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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Ag Tech

Watch as AppHarvest’s Automated Indoor Farm Takes Produce From Pre-Seed to Packaging

Even if you’re aware of controlled environment agriculture, a tech-forward approach to indoor farming that can include techniques such as hydroponics, aquaponics, vertical farming, automation, and more, chances are you haven’t seen a CEA system take a plant from seed to packaging.

Well, today’s your lucky day because we have a video from AppHarvest showing the different stages, from seeding to harvesting to putting it all in a package. The new 4-minute-plus video is a simple b-roll that came to us from AppHarvest as part of the news announcement about their new indoor salad greens farm in Berea, Kentucky.

According to the announcement, the new farm features a touchless growing system that automates the entire lifecycle from pre-seeding to packaging and also includes onsite washing for produce that goes into washed-and-ready-to-eat salad packs. AppHarvest says the new farm can grow about 35 million lettuce plants at a time, going from seed to maturity in about three to four weeks, depending on the variety. That equates to about half a billion lettuce plants produced per year.

AppHarvest built the new facility in partnership with Mastronardi Produce, a company that sells produce such as tomatoes, berries, and salad kits at retail, who provided $30 million in debt financing to AppHarvest to build out the new facility.

You can watch the entire video below or skip to certain portions on Youtube, including harvesting, washing, or packaging.

Watch a completely automated precision farm from seeding to harvesting to packaging.

According to AppHarvest, 5 acres of the new farm is currently operational, and shipping produce. They plan for the new facility to be a total of 15 acres when completed. The company plans to open a 30-acre berry farm in Somerset Kentucky in the next few weeks, a farm which they built using $50 million in USDA-secured debt.

While the new facilities may pump out a whole bunch of produce compared to traditional outdoor acreage, the total number of CEA farms is just a drop in the bucket when compared to the 900 thousand traditional-ag acres there are in the US. According to AppHarvest, the US only has about 6 thousand CEA farm acres, compared with over half a million in Europe.

Doing Avocado-Eaters a Solid the World Over, Apeel Introduces Avocado Freshness Scanning System

Today Apeel announced they would unveil new freshness detection technology for avocados this week at the Fresh Produce Association Global Produce & Floral Show.

The system, based on hyperspectral imaging technology, starts by shining a light that penetrates several millimeters below the skin. From there, it utilizes a sensor to measure how much light is reflected in the visible and near-infrared spectrum. Once scanned, the system’s AI predicts the avocado’s freshness and estimates shelf life by utilizing a “global avocado ripeness model” the company developed using machine learning based on “data on tens of thousands of avocados throughout multiple seasons, blooms, and countries of origin.”

The system, which is the evolution of the technology inherited by Apeel when it acquired Impact Vision last year, will be used in both a commercial implementation targeted at grocery retailers and distributors as well as in a scanner useable consumers to check freshness in the produce aisle.

The commercial-grade technology will feature a scanner and an “AI data model for imaging hardware in produce sorters” at packing houses and distribution centers. According to the announcement, the new scanner will detect freshness five times more quickly than traditional methods such as penetrometers (which poke holes in the produce to detect freshness). In addition, the new software will enable more accurate sorting, enabling distributors to target the proper retail channels based on the remaining shelf life.

While all that sounds great and represents a potentially significant advancement that could significantly reduce food waste, I can’t help but be a little more excited for the consumer retail scanner. If you’re like me, no fruit (yes, it’s a fruit) is more frustrating than the avocado; deliciously sublime when perfectly ripe, but hard as a rock if eaten too early and resembling the decaying flesh of a zombie if you’re just a couple of days too late. If this technology works, my days of throwing avocados into the compost bin may soon be coming to an end.

For Apeel, the new product line represents the first significant new product outside of the food tech unicorn’s flagship life-extension technology. According to the company, the technology will initially be limited to avocadoes, but they indicated they are working on extending it to other produce such as limes, mangos, and mandarins.

Impact Justice Launches Program to Train Incarcerated Populations to Become High-Tech Farmers

This week, Impact Justice announced the launch of Growing Justice, a new program that utilizes precision indoor agriculture to expand access to fresh food in prison communities and provide skills training to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated populations.

The program’s first containerized vertical farm and job training program will be at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, the first of what Impact Justice says will be multiple Growing Justice installations at corrections facilities across California. The second location will be Impact Justice’s Oakland headquarters. Both installations will be hydroponic farms built inside shipping containers outfitted with grow lights and irrigation systems.

