ICYMI: Quick Takes from Biofabricate

Alexandra Harrell
·6 min read

For the first time in its 10-year history, Biofabricate brought the next-generation materials community to Paris.

The three-day summit, held Jan. 10-12, took place at the Fondation Fiminco, Romainville, where bio-innovators, brands and investors came together to showcase and explore emerging biomaterials, engage in conversations and panel discussions with sustainability thought leaders and explore the challenges that lie ahead.

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“Bringing the Biofabricate Summit to Paris is a strategic decision for us,” Biofabricate founder Suzanne Lee said. “It is at once the home of the luxury industry and emerging EU regulation around sustainability, both of us which are driving bio-innovation.”

Supported by principal sponsor Kering and gold-level sponsors MycoWorks and Parley for the Oceans, as well as backing from Ecovative, Spiber and Gozen, among others, Biofabcriate welcomed nearly 50 exhibitors from the fashion and beauty sectors to highlight the progress made in the material revolution.

Here are the most salient snippets from the summit.

Parley for the Oceans

Parley for the Oceans’ founder Cyrill Gutsch kicked off the event by thanking the “rebels” in attendance.

“Parley for the Oceans today, I would say, is this tiny organization that operates in 35 countries, supporting rebels, supporting pirates. Literally supporting pirates, getting them out of prison,” Gutsch said. “But then there are pirates in different clothes, in different mindsets. There are pirates sitting in investment firms…running countries, being poor but having knowledge. And these pirates are the ones that we humans really depend on, driving what we call the material revolution.”

MycoWorks

MycoWorks’ CEO Matt Scullin touched on the critical turning points the bio-fabrication industry went through in 2023.

“At the same time, we saw a failure of a well-known biomaterials company that had a flawed approach,” Scullin said, seemingly alluding to Bolt Threads’ decision to pause operations on its leather alternative, Mylo. “And this was a sign that the market is thinking beyond short-term greenwashing. In 2023, this field transitioned from hype to reality and it’s because so many of you overcame major hurdles, as we did at MycoWorks.”

But, he noted, it’s important to remember that leather is a different animal than new materials; a leather alternative won’t take off unless it can stand on its own with unique properties. As such, the adoption of biomaterials shouldn’t be viewed as a one-to-one swap.

“Should we continue to think about the adoption of biomaterials as a replacement problem? Or is it really a design problem? Did nylon merely replace ancient materials? No, of course not. It spawned a new era of design, countless new products that grew the whole pie,” Scullin said. “To the brands in this room, I say if you’re looking for a leather that isn’t leather, you’re going to be looking forever.”

Bloom Labs

Bloom Labs, a platform that functions as a hub for the next generation of climate-focused solutions derived from nature, considered that the industry is not just facing a material issue, but an economic one.

“It’s a manufacturing issue as demand for textiles is expected to triple in the next 20 years. There’s a pressing need, dare I say desperation, to fill that gap. But this gap has only recently been created by the advancement of petrochemicals and industrial manufacturing,” CEO Simardev S. Gulati said. “But petrochemicals to make clothes? Clothes are something humans have been making from natural fibers and proteins for over 35,000 years. And at Bloom, we’re not trying to turn back time. We’re plotting a new way forward, one that accelerates the transition towards a circular economy.”

Phycolabs

Brazilian biotechnology startup Phycolabs, which is dedicated to developing threads and fibers from seaweed, discussed why sourcing is crucial to success.

“The past three years, I was visiting the seaweed farmers in Brazil…to identify the value chain and how Phycolabs and the textile business can help them to develop the economy in Brazil. We realized that using the farmer seaweed is better for us because [it] hels us to scale up the biomass and to plan the production. Why this is important is because it’s better than wild harvest. These guys are farmers from the Northeast of Brazil in Rio Janeiro, and work[ing] with them not only improves the social and economic status of them, but can guarantee the traceability of our raw material,” CEO Thamires Pontes said. “And as we know, this is one of the biggest problems in the fashion business. So for us it’s super clear that it’s not to make sales, it’s make systemic change in the fashion business.”

Ponda

Ponda, a biomaterials company developing novel textiles from regenerative fibers, talked about a problem CEO Julian Ellis-Brown is “deeply passionate” about: the damage the industry is causing to wetlands, and how fashion may hold the solution for their regeneration.

“At Ponda, we’ve developed a fiber processing technology which can take plants grown in regenerated, rewetted wetland environments and turn them into high-quality materials for the fashion district. This starts with BioPuff, our bio-based insulation to reduce reliance on goose down and synthetic alternatives. But critically, BioPuff comes from the cattail, you might recognize this as a native wetland plant,” Ellis-Brown said. “And what this means is we can directly contribute to the regeneration of three of the 330 million hectares of drained wetlands around the world, transforming them from the carbon-emitting arid conditions. And if we requested just 3 percent of European peatlands in this way, we could reduce European Agricultural emissions by 25 percent.”

Kering

Kering’s Material Lab Innovation director, Christian Tubito, discussed the importance of collaboration.

“One point of this project, this initiative, is that it’s not a press conference, but a call to action. Our real goal is collaboration; it’s not a matter of funding…but to enlarge the scope,” Tubito said. “Because alone as a group or as a brand, we are not able to push an innovation in the market, we are not so strong, we are not enough. We have to get consensus on that.”

Ecovative

The realities of scaling biobased materials were explored by Ecovative’s co-founder Gavin McIntyre.

“When thinking about scaling our first aerial mycelium process…we looked to industry experts, and we intentionally designed our processes to fit into existing mushroom farm infrastructure. The reason why is that this infrastructure already existed worldwide. There’s over 3 billion pounds of installed capacity on most continents in this planet,” McIntyre said. “The next lesson that we learned is that when you adapt to scale, it’s not enough to presume that everything you do at the lab bench is going to seamlessly integrate into scaled infrastructure. The next big challenge we ran into is that it’s not sufficient to just scale up, we’ve also had the requirement to scale down.”