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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Camille Bond

FloWaste Raises a $1.1M Pre-Seed Round To Reduce Food Waste With Machine Learning

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 85% of greenhouse gas emissions from landfilled food waste can be attributed to missteps that occur before the food ever reaches a consumer’s plate—from production to processing to distribution. FloWaste, an Indiana-based startup, is addressing food system inefficiency at the processing stage using a proprietary machine learning system.

FloWaste announced today that it has raised a $1.1 pre-seed funding round, which it will use to scale up and improve its technology. Last week, The Spoon got on Zoom with company founder and CEO Rian Mc Donnell to find out how FloWaste can help food producers send less food to landfills.

Mc Donnell had the idea for FloWaste while studying mechanical and manufacturing engineering at Trinity College Dublin. “I gravitated toward the topic of food waste because by that point, I knew that whatever I did, my life was going to be sustainability-focused,” says Mc Donnell.

Here’s how FloWaste works: Customers identify 20 foods that they’d like the system to track, and the team trains their machine learning system to recognize those foods. Then the team installs cameras above customers’ workstations, production lines, and trash cans. The cameras monitor the food production process, automatically classifying food items and quantifying how much gets thrown away.

Flowaste Animation

Video: FloWaste food identification and qualification. Source: FloWaste

“We gather a ton of data,” says Mc Donnell. “And we can chop and change that data based on ingredient usage, yield, shift performance, or daily performance. We present those insights to the management, and then they can make procedural changes.”

The technology can be used in both the industrial and the commercial food sectors. One of FloWaste’s current customers, a European protein producer, is using the system to monitor waste on a beef production line. “There’s this huge financial return because proteins are expensive,” says Mc Donnell, “but also this huge environmental return because any increase in yield means that you’re effectively killing less cows in the long term.”

According to Mc Donnell, the task of training the machine learning system to recognize different foods has been time-consuming. But he hopes that as the system builds knowledge, it’ll become easier and easier to expand its use. “If we go in with someone and they’re doing fries, it means the next time we go and search for fries, we’ve already got a head start,” he says. “We’re slowly getting more and more robots to the point where eventually we’ll be able to just do a general use case of food as a whole.”

This pre-seed funding round will help FloWaste to build up scale with its technology: The company has signed agreements to launch the system at over 100 locations with its pilot customers in the next nine months. The funding will also help the team contend with the challenges of creating a hardware system from scratch using off-the-shelf cameras. In the near future, Mc Donnell is planning to bring on a full-time IoT engineer to make the system simpler and more reliable.

FloWaste is participating in the current cohort of Europe’s Rockstart accelerator-VC. The company has also received funding from U.S. venture funds, including Underdog Labs and Flywheel Fund.

In the longer term, the team hopes to expand through new partnerships. “We’re working on installing in cafeteria kitchens and doing post-consumer analytics for customers who want that,” says Mc Donnell. “And we’re looking at quick-service restaurants because they have such an emphasis on optimizing their processes and their yield of food in the kitchen.”

Ultimately, the company is on a mission to help food producers discover how more environmentally friendly processes can also boost margins. “The best way to see a sustainability benefit is to tie it to the financials of business,” says Mc Donnell, “and actually teach businesses how they can be making more money by being more sustainable.”

Soli Organic Announces $120 Million in New Financing to Expand Indoor Soil-Based Farms

Virginia-based indoor growing company Soli Organic announced last week that it has entered a $120 million financing arrangement with real estate firm Decennial Group. This new partnership will help the company in its plans to expand with eight new farms, each with the capacity to grow 5 million pounds of produce per year.

Soli was founded in 1989 as Shenandoah Growers, a conventional agriculture company based in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley region. The Decennial Group partnership and expansion is an important milestone in the company’s transition to all-indoor production.

While many controlled environment agriculture companies are using hydroponic and aeroponic technologies to facilitate indoor growth, Soli is using a soil-based system. This August, that proprietary technology won the Agtech Breakthrough award for Sunless Production System of the Year.

The company says that its soil-based, LED-powered approach has helped it to achieve lower unit costs for organic produce than either conventional farming or other indoor growing methods. One of the big selling points for controlled environment agriculture is that the developing body of technologies could make healthy food more accessible to all—and Soli’s success in bringing down costs suggests that the industry may be able to keep that promise.

Using its soil-based system, Soli is focusing on minimizing water and energy use. “Our organic soil, 95% of which is recycled back into our system after use, is an ideal growing medium for crops due to its slow release of water, with crops controlling uptake based on their need,” a company representative told The Spoon via email. “As a reflection of our ‘biology first’ philosophy, we are also controlling environmental factors, such as leaf temperature, relative humidity, CO2 and light, to optimize the plants’ efficiency in water uptake.”

The company is also working to optimize its LED lighting systems to conserve energy, and using wind and solar power at some locations.

Soli has already broken ground on its first new construction, which will be located in Anderson County, S.C. The company expects the facility to be operational by the second quarter of 2022, and to create 50 local jobs. The locations of the other facilities have yet to be announced.

The company has also been taking steps to boost the commercial reach of its products (which include herbs, leafy greens, and microgreens) by staffing its c-suite with executives from big-name food brands. In June, former Starbucks CMO Matthew Ryan stepped up as the company’s new CEO, while former Postmates SVP Mike Buckley became CFO.

“My career has been shaped and defined by innovative, market-leading companies. Here, the opportunity for growth could be even greater, as Shenandoah Growers is uniquely positioned to deliver against the converging demand for affordable, high-quality and organic produce, and the need to grow it sustainably and reliably,” said Ryan in a press release on the leadership changes.

