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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Alternative Protein

Podcast: Talking Alternative Protein with the Good Food Institute’s Bruce Friedrich

If you work in the alt-protein industry or even just interested in the space, chances are you know about the Good Food Institute.

In this episode, I catch up with GFI’s CEO and founder Bruce Friedrich to talk about everything alt-protein and the future of meat.

Some of the topics we cover in this podcast include:

  • The current state of alt-protein sales
  • Why plant-based meat sales plateaued in 2021
  • The need for investment in alt-protein infrastructure
  • The politics of alternative meat
  • When will cultivated meat get regulatory approval for retail sale in the US
  • The need for affirmative messaging around alt-proteins

You can listen to the full episode below by clicking play or, as always, find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Mars Teams Up With Perfect Day to Launch Animal-Free Chocolate Bar

Today Mars announced the launch of a new animal-free chocolate under the brand CO2COA. Developed in partnership with precision fermentation specialist Perfect Day, the chocolate is available today via the product’s new website.

While Mars already offers a range of vegan chocolate bars, this is the first bar from a major candy brand that replaces animal dairy with identical proteins produced through precision fermentation. A German startup by the name of QOA announced last year they are using precision fermentation to develop new chocolate, but their focus is on replacing cocoa rather than animal inputs. The Mars deal follows an announcement made by Perfect Day and Betterland Foods in March of an animal-free chocolate bar.

The new candy is available only via a new website and “while supplies last,” which tells me Mars is trialing the concept before committing to a longer-term product launch (and rollout at retail). It’s reminiscent of the toe-in-the-water that Starbucks took with its testing of Perfect Day’s animal-free dairy. My guess is the company will keep a close on customer response and, possibly, eye a wider rollout in time if the response is positive.

For Perfect Day, the Mars deal is yet another in a growing list of partnerships the company has inked with consumer-facing brands to utilize their animal-free dairy in products such as gelato, chocolate milk, and protein powders. The company also continues to periodically add new products under their own consumer brand subsidiary, Urgent Company, adding protein powders late last year and acquiring another ice cream brand, Coolhaus, to add to their ice cream lineup alongside Brave Robot.

SuperMeat Believes An Open Source Approach to Cultivated Meat Will Benefit All

Lab-grown or cultured meat is a sexy topic that fulfills the dream of healthy eating while saving the planet’s precious resources. Most of the headlines focus on the companies in the four corners of the world waiting for regulators to wave the checkered flag. The more interesting story—at least for those who enjoy looking under the hood—is in the processes, supply chain, and partnerships vital to this promising industry.

To understand the drill-down of what it takes to go from harvesting animal cells to creating consumer-facing products, it’s valuable to speak with visionaries such as Ido Savir, CEO of Israel’s SuperMeat. In addition to his knowledge of cultivated meat, Savir’s background in IT provides him with a panoramic view of the infrastructure needed to build a successful B2B company.

While it might not qualify as an awe-inspiring announcement, SuperMeat recently received a grant from the Israeli Innovation Authority to establish an open-source high-throughput screening system for optimizing cultivated meat feed ingredients. As an analogy, think of it as a system that ensures cows or chickens receive only the best quality feed to produce larger quantities of high-grade meat or chicken. But there is a significant difference.

Savir explains that animals are inefficient producers of their products. “It’s just done more efficiently (in cultivated meat),” the SuperMeat CEO told The Spoon in a recent interview. “In traditional meat production, 70% to 80% of the cost comes from the feed, and animals are just not very efficient conversion machines.” To put it into perspective, the cost of animal component-free (ACF) feed can make or break those vying to play in this space.

Rather than compete with consumer-facing brands such as Future Meat, Eat Just, and Mosa Meat (to name a few), SuperMeat is taking a B2B approach. Working with established meat and poultry providers to build production facilities where companies with existing supply chains can quickly enter the future of the alt-meat market. SuperMeat has announced deals with Germany’s PHW Group and Migros in Switzerland. The Israeli firm is in discussion with potential U.S. partners to reach the stateside market by the end of 2023.

The decision to build a platform for cultivated meat rather than build its own consumer brand directly results from Savir’s tech background, and it is also why the new feed screening system is in the open-source approach. “From my background, and I really believe in open source, and I really believe in sort of a platform approach that can help bring not just one company but the industry forward,” Savir stated.

Also, speaking to his tech background, it’s clear Savir has learned the relationship between capital expenditures and profit. It’s not about cost; it’s about having the right model.

