The woman thinking about how to feed nearly 10 billion people

When venture capitalist Gabrielle Munzer thinks about 2050, when the global population is projected to reach 9.8 billion, her thoughts soon turn to food.

“Ultimately, there are planetary boundaries that will prevent us from producing food at this scale: it is simply impossible to make twice as much using traditional farming practices. Humans need to eat, the animals we produce need to eat, there will be more of us, and we need more food. This is where science and innovation can play a role,” says Munzer, a partner at Main Sequence Ventures.

The aim of Main Sequence, co-founded by the CSIRO, is to partner with ambitious deep tech founders and research organisations to help solve some of the world’s greatest challenges with science. The future of food is one of them.

“Traditional agriculture is already transforming through a variety of regenerative practices that make our land more productive, but we also need to scale breakthrough technologies to produce food alongside traditional methods,” Munzer says.

One such technology is precision fermentation, which Munzer says has the potential to revolutionise how we produce food, using science.

“Think milk without the cow or animal fats without the animal. We need to invest in these technologies in addition to traditional agriculture, to ensure food security and the health of our planet,” she says.

In the NSW town of Orange, Michele Stansfield, CEO and co-founder of Cauldron Ferm is doing just this. After completing a degree in biomedical science, Stansfield delved deeper into cellular and molecular biology, where she encountered the “transformative power” of precision fermentation to create fats, fuels and proteins.

“The more I delved into the science of precision fermentation, the more I realised its ability to revolutionise the way we produce and process food, fibre and feedstock,” Stansfield says.