It’ll be interesting to see how Soli’s combination of proprietary growing technology, legacy agriculture background, and big corporate leadership affects the company’s transition to all-indoor growing—and how soil-based indoor farming will stack up against other methods in terms of environmental footprint and economic efficiency.

Ingredient Optimized Raises Series A Funding to Expand Protein Enhancement Tech

Ingredient Optimized is a different kind of protein startup. While others in the space are focused on perfecting plant-based burgers and growing more protein-rich peas, the biotech company uses a novel process to alter the physical structures of proteins, making them easier for the body to absorb.

The company announced today that it has completed a Series A funding round led by Continental Grain. Last week, The Spoon joined company co-founder Stephen Motosko on Zoom to find out more about the company’s protein optimization technology and goals for this round of funding.

Motosko and his co-founder Chris Flynn-Rozanski both have personal connections to the issue of protein absorption. Both founders have family members who suffer from sarcopenia, age-related loss of muscle mass. “With my grandma, it started small, with her struggling to open a ketchup bottle. And as it progressed, she struggled to get out of a chair, and then couldn’t get out of bed by herself,” says Motosko. “That really opened our eyes to protein malabsorption.”

Insufficient protein intake can contribute to the condition, and older adults tend to synthesize protein less efficiently.

Motosko and Flynn-Rozanski set out to create a more efficient protein product that would be more readily absorbed by the body. There were existing technologies that could make protein more digestible—like hydrolysis, a process that breaks down long protein strands. But those technologies were far from perfect: Hydrolysis is expensive to perform, and gives protein powder a bitter taste.

Because of his background in the plastics manufacturing field, Motosko already had experience with ionized plasma technology. “It’s been around for a number of years, primarily in other industries, and it’s slowly starting to get into the food space,” he says. “We saw what it was capable of doing and thought, with this technology, combined with protein, we could actually make products better and less wasteful.”

The founders adapted the technology to break down proteins in a way that makes them easier for the body to absorb without changing what they are. Motosko compares the process to making a smoothie: “You take strawberries, you put them in a blender, you blend it. It’s still strawberries. All the components are the same. It’s just in a slightly different physical form that makes it easier for your body to actually digest it.”

The plasma technology would normally be used at a small scale, to process one or two grams of a powder at a time. Motosko says that scaling up the technology was one of the company’s biggest challenges. “If you’re doing a couple grams at a time, it’s never going to be commercially viable. We had to develop a process that not only works, but works at a high enough capacity that we could operate within the margins—which tend to be razor thin—of a CPG company.”

In order to understand the effects that the plasma process would have on the end ingredients’ delivery of nutrition, the team partnered with universities and researchers to sponsor a total of ten human clinical trials. “We’ve shown that we increase the absorption of whey protein; we increase the absorption of pea protein; you can actually use less protein in the formulation to get an equivalent result,” says Motosko.

Ingredient Optimized has already launched Performix, a sports nutrition brand that debuted in specialty retail stores like GNC and Vitamin Shoppe, and is now available in Walmart. But Motosko says that Ingredient Optimized views itself first-and-foremost as a technology company: “We don’t make the ingredients themselves. Our partners can continue getting their protein from whoever they want in their supply chain—we’re kind of protein agnostic. We take that protein, and make it better for the consumers.”

The company has also partnered with five brands, and plans to expand through further partnerships. “We’re looking for brands that can not just connect with consumers and sell products, but have an educational component as well,” says Motosko. “Our biggest challenge moving forward is: How do we educate consumers that the protein they’re consuming may not actually be completely absorbed, and that they could be getting a much better experience with something else?”

With the Series A round of funding, the company will work on boosting consumer education. The team also plans to expand their product line, getting io into new food products such as plant-based burgers.

The company did not release the dollar amount of the Series A raise. “We want the focus to be not on the addition of capital but on our validated, human-tested superior technology and products,” a company representative told The Spoon via email.

They’ll also explore new uses for the plasma process, like creating more nutritionally available animal feed. “If we can make an animal feed that has an increased absorption, we reduce the environmental impact of the livestock industry, which is a huge contributor to global warming,” says Motosko.

The global plant protein market could be valued at over $162 billion by 2030 (up from $29.4 billion last year), according to a Bloomberg Intelligence report. With a unique value proposition and a flexible technology, Ingredient Optimized seems well-positioned to take advantage of that growth.

We Talked To Bowery Farming About the Community Impact of Their Indoor Farming Expansion

Back in December, The Spoon reported on Bowery Farming’s plans to build a new, indoor farm in Bethlehem, Pa. The New York-based company already runs two commercial farms in the Mid-Atlantic region, plus two R&D facilities and a plant science innovation hub in New Jersey.

Bowery plans to open the Bethlehem farm sometime this year or in 2022—and meanwhile, they’re expanding in other ways. The company has doubled its revenue this year. Its products are sold in over eight times as many stores as they were last January.

Last week, The Spoon joined Bowery’s Chief Commercial Officer, Katie Seawell, on Zoom to find out how the company is engaging local communities as it expands its operations.

The most obvious way that Bowery’s farms bring value to their communities is by producing nutritious, pesticide-free food. The company expects its new Bethlehem facility to produce about 20 million clamshells of leafy greens and other produce per year. (To grow that volume of food via conventional agriculture, you’d need to use up 5 million square feet of land.)

Seawell attributes some of Bowery’s recent growth to rising consumer interest in locally grown produce and food supply chain issues—both in turn influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of the day, she says, the company wants to build a more sustainable, productive farming model that will weather disasters.

