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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Alternative Protein

Motif and Impossible Patent Fight Continues as Europe Revokes Key Impossible Patent

Motif Foodworks announced today it has filed four additional challenges to U.S. patents held by Impossible Foods, pointing to a recent preliminary decision by the European Patent Office (EPO) to revoke a key European patent of Impossible’s.

According to Motif, the EPO recently revoked Impossible patent No. 2,943,072 B1 (‘072), which centers around making meat alternatives utilizing heme protein, sugars and sulfur compounds. In its release, Motif said they concurred with the EPO’s conclusion that the innovation claimed by Impossible is “obvious”, since these innovations have been used in the creation of food “for decades”.

“We agree with the European Patent Office’s ruling that Impossible’s patent is obvious and look at it as a win for the industry – and a sign of things to come,” said Michael Leonard, CEO of Motif FoodWorks.

For its part, Impossible has told The Spoon that the decision by the EPO is a temporary one and they are appealing it, and for the time being, the patent remains fully enforceable.

“We’re optimistic that the Boards of Appeal will review and overturn this decision,” said an Impossible spokesperson. 

The patent fight between the two companies started last March when Impossible sued Motif for violating an Impossible patent (No. 10,863,761). Impossible’s lawsuit claimed that Motif has been able to gain an understanding of its process through information in the public domain, which then helped it develop its HEMAMI protein. The lawsuit also calls out Motif and parent company Ginkgo’s claims that its novel protein can essentially replace Impossible’s proprietary heme.

Motif fought back, filing a petition with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”) to invalidate Impossible’s patent at the center of the lawsuit against them. The petition, known in legalese as an “inter partes review” (“IPR”), could allow Motif to ask a panel of judges from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) to review the Impossible Foods’ patent for to beef replicas.

Impossible has since added four additional patents related to plant-based meat formulations to its lawsuit and, in light of the EPO decision, Motif is now challenging these patents (US11,224,241, US11,013,250, US10,039,306, and US9,943,096). All four of these patents relate to the creation of flavors and aromas in alt meat that contains heme protein, sugars, and sulfur compounds.

Motif might have an uphill battle on its hands, especially given the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board ruled in October that Motif’s challenge to Impossible’s patent at the center of the original lawsuit is invalid, writing Motif “has not shown a reasonable likelihood that it will prevail in showing that at least one of the challenged claims is unpatentable” and declining to review the case.

“Motif has tried repeatedly to avoid accountability for its theft by attempting to have Impossible’s lawsuit dismissed, delayed, and petitioning for our patent to be reviewed and revoked,” said an Impossible spokesperson. “Both the District Court and the Patent Office have rejected Motif’s requests. The case is proceeding, and Motif can no longer skirt accountability for its theft of our technology. We remain wholly confident in our position and are confident that Motif will be held accountable.”

The battle has serious implications for both companies. Impossible has pointed to its proprietary heme product as the secret to much of its success in achieving a realistic plant-based alternative to animal meat. Meanwhile, Motif hopes to offer its Hemami product to plant-based meat makers to help them create make products that could rival Impossible’s in terms of realistic taste and aroma.

The IP wars for future food are only going to continue heat up as we see increased competition in the market.

New Culture Believes Its Animal-Free Casein Will Help Grow the Alt.Cheese Market

It might sound like a scene from “Forest Gump,” but consumers love cheese–sliced, diced, shredded, spread, liquid, and chunked. Globally, according to Expert Market Research, we’re looking at a space that reached a value of about $75.46 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.8% in the forecast period of 2023-2028, reaching a value of approximately $109.85 billion by 2026. Any way you look at it, that’s a lot of cheddar.

While David-like com-compared to the Goliath dairy-based cheese world, alternative cheese—that is, “cheese” made without products that come directly from animals—is gaining steam and popularity. Future Market Insights states that the global cheese alternative market reached a  market valuation of $4.3 billion in 2022, accelerating with a CAGR of 8.3% by 2022-2032 to reach a value of $9.6 billion by 2032.

What alt.cheesemakers know is that one of the keys to producing animal-free cheese is the production of animal-free casein. Casein, which predominantly comes from cow’s milk, is a protein that is a critical ingredient in cheese-making. California-based New Culture has a solution that can make casein at scale without animal milk using precision fermentation. The company says its mozzarella will debut at pizzerias around the United States in 2023.

