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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food as Medicine

Brightseed’s First Major Phytonutrient Discovery Finds Black Pepper May Help with Fatty Liver

Brightseed, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover previously hidden phytonutrients in plants, today announced preclinical data from its first major discovery targeting liver and metabolic health.

The discovery was made with Forager, Brightseed’s AI platform that looks at plants on a molecular level to identify novel phytonutrient compounds (for example, antioxidants in blueberries). Once found, Forager then catalogs these compounds and uses that information to predict the health benefits of those compounds.

With today’s announcement, Brightseed’s Forager has identified phytonutrients that can help with fat accumulation in the pancreas and liver, a condition linked to obesity. Brightseed explained its findings in a press release, writing:

Using a computational approach with data from Brightseed’s plant compound library, Forager identified two natural compounds with promising bioactive function, N-trans caffeoyltyramine (NTC) and N-trans-feruloyltyramine (NTF). Researchers determined that these compounds acted through a novel biological mechanism governing the accumulation and clearance of liver fat. The preclinical data was presented in the fall of 2020 as a poster session at The Liver Meeting® Digital Experience hosted by American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, and published as abstract #1679 in Hepatology: Vol 72, No S1. 

The release continued:

IIn preclinical studies, NTC and NTF acted as potent HNF4a activators, promoting fat clearance from the steatotic livers of mice fed a high fat diet, by inducing lipophagy.  HNF4a is a central metabolic regulator that is impaired by elevated levels of fat in the bloodstream resulting from chronic overeating. Administered in proper doses, NTC and NTF restored proper function of this central metabolic regulator, including maintaining healthy lipid and sugar levels in the bloodstream to normalize organ function. Their activities were confirmed using a cell-based human insulin promoter activation assay. Forager found NTC and NTF in over 80 common edible plant sources. 

One of those plant sources, Brightseed Co-Founder and CEO, Jim Flatt told me by phone this week, is black pepper. Now, before you run out and grab your pepper grinder, there is still a lot of work that remains before the results of this discovery bear out.

First, the compounds still need to go through clinical trials to validate Brightseed’s initial findings. This includes not only confirming any health benefits, but also determining the doses and best methods for administering the compounds. Then the best plant source for those compounds needs to be determined as well as the best method for compound extraction. Flatt told me that if all goes well, you can expect to see some form of supplement on the market by the end of 2022.

Even though that is a ways off, part of the reason to be excited by today’s announcement is because of how little time it took Brightseed to make this particular discovery. Through its computational processes, Flatt told me his company was able to shrink what used to take years down to months. “Fifteen to 20 percent of time that is computational saves us 80 percent of the time in the lab,” Flatt said.

Brightseed has already analyzed roughly 700,000 compounds in the plant world for health properties and says it’s on track to surpass 10 million by 2025. Doing so could help unlock a number of previously unknown treatments for a number of ailments and conditions as well as general improvement to our metabolic and immuno health.

In addition to independent research such as today’s findings, Brightseed also partners with major CPG brands to help them identify new applications for their products. For instance, Danone is using Brightseed’s technology to help find new health benefits of soy.

Brightseed’s announcement today also reinforces the bigger role AI will play in our food system. AI and machine learning is being used to do everything from turning data into cheese, to solving complex issues around protein folding.

As more discoveries using AI are made, more investment will be poured into the space, which will accelerate even more discoveries.

PepsiCo Is Taking Applications for Its Fifth Annual Greenhouse Accelerator Program

PepsiCo is now taking applications for the fifth installment of its Greenhouse Accelerator Program, which looks for young startups reinventing in the food and beverage industry. One major focus for this year’s cohort will be on food innovations and technologies that “improve the aging process through wellness and health management,” according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

The program selects 10 companies to participate in the six-month-long program. Each startup gets a $20,000 grant and the opportunity to work with mentors, who will advise on product and brand development, supply chain management, customer acquisition, and other areas of running a food business. One company will be rewarded a $100,000 grant at the end of the program. 