“If we can minimize the externalities of climate change, weather events, and other disruptions that you see in the traditional food system, and can create surety of supply in a way that is more sustainable,” says Seawell, “then we can meet the moment, meet the demands of our growing population. That’s the model we’re cracking with indoor vertical farming at Bowery.”

Last year, the USDA declared Bethlehem’s South Side a food desert. The Brown and White, a local newspaper, reported on the abundance of fast food and relative lack of healthy options in the area.

Of course, Bowery’s expansion won’t solve that problem if its products aren’t accessible to locals. Seawell says that the company is taking a multi-pronged approach to boost accessibility as it expands its commercial footprint. First, the team is taking steps to make its products available to consumers across a wide range of retailers—from Whole Foods and independent grocery stores to Walmart and Giant.

“We’re also looking at innovative models for bringing our product to communities,” says Seawell. Bowery donates produce to nonprofit hunger relief organizations, including Maryland Food Bank and Table to Table.

The company has also partnered with D.C. Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that acts as a wholesale partner, reselling Bowery products to local corner stores at reduced rates. Through its Healthy Corners food program, the organization is working on building the infrastructure for corner stores to carry more fresh foods. “It’s a really cool program because it’s not just access to fresh food that these communities need,” says Seawell, “it’s the infrastructure to support fresh food programs.”

Seawell says the company will explore further community partnerships as it expands to Bethlehem and beyond.

The team is also excited about the Bethlehem farm because of the opportunities that it represents for the former industrial powerhouse. Bowery received grant support for the project from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development and the Governor’s Action Team. The farm will be part of an economic redevelopment project intended to boost employment and create new opportunities in the area.

The farm will be located at a site that was once home to a steel mill. The tract has been identified as a brownfield (or potentially contaminated) site. “This is land that you could not farm in a traditional sense,” says Seawell. “So what we’re doing is transitioning this non-arable land into a highly productive farm that will serve this community.”

Seawell says Bowery provides entry-level employment opportunities that require no previous agricultural experience. Bowery farms also provide year-round employment, in contrast to conventional farms, which generally have seasonal work cycles.

“We cast a very wide net in terms of who we recruit in the community,” she says. “We look more for a cultural fit than any specific, hard skill set.”

The company is also considering the energy footprint of its new facility. Its existing commercial farms are run using low-impact hydropower. Seawell says the team is currently considering renewable energy strategies for the Bethlehem farm.

Last spring, Bowery raised $300 million in Series C funding, which it will use to accelerate its farming expansion and bring new products to market. Seawell says that as the company considers new sites in the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond, the team will continue to weigh their commercial bases, the availability of untapped talent pools, and sustainability issues.

“We aspire to take this model nationally, and eventually globally,” says Seawell. “So in many ways, the new Bethlehem farm is a milestone for us as we continue to think about a national footprint for Bowery.”

BIOMILQ Raises $21M in Series A Funding With Focus on Mission-Aligned Partners

In June, The Spoon reported on North Carolina-based startup BIOMILQ’s success in recreating human milk outside of the breast. The company is working toward manufacturing cell-cultured milk at commercial scale, hoping to provide parents who cannot breastfeed regularly with a nutritionally equivalent option.

BIOMILQ announced today that they’ve closed their Series A financing round with $21 million. This week, The Spoon got on Zoom with company co-founder and CEO Michelle Egger to discuss the funding round and BIOMILQ’s next steps toward commercialization.

“In the grand scheme of fundraising rounds in cellular agriculture, $21 million is par for the course,” says Egger. “But we’re particularly proud because we’re an all-female leadership team. It’s less about celebrating the dollar value and more about celebrating the fact that we were able to raise it with specific partnership criteria that helped us find mission-aligned partners.”

During the round, BIOMILQ focused on identifying funds that employed female partners; that had company portfolios in which at least 10% of founders came from diverse or non-traditional backgrounds; and that had mandates on nutrition, health, or sustainability in their investment criteria.

Egger says that those criteria narrowed the field of potential investors, but ultimately helped the team to connect with partners “that are furthering new ideas and new innovation from areas where we otherwise wouldn’t see it.” Those partners include Novo Holdings, Gaingels, Spero, and Digitalis.

This round of funding will help BIOMILQ to bring its production processes to scale. Currently, the company produces small sample quantities of cell-cultured milk—just enough for compositional and optimization testing, according to Egger. They’re currently building a pilot plant in North Carolina, where they hope to begin producing milk in the quantities required for safety testing before launching the product.

In grappling with the challenge of building up scale, BIOMILQ is in the same boat as cell-cultured meat startups. But Egger says that the process for, and challenges of, producing cell-cultured milk are unique.

“Our product isn’t cells; our product is what the cells produce,” she says. “In cellular agriculture, they’re growing meat to replace the way cattle farmers have traditionally raised bovine cattle to slaughter. We’re more like milkmaids, raising cells to act more like dairy cows, where they’re able to produce milk—in this case, human milk.”

In contrast to cellular agriculture, BIOMILQ’s process is more similar to pharmaceutical production than fermentation production in terms of scale and price.

There are some advantages that come with playing the role of cellular milkmaid. For instance, BIOMILQ doesn’t need its cells to grow explosively, but to secrete milk—so the company’s process requires relatively small quantities of expensive growth factors.

BIOMILQ also stands out from the crowd of cell cultivation startups because the company uses human epithelial cells to produce its milk. The use of human cells comes with its own challenges, as the company has had to prove to the FDA’s Institutional Review Boards that donors consented fully to the use of their cells. “In the past, human research hasn’t always been upfront about how cells were being utilized,” says Egger. “So it’s top-of-mind for us, as the first food product created from human cells.”

