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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Alternative Protein

GFI: U.S. Plant-Based Meat Sales in Food Service Hit All-Time High in ’22, Retail Sales Remain Flat

According to a new report from the Good Food Institute (GFI) examining plant-based meat sales in the U.S. food service sector, sales of meat derived from plants sold to restaurants and other food service institutions hit $730 million in 2022, up 7.8% and $53 million in total dollars compared to the previous year. GFI also says that total U.S. retail sales for plant-based meat – still the biggest overall category – remained flat at $1.4 billion last year.

The GFI report detailed total U.S. sales of plant-based meat, including food service, retail sales, and e-commerce. According to the report, total plant-based meat sales revenue grew slightly from $2.1 billion in 2021 to $2.2 billion in 2022, amounting to an increase of 2%. However, while total plant-based meat revenue was up year over year, GFI’s report says that total pounds of U.S. plant-based meat sold dipped slightly from 349 million to 336 million in 2022, a dip of 4%.

If you’re curious how total revenue went up while pounds shipped went down, that’s due to price increases for plant-based meat brought on by inflation. According to GFI, wholesale prices for plant-based meat in broadline distribution increased by 4% in 2022 over the previous year, half that of the 8% increase in prices for animal-based meat products. Animal meat product price increases were in line with the estimated increase in food service pricing, which was an estimated 8% in 2022. According to GFI, overall plant-based meat price per pound has decreased by 11% since 2019, which they attribute to increased scale and more favorable sourcing agreements with distributors.

GFI also broke down where plant-based meats were sold in the food service category. According to the report, 39% of alternative meat was sold through quick-service restaurants (i.e. fast food), while full-service restaurants accounted for 19%. Education came in a distant third, accounting for 16% of plant-based meat sales in the food service category for 2022.

You can read the full GFI report here.

With Production Milestone, New Culture Eyes Price Parity for Its Animal-Free Mozzarella

New Culture, a company that uses precision fermentation to make animal-free casein, says it has reached a new manufacturing milestone that enables it to produce enough casein for 25 thousand pizzas worth of cheese per manufacturing run.

This new production milestone, which the company achieved through partnerships with external manufacturing partners, pushes the company’s production capacity far beyond its earlier development volumes and, according to New Culture, puts it on a trajectory to reach price parity with factory-farmed cheese within three years.

The push for a more environmentally friendly dairy has resulted in several startups chasing animal-free casein, which gives cheese its stretchy, melty properties. While there are a number of plant-based mozzarella cheeses on the market, New Culture’s mozzarella is the first made at production volume with animal-identical casein, the protein that gives cheese its melty, stretchy properties. In addition to actually tasting like cheese, New Culture and other makers of precision fermentation-created casein (like Change Foods and Standing Ovation) also promise that their animal-free cheese will be free of lactose, antibiotics, and cholesterol.

Looking forward, New Culture hopes to produce enough casein for more than 14 million pizzas’ worth of cheese and has plans to expand into other cheeses. If the company can reach its promise of price parity, it should be able to carve out a nice slice of an alternative cheese market projected to hit $9.6 billion by 2032.

Adam Yee Makes Us Dumplings and Talks About Building His Startup at SKS Japan

Ever since longtime food entrepreneur and podcaster Adam Yee announced his new better-for-you dumpling brand Sobo Foods, I’d been hoping to head to California to try the tasty-looking Asian comfort food.

But as it turns out, I won’t have to make that trip to the Bay area to sample his curry potato and the plant-based pork and chive dumplings since I had a chance to taste some cooked up by Yee himself in Tokyo. Yee was in town for SKS Japan, the global food tech summit hosted by The Spoon and SigmaXYZ, to speak on a session and hand out dumplings to curious event attendees.

Above: Yee at SKS Japan

It was Yee’s first time at the event after trying to get in last year and (as you’ll hear in the interview) getting COVID in Cambodia. I’m glad he made it because, well, dumplings, and also, he’s got some great insights into the broader food tech scene. We discuss why Yee and his cofounder started Sobo, the company’s go-to-market strategy, and more. Click play below to listen to Adam and my conversation and below and stay tuned for more interviews from SKS Japan this week and next.

