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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Michael Wolf

3D Meat Printing Startup SavorEat Goes Public, Raises $13M via IPO

SavorEat, the Israeli startup developing a 3D printing platform for plant-based meat alternatives, has had an initial public offering (IPO) on Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE), raising NIS 42.6 million ($13 million) in funding.

The company is the second 3D meat-printing startup to go public this year, but will be the first company focused on plant-based meat analogs to trade on Israel’s stock exchange. The first meat printing startup, MeaTech (trading as Meat-Tech 3D Ltd), is developing technology for printing cultured steak.

The IPO comes on the heels of $5.5 million in venture funding raised earlier this year, including a $3 million funding round raised this summer. According to the company, they plan on using the IPO funds to continue developing its technology, which is unique in that it both prints and cooks the meat simultaneously.

From The Spoon’s earlier post on SavorEat:

SavorEat’s technology prints and cooks simultaneously, which allows the company’s printers to make a fully cooked piece of 3D printed meat like you might see produced by a futuristic appliance like that in the TV show Upload.

The food comes out “ready to be eaten,” said Racheli Vizman, company CEO. “We’re printing one layer, then we cook one layer, print one layer, cook one layer. So at the end, you get something that’s ready to be consumed.”

I caught up with Vizman via email to ask her about why she decided to take SavorEat public. You can see her answers below:

Why did you decide to go IPO vs. raise venture funding for more financing? 

Vizman: Going IPO has some additional advantages, such as the recognition of the potential we have as a company in the local ecosystem as well as the potential of the foodtech market, this brings a lot of new growing and business opportunities locally and globally, access to capital in the future and the money we raised will help us to continue to develop our technology, product and market penetration.

How big a deal is it to be publicly traded in Israel? In the US, it takes quite a bit of work in advance to prepare for an IPO for NASDAQ or the NYSE. 

Vizman: Since I have experience in preparing for an IPO in Nasdaq (in Beyond Air), the requirement are more or less similar while the timeframe in TASE is shorter. Putting this aside, it is a very big deal on its own as there have been just a very few IPOs in TASE in the past year, being one of this few showcases the importance of the company’s activity for the local market. 

What do you plan to do with the money? 

Vizman: To boost the development activities, adding additional pilots testing and support commercialization. We are also in the stage in which we are looking for global partnerships (with a focus on the US market) and we hope this recognition of TASE will boost that as well.

Is being public similar to the US where you have to report financial results every quarter? 

Vizman: Yes it is more or less similar but for medium size companies we need to report every 6 months

Heatworks Partners With BASF to Bring the Tiny Tetra Dishwasher To Market in 2021

When Heatworks introduced the Tetra at CES 2018, I imagine they were just as surprised as anyone when it became one of the most buzzed about new products at the annual tech show.

The tiny countertop dishwasher, which promised to clean a few settings of dishes with just half a gallon of water in 10 minutes, appeared on dozens of top of CES lists and the product’s small form factor, sexy design and estimated price point ($299 at the time) had many of us signing up to be notified when it was available.

All of that buzz was probably new for a company that had focused on making tankless water heaters to that point, which probably added a bit of pressure when the original ship date of end of 2018 slipped by.

When I asked them about it last year, Heatworks said the reason for the delay was they were primarily focused on bringing their latest generation water heater, the Model 3, to market. It turns out they also had another reason, which is they would ultimately need a partner to build the sophisticated detergent dispensing system required for such a small form factor device.

That partnership, announced today, is with German conglomerate BASF.

According to the release, the Tetra cartridge system “will be designed to deliver custom solutions and dosing, dependent on the selected wash cycle, ensuring each cleaning cycle is optimized. Tetra’s cartridges will last for multiple loads and consumers will be able to sign up for a subscription, so that cartridges are shipped to them automatically.”

Obviously a subscription based detergent system is a new wrinkle for the Tetra, one that might be a cause for reconsideration for those still waiting for a Tetra. Another potential concern might be the slightly higher price tag ($399) for the new device.

Still, unlike many of the other countertop dishwashers on the market, the Tetra doesn’t require plumbing or hoses and uses less than half of the water. Because of this self-sufficiency and the product’s attractive design, I imagine the 25,000 or so customers the company says have signed up expressing interest in the Tetra might still pull the trigger.