The regulatory pathway for BIOMILQ remains unclear, although the company is actively working with regulators.

Egger says that the company “might be a bit quieter” over the next year or two, as the team works on building up scale and undergoing safety testing. Still, she’s excited about these next steps.

“We get to pioneer a new future of nutrition and push forward technologies that have never been applied in this way,” says Egger, “which is very exciting. And it’s also a huge challenge that we take very seriously, because at the end of the day, the product we’re making isn’t a novel hamburger or a novel chicken nugget—it’s nutrition that supports the life of human beings on our planet.”

Image credit: BIOMILQ

“Have Your Bagel and Eat It Too”: Better Brand CEO Aimee Yang Wants To Change Our Relationship With Carbs

So many of our favorite foods contain refined carbohydrates like white flour and white sugar. These ingredients reliably produce delicious foods, but they’re also associated with health problems like Type 2 diabetes and obesity.

California-based startup Better Brand is on a mission to hack refined carbohydrates, recreating their flavor without the health consequences. The company’s first product, the Better Bagel, has the carbohydrate content of two banana slices, the protein content of four eggs, and the sugar content of a single stalk of celery.

In a Zoom interview this week, company founder and CEO Aimee Yang told The Spoon that she set out to develop products that would make healthy eating easier while improving consumers’ relationships with food.

“We have always lived with this underlying belief in pre-imposed limitations,” says Yang. “That the foods that we crave can’t be good for us, and we have to deprive ourselves. We’re posing the thought that you don’t have to do that anymore. You can have your cake—well, your bagel—and eat it too.”

Better Brand CEO Aimee Yang


That cycle of craving and self-deprivation has personal significance for Yang. “It was the largest pain point that I felt throughout my life,” she says. “I’d always been on the cycle of wanting to eat something and questioning if I should. It consumed so much of my mind space and was just so anxiety-inducing for me.”

As she worked toward her M.B.A. at The Wharton School, Yang realized that that personal pain point could also be an opportunity to make an impact in the food space. During her second year of business school, she delved into research on the science of food.

Yang says that upon founding Better Brand, she chose the bagel as the company’s flagship product because “turning the most carb-heavy food, which is the equivalent of multiple slices of bread, into the carb equivalent of two banana slices is so exciting. When you’re a consumer and you hear that, it promotes a mind shift in terms of what’s possible.”

Using some of the insights from Yang’s research, Better Brand collaborated with food labs to develop a bagel dough with novel ingredients. “If you brought this dough to a bagel manufacturer or a bakery, they would have no idea what to do with it,” says Yang. “If you tried to use it in the conventional way, it would be impossible.”

After the dough undergoes some processing (the details are a trade secret), Better Brand’s enzyme technology is applied. The company extracts its enzymes from plants, and adds them to the dough to improve the flavor, mouthfeel, and texture of the finished product. Though the enzymes are the last part of the ingredient deck, and are used sparingly, Yang says that without them the Better Bagel “would be a completely different product.”

The Better Bagel launched over the summer on the company’s online store. Rather than waiting to perfect every detail in the lab before launching, the team wanted to introduce the product quickly and make improvements based on consumer feedback—which Yang says is a focus point for the organization, right up to the investor level.

“Our investor base is a group of incredible people who care about more than the bottom line,” says Yang. “That’s never a point of conversation; it’s always about how we’re driving impact, what the product is like, and how we can improve the customer’s journey.”

By launching online with a direct-to-consumer model, Better Brand hopes to take advantage of reviews and sales data. “If a product is on a grocery shelf, there are so many levels in between you and that purchase point that you don’t really get a complete data set,” says Yang. “It’s important for us to be consumer-first because we need that feedback in real-time. There’s also an element of wanting the consumer to have a certain experience, and it’s a lot easier to control that experience if you’re DTC.”

The company is working on building strategic partnerships, starting with Ojai Valley Inn, a luxury resort in Southern California. The team is also in talks with a few large food service companies, considering relationships that would mirror Impossible Foods’ symbiosis with Burger King. Yang says that they plan to work closely with partners to maintain some control over branding and keep a close eye on consumer experience.

In the future, Better Brand plans to expand its product offerings, keeping a focus on refined carbohydrates. Having hacked the bagel, titan of carbohydrates, Yang says the company will be able to replicate other carb-heavy foods more easily.

“If it’s something that you crave and feel guilty about eating,” she says, “we’re going to be innovating in that space.”


Black Sheep Foods Launches Plant-Based Lamb in San Francisco Restaurants

This week, alternative protein startup Black Sheep Foods’ plant-based lamb made its debut in San Francisco restaurants. The launch is a big step for the Black Sheep team, which wants to offer more variety to plant-based meat eaters.

“Our first product is lamb because it’s both alien and familiar in America,” company co-founder Sunny Kumar told The Spoon this week over Zoom. “Everyone knows about lamb, but no one really eats it at a high cadence.”

Kumar points out a few reasons for relatively low lamb consumption in the U.S. For one thing, lamb and mutton popularity plummeted when World War II GIs returned home, having lost their taste for the gamy, canned meat they had had to eat abroad. Then there was the influence of Lamb Chop, the adorable host of a 1990s PBS program for preschoolers. (“As these kids grew up, they would be like, ‘I don’t want to eat lamb, this was one of my favorite characters on TV,’” says Kumar.) And of course, there’s the general guilt factor of eating a baby animal.

Black Sheep wants to decouple the taste of lamb from some of the negative cultural connotations in the U.S. market—both by taking the actual lamb out of the picture, and by making a great-tasting product. To do that, the team had to figure out how to reproduce the meat’s flavor using plant-based ingredients.