In a recent interview, New Culture told The Spoon about the company and its future trajectory.

How is your company different from Change Foods, which also says it is making animal-free casein?

At New Culture, we’ve proven our ability as the industry leader to produce animal-free casein at scale efficiently. This is critical in enabling us to produce delicious animal-free mozzarella, drive down cost, unlock broad distribution, and succeed in our mission to lead the change to an animal-free dairy future. We’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback from a wide range of chefs, pizzaiolos, and pizza lovers who have been able to enjoy our melty, stretchy cheese cooked in ovens up to 800 degrees.

We’re focused on creating a future with delicious animal-free cheese that positively impacts the environment and the global food system, and we’re excited about the rapidly expanding ecosystem working toward that goal. 

Are you involved in the entire process, including making the cheese or animal-free protein?

New Culture makes animal-free cheese from end to end, producing our animal-free casein protein and then turning that casein into cheese. Beginning with our mozzarella,  we combine our animal-free casein with water, plant-based fat, and a touch of sugar, vitamins, and minerals. We use traditional cheese-making to create the final product. Unlike conventional cheese, ours is free from lactose, cholesterol, trace hormones, and antibiotics.

To make animal-free mozzarella that tastes like the real deal, we use only the best plant-based fats to produce the perfect mouthfeel and consistency and a dash of plant-based sugars to match the sugar content in cheese that comes from animal milk. We also mix good vitamins and minerals such as calcium, vitamin D, and vitamin B to ensure our cheese provides the dietary profile that cheese eaters expect and the nutritional benefits they deserve.

Do you plan to be B2B or direct to the consumer?

New Culture’s first product is a melty, stretchy, animal-free mozzarella, which we’re planning to launch in pizzerias as our first market. Over time we will develop a complete portfolio of other cheese products, expand into retail (e.g., grocery stores), and sell our animal-free casein to food manufacturers as a B2B ingredient supplier.

How long before you have products in the market, and what will they be?

We are very excited that our first animal-free mozzarella will be available for consumers to taste in 2023. Mozzarella is the most consumed cheese in the US (13 Ibs consumed annually per person – everyone loves pizza!), and we will be the first to market with a pizza cheese made of casein from precision fermentation.

How do you think your product will fare with vegans, given it is animal-free but not strictly vegan?

New Culture cheese is free from all animal inputs and is entirely vegan. We are proud to make a product that vegans and cheese lovers will enjoy. We can do this by producing our animal-free casein protein – the essential protein that makes cheese cheesy – through precision fermentation. Instead of using a cow to produce milk that contains casein proteins, we get mighty microorganisms to make those same casein proteins, but without involving any animals. This food technology has been around for decades and is actually a method already used in the cheese-making process. 

Perfect Day is Building an AWS for Precision Fermentation

Back when Amazon was still just an e-commerce company, founder Jeff Bezos became so frustrated that every project took so long to get going that he asked his then-chief of staff, Andy Jassy, to investigate. What Jassy found is that everyone was spending all their time reinventing wheels:

“…(Jassy) found a running complaint. The executive team expected a project to take three months, but it was taking three months just to build the database, compute or storage component. Everyone was building their own resources for an individual project, with no thought to scale or reuse.

The internal teams at Amazon required a set of common infrastructure services everyone could access without reinventing the wheel every time, and that’s precisely what Amazon set out to build — and that’s when they began to realize they might have something bigger.

That something bigger eventually became AWS, which Jassy visualized as something he called the Internet OS, where the company would provide all the necessary ingredients for an Internet company to run a successful business.

While both Bezos and Jassy were visionaries to realize they could offer Amazon’s industry-leading Internet infrastructure as a platform to help Internet companies could build products, no one – not even Bezos or Jassy – could have predicted the company’s cloud services would eventually become a $46 billion annual business.

Since then, we’ve seen the infrastructure-as-a-service playbook applied to new verticals, from delivery to food service production. But when it comes to building the future of food, we’ve yet to see any companies create a full-stack production platform for alt protein.

Enter Perfect Day. The company, which has made a name for itself with its pioneering precision-fermentation derived animal-identical proteins, has begun to put together the pieces to help create essentially what is an AWS for alt-protein, particularly precision fermentation.

