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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Josh Schonwald

I Tried a New Rival to Impossible’s Heme, and it Could Be A Game Changer

I have good news for mock meat makers who want to challenge the Impossible Burger: You’ll soon have access to Impossible’s magic ingredient — that’s heme, the molecule that makes its plant-based burgers bleed, sizzle, and taste so similar to the real thing.

Last month, Leonard Lerer, CEO of Back of the Yards Algae Sciences (BYAS), a Chicago-based start-up, invited me to a taste test of a beta-version of his heme, which is derived from spirulina, a blue green algae. The test gave me a chance to compare two popular plant-based burgers —Beyond and Morningstar — with burgers sprayed with low-concentrations of BYAS’s heme.

On a quick inspection, the heme-sprayed versions didn’t look significantly different, or smell different, but after a few bites, I had a clear favorite. It’s hard to pinpoint the source of my preference. Maybe the heme-flavor overshadowed the nutty aftertaste of Beyond? Perhaps it was an increase in umami? Whatever it was, the heme-sprayed burgers were a clear upgrade. In fact, I was so impressed with the heme’s flavoring that I tested the burger on the biggest mock-meat skeptic I know: my 11-year-old son.

As expected, Max shot a frown and yuck look after trying the standard Beyond. But after being persuaded to take one bite of the heme-sprayed version, Max had a shocking response. No frown. In fact, he said, “It’s pretty good.” My wife also tested the samples. While none of us thought the heme elevated Beyond to match the flavor of a real burger, we all agreed: Algal heme makes a big difference.

“There’s a lot of ways to give mock meats a meaty flavor, but there’s nothing quite like heme,” said Lerer, the lead developer of the heme. To date, plant-based heme has been virtually synonymous with Impossible, but BYAS aims to change that. “Impossible is a food company — and as far as I know, they don’t sell their heme. We’re an ingredient company, and want to give plant-based meat makers an option for a heme.”

Lerer describes what he believes is “heme 2.0” because it’s “healthier for people and for the planet.” According to Lerer, BYAS’s heme extraction process is all natural, uses less energy, and eliminates waste. And because BYAS’s heme is derived not from soy, but spirulina, a noted superfood, it brings an array of added health benefits to plant-based meat makers. “I don’t think there’s ever been a burger — plant-based or dead cow — that stimulates gut bacteria.” Lerer also notes that BYAS’s process is all natural and GMO-free, unlike Impossible’s, which he believes will appeal to plant-based burger makers aiming for a cleaner label.

Founded in 2018 by Lerer, who like Impossible founder Patrick Brown is a former physician, BYAS has just six full-time employees in its Chicago lab. The company recently partnered with LiquaDry, a Utah-based specialist in converting natural products into powders, to develop an industrial scale production facility for its algal-derived ingredients. The debut of a product with BYAS’s algal heme will be next month when Brytlife Foods, a vegan food maker, introduces a burger, dubbed the “Biome Burger,” in four specialty grocers in New York City, including the Park Slope Food Coop and Orchard Grocer.

The Backstory of Algal Heme: An “Accidental” Discovery and a Food Waste Solution
Lerer said the idea for the algal heme can be traced to a “serendipitous” discovery that occurred while doing research three years ago for one of BYAS’s core businesses: meeting the food industry’s exploding demand for natural colorant. While working on a process to make the color purple, Lerer isolated spirulina’s leghemoglobin protein. “It was intriguing,” he recalled. “But I didn’t taste it. I didn’t smell it, as I was focused on colorant.”

As BYAS and its food colorant business grew, Lerer & BYAS team started trying to find solutions to another problem: waste. The colorant extraction produces a huge amount of high value algal protein. “Most dye makers just trash it,” Lerer said. “We pride ourselves on zero waste.”A big reason for Lerer’s emphasis on waste reduction is because BYAS is based in The Plant, a former meat packing facility on Chicago’s South Side, which is one of the world’s only food business incubators that functions as a “closed loop ecosystem,” where the waste of one business is used as an input for another. For example, carbon dioxide from a brewery on The Plant’s ground floor is piped into the BYAS’s lab where it feeds the growth of spirulina.

