Spotlight on Terraferma and Tomorrow, Inc
Victoria Mo & Alec Lourenco
Sweet Science: A Story of Startup Collaboration at MBC, Engineering the Future of Protein-Based Flavor
When Tomorrow Inc. (formerly Weekend Inc.) and Terraferma shared their recent “Founders at Work” story along with a tasting, the collaboration made technical sense. One company engineers the proteins that create taste, while the other engineers the microbial strains that manufacture them at scale. Together, they sketch out a full stack for “deep tech” food, from amino acid sequence to fermentation tank to shelf.
Tomorrow Inc.: Redesigning Taste at the Receptor Level
Tomorrow Inc. was founded by biochemist Alec Lourenco and creative director Tristan Jensen. Their core technology, marketed as TomorrowSweetTM (previously WeekendSweetTM), is a blend of engineered flavor proteins designed to bind the same tastereceptors that sugar activates, most notably the sweet-taste receptor complex on the tongue, triggering a sweet signal without delivering caloric sugar. Because these are proteins rather than sugar alcohols or synthetic sweeteners, they’re metabolized the way any dietary protein is: broken down by digestive enzymes into amino acids, rather than passing through the gut largely intact, which the company points to as the mechanism behind why sugar alcohols cause GI distress and their proteins reportedly don’t. This isn’t wholly novel biology — it builds on a small, well-documented family of naturally sweet proteins, including thaumatin, monellin, brazzein, mabinlin, and even hen egg-white lysozyme (technically sweet, though astringent). Alec cited mabinlin and lysozyme directly in the talk. Tomorrow Inc.’s approach is to take that natural design space and engineer it further: editing amino acid sequences to tune potency, remove off-notes like astringency, and extend the same logic to other taste modalities — salt, umami, spice — beyond just sweet. TomorrowSweet is currently deployed in the company’s flagship product, TomorrowPop, a zero-sugar soda sweetened entirely by protein rather than sugar, stevia, or sugar alcohols.
Terraferma: AI-Designed Microbes for Precision Fermentation
Terraferma was founded by Dr. Ruby Yu (Chief CSO) and Victoria Mo (CEO) out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2022 batch.
Terraferma’s high-yielding fermentation platform bridges the gap between computational protein design and commercial production, combining AI-guided strain engineering with ultra-high-throughput genetic screens to improve recombinant protein titers. Computationally designed proteins often fail to express at commercially viable levels – a critical barrier to commercialization across therapeutic, industrial, and food applications. Systems capable of multi-gram-per-liter titers are required to solve this. Terraferma’s AI-guided optimization platform has led to >100x improvements over off-the-shelf strains, achieving double digit titers across a range of protein types. Developed by MIT- and Harvard-trained scientists with expertise in synthetic biology, high-throughput screening, and machine learning (publications in Nature and Molecular Cell). Terraferma generates and maintains one of the largest proprietary datasets linking yeast genotype to expression phenotype.
Terraferma’s first proteins were the animal proteins behind Ten Lives, its cat-treat brand, made via precision fermentation rather than animal agriculture, pitched against the fact that pet food accounts for 1-4% of global carbon emissions. The team has now expanded the reach of its high titer strains to produce proteins for other companies, enabling AI-designed proteins to reach commercialization faster than ever before.
Why Neither Company Chose to Compete on Brand
Both founding teams arrived at the same structural conclusion: winning retail shelf space (slotting fees, distribution, brand mindshare) draws on a completely different capability set than engineering a protein or a strain. Rather than abandon branding, Tomorrow Inc. uses an ingredient-brand model — “Powered by TomorrowSweet” — the Intel Inside playbook, where downstream products advertise the underlying protein technology rather than compete as a standalone CPG label. Terraferma runs a parallel model as the TSMC of protein production: Ten Lives stays as a proof point and cultural anchor, while the strain platform itself is licensed or proteins produced for partners.
What’s Next, Technically
Alec’s stated frontier is sequence-level: unlocking as-yet-undiscovered taste properties by systematically varying known sweet-protein scaffolds, and extending the same design process to salt, spice, and umami receptors. Victoria’s frontier is throughput: leveraging further titer gains to make more proteins in food, enzymes, and therapeutics commercially viable to manufacture.
The talk closed with a tasting of TomorrowSweet-based products (protein-sweetened sports hydration drink, zero-sugar sweetener packets, original Weekend sodas) alongside Terraferma-derived cat treats.
The Magic of MBC
Just three days after arriving at MBC in November 2025, Alec attended Terraferma’s presentation at the MBC BioLabs Climate Tech Innovation Forum and immediately recognized that its strain engineering platform could become an ideal manufacturing partner for Tomorrow’s next-generation sweet proteins.
Victoria and Alec reconnected early the following year through Rachel Hatano, MBC’s Director of Scientific Operations, and launched a pilot using Terraferma’s strain platform to express one of Tomorrow’s engineered sweet proteins. After Terraferma successfully produced the protein in its optimized yeast strain, Condivine, led Fengling Liu, completed the downstream purification.
What began as two independent startups sharing a building became a three-company collaboration spanning computational protein design, AI-guided strain engineering, and downstream bioprocessing. This collaboration in many ways is the real magic of MBC.