On the long list of problems facing the world, gummy bears don’t rank very high. But the candy–like yogurt, Frosted Mini Wheats, and many other foods, cosmetics, and drugs–is made with gelatin, and because gelatin is made from animal bones and tissues, it intersects with the much larger set of problems caused by factory farms.

While vegan alternatives to gelatin exist, they don’t work particularly well. So a Bay Area-based startup called Geltor is using genetic engineering to make animal-free gelatin that’s identical to the traditional product. The company programs microbes with the same genes that produce gelatin in animals and then uses those microbes to “brew” the product.

Co-founders Alexander Lorestani and Nikolay Ouzounov were grad students in molecular biology at Princeton University when they started exploring the idea. Lorestani, who was studying the problem of antibiotic resistance, became particularly interested in finding solutions for agriculture. Around 70% of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. are used on livestock.

“When I started looking at the systemic underpinnings of the global problem that is antibiotic resistance, the first thing on the list is the food system . . . and our overuse and misuse of antibiotics within that sphere,” says Lorestani.

Factory farming poses other problems, from water use in drought-stricken states like California to animal cruelty and massive greenhouse gas emissions. While other companies in the post-animal economy try to come up with cultured hamburgers and leather fermented from mushrooms, Lorestani and Ouzounov decided to focus on gelatin.

“It’s perfect in that it is so elegantly simple,” Lorestani says. “It’s made of one thing, which is collagen, and collagen is extremely well understood. It’s this extremely elegant, repetitive structure…from a manufacturing standpoint, it was really exciting because it took a lot of the basic complexity out of the equation.”

It was also simple in terms of what the market wanted, from pharmaceutical companies using gelatin to coat pills, to ice cream manufacturers.