Hopefully soon they’ll have a chance: According to Heatworks and BASF, the Tetra will be available in the second half of 2021.

Cricket One Announces New Funding as it Rolls Out Cricket-Based Burger Patty

Cricket One, a Vietnam based startup specializing in cricket-based protein powders and oils, has raised a new funding round from Singapore based Corecam Partners The Spoon has learned. The funding follows a seed round investment from 500 Startups and Masik Enterprise made last year.

While the amount of the funding was not disclosed, cofounder Nam Dang told The Spoon the Corecam Partners does not make investments below $1 million.

Cricket One, which made a name for itself providing cricket protein powder and oils to food manufacturers, plans to use the new funding to fuel the rollout of a new cricket-based burger patty. The company sees burgers as a logical next step to attract new consumers not accustomed to having crickets as part of their diet.

“When we were building a roadmap for cricket protein to reach a wider audience, we thought it had to be in a common form,” said Dang. “There is nothing more familiar than a burger patty.”

To make their cricket-burger more meat-like, the company adapted their ingredients to address some of the common complaints about food made from cricket powders. According to Cricket One, foods made with cricket powder can have a grainy texture some consumers don’t like, so the company removed the exoskeleton of the crickets to result in a softer, more meat-like texture and taste.

This new direction beyond powders is just the beginning. The company, which has been working with other food manufacturers to develop meat analogs using cricket protein and cricket oil, is looking to extend its own meat substitute technology beyond the burger.

“We actually want to introduce a meat analog technology using cricket as an ingredient,” Dang told The Spoon via email. ” Burger is one thing, it can be used in other application like sausage and pâté.”

The company plans to sell its new cricket burger in different countries, including the US. According to Dang, what form it takes depends on the country and its local rules and regulations. For some markets it makes more sense to ship frozen patties made in Vietnam, and for others they may license the manufacturing process to local manufacturers and sell them the ingredients to make the burger in-market.

There’s no doubt that many see cricket and insects as a much more sustainable source of protein, but can cricket-based products make a dent in the fast growing market for more sustainable meat substitutes? Possibly, but the product’s success will ultimately depend on a large part on taste and, in markets like the US, how well they can convince consumers who are normally reticent to consuming insects.

To do that, a burger seems like a good place to start.

Meet the Aurora Nutrio, a Smart Cutting Board With Built-In Food Sensor

Nowadays it takes a lot for me to consider putting a new piece of technology on my countertop.

It’s not that I don’t love kitchen tech. (Heck, I did start an event on the topic.) It’s that I long ago ran out of countertop space and my wife only has so much patience for my expensive habit of buying new kitchen gear.

Which is why I’ve never made room for a kitchen scale. Intellectually, I understand the arguments for one: more precise measurements, less clutter than a hodgepodge of measuring cups and bowls, and a good way to track food calories and intake. In the end, though, I still can’t see where I’d put it.

But what if I could combine it with a cutting board? And better yet, what if I could also use this new cutting board-scale as a food inventory and tracking system?

All of this may be possible with the Aurora Nutrio, a new smart cutting board that has debuted through Indiegogo. The device weighs and identifies raw food, scans packaged food, calculates nutrition information, helps users track food inventory and ingredients on hand.

When you look at the Nutrio’s cutting surface, you’ll see the actual board part of the cutting board is made of wood. The wood board (or boards; the system offers bamboo, beech or nutwood board options and you can buy more than one board to use during a cook) reside on top of a base which houses all of the technology and sensors.

One of those sensors is a spectrometer. The spectrometer, the small circle in the upper left hand corner of the board, uses infrared light to scan the molecular properties of the food and give you the caloric and nutritional composition of food.

You can see a demonstration of how a scan would work in the Nutrio Indiegogo video below:

The device also has an on-board camera for scanning packaged goods, and a built-in NFC reader to track food inventory with the provided NFC food tags.

Like a lot of connected devices, the Nutrio has an associated app that unlocks more features, including the ability to log food in a diary and access nutrition information of food you weigh and scan. The app, called Lighthouse, is also where you’d track food inventory through the associated NFC tagging system.

I have to admit, all of this technology sounds pretty neat. Not only would I get the scale I want disguised as a cutting board, but I’d also get a full food-tracking and nutrition-management system.

That said, I’m still hesitant to pull the trigger for a few reasons.