“The way I look at this, and it doesn’t matter how much the infrastructure costs,” he said. “What matters is how efficient and the return you can get from that money. Right. And if you can get that return in a reasonable time, it makes sense, no matter what the cost is. We have our cost of goods models that demonstrate that that makes sense.”

A trip to SuperMeat’s facility in Israel will yield more than a view of lab equipment and many steel fermentation tanks. The facility includes a small restaurant-like space called “The Chicken,” where potential business partners, consumers, and others can taste the lab-grown animal protein. Savir says it’s more than just a pretty place to show off.

“We’re trying to do things a bit differently,” Savir said. “We thought it was important for us and our potential clients, which are food companies, to have that full transparency and traceability.”

See video of the makeshift eatery below:

World's First Cultivated Meat Blind Tasting Full Reel

Molecular Farming Pioneer Moolec is Going Public Via SPAC

Moolec Science, a company that develops animal-identical proteins utilizing a technique called molecular farming, announced today it is going public via a special purpose acquisition company (“SPAC”). The company is doing so via a business combination agreement with LightJump Acquisition Corp, a company formed in 2020 as a SPAC vehicle. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2022.

Moolec, a spinout of Bioceres Crop Solutions, is one of the first companies to utilize molecular farming to create alternative proteins. The attraction of molecular farming is that it uses crops as a protein factory, compared to traditional microbial fermentation techniques that utilize more capital-intensive fermentation infrastructure.

With molecular farming, crops are genetically modified to produce a target molecule. The Moolec team matches the target molecule with a host plant, creating different plant-molecule combinations for different applications. The company has launched two products so far, including a plant-based dairy ingredient called chymosin and nutritional oil GLA, both of which use safflower as a carrier crop. According to Moolec, both products have been cleared by regulatory authorities and the company is currently ramping up seed inventories. 

The newly combined organization, which will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “MLEC,” will have an initial proforma equity value of $504 million. Once public, the newly combined company will represent the first publicly traded alternative protein startup focused primarily on molecular farming. The company plans to use the funds from the transaction to commercialize its initial products, fund additional R&D around new products, and expand hiring.

Brevel Raises $8.4 Million to Scale Nutrition-Rich, Neutral-Flavored Microalgae Protein

Move over pea protein and soy, there’s a new alt-protein in town made from microalgae, and it’s cheaper and more sustainable. Brevel, the Israeli company behind this alternative to the omnipresent ingredients in everything from plant-based burgers to dairy-free cheese, aims to become the number one choice for plant-based protein worldwide.

Brevel’s vision now becomes a business reality with the announcement of $8.4 million in a seed funding round. The funding will be utilized to build a commercial pilot factory which will serve as the basis for scaling the company’s proprietary technology and enhancing its research and development capabilities. Investors include FoodHack, Good Startup VC, Tet Ventures, and Nevateam Ventures.

The fermentation of microalgae as an alt-protein has been under consideration but has not made the headlines because of its cost and issues with flavor. Brevel says it has found a solution by combining sugar-based fermentation of microalgae with a high concentration of light at industrial scales. The company says its nutritionally rich, neutral-flavored microalgae-based protein solves issues with plant-based dairy and egg products that lack a valuable nutritional profile.

In an email interview with The Spoon, Brevel CEO and Co-Founder Yonatan Golan shared some additional details.

Will the company make its own microalgae foods or sell them to other manufacturers? Have there been any sample products created yet?

Our protein comes as a dry powder which can be simply added directly to formulations. Today, our partners add it in different forms – either directly as powder, or apply some processes such as homogenization, secondary fermentation, etc. to increase its solubility, extract additional flavors, and more. This depends on their specific needs and preferences.

In terms of functionality – at the moment, for our first segment of partners, we actually try to be as inert as possible – increase the nutritional profile of products without changing taste, color, texture, or cost for the end consumer. One of our piloting partners described it as a “ghost protein” – it increases protein content without you noticing it is there. In the second stage, we will be looking to provide functionalities such as gelation, texturing, emulsification, and more, which are most suitable for fish and seafood alternatives.

We are piloting with many different food manufacturers worldwide who are very excited about our ability to increase their nutritional profile without changing taste, color, texture, or cost for the end consumer.

Later in June, we will be at the largest alternative protein conference (Future food tech) in NYC and will have an exclusive tasting room where we will showcase several of the products our partners developed with our protein – plant-based cheese with a high protein content which melts on pizza, sunny side up eggs with our protein both in the white and the yolk.

