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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

3D Food Printing

Novameat Gets €250,000 From Spanish Govt, Partners With Culinary Gastronomy All-Star Team From Disfrutar

Novameat, a Spanish startup that uses 3D printing technology to create whole-cuts of plant-based meat such as beef steak or pork fillets, has received €250,000 (~ $307,500 USD) from the government of Spain, according to an announcement sent to the Spoon. The funding comes via a Spanish government technology development organization called the NEOTEC Program of the Spanish Centre for Industrial Technological Development (CDTI).

Novameat plans to use the funding to help to ramp up production of 3D printed meat through the integration of its microextrusion-technology into higher-output industrial printing machines. The company’s microextrusion technology, which intricately prints plant-based proteins at microscopic levels, was developed by Novameat CEO Giuseppe Scionti when he was a professor of bioengineering at the University of Catalunya.

The funding follows what was a fairly eventful 2020 for the company. In October, Scionti announced at the Smart Kitchen Summit that Novameat had developed a prototype to create hybrid products that combined 3D printed plant-based scaffolding with cultured meat cells. In May, the company announced it had developed a realistic plant-based pork product. Prior to that, the company announced it had developed a second generation of its plant-based steak.

As part of the news, Novameat also announced a collaboration with Disfrutar, a two-Michelin star restaurant that one list ranks as the 9th best restaurant in the world. The chefs behind Disfrutar are a part of the same culinary creative team from early molecular gastronomy pioneering restaurant El Bulli.

I asked Scionti what the collaboration with Disfrutar will look like.

“Disfrutar will have full-access to Novameat’s patented micro-extrusion technology through 3D printing.” said Scionti. “Disfrutar’s creativity lab now already has Novameat’s first 3D printer located outside Novameat’s Innovation Lab. The three chefs have been working 2 decades as El Bulli chefs and two of them (Oriol Castro and Eduard Xatruch) were part of the legendary creativity Lab of El Bulli, ElBullitaller. This group of chefs is the same that invented spherification technique of molecular gastronomy.”

Today’s funding follows a 2019 investment by New Crop Capital (sum undisclosed). Scionti told the Spoon that Novameat is planning to raise additional funding in 2021, which he expects to be a big year for the company.

“3D printing is a very fast technology to iterate and test new formulations and textures everyday, and it can be the enabler to unlock the future of personalized nutrition,” said Scionti. “2021 will be the most important year so far at Novameat as we’ll launch in restaurants, launch our scaffold as a service business model for cell-based industry, and what I care most, we’ll scale up with bigger machines to ensure we contribute to the future of planet’s health.”

If you want to see Novameat’s 3D meat printer in action you can watch the video of the printing demo at Smart Kitchen Summit below. You can also watch the company demo their scaffolding printing technology live at Food Tech Live next week (get your free ticket here).

Novameat 3D Prints Plant-Based Meat at Smart Kitchen Summit 2020

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

Kickstarter: Cakewalk Brings Edible 3D Printing to Your Home

Damn those adorable bakers on The Great British Baking Show! They make piping and decorating cakes look so easy. But anytime I fill up a piping bag to add decorative lines or write out “Happy Birthday” on a cake or tart, it winds up looking like a crime scene.

But perhaps I can make up for my lack of manual precision with some automation. Cakewalk is a kit that launched on Kickstarter today, which promises to let you 3D print elegant, edible, designs and writings on your home baked goods.

How much it costs and what you get depends on the level you back. At the low end, €49 (~$57 USD) gets you just the core extruder. At €89 (~$104 USD) you get the complete kit, which includes the extruder as well as the motor that you assemble and attach to your own 3D printer. On the high end, €459 (~$537 USD) gets you a 3D printer with the Cakewalk already assembled.

According to the campaign page, the Cakewalk has been tested and works with chocolate, meringue, vegetable puree, ketchup, guacamole and honey. Simply stir up the ingredients, add them to the Cakewalk tube (that you attached to your 3D printer) and print out your designs.

The printer works with existing 3D printing software, and the parts can be easily added to and removed from an existing 3D printers, so there is no need to buy an additional 3D printer just for food.

We’ve actually written about Marine Coré-Baillais, the creator of Cakewalk, before. She was CEO of French 3D-printing company Sculpteo before going to culinary school to become a pastry chef. As Spoon Founder, Mike Wolf, wrote at the time:

I asked Baillais why she decided to tackle 3D food printing after working at a big 3D printing services startup focused on enterprise applications. She told me it was in part due the frustration that had built up over the past decade at the relative lack of interest from the food industry in using 3D printing.

As of today, Cakewalk has already raised $5,000 of its $11,752 campaign goal. The company says it will ship Cakewalks to backers in December of this year. In the meantime, you can finish up this season of The Great British Baking Show for even more inspiration.