The most obvious one is this is still just a prototype being offered on Indiegogo. And as we’re all too aware, super tech-forward products like this have a real mixed track record of ever making it to market. Add in that this product is promising a bunch of features using fairly complicated technology, and you have to wonder if the company will actually be able to deliver on all of those claims.

My second reason to hesitate is price. The Nutrio is expensive, with an early-bird price that’s over $400 on Indiegogo. That’s much higher than basic digital scales or even smart scales like the Renpho, which go for $20 nowadays on Amazon.

The final concern is that this product would be yet another proprietary system and app that relies on a subscription model to unlock all the features. According to the campaign’s FAQ, the system’s Pro edition of the app will cost between €5 and €10 per month, or roughly $6 to $12 USD, after the first year. I don’t know about you, but it takes a lot for me nowadays to pull out a credit card for an app, let alone for a cutting board and scale app (though the campaign promises to give lifetime access to the app if they hit €250,000).

All that said, the Nutrio is still an interesting appliance, presenting a fairly holistic approach to food tracking and management. I’ll be keeping an eye on it, and if you’d like to follow (or buy one), you can find it here at Indiegogo.

Aleph Farms Debuts Commercial Production Platform for Cultivated Steak, Starts Construction of Its ‘BioFarm’

Today, Aleph Farms announced a platform for the commercial production of its cultivated beef steak. The company says this platform will allow it to eventually produce meat grown from cells of a living cow affordably at scale, putting its cultivated steak at price parity with factory farmed meat.

The new production process is the first part of a phased build-out of what Aleph Farms is calling its BioFarm, a pilot plant the company intends to have fully operational by 2022.

“One of the big challenges of cultivated meat is the ability to produce large quantities efficiently at a cost that can compete with conventional meat industry pricing, without compromising on quality,” said Didier Toubia, Co-Founder and CEO of Aleph Farms, in today’s press release. “We have developed five technological building blocks unique to Aleph Farms that are put into a large-scale production process, all patented by the company.”

The company has created a prototype of beef steak produced through its new commercial production platform and will debut it via a virtual cooking demonstration at the Agri-Food Innovation Summit on November 20th.

With its new process, Aleph says it is trying to emulate the tissue regeneration process of meat produced through traditional animal farming, only outside of the animal’s body and under controlled conditions. The company also is growing whole meat (rather than minced) by using a plant-based matrix that mimics that extra-cellular matrix founds in animals.

This announcement is another indication of how the cultivated meat market is transitioning into a new phase as companies like Aleph and Matrix Meats lay the groundwork for a more scaled production of cultivated meat produced from animal cells. This development of lower-cost production is a necessary step if lab-grown meat is to ever to become a widely consumed alternative to traditional, animal-farmed meat products.

While some skeptics like Pat Brown say that these companies will never be able to get production to the point where prices will be at parity with traditional meat, others, like Josh Tetrick, say that day will definitely come, even if it takes us a decade or more before we’re buying a piece of cultivated meat at the local fast food joint.

And with today’s news by Aleph, it looks like we may have taken another step forward towards into a more sustainable, alt-protein future.

Terra Kaffe Raises $4 Million for Pod-Free Grind and Brew Coffee Maker

Terra Kaffe, a New York based startup that makes grind and brew coffee machines, has raised $4 million from The SeedLab, an early stage venture capital firm focused on consumer products.

The company had previously raised $575,000 in a seed funding late last year, and the new round of funding brings the company’s total to just under $5 million.

Last year, company CEO Sahand Dilmaghani showed me their coffee maker, the TK-01, and I liked what I saw. I also liked the fact that it was shipping, something that wasn’t the case (at the time) with my long-overdue Spinn.

Both machines are part of a growing category of grind and brew (also called superautomatic) coffee makers that make espresso-level coffee with the convenience of a Nespresso or Keurig, but without the plastic waste of pod-based systems. Nespresso and Keurig have come under fire in recent years for how much plastic they push into the waste stream, and while both are trying to make their pods more environment-friendly, it makes sense (and better coffee) if you can just grind from fresh within the system when you’re ready to brew.

In researching the TK-01 and the grind and brew market, one thing I noticed is how Terra Kaffe’s machine resembles a few other early grind and brew appliances on the market. And when I say resemble, I mean looks like an exact replica from an outward physical standpoint.