How did the company land on microalgae? From previous research?

My co-founders are my two brothers: Matan is an MD who brings the health angle (plant-based food products today have a very low nutritional value which must be solved if we want to have a healthy future), and this is a key element in our vision. The second, Ido, is a genius engineer who happens to have a vast background in microalgae and manages to invent this entirely new way of producing microalgae efficiently and at a very high quality. I am vegan both from a moral and sustainable standpoint and am enthusiastic about finding solutions to feed our growing population sustainably and ethically. I have three children who are also vegan, and I am very concerned about the future they will live in if we don’t make drastic changes. As a physicist, I view this challenge very rationally and believe that microalgae can become the ultimate solution, like many experts and companies. However, to date, no one has been able to solve the cost and quality barriers to make this vision become a reality.

This is why we decided to dedicate ourselves to working hard on this problem and have managed to break through the glass ceiling this industry has seen for too many decades.

To educate those who do not know what exactly is microalgae?

Microalgae are microscopic organisms that use photosynthesis to grow very resource efficiently. Microalgae evolved more than 2 billion years ago. For the first time in the prehistory of earth transformed most of the CO2 in our atmosphere into oxygen and enabled the development of more advanced forms of life. Even today, microalgae account for more than 50% of the oxygen production cycle daily.

Microalgae naturally contain 40%-60% protein alongside a variety of healthy ingredients.

Microalgae grow everywhere on our planet – lakes, rivers, oceans, and even deserts and the arctic. More than 500,000 different strains exist in nature, and only a small fraction have been researched. A handful is used for food, feed, cosmetics, nutraceuticals, fertilizers, and biofuel production. Brevel uses non-GMO microalgae grown in a unique breakthrough technology that enables the highest quality of sustainable protein production at cost levels comparable to pea and soy, the leading plant-based protein source today.

Move over pea protein and soy, there’s a new alt-protein in town made from microalgae, and it’s cheaper and more sustainable. Brevel, the Israeli company behind this alternative to the omnipresent ingredients in everything from plant-based burgers to dairy-free cheese, aims to become the number one choice for plant-based protein worldwide.

Brevel’s vision now becomes a business reality with the announcement of $8.4 million in a seed funding round. The funding will be utilized to build a commercial pilot factory which will serve as the basis for scaling the company’s proprietary technology and enhancing its research and development capabilities. Investors include FoodHack, Good Startup VC, Tet Ventures, and Nevateam Ventures.

The fermentation of microalgae as an alt-protein has been under consideration but has not made the headlines because of its cost and issues with flavor. Brevel says it has found a solution by combining sugar-based fermentation of microalgae with a high concentration of light at industrial scales. The company says its nutritionally rich, neutral-flavored microalgae-based protein solves issues with plant-based dairy and egg products that lack a valuable nutritional profile.

In an email interview with The Spoon, Brevel CEO and Co-Founder Yonatan Golan shared some additional details.

Will the company make its own microalgae foods or sell them to other manufacturers? Have there been any sample products created yet?

Our protein comes as a dry powder which can be simply added directly to formulations. Today, our partners add it in different forms – either directly as powder, or apply some processes such as homogenization, secondary fermentation, etc. to increase its solubility, extract additional flavors, and more. This depends on their specific needs and preferences.

In terms of functionality – at the moment, for our first segment of partners, we actually try to be as inert as possible – increase the nutritional profile of products without changing taste, color, texture, or cost for the end consumer. One of our piloting partners described it as a “ghost protein” – it increases protein content without you noticing it is there. In the second stage, we will be looking to provide functionalities such as gelation, texturing, emulsification, and more, which are most suitable for fish and seafood alternatives.

We are piloting with many different food manufacturers worldwide who are very excited about our ability to increase their nutritional profile without changing taste, color, texture, or cost for the end consumer.

Later in June, we will be at the largest alternative protein conference (Future food tech) in NYC and will have an exclusive tasting room where we will showcase several of the products our partners developed with our protein – plant-based cheese with a high protein content which melts on pizza, sunny side up eggs with our protein both in the white and the yolk.

How did the company land on microalgae? From previous research?

My co-founders are my two brothers: Matan is an MD who brings the health angle (plant-based food products today have a very low nutritional value which must be solved if we want to have a healthy future), and this is a key element in our vision. The second, Ido, is a genius engineer who happens to have a vast background in microalgae and manages to invent this entirely new way of producing microalgae efficiently and at a very high quality. I am vegan both from a moral and sustainable standpoint and am enthusiastic about finding solutions to feed our growing population sustainably and ethically. I have three children who are also vegan, and I am very concerned about the future they will live in if we don’t make drastic changes. As a physicist, I view this challenge very rationally and believe that microalgae can become the ultimate solution, like many experts and companies. However, to date, no one has been able to solve the cost and quality barriers to make this vision become a reality.

