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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Alternative Protein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israel’s BioBetter Gets Funding for its Tobacco Plant Protein Technology

Analysts predict the value of the cultured meat market will reach $2.8 billion in 2030, which isn’t bad for a sector that has yet to produce a viable mass consumer product. While many global regulatory agencies decide if/when to give lab-grown beef, chicken, fish, etc., the green light, there is no shortage of companies working on supporting this nascent space.

Among the latest to see the merit in providing the underlying technology for the cultured meat space is Israel-based BioBetter, which has landed $10 million in  A-round funding. This significant injection of capital will be instrumental in further building out its company, which uses tobacco leaves to develop growth factors (a material that stimulates cell production) to lower costs and increase lab-grown meats’ production.

BioBetter has developed a unique protein manufacturing platform for producing growth factors (GFs) using tobacco plants (Nicotiana tabacum) as natural, self-sustaining, animal-free bioreactors. The field-grown tobacco plants offer a new, sustainable, efficient, and flexible response to the market need for more competitively priced GFs, specifically insulin, transferrin, and FGF2. These compounds are necessary to make cultivated meat commercially viable.

“Tobacco plants actually have many advantages, including large biomass and fast-growing rate, their ability to yield multiple harvests year-round. Tobacco is not a food crop, and its foul-tasting alkaloids prevent it from being eaten by any animals, which makes it especially suitable for the production of growth factors,” Amit Yaari, PhD, CEO of BioBetter, told The Spoon via email. “No nutrients are extracted from the plants, but the tobacco plant cells are turned into small bioreactors, each manufacturing growth factor, according to the DNA sequence inserted into their genome.”

A bioreactor is defined as a vessel in which a chemical process is carried out which involves organisms or biochemically active substances derived from such organisms. For many plant-based foods and beverages, a bioreactor is a physical tank, such as that used by a brewery. Inside, genetically engineered microorganisms are cultivated with a substrate to create a mycoprotein burger, beer, or kombucha. Using a self-contained abundant available bioreactor lowers the cost of lab-grown meat. Every company in the world of lab-grown meat would agree that product pricing is a significant obstacle.

The $10 million round is led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), with additional investment from Milk and Honey Ventures, and the Israeli Innovation Authority (IIA). Erel Margalit, founder and executive chairman of JVP & Margalit Startup City, a Jerusalem-based innovation space, explains the economic advantage of using tobacco for growth factors. “Growth factors form the key building blocks for cell-cultured proteins. But costs currently run anywhere from $50,000 to $500,000 per gram of FGF2 (basic fibroblast growth factor). BioBetter’s technology can lower these costs to just $1 per gram.”

With its, investment BioBetter will expand to a larger pilot plant within the Tel Hai Industrial Park in the Upper Galilee Region of Israel. The new site will increase its tobacco plant-processing capacity, enabling it to meet its current global pool of commissions from cell-based meat cultivators. Shoseyov said that BioBetter is speaking to several companies in the cultured meat space but wouldn’t name any potential partners.

As for its immediate future, Yaari said, “We plan to scale up our production facility during 2023 and begin sales and supply of food-grade growth factors in Q1 2024. The tobacco plant suffers from a bad reputation, but we put it to good use.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond Meat Enters Japan Through Exclusive Agreement With USMH

Beyond Meat is entering Japan through a new partnership with one of the country’s largest grocery store holding companies in United Super Market Holdings (USMH).

The new agreement, announced on Friday in Tokyo at the SKS Japan conference, is a distribution and product development deal through which USMH will have exclusive distribution rights of Beyond Meat branded products in Japan as well as the ability to use Beyond’s meat in new products developed for the Japanese market.

Products co-developed under the partnership will be sold under USMH’s Green Growers brand, a brand initially launched by the grocery chain to sell lettuce grown via the company’s vertical farm “plant factory” called TERRABASE. These products, the first of which will include Beyond’s minced plant-based ground beef, will also include Beyond’s branding on the products in something akin to a “powered by Beyond” style branding approach. Products developed under the Green Grower brand will be tailored to specific formats and tastes of the Japanese consumer.

The co-development partnership between USMH and Beyond will be done through a new open innovation initiative from USMH called “AKIBA-Runway”. USMH launched AKIBA-Runway in March of this year as a way to work with other companies to utilize their technologies to create new products for their customers.