I asked Dilmaghani about this and he told me when he was getting the company off the ground, he didn’t have enough funding to custom design an entirely new coffee machine. This meant getting creative.

“The whole development is a story of trade offs,” said Dilmaghani in a phone interview. Instead of paying a company to create an entirely new product, they worked with a Chinese ODM (original design manufacturer) to build the hardware system architecture using some off the shelf parts such as brew unit and chassis (why there are others that look like the Terra Kaffe). Dilmaghani and his team focused on software, the UI and the overall consumer experience.

“I was like, ‘let’s prove out the market that there is an opportunity here'” said Dilmaghani. “Let’s work with as much off the shelf as possible, give people some awareness that this can sell DTC (direct-to-consumer), that it isn’t the Nespresso model that I have to lose money on the machine and only make money with recurring revenues. That you can make money on the product, and it can be a viable business.”

It’s a much different approach from Spinn, who designed a coffee maker from the ground up. The end result was a long drawn out design and manufacturing ramp-up process that took years to bring their product to market. In contrast, the TK-01 was available and shipping last year, and, according to Dilmaghani, has sold in the thousands.

And I imagine it’s this early sales success, not a complicated piece of hardware, that mattered to the company’s newest investors.

GoSun Debuts the Dream, a Hybrid Solar-Powered Tiny Home

Apparently being the king of solar cooking wasn’t enough for Patrick Sherwin.

That’s because this week the CEO of GoSun, a Cincinnati-based startup focused on building solar cooking products, debuted a hybrid solar-powered tiny home on wheels. Called the Dream, the portable home is packed with features for the sustainably-focused traveler or off-gridder who just wants to be able to plop this thing in the middle of a field somewhere.

Not surprisingly, the Dream features a bunch of the GoSun systems that the company has launched in recent years, including a GoSun Fusion hybrid solar/electric oven, the GoSun Chill portable high-efficiency refrigerator and the GoSun Flow water purification system.

There’s also a bunch of interesting new features that go beyond the company’s mainline cooking products that make the Dream a fully self-sufficient tiny home for the sustainably-minded weekend warrior or doomsday prepper:

Full Solar System. A full solar PV array on the roof, an on-board lithium ion energy storage battery, inversion, and control systems all included with the Dream.

A Complete Solar Kitchen. Each Dream comes complete with a GoSun Solar Kitchen package. GoSun launched the Solar Kitchen last year, which includes a GoSun Fusion solar oven, a solar table (with built-in solar panel) and a high efficiency electric cooler.

A Smart Retractable Awning. In his guided tour (see below), Sherwin emphasizes the importance of indoor-outdoor living (probably to be expected by a guy who started a solar cooking startup), and shows off a sixteen-foot wide awning that will automatically retract when it senses a wind is kicking up.

A Composting Toilet: A flush toilet comes standard, but hyper-sustainably focused users can get an optional upgrade gives you a toilet that separates liquids from solids.

Hideaway, Liftable Queen Sized Bed on Tracks: This is maybe my favorite feature, a queen sized bed on a track system for daytime storage. This means that during the day the bed is lifted up to the ceiling, allowing users to use that space with a small table below. When it’s time to hit the sack, you just click on the switch and the queen sized bed comes down.

In a way, the creation of a fully featured solar-powered tiny house makes sense for GoSun, which started with a simple solar powered oven for campers and has slowly been adding products over the years such as refrigeration, water systems and lighting.

According to GoSun, the Dream will be available in 2021 and sell starting at $69,500. For those looking to go off grid, you can reserve your’s with a $500 down payment.

You can watch Sherwin give a guided tour of the GoSun Dream below:

Solar Off-Grid Tiny House

The Food Tech Show: What Would a Biden Presidency Look Like for Food Tech?

It’s another Food Tech Show podcast!

The Spoon editorial team got together this week to discuss our favorite stories of the week, including:

  • McDonald’s announced their new plant-based burger, the McPlant, and everyone was confused
  • The Golden Arches also talked about how technology will change the McDonald’s experience in coming years, especially when it comes to drive-thru
  • Boston robot restaurant startup Spyce Kitchen debuted their 2.0 concept and it’s pretty darn different than the first generation. Also different: no dine-in eating.
  • What a Biden presidency could look like when it comes to food tech?

As always, you can find the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other places you get can podcasts.

You can also hit play below or download the episode direct to your device.

