What’s a Superculture? It’s the Key to a Delicious Plant-Based Future

The 300-acre Brooklyn Navy Yard complex in New York City is home to a number of premium artisanal food and beverage businesses you’ve heard of, including whiskey producers Kings County Distillery and lox specialist Russ & Daughters. It’s also the headquarters for one you likely haven’t: Kingdom Supercultures, a company that’s using modern microbiology to update one of the world’s most ancient—and currently megatrendy—cooking methods, fermentation.

Apart from the occasional stray jar of sauerkraut sitting on a bench, the space looks like a medical lab. Kingdom is using machine learning, genomics, and next-generation DNA sequencers to amass a vast collection of microbial cultures. It then offers supercultures (a combination of those cultures) to food manufacturers who want to reduce the amount of sugar in a dessert or alcohol in a drink or—most significantly—replace conventional dairy products with plant-based ones.