This is why we decided to dedicate ourselves to working hard on this problem and have managed to break through the glass ceiling this industry has seen for too many decades.

To educate those who do not know what exactly is microalgae?

Microalgae are microscopic organisms that use photosynthesis to grow very resource efficiently. Microalgae evolved more than 2 billion years ago. For the first time in the prehistory of earth transformed most of the CO2 in our atmosphere into oxygen and enabled the development of more advanced forms of life. Even today, microalgae account for more than 50% of the oxygen production cycle daily.

Microalgae naturally contain 40%-60% protein alongside a variety of healthy ingredients.

Microalgae grow everywhere on our planet – lakes, rivers, oceans, and even deserts and the arctic. More than 500,000 different strains exist in nature, and only a small fraction have been researched. A handful is used for food, feed, cosmetics, nutraceuticals, fertilizers, and biofuel production. Brevel uses non-GMO microalgae grown in a unique breakthrough technology that enables the highest quality of sustainable protein production at cost levels comparable to pea and soy, the leading plant-based protein source today.

The Right’s War on Alt-Meat is Intensifying. Here’s What the Food-Tech Industry Should Do About It

In a new video posted online, far-right firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene claims that the government wants to surveil every aspect of our lives, including what we eat.

“They want to know if you’re eating a cheeseburger, which is very bad because Bill Gates wants you to eat his fake meat that grows in a peach tree dish,” Greene said. “So you’ll probably get a little zap inside your body and that’s saying ‘no, don’t eat a real cheeseburger. You need to eat the fake burger, the fake meat from Bill Gates.'”

Greene’s video is the latest example of the right’s effort to politicize meat alternatives as a way to agitate its base into voting for them and against those who allegedly are scheming to take away their Big Macs. Since the vast majority of these claims are easily disprovable and make us all a little dumber for just hearing them (peach tree dish?), we should ignore them, right?

Wrong. The problem is, as dumb as these statements are, the more they’re repeated, the more likely they take hold in the collective consciousness of consumers and risk becoming widely accepted folk wisdom.

So what should the food tech industry do about it? The most important thing is not to be complacent and be clear in its messaging about its industry and its product, so misinformation doesn’t fill the void.

What exactly should be the message? Here are a few ideas:

No one is taking anyone’s animal meat away. Let’s face it: There’s really nothing more ‘American’ than eating a big slab of red meat, and if Americans think they will be forced to do anything (or have something they like taken away from them), many will reflexively react negatively. The alternative meat industry needs to be clear that its goal is to make plant-based and cultivated meat good enough that consumers choose it over the alternatives. And those who want to continue to pay ever-higher prices for traditional factory-farmed meat will always have that option. Speaking of higher prices…

Real meat has lots of problems, including a rising price tag. One of the reasons red-meat Americans might actually consider an alternative is that real meat has lots of issues, including being a vector for viruses, it’s cruel and often unhealthy. But perhaps the most significant negative for everyday Americans when it comes to meat is it’s getting a lot more expensive. Alternatives to industrialized meat might not only taste just as good and be healthier but there’s a good chance they will also be more affordable in the future.

There are a lot of options when it comes to meat alternatives. Not every meat alternative is built the same. There are plant-based alternatives that rely heavily on science to taste like the real thing, there’s real meat grown in bioreactors instead of animals, and there are meat alternatives that don’t pretend to be meat at all. There are many options for different preferences, and the industry should try to be clear if one doesn’t fit your needs, another might.

Stop using terms like ‘synthetic meat’. I’m looking at you, Bill Gates. Gates used the term in an interview with MIT Technology Review, despite the fact the type of meat he’s invested in with Upside Foods (formerly Memphis Meats) isn’t synthetic at all. It’s real meat, only instead of being grown on an animal, it’s grown in a bioreactor. While this might seem like nitpicking, terms like ‘synthetic’ and ‘lab-grown’ – while often wrongly applied – really turn consumers off and are easily weaponized by culture warrior-minded politicians looking for their next grievance to make hay with on social media.

The reality is the politicization of meat is only going to intensify, and if the alt-protein industry wants to avoid becoming a casualty of the political culture wars, they need to get their messaging straight and do it soon.

