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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Alternative Protein

Remilk Launches Recombinant Protein Powered Milk in Israel, Eyes US Launch in 2026.

After spending half a decade (and $150 million in funding) developing recombinant proteins made via precision fermentation, Remilk announced last week the launch of what it’s calling New Milk in partnership with Gad Dairies, one of Israel’s largest dairy distributors. Remilk announced that under the new partnership, they and Gad will begin a nationwide rollout of their new product in their home country of Israel.

Real Milk, which will contain 75% less sugar than regular milk, will be manufactured in Spain via a contract manufacturer. The company indicated it will also distribute its milk to cafes and coffee shops and will follow with retailers later this year. The company is eyeing a US market launch in 2026.

To learn more about ReMiIk’s new product and its US market plans, I decided to catch up with the company’s CEO, Avi Wolff. Our conversation ranged from the technical challenges of rebuilding milk from a single protein to what he learned while working with big CPGs and how the company approaches scaling without building its own mega-plants. The answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

Let’s start with the basics. What is The New Milk, and how are you making it?

“We’re using yeast and precision fermentation to produce beta-lactoglobulin, the primary whey protein in milk. And we’re also responsible for the formulation and the manufacturing of the finished product, while Gad will be handling distribution.

“So we are producing milk in bottles at a commercial scale, and this is the product that we’re launching. We’ve already distributed thousands of gallons of milk to consumers, to cafés and restaurants.”

Remilk started as a B2B ingredients company. Why step into finished products and a consumer-facing brand?

“We started as a B2B company selling the ingredients to CPGs. We piloted some products with General Mills three years ago, and what we realized is that a whole lot of innovation and skill sets are required to turn this subset of protein into a delicious dairy product. So we’ve stepped in and we’ve decided to take ownership of the entire value chain from the production of the protein to the production of the finished product. We’ve spent almost six years after raising $150 million in developing the formulation, and this is why we are now ready to launch.”

Can you tell us more about your joint venture with Gad Dairies?. How does that partnership actually work?

“We knew establishing a pure B2C business model is complex and would take a lot of time. We also recognize that this is not within our area of expertise. In simple terms, we believe that distribution and sales are more of a commodity, allowing us to utilize other partners.

“So we decided to partner and establish a new company. We’ve built a new venture with one of the largest dairy companies in Israel. This new company is co-owned by Remilk and Gad and each party is responsible for different parts of the value chain. Distribution, sales and all the logistics around it is taken care of by Gad and everything else is managed by us.”

“We manufacture the finished product, they take it, they store it, they load it on the trucks, and they’re responsible for selling it and driving it to the point of sales, whether it’s retail or foodservice. And obviously, each party has their own KPIs and objectives.”

Is the reason you are looking at North America next because of Europe’s anti-GMO stance?

“Yes, that’s the primary reason.”

How is your product different than Perfect Day’s or other precision fermentation-derived dairy?

“I think it’s in the small breakthroughs and how you take this protein and make it more functional, and how you create a specific flavor profile. If you mix protein with water and fats, it doesn’t taste like milk, and it will not work in coffee like milk. So you need to enhance functionality, and you need to enhance flavoring and aroma and everything. And this is something that we’ve been doing, I would say, perfectly.”

You mentioned you had worked with big CPGs such as General Mills and you needed to take more control over the process. What did you mean by that?

“We worked with them, helping and supporting them in their development process. But the development process, despite the fact that it was sometimes even two years with ongoing developments, we felt that the product was not good enough.”

“And I think that there are many explanations to this, but I think the primary one is the fact that the skill sets that these CPGs have in their existing R&D centers are just completely different from the ones you need different skill sets than what you need to develop dairy products from a single subset of protein.”

“We have 100 employees in Remilk, 70% of them are scientists, PhDs in biology, chemistry, and they’re developing the products. We’re not just traditional food scientists who used to work at the large dairy companies, because we’re conducting deep research on the protein, on the flavoring, on the milk itself. We analyze the milk in order to understand how to mimic the specific smell and taste.”

What is your timeline for a US launch?

“Definitely for the next six to nine months, our focus is going to be succeeding in Israel. Again, we believe that given the nature of this market, we can reach strong momentum relatively quickly.

“While most of the company’s operations will remain in Israel and focus on the Israeli launch, a few key employees and I will begin negotiating a similar deal with a U.S. partnership. A US partnership is definitely something we’re aiming for in 2026.”

We Talked With Nectar About Their Plans to Build an AI for Better Tasting Alt Proteins

A few weeks ago, the philanthropic investment platform Food System Innovations announced that it had received a $2 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund. FSI’s non-profit group NECTAR has been building a large dataset of consumers’ sensory responses to alt proteins, and the grant will help NECTAR to continue working on, in partnership with Stanford University, an AI model “that connects molecular structure, flavor, texture, and consumer preference.” The goal, according to NECTAR, is to create an open-source tool for CPGs and other food industry players to develop more flavorful—and hopefully better-selling—sustainable proteins.

I’d been following NECTAR for some time and have been closely tracking the impact of AI on food systems, so I thought it would be a good time to connect with NECTAR. I’d talked about the project briefly with Adam Yee, the chief food scientist who helped with the project, while I was in Japan, and this week I caught up with NECTAR managing director Caroline Cotto to get the full download on the project and where it’s all going.

Below is my interview with Caroline.

What are you building with this new Bezos Earth Fund grant?

“One of the things Nectar is doing is we just won a $2 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund to take our sensory data and build a foundation model that will predict sensory. So we kind of bypass the need for doing these very expensive consumer panels, and then also predict market success from formulation. It’s intended to be sort of a food scientist’s best friend in terms of new product ideation.”

For people who don’t know Nectar, what’s the core mission, and how did this AI project start?

“Basically, Nectar is trying to amass the largest public data set on how sustainable protein products taste to omnivores. That’s what we have set out to do. We’re building that, and we are working heavily with academics to operationalize that data.

Over a year and a half ago, we started talking to the computer science folks at Stanford to say, like, what are things we could do with this novel data set that we’re creating? It happened to be around that time that the phase one Bezos Earth grant was opening up for their AI grand challenge. I connected Adam with the Stanford team, and they did some initial work on LLMs and found that it was able to do some of this support for food scientists. They published a paper together that came out in January for ICML, the largest machine learning conference, and we ended up winning that phase one grant, which then allowed us to apply for the phase two grant that we just found out about in October.”