SKS 2020: Novameat Expanding into Cultured Meat for its 3D Printer

Spanish startup Novameat is adding cultured meat to the list of ingredients it is using to 3D print cuts of non-animal meat.

Historically, the company has used only plant-based ingredients to 3D prints steaks and pork. But during his demonstration at the Smart Kitchen Summit today, Novameat CEO, Giuseppe Scionti, shared that his company has protoyped 3D printing hybrid meats that use plant-based ingredients for scaffolding together with cells from cultivated meat.

Scionti showed off how Novameat’s technology works at SKS by printing a plant-based steak in real time. The 3D printer holds a plant protein mixture that is extruded in a way that mimics the texture and appearance of animal protein. Right now the process takes long time, Scionti’s SKS steak was started before his half hour talk and was not finished by the time he was done.

Novameat is working towards speeding that process up, initially to a point where it could work in restaurants. Scionti laid out a vision where people could customize the ingredients that go into their protein mixture to have the restaurant create a customized steak on the spot.

Novameat had some pre-3D printed plant-based steaks on hand for its demo (see the video below). And while they were a little hard to completely see because of lighting and the nature of streaming video, the bits of steak did indeed cook and cut apart like steak.

3D printing could wind up being an important part of the meal creation process in the not-too-distant future. 3D printing and micro-extrusion allows for the creation of foods with specific layers of fat and protein. Plus, as noted earlier, they can be the vehicle for constructing truly customized foods.

While we write about the future of food all the time here at The Spoon, seeing a 3D printer in action like we did today really did give attendees a sci-fi like peek into what’s ahead for our meals.

NovaMeat 3D Prints Plant-Based Meat at Smart Kitchen Summit 2020

Welcome to Sushi Singularity. Did You Have a Reservation and Submit Your Biosample?

Just offering 3D printed sushi would be enough for a restaurant to land a story in The Spoon. But Sushi Singularity, a restaurant opening in Tokyo later this year, is taking the concept one step further by requesting you kindly submit a biosample from which they will 3D print a personalized meal created specifically for you.

Oh man, 3D printing and personalized nutrition? That’s like catnip for us.

My Modern Met reports that the Sushi Singularity restaurant is from Open Meals. You might recall that Open Meals made headlines a couple years back by teleporting sushi, which the company called “the world’s first food data transmission.”

Now Open Meals is looking for a different type of data: yours. When you make a reservation at Sushi Singularity, they mail you a home health kit to collect biosamples. According to Mashable Southeast Asia, “You’ll have to send them samples of your DNA, urine, and other bodily fluids first. They call this your ‘Health ID’.”

Okaaay… That’s a little, personal, but whatevs! You’ll be dining in the future, and how else are you supposed to get a completely personalized meal?

At the restaurant, you’ll be treated to beautiful 3D-printed dishes built bit by bit into sushi such as Cell Cultured Tuna, Powdered Sintered Uni, and Negative Stiffness Honeycomb Octopus. Aside from the eye-popping design of each piece of sushi, it will be crafted specifically for your health profile (though exactly what that means remains unclear).

Video via Open Meals

As noted, Sushi Singularity sits firmly at the nexus of two trends we follow closely at The Spoon: 3D printing and personalized nutrition.

It’s actually been a busy year for 3D food printing. Redefine Meat announced high-volume 3D printing for plant-based steaks. Legendary Vish is 3D printing plant-based salmon. And SavorEat has developed a technology that 3D prints and cooks plant-based meats.

As 3D printing evolves, it promises to open up new levels of bespoke food creation tailored to your specific dietary and health needs. For example, a company called Nourish is using 3D printing to create personalized vitamin supplements. As raw ingredient materials advance and resolution improves on the machines, even greater levels of specificity with meals and personalization will be unlocked.

Neither the Sushi Singularity website or coverage of the restaurant mentions prices, though if you have to ask, as the saying goes, you probably won’t be able to afford it. If that winds up being the case, don’t take it personally.

Isreali Startup MeaTech Prints Carpaccio-like Meat

Israeli bioprinting startup MeaTech 3D announced earlier this week that it successfully printed a carpaccio-like layer of meat, CTech reported. The thin, uniform layer of muscle tissue lays a foundation for the holy grail of alternative proteins: lab grown steak.

Founded in 2018, MeaTech integrated tissue engineering and 3D printing technologies to produce animal-free cuts of beef. Stem cells are taken from the umbilical cord— so no animal is harmed in the sampling process—and multiplied in a bioreactor. The stem cells are then differentiated into the needed cell types, like muscle and fat cells. These distinct cells become the cellular inks used by the 3D printer, which prints a complex structure of fat and muscle cells that can grow into an actual cut of meat. 