The latest move in the company’s evolution towards becoming a full-stack microbial fermentation services company is its acquisition of Sterling Biotech Limited (SBL), an India-based biomanufacturing services company that currently serves the pharmaceutical and food industries. According to the announcement, the acquisition will double the company’s production capability by adding four high-value assets. These manufacturing facilities include fermenters that provide precision fermentation capabilities, which Perfect Day will use to expand its precision fermentation capabilities while continuing to service existing SBL customers.

This news comes just a couple of months after Perfect Day announced the formalization of their enterprise services business, which the company is calling nth, under which it plans to offer expertise and technology services to partners developing food and other products that utilize precision fermentation-derived inputs. According to Perfect Day, the company worked for two years to develop the nth services business, building out its scale-up production, IP licensing, strain engineering services, and other precision fermentation solutions.

nth is the only enterprise biology company in the world that offers end-to-end expertise and services from the earliest stages of molecular development to commercial-scale manufacturing, and the many steps in between.

While Perfect Day has a lead in creating an alternative protein services platform, they aren’t the only ones trying to become an essential partner for others. For example, Gingko and its Motif subsidiary are working to build an ingredient platform business, and BioBrew is offering scaled manufacturing services to companies like Clara. Others, like Pow, provide scale-up services and infrastructure to companies in the early stages of product development. But none of these have the depth of services that Perfect Day has, at least now.

There’s been much conversation as of late around how companies in alternative protein will scale their products to make them more affordable and plentiful enough to make a dent in traditional animal agriculture. Perfect Day’s answer this to make their processes, technology, and production infrastructure available to others, so these early-stage companies don’t spin their wheels trying to recreate the wheel.

The Secret to Scaling a Plant-Based Meat Startup With Nowadays’ Max Elder

In his previous life, Max Elder worked as a futurist, where he helped food brands develop strategies for the future.

One of his primary motivations in this work was the belief he could help steer these brands away from animal agriculture and toward a future centered around more humane and sustainable foods. Over time, however, Elder realized that to have a meaningful impact, he’d have to create his own product.

“I always thought that I could sneak into the boardroom and try to shift the Titanic,” Elder said. “That was meaningful work, but it’s quite hard to do. Structural sort of incentives aren’t aligned in these kinds of companies. And Titanics sink. That’s the story, right?”

So in late 2020, Elder left his job as a futurist and created a plant-based meat company. With Nowadays, Elder envisions a future where he can have a bigger impact by scaling meat utilizing production techniques perfected for traditional animal agriculture.

“To truly scale these products efficiently so that the category can realize its potential, we have to think more creatively about our manufacturing process, our finishing process, and partnering with existing players across the meat value chain,” Elder said.

He sees many plant-based meat startups trying to create entirely new ways to make their products when, in truth, many existing processes built for the world of animal agriculture work and are already highly scalable.

“A lot of work is being done to recreate wheels,” Elder said. “And the (existing) wheels are cheap, ubiquitous, and super efficient. They’re just pumping out conventional protein that isn’t as good for people or the planet.”

So while Titantics may sink, Elder thinks he has created a way to leverage much of the existing know-how from the old world to lift the tide of alternative proteins by making them more efficient and affordable.

“As a founder, Nowadays is my version of a speedboat. Hopefully, one that we can grow to have impact.”

Elder was this week’s guest on The Spoon podcast, where we talked about his transition from strategist to entreprenuer, and Elder put his futurist hat back on to look at where things are going in the world of alternative protein.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below or get it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Breaking: UPSIDE Becomes First Company to Get Greenlight From the U.S. FDA For Cultivated Meat

Today UPSIDE Foods announced it has become the first company in the world to receive a “No Questions” letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for cultivated meat, poultry, or seafood. This letter signals that the FDA believes UPSIDE’s cultivated chicken is safe for consumers.

This is big news for UPSIDE and the broader alt-protein industry since it’s the first time that the FDA has greenlit a cultivated meat product. The approval moves the U.S. market one step closer to seeing meat made via cellular agriculture sold to consumers.

