SMEY, a Franco-German startup, identifies natural high-performing yeasts, predicts their lipid/enzyme potential with AI, validates them through fermentation and delivers novel, sustainable, high-performance local ingredients for the cosmetic and food sectors.
Today, fewer than 20 plant oils — such as palm, cocoa, and soybean — support a global market worth over $480 billion. This narrow base exposes industries to climate shocks, geopolitical risks, and fragile supply chains. Environmental damage from current sourcing is also well-documented. Palm oil is responsible for roughly one-third of Indonesia’s loss of old-growth forest over the last 20 years, threatening biodiversity and worsening air quality. Meanwhile, cocoa cultivation drives habitat loss across West Africa. Consumer goods companies face mounting pressure to act.
At the core of SMEY’s offering is a physical and digital library of 700 non-GMO yeast strains that are integrated with SMEY.AI — a proprietary system that maps genomic, metabolic, and fermentation data. Rather than genetically engineering new organisms, SMEY searches its library for yeast that already naturally produce the desired oil composition. Think of it as an ‘AI-powered periodic table of oils.’
SMEY says its Lipid Atlas unlocks over 350 distinct oil profiles from natural yeast strains. Some strains can accumulate up to 80% of their dry weight as oil, producing fatty-acid profiles that mimic or exceed up to 78 known plant oils.
“Nature gives us a way, enabling brands to design high-performance, sustainable oils independent of climate, geography, or volatile agricultural supply chains,” says founder and CEO Viktor Sartakov-Korzhov.
SMEY already has 17 replacements for plant oils in its portfolio of fermentation-based alternative fats. Key products developed on SMEY’s platform include:
- Noyl Cocoa cCB (Cultivated Cocoa Butter): 35% stearic acid, matching the performance of traditional cocoa butter in food applications.
- cHOB (Cultivated High Oleic Butter): designed for cosmetics, offering superior stability, skin feel, and a unique fatty acid profile.
- Noyl Silk: a fermented oil for sensorial excellence, stability, and active performance in personal care.
- Noyl Omega-7: over 40% palmitoleic acid, a fatty acid naturally found in human sebum, in a lightweight format for cosmetics.
- Noyl Palm: a perfect sustainable and EUDR-compliant solution for direct applications in lipsticks, makeup without any unpleasant odor and with a neutral creamy color.
- Noyl Avocado: an avocado oil extender with a fatty acid composition and physical characteristics similar to original avocado oil.
The platform promises to slash cultivated oil R&D timelines from 24 months to just 30 days, opening new possibilities for brands seeking sustainable alternatives to cocoa, shea, and palm butter.
SMEY combines discovery and scale-up services: once a client selects a target oil profile, SMEY moves from validated strain to lab-scale fermentation (100g samples) and then to pilot-scale production in a total of 60 days. Industrial-scale capacity stands at 1,000 metric tons of oils per year for cosmetics and 10,000 metric tons per year for confectionery, says Sartakov-Korzhov.
“We see very strong demand from the food, cosmetic and beauty sectors for different reasons,” he says. Take the case of cocoa butter. West Africa accounts for nearly 70% of the world’s cocoa supply, and a combination of adverse weather, aging cocoa trees, pests, disease, and the encroachment of gold mining on agricultural land has caused wild fluctuations in pricing. From 2017–2022, cocoa butter traded in the rough range of $3,500–$6,000 per metric ton (MT) depending on region and grade. In October 2024, the price surged to $12,530/MT and by December it peaked at $14,300/MT, a 137% year-on-year rise. Prices then corrected somewhat, pulling back to roughly $9,500/MT by mid-2025. As of April 2026, cocoa futures were trading around $3,200 per ton. around $3,200 per ton. “All the big chocolate companies are looking to stabilize their supply chains with solutions made from our yeast,” says Sartakov-Korzhov. “Nature can make the butter.”
Another example is the cosmetic oil market, which expected to grow from $62 billion in 2024 to $104 billion by 2034. Companies that use cosmetic oil in their products are looking to replace jojaba oil for reasons connected to cost, sustainability and supply chain resilience, he says.
Like cocoa, Jojoba harvests can be affected by price swings. Jojoba is grown primarily in desert regions of the U.S. (Arizona, California), Mexico, Israel, and Argentina. Drought, excessive heat, or geopolitical factors impact cost, and for companies based in Europe or Asia, shipping ingredients means long supply chains, import costs, currency exposure, logistics complexity, and a significant carbon footprint. Locally sourced ingredients align with sustainability commitments and reduce transport emissions — increasingly important for ESG reporting and eco-conscious branding and can also offer more stable, predictable pricing. And consumers — especially in Europe — increasingly favor products with local, traceable ingredients. Some brands are investing in regional crops to support local farmers or revive heritage plants, tying product development to community and land stewardship narratives.