Companies worldwide are eligible for the program. They must have a product or service currently available in the market, and have more than $1 million.

This year, PepsiCo’s program is looking for companies addressing issues around health, wellness, and aging. According to the Greenhouse Accelerator website, some focus areas include products that assist with tracking and managing wellness, functional ingredients, wearables that promote health awareness, and other innovations that encourage healthy diets and lifestyles.

The focus makes sense, given the ongoing global health crisis that has disrupted the way people both shop and eat for food. Snacking may be on the rise, but so too is a need for healthier food choices. Making health and wellness more accessible is in turn becoming a priority for many companies in the food industry.

PepsiCo will select the 10 companies for this cohort in January 2021. The application process is open until December 9.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that the Greenhouse Accelerator Program was only open to companies in the U.S. and Canada.

Food Tech News: Bee-Free Honey, Menu Items With Low Carbon Footprints

It was an exciting week in food tech with the annual SKS Summit happening earlier this week (if you missed it, check out the highlights of day one, day two, and day three). Outside of this week’s virtual event, a few other stories stood out to us, including bee-free honey, low carbon footprint menu items at Panera, Minnow partnering with two restaurants, and anti-stress nutrition bars.

Melibio is creating bee-free honey

Melibio is using microbial fermentation and synthetic biology to create honey without the use of bees. The process will mimic the process a bee would take to create honey and will use real flower nectar. Honey is often touted for its health benefits, and Melibio’s honey will contain small amounts of the amino acids, minerals, and enzymes found in real honey. The company plans on launching a product for food and beverage companies by late 2021.

Panera Bread releases climate-friendly labels on menu

Starting this week, Panera Bread’s menu will include “cool food” badges that signify which of its menu items have a lower carbon footprint. Around 55 percent of the chain’s existing menu items will have a cool food meal badge. Ingredients that are considered to have a low carbon footprint include vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes. Medium carbon impact ingredients include fish, eggs, cheese, nuts, and poultry, and beef has the highest carbon footprint. Last month, Just Salad also released a Climatarian menu that shows menu items with the lowest greenhouse gas emissions.

Minnow launches pilot program in fast-casual restaurants

Minnow, the recent winner of the SKS Startup Showcase, launched a pilot program for its contact-free delivery and pick-up solution. The Minnow Pickup Pods will be located at Crisp Salads in Portland, Oregon, and bNatural Kitchen in New Haven, Connecticut. Similar to the design of an Amazon locker, the pods disrupt the use of expensive third-party delivery services like Doordash or Postmates. Additionally, the pods have a touchless interface for pick-up, and the cubbies are insulated to keep food fresh.

myAir releases stress-reducing nutrition bars

Tel-Aviv-based startup myAir makes nutrition bars infused with different herbal compounds to manage stress. The personalized nutrition company offers a short three-minute quiz on its website to determine a customer’s level of stress, and then the customer’s heart rate, sleep quality, physical activity is tracked through smartwatches. This data is then used to determine what combination of bars would be most beneficial for the customer. The gluten-free and vegan bars cost $3 each, and are available in flavors like Calm Green (infused with lemon balm extract) and Sleepy Gray (infused with hops).

S2G Ventures’ Managing Director on the 4 FoodTech Trends That Will Rise Post-COVID (Spoon Plus)

I wanted to (virtually) sit down with Krishnan to discuss S2G’s recent white paper entitled “The Future of Food in the Age of COVID-19.” It outlines four foodtech trends that S2G expects will grow in the coming months and years: digitalization, decentralized food systems, de-commoditization, and food as as medicine. Krishnan and I unpacked these four trends — and speculated about how investors will change their focus post-COVID — in our call.

The Deep Dive interview is available for subscribers to Spoon Plus. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

Danone to Use Brightseed’s AI to Uncover New Health Benefits of Soy and Other Plants

Danone North America and Brightseed announced today that they have formed a partnership to use Brightseed’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform to profile and uncover health benefits of key plant sources.