With Foodtech Bridge, Green Circle Capital Highlights the NYC-Israel Food Tech Connection

Food tech might not be the first thing you associate New York City or Israel with, but Green Circle Capital Partners, a boutique investment firm specializing in natural product brands and food tech, is on a mission to change that. Last month, I joined investors, startups, academics, industry enthusiasts, and commercial partners from the United States and Israel at the Cornell Tech campus for the Green Circle NY-Israel Foodtech Bridge Conference.

The conference, hosted in collaboration with The Kitchen FoodTech Hub, Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Technion, explored a variety of food tech related topics including climate solutions, intellectual property, venture financing, scaling and finding distribution partners, and research and academic opportunities.

Although it covered many topics, it was clear the conference had two goals: to support cross-border collaboration between Israel and the United States and to establish New York as a hub for food tech. It’s difficult to achieve those goals in a single conference, and some of the missions described sounded very far-off, but I enjoyed learning about the small steps that can be taken in the right direction. 

Photo credits: Dave Neff, Neffpix

The startups pitched ideas related to alternatives, including cultivated meat, plant-based and cultivated fish, animal-free dairy products, fermentation, and microalgae. One memorable insight was from The Good Food Institute’s Bruce Freidrich, who noted that alternative proteins are the only climate solution in food and agriculture tech analogous to electric vehicles or clean energy. This was particularly interesting to me because the scalability of alternative proteins is something that is often questioned since they are still more expensive than their traditional counterparts in the same way that electric vehicles are often more expensive than gas ones.

A number of alternative protein startups from Israel pitched during the conference, including: 

  • Profuse: reducing the costs and accelerating the production of cultivated meat muscle through biological pathway manipulation. This startup takes stem cells and turns them into muscle at 50% of the existing cost. 
  • Plantish: making whole-cut plant-based fish filet with structure, texture, and scalability. The company will be launching at pop-up locations later this year and plans to be commercially available in 2023. 
  • Mushlabs: using mushroom mycelium to create raw ingredients for hybrid meat alternatives that are 50% animal and 50% mushroom. The company raised a $10 million Series A round in late 2020. 
  • Forsea: harnessing nature’s way of tissue formation and an organoid-based approach to replicate natural composition and lower costs by up to 90%. The company’s first product will be cultivated eel meat. 
  • Yeap: repurposing yeast that would otherwise be broken away into a functional concentrated protein. The end product will act as an egg, milk, or soy replacement. 
  • Meatfora: creating a clean meat platform based on scalable edible carriers and matching processing methodologies. Meat is grown from cells using edible and affordable plant-based platforms. 
  • Brevel: leveraging microalgae to achieve a more neutral flavor, neutral color, and full amino acid profile in alternative proteins. The startup combines fermentation and light in industrial-scale indoor bio-reactors.

Photo credits: Dave Neff, Neffpix

With so many different companies working towards the same goal of using food tech to combat climate change and increase sustainability in food systems, it was no surprise that collaboration and trade secrets were topics of conversation during the day. One discussion explored the idea of open-source research to allow alternative protein companies to collaborate and drive scientific discovery together. It made sense since one of the conference’s main goals is to drive collaboration, so it is only natural that the scientists, startup founders, investors, and commercial partners meet each other and find ways to work toward the common goal of a healthier food system. 

The most exciting part of the conference was the startup pitches. The other startups from Israel that pitched at the conference included: 

  • Biotic Labs: using microalgae to create bio-based, biodegradable RPBHV polymers. The goal is for this to be used in plastic to eliminate recycling limits and costs. 
  • Imagindairy: creating animal-free proteins for dairy products through precision fermentation. The startup closed a $13 million seed round late last year and is partnering with leading dairy companies to offer their dairy-free proteins. 
  • Maolac: creating functional milk proteins for adults for brain, bones, eyesight, skin, and immune system and development support. A unique algorithm identifies proteins in breast milk for different mammals and amplifies absorption. 
  • MyAir: leveraging wearable data and a nutrition bar to offer insights into stress and deliver actionable insights into diet. The nutrition bar is currently available online. 
  • Yarok: developing fast testing technology for food companies to identify dangerous microbes and plant pathogens. The technology aims to protect the entire food supply chain.

The NY-Israel Foodtech Bridge will be traveling to Tel Aviv in November. In the meantime, the conference organizers hope that the connections and insights exchanged at the event will translate into actions and partnerships.


