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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Michael Wolf

Food Tech Intelligence Briefing: What Do App Clips Mean for the Food Industry?

This market power is derived from the strength of the iPhone. The device’s widespread adoption makes Apple and its associated app ecosystem a necessary consideration for any new consumer-facing technology (or technology adjacent) product launch. 

But as Techcrunch wrote last week, the world of apps that Apple ushered in a dozen or so years ago (yes, it’s been that long) has become long in the tooth. Not only are grid-based apps becoming less relevant in an age of voice assistants, AI, and chatbots, but most of us have become fatigued with app downloads and are reluctant to cede space on that ever-important first screen. 

This app fatigue is a problem for any products that rely on the aging app ecosystem Apple has built. If customers don’t use apps, brands can’t monetize through them.

Some products have tried to move almost entirely to voice, but it’s almost impossible to make a voice skill the primary interface for a device because they are so ephemeral. If we can’t see them, we aren’t going to use them. There is no first-screen for voice apps. 

Say Hello to App Clips

Which brings us back to Apple. At WWDC in late June, Apple introduced the App Clips, which are slimmed-down versions of an app or, more specifically, the portion of an app that is necessary in a given moment. 

The rest of this report is available only for Spoon Plus subscribers. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. If you already have a Spoon Plus account, you can log in here.

Whirlpool’s W Labs Countertop Smart Oven is Now Selling for Half The Original Price

Did you know Whirlpool has a countertop smart oven?

Don’t worry, most people didn’t, in part because Whirlpool never talked much about it after it launched in early 2019.

But now that you do know about it, you might also be interested to know they’re selling it for just $399. That’s half the original sticker price for the smart oven from W Labs, Whirlpool’s innovation hub. From the looks of it, the price reduction looks permanent.

So why is W Labs selling its June clone which debuted in January 2019 so cheap? It might be because the group is looking to clear out the remaining inventory of a product which was, from the beginning, positioned as an experiment. They only made 2000 of them and they only sold the product online and not through traditional Whirlpool appliance showroom sales channels.

Still, the wind down makes me wonder if the big appliance manufacturer is making way for a more permanent replacement. Whirlpool tends to do big refreshes to its product lineup every two years, which means 2021 is a refresh year after a relatively quiet 2020 and a big 2019. As part of a larger refresh, I can see a countertop smart oven as a logical candidate for the lineup.

It also appears Whirlpool is closing out its scan-to-cook smart microwaves and is out of stock on many of its smart ovens or ranges. While some of this could be due to COVID-related supply chain disruptions, this could be another indication that the company might be starting to wind down its current lineup more broadly as it prepares for a new line of smart ovens for 2021.

Food Tech Show: Food Tech 25 And Cricket Flour Cupcakes

If you’re driving somewhere for the 4th of July weekend (don’t forget the mask and hand san), why don’t you download the latest episode of the Food Tech Show podcast?

This week the editor team got together to discuss some of our favorite companies from this year’s Food Tech 25, the spike in COVID cases as restaurants reopen, and a system for growing meal worms to eat at home. We also share our food plans for the 4th of July (Jenn’s gonna bake cricket flour cupcakes).

As always, you can listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download direct to your device or just click play below.

Also, if you have a spare moment this weekend, please leave a nice review in iTunes or Apple Podcasts!

Thermomix Users Can Now Order Ingredients With Launch of Shoppable Recipes on Cookidoo

Thermomix announced today they have launched ingredient shopping on the Cookidoo, the Thermomix multicooker’s digital recipe and meal planning platform.

The new capability allows Thermomix users to add a recipe’s ingredients to a digital shopping list and order them through the Cookidoo app. Fulfillment of the order (delivery or pickup) is done through a third-party grocery retail partner of the shopper’s choosing.

The new shoppable recipe feature will be available to users of any Cookidoo-compatible Thermomix model (TM5, TM6 and TM31) in the U.S., Germany and the United Kingdom.

You can watch how it works on the video below:

Those using the TM6 can add ingredients from any of the 50,000 or so recipes available through the Cookidoo interface by simply clicking on the “Add to Shopping List” option directly on the appliance’s touchscreen. From there, they head over to the Cookidoo mobile app or website to review the list, remove items they may already have, and add additional items to the list. They can then select a grocery retailer or online grocery service provider like Instacart to fulfill the order.

