This week, RFK Jr. took his latest step toward reforming the food industry, announcing a “request” to ban all petroleum-based artificial food dyes from the U.S. food supply by the end of 2026—part of his broader effort to crack down on ultra-processed foods, additives, and synthetic chemicals.

So what’s the alternative?

We’ve been investing in the future of food for years. This latest news is especially exciting for one of our portfolio companies: Michroma, a startup using fungi to produce natural food colorants. Founder Ricky Cassini recently talked to AgFunderNews about the what the future holds:

Ricky said he was seeing “accelerated interest from investors and potential customers” in his precision fermentation platform.”

Michroma, which has operations in Argentina and the US, works with filamentous fungi that naturally produce red pigments, but uses the gene editing tool CRISPR to enhance yield and performance.

“The reality is that many food producers currently don’t have suitable alternatives for synthetic dyes Red 3 and Red 40,” claimed Cassini.

“The main options each come with significant drawbacks. Carmine provides comparable shade and stability, but, being extracted from the cochineal bug, it’s not suitable for vegetarian, vegan, kosher, or halal diets. Meanwhile, vegetable-derived colorants like beetroot extract lack the necessary stability and taste neutrality for many applications, especially in baked goods, dairy, and meat products.

“Moreover, even if current natural dyes worked well enough in terms of performance, the supply wouldn’t be sufficient to solve the increased demand,” he claimed. “Natural colorants generally have much lower coloring power compared to synthetic food dyes, meaning larger quantities are needed to achieve the same effect [although several natural color suppliers now make more concentrated products enabling formulators to use less]. This makes a direct 1:1 replacement practically unfeasible on a global scale without innovative new solutions like ours.”

According to Cassini, Michroma’s Red+ colorant can deliver “remarkable stability across pH ranges and temperature conditions that surpass both synthetic dyes and existing natural alternatives. Unlike plant-based colorants that often struggle with stability during processing, our fungi-derived pigments maintain vibrancy through pasteurization, baking, and extrusion.”

Red+ delivers “exponentially more coloring capacity than beetroot powder, requiring significantly less product to achieve the same visual impact,” he added. “This translates to better economics and cleaner labels for food companies.”

Michroma now has 20+ signed letters of intent from food companies and has completed over a dozen paid pilot projects, said Cassini, who is currently scaling production and navigating the color additive petition process in the US.  “The feedback has been consistently positive, with several companies confirming that our colorants perform better than any other natural alternative they’ve tested.”

“The timing of this FDA announcement couldn’t be better aligned with our mission.”