From a technical standpoint, what kind of AI are you actually building?

“I am not an AI scientist myself here, so we are heavily partnered with Stanford and their computer science team, but it is an LLM base. We’re basically fine-tuning an LLM to be able to do this sensory prediction work, and it’s a multi-modal approach. There’s a similar project that’s been done out of Google DeepMind called Osmo for smell and olfactory, and we’re working with some of the folks that worked on that in order to model taste and sensory more broadly, and then connect that to sales outcomes.”

How does the Bezos Earth Fund AI Grand Challenge work in terms of phases and funding?

“It’s the Bezos Earth Fund AI Grand Challenge for Climate and Nature. It’s $30 million going to these projects. There were 15 phase two winners that each received $2 million and have to deliver over two years.

The phase one was a $50,000 grant to basically work on your idea and prepare a submission for phase two. We spent about six months preparing, trying to connect this Nectar data set with sales data and see which sensory attributes are most predictive of sales success, and also connecting the Nectar sensory data set to molecular-level ingredient data sets. Ideally the chain of prediction would be: can you predict sensory outcome from just putting in an ingredient list, and if so, what about sensory is predictive of sales success? We’re working on the different pieces of that predictive chain.”

What does your sensory testing process look like in practice?

“It’s all in-person blind taste testing. In our most recent study, we tested 122 plant-based meat alternatives across 14 categories. Each product was tried by a minimum of 100 consumers. They come to a restaurant where we’ve closed down the restaurant for the day, but we want to give them that more authentic experience. They try probably six products in a sitting, one at a time, and everything is blind, so they don’t know if they’re eating a plant-based product or an animal-based product and then they fill out a survey as they’re trying the product.”

How big is the data set now, and what’s coming next?

“We do an annual survey called the Taste of the Industry. For 2024, we tested about 45 plant-based meat products. For 2025, we tested 122 plant-based meat products. Outside of that, we have our emerging sector research, which are smaller reports. We’ve done two of those, and both have been on this category we’re calling balanced protein or hybrid products that combine meat. We’ve tested just under 50 products total in that category as well.

We’re testing blends of things like meat plus plant-based meat, meat plus mushrooms, meat plus microprotein, meat plus just savory vegetables in general. For 2026, our Taste of the Industry report is on dairy alternatives. We’re testing 100 dairy alternatives across 10 categories, and that will come out in March.”

When you overlap taste scores with sales data, what have you seen so far?

“The Nectar data set is mostly just focused on sensory. That’s the core of what we do. We are also interested in answering the question ‘do better-tasting products sell more?’ In our last report, we conducted an initial analysis of overlapping sensory data with sales data, finding that better-tasting categories capture a greater market share than worse-tasting categories. Better-tasting products are capturing greater market share than worse-tasting products. In certain categories, that seems to be agnostic of price. Even though the product might be more expensive, if it tastes better, it is capturing a greater market share.

We’re currently working with some data providers to get more granular on this sales data connection, because that analysis was from publicly available sales data. In this AI project, we are trying to connect sensory performance with sales more robustly to see which aspects of sensory are predictive of sales success. It’s hard because there are a ton of confounding variables; we have to figure out how to control for marketing spend, store placement, placement on shelf, that sort of thing. But we have access to the Nielsen consumer panel, this huge data set of grocery store transactions over many years, from households that have agreed to have all of their transactions tracked. We’re able to see what consumers are purchasing over time, and we’re trying to connect the sensory cassette to that.”

You also mentioned bringing ingredient lists and molecular data into the model. How does that fit in?

“We’re trying to say, there are a lot of black boxes in food product development because flavors are a black box. We don’t have a lot of visibility into companies’ actual formulations. We’re trying to determine if we can extract publicly available information from the ingredient list and identify the molecular-level components of those ingredients, and then determine if any correlations can be drawn between them.

It’s all of these factors plus images of the products and trying to see if we can predict that.”

What do you actually hope to deliver at the end of the two-year grant?

“The idea is to deliver an open source tool for the industry to use. The goal would be that you can put in all the constraints you have for sustainability, cost, nutrition, and demographic need, and that it would help you get to an endpoint where you don’t have to do a bunch of bench-top trials and then expensive sensory.”

How do you think about open source, data privacy, and companies actually using this tool?

“Data privacy is a big thing in this space. We don’t have any interest in companies sharing their proprietary formulations with us. The goal is that they would be able to utilize this tool, download it to their personal servers, and put in their private information and use it to make better products. If we’re rapidly increasing the speed at which these products come to market and they are actually successful, that would be a success for us.

There are other efforts in this space, from NotCo to IFT. Where does Nectar fit?

“I think everybody is trying to do similar things, but with slightly different inputs and different approaches. We are open to collaborating and learning from people. Our end goal is a mission-driven approach here, not to make a ton of money, so it depends on whether or not those partners are aligned with that goal.

IFT has trained its model on all of the IFT papers that have been published over the many years of its organization being around. We’re training our model on our proprietary dataset around sensory data, so there’s some nuance between things. They’re really focused on developing formulations, but there is a limitation to what you can do with that tool. It’ll tell you, ‘here’s how to make a plant-based bacon, add bacon flavoring,’ but there are 10 huge suppliers that provide bacon flavoring, and it doesn’t provide a ton of granularity on at what concentration and from what supplier.”

What’s the bigger climate mission you’re trying to advance with this work?

“Nectar’s specific directive is, how do we make these products favorable and delicious? We know that we need to reduce meat consumption in order to stay within the two degrees of climate warming, and we’re not going to get there by just telling people, ‘eat less steak.’ We have to use that whole lever and make the products really delicious so that people will be incentivized to buy them more and reduce consumption of factory-farmed meat.”

Answers have been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

Paul Shapiro’s Better Meat Company Forges a Path to Success (and New Funding) Through Pragmatism

As meat prices soar to record highs, The Better Meat Co. (BMC) announced this week that it has closed an oversubscribed $31 million Series A round to scale its patented mycoprotein fermentation platform to commercial levels. The West Sacramento–based company plans to bring its Rhiza mycoprotein to market at prices lower than U.S. commodity ground beef by 2026.

