Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Future Food

Motif FoodWorks and University of Illinois Are on a Quest to Find the Perfect Texture for Plant-based Meat

Food ingredient innovator Motif FoodWorks announced today it has struck partnerships with two universities to further research the properties of plant-based foods and develop technologies to improve elements like texture. For the research, Motif will work with the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana.

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of Motif forming a partnership with the the University of Guelph to research plant-based fats in order to make them more like the real thing.

Fat is a key part of what makes meat taste good. And so is texture and mouthfeel. Achieving better versions of those latter two elements in plant-based meat is the driving motivation behind Motif’s partnerships with the University of Illinois. As we’ve written many, many times before, texture is one of the keys to making plant-based meat more appealing to mainstream consumers. 

In its press release today, Motif’s lead for food science, Stefan Baier, said that in order to get textures more precisely like those of actual meat, “we need to continue to evolve the way we approach food design” rather than relying on decades-old tools and technologies that might work for meat-meat but not so much for alt-meat.

Baier will lead the two-year-long project with UIC and UICU, working with the schools’ experts on advanced rheological techniques from the fields of mechanical and chemical engineering.

This isn’t the first time Motif has partnered with higher education to solve the texture riddle. In 2019, the company said it was working with the University of Queensland in Australia on improving texture of plant-based meats.

Motif’s quest to make plant-based meats replicate the properties of animal meat comes at a time when demand for plant-based meat is steadily on the rise. Many companies in the space are expanding in response. Impossible launched its direct-to-consumer site recently, and its chief rival Beyond has plans to launch a similar e-commerce store. And other companies are tackling the texture issue, too, from Redefine Meat‘s 3D-printed steaks to Ecovative’s mycelium scaffolding to Emergy’s fermented fungi steaks.

One thing Motif will need to consider in its research is just how closely consumers actually want their plant-based staples to replicate the real thing. Catherine Lamb, the Spoon’s former expert on all things plant-based meat, often said plant-based meat was too meaty. This nine-year-old concurs. But Catherine is a longtime vegetarian and the nine-year-old is, well, nine. Which is to say, adults who’ve been eating real meat for decades may prefer a more exact replication. At the moment there isn’t too much data out there on this subject, but it’s one Motif and others will most definitely need to tackle on the quest to make the perfect plant-based meat.

IntegriCulture and Shiok Meats Partner to Scale Up Production of Lab-Grown Shrimp

Cell-based meat companies Integriculture and Shiok Meats announced this week that they have officially entered into a collaboration to scale up production of the latter’s cell-based shrimp, according to Vegconomist.

For the partnership, Integriculture will provide its CultNet System, which allows other businesses to culture their own animal tissues. In this case, Shiok Meats will use the CultNet System to create shrimp cell cultures. Doing so would bring the overall cost of producing lab-grown shrimp down because the system doesn’t require animal serums, which are extremely expensive, not to mention controversial.

Dr. Sandhya Sriram, co-founder of Shiok Meats, told Vegconomist that at this point, most cell-ag companies are looking for alternatives to serum, as animal serums are “neither ethical nor sustainable.” 

IntegriCulture’s CultNet System lets cell-based meat produce bypass animal serums altogether. (This democratization of meat production is one of the reasons the company landed on our Food Tech 25 list for this year.)

Unfortunately, your average consumer won’t be able to taste this cell-based shrimp yet. The companies did not give a timeline for this cell-based shrimp, and cell-based meat in general is still some time away from landing in the consumer market. IntegriCulture has said it will launch its first product, a cell-based foie gras, in 2021. Shiok Meats did its first public taste testing, of its cell-based shrimp dumplings in the spring of 2019, but the company is still most likely three to five years out from commercializing anything.

Both companies recently raised money. Integriculture raised $7.4 million this past May. Shiok Meats raised $3 million in bridge funding at the end of June.

