uses a microbe sourced from the volcanic hot springs of Yellowstone National Park to grow a protein that can be turned into numerous alternative meat and dairy products.

The company, which plans to begin selling to the general public within the next 10 months, isn’t saying yet which products will hit retail shelves first, but its capabilities include “chicken” nuggets, sliders, cream “cheese,” “pork” dumplings and chocolate mousse.

Nature’s Fynd, which recently changed its name from Sustainable Bioproducts, on Tuesday announced it raised $80 million in a Series B round, adding to $33 million in Series A funding raised a year ago and to its list of prominent supporters. The new round was co-led by Generation Investment Management, whose chairman is Al Gore, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, whose funders include Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Mike Bloomberg. ADM, the Chicago-based ingredients giant, and Danone, the French dairy company, are also investors in the startup.

Nature’s Fynd joins a growing array of protein alternatives catering to consumers who increasingly seek to eat less meat and dairy for health, environmental or animal welfare reasons. But it is different from its booming plant-based counterparts or the nascent industry of lab-grown meat derived from animal cells.

The microbe, part of the fungi family, undergoes fermentation in stacks of trays in a lab, feeding on starches and simple sugars to create a protein containing all nine essential amino acids, one of the few examples of a “complete” protein not derived from animals, said co-founder and CEO Thomas Jonas. The process takes just three-and-a-half days and uses a fraction of the land and energy of traditional agriculture.

A single tray, the size of a baking sheet, can produce the equivalent of 30 chickens in a year, Jonas said. Once fully operational, the 36,000-square-foot facility will be able to produce, in burger equivalents, what would otherwise require about 15,000 acres in grazing land.

“It seems like science fiction, but it’s science, not fiction,” Jonas said. “It’s very real.”

The discovery of the microbe began as a NASA-funded research project to prepare for sending a probe to space to search for life on another planet. Scientists traveled to Yellowstone National Park, which contains the largest volcanic system in North America, to learn how life survives in different, harsh environments.

They took a small sample from a volcanic hot spring and discovered a microorganism that contained a complete protein that could multiply quickly. The initials of the microorganism’s scientific name, Fusarium Yellowstonensis (FY), inspired the company’s new name.

“Across millennia, we don’t know or understand how that happened, but microorganisms managed to colonize this environment and developed strategies to survive and thrive in this pretty barren environment,” Jonas said. “As a result they had to become super efficient at using the very rare resources they have. For us as a species, with the 10 billion of us on one little planet (by 2050), and global warming, looking at organisms that are more efficient and do more with less, is relevant.”

The company for the past five years has been developing the fermentation technology at its research and development center in Bozeman, Mont. Karuna Rawal, chief marketing officer, compared the process to baking bread.

“Think of (the microbe) like a yeast or dough starter,” said Rawal, who joined the company last summer from Publicis Groupe, the French parent of Leo Burnett, where she had a lead role in the much-praised Always “Like a Girl” campaign. “We took a small sample from Yellowstone, and we never need to go back. We have enough stored in freezers across the country and world to literally feed humanity.”

The company chose Chicago for its headquarters because of its density of large food companies and food industry talent, and also liked the poetic symmetry of locating near the former stockyards, which for decades were the center of America’s meatpacking industry. It employs half of its 50 employees in Chicago currently — the others are in Montana — and plans to grow its staffing to 100 by the end of the year.

“We are going to reclaim it as the headquarters for new protein,” said Jonas, a Frenchman who previously was a president at packaging giant MeadWestvaco.

In the test kitchen, Eleanore Eckstrom, director of product design and formerly a food scientist at Kraft Heinz, experiments with turning the substance into recognizable food. A crisp “chicken” nugget could be mistaken for the real thing. The chocolate mousse, made with chocolate, cashew nuts, cornstarch, vanilla and Nature’s Fynd in place of any dairy, is quite smooth.

Nature’s Fynd is versatile. The fermented raw material, which is white, ropy and rubbery in appearance, has a filamentous structure that mimics muscle in its solid form. But it also can be made into a creamy liquid — “milk” — by just adding water to a blender, or ground into powder for use in baked goods. A key part of the fermentation technology is that it renders the protein tasteless so that flavors can be added.

The sci-fi nature of eating fermented volcanic microbes could be a turnoff to some. But the company’s research has found people are “way more open than initially expected to new forms of food,” Jonas said. “They want things that are healthy, taste good and more and more, especially the younger generation, they care about the environmental impact. Which was not really true five to 10 years ago. It was nice to say, but people didn’t vote with their wallet. And that is something where we are seeing a shift happen.”

Analyses conducted by third-party labs have found Nature’s Fynd digests better than most animal proteins and some plant-based proteins, such as pea, Jonas said. The substance is also naturally high in fiber and calcium and is vitamin dense. It has no cholesterol and one-tenth the fat of meat.

The company has self-affirmed its product as generally recognized as safe with the Food and Drug Administration, a process that allows manufacturers to vouch for the safety of a product.

The microbe’s utility doesn’t end with the food supply. Nature’s Fynd’s scientists in Bozeman are working with NASA to use it to create a bioreactor for space travel.

“We are at the heart an exploration company,” Jonas said. “Solving big problems is what gets us excited.”