A Conversation with Adam Yee about his new Sobo Foods, a better-for-you Asian comfort food brand.

Alt Protein Enters New Era as USDA Approves Sale of Cultivated Chicken By UPSIDE & GOOD Meat

Today marks a big day for cultivated meat as two companies, UPSIDE Foods and Good Meat, announced today that they had received approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to sell their cultivated meat products to consumers.

According to UPSIDE, the news came in the form of notification from the USDA that they have received a “grant of inspection” (GOI) from USDA, which means the company has met the applicable federal requirements and standards to operate as a meat establishment and is allowed to process, package, and sell our cultivated chicken in the United States under the inspection of USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

UPSIDE says that with this news, they have passed all three of the requisite milestones necessary to sell its meat – 1) “No Questions” Letter from FDA — November 2022, 2) USDA Label Approval — June 2023, and 3) today’s GOI notification.

With the latest news, the company says they are starting manufacturing of meat and scaling up production at their EPIC facility. They plan to start selling the meat soon at San Francisco’s Bar Crenn through their partnership with 3-Michelin Star chef Dominique Crenn.

Not to be outdone, GOOD Meat – the cultivated meat division of Eat Just – plans to sell its first cultivated meat in the U.S. through a partnership with Chef José Andrés. According to the company, the sale of their cultivated meat product was greenlighted with the news that the USDA has given the company approval for its first poultry product to enter interstate commerce in the U.S. According to GOOD Meat, the sale of its product will take place at a yet-to-be-disclosed restaurant in Washington, D.C.

For GOOD Meat, the news marks the second country approval for the company will begin selling its cultivated meat product. The company achieved a global first in late 2020 by selling its cultivated chicken in Singapore.

Today’s news is truly a watershed event for the alt protein space. After billions of dollars spent across the industry for research and development, commercialization, and production, we will finally see the first cultivated products sold to U.S. consumers.

However, despite today’s news, everyday consumers may still have a bit of a wait. Cultivated meat products are still being made in small quantities and will first be sold in the most exclusive of restaurants, and it might be a while before we see it at the corner grocery store.

Shiru Used AI To Discover Its First Novel Ingredient in 3 Months. The Next One Will Go Even Faster

This week, novel ingredient discovery startup Shiru announced they have commercially launched their first ingredient, OleoPro, a plant-based fat ingredient the company says doesn’t have the environmental costs or health consequences of animal fat. As part of the announcement, the company disclosed that the company’s first commercial partner is Griffith Foods, a commercial food ingredient manufacturer.

As readers of The Spoon know, Shiru is part of a cohort of startups using AI to discover new ingredients more quickly than traditional methods. Unlike many first-generation synthetic bio products, OleoPro was developed using machine learning, enabling a multifold acceleration of the discovery and testing phase according to the company.

The company’s discovery timeframe for OleoPro took less than three months. According to the announcement, “Shiru’s biochemists and computational biologists used AI to scan and select nearly 10,000 formulations” in that time frame, and “then they determined the precise molecules that would combine to form an ingredient with the unique oil-holding protein scaffold of animal fat.” The entire discovery and commercialization process took 18 months from the project’s start, much shorter than the multi-year process typical of classical synthetic biology workflows.

And now, according to Shiru CEO Jasmin Hume, that time frame for discovery will compress even more now that the company has built out its machine learning model. Finding a new novel protein or functional ingredient will take “eight to 10 weeks is like what we’re comfortable with,” Hume told me in a recent interview. “And what that means is, it’s not just digital, but at eight weeks, we have up to half a dozen proteins that we’re making at a couple of grams. And so we go from totally digital to pilot-produced ingredients, not one but a couple that can work, in about eight weeks.”

“Instead of a half decade and more than a quarter billion dollars in R&D to ship a viable product, Shiru used AI to dramatically reduce the cost and time to market of an essential ingredient of plant-based meat to a matter of months and a few hundred thousand dollars – and the cost of protein discovery at Shiru continues to decline,” said Dr. Ranjani Varadan, Shiru Chief Scientific Officer, in the announcement. Varadan, who sat down with The Spoon last summer, was previously VP of R&D at Impossible Foods.