The cultured meat and cell-ag space overall has seen much activity of late in terms of both new funding and expanding production. Memphis Meats raised $161 million at the beginning of 2020, doubling global investment in cultured meat. BlueNalu announced in June it will expand its facilities to bring cell-based seafood to test markets. Both Turtle Tree Labs and BIOMILQ have raised money for their cultured human breastmilk. 

While we’re still a ways away from grabbing cell-based meat off our grocery store shelves (or growing it at home), the flurry of new developments and funding news in this space make clear that cell-based ag is less the stuff science fiction now and inching closer to reality.

Beyond Meat Arrives at Alibaba Stores in China

Beyond Meat continues its expansion in China, this time into the retail sector. The company is bringing its Beyond Burgers to Alibaba’s Heme supermarkets, first in Shanghai, then elsewhere in the country later this year, according to TechCrunch. 

Beyond debuted in China earlier this year with a Starbucks partnership, selling its plant-based meat products in cafes across the country. Availability of Beyond products expanded to the Yum China empire, where they were at Pizza Hut, KFC, and Taco Bell for a limited time.

The company’s arrival in Alibaba stores is its first foray into retail in China. Though it makes sense. China has the world’s largest population and is also the world’s largest consumer of meat. The Chinese government has been urging citizens for some time now to cut down their meat consumption, which makes China a lucrative market for plant-based meat products.

This move is also the latest salvo in what has been a busy few months of back-and-forth expansion news for both Beyond and its main plant-based rival, Impossible Foods. Impossible launched a direct-to-consumer sales channel at the beginning of June. Shortly after, Beyond released bulk packaging that narrowed the price gap between its burgers and traditional meat. Beyond also announced plans for its own D2C site, which has yet to launch. Then earlier this week, Impossible announced that its Impossible Sausage is now available to all restaurants in the U.S. 

This latest deal with Alibaba helps bolster Beyond’s foothold in China. Impossible is not yet in Chinese markets, though the company has suggested in the past it plans to eventually launch products there. As demand for plant-based meat offerings has surged since the start of the global pandemic, it’s a safe bet to expect the back-and-forth news from both companies to continue throughout the year.

Singapore to Allocate $40M to Help Agtech and Aquaculture Startups Grow More Local Food

Singapore agtech is about to get an investment shot in arm, one that could give the whole world a clearer vision of alternative farming’s role in our future food system. Enterprise Singapore, the government agency committed to startups, said last week it will invest roughly $40 million USD into agtech and aquaculture companies, according to AgFunder News. 

Koh Poh Koon, Singapore’s senior minister for trade and industry, said during the announcement that “Using agritech can help to make [Singapore’s] food supplies more resilient by building a bigger margin of local food capacity.”

Sinapore relies on imports for about 90 percent of its food. As the pandemic has shown us, that reliance on external sources can be problematic if the supply chain gets disrupted. The city-state already has one initiative in place to address this, the “30 by 30” program, which aims to have 30 percent of Singapore’s food produced domestically by 2030. 

The newly announced funding will go towards agtech and aquaculture startups that apply through the Singapore government’s Business Grants Portal. 

Singapore has become something of a hotbed in the last couple years for food tech, especially when it comes to alternative proteins and alternative farming methods. Last year, the city-state’s National Research Foundation allocated $535 million (USD) to increase R&D efforts in cell therapy manufacturing, digital technology, and sustainable urban food production. Food-focused accelerators like GROW’s Singapore Food Bowl program are also emerging as a resource for startups. Meanwhile, individual companies are also developing ways to make Singaporean food more local, from SinGrow’s proprietary strawberries, to Turtle Tree Labs’ cultured human breastmilk.

Those uses of alternative farming and food production could be a clue for the rest of the world about how technologies like high-tech farming systems, post-harvest technology, and raising alternative protein sources fit into the broader picture of the future food system. Many of these technologies are nascent and have yet to prove themselves economically scalable. If Singapore can use them to meet its “30 by 30” goal and beyond, it could provide a blueprint for the rest of the world as the population increases and demand for local food production grows.