Photo credits: Dave Neff, Neffpix

“A one-day conference isn’t going to save the world, but incrementally each of us doing our own part can chip away at a problem,” said Stu Strumwasser, Managing Director of Green Circle Capital Partners. “And that’s how things change.”

Has The Era of Private Label Plant-Based Meat Arrived? Motif Thinks So With Launch of New Line

Last year, the execs at Motif Foodworks figured they’d make some finished products to showcase the company’s next-gen plant-based ingredients in alt-beef, chicken, or pork.

The tests went so well that the company, which normally focuses on making plant-based meat building blocks for other manufacturers, has decided to launch its own line of finished-format private label products targeted at the foodservice and food retail markets.

Motif announced this news today as part of a release that led with the news of Robert Downey Jr’s Foodprint Coalition investing in Motif Foodworks. In fact, the launch of the new line was almost a footnote in a press release with the headline “Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition Ventures Joins Motif FoodWorks in its Effort to Reimagine Plant-Based Foods.”

Sure, it’s exciting to announce a celebrity investor, but the truth is you can’t walk on a red carpet nowadays without turning around and knocking over an alt-protein investing movie star. So the private label launch is the more interesting news of the two and, I’m guessing, more impactful long-term for Motif’s business.

From a business perspective, it’s a smart move to chase a market that accounts for 17% of meat in North America and almost half of all meat sold in Europe. While the private label has only been a small part of plant-based market thus far, some like Trader Joe’s and Walmart have already launched some lines of their own branded alt-meat products, and I’m sure the trend will only continue to grow in the coming years.

And that’s just food retail. The private label opportunity is probably even more significant in foodservice, where the allure of having a branded plant-based burger is probably declining for restaurants. The company is betting on its HEMAMI (Motif’s umami flavor technology) and APPETEX (its texture/mouthful tech) as differentiators in a crowded plant-based food market. I think they’re right since the reality is these types of tech-forward advances are beyond the scope of typical suppliers of meat for food retailers and restaurants.

I also think a healthy private label business is good for the broader plant-based meat industry, which still needs to work on bringing the price differential down between traditional meat and plant-based products. And with the food industry’s continuing battle with inflation turning consumers to store branded products, it seems like it might be time for the era of private-label meat to begin.

Change Foods Says Its Alt-Cheese Has A Market Beyond Plant-Based Consumers

As the name infers, Change Foods is poised to take on the world of cheese and go beyond today’s plant-based offerings and craft a cheddar or mozzarella that is identical in taste to a dairy-based product. The trick, company founder and CEO David Bucca believes, is the replication of casein, a dairy protein, that gives the cheese its signature flavor.

Using precision fermentation, Change Foods has a current war chest of more than $15 million from venture firms and food manufacturing companies and collaborations with such giants as Upfield and Mexico’s Sigma-Alimentos. Bucca believes Change Foods will have products on the market in 2023.

Recently, David Bucca spoke to The Spoon about Change Foods’ origins, its vision, and how he hopes to lure current dairy-based cheese eaters to his company’s line of products.

Why take on a market with so many companies already tackling plant-based cheese?

When you look at the limitations of current products on the shelf, unfortunately, it doesn’t cut it for many other cheese consumers in terms of certainly from a functionality point of view, let alone a taste point of view. So, when you’re talking about specifically harder cheeses like cheddars or even a very functional cheese like mozzarella, you expect to stretch and melt and do all of its usual things on a pizza, for example. Then there are clear limitations that you experience with plant-based cheeses.

I think certain products have come a long way, and soft base cheeses and fermented cheeses are all fantastic in their own use application. But you know, they just don’t consider them like cheese for the regular sort of cheese and dairy consumer.

How and why did you move from the aerospace industry to the world of alternative foods?

I was working in the aerospace industry when I started a nonprofit organization called Series Frontier in Australia, which is a think tank and industry accelerator for proteins. And so that allowed me to look at many companies, look at lots of different technologies, and sort of study and evaluate gaps in the market and opportunities. And basically, the conclusion I came up with was that microbial fermentation is such a powerful enabler, specifically when you can focus on specific compounds. One of which was the magic unlock that you find in a dairy engine, specifically, casein.

 So, once I drew that connection, we can recreate the key functional component of cheese and dairy, which is casein using a technology that allows you to produce something bio-identically the same. And suddenly, it was a magical epiphany to say that wow, if we can recreate casein exactly one for one, then there is that whole concept of cheese without compromise.

So, your goal is to provide an alternative to dairy that appeals to more than plant-based or vegan consumers.

