Formo founder wanted to make Gruyère cheese, but without cows

Between vision and exhaustion: Raffael Wohlgensinger’s life as a founder. SWI swissinfo.ch

Swiss entrepreneur Raffael Wohlgensinger wants to shake up the vegan cheese market in Germany. However, the slow EU approval process is making him look to greener pastures such as the US.

The son of a Swiss father and a Brazilian mother, Wohlgensinger grew up in a village in the Winterthur area, northeastern Switzerland, and loves cheese. He missed it when he became vegan a decade ago after nudging from his wife.

The dairy-free cheese substitutes on the market simply couldn’t match the flavour of the original. It was on a hike in Switzerland in 2016 that he decided to produce vegan cheese that tasted as good as traditional Swiss cheese.

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The idea for Formo was born but first had to mature like a good Gruyère. Wohlgensinger left nothing to chance and planned his start-up journey carefully. In the summer of 2018, he moved to Berlin and initially did internships with venture capital companies.

“That was extremely important,” he says. “If you want to get money from the venture capital market, you have to understand how it works and thinks.”

He also picked up practical tips like how to raise capital and build teams. It helped that he had studied business administration in St Gallen. But he had to familiarise himself with the finer details of alternative cheese production. Wohlgensinger learnt from founders in the food sector and picked up the basics of biotechnology through six months of distance learning.

The big question was could he make his concept work. Could he produce a cheese that didn’t taste like nuts or substitute ingredients but like real Cheddar and Gruyère and also had the right consistency?

Leaving nothing to chance

Wohlgensinger spoke to food scientists at universities and gathered input on both the economic and biotechnological aspects.

“I already had feedback from many experts before the start. Where are the weak points, where are the potential problems?” he says.

What Wohlgensinger heard gave him confidence. In 2019 he founded the food start-up FormoExternal link in Berlin together with Britta Winterberg, who holds a doctorate in microbiology, under the name LegenDairy Foods at the time.

There were many arguments in favour of Berlin as the place to found the company.

“At the time, Berlin was clearly the start-up hub of Europe and much more international than Zurich. The ecosystem was super-interesting. There were exciting and creative people and alternative approaches to life,” says Wohlgensinger.

Access to investors was also easier. He was also drawn to Berlin for personal reasons. It was already one of the most vegan-friendly cities in Europe.

“I found Berlin extremely liveable. I still do, although not to the same extent as back then,” he says.

While Berlin has an excellent ecosystem for founders it comes at the price of extremely complex regulations. Many start-ups complain about what Wohlgensinger experienced in Berlin.

“If I had known in 2018 how bureaucratic the process was, I would have reconsidered coming to Berlin,” he says.

A lot of things are extremely cumbersome and inefficient, from financing rounds and employee contributions to the registration of new employees, he says. The mills of bureaucracy also grind slowly when it comes to procedures and product authorisations. In the area of food authorisations, this is also due to complicated EU regulations. After all, the authorisations then apply EU-wide for a large market and for a growing target group.

According to a YouGov survey, only 1% of the German population aged 61-79 follow a vegan diet. Among Gen Z (13- to 28-year-olds) one in ten already abstains from animal products for reasons of animal welfare but also to combat climate change, as cows release greenhouse gas methane. In Switzerland, the proportion is lower.

Formo’s first step was to produce cheese based on koji mushroom cultures. This was a way to enter the market quickly. The legal barriers were low and consumer acceptance was high, as no genetic engineering is used in this process. Formo’s koji-based cream cheese has already made it onto the German market.

Closer to real cheese

However, the founders actually wanted to get closer to the “real” cheese. This is why Formo is now focusing solely on precision fermentation, a technology that was developed in parallel from the outset. In this process, genetically modified microorganisms such as yeast or fungi produce casein in fermenters, which is identical to cow’s milk protein.

Casein is central to cheese production. It is the decisive protein for its texture and spreadability. The Formo fermenters therefore produce the raw material for cheese that tastes like the original. It can be cut and the mouth feel is similar to Cheddar or Gruyère.

However, this cheese needs EU authorisation, which in turn takes time. In the meantime, the company, which currently has around 40 employees, is looking to the US and Asia and is also consolidating its activities within Germany on the Frankfurt site. The “Formo Culture Campus” with laboratories and bioreactors is already located there. Many destinations, such as the US, can also be reached more quickly and directly from Frankfurt Airport.

Plans for an offshoot in North America are progressing rapidly because food laws are simpler. Formo registered its innovative ingredients in the US last year and is expecting approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this year. The European Novel Food Regulation External linkis strict.

“In Europe, it will probably take another four years,” Wohlgensinger estimates.

He has learnt a lot, including about the personal cost of founding a start-up. “It takes a lot of energy, and to a certain extent that has paid off for me. But it was still a lot of fun. I was totally in the flow.”

He didn’t take a holiday for three years, putting all his time into his project.

“I missed my grandfather’s funeral,” he says, shaking his head. He came to the realisation that he would burn out if he carried on like this.

Quick growth demands complete commitment

Is it possible to make a start-up a success without working day and night?

“You need a certain morbid obsession to grow in the beginning. Every hour counts,” Wohlgensinger says.

According to him, it is almost impossible to proceed with caution and have a good work-life balance in the first few years. He knows from conversations that the risk of burnout hovers over many young founders and it is also due to the start-up system.

“If you raise a lot of venture capital and want to grow quickly, it’s extremely difficult not to go full throttle,” he says. “If you’re building a company that can grow slowly over the years, that doesn’t have a lot of venture capital and no expectations of huge returns, and if the company is all mine, then maybe that’s a different story.”

As far as he personally is concerned, he found a better way to deal with the challenges in good time. The centre of his life is now back in Switzerland because his family lives there.

“But also because there’s a lot going on in the start-up scene here at the moment,” he says.

Edited by Balz Rigendinger/me. Adapted from German by AI/ac/ts

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