The round was co-led by Future Ventures and Resilience Reserve, with participation from Epic Ventures, Sigma Ventures, Hickman’s Family Farms CEO Glenn Hickman, and others. Both Hickman and Future Ventures co-founder Steve Jurvetson will join BMC’s board.

“We’ve invented and patented our tech, received regulatory approval, scaled to a demonstration plant, and proven demand exists for Rhiza mycoprotein. It’s now time to fully commercialize and introduce our new crop that will help the protein industry cut costs and improve nutrition, all with a much lighter footprint,” CEO Paul Shapiro said in announcing the round.

Shapiro, who has been one of the leading evangelists in the alt-protein space since the publication of his book Clean Meat in 2018, has remained unwavering in his push to end animal agriculture. At the same time, he has taken a pragmatic approach to building alternatives that can gain real traction in the marketplace.

“Even in 2018, I believed that cultivated meat was still something that would be a long time before it made any real dent in the meat market, I wanted to make an impact sooner,” Shapiro told me last year on The Spoon Podcast. That desire for immediate impact, he said, is why he shifted to mycoprotein.

The decision was also shaped by the limitations of plant proteins. “It became very clear that there were a lot of limitations to using plant proteins like flavor, ingredient lists, allergenicity, and volatility in supply chains,” Shapiro said. By contrast, mycoprotein offered better functionality, fewer allergens, and lower costs at scale.

Shapiro and BMC eventually honed in on a strain of Neurospora, which he described as “much more meat-like than Quorn’s product, doesn’t have to be frozen, can be used as a single ingredient, and now has both FDA and USDA approval.”

Shapiro’s pragmatism extended beyond focusing on mycoprotein. He recognized that consumers and mainstream meat brands were not ready to give up animal agriculture altogether, and he saw hybrid products as a way to show early impact and win adoption.

BMC’s early partnership with Perdue Farms led to the successful Chicken Plus line, still on shelves five years later. Shapiro believes hybridization can unlock far greater impact than niche plant-based options. “Imagine if in addition to offering the Impossible Whopper, Burger King were to make the conventional Whopper 20% plant-based. All of a sudden, you’ve got a ten-fold reduction in meat without having to persuade one person to make a different decision.”

With the new round, BMC plans to scale its fermentation facility tenfold and prepare for the commercial rollout of Rhiza in 2026.

At the core, Shapiro’s motivation remains unchanged. His focus on scalability and consumer adoption has now resulted in fresh funding in a difficult fundraising environment and set the company on a pathway toward strong growth.

In a summer when some are claiming cultivated meat is making a comeback thanks to new regulatory approvals, and when highly processed, tech-forward plant-based meats from the likes of Beyond and Impossible are still struggling to find traction, Shapiro has shown that practicality and meeting consumers, retailers, and CPG partners where they are is a winning strategy.

Still, his long-term focus has not shifted. “Maybe in 20 years, people will be shocked if they find out that people are still eating meat from slaughtered animals. They’ll think, ‘why aren’t you using the obviously better innovation that came up with?’”


Tasting Cultivated Seafood in London’s East-end

In London’s East End, a food revolution is bubbling – a high-tech movement promising to change our way of life. Although still in its infancy, with significant early-stage obstacles to overcome, it could become the biggest agricultural disruptor since the advent of farming. I’m talking about cellular agriculture – meat, fish, milk, proteins, and fats – grown in bioreactors, rather than in farmyards.

Recently, I was invited to try it for myself, and I was keen to give it a go. 

The invitation read, “We would like to invite you to an intimate tasting experience hosted by Umami Bioworks (Umami).” It continued, “At this tasting, you will have the opportunity to sample two of our signature product categories: Cultivated White Fish — prepared in a classic fish & chips style. Cultivated Caviar — traditionally presented to highlight its sensory experience.”

Umami is a Singapore-based cultivated seafood company with offices in Japan, the USA, and Europe. It’s applying for approval to sell cultivated fish in several jurisdictions, including the UK, South Korea, the USA, and Singapore. Umami is partnering with Nestle Purina in line with its ambition to launch a tuna-flavoured pet food in the UK.

On 28th May this year, Wildtype’s salmon became the first cultivated seafood to be made available to consumers anywhere in the world , having received approval from the FDA, and the third cultivated protein to enter the US market. But because Umami doesn’t yet have regulatory approval, tastings of its cultivated seafood are by invitation only. 

Twelve of us were seated at the table in the trendy East London basement kitchen, which gleamed with polished utensils, pans, and white tiles, and unsurprisingly smelled of cooking fish. The director of food science, Dr Lou Kutzler, was in the kitchen overseeing the cooking process, which, he assured us, was just like cooking any normal piece of fish fillet.

Having verbally agreed that we had no allergies, we signed a consent form. The same document outlined the purpose of the tasting, which was “to assess the sensory properties and overall product acceptability of cell-cultivated seafood products prior to their market launch.”   

We grilled the CEO, Mihir Pershad, and Dr Lou Kutzler as we awaited our first dish – about cell lines, flavours, and ingredients. Mihir answered with cautious frankness. Although he was unable to tell us what the scaffold was, what the hybrid sections of the dish consisted of, nor what percentage of the fillet was cultivated, he did try to answer our questions, and seemed genuinely interested to know what we thought of the food.

Beer Battered Cultivated Fish Fillet

The fish was cooked in beer batter and arranged delicately on the plate, alongside a block of sculpted chips, some red cabbage, and a dollop of tartar sauce. As I bit into the fish, a shiver washed over my back and face – perhaps it was the momentousness of the event itself, or maybe it was a sense of trepidation. After all, I was about to eat something which very few people in the world had ever tried – and which hadn’t been approved for consumption anywhere. And what’s more, because we knew little about its contents we were eating it blind, on trust.

So how did it taste?

Beer Battered Cultivated Fish Fillet

Beer Battered Cultivated Fish Fillet

The product tasted just like fish. It looked and smelled like fish, too. The texture and mouth-feel, however, was slightly off the mark – a little harder and more jelly-like – not as flaky as white fish should normally be. Lou assured us that the texture and mouth-feel could be resolved at the production stage. I’ve heard this critique before from people who have tasted the chicken equivalent, in the USA and Singapore – the mouth-feel dilemma.

