Palm oil and cocoa fats are facing upheaval thanks to their climate and economic costs. For Smey, the solution lies with yeast, fermentation, and AI.
You likely used palm oil at some point today. The fat is ubiquitous, present in half of all supermarket items, thanks to its many functional advantages: it sets at room temperature, it’s shelf-stable, and it’s flavourless.
It’s also dangerous. Producing palm oil (and meeting the insatiable demand for it) requires vast amounts of deforestation that puts tropical animals, communities, and climates at risk.
Palm oil is widely used in the chocolate trade, itself under threat from the climate crisis. The industry is directly responsible for 94% and 80% of deforestation in Ghana and Ivory Coast, the two largest producers of the crop.
Cocoa prices are through the roof and will continue to rise this year, as extreme weather events wipe out harvests and push a third of the world’s cocoa trees towards extinction. That jeopardises cocoa butter stocks too.
Replacing these two fats isn’t easy. Using vegetable oils instead comes with its own unintended climate consequences. That has led many startups to resort to microbial fermentation, which significantly lowers the need for farmland and produces a fraction of the emissions.
Savor, NoPalm Ingredients, Clean Food Group, Palm-Alt, Äio and C16 Biosciences are just some of the startups using fermentation to decarbonise the global fat industry. Joining them is Smey, a German-French firm that uses artificial intelligence to create cultured oils for food manufacturers.
How Smey uses AI to find the ideal microbe strains
Headquartered in Paris with an R&D centre in Munich, Smey has launched the Neobank of Yeasts (NOY), a digital databank of yeast fatty acid profiles.
It’s designed to speed up the development of next-gen oils intended as a drop-in replacement in food and beauty products. The tool replaces genetic engineering with a “precision-matching process” – instead of modifying yeast to produce specific fats, its database finds strains that already naturally produce the desired oil. That cuts R&D timelines from two years down to 30 days.
Smey founder Viktor Sartakov-Korzhov explains that the NOY contains an extensive database of over 1,000 yeast strains and their metabolic profiles. “Using AI models, we identify strains that naturally produce specific fatty acid profiles like stearic acid for cocoa butter mimetics,” he tells Green Queen.
“Once a suitable strain is selected, we proceed to fermentation under optimised lab conditions. The goal here is to fine-tune the triglyceride composition, a critical factor that determines the oil’s melting profile, skin feel, and absorption rate,” he adds.
“Additionally, we apply adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE), a non-GMO method, to improve yield and stability. AI is primarily used upstream, at the strain selection stage, while downstream processes like solvent-free oil extraction ensure regulatory compliance and sustainability. The final oils mimic natural oils in performance, yet are more scalable and environmentally efficient.”
The NOY is seamlessly integrated with Smey.AI, a proprietary engine that maps genomic, metabolic, and fermentation data to identify the optimal strains for specific attributes (like melting point, texture, or oxidative stability) in just hours, instead of weeks.
To feed the microbes, Smey uses a variety of carbohydrate-based inputs, including glucose, sucrose, and sugars derived from agricultural byproducts.
The fats are produced without farmland and with minimal water, and generate up to 90% less emissions than conventional oils, offering the food industry a climate-friendly alternative that is better for their bottom lines.
Cocoa butter and tropical oil alternatives can ease EUDR concerns
All of the company’s operations have so far been financed through shareholder investments, and it isn’t raising funds from external sources at the moment. “Smey is currently B2B-focused, working with partners across cosmetics, oleochemicals, lubricants, and food industries,” says Sartakov-Korzhov.
Its two flagship ingredients, cHOB (Cultivated High Oleic Butter) and cCB (Cultivated Cocoa Butter), aim to provide stable and traceable options to conventional tropical oils. cHOB is a semi-solid fat for cosmetic use that offers a unique fatty acid profile, with “superior stability, skin feel, and sustainability” and a non-greasy texture.
cCB is a direct replacement for cocoa butter, featuring 35% stearic acid. It matches the functional properties of the latter while avoiding the environmental and ethical trade-offs.
These oils will appeal to companies looking to overhaul their supply chains ahead of the EU’s Deforestation Regulation, which will ban the import of cocoa, palm oil and shea butter linked to deforestation. Violators face fines of up to 4% of their global turnover.
Since Smey uses different fungi strains, its regulatory strategy depends on the use case. “[For] cosmetics, our oils are composed of safe, well-known triglycerides, which accelerate regulatory pathways. An INCI name can usually be obtained in six to 12 months, depending on customer requirements,” says Sartakov-Korzhov.
For lubricants, there are usually no special regulatory approvals required. As for food, “novel food approvals can take 1.5 to two years” in the US and the EU, he says: “But our solvent-free downstream processing aligns with both safety and sustainability requirements from day one.”
The company’s AI technology can also produce animal-free proteins, starting with ovalbumin (the main protein in eggs) and lactoferrin (an iron-boosting protein found in bovine and human milk).
“Smey’s primary focus is on cultivated oils, as these products are ready for industrial scaling and already showing strong commercial traction,” notes Sartakov-Korzho, though among its proteins, ovalbumin is first in line for scale-up. “Ovalbumin is a key functional protein in food formulations. Given the regulatory pathway, especially for food proteins, we expect Smey Ovo to reach the market in mid-2027,” he says.
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