While you were enjoying your sourdough or drinking craft beer, you were almost certainly consuming Lallemand's product. This 118-year-old Montreal-based company is the invisible infrastructure behind global fermentation, yet most tech founders have never heard of them.

"They don't sell yeast—they sell fermentation itself. That's the difference between a commodity and a platform."

The company's structure reveals their strategy: separate CEOs for North America Baking (Audrey St.Onge), Pharma (Frederic Durmont), and Soluções Agrobiológicas in Brazil (Fernando Urban). This isn't a monolithic corporation—it's a federation of specialized fermentation ecosystems. Each vertical builds its own moat with proprietary strains and processes that can't be replicated by generic competitors.

• 118 years of strain collection creates an unassailable biological library
• Vertical integration from lab to production creates pricing power
• Industrial customers prioritize consistency over cost, creating sticky relationships
• Pharma and agro-bio divisions diversify beyond commodity food markets