Up Next for the Astronaut’s Diet: Space Peppers

Two things we love here at The Spoon: space food and indoor farming tech. So I got pretty excited to come across a HoritDaily article today about  Jacob Torres, who works at the Space Crop Production Lab at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and is currently researching how to grow chile peppers in space. 

The idea is to eventually supply astronauts that spend a lot of time in deep space with fresher foods to accompany their packaged items. Torres is starting with peppers, which can add more important vitamins to astronauts’ diets, not to mention bring some much-needed flavor to the food.

For those peppers, Torres uses the Española Improved pepper, which performs especially well in a space environment compared to other breeds. Conducting research inside the NASA-developed Plant Growth Habitat, he is also experimenting with different light “recipes” and finding a solution to watering plants in an environment without gravity. “Existing hydroponic systems are largely inoperable in microgravity,” he told HoritDaily.

He finally settled on the Passive Porous Tube Nutrient Delivery System (PPTNDS), which forces water upwards to water the plants and, he said, could eventually be used on earth for those hard-to-reach upper levels of vertical farms that growers can’t get to as often.

An underlying goal of the project is to create an indoor grow system that needs little input from the astronauts themselves, who wouldn’t have the kind of time to devote to plant cultivation that other indoor growers have.

But back to space. One of the reasons we’re seeing an uptick in food projects beyond planet Earth is what Spoon Publisher Michael Wolf calls “the renewed interest in space travel.” NASA wants to put people on the moon again, and there’s of course interest in Mars. As Mike says, “Whether it’s the actual habitation of Mars or some other place in the galaxy, simply packing up freeze dried food won’t cut it.” And from Japan’s Space Food X initiative to space-friendly bake ovens to tomatoes, there’s a ton of companies and projects out there now figuring out how to feed people in space. Torres’ ongoing research is certainly bringing some new spice to this mix.

If you’re into space food, join us for our free live virtual event on Tuesday June 30th where we’ll talk with the inventors of the Zero G Space Oven.

AppHarvest Partners With the Dutch Government to Make Kentucky an Indoor Farming Powerhouse

Agtech startup AppHarvest this week announced a partnership with the Dutch government, the state of Kentucky, and several other organizations including universities to turn Appalachia into an “ag-tech epicenter,” according to the Louisville Courier Journal. 

The partnership comes just as AppHarvest is building out its massive 2.76-million-square foot indoor farming facility in Morehead, KY that’s scheduled to open in Fall 2020. That facility will grow 45 million pounds of fresh produce each year, with an emphasis on tomatoes. The company says it expects to eventually deliver produce to not just grocery stores in Appalachia but also those in surrounding states that are within a day’s drive.

The AppHarvest facility will use hydroponics to vertically grow produce inside high-tech greenhouses. In addition to supplying more local produce to surrounding regions (as opposed from shipping that produce in from Canada or Mexico), the new facility will also create about 285 jobs encompassing everything from “head growers” all the way down to entry-level positions. The addition of those jobs is especially important to Appalachia — an area of the U.S. ravaged by persistent poverty. 

The goal of the new partnership is to create even more jobs in addition to getting more locally grown food into surrounding regions. The agreement, signed yesterday by the different parties involved, will create a series of research programs as well as a “center of excellence” for agtech innovation. 

Why The Netherlands? According to the Courier Journal, that country has spent decades building its own sustainable food supply chain through a network of more than 10,000 high-tech green houses. “The year-round, temperature-controlled farms have made the Netherlands the world’s second largest agricultural exporter and a leading ag innovator,” AppHarvest founder Jonathan Webb said at a press call cited by the Courier Journal.

The new partnership also includes participation from two higher education institutions in The Netherlands as well as Morehead State University, Berea College and Eastern Kentucky University, University of Kentucky and University of Pikeville. 

