They Did Not Cross the Jordan: A farewell to Fermentum
A farewell to Fermentum, and the pioneers who built a road to a promised land they would never see
There is a moment in the Book of Deuteronomy when Moses, having led his people through forty years of wilderness, climbs Mount Nebo and looks across the Jordan toward the land he has spent a lifetime trying to reach. And there is the terrible knowledge that he will not cross over with them.
There is something of Mount Nebo in the farewell announcement from Fermentum, Inc., whose shareholders and board have made the difficult decision to wind down operations after more than a decade of trying to solve one of industrial biotechnology’s most stubborn problems. They will not make the crossing. They cleared much of the way. We should remember.
The land beyond the river
Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, industrial biotechnology was a land of magnificent inventions and remarkably few places to manufacture them. The scientists could engineer microorganisms to produce milk without the cow, meat without the cow, cotton without the field, leather without the hide. Journals overflowed with discoveries, coffers with VC cash.
What there were not enough of were fermenters.
Not the little ones that sat on laboratory benches, bubbling away like something from an alchemist’s workshop. The 30,000-liter and 70,000-liter vessels where a brilliant biological idea must meet the pitiless arithmetic of oxygen transfer, contamination, cooling, yield, productivity, recovery costs and customer specifications. Fermentum was among those who saw the missing bridge early and set about building it.
The company understood that the world did not particularly need another presentation explaining what engineered biology might eventually accomplish. It needed somewhere to make the stuff. No headline-making new organism. No miracle molecule. Just the conviction that the bioeconomy would never fulfill its promises until somebody took responsibility for the enormous, complicated, capital-intensive middle between invention and industry.
The squeeze
In August 2023, we wrote in The Digest about Fermentum’s joint venture with LiDestri Foods, the established American food manufacturer, under the headline The Squeeze, Eased. It was a cheerful headline, and we meant it. The industry had spent years complaining about the shortage of commercial fermentation capacity, and here, in Rochester, New York, was a project assembling a serious answer.
Six 70,000-liter fermenters. Three more at 30,000 liters. More than half a million liters of capacity. A 400-liter seed vessel, a microlaboratory, room for expansion, and a partner with decades of manufacturing experience and a reported $8.5 million commitment in lease and construction financing. It was the kind of news that made you reach for the telephone and call people who had been stuck in the valley of death for years.
It was an approach that deserved to succeed. The need was urgent.
What was not yet settled was whether enough customers, with enough capital, and with processes ready for commercial manufacture, could arrive at the same time. The brutish math of being early.
The things the pioneers knew
Fermentum understood that the challenge was never simply finding enough stainless steel.
A fermenter is a remarkable machine, but it is also a relatively promiscuous one. With the right preparation, different organisms can take their turns inside it. Downstream processing is another matter entirely. Once the biology has done its work, the product must somehow be recovered from the broth, separated, concentrated, purified, dried, crystallized or otherwise persuaded to emerge as something a customer can buy.
One customer’s miracle molecule may require filtration. Another may require solvent extraction. A third may need crystallization, while a fourth creates such a spectacular downstream headache that the laboratory’s beautiful economics disappear before anyone can get the product into a shipping container.
This was why Fermentum emphasized the marriage of hardware and what it called the software of industrial manufacturing: process development, engineering judgment, contamination control, specialized recovery systems and the practical understanding of how to make a biological process behave when the laboratory is far behind you and the production invoice is due.
Today, a new generation of precision fermentation infrastructure companies is attempting to build upon those lessons. Liberation Bioindustries, previously Liberation Labs, has pursued purpose-built commercial fermentation capacity in Indiana, with the ambition of giving emerging producers access to manufacturing infrastructure that would otherwise require immense investments of their own.
That is encouraging. The problem Fermentum spent a decade describing, organizing around and trying to solve is increasingly recognized as an industry in its own right.
The valley has a memory
We have an unfortunate habit in the bioeconomy of remembering the companies that make it to the other side and forgetting the companies that made the crossing possible.
Some people built companies that succeeded. Others built companies that didn’t. It is tempting to describe every unsuccessful pioneer as a misunderstood prophet. That would be too generous, and it would do the serious builders no favors. Markets are entitled to demand results. Investors are entitled to ask for returns. Customers are entitled to expect reliable production. A good idea is not a substitute for a durable business model, and the valley of death does not become less real because those who enter it are brave.
But it is equally mistaken to suppose that a company which closes its doors has therefore contributed nothing lasting. Fermentum did not retire all the uncertainties it set out to conquer. It could not make capital markets more patient, force prospective customers to commercialize faster, or decree that the industrial economics of a new molecule would work.
But it helped identify the uncertainties that mattered: capital availability, process readiness, shared manufacturing infrastructure, specialized downstream processing, and the mismatch between the timelines of biotechnology developers and those who must finance their factories.
Those are not small contributions.
On the far shore
But for those of us who watched the early years, who remember the fermenter shortages and the desperate search for scale-up capacity, the funding gaps and the projects that waited year after year for a place to manufacture their products, there will always be a place in the story for Fermentum.
They did not make it to the promised land. And it would be wrong to pretend otherwise, or to cover the disappointment with a cheerful prediction about how bright the future will surely be. A company is not an abstract experiment. It is years of work, hopes, commitments, difficult decisions, relationships, and lives invested in an idea. Its ending deserves more than a footnote in someone else’s market forecast.
There is sadness in this news. There ought to be.
In the old story, Moses looks out over the Jordan and sees a country he will never enter. The people go forward without him. The promise survives the prophet, and the journey continues.
So, to the people of Fermentum, who spent their years trying to bring industrial biotechnology out of the laboratory and into the working world, we offer something simpler than an investment analysis and more durable than an optimistic forecast. Thank you for showing the way. Ave atque vale.
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