The Growing Justice work training program is available to populations within 24 months of their scheduled release date. Those already released can apply to participate in the program. Growing Justice is also working with controlled environment agriculture advisory firm Agritecture to create a six-month training program tailored to give prison populations hands-on experience operating a vertical farm.

The organization is also working with a number of vertical farming startups to create pathways for employment post-training, including Square Roots, Bowery Farming, and Fork Farms.

“People in prison face substantial challenges, including poor and limited food choices. For those released, employment options are limited and healthy food remains difficult to obtain,” says Impact Justice President Alex Busansky. “Growing Justice demonstrates how government, the nonprofit sector, and businesses can work together to improve the quality of food, create pathways to jobs, and give people a real second chance.”

In addition to job training, Growing Justice also provides fresh food to prison populations. According to Impact Justice, a fully operational containerized farm will provide up to 60 pounds of leafy greens and herbs per week. Only 11% of prison populations have regular access to fresh vegetables, and this low access often leads to lingering health problems for prison populations that can often extend well-beyond incarceration.

Growing Justice is the latest program in the vertical farming space launched to help train a new generation of farmers. Kentucky-based Appharvest has been building training centers at schools in low-income areas of Appalachia to give high-school students skills training in vertical farming, while Freight Farms works with schools around the Northeast to launch containerized farms at high schools.

The program by Impact Justice is unique, however, in its focus on bringing rehabilitative programming to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated populations. Initially funded by the California State Legislature, the California Department of Corrections, and an anonymous donor, the program provides a potential pathway for people of color to start businesses and find employment post-incarceration.

The program is a tangible example of how newer approaches to food production can be made as on-ramps for marginalized populations to enter the job market. What makes Growing Justice pretty neat is it’s also a very tech-forward and sustainability-centered approach to farming, a part of the economy where people of color own a tiny percentage of businesses.

Construction of the containerized farm at the Central California Women’s Facility will begin in early 2023, and the organization expects to recruit its first cohort in June next year.

Vienna’s LIVIN Farms Receives €6 million to Upcycle Food Waste Into Insect-Powered Protein

Turning food waste into a usable commodity might seem like magic, but it’s a reality for companies such as Vienna-based LIVIN farms. The company has announced a €6 million Series A round led by venture Investor Peter Luerssen, allowing it to expand its team and solution.

As a player in the alternative protein space, LIVIN Farms developed HIVE PRO, a modular system for fully automated insect processing. HIVE PRO allows waste management companies and large-scale food producers to upcycle organic waste and by-products into valuable proteins, fats, and fertilizers.

In an interview with The Spoon, Katharina Unger, Founder of LIVIN Farms, explained her company’s process. “Livin Farms customers are largely food and feed processing companies and agricultural players that have access to at least several thousand tons of organic by-products every year. They typically make a loss on it by having disposal costs. Generally used feed substrates include by-products, surplus production from the bakery, potato, vegetable, and fruit processing industry, and pre-consumer wastes from retail and grain by-products.”

One of the critical elements of the LIVIN Farms solution is the use of black soldier fly larvae in its “plug-and-play” solution. A module is set up at a customer site, after which, as Unger says, her company operates it as a Farming as a Service (FaaS) model. The first step is when the organic waste of the customer is recycled on-site by being processed and prepared as feed for the insects. After that is completed, using a robotic handling machine moves the feed made from the organic food waste into pallet-sized trays. The machine then inserts seedlings (baby larvae) and empties the harvest-ready larvae from the trays.

At this point, insect Larvae are fed on recycled organic food waste in a climate-controlled environment. The insects are then ready to be harvested within seven days only. The final step is processing the insect larvae into protein powder and oils. The end product is three animal feed types high in protein, antibacterial, and antiviral properties.

LIVIN Farms LIVIN farms recently opened a fully up-and-running 1,400 square meter pilot site in Vienna where the HIVE PRO is demonstrated to interested customers.

Unger began her journey to building LIVIN Farms in 2013, she said. “The idea for Livin farms started when I developed the first device to grow the entire lifecycle of the black soldier fly larvae in a kitchen device to turn kitchen scraps into proteins ready to harvest. This prototype was patented and then turned into a tabletop farm for mealworms (The Hive) later on that was sold in the hundreds to more than 45 countries worldwide. Since 2019, Livin Farms has used our years of R&D to focus on industrial insect farming technologies.”