Part of the food as medicine movement, Brightseed is a three-year-old San Francisco startup that examines plants on a molecular level to uncover hidden phytonutrients that can contribute to healthier lifestyles. As it uncovers compounds, Brightseed’s AI platform is then used to predict what impact they will have on the human body.

An example of a phytonutritional compound would be something like the caffeine in coffee or the antioxidants in blueberries.

“We use AI to illuminate the dark matter of nutrition,” Sofia Elizondo, Co-Founder and COO of Brightseed told me by phone this week. “Once you have completed this circle of knowledge. You can transform the food ecosystem.”

Elizondo explained that Brightseed’s platform works for both the sourcing and production sides of CPGs. On the ag side, it can help identify healthy compounds and encourage plant breeding to maximize those benefits. For CPG companies, Brightseed can help source plants that are beneficial and reveal new phytonutrients in existing plant ingredients around which new products can be built.

The partnership with Danone, which owns the Silk and So Delicious Dairy Free brands, will start with Brightseed turning its AI on soy to illuminate the unknown health benefits of soy.

Brightseed, which has raised and undisclosed sum of venture funding, is among a wave of companies using AI to unlock new understandings of our food. Other companies like Spoonshot and Analytical Flavor Systems are using AI to help predict flavor trends and novel food combinations.

But while those companies are looking at existing data, Brightseed is building an entirely new body of data from which entirely new discoveries can be made.

“A lot of technology in our field is built to manipulate nature,” Elizondo said, “There is so much more to learn from what nature has already provided.”

COVID Could Usher in a New Trend: Frozen Food as Medicine

It seems that Americans are turning to frozen food during the coronavirus pandemic. Last month, the American Frozen Food Institute (AFFI) reported that sales of frozen food jumped 94 percent in March of 2020 compared to a year before, and continued to rise by 30 percent in April.

Granted, considering the source it’s best to take the report’s numbers with a grain of salt. But this growth actually makes a lot of sense. Frozen food keeps for a long time. Americans are wary of grocery stores and worried about feeding their families, so it follows that they’d stock up on staples that can last for months and be ready when needed.

Curious to see if this was an opportunity for more curated frozen meals, this week I spoke to Christine Day, CEO of healthy frozen meal company Performance Kitchen, about how COVID has affected their sales.

“Every week the volume is picking up,” Day told me. While they had to halt their business with Delta Airlines, for whom they provided some meals for first-class passengers, she said that their online business is up over 200 percent.

Day said that when the pandemic first hit, consumers were stocking up with lots of bulk food. Then there was a phase of over-indulgence: there was “a lot of lasagnas,” she said. Now, Day thinks we’re at a phase when consumers are shifting away from bulk and comfort food to seek out healthier choices.

At the same time, consumers are still looking for convenience. Meal kits can offer that to some degree, but they require preparation and also have a relatively short lifespan in terms of how long it takes for the food to go bad. Frozen meals offer more flexibility. “When you buy a frozen meal you have a choice if your plans change,” said Day.

Performance Kitchen has two branches: Performance Kitchen and Performance Crafted (formerly called Eat Local). Both focus on providing nutritionally balanced frozen meals for specific dietary needs: keto, maternity, vegan, etc. Performance Kitchen makes wholesale meals for sale in 10,000 grocery stores nationally and online. Performance Kitchen Crafted, on the other hand, is a physical store where consumers can come and shop for branded frozen meals. It has six brick and mortar locations in Seattle.

Since COVID has forced those stores to shut their doors, Day said that Eat Local has pivoted to D2C sales and curbside pickup. Before the pandemic they only delivered to the West Coast, but they rolled out national shipping three weeks ago.

Performance Kitchen is not only positioned to tap into the rise in frozen food demand, but also new interest in a burgeoning trend: food as medicine. “People are really focused on immunity health, recognizing that issues like diabetes, hypertension, etc. increase our risk,” Day said. She credited this focus with one of the reasons they were seeing so many more sales during the COVID pandemic.