Unlocking the taste of game

Kumar says that he and co-founder Ismael Montanez had an “aha” moment while working together at Finless Foods. “We realized that the taste of an animal really comes from what it’s eating, and how that food is processed by the animal itself,” he says.

The team ultimately came up with what Kumar calls the company’s secret sauce: A class of compounds called branched chain fatty acids, which account for the gamy flavor of lamb. After that, there were the hurdles of building a reliable supply chain and getting FDA approval for the ingredient.

“You can’t go for regulatory approval until you know the levels of the compounds you want to use, and the levels of the compounds are directly dictated by the texturing,” says Kumar. “And so you have to understand what you’re putting in, and as you add a little bit more fat or a little bit more water, you have to understand how those changes affect each other.”

Though the regulatory process was long and complicated, Kumar expects the team to enjoy a certain amount of competitive insulation as a result, making the investment in research and FDA approval worthwhile.

By unlocking the flavor of lamb, Black Sheep has been able to create a product that stands out among other plant-based meat options. Moving forward, Kumar says that flavor is one of the key elements that Black Sheep wants to focus on developing and producing in-house. The company currently works with a manufacturing partner to produce the branched chain fatty acids that create that gamy flavor—but, according to Kumar, they plan to take on more of the ingredient production internally over time.

The lamb launch strategy

Black Sheep has tested its formula in consumer panels, and judging by the results, Kumar expects the restaurant launch to be a success. “So far, the reviews are highly positive,” he says. “Some people have told us, ‘I don’t eat a lot of lamb, because I don’t like some of the notes in it.’ But the cool part about building it from the ground up is that we don’t have to add those negative notes—we only add the positive, gamy elements.”

With Mediterranean restaurant chains like Cava growing in popularity, Kumar sees plenty of room for more restaurant partnerships in the future. The team is tentatively planning to introduce products in grocery stores by the end of 2022. But first, they’re focused on ironing out the flavor and texture of their consumer products.

“We bought a small extruder and we’re going to get some learnings on it,” says Kumar, “but we’re going to be limited by the output of that machine. Hopefully with the next round of funding, we’ll be able to unlock a little bit more capacity.”

When The Spoon interviewed Black Sheep in 2019, the company was planning to launch its products in Asia. Kumar says that the team shifted its strategy due to the relative ease of co-packing and sourcing supplies domestically. After expanding in the U.S., they’re eyeing Europe and the U.K., where North African cultural influences have boosted the popularity of lamb.

Plant-based possibilities

Down the line, Kumar says that the team’s dream is to create plant-based, formed foods like burgers, nuggets, and sausages—“but with flavors that are insane.”

Ethics and environmental impacts are on the team’s mind. But beyond reacting to those concerns by replacing common frozen aisle products with similar-enough alternatives, Black Sheep wants to delight consumers with unique tastes. They hope to win over flexitarians by offering the chance to enjoy flavors they wouldn’t otherwise try.

With the plant-based space becoming increasingly competitive and crowded with similar products, the strategy makes sense. As Kumar says: “Why eat chicken nuggets when you could have duck nuggets with hoisin barbeque sauce?”

Photo credit: Nicola Parisi

How New Culture and Moolec Science Are Growing Cow-Free Dairy Proteins

Most of today’s vegan cheese startups face the challenge of reproducing cheese using ingredients like plant-based oils and nut milks. That’s no easy feat, as unique dairy proteins are responsible for some of the taste, stretch, and melt properties of cheese.

But alternative cheese may soon be getting a tech upgrade. A handful of startups have developed cow-free processes for replicating those key dairy proteins. Last week, The Spoon got on Zoom with the CEOs of two of those companies—New Culture and Moolec Science—to ask about the state of alternative cheese technology.

New Culture & precision fermentation

When California-based startup New Culture set out to develop a better alternative cheese, the company’s founders surveyed a range of processes that could be used to grow dairy proteins. Company CEO and co-founder Matt Gibson says that precision fermentation stood out because the technology had already been used by the conventional dairy industry at commercial scale.

“It’s a process that has been done time and time again,” says Gibson. Precision fermentation is used today to produce chymosin, a cheesemaking enzyme. “And that means that all those risk factors that come with anything that you scale up have really been eliminated. It’s a tried-and-true method of going from a small fermentation shake flask of say 50 milliliters to a large fermentation tank of 200,000 liters.”

In New Culture’s fermentation process, microbes are genetically edited to convert sugar into a dairy protein called casein, which makes up about 80% of the protein content in cow’s milk. To grow the protein at high volumes, the microbes need to be kept at a certain temperature and pH, and fed sugars at a specific rate.

According to Gibson, another advantage of using precision fermentation is that the regulatory process is relatively simple. This is partly because the dairy industry has set a precedent for using precision fermentation, and partly because New Culture is using the process to create an existing protein rather than a new ingredient.

“So there’s no concern from a regulatory point of view about the fact that you’re using genetic engineering,” he says. “You go through the regulatory process to show that the process you’re using—like what you’re feeding your microbe—is safe and stable. So the regulatory process is expected to be very smooth sailing.”

New Culture expects to complete the regulatory approval process next year. The company’s flagship cheese will be mozzarella, which they plan to launch as a branded product in restaurants in late 2022. In particular, Gibson says the team has its eyes on the pizza industry, which is a huge consumer of mozzarella, but has been held back from using alternative cheeses because today’s plant-based options don’t stretch well or tolerate the high temperatures in pizza ovens.