The company is working on projects throughout Europe, Unger said. LIVIN Farms hopes to have several installations over the next several years.

LIVIN Farms has previously secured a Seed investment round, grants, and subsidies from the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), Austrian Promotional Bank (AWS), and the European Innovation Council (EIC) under the European “Green Deal,” totaling more than $4 million €. The company believes its latest investment will lead to the “further growth of the company and will be used for expanding the LIVIN farms team, standardization of the technical solutions, and driving the initial scale-up phase.”

Israel’s Profuse Technology Raises $2.5M for Technology That Lowers Cost of Cultured Meat

As the world awaits the arrival of cultured meat, manufacturers and their suppliers strategize to cope with the realities of this potentially mammoth market. Infrastructure and product scaling for growth remain a challenge from the supply side. Still, concerns over the pricing of lab-grown meat, poultry, and seafood might be the most significant roadblock to consumer acceptance.

Israeli-based Profuse Technology believes it has a solution to bring manufacturing costs down to a point where a pound of cultured beef could achieve price parity with meat from a live animal. A step forward, the company has announced the completion of a $2.5 million seed funding round (and a total of $3.75m since its establishment). The round is led by New York-based investment firm Green Circle and existing shareholders – OurCrowd, Tnuva, and Tempo. Other new investors include Siddhi Capital, a leader in investments in cultivated meat, and Kayma, the investment arm of De-Levie, a meat industry specialist.

According to the announcement, the company will use the funds to collaborate with cultivated meat producers, obtain FDA regulatory approval, and expand the research and development team and its laboratories. The funds will also position the company to source significant capital raising at the end of the second quarter of 2023 to commercialize its customer collaborations.

Profuse’s solution is based on what it calls “a cocktail” that is added during the period when a harvested animal stem cell begins its proliferation process. As founder and CTO Dr. Tamar Eigler-Hirsh told The Spoon: “You would start with a biopsy, and it could be directly from the muscle tissue or an embryonic stem cell harvested from an animal. The cultivated meat companies would take these cells, bank the most successful ones, and optimize them. They would grow them in bioreactors and expand and expand and proliferate these cells until they have hundreds of millions of cells per milliliter. And then, at some point, they have to differentiate the cells to become muscle tissue or muscle fibers. This is where our media supplement comes in.”

“What we’ve basically found a way was to target this natural biological mechanism of regeneration by understanding the biological pathway that that that’s responsible for that,” Dr. Eigler-Hirsh continues. “There’s one protocol to make muscle, and everybody follows it, and it’s very inefficient. Right now, we’re hearing numbers being reported about between 10% to 30% efficiency in converting stem cells into muscle. And using our technology, we can bump that number up from 30% well to over 90% efficiency in conversion of stem cell to muscle.”

Greater efficiency yields more muscle which in turn leads to cultured meat. The math is simple: a more significant and efficient supply can bring down manufacturing costs, which can be passed on to the consumer.

Profuse founder and CEO Guy Nevo Michrowski goes into further detail on the issue of price parity. . First, you won’t need as many cells to start with because your efficiency of using the cells will be 95%. So instead of going for 30 days, you’re going for only 25 days. And most important, the most expensive days are being saved. So, in the last ten days, where over 85% to 90% of the median cost is consumed, those days are cut by half because you don’t need as many cells. And then also, the differentiation and fusion maturation phase of creating them is now reduced to two days instead of ten. Your overall process is only 27 days versus 40 days, which means your factory can produce 33% more yearly.”

Using technology developed at the Weitzman Institute, the company started in 2021. In 2022 it began collaborating with cultivated meat companies and others who potentially would be our distribution partners. Michrowski said that Profuse is working with the major players in the cultured meat and poultry space” And I would say that of the ten leading companies worldwide, we are working with the vast majority together “to demonstrate and quantify the effects of our cocktail on their specific production environment. We operate with different customers to demonstrate our value in different viable development environments and methods.”

Better Meat Co. Serves Legal Foie Gras To Hungry Silicon Valley Workers

No trip to Silicon Valley would be complete without a visit to one of the sumptuous dining experiences at companies such as Yahoo, Google, Adobe, and LinkedIn. We’re not talking private dining rooms with white table clothes; employees and guests (especially employees) are treated to five-star dining every day, at no charge. And, if someone is hungry between scheduled meals—no worry; there are more snacks on hand than you would find at your neighborhood grocery store.