“This is a watershed moment in the history of food,” said Dr. Uma Valeti, CEO and Founder of UPSIDE Foods. “We started UPSIDE amid a world full of skeptics, and today, we’ve made history again as the first company to receive a ‘No Questions’ letter from the FDA for cultivated meat. This milestone marks a major step towards a new era in meat production, and I’m thrilled that U.S. consumers will soon have the chance to eat delicious meat that’s grown directly from animal cells.”

Along with the FDA’s memo detailing the agency’s review of the data and information provided by UPSIDE Foods to establish the safety of its cultivated chicken filet, it’s also released a 104-page document prepared by UPSIDE Foods that details the safety of the cultivated chicken and its production process.

While this is a big step, don’t expect to see UPSIDE’s chicken on store shelves in the immediate future. According to the release, UPSIDE Foods still needs to secure the necessary approvals from USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) before UPSIDE Foods’ cultivated chicken can be sold to consumers. According to the company, details on the launch timing will follow.

Steakholder Files Patent For Printing Flaky Fish

Steakholder Foods announced today it has filed a provisional patent with the US Patent Office for a new process to create cell-cultured fish with layers of tissue to achieve “the characteristic tender flakiness of cooked fish.”

The company, formerly known as MeatTech 3D, says the new approach will be created using its 3D printing technology and is expected to enable the production of a wide variety of fish, seafood, and cuts.

“The filing of this provisional patent application is another significant step forward in our ability to 3D print a wide variety of species,” Arik Kaufman, CEO of Steakholder Foods, said in the release. “We are passionate and committed to using our technological versatility to make both the terrestrial and marine animal protein industries more sustainable.”

The move into seafood is strategically a good move considering how sky-high fish prices have risen compared to other forms of protein. Po Bronson, head of IndieBio, said as much on the latest episode of The Spon podcast.

“The seafood companies look to be in a much better position because you’re competing with what is a very expensive product,” Bronson said. “Wild caught seafood is very expensive in market prices, so your competitive index is a more matchable price.”

The company partnered with Umami Foods in August, a Singapore-based cultured seafood startup. That announcement and today’s comes amidst a flurry of deals (and patent filings) for the company, which became one of the first cultured meat companies to go public on a US exchange. Unfortunately, the company’s stock hasn’t fared well over the past year, dropping from around $11 in initial trading to under $2 today.

While it’s unclear when and at what price we’ll see Steakholder’s fish product reach the market, if they can figure out how to create a viable cellag fish product, their stock price will no doubt benefit long-term.

Company Behind Babybel Cheese Bets Big on Non-Animal Casein With Standing Ovation Partnership

Today French cheese giant Bel Group, the company behind cheese brands Babybel, The Laughing Cow, and Boursin announced an exclusive partnership with precision fermentation specialist Standing Ovation to incorporate the startup’s animal-free casein milk protein into select cheese offerings. The deal follows an equity investment made by Bel Group into the Paris-based startup in September.

According to the announcement, the two companies scientific teams will work together at Bel’s R&D center in Vendôme, France, and at Standing Ovation’s facility in Paris. In addition, Bel plans to use Standing Ovation fermentation-derived casein – a protein critical in the cheesemaking process and helps give cheese its taste, aroma, and stretching and melting characteristics- in select Bel products.

Standing Ovation’s technology derives animal-identical proteins through microbial fermentation. The company uses protein-producing microbes and feeds them with plant-based sugars in fermenters. They then recover and purify the cheese proteins, then mix them with plant-based or mineral ingredients such as lipids and sugars.

“Caseins are essential to the quality of cheeses – they are nutritious and provide firmness, texture, and the capacity to melt,” Anne Pitkowski, Bel Group Research and Application Director, said. “Standing Ovation’s technology, combined with our knowledge of the links between structure and function, will enable all these features – and more – to be developed. Our unique cheesemaking expertise will put these advances into practice.”

Standing Ovation is part of a growing cohort of precision fermentation-focused startups building animal identical proteins for food companies to utilize in products such as cheese, milk, and other dairy products. Other startups such as New Culture and Fooditive are creating precision-derived caseins, while industry pioneer Perfect Day has made several products under its brands and partner brands utilizing both its animal-identical casein and whey proteins.

Image credit here.

Cultimate Foods Raises €700k To Develop Cultivated Fat for Hybrid Alt-Meat Products

Fat is sexy, don’t you know? In particular, the type of fat made without killing any animals.