Casein is the foundation for all kinds of cheeses. Someday, the company could add other bacterial cultures and age their casein curd base to create blue cheese, brie, and other varieties. For now, they’re focused on building scale and getting their mozzarella onto menus.

“To quickly transition away from animal-derived cheeses, you need a technology that can scale quickly and get costs down quickly,” says Gibson. “And that’s what precision fermentation ultimately allows you to do.”

Moolec Science & molecular farming

Moolec Science, headquartered in the U.K., is taking a different approach: The company grows animal proteins using molecular farming. Last year, The Spoon reported on Moolec’s success in producing the cheesemaking enzyme chymosin (mentioned above) in plants.

Molecular farming solves the problem of scaling up in a different way from precision fermentation. Through molecular farming, says company CEO and co-founder Gastón Paladini, Moolec can take advantage of existing agricultural infrastructure for production purposes. “There’s nothing better than low-tech farming to produce at an enhanced scale and low cost.”

In molecular farming, crops are genetically modified to produce a target molecule. The Moolec team matches the target molecule with a host plant, creating different plant-molecule combinations for different applications. The company’s proof-of-concept chymosin is grown in safflower plants; its next products, meat proteins, will be grown in soy and yellow pea plants.

Moolec is a spinoff of Bioceres Crop Solutions, an agtech company. The team at Bioceres spent over a decade building the tech platform that Moolec now uses for molecular farming, says Paladini—“from the laboratories and construction design to the new genes, new seeds, field trials, farming, and harvesting.”

While precision fermentation companies can scale up using models created by the conventional dairy industry, Paladini says that the scale for molecular farming already exists. “There aren’t many precision fermentation tanks out there to produce alternative protein right now, so the industry needs to build new fermenters,” he says. “With molecular farming, we could use the same lands that are currently used to grow animal feed right now. You only need to switch the seeds.”

Bioceres has an existing network of growers in Latin America and the U.S., which is helping Moolec to expand its operations.

The regulatory process for molecular farming is relatively complicated, requiring both USDA and FDA approval (while the precision fermentation process requires only FDA approval). Moolec is currently working its way through the regulatory process.

Moolec’s process involves farming genetically modified crops on a large scale, a controversial practice in some regions. Paladini says that the team plans to take an active and transparent approach when it comes to communicating with the public about GMOs.

“We believe that we need to inform, educate, and promote the benefits of GM techniques, when they’re used for a good reason,” he says. Toward that end, the company is working on building an NGO in collaboration with scientists and industry representatives. The organization, GM4GOOD, will “promote the benefits of using science and GM techniques.”

Moolec is currently working with R&D departments at CPG companies to develop end products using its proteins. The team plans to re-launch its plant-derived chymosin later this year, and to introduce its alternative meat proteins in late 2022 or early 2023.

Both New Culture and Moolec can leverage knowledge from previous applications of their technologies, and both companies will face challenges as they build up scale and work toward regulatory approval. And there are questions to ask about both companies’ processes: about the energy intensivity of protein extraction, for instance, and the land use implications of growing animal proteins in plants at scale.

But both companies’ uses of technology to produce native dairy proteins mark big steps forward for alternative cheese. The next wave of cow-free cheeses will likely be more versatile and convincing, and more attractive to restaurants and CPG companies.

TiNDLE Plant-Based Chicken is Coming to the US Soon. But How Does It Taste?

Next Gen Foods of Singapore launched its flagship plant-based chicken product, TiNDLE, just 11 months after its founding in April 2020. Three months later, the company began its international expansion—bringing TiNDLE to over 130 restaurants worldwide, from Hong Kong to the U.A.E.

Now, Next Gen is introducing TiNDLE in the U.S. This week, the company will offer a sneak peek of the product at the Food Network & Cooking Channel New York City Wine & Food Festival. The team is currently working with chefs to bring TiNDLE to restaurant menus next year.

This week, I met up with company co-founder and CEO Andre Menezes at Next Gen’s New York City tasting room to learn more about the anticipated launch—and try TiNDLE myself.

According to Menezes, the Wine & Food Festival sneak peek is part of Next Gen’s international strategy, which hinges on building partnerships with sought-after food names and brands. “We’re working toward launching in food havens around the world,” he said. “We’re targeting the coolest places, the best chefs, the restaurants consumers love to visit.”

I tasted the two dishes featured at the festival: a lotus leaf bao wrap with veggie slaw and a parm slider on a brioche bun. TiNDLE appeared as a breaded patty in both dishes, although there are other ways to cook the product.

Both dishes were flavorful, creative, and fun to eat. The TiNDLE was satisfyingly crunchy, with none of the wet sponginess that I associate with fast food chicken patties. It had a defined, fibrous texture, an appealing bite, and a rich, convincingly chicken-y taste. A more chicken-y taste, I thought, than some actual chicken products. Menezes said that that’s because the company didn’t set out to recreate the taste of a chicken breast; they wanted their products to taste more like a wing or a thigh.


In developing TiNDLE, the team wanted to figure out what people love about chicken and then develop a food ingredient that would maximize those beloved qualities—which turned out to be chicken’s fibrous texture, smell and taste, and versatility.

The fibrous texture is achieved via extrusion. To mimic the flavor of chicken, the team uses a proprietary, sunflower oil-based emulsion called Lipi™. “As an emulsion, it goes within the fibers just like fat does,” said Menezes.

As for versatility, Menezes said the team wanted to create “a product that chefs can really play with, like Playdoh.” Rather than offering preformed products like burgers, they’re working closely with chefs to see what TiNDLE can do.