“3D printed tissues are at the cutting edge of cell-based meat technology,” Kate Krueger, a cell biologist and alternative proteins consultant for Helikon Consulting told me this week in an email interview. 

MeaTech’s most recent initiative, named Project Carpaccio because of the products similarity to the thinly sliced Italian meat. The printed single layer of tissue proved the team could successfully sort muscle and fat stem cells, produce the necessary cellular ink and combine the meat and fat cells in a way that causes them to coalesce into a single structure. 

MeaTech is one of a few companies exclusively aiming to produce whole muscle tissue. The majority of cultured meat to date has been ground or minced, made by manually combining lab grown cells into a sludge that can be turned into a burger, nugget or patty. While both types of cultured meat are necessary to disrupt the meat industry, growing muscle tissue is decidedly more difficult. Tissue engineers have to mimic the intricate systems that support muscle growth in an animal. 

“It’s easier to make minced meat and we understand that – but we’re not going there. We believe the real solution will come from growing large, industrial-size chunks of meat,” CEO Sharon Fima told the Jerusalem Post earlier this year.

Project Carpaccio shows proof of concept and a lot of progress in two years. But MeaTech’s 3D printed steaks have a long road ahead. Regulatory approval, affordability and scalability are still major hurdles that could take up to a decade to overcome, Fima told Haaretz in March. Their competitors, however, believe they’ll be on plates and burgers within the year.  Fellow Isreali startup, Redefine, announced in June that their printed steak will be in restaurants by the end of 2020 and in supermarkets by 2022. And SavorEats plans to test out their plant-based burgers, which are 3D printed and cooked simultaneously, in a leading fast food chain within the next twelve months.  

With Project Carpaccio finished ahead of schedule, MeaTech is on to the next challenge, printing a quarter pound (100 gram) steak. They will print the steak’s foundational structure, grow it so size in an incubator and see if it passes the taste test. 

Legendary Vish Creates Plant-based Salmon through 3D Bioprinting

To create a more sustainable seafood option, three Ph.D. students decided to apply their experience in 3D bioprinting. The result is the Austrian startup Legendary Vish, which uses plant-based ingredients and 3D bioprinting to re-create a realistic salmon fillet.

I spoke to Robin Simsa, the CEO of Legendary Vish this week. He said a benefit to bioprinting salmon is that it offers an alternative to aquaculture and wild salmon. Fish that are raised in aquaculture farms are often fed antibiotics and are at risk for contaminating wild fish with parasites/pathogens, and wild salmon can contain microplastics and heavy metals. Additionally, salmon is susceptible to overfishing since it is a popular seafood and often touted as a “health food.” Legendary Vish’s 3D printed plant-based salmon fillet is free of these toxins and contaminants, and void of potential environmental concerns.

The plant-based salmon fillet looks shockingly real, with a convincing red-orange color and white stripes of fat. When asked if the salmon fillet truly tasted like salmon, he said the flavor and aroma are very accurate. However, they are working on developing an improved “mouth feel” for the product, in hopes of making it a firmer texture. The salmon will contain nutrients and health benefits similar to real salmon, like protein and Omega-3 fatty acids.

Legendary Vish’s salmon is a unique seafood alternative because it is crafted from mushroom protein and algae. Other companies re-creating fish like Shiok, BlueNalu, and Wild Type use cell-based technology to create seafood alternatives. In the world of 3D printing, Redefine Meat and Novameat create plant-based beef and pork alternatives. 

Legendary Vish has not yet received outside capital, but is currently speaking with investors. The company’s goal is to release their bioprinted salmon to the European market by 2022, first focusing on Scandinavian countries, and then turning to larger cities within Europe. Next year, they may begin testing the salmon in certain markets on a small scale.

3D Meat Printing Startup SavorEat Lands $3 Million in Funding

Israel-based SavorEat, a company which has developed a proprietary technology that simultaneously print and cooks plant-based meat substitutes, has landed a $3 million funding round. The funding round was led by investors Mor and Meitav Dash.

The funding round, which was first reported by Israel-based news publication Globes, is the second for SavorEats in the last two weeks. Prior to this investment, the company had raised $1.75 million from Millennium Food-Tech.

The investment comes as interest in 3D printed meat alternatives heats up, especially in Israel. Other startups competing in this nascent market include Redefine Meat (formerly Jet Eat) and Meatech, a company which prints cultured meat cells into steak.

SavorEat’s technology is unique in a couple of ways. The first differentiator is that is uses a plant-based cellulose as a binder. The cellulose is combined with other ingredients such as plant-based fats and protein to make the final product.

Another thing that sets SavorEat apart is that it prints fully cooked pieces of meat.

From my piece on SavorEat earlier this month:

The other big differentiator for SavorEat’s technology is that it 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 Vizman. “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.”