Thanks to its relationship with Bon Appétit Management Company, a Palo Alto-based café and catering service, Better Meat Co. is pulling a sleight of hand by offering foie gras to the employees at LinkedIn’s Sunnyvale officer cafeteria. The trick here is that foie gras is illegal in California, so Better Meat substitutes fungi for duck or goose liver. For good measure, Better Meat is showcasing its deli turkey slices, also made from mycelium called Rhiza. Rhiza (the Greek word for root) is a whole food, complete protein that’s allergen-free, neutral in taste, and has the texture of animal meat.

Showcasing is the keyword here. At this point in its lifecycle, Better Meat Co. is more of a supplier than a producer, offering its mycoprotein to partners such as Hormel for inclusion in its existing and new products.  As CEO Paul Shapiro explains, Better Meat Co. is focused on what it does best—“Our real expertise is in the fermentation and creating this extremely meat-like and versatile ingredient,” he told The Spoon, “But every once in a while, we like to showcase what the ingredients can do and the fact that it can make things as diverse as a turkey slice and foie gras really showed that. And so, in California, it’s illegal to sell foie gras, but now there is an option to enjoy that same delectable experience.”

Better Meat Co. walks a tightrope like others in the plant-based protein and cultured meat sector. Once a viable product has been developed, they face the option of taking their creations directly to the market (B2C) or taking the safer B2B route where a company offers its product to food manufacturers for their use in existing or new products. Shapiro, known throughout his industry as a visionary, realizes his company can take both paths to success.

In October 2021, Better Meat Co. and Hormel’s venture division entered an exclusive partnership to bring new mycoprotein and plant-based protein products to the marketplace. “Companies like Hormel have dramatically larger product development teams than we do,” Shapiro said. “Once our ingredients are in the hands of experts at companies like Hormel Foods, we are confident that the next generation of alternative meats will be more convincing and economical than ever.”

Perdue is another partner of Better Meat Co. In June 2019, the Sacramento-based company launched a national partnership with Perdue Farms – a leading chicken producer in the U.S. The company will provide Perdue with plant-based blends mixed with Perdue chicken to create the Chicken Plus product line.

While relationships with Hormel and Perdue make sense in the short run, neither, at his point, shows the breadth of Better Meat’s possibilities. In-house products developed by its food scientists and chefs range from Rhiza-based beef to fish to pork and may lead to the company—at some point—going directly to consumers.  “I think you can expect to see that,” Shapiro said of such future plans. “We want to be able to bring our micro protein to as many people as possible, and we want to make it humane, easy to eat and affordable for everyone.”

According to Crunchbase, Better Meat has raised $9.6 million, the bulk of which came in a July 2020 round of $8.1 million. The new funding is led by Greenlight Capital and Green Circle Foodtech Ventures, and Johnsonville, the maker of Johnsonville Sausages. Another financing round would be expected for Better Meat Co to scale enough to bring its branded crabcakes and deli slices to hungry, healthy consumers.

Israeli Startup Mermade Gets Seed Funding for Its Lab-Grown Scallops

Mermade is more than just another food tech startup with a laboratory-oriented process to manufacture an alternative protein. The Jerusalem-based company’s method of using algae to create scallops has set it apart and attracted significant early-stage investment.

The company has announced an oversubscribed $3.3M seed round as it showcases a circular cellular agriculture technology for producing cultivated scallops. In doing so, Mermade attacks two problems at once: bringing sustainable, good-tasting scallops to the public at a below current market price. Most cultured meat companies struggle with the economics of meeting or beating the cost of beef, chicken, or conventional seafood.

In an interview with The Spoon, company Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Einhorn explained the differences in his company’s business and technology approach. “We thought is why not pick some meat product that eliminates as much as possible of that food engineering challenge and just focus on those huge biological challenges,” Einhorn said. “Scallops, they have a fairly similar size, and each unit is a fairly similar size and shape. And texture taste is the same all throughout the cuts. Those are huge unfair advantages compared to our direct competition– other startups trying to replicate the more complex meat products.”

Mermade says it is the first company in the world to produce scallops using cellular agriculture. The company intends to develop a product and reach laboratory-scale production by 2023, reaching consumers and restaurants after that. Mermade will use the funds to employ more stem cell and algae researchers, accelerating the company towards this goal. The scallop is the first product the company will develop out of a diverse seafood portfolio that will gradually arrive on the market.