Moolec Science Plans to Make Animal Proteins With Soy, Pea & Safflower Using ‘Molecular Farming’

Moolec Science wants to bring sustainable animal protein production to the farm. Not through the cattle pasture or henhouse, but through crops.

Using a genetic engineering technique known as molecular farming, the company believes it can leverage the scale of production of crop farming to create animal proteins more cost effectively than other forms of cellular agriculture – like cultured meat – can do today.

The technique, which uses genetically-modified crops like tobacco or safflower to produce proteins, has been used since the 90s in the pharmaceutical industry. However, using molecular farming for production of animal cell protein through crops for use in food is relatively new and something Moolec’s predecessor company has spent years working on.

Moolec is a spinout of Argentina-based bioscience conglomerate Bioceres SA, which has already developed a technology for producing an enzyme used in the production of cheese called chymosin. While chymosin originally was produced through traditional animal agriculture (it’s found in the intestines of cattle and goats), in recent decades cheese producers have sought more sustainable approaches such as fermentation-based production of chymosin. The technology developed by Bioceres – and now Moolec – is a hybrid approach that enables them to produce the same animal-cell chymosin through plants like safflower.

The process to create chymosin originally developed by Bioceres was patented in 2015, and the company already sells the enzyme to cheese processors in markets across Europe. By spinning off Moolec, the creators of the technology hope to now extend its use to create recombinant animal proteins through new crops like soy and pea.

“Molecular farming is not yet a fully explored technology in the alternative protein space,” said Moolec CEO Gastón Paladini in a Zoom interview with The Spoon. “We do all the science up front from the lab to use genetic engineering to express animal cells.”

I asked Paladini why the company decided to create a new company separate from Bioceres, a well-resourced corporation publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. He told me the founders, including the CTO Martin Salinas who led the research into the chymosin through safflower, felt a new company would bring focus and help them build out their technology.

“We started thinking about how we could use all the experience and R&D from all these years to explore new products for this new alternative protein space,” said Paladini.

There’s no doubt that the team also sees opportunity in a white hot alt-protein space where venture capitalists are looking for any new spin on alternatives for traditional industrial farmed animal protein, in part because there is huge demand for plant-based proteins for use in making alternative meat products.

The company sees two crops in particular that they are excited to extend their process for animal-cell protein through plants: soy and pea.

“Soy and pea isolates and concentrates are the stars in a plant-based landscape,” said Paladini. “They are the main raw material to make plant-based products. We are actually doing the same process but with animal cells inside.”

However, unlike the company’s safflower-based products, which they can derive revenue from immediately, the development of the newer product lines will take some time. According to Paladini, they expect that the new proteins expressed through molecular farming to be on the market by 2025, slowed in part by the long approval process required for genetically modified food products.

2025 is a ways off, but Paladini said the company will be able to start to monetize alt-based animal proteins sooner. They have already started working on another process to bring the same animal proteins to market sooner through precision fermentation.

Spoon readers may know that precision fermentation is the technology that the Good Food Institute (GFI) sees as the bridge between the current plant-based alt-protein market and the world of lab-grown meat, where technology is more nascent. Unlike lab-grown meat that uses in vitro animal cell cultures, companies like Perfect Day and Geltor engineer microbes to produce protein that is essentially identical to that produced by animals.

The technology is already producing proteins at scale and the GFI expects the cost of precision fermented proteins will be lower than that of animal-produced proteins.

For Moolec, its fermentation technology also is just a quicker route to market, and embracing both approaches gives them an intermediate term (precision fermentation) and long term (molecular farming) monetization strategy, something no doubt important to investors.

And having a diversified revenue strategy makes sense for a company looking to raise capital. While Biosceres pre-seed investment gave them enough to start the company, Paladin told me they plan on exploring capital markets immediately to secure a seed round in 2021.

“Hopefully we could go to our seed round very soon so as to expand our lines and also to explore new proteins,” said Paladin. “The idea is to probe what we’re doing, and at the same time to go to the capital markets and some strategic partners to start building this new adventure.”

Paladin believes part of the company’s appeal to investors is due to the fact that’s while it technology is new and cutting edge, it could help secure a future for the oldest producer in the food ecosystem – the farmer – going forward.