For Beyond, the deal with USMH is the company’s second attempt to enter the Japanese market. The company’s first attempt was going to be through a partnership with investor Mitsui, which had invested in Beyond back in 2016. However, the two companies announced in 2018 that the plan to enter Japan had been shelved.

But now with USMH, the plant-based meat company will enter the market in partnership with a powerful grocery chain with deep knowledge of Japanese consumer preferences and tastes. USMH, which has over 500 retail outlets in Japan through its MaxValu, Maruetsu and Kasumi chains of stores, has a wide reach across Japan.

For USMH President and CEO Motohiro Fujita, the new deal delivers in part on a vision he discussed the last time he spoke at Smart Kitchen Summit Japan in 2019. At that event (SKS Japan is put on in partnership with The Spoon and SigmaXYZ), Fujita talked about how he wanted to disrupt the Japanese grocery store market through innovation. Fujita told The Spoon that this deal and innovations delivered through AKIBA-Runway are the results of that vision he outlined on stage in the summer of 2019.

Shiru’s Partnership With Puratos Adds Further Credibility to its Protein Discovery Platform

In the world of food tech, decisions made on viable data are good, and a lot of data is even better. But with Shiru, a functional ingredient discovery company, with a dataset of more than 450 million known proteins, you are in rarified air and a welcome partner to forward-thinking companies.

With that in mind, Shiru has announced a new partnership with Puratos, a Belgium-based company that supplies food ingredients for bakeries. Shiru’s Flourish platform will evaluate naturally occurring proteins that could serve as a next-generation egg replacement.

“At Puratos, we truly believe that collaborations can fuel innovation within the food ecosystem,” stated Paul Baisier, Chief R&D Officer at Puratos. “As a company rooted in biology and science, Shiru is the perfect partner in the Puratos’s journey to finding novel uses for proteins discovered by Shiru’s Flourish platform as functional food ingredients that are sustainable, healthy, and delicious. Together with Shiru, we will be able to accelerate our plant-based product innovation pipeline for the benefit of our customers and consumers.”

Julian Lewis, Shiru’s Vice President of Business Development, told The Spoon why his company is excited about this partnership. “(Puratos) will help us scale up these (egg replacement) proteins using their fermentation facilities to a large kind of food grade sample, where we can then do more extensive food application testing. And through this partnership, we have a clear path to fully scaling these ingredients and bringing them to market.”

At this stage of its life cycle, Alameda, Calif.-based Shiru lives for such a partnership. Its database Flourish Flourish uses AI and machine learning to analyze its database of nearly 450 million proteins found in nature. Each application—for example, a plant-based meat company that wants to add taste to its burgers—identifies ingredients that will solve that specific functional ingredient challenge. This business model, Lewis explains, might expand to his company by commercializing some of its discoveries.

“There’ll be other food categories where we might collaborate, or we might do it ourselves,” Lewis said of opportunities down the road. “We might end up in a hybrid where we’re doing some stuff ourselves and collaborating with experts in other fields just to accelerate its market path.”

Functionality is Shiru’s secret sauce, which is the ability to target a specific property of a particular food product. Lewis explains:

“There are three categories we can play in. There’s replace in which we substitute an ingredient for one that, for example, doesn’t work properly. A second is taste. And what we mean by that is some plant-based foods are not that good, and I have yet to find a vegan cheese that works. Lastly, it is to transform. What new foods could be generated in the future that is not replacing traditional products, which are just new things? And maybe we can do that by discovering new functional protein.”

One of the side benefits of working with a complex database is the ability to help food manufacturers get away from using relatively unhealthy ingredients in some plant-based products that give the impression of being a clean alternative. “We’re aiming to provide a much better toolkit of ingredients to the food developers trying to create plant-based foods,” Lewis said.

Lewis adds that while Shiru is currently generally focused on the plant-based world, there’s no reason it will not be a player as the cultured food business develops. “All food has, I would say, taste and texture challenges, so with cultured meats, some additional ingredients may be required. And we’re already working on the early stage with players in that space as well. Our goal is to create more sustainable food ingredients that are both required and interesting.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ADM Partners With New Culture as Part of Growing Buildout of Alt-Protein Production Infrastructure

ADM, one of the world’s largest food processing companies, has inked a deal with New Culture, a startup developing animal-free cheese utilizing precision fermentation, to offer joint product development and scale-up commercialization services.

The deal will help New Culture scale up production of its animal-free casein (casein is the protein that gives cheese its stretchy and melty goodness) as it eyes the commercial launch of its animal-free mozzarella in 2023.