One company working on such a fat is Cultimate Foods, a Berlin-based startup developing cultivated fat for hybrid alt-meat products. The company announced it has raised a pre-seed €700 thousand round led by Big Idea Ventures, ProVeg International, and Realum.cloud.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Cultimate plans on targeting its cultivated fat at food companies interested in developing hybrid plant-based meat products. The company, which claims its cultivated fat replicates the structure of animal fat tissue, says it uses a “unique technological approach to 3D cultivation creates the structure of their ingredient and reduces the costs of production.”

“Our ultimate goal is to deliver a game-changing ingredient for the plant-based meat industry,” said Cultimate cofounder George Zheleznyi. “We are focused on developing the most important part of meat experience, fat. Cultimate will deliver all the properties of meat that are currently lacking in the available meat alternatives.”

Zheleznyi previously cofounded a Russian-based alt-meat startup called Greenwise. His cofounders at Cultimate include Eugenia Sagué (co-CEO, ex-ProVeg) and Oskar Latyshev (CTO, ex-Partner M).

Cultimate enters an increasingly crowded market for alt-fat products. San Francisco-based Mission Barns raised a significant round last year to help it scale up its cell-cultured fat, and Steakholder Foods (previously MeaTech 3D) is also working on a cultivated fat for its 3D-printed alt-steaks.

Cultimate says it plans to use its new funding to validate its cultivated fat product and begin to prepare for pilot-stage production.

The Moldmentum Continues: Fungi Protein Gets a Trade Group

If there was an alt-protein prediction that was easy to make for 2022, it was that fungi-powered protein would have a good year.

All the signs were there: Interesting new products making their way to market, impressive advances in manufacturing, and new funding rounds coming in despite growing market uncertainty. And as we near the end of the year, there’s yet another sign that this nascent space will continue to mature in 2023 and beyond: a new trade association.

The just-announced Fungi Protein Association’s list of founding members includes many names Spoon readers will be familiar with, including Quorn, Nature’s Fynd, ENOUGH, The Better Meat Co., The Protein Brewery, Prime Roots, Mycotechnology, Mycorena, Aqua Cultured Foods, Mush Foods, MyForest Foods and. Bosque Foods. In addition, nonprofits ProVeg and The Good Food Institute are also founding members.

While some trade associations are often little more than a way for industry insiders to get together once or twice a year to expense meals and talk shop, other times, they can be immensely helpful in lifting nascent spaces off the ground. Good trade associations help foster communities, create industry frameworks & terminology, and develop industry certifications and standards.

An example of this in the future food world over the past few years is the Upcycled Food Association. Started by a small group of primarily early-stage startups, the UFA has become an important organization and can rightly take credit for much of the momentum we’ve seen in upcycling the last couple of years.

According to Food Dive, the Fungi Protein Association will advocate for the space to consumers and lawmakers and conduct consumer research on the space.

Pat Brown’s New Job is to Build a Moonshot Factory For Food

This week we learned Pat Brown is leaving his role as Chief Science Officer at Impossible Foods to start a new research arm within the company, tentatively called Impossible Labs.

According to an email obtained by Insider, Impossible Labs’ goal is “to focus on the transformative innovation that will propel Impossible Foods to achieve our mission.”

In other words, Brown is building a moonshot factory for the future of food. In fact, the new mission and structure of Impossible Labs sound pretty much like that of X, Google’s not-so-secret secret research arm that exists outside of the company’s core R&D division and incubates new ideas on everything ranging from driverless cars to Internet-by-balloon to diabetes-detecting contact lenses.

The move comes just half a year after Brown stepped away from his role as CEO to become the company’s chief science officer, a move in which he said at the time would allow him to lead “research and technology innovation, strategic initiatives, public advocacy and, most importantly, our mission.”

So why start a new group when, to be honest, he just started a new role six months ago that sounds pretty similar to what he’s focused on at Labs? My guess is Brown found trying to build the future within Impossible’s existing product R&D group wasn’t future-focused enough. Impossible has lots of products now that need continuous iteration and improvement, and iteration and improvement involve a totally different focus and set of processes required for building disruptive breakthrough ideas.