According to Thermomix’s head of consumer experience, Ramona Wehlig, bringing ingredient shopping and delivery to the users of the Thermomix completes the meal journey for their users.

“We had the weekly planner and curated shopping lists,” Wehlig said by phone, “but we never closed the gap in the meal journey until the ingredients were delivered.”

Wehlig said the company has been developing shoppable recipe functionality for the past year and a half. The company started trialing an early version capability through pilots in Germany. These initial pilots, which used technology developed by Thermomix, helped the company to understand the digital grocery shopping process and to fine-tune the ability to do things such as ingredient matching.

However, as the company pushed to accelerate its shoppable recipes efforts, it started looking for a partner to help them scale. This brought them to Whisk, a shoppable recipe and digital food platform startup acquired by Samsung Next last year. Whisk powers a number of grocery commerce capabilities in the connected kitchen, including (not surprisingly) on the Samsung Family Hub fridges.

“The core aim [of working with Whisk] was to scale faster,” said Wehlig. “This allows us to connect our users with more grocery stores in a shorter time frame.”

For Whisk, the addition of Thermomix helps cement an already strong position as one of the primary shoppable recipe platforms. While I haven’t seen updated numbers for a while, back in 2018 Whisk told me its platform touched 20 million users each month. With the addition of Thermomix — first in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S., later globally — the company will get millions more.

For Thermomix, the integration of shopping capabilities from the Cookidoo digital recipe platforms opens up potential new revenue streams through various forms of partnerships with CPG brands and any commissions passed on from the third party grocery platforms. For users, it adds another nice feature and could entrench the Cookidoo recipe platform as their primary digital shopping list manager.

Redefine Meat Announces High Volume 3D Printing For Plant-Based Steaks

Redefine Meat announced today it has achieved the ability to produce its 3D printed, plant-based steaks using high-production industrial-level 3D printing capabilities.

This new capability, which the company says allows them to now print up to 50 steaks an hour, will help company roll out its 3D printed steaks to select restaurants in Europe this fall for market tests as it prepares for a broader rollout of its industrial 3D meat printers to meat distributors in 2021.

Redefine’s plant-based steak is printed from three different ingredient packs which company calls ‘Alt-Fat’, ‘Alt-Muscle’ and ‘Alt-Blood.’ According to the company, they have mapped out 70 sensorial parameters that allow its printers to control texture, juiciness, fat distribution and mouthfeel.

“By using separate formulations for muscle, fat and blood, we can focus on each individual aspect of creating the perfect Alt-Steak product,” said company CEO Eshchar Ben-Shitrit in a release. “This is unique to our 3D printing technology and lets us achieve unprecedented control of what happens inside the matrix of alt-meat.”

When we spoke to Redefine last fall, at the time the company said printers cost up $100,000, but I’m guessing prices will come down slightly as they scale manufacturing of the hardware.

And while 50-steaks-per-hour production volume is certainly higher than early prototypes we’ve seen for plant-based meat production, it’s not quite industrial animal meat processing volume. As a result, the company’s printed steaks are currently only priced for higher end restaurants.

I’m hoping as the volume of production goes up and printer prices eventually drop, the price for the end user will come down enough for the company’s steak products to be sold outside of high-end restaurants at retail.

As part of the announcement, the company also announced a new partner in global flavor conglomerate Givaudan, who worked closely with the company in mapping the flavor components of the company’s Alt-Steak formulation.

The 2020 Food Tech 25

Our previous Food Tech 25 lists (2018, 2019) were all about the disruptors. The food tech companies innovating and changing the meal journey.

This year’s list is still about that, but needless to say 2020 has been one big, awful disruption itself thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Everything got turned upside down. The restaurant industry was decimated. Online grocery shopping experienced record setting sales. And the weaknesses in our supply chain were exposed as people panicked and left store shelves bare.

This year’s Food Tech 25 isn’t an all-pandemic list, but watching how companies navigated this, the darkest timeline, was certainly a factor for us. This list is the culmination of weeks of research and intense debate around The Spoon’s (virtual) offices. And while it’s not exhaustive, we feel this Food Tech 25 represents the best, brightest and most innovative companies in the space right now, pandemic or no.

Think we missed a company, or have a question about how we came up with this list? Drop us a line and let us know!

If you’d like to see the full list on one page, just click here.