In an effort to upcycle colorant waste, BYAS first aimed to use the leftover algal protein to create a meat analogue for burgers that offer an alternative to soy. But after almost two years of R&D, Lerer stopped the project. “We tried everything and made a lot of progress,” he said, “but it still tasted like crap.”

It was after this failed attempt at algal meat that Lerer had the breakthrough idea — instead of using algae as the burger’s meat, he could explore its potential as a flavoring source. He revisited the heme that he encountered. “And voila, with a little tweaking there it was.”

Lerer said the approach that BYAS is using to develop heme is radically simpler than Impossible’s method. Impossible generates its star ingredient by inserting the DNA of soybean heme into yeast, and then fermenting that yeast at industrial scale. But while the process is much more environmentally-friendly than harvesting heme directly from soy plants, it still requires fermentation, which is energy-intensive and costly.

BYAS’s process doesn’t require genetic engineering or fermentation. The heme is extracted from algae that will be grown outside in tanks in Abraham, Utah, feeding on water and sunlight. While Lerer didn’t reveal his process, he said, it’s a simple, all-natural process and because it’s natural algal heme, it’s already Generally Recognized as Safe.

The “Biome Burger”
The earliest adopter of algal heme, Brytlife Food’s founder Lita Dwight, said that her new product, dubbed the “Biome Burger” isn’t just intended to match the meaty taste properties of Impossible, it’s also, as the name suggests, developed to highlight the health benefits of algal ingredients. Dwight hopes that by incorporating BYAS’s heme, and other spirulina extracts, she will be able to differentiate her product in a crowded marketplace.

She was initially drawn to algae because of its high protein density, but noted that studies have shown that spirulina stimulates the growth of beneficial bacteria in the gut, which helps with everything from digestion to nutrient absorption. While it’s not unusual to hear about antioxidants and probiotics in the food industry — it still is in the burger world. Plant-based burger makers have made upgrades to their burger’s health profiles, but have largely focused on increasing protein, reducing saturated fat, and sodium.

“This is likely the first burger with probiotic benefits,” Dwight said. “And I really think that more healthy is the future of the market.”

But Lerer said he hopes the “Biome Burger” will not only raise the bar for the nutritional content of plant-based burgers, but also the environmental sustainability of mock meats. “Our goal is to reduce dependence on industrial soy and pea,” he said. “There’s so much waste in getting soy protein levels so high.” He notes that the “meat” of the Brytlife burger will be a blend of oats and mycelium, ingredients that require less intensive farming than soy, but are less frequently used because they’re bland.

Lerer’s research has found that algal heme provides such a powerful flavor-enhancing meaty quality that food makers could shift to plant protein sources that are less environmentally-damaging, such as oats and mushrooms.

While I ordinarily would been deeply skeptical about an oats-based burger — flashbacks to the veggie burgers of the 1990s — after seeing my son happily chewing a heme-enhanced Beyond burger for the first time, it suddenly seemed plausible.

Whatever happens with the Biome Burger, here’s one prediction. At such a hyper-innovative, health-obsessed time in the plant-based world, it’s almost inevitable that key player in the space (hello, Beyond), will introduce an algal heme-enhanced burger in the coming year.

I Tried a Biodegradable Straw — Made From Food Waste — that Even Trump Will Love

Remember when the President of the United States got into the plastic straw business last summer, introducing “Trump Straws” because  “liberal straws don’t work”?

Well, two Chicago entrepreneurs are now selling a “liberal” straw —100-percent biodegradable and compostable, fossil-fuel free, made from recycled food waste —that does work. 

The AVO Beginning straw could make biodegradable straws great again by using an ingenious food waste innovation: upcycling discarded avocado pits.