We also can’t ignore that the move may have something to do with the moment Impossible finds itself in, one in which they’ve witnessed some executive departures and a flattening of plant-based meat industry sales. We’ve also seen some criticize Impossible (and Beyond)’s products as too processed, a claim that seems to have resonated with at least some consumers.

While I won’t pretend to be smart enough to figure out any specific scientific breakthrough Brown might come up with next, here are a few high-level guesses on what he might be up to next.

Create New Alt-Protein Building Blocks. Brown’s first breakthrough idea for Impossible – that we could use create a version of heme using plant-based inputs to give a meat analog many of the same attributes of the real thing – was a big idea that has now become a foundational concept for many alternative protein companies. However, as companies like Shiru have shown, there are a whole lot more molecular building blocks out there that could create functional or taste parity to animal-based products. Brown, no doubt wants to find more plant-based building blocks that could deliver sustainable alternatives to animal-based products.

Build Internal Discovery Platform. Speaking of Shiru, the company is gaining traction with its AI-powered approach that is allowing them to create a massive database of potential proteins. The approach contrasts with Impossible’s more traditional (and slow) approach to ingredient discovery. Brown (and Impossible) might be looking to create its own AI-powered discovery engine to speed up its own innovation process that will help uncover the next big idea.

Cellular Agriculture. Brown is famously skeptical of cell-cultured meat, so I think the chances of his company looking at creating cultivated meat or other protein product is pretty low. But, maybe he has an idea for a technology or process breakthrough he’s thinking of that he thinks could be a gamechanger.

Explore Entirely New Food Products, Processes, and Inputs. Impossible’s existing product road map is pretty straightforward and similar to lots of other products out there, but there are no doubt lots of entirely new products we haven’t conceived of yet that can use novel processes and inputs that have yet to be discovered. Maybe Brown has an inkling for another breakthrough idea similar to that of plant-based heme that will change the industry.

Non-Food Products. Impossible has shown they’re happy to move into new forms of food products, whether it’s chicken or milk. But what about products that aren’t food? Creating alternatives to products that use animal inputs would align with Brown’s mission of reducing greenhouse gas and fighting climate change, so maybe he has an idea for products in clothing, cosmetics, or other industries. Impossible Shoes, anyone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asia Pacific Leads in Plant-Based Meat IP According to Report

While many think innovation in plant-based meat is a fairly recent phenomenon, companies, researchers and entrepreneurs have looking for ways to leverage plants as an alternative to animal agriculture since the sixties.

However, there’s no doubt the pace of innovation has accelerated in recent decades amidst a worsening climate crisis and a rising global population, and one way to quantify the innovation is through an analysis of the growth in intellectual property. And now, thanks to a new report published by researcher Roots Analysis, we can do just that.

Source: Roots Analysis

According to the Roots report, the number of cumulative IP publications for plant-based meat has grown by nearly 3x over the past decade, going from 2,388 in 2012 to 7,126 by 2022. In addition, the growth in patent filings, granted patents, and amended patents (the three of which make up the bulk of IP-related publications) has grown nearly every year over the past decade, with the annual growth of publications going from just over one hundred per year for the decade prior to 2012, to around 900 per year in both 2020 (915 new IP documents) and 2021 (891 new documents).

Source: Roots Analysis

According to the report, most IP documents in the plant-based meat space are patent applications (77.4%) and granted patents (18.7%). When breaking the documents down by region, Asia Pacific is responsible for over half of all IP (3,717), compared to about 18% for North America (1,277 documents) and Europe (1,310 documents).

While Asia Pac dominates in terms of the total number of patent filings and granted patents, the report points out that some of the most valuable intellectual property in the early market is owned by larger North American and European food companies. The report points to Impossible Foods, Cargill, Mars, and Solae as some of the leading IP stakeholders in plant-based meats.

The report also broke down the key phrases used within the intellectual property documents to give an idea of the focus of the innovation. The top categories of keywords within the filings are production methods, proteins, preparations, and products. The report also analyzed the various types of plant-based meats in which researchers and companies create intellectual property. Some of the different plant-based meat categories include plant-based seafood, structured/textured meat analogs, plant-based meat for pet food, processed meat analogs, amorphous meat analogs, and dehydrated meat analogs.

You can find out more about the report here.