What’s remains to be seen is if the success of frozen meals, specifically those offering a food as medicine angle, will continue post-coronavirus.

Taika’s Canned Adaptogen Coffee Ticks the Boxes for Wellness-Loving Millennials

During quarantine I’ve been drinking more caffeine than ever, which means that by 10 a.m., I’m usually about to rocket out of my chair.

Maybe that wouldn’t be the case if I was sipping on the java from new startup Taika (“magic” in Finnish). Founded by an ex-Facebook employee and a champion barista, the company makes cans of “perfectly calibrated coffee.” The startup uses a patent-pending process to reduce the amount of caffeine in each can to 130mg. A 12-ounce cup of regular coffee has 200mg. It also features adaptogens and mushrooms like ashwaganda (for calm) and reishi (for immunity).

Taika is launching with three flavors: Black Coffee, Oat Milk Latte, and Macadamia Latte. The coffee is sourced from a roaster in Vancouver, BC, and the lattes are plant-based and don’t have added sugar.

The caffeine curious can get a variety pack of six Taika drinks, two of each flavor, for $36. A 12-pack of a single flavor costs $59. As of now, Taika’s coffee is available for two-hour contactless delivery in three cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. It also sells product to a handful of retailers in the San Francisco Bay Area and L.A.

Taika is clearly trying to appeal to consumers interested in the beverage wellness trend — especially younger people, like millennials and Gen Z. In fact, if you had a list of all the attributes of a trendy CPG beverage company, Taika would check literally all of the boxes. Cool, brightly colored branding? Check. Minimalist packaging? Check. Cheeky marketing? Double check. Taika’s cans even feature a phone number, which consumers are encouraged to text to make sure they got home safe. (I tried it and got a question about the Turing Test, then no response.)

With this wellness focus, Taika is clearly aiming to capture the same demographic as other good-for-you beverage brands, like CBD soda company Recess or Dirty Lemon. Price-wise, it’s in line with both.

Taika isn’t the first company to put adaptogens in coffee, or the first to create lower-caffeine coffee. But combining those two aspects, along with marketing explicitly geared towards wellness-conscious consumers, could help this startup rocket to success.

Food-as-Medicine Doctor Embraces Telehealth To Run Practice During Coronavirus

In a given week, Harvard-trained physician Robert Graham normally sees about twenty patients at his New York based medical practice where he combines traditional medical approaches with the rapidly emerging area of food-as-medicine.

But that all changed this past week as his town of New York City came to grips with the reality of COVID-19 and the CDC advised everyone to practice stay at home as a way to slow the pandemic.

To deal with the new reality, Graham sprung into action and started to implement a telehealth system that would allow him to continue his patient visits in an era of social distancing. He began to use a platform called Clocktree, a telemedicine platform with Zoom-like video conferencing capabilities. He also started requesting his patients use wearables like the Apple Watch to allow him to access their heart rate.

Graham started utilizing this new approach this past weekend and so far, he’s making it work.

“I did seven visits this weekend and have transitioned all appointments to virtual calls,” said Graham. ” I have closed my office till April 1st and transitioned all patients to this platform.”

I asked Graham if all of his patients were on board with using telehealth and he told me most have agreed, but not all.

“So far, about 70% have agreed, 10% rather just jump on call, 20% want to wait and reschedule for an in person visit.”

Telehealth has certainly gotten lots of attention in recent days as a way to expand the reach of over-taxed front-line medical experts to diagnose and treat COVID-19 patients, but it’s clear it’s also becoming a valuable tool for also family practitioners and specialists like Graham to connect with patients during extraordinary times.

I asked Dr Graham if he’s had to make any significant changes to the way he provides care as he transitions, at least temporarily, to telehealth?

“Yes, I had to clean my house,” he joked.