One of the items on Next Gen’s tasting room menu, a miso ramen dish, incorporates TiNDLE in noodle form: instead of chicken and noodles, an actual (plant-based) chicken noodle. Menezes mentioned a chef who rolled the product out like dough and cut it into flower shapes, and another who put it on top of a sushi roll, then cooked it with a torch.

Menezes said that the company has developed the technology to manufacture whole cuts as well as nuggets and tenders, and that one day, they’ll explore those options. But first, they’re working on growing their brand worldwide through restaurant partnerships.

“We believed that if we really wanted to drive food system change, we needed to be global from day one,” he said. At the outset, the team wanted to address both current meat consumption in the U.S. and Europe, and fast-growing consumption in Asia.

Next Gen focuses on controlling product development, branding, and operations internally. The company builds local teams as it expands, and partners with external contract manufacturers and distributors. Production is currently based in the Netherlands, but Menezes said the team is interested in partnering with U.S. manufacturers, and potentially using the U.S. as an export platform for Canada and Mexico.

The company will use its $30 million extended seed investment to build global operations and supply chains this year. In 2022, they plan to launch at restaurants in the U.S. and Europe. After that, they may eye other plant-based spaces, like dairy and seafood.

How will Next Gen compete in the diversifying alternative protein industry? According to Menezes, Next Gen is all about expanding the plant-based category, and the team doesn’t see other companies as rivals. “Our competition isn’t other startups,” he said. “Our competition is birds.”

Revo Foods Wants To Build a 3D Printing Facility For Plant-Based Fish

Austrian startup Revo Foods produces plant-based fish products, but not the formed and fried items that are becoming increasingly common in grocery store aisles. Revo is making structurally sophisticated products: sheets of smoked salmon, salmon fillets, and sushi cuts with a realistic look and feel.

We’ve already seen cell-cultured meat startups use 3D printing to create cuts of meat with complex fat and tissue structures. Revo has brought 3D printing into the plant-based fish arena, and the company is betting that the resulting products will win over more seafood eaters.

This week, company CSO Theresa Rothenbücher joined The Spoon on Zoom to talk about Revo’s 3D printing technology and vision for scaling up.

“3D printing is our core technology here at Revo because it gives us the possibility to produce precise structures,” says Rothenbücher. With 3D printers, the team can closely mimic the appearance of a salmon fillet, with its layers of orange muscle and white connective tissue.

Revo is currently ironing out its production process, both by speeding up the actual printing, and by experimenting with other techniques that can be used to complement 3D printing.

But the company is also working on an ambitious plan to boost its production capacity. 3D printers have typically been used to produce prototypes, but Revo wants to scale up the technology. Rothenbücher describes the team’s vision: A production-scale facility that houses interconnected 3D printers of varying sizes. To save space, printers could be stacked on top of each other. An automated conveyor belt system would run through the facility.

Austria already generates around 80% of its energy from renewable sources, but the team is still working on maximizing the facility’s energy efficiency. “We are designing it in a way that we hope will avoid wasting energy, kind of like a closed circuit system,” says Rothenbücher. “So really, sustainability is one of our main focus points—besides having a great taste.”

The idea of producing food in a high-tech, 3D printing factory might seem like a potential turnoff for buyers, but Rothenbücher is optimistic about consumer acceptance. Revo has already produced some animated videos to introduce the technology—and brought out printers to meet consumers face-to-face.

“We usually bring one of our R&D printers to events, and then show people how the food material is transformed into the salmon products. Usually, they really like it and are fascinated with it, and if they can directly taste it, it’s even better,” says Rothenbücher. “Of course, it is not a traditional way of producing food. But then, we are a new generation.”

Revo has already tested its products at restaurants in Vienna, with positive results. The company plans to launch a line of fish spreads in early 2022, and to introduce sushi and whole cuts sometime after that.

The team selected salmon as a flagship offering because of the species’ popularity and environmental concerns linked to salmon aquaculture. They’ve also created some tuna products, and in the future, they’ll consider expanding to other species. As Rothenbücher says: “There are so many different fish in the sea.”

While Revo is focused on plant-based fish products for the time being, Rothenbücher believes that there will be opportunities for the company to collaborate with cell-based companies or manufacture hybrid products in the future. With specialized, upscaled technology for printing realistic cuts of fish, Revo could position itself as a production partner for cell-cultured startups moving toward commercialization.

Terra Bio Turns Spent Grain Into Protein Ingredient for Plant-Based Meats

Spent grain, a byproduct of the beer brewing process, often goes to waste (although it’s sometimes fed to livestock). Canadian startup Terra Bio is giving the used grain a second life as a plant-based protein.

Terra Bio has developed a proprietary process called bio-fractionation, which breaks down the grain into component parts while leaving its proteins intact. The company says that the resulting protein—which it calls Protina—has a mild, malty flavor and promising gelation properties.

This week, The Spoon got on Zoom with the Terra Bio team to learn more about its vision for Protina.

Meet Protina

In spent grain, Terra Bio saw an opportunity to create a more sustainable, plant-based protein. Protina requires no direct agricultural inputs as an upcycled ingredient, making it less land- and water-intensive than soy or pea protein.

Terra Bio doesn’t envision Protina as a stand-alone protein. Instead, it sees the ingredient as a textural base alongside other proteins.

“There’s no such thing as a perfect protein,” says company President and Co-Founder Ricardo Martinez, but Protina can add value by complementing other ingredients. “It can be used in combination with other more expensive or premium proteins, so you can reduce costs. And you can increase your product’s performance in terms of amino acids or textures.”