The use of algae to recycle the cells’ growth substrate is a clear distinction for Mermade. This cellular interpretation of traditional aquaponics was termed by the company Cytoponics, and the company has filed several patent applications related to this circular production method.

Related to the cost issue, Einhorn states, “It’s a big market segment and one that it has a very high price point, which is important because the main challenge right now is driving costs down. We’re trying to integrate all parts of our design into this prototype to bring cost even close to market parity.”

“In the next few years, consumers worldwide will be able to buy cultivated scallops (Coquilles Saint Jacques) made by Mermade in a supermarket or restaurant, at an affordable price and with the same quality and taste as the original food. Using Cytoponics as our production platform, we could also produce a variety of other cultivated seafood products such as calamari, shrimp, crab meat, and more.”

The company was founded in July 2021 by Daniel Einhorn (CEO), Dr. Rotem Kadir (CTO), and Dr. Tomer Halevy (COO). Investors in the seed round include the investment platform OurCrowd, Israel’s most active venture firm; Fall Line, an American VC fund specializing in AgTech; and prominent Dutch investor Sake Bosch.

Alternative seafood—both plant-based and cell-cultured—is a hot area. As The Spoon reported in April, Good Food Institue’s report, which looks at the entire alternative seafood category across plant-based, cell-cultured, and fermentation-based products, said 2021 investment brought the total invested in the category to $313 million from 2013 through 2021. Cultivated seafood startups commanded two-thirds of all investment in alt-seafood last year at $115 million, compared with $58 million invested in plant-based seafood startups and $2 million in fermentation-based seafood.

Among the companies active in this space are Wildtype, UPSIDE Foods, Gathered Foods, and Finless Foods. With all the activity in this forward-looking space, the United States—in the form of the USDA and FDA—has yet to give the green light for sales of these lab-grown alternative proteins. Only Singapore, Qatar, and to some degree, The Netherlands have given their stamp of approval.

Zero Acre Farms Launches a Healthy Cultured Cooking Oil That Tastes Good and Saves the Planet

By his own admission, Zero Acre Farms founder Jeff Nobbs is a thinking man’s entrepreneur. And while he has taken a somewhat circumventous route to the world of healthy food and environmental well-being, diet and nutrition have always been at the forefront of his life.

“Looking backward, even in middle school, I was, you know, the weird kid who brought in chicken breast and radishes for lunch,” Nobbs told The Spoon in a recent interview. “And because I thought that was just the healthiest thing. And I didn’t drink sodas growing up because I thought they were bad. So why would I do something bad? Even then, it always kind of puzzled me that there was so much conflicting advice regarding diet and nutrition.”

Years later, with e-commerce and food industry successes under his belt, Nobbs’ Zero Acre Farm is bringing to market a cultured cooking oil (actually a multipurpose oil) that checks all the boxes. Not only is it healthier than alternatives such as corn oil, soybean oil, and canola oil, Nobb’s new entry into the market uses less water in its production and engages in no deforestation.

Some of the benefits of Zero Acre Farm’s oil include a higher smoke point than heart-healthy olive oil; heat-stable monounsaturated fats (35% more than olive oil; and low linoleic acid (aka 10x less “bad fats” than even avocado oil). By comparison, one cup of corn oil, one of the more common cooking oils, contains 28 grams of saturated fat and 199 grams of polyunsaturated fat.

Moving from e-commerce Extrabux to starting a healthy restaurant in 2015 in San Francisco allowed Nobbs to tap into his lifelong passion for food and forced him to “turn on the fire hose” and gather as much information as he could from varied sources.

“I did not want to make the same mistakes that others have made and learn from others,” Nobbs said. “So I gathered knowledge from my co-founders and a long list of people that each contributed a little bit. And I kind of take each conversation and create my own mosaic.”

One of the lessons Nobbs learned, which has been steadfast in his restaurant, Kitava, and now with Zero Acre, is that creating good-tasting food is as essential as providing health benefits and helping with climate change.

”We’re not going to bring products to market where people must make a sacrifice or where they feel like to do the right thing to the planet,” Nobbs explained. “I think it’s unrealistic to expect consumers to make a sacrifice on one of those critical areas such as taste, and we focused on that from the start of our product.”