From the release:

The partnership will also include collaborations to advance the commercial scale-up of New Culture’s animal-free casein and dairy products. ADM’s global manufacturing assets and expertise will accelerate New Culture’s efforts toward commercializing their animal-free mozzarella in the U.S. food service market, beginning with pizzerias in 2023. As New Culture grows its commercial footprint, ADM’s production capacity for both fermentation and dairy operations will be made available to meet the demand for New Culture’s melty, stretchy cheese.

The partnership marks the latest in a flurry of new initiatives by the food processing giant to position itself as a scale-up partner for alternative protein startups. Earlier this month, the company announced a joint venture with Asia Sustainable Foods Platform (a subsidiary of Singapore conglomerate Temasek) called ScaleUp Bio. The new company will work A*STAR’s Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation (SIFBI) to provide a lab for precision fermentation and scale-up services. ScaleUp Bio will provide access to 100L fermentation tanks for testing and optimization of future food products and high-scale production capabilities through access to a new facility with a 10,000L fermentation capacity.

The New Culture and ScaleUp Bio deals follow an announcement of ADM’s $300 million investment to build an alternative production center in Decatur. That move followed the acquisition of Sojaprotein in 2021. The company has said these two deals will increase its alt-protein production capacity by 30%.

ADM’s push into alt-protein scale-up services is part of a larger trend by big food to build-out infrastructure for the growing alt-protein industry. Beer giant AB InBev’s BioBrew, a division of the company’s ZX Ventures that provides scale-up for alt-protein startups, is working with Every Company (formerly Clara Foods) to help scale up its precision fermentation-derived egg products. Bitburger, a German-based brewery, is providing precision fermentation production capacity and sidestream byproducts as inputs for development of Mushlab’s mycelium-derived proteins for alternative meats.

Increased investment by big companies like ADM, AB InBev, and Bitburger is just the beginning of what will likely be a multi-billion-dollar alt-protein infrastructure build-out by big food over the coming decade. The Good Food Institute has said $27 billion is needed to meet demand by 2030 for plant-based meat alone. The tally will certainly be much higher when factoring in other alt-protein variants manufactured using cell-cultured and precision fermentation techniques. These investments come as a new wave of biomanufacturing startups building next-generation production facilities continue to pop up and receive funding.

 

Food Tech Funding Drops 21.5% in Q2, But Alt-Protein Proves Resilient With Only 9% Decline

According to a new report from Pitchbook, total food tech venture funding declined by over one-fifth in total deal value in the second quarter of 2022, dropping from $6.9 billion in Q1 2022 to $5.6 billion in Q2 2022.

The drop in deal value corresponds with a decrease in the total number of deals, which declined in the second quarter by 23%, going from 359 funding deals in Q1 2022 to 275 deals completed in Q2 2022.

Q2’s decline marks the fourth straight quarter in which food tech funding has dropped. Total investment is down 45% ($4.5 billion) from the sector’s high water mark of $10.1 billion reached in the first quarter of 2021.

Food tech isn’t alone in its pullback. The sector’s quarter-over-quarter decline in funding is just slightly less in relative terms than the overall venture capital market, which dropped 23% from the previous quarter. At $5.6 billion in total funding in Q2 2022, food tech represented about 5.2% of total venture capital in the quarter, compared to 7.6% of total funding in the first quarter of 2021 when food tech funding had reached its high point.

As usual, the total funding for the sector was dominated by a handful of mega-rounds, including Wonder’s $350 million series B. Other big rounds include Upside’s $400 million series C and Gopuff’s $1.5 billion, which Pitchbook says closed on May 18 (though word of the forthcoming round leaked late last year).

Gopuff’s funding comes at a time when many investors and industry watchers are reevaluating the business model for the ultra-fast grocery business, a sector responsible for many of the mega-rounds that pumped up the food tech sector’s total deal value over the past year and a half. Gopuff, like many of its peers, announced layoffs over the past few months and that they would shut down a good chunk of its distribution network. Essentially everyone in the ultra-fast-grocery is attempting to slash costs as they look to extend runways as they recognize they’ve seen their last big funding round for a while.

So will food tech investment continue to decline? My guess is yes, at least in the near term, in large part due to recessionary fears, the continued tightening of monetary policy in the US, and broader geopolitical uncertainty. The absence of future investment into ultra-fast grocery may also lead to near-term drops compared to previous quarters over the next year, but the good news is that as the inflated valuations from the ultra-fast grocery recede into the rearview mirror, overall declines quarter over quarter should decelerate.

