Simo Ellilä is the CEO of Espoo, Finland-based Enifer, a biotech firm concentrating on producing its PEKILO fungi-based protein product for aquafeed and other uses.
SeafoodSource: What is your background and how did you get involved in Enifer?
Ellilä: I'm a bioprocess engineer. In my previous life, I did a lot of development with biofuels and biochemicals, and the underlying theme was how could we transform side-streams from different industries into something of value, like waste-to-fuel type processes. And then I came across the history of this PEKILO process in 2016, and I was fascinated by it. It was remarkable that Finnish engineers had been producing mycoprotein 50 years ago, and it was just such an intriguing concept that they could take a pretty complicated side-stream from the paper pulping industry and transform it into protein. So I started looking up just about everything I could find on it, and decided protein seemed like a lot more attractive of a market than biofuels and chemicals, which I had previously been working with. Along the way, I happened to bump into one of the other co-founders of the company who independently had the same idea of reviving the PEKILO process but had been looking more on the market side.
SeafoodSource: What is so special about the PEKILO process?
Ellilä: The original process had been developed by the pulping industry because they needed to process a side-stream. The starting point was water treatment and the protein part was nearly secondary – that happens to be the end product of this water treatment. Then they then they figured out what it would be good for and they used it for pig and chicken feed. But they stopped making it in the early 1990s, mainly because the raw material disappeared from the Finnish pulping industry, but also because the engineering company that had built these plants went bankrupt. That discontinuity meant a lot of that know-how was forgotten at that point. What we saw was a production-ready concept, and we just needed to figure out if we could make it work in today’s context. Where my background came in was finding the raw materials. I had worked with the biofuels industry, so I knew there were suitable new raw materials to run this process. And then our co-founder was looking on the market side and saw … there are more valuable end-use cases for this protein today. Aquaculture was the first one we looked at. Compared to pigs or chickens, aquatic organisms – and especially salmonids – are really picky eaters. They have much more stringent dietary requirements, so the price-point of these feed ingredients is a lot higher. So we were running the numbers and figured out if we revive this process and we take it to aquaculture, it would actually make financial sense.
So we started the company in 2020 with a small seed round of about EUR 1 million (USD 1.1 million) with that we built we built a lab, a small pilot line, and started testing to see whether we could make standard, quality mycoprotein out of all these different side-streams that I had identified. In aquaculture, this ingredient had been fed to salmon before, so we've been doing a lot of trials, particularly in salmon but also shrimp, and we were also looking at pet food applications.
Just over a year ago in March, we raised EUR 23 million (USD 24.6 million) in our Series A, and with that, we started pursuing scaling the process and applying for a food permit for this ingredient. Feed grade and food grade have some slight differences, primarily the raw material from which they produced, but they’re very similar, so those are two avenues we’ve pursued.
And then we really went into overdrive in December …