The avocado straw, which started appearing in the Chicago market this summer, is produced in Morelia, Mexico by Biofase, a start-up whose young founder came up with a breakthrough way of creating a polymer by extracting a molecular compound from an avocado pit.  According to Mexico Daily News, chemical engineer Scott Munguia spent a year and a half looking for the perfect Mexico-sourced bioplastic, testing mango and mamey sapote seeds, before settling on the avocado pit as the most viable, eco-friendly alternative to the fossil fuel-derived plastic straws that are discarded at a staggering rate (500 million a day in the U.S. alone, according to one estimate)

The most extraordinary aspect of the avocado straws, though, is how they work.

As the success of the “Trump straw” venture indicates, many people have issues with paper straws; although biodegradable, the colder the drink, the quicker paper straws deteriorate. For ice-obsessed Americans, this is a problem.

 Enter the avo straw.  I tested the straws in a variety of cold, iced drinks (sparkling water, hard seltzer, iced tea, Coke) at my home, and they held up beautifully— as good as any fossil-fuel based, turtle-nostril clogging plastic straw. “It holds up in water as cold as 20 degrees,” said Moses Savalza, one of the company’s co-founders. Savalza also told me that the avocado straw degrades in 240 days. (This is in contrast to conventional plastic straws, which can take more than 100 years to degrade.)

But AVO Beginning’s ice-friendly avocado straws face plenty of competition in an increasingly hot market for plastic straw alternatives.

As single-use plastic straws become increasingly taboo  or illegal (cities such as Seattle, Vancouver, and Washington, D.C. already have bans) and as more consumers complain about mushy paper straws, a wave of start-ups are vying for a slice of the eco-friendly straw market.

The alt plastic straw market includes start-ups pitching straws made from everything from hay, corn, and bamboo to pasta, rice, potato and even wild grass straws.

Although any of these straws are better for the environment than plastic, not all plant-based straws are created equal. They have varying durability in cold and hot temperatures, differing production costs, and environmental impacts.  (For example, in the environmental blog Green Matters, writer Sophie Hirsh noted that the popular Australian brand Biopak’s eco-friendly utensils are only compostable in “commercial compostable facilities,” whereas the avocado-derived plastics can biodegrade in any natural conditions, including your backyard. 

Of some of his chief eco-friendly competitors, Savalza said, “bamboo has good quality, but it’s too expensive, hay…it’s too fragile. Corn or potatoes. They use food.” 

Indeed, the reason why the AVO straw make a case for “eco-friendliest of al”  is not just because it disposes quickly (biodegrading in 240 days), it is because it’s made from waste.

AVO Beginning straws are made from the thousands of avocado pits that processors discard each day in Michoacan state, the epi-center of Mexico’s avocado industry; most of these pits come from ag giant Simplot, which has alone provided 450,000 pounds of pits for bioplastic production.  This is the differentiator, Savalza said.  “Paper straws.. you’re cutting down a tree.  Straws made from potatoes, or cornstarch.. you’re using something that could be food or feed.  With this, you’re not taking away from the supply chain.”   

AVO Beginning is one of only two distributors of Biofase’s avocado-based bioplastics in the United States; the chief distributor is California’s Nostalgia de Mexico, said AVO Beginning co-founder Hugo Villasenor.

Since launching in June in Chicago  Villasenor said, AVO Beginning has found a small group of enthusiastic early adopters, such as LYFE Kitchen, a small chain that stresses healthy and environmentally-conscious foods, and a Chicago-area catering company that works with corporate clients trying to reduce their plastic footprint.  “These are clients that are willing to pay a little more for straws for the environmental benefit,” Villasenor said.

But for many other prospective clients, price is an obstacle.  Although the straws are affordable for a bioplastic straw, at two-and-a-half to three cents per straw, Villasenor said that is still more than paper straws (roughly two cents) and plastic straws (less than a penny). For many small restaurants and cafes facing tight margins, this is still a deal breaker, Villasenor said. 