The market for seafood, in the UK alone, was worth £10 billion in 2023, according to the Marine Management Organisation, and worldwide the numbers are enormous. Cultivated fish has been listed by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as a potential solution to currently damaging fishing practices, and to the massive depletion in stock, especially tuna. WWF reported that bluefin tuna have “been overfished to near extinction globally, and if not managed effectively, the world’s tuna fisheries face an ecological disaster.” Umami recently announced a cultivated tuna co-development partnership with Japanese company Maruha Nichiro , the world’s biggest seafood company and a leading supplier of tuna.

Back in central London, where one cultivated fish product would have been plenty for our adventurous palettes, we were being served up a second helping of cell-grown caviar. We had been briefed that the dish was a top-end, Beluga-like caviar product – a more subtle tasting, creamier and less fishy caviar than others. We were told Beluga caviar melts in your mouth, rather than bursts like the cheaper variety. It was served with sour cream on blinis, arranged delicately on a fancy spoon. Since none of us had tasted Beluga, we all agreed the cultivated caviar didn’t live up (or down) to our experiences – it had less flavour and the consistency was more soluble. Unfortunately, the sour cream and blini somewhat overpowered it. Perhaps we weren’t the right people to appreciate the product given our inexperienced tastes. 

Cell-Cultivated Caviar

Cultivated caviar seems, at least price-wise, like a sensible product to launch, as cultivated foods will (at least in the early days) be sold at a premium, until scale-up brings the price down. But I couldn’t help wondering whether the appeal of this luxury caviar, to those wealthy individuals able to afford it, is at least in part the way it’s sourced. Would cultivating it reduce the requisite exotic appeal? However, we were assured by Mihir that a growing popularity amongst Gen Z is a potentially encouraging market. 

Singapore was the first to approve the sale of cultivated meat back in 2020, followed in the USA in 2022 for Upside Food and Good Meat, and last year for Mission Barn’s cultivated fats. Also last year, Aleph Farms received approval from Israeli regulator to sell cultivated beef, and in the same year, the UK became the first in the world to approve the sale of cultivated meat for pets, for company Meatly. Other UK cultivated meat companies are awaiting approval from the FSA, including Ivy Farm and Hoxton Farms – developing beef fats. 

Cultivated meat and dairy companies face significant headwinds regarding capital funding, a largely negative media, and regulatory hurdles, but there are signs of encouragement from governments who see it as a net zero contributor. The UK is fast becoming a frontrunner in Europe with initiatives like the Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub and the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein. Last year also saw the opening of the £38 million National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (NAPIC) which works to advance research and innovation in areas like cultured meat, plant-based proteins, insect-based proteins, and fermented proteins, derived from sources other than animals. In addition, the FSA sandbox programme was also launched last year, and invited 8 companies, including BluNalu, Most Meat, Vow, Gourmey, and Hoxton Farms, to help inform and develop a robust system of regulation for cultivated novel foods. 

Following the event on City Road, I said goodbye to my fellow tasters and headed to the HYLO Building, in EC1. It was just 10 minutes on foot and is home to Hoxton Farms. There, I met with, CEO, co-founder (and former Future of Foods Interviews guest) Max Jamilly, who had agreed to give me a tour. 

Max Jamilly – Co-Founder Hoxton Farms

Jamilly is a scientist and a businessman, with a PhD in Synthetic Biology from the University of Oxford and two master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge in biotechnology and business. He has a background in venture capital, which almost certainly assisted Hoxton Farms in raising an impressive $35 million in funding. Though significant, this is a fraction compared to the heady days of 2020 when the likes of Mosa Meat and Good Meat were raising hundreds of millions. 2024 saw record-low levels of venture capital investment in this space, so to secure this sum is impressive for Hoxton. Jamilly assured me that he isn’t fazed by the current lack of investment in the industry and expects a turnaround. 

The scale of the project is very impressive, and much of what happens inside is commercially and technically sensitive, hidden from external view by a privacy glass façade. I was allowed one photograph outside the lab, then I was decked out in laboratory gear – hat and gown, shoe coverings and gloves, and led from the wide open-plan offices into the technical guts of the building. It was made clear that any contamination would be catastrophic, destroying entire batches, so although the air filtration system worked almost unnoticed in the background, it was described to me as one of the most impressive parts of the whole set up. I was taken into the laboratory and given a brief explanation of the process, shown the old bioreactors and the new ones, and introduced to the engineers who were building them on site. I was shown the kitchen area where the cultivated fats were being turned into products by an in-house chef, Josh Hatfield. 

Hoxton Farm’s next move, according to Jamilly, is a new facility in Singapore where their regulatory application is ongoing. According to Jamilly, having a facility in Singapore makes things easier for the Singapore regulators to do their inspections and examinations, but also allows Hoxton Farms to produce it’s cultivated beef fats locally for sale, not just for Singapore but eventually into the wider Asia market. 

Research carried out internally by cultivated meat company, Aleph Farms, indicates that acceptance of cultivated meat is significantly more positive in Asia than in the west. Perhaps recent events in the USA have also added to this fresh eastern-promise. And Singapore appears to be ahead of the game, not just because it has a well established, globally respected Novel Food Regulatory Framework, and is selling cultivated meat into retail, but also because it’s been perceived by global companies as a gateway into Asia. It’s generally accepted that getting approval in Singapore could be persuasive with other countries in the region, when it comes to regulation. But it appears to be a two way street, because as western companies like Hoxton Farms look to Singapore and Asia for a market – so too are those Asian companies such as Umami Bioworks, being drawn to the UK, which could also become a significant player.

Alex Crisp is a writer, podcaster, and facilitator – host of Future of Foods Interviews.

Vow Gets Greenlight in Australia As It Hits 1,200 Pounds Per Week of Cultivated Quail Meat

Vow, the Australian-based startup making foie gras and parfait from the cultivated cells of Japanese quail, announced a couple of big milestones this week, including what it claims to be the biggest ever production run of cultivated meat after harvesting 1,200 pounds of Japanese quail in a single week. This milestone was achieved using the company’s custom-designed 20,000-liter vessel designed entirely in-house.