AIR PROTEIN
Everything you need to know about Air Protein’s main business is in the company’s name. Air Protein makes edible protein from air — specifically carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen that, when fed to single-cell organisms creates an edible protein. That may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but the process is actually similar to brewing beer or making yogurt, and while still nascent, it’s another sustainable alternative to traditional protein sources. Air Protein, which spun out of Kiverdi, has named meatless meat and protein powder as potential areas for its protein, though it will be a couple of years before any actual products hit the market.

Photo: Apeel

APEEL
With its recent $250 million funding round, Apeel looks to be food waste’s first unicorn. With good reason too. The company’s edible coating extends the life of produce by up to three times its normal life, and is finding traction with both grocers and consumers. Apeel’s coating, which keeps oxygen out and water in, extending produce shelf life, started on avocados and citrus. Now, the company has its eyes set on asparagus and cucumbers. Today you can find Apeel-coated avocados in over 1,100 Krogers and on store shelves in Denmark and Germany. This year, the company also hopes to bring its technology to Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.

BIOMILQ
Whether for biological or environmental reasons, breastfeeding is not something that is equally available to every mother. That is why BIOMILQ is creating cultured human breast milk in a lab. It’s patent-pending technology triggers human mammary gland cells kept suspended in a stream of nutrients to lactate. The company says that using this approach to supplement any shortfalls in a mother’s milk is more environmentally friendly and healthier for a baby than other dairy-based formulas. The technology is still very early on, but could change the way babies are fed around the world. BIOMILQ just received $3.5 million in funding to work on production and begin engaging with doctors, families and other organizations focused on breastfeeding.


BLUENALU
Between problems with over-fishing and microplastics, the world’s fish stocks are in peril. Enter BlueNalu, which is creating cell-based cultured fish. It’s starting with finfish like yellowtail and mahi mahi, but the kicker is that the company says its product can cook just like the “real” thing. Seared, steamed or ceviched, BlueNalu’s fish can maintain its integrity. While the product is still years out from hitting your grocery aisle, the company raised $20 million earlier this year and signed a lease on a new facility that will produce between 200 and 500 pounds of commercial cultured fish a week in the second half of 2021.

CHIPOTLE
Chipotle was one of the few major restaurant brands to emerge from nationwide shelter-in-place mandates with stronger digital sales than before. A big reason for this is the company’s unflinching commitment to using tech to build a better restaurant experience both in the restaurant and via off-premises channels. In the last year alone, the chain has expanded its delivery program, tested new store formats that emphasize digital ordering and payments, and basically turned its mobile app into a virtual recreation of the in-house experience. All of this and more has so far gotten the brand through the current upheaval in which the restaurant industry finds itself — and will inevitably provide some blueprints for other smaller chains.

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The Food Tech Show: Investing In Consumer Brands With Elizabeth Edwards

Investing in consumer brands can be tough.

Not only do these startups need to navigate numerous channels to market and face competition from large corporate multinationals, but they’re also faced with having to build brand awareness with limited resources with what are almost always fickle consumers.

But the rewards can be enormous for those that invest in brands that become a category leader (or creates a new category altogether).

Elizabeth Edwards learned this early in her career when she invested in companies like Peloton and Farmer’s Fridge. And now as managing partner for her own venture capital firm H Venture Partners, she’s more excited than ever about investing about finding the next big consumer brand.

Elizabeth joined me to talk about how she identifies investible consumer-focused startups, why food is her favorite category, and how she thinks COVID has impacted the investment landscape.

You can find The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, download direct to your device, or just click play below.

Forget Air Protein, It’s Time for Air Fat. Swedish Researchers Make Fat Using Carbon Dioxide and Electricity

Making protein with electricity and carbon dioxide is neat and all, but what about fat?

A group of chemists from the Swedish research organization RISE recently developed a method to do just that, only unlike the new crop of startups that make protein through a biological process using electricity as an energy source for hydrogen or methane-eating bacteria, this fat-making innovation the group terms ‘Power to Food’ does it completely through chemistry.

The breakthrough was first reported in Swedish-language food tech news site AGFO.

“We have no biology, it’s just chemistry,” said Anders Lorén, a researcher and chemist for RISE who conceived of the concept. “We believe that scalability is worse in a biological system.”

To convert the CO2 into fat, the Power to Food method essentially recreates a process that already happens in nature using chemistry.