It’s change without compromise to the average consumer.

We’re seeing high growth in the vegan and plant-based cheese market, which is fantastic. But for the average mass-market cheese consumer, we need something better. We need something that minimizes that compromise that people have to put up with. And I think this is the, and I can do that.

Your focus is on the casein, so is it the same as casein found in dairy?

The DNA is actually encoded in the gene. So, the gene itself is what we’re using one for, one from basically the same gene that you tell that encodes for the cow to produce casein. So, we take that same DNA, but then we use a microbial host to produce that same protein rather than a cow affected by it. So, we’re creating miniature cows in some sort of way whereby we can target specific compounds of interest, one of which is casein that a case is bioidentical.

Other companies using precision fermentation face the challenges of scale and cost. What’s your approach to those issues?

Well, where we’re at today, we’re at the very cusp of straddling the high-cost sort of existing process to now moving it forward into this new era of cost-effectiveness and scalability. And that’s why it’s a challenge. And the biggest challenge is how do we obviously optimize for this protein or company you’re looking for within the lab in terms of getting the microbes to produce things in as high a quantity as possible. But the second challenge is by leveraging the scales of what is the economy of scale in larger and larger fermenters because that’s truly where you start.

The other key component that drives a lot of that is also the regulatory timeline to produce products at scale and via a repeatable process, to then go through the regulatory approval process with the FDA and get aggressive approval for these specific compounds for use in the food.

If you hope to have products in the market in 2023, what do you have in place today? Something I can hold in my hand?

Yes, absolutely. We have a number of benchtop prototypes.

Lastly, please talk about the impact you believe Change Foods will have on climate change and sustainability through its cheese.

If we really want to solve some of the issues around climate and animal agriculture-related to dairy, then this is why cheese is so important. For example, it requires ten liters of cow’s milk to make one kilogram of cheddar. So, it’s a conversion ratio of 10 to 1. So not only is dairy milk unsustainable, to begin with, but then you can compound that by a factor of ten to cheese.

With that in mind, we have to be strategic about making sure there is no compromise on taste, performance cost, texture, price, and convenience for the average regular dairy consumer.

Alt-Fat Gets Heavy Push From New Startups Creating Building Blocks For Realistic Meat Alternatives

As some of us work to shed pounds as bathing suit season approaches, a growing cohort of new startups developing new forms of healthier and more sustainable fat alternatives is bulking up on funding to scale production and roll out new products.

The latest alt-fat startup to raise funding is CUBIQ Foods, which announced today they have raised €5.75 million Euros ($6M USD) from Cargill and other investors. CUBIQ, which plans to use the new investment to expand commercial and production operations in North America and Europe, is developing a range of products that include plant-based fat replacements and cell-cultivated fat ingredients.

The company rolled out its first product in 2021, a plant-based fat replacer called GoDrop that improves juiciness with fewer calories and less saturated fats. The company, which initially had hoped to release its cell-cultivated fat by the end of 2020, is now eyeing a 2023 release of its cultivated fat in the US market.

The news of CUBIQ’s latest funding round comes a week after Melt&Marble announced they’d raised a €5 million Seed round to scale up production for its precision fermentation-derived fat alternative. Last year, Mission Barns raised an impressive $24 million for its cell-cultivated fat technology it hopes will plump up the flavor profile of alt-bacon, breakfast patties, burgers, nuggets, and more. And in March, Sunnyvale-based Lypid raised $4 million for its technology that microencapsulates plant oils in water to create spongy fats with high melting points.

The race to create new fat alternatives is part of the broader maturation of a future food industry where new startups work to create building blocks for other companies hoping to develop more realistic meat alternatives. This same “horizontalization” of future food is similar to what has occurred in other technology industries where startups can focus their funding and attention on single attributes or components of the end product. Other future food building block cohort sectors include sweeteners, collagen, scaffolding, and the many companies making alt-protein and flavor components for alt-meat and dairy products.

Melt&Marble Raises €5 Million For Fermentation-Derived Fat That Tastes and Melts Like the Real Thing

In the first wave of plant-based “meat,” the marketing challenge was about convincing customers that giving up meat needn’t create a hole in their regular diet. For the Impossibles, Beyonds, and others, developing a reasonable, tasty facsimile to the beef or chicken experience got them into millions of homes and in demand on grocer’s shelves. For plant-based meat products to become a savory choice rather than a substitute requires innovators to “kick it up a notch.”