This news comes the same week the Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) officially approved Vow’s application to add cultivated quail to the Food Standards Code. The final step is a 60-day review period by ministers from each jurisdiction within Australia and New Zealand. If no objections are raised, Vow could begin selling its cultivated quail products across ANZ as early as June.

According to CEO George Peppou, the secret to Vow’s rapid progress isn’t just about bigger tanks—it’s about rebuilding the entire factory model from scratch.

“Pharma infrastructure just doesn’t work for food,” Peppou told me in a recent episode of The Spoon Podcast. “We designed our second factory using a completely vertically integrated approach—engineers, welders, software, everything in-house—and built it for a fraction of what others have spent.”

Vow believes its new plant can make cultivated meat at a cost that is 20-50 times cheaper than its competitors, and now Peppou says that the company is now being approached by others as a potential manufacturing partner who see their approach as one that could scale.

“We’ve seen this sort of interesting uptick recently of other companies approaching us to ask about contract manufacturing. We’ve got the capacity. We’re selling continuously and we do have some excess capacity that we can provide to other companies. So we’ve got a few projects underway at the moment, which has been a very interesting insight into how other philosophies have played out.”

You can listen to my full conversation below.

A New Approach to Cultivated Meat with Vow's George Peppou

Dispatches from Future Food Tech 2025: After the Alt-Protein Boom, a New Realism Takes Hold

Last week, I headed down to San Francisco to check out the Future Food Tech conference, one of the leading gatherings in food innovation, where investors, startups, and big food brands come together to share ideas, commiserate, and network.

I attended this year’s event to gauge the current state of future food and assess if the industry had rebounded from last year’s somewhat somber mood, marked by cash-strapped startups—primarily in the alt-protein space—focusing on extending their financial runways amid a venture investment “winter.”

The good news: the overall mood is improving despite a rapidly shifting regulatory and governmental landscape, particularly in the U.S. Also, the industry has pivoted, in a fairly significant way, away from a pretty substantial over-indexing on alt-proteins as the key investment focus.

Below are my key takeaways, featuring some quotes from some of the experts who were at the show.

Dialed Down Alt-Proteins and More Discriminating Investors

First off, let’s get something straight: Alt protein is still important and on everyone’s mind at FFT and across the future food industry, but it’s just not the singular dominating focus anymore. Investors and entrepreneurs appear increasingly aware of the substantial regulatory, economic, scaling, and consumer adoption hurdles that many alt-protein products face.

At the same, many of the big investment funds and venture investors who got pulled into food tech during the bubble in 2019 to 2022 have pulled away from the space. While it means less investment dollars to fund, say, a pilot plant for a cultivated meat company that may be years away from coming to market, it also means fewer investment dollars are chasing me-too business plans.

“Everybody outside this sector was excited about Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat and thought all this stuff was going to change the game,” said Brian Frank, founder of FTW Ventures. “When all of us that were rationalists were going, ‘No, guys, it’s food. It is this.’ And so we’re coming back to this, and a lot of the tourist investors are leaving.”

Differentiated Players in Cultivated Meat Keep Pushing Boulder Up the Hill

Despite these challenges, some companies continue to talk up their advances in cultivated meat. One such company was Forsea, a company specializing in making cultivated unagi.

After signing the standard legal disclaimer waiving future litigation rights (typical at cultivated meat tastings—one investor told me he’s signed about twenty-five of them), I sampled Forsea’s cultivated unagi. It was good! The taste was pretty spot on, and the mouthfeel was about 90% there.

Another company that was pretty visible at FFT last week was Mission Barns, which had just received its ‘no questions’ letter from the FDA for its cultivated pork fat and was inviting people to try it out at tastings. While I wasn’t added to their tasting invite list, attendees who I spoke to who sampled their meatballs spoke highly of them.

Meeting the MAHA Moment: A Focus on Better Health Outcomes Becomes Primary Driver

It shouldn’t be overly surprising that the event’s focus has shifted from sustainability alone toward creating better, healthier food inputs. This adjustment reflects broader regulatory and business climates in the U.S., where food companies are adapting to an FDA and USDA potentially influenced by the likes of RFK Jr.

This new direction acknowledges the increasingly challenging regulatory environment for cultivated meat—now banned in states like Florida—while recognizing heightened consumer and governmental interest in clean labels and nutrition-focused, less futuristic food categories.

One company that aligns well with this trend is Borealis. Founder Reza Soltanzadeh emphasized the concept of “stealth health”—enhancing familiar foods with added nutritional value, like with their protein-rich pastas.

“Changing consumer behavior, like ordering a plant-based Big Mac at McDonald’s, is incredibly challenging,” Soltanzadeh explained. “But stealth health means your child shouldn’t even notice a difference from their regular ramen.”

AI is Tablestakes Now, But Beware the AI-Washing

Artificial intelligence was everywhere, both in on-stage panels and in hallway side conversations. Longtime pioneers in the space held court in packed rooms while new startups tried to talk up their AI bona fides.

As someone who created the first dedicated event a couple of years ago to explore how AI will change food, I’m not surprised at just how fast it has permeated the entire consciousness of the food industry executive class. After all, most of us, just being a person living in society, find it nearly impossible to get away from the AI-is-changing-everything conversation.

Still, the sheer amount of AI-food conversation was perhaps even more than I expected, and I imagine the heads of many in attendance were probably spinning as they tried to determine what exactly is a true innovation in food AI and what is simply a form of AI-washing.

I interviewed Matias Muchnick, CEO of NotCo, who warned startups against overstating their AI expertise: “Ultimately, claiming AI capabilities you don’t genuinely possess is a short-lived lie. Like greenwashing, AI-washing will eventually catch up with you.”

That said, it’s still exciting to see the potential. AI applications demonstrated at Future Food-Tech ranged from toxin detection to personalized nutritional recommendations.

As Megan Thomas, podcaster and future food consultant wrote: “Distinguishing meaningful innovations from hype remains a challenge, but the real-world applications of AI in food—from health to supply chains—are undeniably compelling.”

