NoCamels, Sep 1st 2022

Pigmentum, a startup based in Kiryat Shmona, northern Israel, plants GM lettuce in hi-tech greenhouses, cultivates it with special fertilizers and harvests the crop when it’s ready, a little over three weeks later.

It then squeezes out the juice – over 90 per cent of lettuce is liquid – adds natural ingredients to give it a milk-like taste and smell, and has a product which is ready to drink, pour on your breakfast cereal or add to your coffee.

“Lettuce is green and leafy and doesn’t look the sort of thing you’d make cheese from,” says Tal Lutzky, CEO of the company. But as he explains, they use lettuce as an organism for growing many things, including casein.

He and co-founder Amir Tiroler both studied agronomy at Hebrew University’s Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, with Prof. Alexander Vainstein, a world leader in genetic engineering in plants, and a member of their team.

Lutzky and Tiroler came up with the idea of using lettuce as a platform to grow a range of pigments, such as anthocyanin (the purple found in blueberries and raspberries) and vanillin, which makes vanilla, as well as aromas and other compounds used in the food industry, that are otherwise very costly or hard to produce.

They genetically modify romaine lettuce, then irrigate or spray it with a special fertilizer that triggers the growth of whatever they’ve encoded into its genes.

“We engineer the lettuce to produce whatever we want in very, very high yields, in this case casein, to make milk,” says Lutzky.

Ordinary lettuce contains no casein at all. It’s only by genetically modifying it that they have been able to turn ordinary-looking lettuce becomes a platform or a vehicle for casein production.