Zero Acre Farms employs a fermentation process Nobbs says is between precision fermentation and biomass fermentation. Using his business acumen to its fullest, Zero Acre uses a third party to produce its product at scale, which the founder states will allow it to hit the ground running with a substantial supply of products.

“We’ve seen some companies start with the new product and have 150 units available for sale. We’re not taking that approach; we’re making thousands of units available for sale, and we’re at a commercial scale,” Nobbs says.

After its launch, Nobbs believes there are opportunities to produce food products—such as snack foods—that use cultured oil and a solid fat variety that could take the place of butter or margarine.

While Zero Acre Farms’ product is available today exclusively on its website, in the future Nobbs hopes to bring the product to retail.

With European Governmental Approval, Ynsect Moves Forward With Its Plan to Feed the World, Save the Climate

Will bugs save the world?

Save may be a strong word, but Paris-based Ynsect, a producer of insect protein and natural insect fertilizers, believes in the dual mission of feeding the world and protecting our diminishing climatic resources. That vision moves a step forward with backing from a European food safety agency and data that supports a change in consumer attitudes toward a diet containing bugs and insects.

According to Ynsect’s CEO Antoine Hubert, approval by the European Food Standard Agency for Ynsect’s Lesser mealworm for human consumption will allow his company to quickly move forward with its efforts to create its line of insect-based products as well as work with third-part food manufacturers.

“Our company was born from a passion for helping tackle climate change through real solutions. Insect protein, which can easily be incorporated as a powder into a whole range of products, is healthier than plant protein and more environmentally friendly than traditional animal proteins,” Hubert told The Spoon in a recent interview. “We’re excited to see the EFSA approval come through in line with consumer demands; conscious consumers become increasingly informed of better choices for both them and the environment.”

Coinciding with the EFSA green light results from an independent research firm gave further credence to Ynsect’s timing. OnePoll, a British market research company, surveyed consumers to gauge their willingness of participants to consume insects as an alternative source of protein. At first, only 59% were open to the idea, but after learning the benefits of insect consumption, over 70% responded favorably. More than half of vegans and vegetarians responded favorably once the benefits were explained.

Mealworms are the larval form of the mealworm and Buffalo beetles, an insect that Hubert says is rich in protein and fat. The mealworm as a bug has been part of Southeast Asian diets and can reproduce prolifically. Ynsect uses vertical farming techniques to “grow” these insects and deploys chemical-free produce to turn them into a range of products, including fertilizers and pet food. Recently, Ynsect expanded its footprint by acquiring Protifarm, a Dutch mealworm producer, and then by incorporating Nebraska-based Jord Producers, a start-up mealworm farm, into its portfolio.

Ynsect’s consumer product is called AdalbaPro, a minimally processed ingredient line offering meat replacement and protein fortification solutions. Working with European partners, AdalbaPro products are already in several baked goods, sports nutrition, pasta, and meat alternatives. AdalbaPro contains all essential amino acids, vitamins, and minerals as a high-quality animal protein.

As Hubert chronicles his company’s path, not only has it shown organic growth by evolving from a fertilizer/aquaculture company to pet food and then to a product for humans, but Ynsect’s approach has also overcome the issue other alternative protein companies face in building infrastructure. The company has carefully conducted its mealworm growing processing plan, which allows it to remain nimble for an opportunity in Europe and, hopefully, after governmental approval, the U.S.

To date, Ynsect has raised more than $400 million from such companies as OurCrowd, SuperNova Invest, and Caisse d’Epargne. The company also has captured the imagination of the real-life Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. The actor/investor recently touted Ynsect’s product on Steve Colbert’s late-night show.

(Extract) Robert Downey Jr - The late Colbert show with Stephen Colbert

Germany-Based Mushlabs Scores An Infrastructure Partnership with Bitburger Brewery Group

Hamburg-based biotech startup Mushlabs may have created the perfect storm in its approach to creating a clean, nutrient-rich plant-based meat alternative. The company can hit the ground running without worrying about costly infrastructure and potential distribution partners by applying its proven technology and a sound business approach.

Mushlabs has announced a relationship with Bitburger Brewery Group, a large private brewery in Germany. Bitburger will provide capacity and sidestream byproducts from its beer production as raw materials. Mushlabs intends to enhance and use these local byproducts to cultivate edible mushroom mycelium in a precision fermentation process. The mycelium will be used to produce nutrient-rich, minimally processed foods.