Fiber is Having Its Moment as GLP-1s Grips The Food Industry

Outside of AI everywhere, the most interesting trend to me was the pervasiveness of the impact that GLP-1s is having on both startup investment and overall focus in the space.

Peter Bodenheimer, venture partner at PeakBridge, wrote that “fiber is everywhere and continues to have its moment, with startups focused on new functional elements, improved formats, and data-driven discovery.”

What’s interesting is the divergence in conversation that is happening societally and within the food space. Ozempic and other GLP-1s have become household names and a part of the larger cultural conversation as folks on social media try to guess which celebrity on the red carpet is taking GLP-1s, the food industry is moving beyond last year’s initial panic to proactively optimize products for GLP-1 compatibility.

A wave of startups, including One.Bio, SuperGut, and Carbiotix, have emerged, offering platforms enabling CPG brands to enhance their fiber content and position products as GLP-1-friendly alternatives to pharmaceutical interventions.

I spoke with Carbiotix chairman Kristofer Cook, who described the company’s efforts in helping major brands integrate gut-healthy fiber through on-premise food side-stream upcycling. This two-birds-one-stone approach sounded like a pretty nifty trick, particularly for those brands who didn’t want to become reliant on startup’s nutraceutical to fortify their food.

Companies using their platform are “extracting more value from a side stream, which is typically set the way for animal feed,” said Cook. “They’re making their products healthier. And they’re able to market themselves as being more sustainable as well.”

Looking Forward

The bottom line is it seemed like, despite the shifting terrain underfoot from a regulatory standpoint and the continued fundraising headwinds, that food startups are finding their way. Those remaining in ths space are becoming increasingly pragmatic about the realities of innovation adoption, investment sustainability, and regulatory navigation. The exuberance over cultivated protei has been tempered by a clear-eyed recognition of consumer behavior, economic constraints, and the long-term role of health-centric innovation.

Looking forward, if this year’s FFT is any indication, it seems food tech innovation is now being defined more by clear-eyed realism, a focus on finding practical food-driven health interventions, and an embrace around accelerating innovation through the use of technologies like AI.

Pet Food Snapshot: Innovation, Cultivation, and a Ruff Patch

Whenever I head to the pet food store, I’m simultaneously overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choice available on the shelves and disappointed by the limited selection of alternatives that don’t rely on traditional animal agriculture.

The good news for those looking for more sustainable alternatives is that the alt-protein pet food sector has been slowly inching forward (and occasionally stepping back, as you’ll see below), but there has recently been a surge of news in this space.

First up, this week German pet food manufacturer Marsapet, in partnership with Calysta, launched “MicroBell,” a dry kibble featuring FeedKind Pet protein produced via gas fermentation. Gas fermentation uses microbes to produce protein, eliminating the need for arable land or animal ingredients.

Last month, Meatly became the first company globally to offer pet food made from cultivated meat. Partnering with plant-based dog food brand THE PACK, Meatly introduced “Chick Bites,” a limited-release dog treat that blends plant-based ingredients with Meatly Chicken. Following this launch, Meatly is focused on scaling production and making cultivated pet food more widely available. The company plans to raise additional funds to expand production and distribute Meatly Chicken to more retailers over the next three to five years. Future collaborations with THE PACK and Pets at Home are also in the pipeline.

Finally, despite positive news from both the cultivated meat and gas fermentation fronts, the industry faces challenges. Wild Earth, a vegan pet food startup that gained prominence after securing a deal on “Shark Tank” in 2018, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last month. The company reported $2.4 million in assets against $12.6 million in liabilities. Co-founder and CEO Ryan Bethencourt—who has been one of the most influential voices in alternative proteins over the past decade—cited difficulties in securing venture capital and managing debt as contributing factors.

Bethencourt remains optimistic despite the bankruptcy. “I don’t think this is the end of the Wild Earth story.”

Givaudan, Bühler Group, and Migros Open Doors to The Cultured Hub, a Scale-Up Facility for Cellular Agriculture

Three years after announcing a joint venture, Givaudan, Bühler Group, and Migros have finally opened the doors to The Cultured Hub, a cutting-edge biotech facility dedicated to cellular agriculture production in Kemptthal, Switzerland. Initially introduced in 2021 as the Cultured Food Innovation Hub with the stated mission of accelerating the development and market penetration of cellular agriculture products, the facility now boasts advanced product development labs as well as cell culture and bio-fermentation capabilities.

According to the announcement, the new facility will enable startups to scale up their processes from small-scale laboratory experiments (e.g., shake flasks) to 1,000-liter pilot operations without requiring expensive asset investments or equity dilution. The organization says the facility will allow emerging companies to access subject-matter experts and resources to “create regulatory batches with analysis and food safety procedures, test new products, work on optimizing processes, and conduct small market launches.”

In some ways, the new facility is reminiscent of MISTA, the San Francisco-based innovation hub resulting from a partnership between Givaudan and Bühler. However, unlike MISTA, which features facilities such as a biotech lab and an extrusion hub, The Cultured Hub’s infrastructure is specifically focused on cellular agriculture production for products such as cultivated beef, fish, dairy, and more.

“The Cultured Hub is designed to bridge the scale-up gap for companies, enabling them to retain equity, protect intellectual property, and fast-track their journey to market without high capital investment,” said Ian Roberts, Chief Technology Officer of Bühler Group. “We are thrilled to bring together industry players and create a collaborative environment that will drive significant advancements in the industry.”

The rise of shared-access facilities for piloting new cell-ag food products makes sense in today’s capital-constrained environment. Venture capital investment in cultivated food startups has slowed over the past couple of years, particularly as capital requirements have risen with many of these companies entering the scale-up phase. At the same time, it remains uncertain whether many of these products will ever reach the commodity price points required to make them viable replacements for traditional animal agriculture.

Notable companies participating in The Cultured Hub’s community include Ever After Foods, GOURMEY, Mosa Meat, Nestlé, Nutreco, and Orbillion Bio.

GFI: Fermentation Fuels Q3 2024 Alt-Protein Investments, While Cultivated Meat Lags

This week, the Good Food Institute released its quarterly alt-protein investment update, so I thought it’d be a good time to check in and see which way things are trending.

At this point it’s well-known that the alt-protein investment climate has had a couple tough years, and the latest numbers show things remain tough.