“You can think of this as electrical photosynthesis,” said Marcus Vestergren, the other researcher on the project. “Nature does this, they take carbon dioxide and water and make energy carriers. We emulate it with electrochemistry.”

The researchers believe this process could be highly scalable and could ultimately produce enough fat to replace a significant amount of palm-oil production. They envision production plants for electricity-derived fat using carbon outputs from large producers such as oil refineries or paper mills.

“Instead of retrieving palm oil from a plantation using shredded rainforest, we could produce the fat on a limited area on a large scale with minimal impact on the planet,” says Marcus Vestergren.

You can read more about the Power to Food breakthrough by RISE at AGFO.

Plant-Based Sushi Startup Ocean Hugger Foods Falls Victim to COVID-19, Ceases Operations

COVID-19 has claimed another food-related business, this time plant-based seafood startup Ocean Hugger Foods.

The company, which had raised $500,000 in late 2019, had been gaining traction through much of 2019 for vegan sushi products as it reeled in wins at select Whole Foods and quick service restaurants such as Ahipoki.

But once COVID-19 hit, the bulk of the company’s customers closed down for months and, as a result, Ocean Hugger couldn’t survive.

The company disclosed the news via an open letter on its website. From the letter:

Due to the COVID-19 health crisis our world is facing, and the fact that our company sells exclusively to foodservice customers (such as university and corporate cafeterias, and restaurants) who are suffering greatly during this time, it is with tremendous sadness that we must report that Ocean Hugger Foods must cease operations.

The company had launched its second product at last year’s National Restaurant Show, a vegan eel sushi (unami). The product followed its original ahimi (the company’s plant-based “tuna” sushi).

While some food companies that rely heavily on food service were able to sustain themselves through ramped up restaurant delivery or by pivoting to direct to consumer channels, Ocean Hugger didn’t benefit much from either of these alternative models. Sushi is the type of food most prefer to eat fresh and in-venue, and it certainly isn’t the type of product that could be delivered direct to consumer through order-by-mail.

While Ocean Hugger wasn’t the only company with plant-based sushi alternatives, they were maybe the most well known and seemed to be on a good trajectory before COVID-19.

With restaurants in the US and other markets slowly reopening, hopefully other startups who have been struggling like Ocean Hugger can start to sell their products again. However, with some markets starting to see an increasing number of COVID cases as people start heading to restaurants, chances are we’ll probably see some future COVID-related casualties.

Talking 23andMe For Farms, Bioreactors-as-a-Service & Other Crazy FoodTech Ideas With Dave Friedberg

But here’s the thing: most ideas about the future sound a little crazy the first time you hear them.

I had known about Friedberg for some time, in part because was the founder and CEO of agtech’s first unicorn in the Climate Corporation, a company that sold to Monsanto in 2013 for over $1 billion.

More recently I’d been tracking his progress at the Production Board, a company that is essentially an idea incubation factory for food, bio and ag tech concepts. The group is run by what Friedberg describes as “operators more than investors”.

The Production Board company portfolio is strung together by something closer to a grand unified theory about how the world should work rather than any sort of single investment theme. This theory, which Friedberg articulates in a manifesto on the Production Board website, reads as much like a science fiction short story as it does an investment guide and is centered around how the world’s existing food and agricultural production systems are antiquated relics of an inefficient industrial production processes that have taken root over the past couple centuries.

I sat down for a (virtual) meeting with Friedberg recently to talk about how the Production Board works and the progress he is making for upending some of the antiquated food and ag systems. We also talk about Friedberg thinks the future of food could look like ten years or more in the future.

You can see some excerpts from our interview below. In order to see the full interview and read a transcript of our conversation, you’ll want to subscribe to Spoon Plus.

Friedberg on how crazy it is we aren’t harnessing the full technology development to address our problems around food and agriculture:

If a Martian came down to planet Earth and they look at the way we’re doing things they would say, “that’s a little bit crazy. Not only that, but it’s crazy that you guys do things the way you do them given all the technology you have. You can do crazy shit as humans. You can like write DNA and you can like ferment things in these tanks and make whatever molecule you want. And you can pretty much print anything anywhere using different chemistry.” It’s ridiculous that the systems of production operate the way that they do.