“(Bitburger) has a valuable sidestream that would otherwise get burned to produce energy or go to cattle, but is also not necessarily super stable,” Thibault Godard, Chief Science Officer at Mushlabs, told The Spoon in an interview. “So we are offering them a solution to upcycle in a way that is also better for the planet.”

Godard boils the complex process down to a simple example: “I like the example of coffee. For instance, coffee has 80 to 90% of waste from the crop to the cup. And this is also something where you have valuable nutrients there that you can recycle and produce food. So we are basically taking the leftovers and injecting them into the food system.”

The approach—that is, using mycelium, which has a property that acts as a natural decomposing agent in precision fermentation to create a healthy plant-based protein is what Mushlabs called fulfilling the goal of a “circular economy.”

“In natural ecosystems, fungi recycle nutrients through a specific fermentation process that digests their surrounding biomass,” the company explained in a blog post. “At Mushlabs, we harness this process to produce food from agro- and food industries’ side streams (i.e., spent coffee grounds, fruit peels, and sugarcane bagasse). This is a unique form of food production with many potential applications for the circular economy, yielding tasty meat-alternative products.”

And then there’s the smart business angle. While other companies in similar adjacencies struggle to raise large sums of capital to scale out their facilities with large fermentation tanks, Mushlabs’ partnership with Bitburger will accelerate its growth. Using often underutilized brewing tanks, Mushlabs avoids the cost of new infrastructure. CEO and founder Mazen Rizk acknowledges collocating with Bitburger gives his company a giant boost.

“And not only saving the cost, but it’s also saving the time. Because if we now decide we want to build the facility, I think ordering steel would take you probably a year and a half because there are delays in even ordering steel. Then building a facility is very costly and takes time,” Rizk says.

“When you’re talking about food products. It would be best if you did it in the most economically viable way possible so we can find a sidestream that the mushroom can grow on,” Rizk says. “So part of it is understanding what kind of product you can do, what kind of taste, what kind of nutrition they provide. The other side is understanding which one is economically feasible. How can you produce it at a high yield and low cost to ensure that you have a food product that can go into the market at a price that people can afford?”

In June, the company also boasts a huge financial acknowledgment from the EU’s prestigious EIC Accelerator Program. More than 1,000 startups and small businesses from Europe applied to receive a share of €382 million in total capital. Seventh-four companies each will get funding of up to 17.5 million Euros, with Mushlabs receiving an eight-digit figure. Through the EIC Accelerator program, the EU aims to support technology startups that address societal challenges and drive breakthrough European innovations.

Tropic Biosciences Raises $35M For Gene-Editing & RNAi Platform Aimed at Developing Tropical Crops

Agriculture scientists have continuously worked to evolve coffee crops to battle an ever-changing climate for much of the past century.

Some of the most famous examples of these efforts are from the 60s and 70s, in which horticulturists and ag scientists worked to develop hybrids to fight against an invasive coffee tree fungus (called leaf rust) that was propagating across the coffee belt of Latin America. Plant-breeding work done by research centers in Portugal and Columbia helped to create hybrids that combined the flavor of Arabica flavor properties with the fungus-fighting properties of Robusta.

While this work resulted in much more robust coffee varietials that have produced the bulk of coffee over the past few decades, coffee breeders today are struggling to keep up with the accelerating change in climate across the world that is making it ever-harder for coffee farmers to grow their crops.

Enter gene editing. Newer technologies such as CRISPR utilize genetic manipulation techniques that involve changing an organism’s DNA, so instead of spending decades to create new varietals that combine the desirable characteristics of different breeds through traditional breeding techniques, gene editing can get there an order of magniture faster by editing out specific genetic traits.

However, gene editing still requires a significant amount of time to identify the host genes that need to be edited out. To accelerate this process even further, a company called Tropic Biosciences has developed a proprietary platform that combines gene-editing techniques such as CRISPR with another biotechnology process called RNA interference, or RNAi, to accelerate the gene discovery cycle and help develop new varietals much more quickly.

In a nutshell, Tropic Biosciences enables editing to a host’s DNA to alter the target of RNA interference, allowing for direct targeting of select target genes to degrade protein production. Genes that belong to the host (such as a gene that, for example, makes a crop more sensitive to high temperature) or genes that belong to viruses, pests, or fungi (like leaf rust) can be targeted in order to protect the host against these organisms.

