About

Escarpment Laboratories Inc. specializes in the development and supply of high-performance yeast strains for the brewing industry. Since 2015, the company has served over 500 breweries across Canada, the U.S., and Europe with liquid yeast, R&D services, and fermentation expertise. Escarpment’s core offerings include a catalogue of premium brewing yeasts, custom strain development, and advanced fermentation analytics to help breweries optimize flavour, consistency, and production efficiency.

Project

With the support of the Development and Commercialization program,Escarpment Laboratories aims to enhance yeast performance for brewing by building on a genome-scale metabolic model (GEM) platform. This project will leverage the resources of the ventureLAB TDS to refine these models to include new traits such as flocculation, biotransformation, and stress tolerance, which are key factors affecting beer quality and production efficiency.

Impact

This project will result in a finalized software-based modeling package incorporating refined genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) tailored to brewing yeast, including new traits such as flocculation, stress tolerance, and flavour compound regulation.  This software package will help Escarpment Laboratories increase revenue by $300,000 per year and hire an additional two full-time employees within 18 months post project. Additionally, Ontario craft breweries will have access to improved yeast strains which will help strengthen their businesses.