Presentation at AstraZeneca HQ
Last week our co-founder and CEO Fredrik Åkerman gave a presentation at AstraZeneca’s Headquarter in Gothenburg as part of their opening ceremony of the new campus restaurant Galleri Curie. Sodexo, a customer of Volta Greentech, who operate restaurants and office services globally, including for AstraZeneca, invited us to come and share about the work we are doing together to use science to reduce emissions from food.
Over the past year, we have worked closely with Sodexo to tackle one of the food industry's most climate-intensive challenges: methane emissions from cows. Through our ongoing pilot project in Sweden, which compensates for emissions by supplying farmers with methane reducing feed additives, we’ve proven that it’s possible to significantly lower the footprint of beef and dairy.
Now, that same climate action is a part of AstraZeneca’s newly opened Galleri Curie. Given AstraZeneca's foundation in scientific innovation and research, it feels fitting that the food served at their brand-new headquarters restaurant is backed by innovative climate science. It shows that when forward-thinking food companies and science-driven companies collaborate, real change happens. More can be read about the Sodexo partnership in a previous blog post.
During the opening ceremony, Fredrik took the stage to explain exactly how our solution works, the urgency of tackling agricultural emissions, and why corporate action from industry leaders is the key to scaling these solutions fast.
As Fredrik highlighted during his presentation:
“During the past year in collaboration with companies such as yourselves, we have already in total reduced 500 ton emissions using feed additives in Sweden. [...] These 500 tons is small in comparison to our ambitions of course, but it’s real measurable impact and it’s a start and valuable as a demonstration showing that this is a viable solution and that we can scale this up more in the future.”
For those who couldn't be there in Gothenburg with us, we’ve included the full transcript of Fredrik’s presentation below.
Transcript of the presentation
Thanks for this great event. Fun to be here.
My name is Fredrik Åkerman and I have started the company Volta Greentech based here in Göteborg. We are based not too far from here actually at Sahlgrenska Science Park.
I want to begin by sharing a bit about the problem we are working on solving and that problem is global warming. Global warming is a very serious issue. It is already having enormous negative effects. It’s also one of these types of issues that are difficult to really see until it can actually be too late. I think it’s obvious that much more needs to be done to take better care of our planet. It’s not too late, but we are kind of getting close to it being too late so we need to step up and drastically reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that we emit here in our country Sweden, and in other countries we purchase a lot of stuff from.
At Volta Greentech we are very focused on only one thing.
And that’s cows. “If cows were a country they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions”. Cows emit a lot of methane which is a powerful greenhouse gas warming the planet.
Or… it’s actually not the cows. It’s a specific type of microbe in the gut of the cow. These little microbes who hangout in the cow together in the world emit 2x more greenhouse gases than the world’s fleet of airplanes. And it represents about 5% of the world’s emissions.
Which is quite crazy. It’s very important to fix this.
With 1.5 billion cows on the planet we basically need to figure out how to help all these cows burp and fart less methane gas. And quickly.
And this is where science needs to come in. Our team are scientists and who together have spent many, many, years in our lab trying to figure out a scientific solution to this. AstraZeneca as a company and your history has of course been a great source of inspiration for us. Our Head of R&D, Hanna Tydinger, have actually worked at AstraZeneca in the past.
After a lot of years of trial and error in the lab we made a breakthrough. What we have invented is a new feed additive called Lome that has a specific molecule encapsulated, that gently suppress these microbes in the gut that produce methane, and it reduces the methane burped out by the cows by up to 50%. Yes 5 - 0, 50… which is great. And what we also see in our research is that when the methane emissions, the methane waste, is reduced we also see up to 5% improvement in the cows productivity. Meaning that by not farting and burping methane the cow save that wasted energy from the feed and use it to grow.
It’s a win win and win for the cow, the farmer and the planet. And it’s as simple as just mixing in a tiny tiny amount of Lome in the cows feed daily.
Since we started the company we have raised about 100 million crowns from investors to invest in developing the product and really proving the science. We have now done 12 farm trials in 7 countries all over the world. As you know here at AstraZeneca, to commercialise a targeted molecule to create health benefits is an enormous task, it’s scientifically complex and it’s expensive.
We are very soon ready to submit the application to EFSA, the European Food and Safety Authority, to apply for getting the product approved for market use in Europe as well as later on for the US, Brazil and Australia. Where most of the cows are in the world. It has taken many years but we are getting very close now. The impact potential of this is enormous and we really see how we can make a good impact on both the climate as well as supporting farmers with a new tool that improve their resourcefulness and economics.
It is a tough situation right now with global warming and the world is getting more and more desperate for new solutions based on science if we are actually going to fix this. I'm sure global warming is solvable and it's very exciting that we are able to develop something as groundbreaking, I would say, as this science here in Göteborg.
In parallel to the research we are doing and the animal trials together with universities we also have several pilots ongoing with great food companies. Such as the project with Sodexo led by Johnny Sandberg. That’s why I'm here today.
During the past year in collaboration with companies such as yourselves, we have already in total reduced 500 ton emissions using feed additives in Sweden. It’s the equivalent of driving an older Volvo 99 laps around the world, flying from Sweden to New York 1373 times, or the annual emissions of what 63 average swedes would generate in a year. We are maybe around 100 average Swedes in here right now?
These 500 tons is small in comparison to our ambitions of course, but it’s real measurable impact and it’s a start and valuable as a demonstration showing that this is a viable solution and that we can scale this up more in the future.
There are a lot more things I would be happy to talk about but this was my short intro to what we are doing at Volta Greentech and in collaboration with Sodexo and AstraZeneca. Happy to talk more at lunch if you are there, and if you are interested to stay in the loop of the progress I recommend to sign up to our email newsletter, scanning this QR code. Thank you!
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