Foremost Farms USA, a producer of cheese, butter, and dairy ingredients supplied to national and international markets, announced a partnership with Gingko Bioworks to use advances in biotechnology to enable domestic, sustainable biomanufacturing of materials from dairy co-products to benefit the environment, family farms and the dairy industry as a whole.

Through this partnership, Foremost Farms will leverage Gingko's bioproduction services to develop and commercialize a new technology that could help upcycle billions of pounds of dairy co-products each year. Foremost Farms has selected Ginkgo as its partner of choice to develop a new upcycling technology because of Ginkgo's metabolic engineering and analytical capabilities, which will allow strain optimization for challenging environmental conditions while avoiding common toxicity issues.

"We're excited to partner with Ginkgo Bioworks, which can uniquely help Foremost Farms realize its goals. Ginkgo's platform gives us access to everything we need to move from concept to commercialization faster, providing a competitive advantage," said Greg Schlafer, president and CEO, Foremost Farms. "We are innovating to continue our trajectory as environmental stewards that take care of our world and create value for dairy farm families by potentially lowering manufacturing costs and creating a significant new revenue stream for those farmers."

"Ginkgo is always on the lookout for opportunities to use biology to create more sustainable products, and we are especially interested in helping customers in legacy industries develop improved production processes and a more circular economy," said Jennifer Wipf, Ginkgo's Head of Commercial, Cell Engineering. "We're eager to put our advanced metabolic engineering capabilities to work for Foremost Farms and are proud to help accelerate efforts focused on sustainable biomanufacturing."

"We're in a unique position to leverage Ginkgo's expertise because their flexible R&D service offerings allow us to creatively approach this significant opportunity in our value chain," said Declan Roche, Chief Commercial Officer at Foremost Farms. "With Ginkgo, we're able to pursue this exciting opportunity while minimizing our internal R&D fixed costs and allowing our team to remain focused on our core business."

Photo courtesy of Gingko Bioworks.