Extracellular To Offer License-Free & Low-Cost Cell Banks for Cultivated Meat Startups in the UK

Today Extracellular, a cultivated meat-focused contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), announced the availability of low-cost and license-free cell banks for research to cultivated meat developers in the UK. The banks of primary cells will be made available to early-stage cultivated meat researchers and startups via funding from StartupUK and through a collaboration with Mutus, another UK startup focused on low-cost inputs for cultivated meat growth media.

Animal primary cells relevant for cultivated meat research are typically not only expensive and often of poor quality, but usually have limited information about their performance or provenance. Their use is also limited due to stringent licensing and commercial agreement requirements. Extracellular aims to address these barriers by providing animal primary cells suitable for cultivated meat research and development at up to 90% cheaper than other cell line providers and free from licensing restrictions.

From the announcement:

The cell banks initially offer cells isolated from the fat, muscle, and bone marrow tissues of cow, pig and lamb. Information on the cells’ provenance, from the age, breed, and sex of the animal, to the passage numbers and expected population doubling times, will be included with each batch. More animal species and tissue types will be made available in the future.

This move comes as more researchers and activists in the cultivated meat and future food space call for more open access to shared resources to accelerate development. Startups in the cultivated meat space typically hold their intellectual property close to the vest, but as venture capitalists have become more reticent about the space, there’s a growing realization in the community that some level of open-source-ish behavior will be required if the industry to continue to move forward and ultimately make a meaningful contribution in reducing industrial agriculture and its associated climate impacts.

New Harvest’s Isha Datar, who has been pushing for open access to cell ag (her group launched OpenCellAg last summer in partnership with CULT Food Science), emphasized this in her comments on the initiative: “Despite the venture capital and startup environment, there are many fundamental aspects of cellular agriculture that can (and must) be solved collectively. The efforts of Will Milligan and the team at Extracellular to share resources at low cost to equip and empower researchers to build a body of work is commendable leadership. In the near term, we need to go beyond traditional academia to build foundational work in this space; this type of initiative from the private sector is exactly what cellular agriculture needs. We need a culture of sharing and open science if we are to move this field forward. Too much depends on it.”

Cell banks will be made available starting next month to UK-based startups.

World’s Biggest Meat Packer JBS Building Cultivated Meat Plant Capable of 1,000 Metric Tons

Lab-grown meat is all grown up.

This week Brazilian meat processing conglomerate JBS announced they had broken ground in Spain on its first commercial-scale cultivated meat production facility. According to the company, the new facility will produce more than 1,000 metric tons of cultivated meat per year, potentially expanding to 4,000 metric tons of production in the medium term, according to Reuters.

The new facility will be built by BioTech Foods, the packing giant’s Spanish subsidiary which the company acquired a 51% stake in 2021. In that $100 million deal, $41 million was earmarked for the production of the facility, which will be built in the heart of Spain’s culinary epicenter in San Sebastian.

While the facility is not the biggest cultivated meat factory in the world that’s been announced – that honor goes to (at least for now) Good Meat’s future facility, which they claim will produce 30 million pounds of cultivated meat – the JBS facility looks like it could be the biggest in Europe. While Gourmey’s plant announced last year looks like it will have a fairly massive physical footprint, the company has only vaguely alluded to a production capacity in the “10s of thousands of pounds” in cultivated meat. If JBS’s facility hits its initial production capacity target of one thousand metric tons, that pencils out to over two million pounds of cultivated meat annually. Expanding to its planned four thousand metric tons will mean 8.8 million pounds.

In reality, the actual pounds don’t matter so much as the symbolic nature of this move by the world’s biggest meatpacker. Also, considering that JBS is investing so heavily in cultivated meat just after the company closed its plant-based meat production facility in Denver, it’s a pretty bullish sign for a technology that has seen a rising chorus of critiques in recent months around its viability and climate impact claims.

BioTech Foods co-founder and CEO Iñigo Charola points to the instability around traditional ag supply chains as the impetus for JBS investing heavily in a cultivated meat future.