Another big obstacle for AVO Beginning is that so many restaurants and cafes rely on a single vendor for their food service product needs. A major goal for AVO Beginning is to get a food service company, such as Sysco or Edward Don, to include AVO straws as part of their range of eco-friendly options.  In addition to straws, AVO Beginning also sells knives, forks and spoons made from avocado pits using Biofase’s technology.

Both Villasenor and Savalza concede that another reason their early sales have been sluggish is because they’re both newbies. Villasenor has spent most of career as a restaurant server; Savalza’s background is in trucking and logistics.  They’re new to food service sales, and acknowledge there’s a learning curve in figuring out how to reach new clients and decision-makers.

But when asked about the future of avocado-derived plastics, both are confident.  “I know this straw will take off,” said Villasenor. “People understand that plastics are one of the great problems of today, and now they want to fix it.” 

Is the Gourmet Fish of the Future Frozen?

Fresher is always better.    

That belief is an article of faith in a seafood world that has been boasting of “catch of the day” and “fresh-from-the-boat” since ancient times.

But a growing community of activists, chefs, and entrepreneurs are challenging that assumption, arguing that at a time when nearly half of America’s edible seafood supply is wasted, fresher is not better.

There’s a problem with your supermarket’s fresh seafood counter, explained Pete Pearson, who leads the World Wildlife Fund’s food waste prevention programs. That tempting display of fresh cod, salmon and trout, bedded artfully on ice, is time sensitive. Fresh fish typically has two days in a grocer’s seafood counter before it gets thrown out.  

Pearson says that the perception that “fresher is better” is a big reason why most store managers he’s talked to say it’s “normal” to accept that between 10 to 20 percent of their seafood will be lost – either because it’s damaged, expired, or spoiled.

But Pearson and others argue there’s a way to solve the massive waste problem: go frozen.

Instead of a shelf-life of days, frozen seafood can be safely stored for weeks or months. What’s more getting consumers to choose frozen would offer them more affordable, healthy protein (just think about the millions of pounds of protein lost each year because it expired). And for the World Wildlife Fund, Pearson says, supporting a shift to frozen seafood is a natural extension of its mission — eliminating seafood waste to reduce pressure on endangered fisheries.

To address the waste problem, WWF partnered with Jonathan Deutsch of Drexel University’s Food Lab on a research project to develop strategies to persuade retailers and consumers to embrace frozen seafood.

WWF isn’t the first to pitch frozen as the sustainable seafood choice; the Alaska Longline Seafood Association kicked off its “eat frozen” campaign in 2009, and the food journalist Paul Greenberg has been touting “frozen” wild salmon as a sustainable choice for years.

But more recently, some entrepreneurs have taken a new approach to frozen seafood, trying to lure consumers with not just a sustainability message but also by touting the superior quality of frozen.

Perhaps the best-known example of the “gourmet frozen” movement is Love the Wild. The Boulder-based company, which has received support from actor and aquaculture supporter Leonardo DiCaprio, only sources fish from farms renowned for responsible practices and only sells frozen fish. Love the Wild’s frozen offerings — like frozen red trout with salsa verde and frozen barramundi paired with sriracha — are meal kits with easy-to-follow instructions that are priced at a premium (LTW sells its 5.33 ounce salmon kit online for $6.99; Whole Foods has fresh Atlantic salmon at $9.99, as of this post). Love the Wild, which pitches its frozen seafood kits as not only the environmentally responsible choice but also as good as fresh, has grown rapidly. According to a story in Inc, you can get its products in more than 2,700 stores, including Safeway and Whole Foods. 

Another pioneer of high-end frozen fish is Chicago’s Wixter Market. The boutique shop in the city’s Wicker Park neighborhood sells an impressive range of seafood (scallops, Chilean sea bass, Mahi Mahi) from across the globe, but nothing is “fresh.” Started by seafood industry veteran, Matt Mixter in 2015, Wixter boasts that its frozen seafood is “better than the fresh product” and guarantees a shelf-life of 12 months.