One particular sector I am keeping an eye on is the alternative protein segment, which has held up better than the overall food tech space. According to the Good Food Institute, alt-protein funding declined only 9% quarter over quarter, a much smaller decline than both the broader food tech industry and the overall venture market. Alt-protein has seen its share of late stage high-value deals (like Upside, Impossible, Eat Just, etc), something which looks to have continued into the most recent quarter. It’s also seen continued investment across all three major sub-segments (plant-based, precision fermentation, and cultivated/cell-based), which may have contributed to its relative resilience. If any of the three might be susceptible to potential pullback, it’s plant-based meat, a market that is proving to be both crowded and, in some cases, one in which some brands struggle to bring back repeat customers.

Long-term, I expect investors in future food to continue to be bullish, especially as we start to see government money start to enter the alt-protein market. Globally, governments are beginning to view future food as an important part of national security strategy, and while the US is lagging a bit in that regard – food was not a major part of the recent climate change-centric Inflation Reduction bill that just passed – we are beginning to see state governments start to invest in the space. While the alt-protein space has lacked the same type of government taxpayer support as that of alternative energy, a moderate amount of future growth in government support should catalyze future private investment in the space.

Here’s Our Q&A With Ranjani Varadan, Who Just Became Shiru’s New CSO After a Decade With Impossible Foods

When she became the first scientist ever hired by Pat Brown at Impossible Foods in 2011, Ranjani Varadan became a pivotal part of the R&D team for one of the earliest entrants in the modern plant-based meat industry. Over the next decade, she would play a part in helping guide Impossible through many technical milestones, from the very early days in its stealth lab all the way to commercial scaleup.

And now, Varadan hopes to witness many more seminal moments in the alternative protein space as part of her new role as the Chief Science Officer for Shiru, a company that makes ingredients for CPG companies building plant-based meats and other alternative proteins. Varadan will oversee all aspects of R&D, from discovery and screening to ingredient pre-production.

I sat down with Varadan to talk to ask her about her time at Impossible, the decision to come to Shiru, how she believes her new company differentiates itself in a fast-growing alt protein market, and what she sees going forward for the plant-based foods and alternative protein industry. Answers have been edited slightly for readability.

Congratulations on your move. Tell us a little about your journey before you got to Shiru.

I have a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Maryland, and then I was a postdoctoral fellow for several years.

And at the end of my postdocs, I was thinking about what to do. A fairly traditional route for folks with my training is the biopharma industry, and that was not particularly compelling to me at the time. I wanted to do something that was meaningful. So I was very fortunate in that I was put in touch with Pat Brown who had just founded Impossible in 2011

For me, that was the first time that I could put climate change, food security, and animal welfare all in one sentence. And it was really eye-opening and very compelling for me. It was a vision Pat had at the time with a very small team of people, so I joined because it was really so refreshing and such a different way of thinking about the problem.

What attracted you to the opportunity at Shiru?

I’m excited to be joining Shiru because I think we really need a way to rethink ingredients. Even for companies like Impossible, for them to make the next game-changing product, you really need access to ingredients that will not carry whatever other sentiments of the plants they’re extracted from, or be limited in the type of functionality like soy proteins. So I think for technical reasons, ingredients are going to bring the next big change to plant-based foods, and I’m very, very excited about Shiru doing that.

Talk about that transition from Impossible, an early stage, vertically integrated plant-based meat company which essentially built the entire ingredient list for their consumer products, to Shiru, which is a B2B company building novel ingredients for other plant-based meat companies, who in turn build consumer-facing products.

At the time (at Impossible), we were really trying to extract every different thing, every different protein so we could to play with it, understand what it does, and formulate a product with it. Ultimately, I think when you see the reality of what it takes to commercialize a product, it is very difficult for a single company to be vertically integrated for each one of these ingredients. Because the mission is not to create one SKU for plant-based meat or whatever other product a company is making. You want to be able to make a variety of different products for the economic viability of the company itself.

This is one of the reasons I find Shiru to be very interesting and fascinating because instead of trying to do it like that, you’re saying ‘we’ll create the toolkit’, right? And not only is it going to be a viable business model for Shiru, but it’s also going to help the entire community.

My understanding of Shiru is that you’re building alternative protein building blocks, but you’re not trying to create animal identical ones like you might see like with some other precision fermentation-focused companies. It’s actually looking within plants and looking for functional equivalency rather an exact equivalence with an animal protein. That’s an interesting switch for you.