“With the challenges imposed on global supply chains, cultivated protein offers the potential to stabilize food security and global protein production,” Charola said in a statement.

All grown up, indeed.

Oobli May Have a Hit on Its Hands With Sweet Teas That Get Sweetness From Protein

This week, Oobli launched its lineup of sweet teas sweetened with sweet protein.

The company, formerly Joywell Foods, showed the products off on-stage this week at the SynBioBeta conference (in a session moderated by yours truly). The company’s sweet teas, which are sweetened by a sweet protein called brazzein, can now be purchased on the Oobli website.

Brazzein is the name for the sweet protein derived from oubli, a fruit found in West Africa. Because brazzein from oubli is extremely hard to extract, Oobli (which, as you can probably tell, took inspiration for its name from the fruit) has developed a process to create a chemically identical version of the protein via the process of microbial fermentation. The company’s process for creating brazzein involves isolating the genes responsible for the sweet protein and then inserting them into yeast. This modified yeast is added to a nutrient-rich broth within fermentation tanks, where it then consumes the sugars in the broth to produce sweet proteins identical to that found in the oubli plant.

The result is a tea that has only 7g of sugar (compared to 40g of sugar in 16 oz Snapple Peach sweet tea) and only 60 calories, compared to 150 or so in a similarly sized Snapple. For those who might be thinking they could just drink diet sweet teas with artificial sweeteners or sugar alcohols to reduce their sugar intake, Oubli and others point out that sweeteners like sucralose or aspartame can raise blood sugars and play havoc with a person’s microbiome. Natural sweeteners like monk fruit and stevia might be better, but they often contain erythritol, which has been shown to increase blood clotting that could lead to stroke or heart attacks.

The Oobli Peach Sweet Tea I had tasted as good or better than any sweet tea I’ve had with sugar or corn syrup, and it didn’t have any noticeable off-taste weirdness I sometimes notice with artificial sweeteners. Add to that the sweetened-by-protein could be a major selling point for consumers who often associate proteins with healthier lifestyles, and I think Oobli might have a potential hit on its hands.

One hurdle to success – at least in the near term – is Oobli’s teas are pretty expensive. A 12-pack of Oobli costs $39, about three times the price of a comparable 12-pack of Snapple would set you back. That said, a more realistic comparison would possibly be a better-for-you brand like Olipop, which sells for roughly the same price as Oobli on a per-unit basis and has shown that higher pricing hasn’t exactly slowed its hockey stick-like growth.

The launch of the company’s sweet tea line comes just a few months after the launch of its chocolate bars which also feature the company’s precision-derived sweet protein. For those wondering, I tried the dark chocolate raspberry, which tasted like other sugar-sweetened dark chocolates I’ve had.

Prime Roots Raises $30M Series B for Deli Meat Made With Koji Mycelium

The average supermarket deli is a sad carnival of sulfites, nitrates, and preservatives that go bump in your belly. There have been a handful of upstarts in the plant-based food space attempting to create a healthy alternative to sliced cotto salami or chunks of smoked roast beef. One Berkeley-based company believes it has a healthy, tasty solution.

Prime Roots, producer of deli-style meat made from koji mycelium, announced $30 million in Series B funding this month from True Ventures, Pangaea Ventures, Prosus Ventures, Top Tier Capital, Diamond Edge Ventures, bringing their total funding to $50 million. The fresh funding will enable Prime Roots to scale and expand to deli counters and restaurants. The company’s alternative deli product currently is available primarily in the San Francisco Bay area.

Growing up with family in the food industry, Prime Roots founder and CEO Kimberlie Le knew that the focus had to be a multi-barreled approach: taste was a must; nutrition was also a consideration, and sustainability also was vital.

“Because I come from a food background, I really wanted to emphasize taste,” Le told The Spoon in a recent interview. “We wanted to make sure the products taste good first and foremost. When we started six years ago, we were also thinking about really the nutrition and the cleanliness of the products. At the time, legacy brands had long ingredient lists and a lot of unpronounceable ingredients. I really wanted to fix that because it wasn’t anything that my mom, who’s a chef, would want to serve in her restaurants or at home. And so really took it upon myself to find a solution that really met the consumer where they are and really solved a personal problem for conscience eaters.”