Friedberg on the idea behind Culture Biosciences, a company he describes as an AWS for Bioreactors:

If you fast forward 50 years, Tyson Foods and these feedlots and cattle grazing, I mean, it’s so fu**ing inefficient it’s just unreal. It’s mind blowing how much energy and money and CO2 is part of the system of producing meat and animal protein. And we have the tools to make animal proteins and fermenters, so if you could have a fermenter in your home, and it just prints meat when you want it, I think that would be pretty cool. Technically the science is there, the engineering isn’t. And that’s the thing: with a lot of these things, the science is proven, but a lot engineering work still to do. But it’s, it’s feasible. All these things are feasible.

Friedberg on how the Production Board germinates ideas that ultimately become one of their portfolio businesses:

We do primary research, we spend a lot of time with scientists and researchers and identify new and emerging breakthroughs in science and technology. We also spend time in the markets we operate in: food, agriculture, human health, increasingly looking at things like energy materials. And then we try and identify what’s a better way of doing this thing in this market?

So using all these new breakthroughs using all this new science, using all this technology that might be emerging, how can we do something that can transform one of these markets and really do a 10x on it? If it’s not a 10x, if it’s just a 5% better model or a 10% better model, it’s not worth doing. If we can 10x the market – reduce cost or energy by 10 times – then it becomes kind of exciting. And so that’s how we kind of think about operating business opportunities.

The full interview and transcript are available for Spoon Plus customers. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

The Latest Ingredient For Alt-Protein? Wood.

Over the last few years, everything from chickpea to microbes found in the air to bugs (lots of bugs) has been put forth as a new source of alt-protein.

But what about wood?

According to Arbiom, an agtech ingredient development company, wood is ready for prime time as a human-consumable source of protein. In a press release, the company said its first commercialized product, SylPro, recently completed a proof-of-concept study in which it replaced a variety of plant-based alternatives such as soy, pea and wheat gluten “without compromising taste or product quality”.

Arbiom says that SylPro could replace plant-based alternatives like wheat, which can act as an allergen, in functional roles such as binding.

Arbiom’s technology works by converting wood substrates into single-cell protein microorganisms through the process of fermentation. Up to this point, the technology had been used to make only animal feed, but this month’s news is the first indication that Arbiom’s technology can be used to convert wood into human food.

The company’s been working on making wood a source of protein for years. It first created a wood pre-treatment concept lab in 2011 and in 2017, it formed the European Union funded SYLFEED Consortium with a €9M grant to develop a wood-to-food ecosystem built around Arbiom’s technology.

There’s no doubt that trees could be a plentiful source of input material when it comes to making food, but any talk of wood as a food source needs to be balanced against concerns of deforestation. Deforestation continues to be a concern around the world, mostly due to the use of trees as construction material, fuel, and through clearing for agriculture. According to Arbiom, SylPro’s impact would be negligible in part because it gets its raw material from excess material derived from the wood processing and paper production industry.

Looking forward, wood might make it into other types besides your plant-based burger. SylPro is part of another European Union project launched last year called Next-Gen Proteins that is looking to put alternative non-animal protein inputs into products like baked goods, sports nutrition and 3D printed foods.

The Food Tech Show: Talking Food Tech & Racial Injustice With Journey Foods’ Riana Lynn

I sat down this week with Riana Lynn, the CEO of Journey Foods, to talk about her journey as a black female food tech entrepreneur.

From her time in the Obama White House, to working for former McDonalds CEO Don Thompson at venture firm Cleveland Avenue, to her latest startup that uses AI to help CPG companies make healthier and more sustainable food products, Riana’s had a fascinating ride over the past decade. But, as she told me in our conversation, the two consistent and recurring themes throughout her career have been food and technology.

We talk about her journey through these worlds as well as:

  • How food tech and food innovation could address some of the systemic problems in the food system that disproportionately impact people of color.
  • How many of today’s current food trends like plant-based food have long histories in black culture.
  • How technologies like blockchain could be well-suited to modernize antiquated systems designed to help those in food insecure situations get better access to food assistance.
  • What she thinks the long term impact could be from the conversation we are having about systemic racism.
  • Some ways in which she thinks the world of food tech and venture capital could be more welcoming to people of color.

Some of you may have read Riana’s guest post last weekend at The Spoon. She and her team are churning out some really compelling and thoughtful content over at the Journey Foods’ blog, so I suggest you check it out.

As always, you can listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or just click play below.