Both Wixter and Love the Wild argue that today’s frozen seafood is wildly unlike your father’s frozen seafood because of emerging technologies.

Love the Wild’s co-founder Jaqueline Claudia credits blast freezing, which allows farms to freeze fish at the peak of their quality. In an interview with Inc., Claudia said blast freezing drops the fish’s temperature to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit in about a minute, causing less damage to cell membranes and preserving texture.

Wixter touts an even more extreme process. With “super-freezing,” fish are frozen, at minus-seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes hours, or even minutes after harvest. Wixter’s website claims this super freeze — which stops all decomposition in fish, increases shelf life and preserves flavor — is why a frozen product is better than a “fresh” product that may have been in transit for days or even weeks.

One prominent believer in the frozen revolution is chef and sustainable seafood advocate Barton Seaver, who admits in a recent video that he used to “shun frozen fish because it wasn’t any good.” But Seaver credits deep-freezing technologies like blast and super-freeze for turning frozen products into a way to capture pristine quality.

A 2017 survey pitting frozen versus fresh cod found that, if properly frozen and thawed, frozen cod was as good as fresh. The WWF-Drexel project also found that, with basic training on “cook from frozen” techniques, home-prepared frozen seafood was on par with the quality of fresh for most consumers.

But despite the revolution in frozen technology and encouraging feedback in consumer testing, WWF’s Pearson said he’s seen no change in the seafood counter at major grocery retailers.

Grocery retailers could see many benefits from a move to frozen, Pearson said. The WWF-Drexel project “Eliminating Seafood Waste” found cost-saving opportunities that reduce labor costs, the footprint of the seafood section and “shrink” (industry grocer-speak for the loss associated with waste). “Grocers want “zero shrink” in every department in the store,” Pearson said, “But how you do that without impacting the customer and the customer experience.”  

Although the fresh seafood display at retailers is often a myth — the shrimp you buy, for instance, is most often pulled out of the frozen case and thawed to appear fresh — that section of the store, with its tempting display of salmon, scallops and halibut, is something grocery retailers use to attract people and shape the experience. “The fear is that if you have frozen filets, people are not going to register that as of high quality,” Pearson said. “That’s just not how are brains are wired. We have to go out and systematically get people to think differently about what fresh really means.”

Pearson notes that vacuum-sealed packaging that puts the frozen product on display is a step forward for frozen marketing.  

One reason proponents of frozen seafood are optimistic is because of what’s taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. Picard, a popular food retailer in food-obsessed France, doesn’t have a fresh seafood counter. They only sell frozen. “Picard has a tremendous reputation,” Pearson said. (It was rated France’s favorite brand in 2014.) “That shows that frozen has nothing to do with quality. In fact, frozen may be a marker some day of better quality.”

But perhaps the most encouraging sign for the frozen seafood movement is a far broader trend.

Two years ago, the Spoon’s Catherine Lamb posed the question “Are We Entering A Frozen Food Renaissance,” after a report from RBC Capital markets found frozen food volume growth turned positive for the first time in five years.

Lamb reported that the frozen renaissance was driven, in part, by companies like plant-based frozen meal maker Zoni Foods and gourmet frozen maker Eat Local that are reversing the long-held frozen food stigma by offering high-quality, healthy frozen meals. Even more recently, the Spoon reported on an NPD study that highlighted more growth and innovation in the frozen section, and offered a reason for the renaissance: time-starved millennials entering the busiest phase of their lives are hungry for convenience.

Leave the Wild, with its frozen-only seafood meal kits, and Wixter, Chicago’s frozen-or-bust seafood shop, are rarities today. But given the outrageous amount of fresh seafood that goes to waste and the changing needs of millennials, these pioneers may signal the beginning of a frozen seafood renaissance.