AppHarvest closed an $11 million funding round in January, bringing the company’s total funding to $120 million.

Amazon to Fund Food Companies as Part of New $2B Climate Pledge Fund

Amazon announced today the launch of The Climate Pledge Fund, which will use an initial $2 billion in funding to back clean technology companies including those in the food and agriculture space.

The fund is part of the broader Climate Pledge, an initiative founded by Amazon and Global Optimism last year to achieve net zero carbon by 2040, 10 years earlier than the Paris Agreement deadline.

From Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund page:

In order to meaningfully reduce the amount of net greenhouse gas emissions, low-carbon solutions need to be developed in all sectors of the global economy. The Climate Pledge Fund will invest in companies in multiple industries, with an initial focus on: transportation and logistics; energy generation, storage, and utilization; manufacturing and materials; circular economy; and food and agriculture. Companies of all sizes and stages will be considered, from pre-product startups to well-established enterprises looking to scale. The scope of The Climate Pledge Fund is global and will consider investments in companies developing products or services that reduce carbon emissions and help preserve the natural world.

The fund announcement comes while the world is still in the throes of a global pandemic, which has had both positive and negative impacts on the environment.

There are plenty of opportunities for Amazon to make a big impact when it comes to de-carbonizing the meal journey. We cover a ton of startups that are fighting food waste, developing tools for sustainable and precision agriculture, and creating alternative proteins that don’t require resource intensive livestock raising.

The Climate Pledge Fund is accepting “indications of interest” right now via email.

Planterra’s Plant-based Meat Brand Ozo Hits Retail Store Shelves, E-Commerce

JBS-owned Planterra Foods announced this week it will launch its first Ozo product on grocery stores shelves in June, and will also make them available direct to consumers via its e-commerce site. To start, the brand will launch its burgers (two-4 oz patties), its Ground product (12 oz), and Mexican-Seasoned Ground (12 oz).

Colorado-based Planterra first announced Ozo in March of this year, saying the new line of plant-based products would include burgers, grounds, and meatballs. All Ozo products are a mix of pea protein and rice protein fermented with shiitake mycelia (root). 

According this week’s press release, Ozo products will hit store shelves in several different states:

Albertsons and Safeway locations in Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota and Wyoming; Kroger* stores in 12 states (Alabama, Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee) and, as well as military bases across the country.

Customers will also be able to order Ozo’s meatless meat through the brand’s website and through Wild Fork Foods for customers in Florida.

And for those looking to try before they buy, Planterra is also sending out its own fleet of vans to offer curbside-pickup samples of its products during the rest of June. Those vans will make stops in Denver, Boulder, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Additional cities are planned for the next 12 months, including Seattle, San Francisco, and Nashville, among others. Finally, “special deliveries will be made to fire stations, hospitals and other locations to serve frontline workers this summer,” according to the company press release.

Selling meatless meat directly to consumers is fast becoming a standard trend for companies, particularly with the restaurant industry — formerly a key channel for plant-based products — still in the throes of its pandemic-induced upheaval. Earlier this month, Impossible launched a direct-to-consumer channel for its “bleeding” meat products that’s available to anyone in the lower 48 states. Its chief competitor Beyond followed with an announcement of its own forthcoming D2C store, which is slated to launch at some point this summer. 

Meanwhile, demand for plant-based meat keeps rising, thanks in no small part to panic buying sprees and meat shortage scares, and online grocery shopping has hit record numbers in the last couple months. That makes now an ideal time to launch direct-to-consumer stores, and also to get new meat alternatives onto store shelves across the country.

It’s unclear if the demand for online grocery shopping will keep now that economies are reopening, so Planterra’s Ozo shop, not to mention those of other plant-based retailers, may or may not be a hit. That said, Ozo’s website says products can be stored frozen for up to 60 days, so flexitarians wanting to stock up may find a D2C e-commerce site a convenient addition to their online shopping.