According to data shared by GFI, alternative protein companies raised $233 million in Q3 2024—a 37% decrease from Q2, but a 25% increase year-over-year. The drop from Q2 is notable, exceeding the 20% decline across the broader venture capital market. However, the 25% year-over-year growth in Q3 is a potential bright spot and could indicate that the second half of 2023 marked the low point for the overall market.

Source: GFI

GFI also broke things down by sub-sector, and it’s clear that fermentation technologies are where investors are placing their bets:

  • Plant-based proteins raised $56 million in Q3, bringing the year-to-date total to $194 million.
  • Fermentation technologies, which saw the largest share of investment, raised $174 million in Q3, with $572 million invested year-to-date.
  • Cultivated meat and seafood companies raised $3 million in Q3, reaching $133 million year-to-date.

It’s important to note that the overall alt-protein investment numbers can be heavily influenced by a few large deals. For example, Q2 2024 saw $118 million invested in the cultivated meat sector, largely driven by a $55 million Series B investment in Prolific Machines, a cultivated meat infrastructure company, and a $42 million investment in Dutch cultivated meat pioneer Mosa Meat. These larger deals led to an average deal size of $10 million for cultivated meat in Q2, compared to a paltry $396,000 in Q3 2024.

Similarly, Q3’s fermentation investment numbers were significantly impacted by two major deals: a $61 million investment in fermentation startup Formo for its Koji cheese products and a $45 million Series B for precision fermentation startup Helaina, focused on its human lactoferrin product.

GFI notes that lower interest rates moving forward could provide a boost to the alt-protein space, but cautions that the cost of capital remains relatively high. They continue to advocate for alt-protein startups to explore non-traditional funding sources, such as government-backed loans and programs.

Looking ahead, I predict that fermentation-based startups will remain the most attractive area for investors in the coming year. Investment in cultivated meat startups will likely focus on infrastructure players with game-changing technology, like Prolific Machines. Meanwhile, many cultivated meat startups that raised significant rounds in the past few years to scale manufacturing have put those plans on hold as they work to extend their funding runways during this ongoing VC winter.

According to GFI, the alt-protein space has seen a cumulative $16.3 billion invested since 2015, a decent number overall but still relatively small compared to other sustainability focused-sectors. To give you an idea of just how small the space is compared to other sectors, the solar industry raised $6.9 billion in venture capital in 2023 alone, and that number jumps to $34.3 billion when factoring in corporate funding.

One thing that the space needs to attract bigger dollars is a more attractive exit outlook. Overall, the exits in alt-protein has been disappointing, as have the results of those companies that have gone public. Until we see a big investor success story in this space, the dollars may remain relatively small compared to other markets.

From Data-Scraping to Discernment Layer: How NotCo’s Giuseppe AI Has Evolved Over the Past Decade

Almost a decade ago, while others experimenting with AI focused on algorithms for trading, diagnostics, or digital advertising, a company called NotCo was experimenting with AI by the name of Giuseppe to create plant-based foods that could match the taste and texture of their animal-based counterparts.

According to Aadit Patel, SVP of AI Product and Engineering at NotCo, the company’s founders (Patel would join a couple of years after the company was founded in 2015) realized early on that, in order to build an AI model that could help create plant-based products mimicking the taste, texture, and functionality of their animal-based counterparts, they would need a whole lot of data.

The problem was, as a startup, they didn’t have any.

When I asked Patel in a recent interview how the company overcame the infamous “cold start” problem—the challenge many embryonic AI models face before they have built large datasets on which to train—he told me they found the solution in a very public place: the U.S. government’s website.

“In the early days, when we had no money, we literally scraped the USDA website,” said Patel. “If you go to the USDA website, there’s a bunch of free data materials for you to use. And I guess no one had actually joined it together to create a comprehensive dataset… So the first versions of Giuseppe were built on that.”

This cobbled-together dataset formed the foundation for Giuseppe’s recommendations, leading to the creation of products like NotMilk, which uses unexpected combinations like pineapple and cabbage to replicate the taste of dairy milk.

As NotCo grew, so did Giuseppe’s capabilities. New analytical labs in San Francisco and Santiago, Chile, gave the company a wealth of new data on which to train its AI. Over time, the model’s ability to create innovative food products also improved.

One of the biggest hurdles in food development is the fragmented nature of the supply chain. Data is scattered across various entities—ingredient suppliers, flavor houses, manufacturers, and research institutions—each holding critical information that contributes to the success of a product. Over time, the company realized that to create an AI capable of building innovative products, it couldn’t rely solely on NotCo’s datasets. Instead, Giuseppe would need to integrate and analyze data from across this complex web of partners.

“What we’ve done with Giuseppe is figure out a way to incentivize this very fragmented ecosystem,” Patel said.

According to Patel, pulling together these disparate datasets from across the product development and supply chain would result in a more holistic understanding of what is needed for a successful product that is better aligned with market realities.

“We realized that if we just made an AI system that’s specific to CPG, we’d be losing out,” said Patel.

Generative AI and Flavor and Fragrance Development

One recent expansion of Giuseppe’s capabilities has been the exploration of new flavors and fragrances using generative AI. While GenAI models like ChatGPT have become infamous for creating sometimes strange and off-putting combinations when designing recipes and new food product formulations, Patel explained that the company has been able to overcome issues with general LLMs by creating what he calls a discernment layer. This layer filters and evaluates the multitude of generated possibilities, narrowing them down to the most promising candidates.

“Discernment is key because it’s not just about generating ideas; it’s about identifying the ones that are likely to succeed in the real world,” Patel said. “With generative AI, you can prompt it however you want and get an infinite amount of answers. The question is, how do we discern which of these 10,000 ideas are the ones most likely to work in a lab setting, a pilot setting, or beyond?”

The discernment layer works by incorporating additional data points and contextual knowledge into the model. For instance, it might consider a formulation’s scalability, cost-effectiveness, or alignment with consumer preferences. This layer also allows human experts to provide feedback and fine-tune the AI’s outputs, creating a process that combines AI’s creativity with the expertise of flavor and fragrance professionals.