The company’s unique platform (called GEiGS, short for “gene-editing induced gene-silencing”), is being used to develop its own product pipeline, which as you can probably guess by its name, is focused on tropical crop commodities such as coffee, bananas, and rice. The company is also working with other clients in the world of agriculture to license the GEiGS platform to develop new crops or avian flu resistance in poultry.

Tropic’s platform has attracted $35 million in new funding. The round, announced today, includes lead investor Blue Horizon and ADQ, Bloom8 (previously Rage Capital), Skyviews Life Science, Sucden Ventures, and Tekfen Ventures, among others.

Coming Out of Stealth, Paleo Unveils Six Animal-Free, GMO-Free Varieties of Heme

In 2024, imagine walking into Burger King and ordering a mammoth burger. No, not one that is bigger than your head; this Whopper will taste like the extinct proboscideans that roamed the earth millions of years ago. It’s all part of the magic from a Belgium-based food ingredient company called Paleo.

After two years, Paleo has come out of stealth mode to announce its technology to bring the authentic taste and aroma of meat and fish to plant-based meat and fish alternatives with a non-GMO, animal-free heme. As part of that announcement, the World International Property Organization has published Paleo’s patent application, finally allowing Paleo to share details of its precision fermentation technology. 

Hermes Sanctorum, CEO and co-founder of Paleo: “When we set out to create the ultimate animal-free meat or fish experience, we quickly zeroed in on heme. Without exaggeration, we can say that we cracked the code of heme, allowing us to produce GMO-free heme that’s bio-identical to the most popular meats and tuna – as well as mammoth.”

More about the mammoth burger shortly.

Heme, a precursor to hemoglobin, is an essential molecule found in every living plant and animal. In short, it makes meat taste like meat, giving it its mouthfeel and umami sensation. Paleo has created a bio-identical heme that, through precision fermentation, can be adapted to add a specific taste to beef, pork, chicken, and even fish. Heme is essential when it comes to resembling conventional meat products. Heme is responsible for the taste and color of meat. Before cooking, heme will give meat alternatives a red color that turns brown during cooking. Heme also offers superior nutritional value. The iron in heme is easier for the human body to absorb than iron in vegetables.

In an interview with The Spoon, CEO Sanctorum explains the process: “We make the yeast release the protein to the environment, which means you can separate your protein. It’s a pure protein that you have separated from the yeast cells, making it a non-GMO product. We can produce an animal protein identical to what you find in nature but on top GMO-free. So that’s, I think, our unique proposition.”

“It’s like basically like brewing beer,” Sanctorum goes on to explain. “Instead of making alcohol, it makes a protein that you want. Instead of brewing or making wine, it’s producing the animal heme.”

Although the company has been working on its technology since 2020, its patent announcement is a significant step forward that inches closer to realizing a finished product. Sanctorum expects to have market-ready products in 2023, even with the number of steps that need to be tackled. Given precision fermentation at scale is a cap-ex-heavy investment, one reason to share their patent with the world is to attract investors. To date, Paleo has raised $2.5 million in seed funding and $ 2.5M in seed funding and is working on a Series A round to bring its products to the market and broaden its portfolio. 

Another issue is the breadth of products. The ability to create a variety of hemes may sparkle in a press release, but, as Sanctorum acknowledges, focusing on one area to start is a more prudent approach for a young company. Part of that B2B process is working closely with prospective customers. “A lot will depend on demand from our clients,” he said. “We are talking to big and small food manufacturers like small ones, and it will be all about testing those heme proteins and to see how they behave in their commercial recipes.”

Opening its technology kimono also brings potential challenges for Paleo from other companies working on similar approaches. Impossible Foods filed a lawsuit against Motif Foodworks, claiming the company’s HEMAMI protein derived from precision fermentation infringed on Impossible’s patent for making plant-based burgers containing 0.1% to 5% heme protein. Sanctorum calls the legal battle a “side event” and refuses to let it impede his or Paleo’s vision moving forward.

Back to the mammoth burger. Creating hemes for popular foods of today’s world is obvious, but reaching back hundreds of centuries—the question is why?

“Well, it was basically it started as a challenge to us,” Sanctorum said. “I mean, we were thinking, okay, if we can make the obvious ones, can we do that for an ancient protein that doesn’t exist anymore?”

Perhaps the better answer is, why not?