Shiru is trying to create an ingredient toolkit coming from natural sources. Not just plants, it could be algae, it could be fungi, or other sources of proteins, but all naturally occurring sequences. And like you said, not looking for the exact one to one match. It’s an orthogonal way to think about the problem in a scientific way, because ultimately what you care about is the way the protein behaves. What is the texture, appearance, flavor, or whatever other aspects of the protein you are trying to create – can this protein do the same thing? As long as you’re satisfied that, it doesn’t matter whether it’s exactly the same protein or not.

One of the differentiation pitches I think I’ve heard from Shiru is this idea of building a massive database of potential plant-based protein ingredients. You’re using machine learning or AI to mine that. Talk about that. Is that is that a new thing for you?

A typical traditional approach is to say, ‘here are all sorts of plant proteins – soybeans, peas, what have you – let’s look at what these proteins can do for us? And then you find that it’s very limited. So now we have to find other sources of protein.

I think what Shiru is doing very intelligently is really leveraging validated tools from AI and machine learning and, I don’t want to get too technical, but using the sort of tools that are available for language modeling. So in a way that you might translate from one language to another, for example, using tools that have been developed for those types of things and applying that to proteins to really understand if I have a protein that looks like this, what are their proteins are going to look like that? So they’ve been able to utilize millions of protein sequences available in the public domain and use these machine learning tools to really find these matches. That’s why the library can be billions and billions, 10s or hundreds. And that’s unique, right?

It seems a lot more efficient. If you’re spending all this time trying to get an exact match to get an animal identical protein, it’s a very finite target you’re kind of aiming at. Whereas if you’re looking for functional equivalency, you have a much wider swath and I think it could accelerate time to market, correct?

Yes, And that’s why for a young company so early in their lifecycle, they already have targets. For a company with a team of forty or so people, to be at a stage where you have targets waiting to take into commercialization, is fantastic.

And because I believe that access to these types of ingredients will really create the next game-changing plant-based foods, for me it makes sense as the logical next step. I spent all this time kind of understanding the whole landscape of plant-based foods, helping to create them at Impossible. I was leading the initiative for strategic ingredients at Impossible before I left. And now to say, ‘Okay, actually here’s a completely different way of thinking about it.’

Does Shiru have a wet lab?

Yes, they do have a wet lab. I think the team is about 10 people in the lab right now. They have robotics set up to help do the rapid high throughput screening.

From a process perspective, like they’re you’re using algorithms to look through this huge dataset, sift through it, come up with promising candidates, and then you then move things into the lab?

Yes, and I think ultimately you would set up your platform for you to feed everything back the output from the wet lab right back into your learning.

What are you looking to accomplish over the next year?

I think in the very near term, really to absorb everything that’s going on at Shiru, but really to help commercialize their first few targets that are already in the works. That will be a great thing for Shiru, because it brings a lot of credibility to what they’re doing and brings in revenue which we can invest back into R&D, which is really the heart of the company. So I think that that’s just the beginning. And, you know, for all the reasons we talked about, very excited about how it’s gonna take off and really revolutionize the way we’re thinking about it.

Tell us a bit about Shiru recruiting you.

Shiru approach to me once my profile changed on LinkedIn. I was committed to teaching the entire year, so I took on advisory roles in several companies. In retrospect, I was very fortunate. I wasn’t going in too blind. I had the time to really talk to several folks and companies and really take a step back and look at what’s going on out there to understand what should be the next thing I want to do. So I’m glad I have that opportunity. I think Jasmine is an exceptional leader. You’ve talked to her. The team is wonderful. They have a great board. The board is also full of people with a lot of experience. So I think it’s going to be fantastic

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Podcast: Building a Next-Generation Ingredient Company with Shiru’s Jasmin Hume

As the former head of food chemistry for Eat Just, Dr. Jasmin Hume thought there was a lot of white space for innovation when it came to food ingredients.

She knew food companies would increasingly need new and novel ingredients they could build plant-based food products around, but felt there wasn’t enough research being done to discover these critical building blocks.

So she decided to start a company to do just that. So far, the company has raised over $20 million and recently hired Impossible Foods’ former VP of R&D and strategic ingredients.

