Fermentation has a long, rich history in food production, from beer and wine to yogurt and cheese, leavened bread and coffee, miso and tempeh, sauerkraut and kimchi, to name just a few of the tasty things we can consume thanks to a chemical process thought to date back to the Neolithic period. But if this 2017-founded Finnish startup, Solar Foods, has its way, fermentation could have a very special place in the future of human food too.

The industrial biotech startup is working on bringing a novel protein to market -- one it says will offer a nutritious, sustainable alternative to animal-derived proteins. The product, a single-cell protein it's branding Solein, is essentially an edible bacteria; a single-cell microbe grown using gas fermentation. Or, put another way, they're harvesting edible calories from hydrogen-oxyidizing microbes.

"Technically it's like a brewery," explains CEO and co-founder Dr. Pasi Vainikka in an interview with TechCrunch. "Like fermentation technologies are. It's not that strange [a process] -- there is this one difference, which is the feedstock."

The production of Solein requires just a handful of 'ingredients': Air, water and energy (electricity) -- which means there's no need for vast tracts of agricultural land to be given out to making this future foodstuff. It could be produced in factories located in remote areas or inside cities and urban centers.

Nor indeed are other foods needed to feed it to create an adequate yield, as is the case with rearing livestock for human consumption. So the promise looks immense. (As Vainikka argues: "Land use and energy use are the two main problems of human kind -- and the rest follows from these two.)

Nutritionally speaking, Solein resembles some existing foodstuffs -- sitting between dried meat, dried carrot or dried soy in terms of the blend of vitamins, amino acids, proteins (overall, it's 65% protein), per Vainikka. "So it's very familiar but it's a bit [of a] new combination," he suggests, adding: "The taste is very mild, very neutral." (A mild taste may not sound especially scintillating for the tastebuds but it means it's easy to include as an ingredient in a wide range of foods without the need for a strong flavor to be masked.)