Early tests have shown positive results. When tasked with creating a new flavor, both the AI and the human perfumers receive the same brief. When the results are compared in A/B tests, Patel says the outputs of Giuseppe’s generative AI were indistinguishable from those created by human experts.

“What we’ve built is a system where AI and human expertise complement each other,” said Patel. “This gives us the flexibility to create products that are not just theoretically possible but also market-ready.”

CPG Brands Still Have a Long Way to Go With AI-Enhanced Food Creation

Nearly a decade after building an AI model with scraped data from the USDA website, NotCo has evolved its AI to create new products through a collaborative approach that results in a modern generative AI model incorporating inputs from its partners up and down the food value chain. This collaborative approach is being used for internal product development and third-party CPG partners, many of whom Patel said approached the company after they announced their joint venture with Kraft Heinz.

“Ever since our announcement with Kraft Heinz and signing a joint venture, there’s been a lot of inbound interest from a lot of other large CPGs asking ‘What can you do for us?’ and ‘What is Giuseppe?’ They want to see it.”

When I told Patel I thought that big CPG brands have come a long way over the past twelve months in their embrace and planning for using AI, he slightly disagreed. He said that while there’s a lot of interest, most big brands haven’t actually transformed their business to fully create products with the help of AI.

“I would say there’s strong intent to adopt it, but I think there hasn’t been put forth like a concrete action plan to actually develop the first AI-enabled R&D workforce,” said Patel. “There is room, I think, for new AI tech for formulators, and room for best practices and lessons learned of adopting AI.”

You can watch my full interview with Aadit below.

The NotCo team will be at the Food AI Summit talking about their new efforts using generative AI to develop flavor and fragrance, so make sure to get your tickets here.

NotCo's Aadit Patel Talks About the Evolution The Company's Food AI Giuseppe

Why GFA’s Unceremonious Drop of Climax is a Big Win For the Company & the Plant-Based Cheese Category

For the past week, the alt-protein world has been abuzz about the news that the Good Food Awards had quietly dropped Climax Food from the list of finalists and, according to Climax, snatched the winner’s trophy from them due to a convoluted and confusing set of rationalizations by the organization.

Washington Post broke the story last weekend in an article titled A vegan cheese beat dairy in a big competition. Then the plot curdled (is there a title for best article headlines? If so, WaPo may have just ran away with it).

The article detailed how Climax was listed among the finalists when the GFA announced them in January and how Climax was quietly informed that same month that they had actually won it all. An uproar among industry insiders ensued, fueled by a blog post from well-known cheese industry influencer Janet Fletcher, questioning whether vegan cheese is actually cheese. The post featured quotes from traditional cheesemakers who, unsurprisingly, felt that cheese not made from animal milk should not be included.

“My take is that it’s not really cheese,” said cheesemaker Mateo Kehler of Jasper Farms in the post.

The story took a turn when Climax Foods CEO Oliver Zahn was informed by the WaPo journalist working on the story that Climax had been taken off the list of finalists and, as he would soon learn, had been disqualified from the competition altogether. From there, Climax and GFA provided differing accounts of what happened, with GFA offering up a confused and convoluted explanation that seemed to hinge on the fact that Climax had included Kokum butter in its original entry, an ingredient that they claim is not designated as GRAS (generally regarded as safe). Zahn claimed that the entry requirements didn’t specify that ingredients needed to be GRAS-certified, a claim backed up by the Internet archive version of the rules as stated in January.

As WaPo was working on the story, Zahn spoke to a few other journalists (myself included) about the news in anticipation of the WaPo story’s release. When I first talked to Zahn, he was worried about the impact of the news and was frustrated that his team had bought tickets and made hotel reservations in anticipation of receiving an award. However, his biggest frustration was that he felt the award would raise the visibility of his product and be an important milestone for the vegan world.

via GIPHY

Above: The Good Food Awards

As it turns out, the controversy surrounding the GFA awards and the organization’s unceremonious retraction of the winner’s trophy might just be the best thing that’s ever happened to Climax and the plant-based cheese category. That’s because it’s clear that even though Climax didn’t receive the award in the end, the publicity from GFA’s rake-step is better and more far-reaching than if the organization had actually gone through with the right thing.

Sure, Climax winning the award would no doubt have been a nice feather in their cap, but would it have gotten them featured as a bit on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert?

Meanwhile… Amazon Cat Returned | Gull Screeching Champion | Vegan Blue Cheese Beats Dairy

When I caught up with Zahn after the WaPo story had come out and dozens of follow-on stories had appeared about the news, he seemed more at peace. Of course, a jump in sales will probably do for you.

“Sales are good,” Zahn told me.

Stepping back, that a panel of judges saw a plant-based cheese as not only on par but actually better than a product made with dairy is forcing the industry and consumers to have a conversation, one in which I imagine many will side with Climax. Sure, today many in the industry are claiming distinctions without a difference when it comes to the actual final product, saying things like real cheese “has a story” and plant-based cheeses aren’t “agricultural products” (huh?). But in the long run, when consumers happily begin choosing great-tasting vegan cheese, the industry (and the GFA) will have to follow their lead.

You can watch my interview with Oliver below.

Climax's Oliver Zahn Talks About Good Food Awards Controversy

‘Amazon for Proteins’: Shiru Launches AI-Powered Marketplace for Proteins

Shiru, a company that utilizes AI to discover plant-based novel proteins, has announced a new marketplace in ProteinDiscovery.ai that lets anyone search, discover, pilot, and buy molecules for food, agriculture, personal care, and advanced material applications.

Shiru claims that its protein marketplace is an industry first. It allows researchers and product builders access to a database of 33 million-plus molecules and search via sequence, functional use, and expression.

“With ProteinDiscovery.ai we’ve made the world of natural proteins for industrial applications accessible. We’ve even added the ability for users to easily purchase samples, creating the ‘Amazon for proteins,’” said Shiru Founder and CEO Dr. Jasmin Hume. “We’ve been using AI to identify high-value, novel, scalable proteins for years, fueling our own product development. With significant recent interest from CPGs and ingredients companies alike, we decided to open our toolbox to everyone.”

I caught up with Hume to learn how the new protein discovery engine works. You can watch the video of our conversation below.

The Spoon Talks With Shiru About New Protein Discovery Marketplace