On the podcast, Jasmin and I discuss a variety of topics, including:

  • How the alternative protein market is evolving from early fully vertically integrated brands to companies like Shiru that build ingredients and solutions for a variety of companies
  • The new cohort of food companies utilizing AI and ML to build the next generation of food
  • How what Shiru is doing with precision fermentation is different from that of Perfect Day and others trying to create animal-identical proteins
  • Where Jasmin sees the ingredient industry going in the future
  • Plus lots more!

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

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

Will bugs save the world?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supergut’s Marc Washington Believes the Way to Better Health Is Through Our Stomachs

The Spoon recently sat down with Supergut CEO Marc Washington to hear about his company’s mission and the inspiration that drives him.

To call Supergut Marc Washington’s passion project is a gross understatement. The former Princeton University football player and Harvard MBA built on his background in the health and fitness industry to create a company whose sole aim is to improve our health through our stomachs. It was more than a noble mission that inspired Washington to start this now two-year-old company; his work is inspired by loss.

“Her name was Monica,” Washington told The Spoon. “She had an unbelievable personality. You know, she was the party and an amazing mom, I’d say, you know, hilarious, even inappropriately. But she was like the life of the party. And she was my little sister. And the biggest challenge throughout her adult life was health.” As Marc Washington said, battling several chronic conditions, Monica died during childbirth, a tragic event that shook him to the core.

And so, the idea for Supergut (formerly Muniq) was born. And the term “resistant starches” (starches such as green bananas that feed your good gut bacteria by fermenting in your large intestine) became a mantra for Washington. Available through its website, Supergut is a proprietary blend that contains unripened green bananas, resistant potato starch, oat beta-glucan, and soluble vegetable fiber. Currently, it comes in the form of a shake (four flavors), bar, and fiber mix.

How did Monica’s death lead you to start your company?

It lit a fire that just never has never been extinguished. It’s like this didn’t have to happen. There had to have been better ways to get better control of her health, which could have let her down a different pathway. And this kind of built up over time. And there’s a point where if you want to make a difference, it’s like ‘If not you, then who?  If not now, then when?’

Looking at the masses, it’s not as though we’re getting healthier. And despite all the advances in science and technology and food, there’s got to be a better way to move the needle and bend the curve of health outcomes and actually potentially impact public health, and things like that could have changed Monica’s trajectory. And so, yeah, that was my inspiration to throw my hat in the ring, and I started this company a couple of years ago. 

How did you get from the desire to improve our health to an actual product?

I like to describe it as the moments in the Matrix where Neo has decisions to make. I think it was an awakening to see just how pervasive the impact of the gut is on our overall health and that it was actually a pathway to activate this vision that I had. You could reorient your body more healthily, and the gut could be that pathway. So I credit some scientific and medical experts, along with my original investors, for helping me with the approach taken with resistant starch.

How do you use resistant starch to formulate Supergut?

We do have our proprietary blend that is resistant starch and other prebiotic fibers as well as other plants. And a lot of that was based on clinical evidence, like literally looking through close to 200 different studies to show what kind of impact that you can have and what form factors, what dosage levels, what concentration levels, what other things you to combine with it, etc. to get to what we felt like was the most productive.

The first thing was, let’s put it into a shake, which was our first product. We had a prototype within a few months, but it tasted like shit. So, for the next year, modulating the taste work with our suppliers or flavor experts, etc., to get to a shake that would work and that you could enjoy. So we did lots of iterations to get a shake that we’re incredibly proud of and our customers love the taste of. And we now find that in bars and other products.

What was behind the name change from Muniq to Supergut?

Muniq is a combination of Monica and Unique. We looked at many names, but one of the benefits of Supergut is that it just reads as if people get it right away. Since we’ve introduced it, I talk to people like, what do you do? I founded this product that creates nutrition for a super gut. With today’s attention span and the shorter and shorter range, you’ve got like 3 seconds to get across. So (the name) Supergut is helping us open doors and open conversations because it says we are all about gut health.  

Your website proudly states that Supergut is a Black-Owned business? Is there a message there?

My aspiration for what we aspire to do is to impact public health significantly. We want to move the needle; if we do that, we can play an important role in closing health disparities disproportionately affecting black and brown communities. When you look at all the factors that make up our public health crisis, 70% of people are overweight or obese. You know, 50% have some form of diabetes or pre-diabetes. 50% some form of cardiovascular health risk. Keep in mind the, African American, Brown, and Latino communities have a 50% higher incidence of almost every single one. This health disparity gap has been something that has led me to create a solution from the very outset. My goal is to help close that gap.