Prime Roots approaches the deli case with the identical microscopic texture of meat, along with its umami taste made from plants. Experienced chefs helped develop the most popular deli products-including cracked pepper turkey, black forest ham, hickory bacon, salami, and pepperoni to emulate the savory, meaty taste, and texture that consumers demand for meat substitutes. According to the company, Prime Roots’ turkey and ham have no nitrates, preservatives, cholesterol, soy, wheat and are lower in sodium than the leading brands.

Koji is a strain of a fungus used for various culinary purposes, including the production of alcoholic beverages like sake or invaluable condiments like miso and mirin. In the case of creating deli meats, koji ignites the fermentation process when added to other base ingredients. Other companies such as Meati and Aqua Culture Foods use koji in their production of alternative proteins.

Le said that as part of her due diligence, she toured a number of delis across the country including New York, the center for all things corned beef and pastrami. The goal was to see how receptive these landmark eateries would be to a new product.

“When we were working on the concept, the deli concept,” Le recalled, “The first thing we did when we had initial prototypes was go to New York, which is really deli mecca and had prototypes which we would take into some of the most iconic delis and say, ‘Hey, try this’ to see how open and receptive these deli folks were and how the deli culture would be receptive to a plant-based product.”

 “Surprisingly, we didn’t get kicked out of a single place, and everyone was super excited to put the meats on their slicer. They were wowed by the texture, the slicing capabilities, and were just very open and excited.”

ADM Partners With Air Protein to Make ‘Landless’ Protein From CO2

Today ADM announced a partnership with Air Protein, a company developing technology to make protein out of thin air, using carbon dioxide as a feedstock.

According to the announcement, the two companies have entered a Strategic Development Agreement (SDA) to advance the development and production of this protein that can be developed without arable land. The agreement leverages ADM’s expertise in nutrition and research and Air Protein’s protein production technology to expand the protein ecosystem and deliver sustainable, cost-effective ingredients for meat substitutes. The two companies will collaborate to build the first commercial-scale production facility for air protein.

The foundation of Air Protein’s protein production methodology (sometimes referred to as gas fermentation) was developed in the 1960s as NASA explored ways to produce food in space. While the technology was shelved for decades, it has been dusted off in recent years as a new cohort of startups has started to explore new ways to create proteins more sustainably.

One of the problems often cited in the alt protein space is an over-reliance on glucose as a feedstock, and many see the development of lower-cost and more sustainable feedstocks as necessary for the continued growth of the industry. Air protein and other companies using gas fermentation technology leverage single-cell organisms to convert CO2 into protein, opening the door to a possibly more sustainable method for fueling future growth in alternative proteins.

Another benefit of gas fermentation is that it disconnects protein production from arable land. Many developing economies neither have arable farmland nor resources to produce cheap and abundant protein; this technology could provide a pathway to produce protein in emerging markets.

Given the company’s size and importance in the global food supply chain, ADM’s entry into the air protein space could be a further validation of this nascent technology. One has to wonder if ADM’s stamp of approval will spur further interest in the technology across the food value chain, encouraging other big food system players to partner with some of the other companies in this space, which include Solar Foods, Deep Branch Biotechnology, and Air Company.

XPRIZE Announces Finalists For $15M Competition to Develop More Sustainable Protein

XPRIZE, an organization that hosts competitions to seek out solutions to global challenges, announced the six finalists of its $15 million XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion (FTNB) competition. The contest, kicked off in 2020, seeks to stimulate the development of more sustainable and accessible chicken breast and fish filet alternatives that can satisfy the rising demand for meat products amid a growing global population.

According to the release, the six finalists have developed “multiple consistent cuts of a meat alternative that replicate the look, taste, smell, feel, cooking behavior and nutritional properties of a structured filet of fish or chicken breast.” The finalists were selected by a judging panel of “diverse experts in international sustainability, agricultural and biological engineering, the food industry, and experts working at the highest levels of academia and research.” 