According to SavorEat CEO Racheli Vizman, the company has signed a partnership with one of the largest fast-food chains in Israel, BBB Group (Burgus Burger Bar), and they plan on testing the product out in the restaurant chain in the next twelve months. From there, the company hopes to use the recent funding round to commercialize and expand using the their recent funding.

KFC Bringing Beyond Meat Plant-Based Chicken to SoCal, 3D Printed Chicken to Russia

KFC announced a partnership with Beyond Meat today to bring plant-based chicken sandwiches to 50 KFC locations across Southern California. Starting on July 20, the Beyond Meat Chicken will be available for a limited time in select KFCs in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego.

This is the latest in a string of tests KFC has rolled out for the Beyond Chicken. The restaurant chain made it first available in Atlanta, GA last year, followed by tests in Charlotte, NC and Nashville, TN, as well as a one-day promotion in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. In Atlanta, the Beyond Chicken sparked long lines of customers who waited at least an hour to try the plant-based nuggets.

Today’s announcement continues the relationship between Beyond Meat and KFC parent company, Yum Brands. In addition to the previous market tests, this past June Yum China announced that Beyond’s burgers would be available at select KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell stores in mainland China for a limited time as well.

The timing of KFC’s move into California is actually coming at a good time. Sales of plant-based meat, which have been growing over the past few years, have surged even higher during the pandemic, as COVID-19 highlighted limitations of our meat supply and shone a light on the working conditions of meat packers.

But plant-based chicken wasn’t the only alternative protein news to come out of KFC today. Over in Moscow, KFC Russia announced that it was “launching the development of innovative 3D bioprinting technology to create chicken meat in cooperation with the 3D Bioprinting Solutions research laboratory.” In other words, KFC is looking to develop lab-created chicken nuggets. The company says it will receive a final product for testing this fall.

SavorEat Plans to Build an Appliance For The Home That Prints & Cooks Meat

“That’s our goal,” said Vizman when I caught up with her via a zoom call. “Where we can also have, next to a microwave, we can have machines that you know can create variety of products.”

But to get there, first her company is working on building a product that can print and cook food instantly for a large quick service food chains, starting with one of the biggest in Israel, BBB (Burgus Burger Bar).

“We are about to start this testing it in their facility within a year, while we believe that we will be commercialize it in a larger scale two years from closing the financial round that we are now running.”

That financial round Vizman is looking to close is a $3.5 million seed round led by a company called Next Food, an Israel based food tech investment fund. Next Food led SavorEat’s pre-seed round of $1.75 million.

3D printed meat has gained momentum over the past couple years, especially, it seems, in Israel. SavorEat joins two other venture funded Israel based 3D meat printing startups in Redefine Meat (formerly Jet Eat) and Meatech, a company which prints cultured meat cells into steak.

Two things set SavorEat’s technology apart from those and other 3D meat printing startups. The first is the company’s binder, which is a proprietary plant-based cellulose. The cellulose is combined with other ingredients such as plant-based fats and protein to make the final product.

“We’re using the cellulose to bind a variety of fats and proteins and other tastes and flavors and combine a very stable emulsion,” said Vizman.

The other big differentiator for SavorEat’s technology is that it 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 Vizman. “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.”

This print and cook technology, according to Vizman, will give the cook a high degree of precision of over the final print.

“The nice thing about that is that you can also control the way you cook it. You can decide whether you want it medium, you want in rare, well done. How you want to cook it in the you want to grill it from the inside and rare from the outside.”

The company’s technology was invented by Oded Shoseyov, a serial inventor and entrepreneur who spends much of his time spinning out new ideas from his research lab at Hebrew University. Shoseyov is SavorEat’s chief science officer. Shoseyov and Vizman are joined by other executives from companies like Stratasys (3D printing) and IFF/Frutarom (flavors).

The full interview with Vizman, where we go in depth on the company and its technology, can be read below if you are a Spoon Plus subscriber. Find more information here about subscribing to Spoon Plus. 

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.

Melissa Snover of Nourished on How 3D Printing is the Key to Personalized Food (Spoon Plus)

Since Nourished lies at the intersection of two burgeoning food tech trends — personalization and 3D printing — I reached out to Snover to learn more about Nourished. In our interview she clued me in on how they settled on 3D printing (fun fact: she actually invented the first ever 3D food printer!), why she’s not rushing to link up with DNA analysis, and sets the scene for a futuristic vision where your health is managed autonomously by wearables and home 3D printers.

It was a super cool conversation that gives real insight into where we’re at right now, both in the 3D printing and personalization spheres. You can read the full transcript of my conversation with Snover, complete with synced audio. I also excerpted some of the most noteworthy parts of our conversation below. 

This Spoon Plus Deep Dive conversation is available only to Spoon Plus subscribers. Purchase a Spoon Plus membership to get access to this exclusive content and much more.