“The technology is quite straightforward in the end because we aim to bring farmers back to the equation,” said Paladin. “Because we put all our science up front, but at the end the biology, the sun and the land do the rest. We are using all the efficiency of the plants of a very low tech, a non tech-technology.

“This is farming.”

Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 Sessions, Day Three

Included below are videos from the following sessions:

  • Same-Day Delivery’s Role in the Modern Kitchen, Grocery Store and Beyond – Wilson Rothman and Kelly Caruso
  • The Tech-Powered Grocery Store – Chris Albrecht and Will Glaser
  • Building Resilient Restaurants With Tech in the COVID Era – Chris Carr, Ian Christopher, Christine Schindler, Jennifer Marston
  • Designing Consumer-Centered Products For The Kitchen – Evan Dash, Jane Freiman, Nicole Papantoniou
  • The CRISPR Revolution – Brian Frank and Tom Adams
  • Off-Premise Disruption: Restaurant Delivery & Virtual Restaurants Change The Game – Brita Rosenheim, Tom Pickett
  • Food Service: Digital Transformation & Disruption – Scott Wu, Daniel Khachab, Michael Wolf
  • Ghost Kitchen Strategies for the New Restaurant Landscape – Ashley Colpaart, Nick Avedesian, Michael Schaefer
  • I, Restaurant: Let’s Talk Restaurant Robots – Clayton Wood, Linda Pouliot, John Ha
  • Table Talk: Fermentation – The next big wave in future food? – Tim West Miller Tran
  • Table Talk: Virtual Restaurants – Kristen Hawley (Wolf Assist) Lawrence Vavra, Michael Wolf
  • Table Talk: Home Cooking Marketplaces – Surj Patel Chris Fung, Akshay Prabhu
  • Into the Modernist Cuisine Kitchen – Francisco Migoya, Michael Wolf
  • The Home Food Robot: From Rotimatic to Rosie the Robot – Khalid Aboujassoum, Pranoti Nagarkar, Michael Wolf

 

If you purchased a ticket to SKS and have not received your Spoon Plus account activation, drop us a line.

If you didn’t attend SKS and would like to see these sessions, you can subscribe to Spoon Plus here.

Could Biden Become The Food Tech President? Here’s 6 Ideas to Help Make That Happen

We all know about the Green New Deal, but what about a Grand New Meal powered by government-catalyzed food innovation?

With a more science-forward administration on its way in and a pandemic refusing to head out, it may be time to swing for the fences with some fresh thinking from the top when it comes to building a better future for our food system.

And while I’m no legislative or governmental policy expert, I figured I’d least start the ball rolling thinking of potential ways Joe Biden could become the Food and Ag Tech President.

Create a Future Food Innovation Hub and Investment Fund

While there’s no shortage of food tech innovation in the U.S., there’s been comparatively little done at the government level compared to Singapore, China and the European Union, all of which have governments making concerted efforts to foster future food innovation in their markets.

Part of the reason these governments have pushed so hard to catalyze innovation in spaces like alternative proteins, synthetic biology and other sources of food outside of industrial farming is they’ve made new sources of food a strategic part of a food sovereignty plan. While the U.S. certainly has traditionally — and wisely — prioritized creating self-sufficiency through its support of traditional farmers and agriculture, there hasn’t been a significant effort to focus on newer technologies outside of traditional ag.

They could change that with the type of organized investing in food and ag tech innovation we’ve seen from groups like Enterprise Singapore. Or the U.S. government could also follow the lead of the EU, which has created a broad food innovation initiative called EIT Food that invests, builds awareness and catalyzes action within the EU to foster food and ag tech.

Create a U.S. Government Office or Agency Focused on Food and Ag Innovation

If Biden really wanted to catalyze innovation to build the future of food, he’d work to create a formal office for food innovation within the U.S. government. That could mean a food innovation group within the FDA or an initiative like Critical Path, which started in the FDA and created the Critical Path Institute.

Chances for a standalone agency focused on food and ag innovation are pretty small, in part because existing agencies like the FDA and EPA already have a strong oversight mandate of much of the ag and food system. That said, if future food was enough of a strategic initiative, Biden could argue that a new food future is one that requires new approaches and try to create something akin to a Space Force type of approach.

Food Innovation Czar

A more realistic (and probably achievable) approach than a full-fledged governmental agency would be the creation of a Food and Ag Innovation Czar.