The finalists, which were selected from a semi-finalist group of 28 companies (later expanded to 31), include a mix of cell-cultured, fermentation, and plant-based platforms. The mix between chicken and fish is 50/50, with three for each:

  • CellX: Cell-based chicken team from China
  • Eternal: Fermentation-derived chicken team from Argentina
  • The PlantEat: Plant-based chicken team from South Korea
  • ProFillet: Plant-based fish team from Canada
  • Revo Foods: Plant-based fish team from Austria
  • TFTAK: Plant-based fish team from Estonia

What’s just as interesting as which companies were named finalists are which ones didn’t make it to the final round. The list of semi-finalists included some of the biggest names in alternative protein across cell-cultured (UPSIDE, Good Meat, Blue Nalu to name a few), mycelium-based (Atlast/MyForest, Good Meat Company) and gas fermentation (Air Protein) based products, and none of these companies made the finalist round.

Also surprising is that none of the companies chosen were based in the United States, the country which has seen the biggest overall amount of venture capital go into alternative protein. Two of the finalists are from Asia, two from Europe, one from Latin America, and one from Canada.

One reason some of the bigger names didn’t end up on the finalist list is no doubt due in part due to the withdrawal by up to about 11 companies earlier this year due to a revision to the contest’s rule changes last year that said Aspire, one of the co-sponsors of the event, would have a right of first refusal on investment in the finalists. The rules were revised slightly in September, but the restrictions still proved too much for many finalists such as Eat Just, Wild Type and Better Meat Company.

The FTNB competition was modeled after XPRIZE conducted an analysis of global food system challenges in which it identified 12 breakthroughs that could establish a more food-secure and environmentally sustainable world by 2050. From these 12, the group chose the need for alternative proteins at-scale as a critical impact area that requires significant technological advances, decreased price points, and notable shifts in consumers’ preferences.

From here, the finalists will head to the next round of tastings. The semifinalist round was hosted in Abu Dhabi, which is the home to Aspire, which cosponsored this XPRIZE competition alongside the Tony Robbins Foundation. According to XPRIZE, the winning team, which will be selected in 2024, will develop multiple consistent cuts of chicken breast or fish filet alternatives (115 grams / 4 ounces) that can replicate the sensory properties, structure, versatility, and nutritional profile of conventional chicken or fish, while having a lower comparable environmental footprint than animal-agriculture derived products.  

Motif Continues Finished Product Expansion With Launch of Portfolio at NRA Show

Motif Foodworks, a company that develops plant-based meat alternative ingredients, has continued its expansion into finished product formats with the debut of its food service portfolio later this month at the National Restaurant Association show.

The company says the portfolio, which includes alt pork (PorkWorks), beef (Plant-Based Ground and Motif BeefWorks, Plant-Based Burger Patties and Grounds) and chicken (ChickenWorks), will be available to food service providers later in 2023. The products are an evolution of their initial steps into the food product prototypes it started testing in 2022 under slightly different brand names and came just a month after the company dabbled in a direct-to-consumer trial.

The move comes despite the company’s recent insistence that they are still primarily a B2B player set on designing next-generation food ingredients for other brands. After the launch of its D2C trial last month, company CEO Mike Leonard told Food Navigator that the company is still a B2B company and they don’t intend to develop a consumer-facing brand of its own.

As appetites for late-round alternative protein investments cool, it looks like Motif continues to look for ways to accelerate its pathway toward revenue. The company, which laid off an unspecified number of employees last summer, has already raised $343 million and would likely have difficulty raising another significant round in the current environment. In addition to its continued expansion into finished products, the company expanded into bioprocessing services earlier this year and showed its openness to platform flexibility by expanding into molecular farming in a partnership with Ingredientwerks.

The expansion into a fully fleshed-out end product portfolio comes at an interesting time for Motif, as the company continues its fight with Impossible over patents which started last year when Impossible filed suit over patent infringement in March of 2022. Motif responded by challenging the validity of Impossible’s patents but endured a setback in October when the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board affirmed Impossible’s patent. The legal battle continues, with the trial set to begin in January 2025.