 While the horse race to alt-burger dominance is on, off to the side, innovators have been working on plant-based beef fat that would offer the mouthfeel and umami taste to a host of faux meat products. Included in the alt-beef fat space is Swedish company Melt&Marble which secured a €5 million Series Seed financing round to scale-up production and expand its team.

 Melt&Marble uses precision fermentation to create its plant-based beef fat. Like others in the alternative protein, dairy, meat, and seafood world know, precision fermentation is a robust process but requires a lot of capital to build a proper scalable infrastructure. CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Anastasia Krivoruchko told The Spoon that her company is currently at a lab-scale but will start scaling up in the coming months. It will still be a couple of years until it is fully industrial scale.

Dr. Kriviruchko believes the opportunity for Mouth&Marble is now and in the future based on conversations with plant-based meat providers. “We have talked with many companies about the challenges they are facing with their existing fats,” she said. “When designing our yeast strains, we have been looking into the structure of beef fats and asking ourselves what elements are important for overcoming these challenges. Our prototype has a similar mouthfeel and melting profile to beef fat, which is extremely important for replicating the taste of beef.”

This begs the obvious question about the health-related issues, such as high cholesterol and heart disease, that come with consuming “real” beef fat. Dr. Kriviruchko says such concerns are not present with plant-based beef fat.

“Generally, our fats don’t contain cholesterol, trans-fats, and contaminants. With our technology, we could also potentially integrate healthy bioactive fatty acids into our fats, and this is something that we are keen to explore,” Melt&Marble’s CEO explained.

Melt&Marble’s technology platform was spun out from research work conducted over the past decade by co-founders Dr.  Krivoruchko,  Dr.  Florian  David, and  Professor  Jens  Nielsen at the Chalmers  University of  Technology in  Sweden.  Lever VC led the latest round; an early-stage venture capital firm focused on technologies and brands in the alternative protein space. Lever has previously invested in Good Plant, The Good Spoon, A Dozen Cousins, and others.

If it appears that plant-based beef fat (and other related healthy fats) is a niche market, the number of trailblazers in this emerging sector speaks otherwise. Among Melt&Marble’s competition are Meat-Tech, Mission Barnes, Nourish Ingredients, Hoxton Farms, and Cubiq Foods.

According to Grand View Research, Inc., the global plant-based meat market size will reach $24.8 billion by 2030. A likely scenario, familiar to most emerging tech markets, will be when a few of the best alt-beef fat companies survive by being purchased by either a mega food processor such as Tyson or Cargill or merge with a plant-based market leader like Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat.

Sea & Believe is Making Plant-Based Whole Cut ‘Cod’ That Flakes Like Real Fish

Sea & Believe is a little different than the typical IndieBio company in that they already have a successful product on the market. The Ireland-based company sells two alt-fish products, an Irish seaweed burger and seaweed goujons, and today they are available in 50 stores across Ireland.

But as the company showed last week at IndieBio’s Demo Day, they are close to launching what they see as their biggest breakthrough yet: a plant-based whole-cut filet of ‘cod’ that flakes like real fish.

For company founder Jennifer O’Brien, Irish seaweed is a natural choice as a foundational building block for an alt-seafood product. Growing up in Ireland, O’Brien would eat seaweed to find relief for chronic asthma. The more she studied it, the more she realized the other benefits of seaweed, including its ability to deacidify the ocean, sequestering carbon at a rate three times higher per acre than forests.

“I knew then that there was something special about Irish seaweed,” O’Brien told IndieBio. “I wanted to learn about its properties and figure out how to scale that into a business some day.”

Sea & Believe’s Jennifer O’Brien and Piyali Chakraborty

That dream eventually led her to found Sea & Believe, where she and Chief Technology Officer Piyali Chakraborty would eventually launch their first couple of products and start to develop their white cod filet. The company believes the filet, which will have up to 25 grams of protein, will be the first plant-based seafood product to flake just like the real thing.

The company is raising funds to continue the development of its cod and to build out its seaweed supply chain, including a seaweed farm in northwest Ireland. They are working with two Irish agencies – Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM), the Irish seafood development agency, and Údarás na Gaeltachta (UnAg), a regional Irish economic development agency – to help train local fisherman to harvest seaweed on 500 meter rope lines.

The company is looking to raise $3 million in seed funding. With a product already on the market and a successful prototype for flaky plant-based cod, I imagine it won’t take long given the growing interest in alt-seafood.

You can watch their pitch video below to learn more.

Sea & Believe (IndieBio SF Demo Day 12)