By taking advantage of different proteins’ unique properties, the team says, manufacturers could also simplify their products’ ingredients lists. For instance, Protina’s appealing texture could cut down on the need for additional texturizers.

To demonstrate the possibilities for Protina, Terra Bio is currently working with microalgae protein startup Smallfood and vegan chef Doug McNish to develop a plant-based fish fillet. The project was selected as one of 28 semifinalists for the XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion competition.

The spent grain supply chain

The team noted another upside of using spent grain: The breweries where the ingredient is generated are often located near food manufacturing plants. By taking advantage of an ingredient that can usually be sourced closeby to production facilities, the Protina manufacturing process can simplify the supply chain.

“That’s especially important as we’re in the middle of this COVID environment where supply chains are highly disrupted,” says CEO and Co-Founder Steve George. The COVID-19 pandemic has put global food supply chains under stress and driven up food prices. “So we said, what if we can shorten the supply chain. This accomplishes that.”

Because the bio-fractionation process can be performed using existing food processing equipment, Terra Bio plans to focus on building partnerships with contract manufacturers rather than constructing new production plants. The team says it sees these partnerships as a way to scale up production and leverage local supply chains while minimizing the environmental footprint of producing Protina.

Protina’s path forward

Terra Bio currently uses barley-rich spent grain mixtures to produce Protina, but the team is working on modifying the bio-fractionation process to accommodate more diverse feedstock. The company has also begun the process of getting food safety approval from Health Canada and the FDA.

As it takes steps to scale up its production process, Terra Bio is also seeking out new partnerships with breweries, food companies, and contract manufacturers. Through those partnerships, the company plans to continue taking on more capacity.

“We expect to be able to make those key partnerships in this coming year, and be able to start having protein and protein-based products out there come 2023,” says Rebecca Bradley, Terra Bio’s Outreach and Marketing Coordinator. “We expect to be able to scale a lot faster because we’re working together.”

We Talked to BlueNalu About Creating Fish Cell Lines From Scratch

Cellular aquaculture pioneer BlueNalu was born out of a contradiction. The company’s founders noted that while technological development around mammal cell products was booming, there was a relative dearth of knowledge about fish cell development. Yet the market opportunity for cell-cultured fish—with global demand for seafood on the rise and wild stocks increasingly vulnerable—looked big.

In attempting to do for fish cells what its peers were doing for cow cells, BlueNalu and other cell-cultured seafood companies faced a steep learning curve. Mammal-cell companies could take advantage of existing cell lines and a wealth of research from the pharmaceutical industry, but fish-cell companies would have to start almost from scratch, unlocking the unique conditions required to propagate and stabilize fish cells.

For BlueNalu, the mission was not only to develop a stable cell line for a single species of fish. “It was about having the correct methods to be able to reproducibly extract stem cells from a wide range of species,” Lauran Madden, the company’s Vice President of Research and Product Development, told The Spoon this week over Zoom.

So the company developed a proprietary technology platform that would allow it to create stable cell lines, with the flexibility to switch from one species to another. Madden says that achieving that reproducibility was a special challenge because cell growth conditions vary between species. “For example, mahi and tuna are not exactly the same, but they’re more similar to each other than they are to a cow,” she says.

To identify a group of focus species, BlueNalu used a decision matrix that factored in a variety of species attributes. The team looked at how scarce or vulnerable a species was, and how heavily it was imported. They also considered species that pose health concerns—like tuna, which contains mercury. And they looked for species that couldn’t be raised using conventional aquaculture.

The search for suitable donor fish also had to be carried out carefully. “We try to find trustworthy sources for species, where they’re legally bred or caught,” says Madden. “And we do extensive testing on the sample tissue to make sure that it’s free of contaminants.”

The team ultimately succeeded in creating cell lines for eight different species of fish, including bluefin tuna, mahi mahi, yellowtail, and snapper.

With its proprietary tech platform and species flexibility, BlueNalu aspires to become more than a manufacturer of a fixed line of cell-cultured seafood products. “Our approach is to become a global brand, a supply chain of seafood products,” company President and CEO Lou Cooperhouse told The Spoon this week in a Zoom interview. In theory, the company could use its platform to respond to a decline of a given fish species.

Having invested extensively in building new technology, the company is eyeing a range of intellectual property opportunities. But Cooperhouse doesn’t expect to see the cell-cultured seafood space become as competitive as the plant-based meats arena in the near future. The technological barrier that still exists for budding cell-cultured seafood companies means that there’s still strong competitive insulation in this industry niche.

“This is a challenging category that requires quite a bit of capital,” he says. “In making cell-cultured fish fillets, there’s really, in my opinion, no other way to do this but through our technology.”

BlueNalu’s investments in research and development may eventually find applications outside of the alternative protein industry: The team believes that some of its discoveries could help to power scientific research and support conservation efforts. For instance, the company’s technology could help researchers to understand fish species’ responses to environmental contaminants at the cellular level.

“There’s so much that is unknown about fish species and the ocean in general,” says Cooperhouse. “We’re all about preserving biodiversity and ecosystem erosion. So yes, there could be some licensing opportunities and other opportunities for our technology to have some real value outside of BlueNalu.”

With its species cell lines ready to grow, BlueNalu is preparing to launch its products in the U.S. and abroad. The company recently announced a new partnership with European frozen food company Nomad Foods, the latest in a series of international partnerships. Cooperhouse believes the company’s tech platform will support its mission of supplying scarce fish species worldwide without competing with local, conventional aquaculture businesses.

“We’re not just making healthier products that are sustainable,” he says. “Our products also support food security, they create jobs, they build factories. It really is a bit of a holy grail opportunity for us.”