While “Czar” appointments in the U.S. government don’t usually mean they are heads of agencies, they often come with fairly broad administrative power. In fact, one of the first appointments of a Czar by the Republican party was a “Food Czar” that looked to put broad oversight power of food pricing during the Second World War.

What would a Food Innovation Czar do? They could focus on the current food system fragility, encourage the digitization of the food supply chain, and encourage legislation and funding for new food innovation initiatives. They would also help highlight innovative new approaches, organizations, and creators who are building food future and encourage private sector investment.

Build a Rock Star Advisory Council on Food Innovation

Presidents often will build advisory councils early in their administration, through which they’ll listen to visionaries like Elon Musk tell them about the future. Sure, some of this is partly a PR exercise, but I think a food and ag innovation advisory council with rock stars from the science, academic and business world would make a real difference both in creating awareness and influencing potential policy. He could start with folks like Jennifer Doudna (the co-inventor of CRISPR) or Pat Brown (CEO of Impossible and the inventor of the DNA microarray), and build from there.

Create Tax Incentives to Foster Innovation in Future Food Businesses

One of the strongest levers a government can pull for behavior change is through tax incentives. It’s also probably one of the easiest, since Republicans like tax cuts and I think there could be common ground for a tax package that incentivizes farmers and food processors to invest in more future forward businesses.

Some potential ideas are a tax cut for farmers that plant more tech-forward crops such as CRISPR-engineered strains or explore molecular farming as a way to create more sustainable foods. The US government could also provide tax incentives for farmers and food processors to invest in building infrastructure and businesses for upcycled food such as we’ve seen in Poland for rapeseed cake.

Install a Vertical Farm or Even a Bioreactor at the White House

Jimmy Carter may have been mocked by conservatives when he installed solar panels on the White House roof in the late 70s, but looking back now we can see how far ahead of his time he was.

So what could Joe Biden do set an example in the White House and bring attention to a new food technology? One idea would be to install a vertical farm, 3D food printer or even a food bioreactor in the White House. Another is to build a a space where all of these different technologies are being used, something like a tech-forward version of the White House vegetable garden.

Sure, things are early, the current president isn’t quite ready to move on, and chances are we’ll have a government that’s even more gridlocked than our current one come January 20. But the reality is that there are lot of tailwinds for change in the food system, and both consumers and food producers have started clamoring for food alternatives produced outside of our traditional industrial-pathways.

So, hopefully, with a new administration coming in, there’s a real opportunity to push for building foundations that could foster innovation in our food system going forward.

After a Summer Hit by COVID-19, Home Brew Appliance Startup MiniBrew Secures Funding for 2021

MiniBrew, a Netherlands-based maker of home-brew appliances, announced last month they’ve secured funding to continue operations after a months-long struggle with COVID-19-related difficulties.

The company, which started shipping its home brew appliance last year in Europe, had big plans for expansion into the U.S. and other markets, but saw a number of strategic investors pull out in the midst of the pandemic.

The loss of investment back in June meant the company went into “suspension of payment” (meaning they couldn’t pay their creditors) and laid off members of the team. The resulting reduction in personnel and funding also meant MiniBrew had to put a halt on development of a 110-volt model of its machine for the U.S. market.

Despite the struggles due to COVID-related funding issues, the pullback came amidst an increase of usage of the appliances in the field as home brewers stuck indoors fired up their units to make beer. According to the company’s update, homebound MiniBrew users created three times more beer recipes compared to pre-COVID times.

Luckily for those MiniBrew users, the company announced they’ve reach an agreement with their creditors, secured funding and are once again adding new features for the MiniBrew such as recipe sharing.

MiniBrew’s struggles and small dedicated user base are reminiscent of PicoBrew’s here in the States, although unlike PicoBrew, the MiniBrew team was able to negotiate with its lenders to live another day.

Overall, home beer making automation remains a struggling category. In addition to PicoBrew and MiniBrew, we’ve watched startups like iGulu and HOPii struggle after big crowdfunding campaigns, while others, like LG’s much-hyped HomeBrew appliance, looks like it never got out the door.

Despite the category’s struggles, there are still companies like BEERMKR, INTHEKEG and Pinter rolling out products and an early and enthusiastic of early adopters buying them.

The challenge will be whether the category can ever break out beyond the small group of early adopters who are craving a tech-forward home brew solution.