Your Next Alt-Milk Latte Could Be Made With Barley

Whether it’s for sustainability reasons or those related to health, more folks nowadays are looking for alternatives to animal-based dairy. Oat milk, chickpea milk, almond milk, and others have all made strides in the alt-dairy market, and now they have a new competitor: barley milk. Plant-based dairy company Take Two Foods just launched its “Barleymilk” product, the first of its kind to use what it calls “rejuvenated barley” to create milk for human consumption.

Portland, OR-based Take Two was founded this year, and launched “Barleymilk” this past March. Right now it’s available in coffeeshops and cafes around the Pacific Northwest and in Los Angeles, according to a recent company press release. 

The company claims Barleymilk is a first of its kind. Over an email exchange with The Spoon, Take Two cofounder and CEO Sarah Pool said that in terms of a source for plant-based milk, “nobody knows about barley because the majority of companies are just fast-following trends.” In other words, plenty of companies are coming to market with almond milks and coconut milks, but barley is an untapped resource in terms of an ingredient for alt-milk.

That’s especially true when it comes to upcycled barley, which is made from the spent grain that goes to waste during the beer brewing process. Pool said about 8 billion pounds of spent barley goes to waste annually around the globe as the result of beer brewing. Take Two “rescues” this grain and uses it to make its Barleymilk, which Pool says can be used for everything from lattes to smoothies. The drink contains about 5 grams of protein per serving and has more than 50 percent less sugar than other milks. 

Of course the acid test for plant-based products these days is taste. And actually, that’s one of the major gripes about plant-based dairy products. They rarely taste like the real thing, and according to Pool, the more nutritious they are, the worst they taste. “Even though the plant-based milk category is booming right now, brands haven’t been able to solve converting the mainstream consumer to non-dairy,” she said. “First and foremost, because plant-based milk doesn’t taste amazing.”

There’s some debate on that point. Plant-based milk is “the most developed of all the plant-based categories,” according to the Good Food Institute, which also notes that plant-based products like dairy are “increasingly competitive with animal products on the key drivers of consumer choice: taste, price, and accessibility.” So plenty of folks are buying alt-dairy products.

That said, taste is subjective, and not everyone agrees on the taste of current plant-based milks. Even my former colleague Catherine Lamb, a die-hard when it comes to plant-based anything, has written about the “bitter aftertaste that comes with, say, pea protein or soy.”

Take Two says its Barleymilk tastes good enough to drink by the glassful, and can also be used as a cooking ingredient. Whether consumers agree is to be determined. The milks currently come in four flavors: original, chocolate, vanilla, and something called “chef’s blend.” Online, a two-pack costs $9.98 (plus $5.99 for standard shipping), and, as mentioned above, the products are also available in cafes in parts of the Pacific Northwest and L.A.

At The Spoon, we haven’t yet gotten the chance to taste Take Two’s take on alt-milk, and we’ll keep you updated when we do. In the meantime, the company says it plans to expand Barleymilk nationally across both retail and foodservice by the Fall of 2020. 

 

The LIVEKINDLY co. Acquires Swedish Plant-Based Meat Brand Oumph!

Alt-protein collective the LIVEKINDLY co. announced this week it has acquired Oumph!, a plant-based brand from Sweden. Oumph! is one of several different brands now in the LIVEKINDLY co portfolio, and the deal furthers the collective’s mission to “make plant-based eating the new normal,” according to a press release. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The LIVEKINDLY co. is itself a relatively new venture, formed in March of this year after Foods United bought vegan media company LIVEKINDLY and rebranded as LIVEKINDLY co. As my former colleague Catherine Lamb wrote at the time, the LIVEKINDLY co. is the only company that owns and operates “the entire value chain of production” when it comes to plant-based protein.

Besides this new acquisition of Oumph!, the LIVEKINDLY co. also holds a majority stake in South Africa-based Fry Family Food Co. and German startup LikeMeat, and has an equity stake in PURIS Holding, a maker of plant-based ingredients like pea protein. 

