At Synonym, we’ve made it our mission to build the infrastructure the world needs to manufacture more things with biology and to be a catalyst for the emerging bioeconomy.

As a first step in our mission, we scoured the world in search of every operational fermentation plant in existence and listed all of them in a free database called Capacitor. A Yelp-like clearinghouse of information, connecting synbio innovators with fermentation capacity.

When you have a database (of anything really), it can be illuminating to see how people use it to uncover “trends.” You can also slice-and-dice data in different ways to provide new perspectives that can lead to new conclusions and discoveries. With Capacitor, we were curious what types of facilities users demand the most? What industries do our users come from? Where are the facilities located? What are the sizes and technologies facilities offer, and more.

That’s why we’re releasing the State of Global Fermentation report. Synonym’s first analysis of the data in Capacitor, offering new details on the state of biomanufacturing capacity worldwide. With 1,000+ registered users, 150 facilities in more than 30 countries and 20+ required specifications per facility, we’ve sifted through all the data to understand the current supply of and the demand for microbial fermentation capacity.

Some of the key findings include:

• A great variety of industry sectors are searching for fermentation capacity and more than half of them are located outside North America. People who signed-up and are actively searching Capacitor aren’t just synbio companies. They come from large food corporations, government, non-profits, consultancies, academia and financial institutions.

• The world does have fermentation capacity, but nearly all of it is smaller-scale. The total capacity of all facilities in Capacitor is 30-million liters. Nearly 70-percent of these offer bench and pilot-scale services with bioreactors less than 20,000 liters.

• People are actively searching for larger scale facilities and not finding them. Capacitor’s most popular search filter is ‘Size of Bioreactor’ and more than half of searches are for bioreactors larger than 20,000 liters. Of all the facilities in Capacitor, only 20-percent of them have bioreactors larger than 20,000 liters. Underscoring the clear demand for larger scale facilities.

There’s much more information available in the report. Including facilities by geography, product expertise, size of bioreactors and more.

Our hope with Capacitor and the release of our State of Global Fermentation report is to provide even greater transparency into the current state of microbial fermentation worldwide. If we’re going to solve the capacity bottleneck problem, then we also need to understand the current capacity landscape.

Additionally, we want this report to highlight trends in the data so the industry understands the major infrastructure gaps we need to overcome for biomanufacturing to become a powerful building block in a greener global economy.

You can download a free copy of the report via this link and if you are not already a registered Capacitor user, sign up via this link.