Jojoba is prized because it’s technically a liquid wax (not a triglyceride oil), making it very stable and skin-compatible. Alternative fats can mimic its emollient and stability properties, making substitution technically feasible.
Regulatory Tailwinds
One of SMEY’s most powerful demand drivers is Europe’s landmark EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), adopted in 2023. The regulation requires businesses to demonstrate that products they sell or export to the EU do not come from land that was recently deforested. It directly covers palm oil and cocoa — the two key commodities SMEY’s products replace.
Although implementation has faced delays, the final compliance deadlines are now set: large companies must comply by 30 December this year, and small and micro-enterprises by 30 June 2027. Companies found in violation face fines of up to 4% of global turnover — a substantial incentive for FMCG brands to begin qualifying alternative ingredients immediately.
Beyond regulation, consumer demand is shifting independently. European manufacturers are moving away from palm oil as ethical and sustainable sourcing becomes more important to shoppers. The global vegan chocolate market is projected to reach $2 billion by 2032, and clean-label preferences are accelerating the shift toward transparent, traceable ingredient sourcing across categories.
An Increasingly Crowded But Still Nascent Field
SMEY’s competitors include:
- C16 Biosciences, a New York-based startup that uses precision fermentation to create high-performance lipid and active ingredients under the ‘Palmless’ brand. It has raised around $42 million in funding, including from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures. C16 has already commercialized its first biomanufactured ingredient, Torula Oil, which is available in multiple beauty and personal care products, including one launched by DECIEM, an Estee Lauder brand, and other products found here. It also has active pilots with multiple multinational food and home care manufacturers.
- NoPalm Ingredients, a Dutch startup that brews microbial oil using a proprietary non-GMO yeast, transforming agricultural side streams like potato peels or whey permeate into fermentable sugars, producing oils with a 90% lower carbon footprint and 99% less land use than conventional palm oil. NoPalm has struck partnerships with Unilever and Colgate Palmolive and reached industrial-scale production of 120,000 liters in early 2025. NoPalm Ingredients and NIZO Food Research announced the establishment of NoPalm’s first demonstration factory at the Food Innovation Campus in Ede, with the first industrial production of yeast oil expected in the second half of 2026.
- Äio, an Estonian biotech startup using byproducts from the wood and agricultural industries — like sugars from sawdust — to produce a yeast-derived palm oil alternative. Its Encapsulated Oil product is rich in protein, fiber, and functional lipids, suitable for food applications as well as cosmetics.
- Xylome, an American synthetic biology company producing a bio-identical replacement for Refined Bleached Deodorized (RBD) palm oil through yeast fermentation, commercialized as ‘Yoil’. Founded in 2013 and based in Madison, Wisconsin, Xylome targets food, cosmetics, and pharmaceutical markets. Its focus is on the single largest palm oil segment rather than a multi-oil platform.
- Terra Oleo, a newer U.S. entrant uses precision fermentation to transform agro-industrial waste into palm oil ingredients and cocoa butter alternatives. It recently raised $3.1 million, was selected to join Breakthrough Energy’s 2025 Fellows Program, and is currently scaling from lab to pilot stage.
SMEY says its differentiators include:
- It is non-GMO by design: SMEY uses machine learning and adaptive laboratory evolution rather than genetic modification to optimize yeast strains. This is strategically important in Europe, where GMO resistance among consumers remains high and regulatory pathways for GMO food products are slow and costly.
- The breadth of its addressable market: While competitors focus on palm oil, SMEY operates as a platform, targeting cocoa, shea, and dozens of other specialty oils simultaneously, giving it a far wider addressable market spanning food, cosmetics, oleochemicals, lubricants, and pharmaceuticals.
- The speed of its innovation: By matching existing yeast strains to product specifications rather than engineering new ones, SMEY cuts R&D from up to two years to roughly 30 days — a critical competitive advantage for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands under time pressure from EUDR compliance.
Challenges
Cultivated oils face lengthy novel food approval processes in Europe. Cocoa butter is expected to face several years of approvals before it can reach the European food market at scale, and palm oil alternatives are projected to take around three years. This limits near-term revenue potential to cosmetics and industrial applications.
Fermentation scale-up is capital-intensive. At €8 million in total funding, SMEY is well behind competitors like C16 Biosciences. Securing the next funding round will be critical to moving from discovery-stage to commercial production.
The primary challenge ahead is translating its scientific platform into commercial-scale production while navigating the long food approval timelines that stand between the lab and the grocery shelf. Investors and commercial partners will be watching closely to see whether SMEY can convert its innovation lead into first-mover advantage before better-capitalized competitors catch up.
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