Ones to Watch: Chromatic shift

26 FOOD TECHS TO WATCH IN 2026

Michroma CEO Ricky Cassini outlines how fungal fermentation is redefining natural colorants for a food system finally ready to move beyond synthetics

For years, food manufacturers have faced an uncomfortable compromise. Synthetic dyes offer unmatched stability, but consumers increasingly reject them. Natural alternatives fit clean-label expectations, but they break down under heat, acidity, or time. This divergence has kept brands tied to old ingredients, slow reformulation, and supply chains vulnerable to crops, pests, and climate shocks. Ricky Cassini, Co-founder & CEO of Michroma, believes that compromise is finally dissolving.

“Color drives choice,” Cassini says. “Today’s options force a trade-off between performance and values. That trade-off slows reformulation, creates supply risk, and ties brands to optics consumers do not want.” Michroma’s solution is to engineer filamentous fungi through precision fermentation to produce clean-label, animal-free colorants with the stability global CPGs require. Or, as Cassini put it, “nature’s palette, industrial reliability”.

At the heart of the platform is a fungal chassis optimized for pigment biosynthesis, with strain engineering delivering high titers and minimal downstream processing. The process runs on commodity-scale fermentation equipment, enabling price and performance to improve with scale. “The net effect is better stability in tough matrices, simpler purification, and a cost curve that improves as we scale, while staying fully natural and animal-free,” Cassini reports.

From fermentation platform to commercial proof

Michroma’s progress in 2025 shows this in practice. The company completed multi-thousand-liter demo runs with a contract manufacturing partner, proving reproducibility across industrial fermenters. Its lead red colorant, Red+, was also qualified in pilots with multiple global CPGs, while regulatory dossiers advanced across key markets. The result, Cassini maintains, is a de-risked platform moving toward commercial scale.

Looking ahead, priorities for 2026 build on that momentum. Cassini says the focus is converting pilots into supply agreements, securing multi-site manufacturing capacity while driving cost-down through process intensification, and obtaining initial market clearances before expansion. The color portfolio is also advancing, with new hues and application-specific blends in development.

Partnerships have been central to Michroma’s progress. Strategic pilots with tier-one CPGs and distributors shaped application fit and go-to-market plans, while CMOs helped de-risk scale-up. The company’s investor group spans food-tech specialists, industry operators, and global ingredient players, including Supply Change Capital, Be8 Ventures, CJ CheilJedang, The Mills Fabrica, Portfolia’s Food and Ag Tech Fund, IndieBio, and angel investors. “We are capitalizing to scale manufacturing while advancing regulatory and portfolio expansion,” Cassini says.

That discipline stands out in a sector often criticized for overreach. “Most people do not realize how lean we have operated,” Cassini says. “Every major milestone, from strain design to industrial runs, was achieved with a fraction of the capital typically required in biotech.”

He is quick to push back on entrenched thinking. “The biggest misconception is that natural means fragile and fermentation means expensive,” he says. “When engineered for industrial fermenters and lean downstream processing, microbial platforms compete on both performance and cost, especially at scale.”

Looking ahead five years, Cassini’s vision is clear. “Michroma becomes the default natural color platform for global CPGs: a multi-hue portfolio in market, unit economics at or below synthetic incumbents, and a broader pipeline delivered by the same fungal platform.” It is an ambition grounded in science, industrial pragmatism, and what he calls the company’s true source of inspiration. “Fungi themselves. Nature’s original chemists,” he concludes. “We are standing on well-proven shoulders.”

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