FermBase by CREMER launches Y-Base Blend: A standardized trace element blend for yeast fermentation

“With our Y-Base Blend, we help yeast fermentation companies significantly simplify a complex and error-prone part of their processes,” says Dr. Gerlis von Haugwitz, Product Manager at CREMER with a background in biochemistry. “Instead of sourcing, storing, weighing and dosing several individual salts separately, our customers receive an optimized, standardized and readily soluble trace element blend that can be used from laboratory scale through to industrial production. Y-Base Blend is the first standardized blend in our portfolio,” von Haugwitz adds.

One blend instead of multiple individual salts

The starting point for product development was a series of conversations with companies in the fermentation industry. These discussions revealed that while many customers work with similar requirements, they each formulate their trace element solutions individually — resulting in correspondingly higher development costs and additional challenges regarding reproducibility, scaling, and procurement. Although trace elements are used only in small quantities, they can still have a significant impact on growth and process stability.

Y-Base Blend therefore combines selected minerals and trace elements in one standardized formulation. In an early-access trial with selected partners across a variety of fermentation processes and products, the blend delivered comparable performance in all cases and, in more than half of the cases examined, even outperformed the customers’ respective in-house blends.

Better performance than in-house blends

“For us, it was particularly important not only to develop Y-Base Blend under laboratory conditions, but also to validate it in customer processes using bioreactors,” says von Haugwitz. “The fact that our standardized blend often performed even better than individually developed in-house blends confirms our approach.”

For the development of Y-Base Blend, more than 50,000 possible trace element combinations were initially narrowed down to 3,300 experiments, which were carried out with different yeast strains. From nine particularly high-performing formulations at microliter scale, the final blend for use in bioreactors was selected.

From laboratory scale to industrial production

Y-Base Blend was designed for scalability from the outset. The product is available from quantities as small as one kilogram for initial laboratory trials. For pilot and scale-up applications, it is supplied in 25-kilogram units and can also be delivered worldwide in industrial quantities of several tonnes. Its composition and specification remain identical across all volume sizes.

The target groups are biotechnology and fermentation companies working with yeast to produce functional ingredients for applications such as food, feed, cosmetics and technical uses.

Bundling expertise across the CREMER Group

The development of Y-Base Blend builds on CREMER’s long-standing expertise across the entire raw material and supply chain – from sourcing and processing raw materials to international logistics.

For the biotechnological product development, FermBase works with Differential Bio from Munich. The biotech start-up is a spin-off from the environment of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), one of Germany’s Universities of Excellence, and contributes expertise in automated fermentation experiments as well as data-driven evaluation using machine-learning methods.

Y-Base Blend is available now. The product data sheet and samples can be requested via the FermBase website. Companies can also book a meeting directly with the FermBase team there.