Oumph!, meanwhile, was founded in 2015 and currently serves the Nordic countries, the U.K., and The Netherlands. Its products, which include “meat” products made from SOYA protein concentration, are sold at both restaurants and grocery retailers across those countries. The brand will launch in other global markets later this year, though this week’s press release didn’t specify which ones.

Regardless, it’s an apt time to be expanding a plant-based protein brand. The market for plant-based food is currently worth $5 billion, and sales of plant-based food grew 11.4 percent in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic has also played a role in this growth. Meat shortage scares and general wariness about where our food comes from has made more consumers open to the idea of buying and eating plant-based meat. 

That’s exactly the audience the LIVEKINDLY co. and Oumph! aim to sway: a wider group of flexitarians trying plant-based meat for a variety of reasons, be they ethical, sustainable, or health related.

Dining With Mannequins: Max Elder on How to Think Like a Futurist About Our Food System

“Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.”

So said Max Elder, Research Director at Food Futures Lab for the Institute for the Future. Elder joined The Spoon yesterday for a virtual workshop on how to think like a food futurist during these uncertain times, and he had a wealth of tools and advice to offer attendees.

Besides the aforesaid quote, one of those nuggets was that you might be dining beside a mannequin next time you go out to eat. Sounds a little William Gibson-esque, right? Personally, I thought immediately of the ’80s film Mannequin, and some folks are no doubt creeped out by the whole idea.

But whatever images it conjures in your head, the concept actually already exists in some places. During yesterday’s workshop, Elder highlighted a Michelin-star restaurant in the Washington, D.C. area, The Inn at Little Washington, that is using mannequins to fill empty tables now that social distance guidelines require restaurants to run at reduced capacity in the dining room. 

This isn’t a widespread trend — yet. It’s what Elder calls a “signal.” Signals, as we discussed at the virtual workshop today, are facts about the present we can use to make predictions about the future. They’re especially important at a time when there’s so much uncertainty about so many parts of the food system, from the supply chain to restaurants to how we’ll get our groceries in future.

So how does one restaurant seating its empty tables with mannequins become an actual trend in the restaurant biz? For that matter, do we want it to become a trend? To answer these questions, Elder led the group in discussing the consequences, good and bad, of restaurants using mannequins as stand-in customers.

Ideas included:

  • Monetizing mannequins with ads
  • Mannequins becoming an extra item in the restaurant to clean and sanitize
  • Creating a Walking Dead-themed restaurants with mannequins
  • Ensuring mannequins are inclusive from racial, gender, and cultural angles
  • Mannequins becoming robots and therefore potential diner companions that could talk to you
  • Said robot-mannequins becoming holograms

The list goes on and on.

As a side note, mannequins and other doll-like figures aren’t just at the Washington Inn. A restaurant in Tokyo, Japan has strategically placed them around its establishment and even partnered with a clothing brand to make the mannequins as stylish as possible. And restaurant in Thailand uses stuffed animals, because who doesn’t want to eat across from a giant stuffed panda bear? 

If it all sounds a tad ridiculous, that’s the point. And as Elder and the workshop audience showed, seemingly ridiculous ideas can sometimes lead to us pondering the bigger implications of signals poised to become trends.

That’s just a smidgen of what we talked about at the workshop. To learn more about what signals are and how they become trends, what a future wheel is and why it’s important to making forecasts, and a bunch of other tools, watch the full video.

Become a Food Futurist

In Sweden, Plant-based Meat Is Getting a Bit Fishy

It’s no secret the alternative-protein market is skyrocketing in terms of both growth and new innovations. Already today we’ve written about Motif Foodworks’ efforts to make better fat for plant-based burgers and Japanese startup DAIZ’s recent $6 million funding round. 

And here’s another one to watch: a Swedish startup called Hooked, which is developing the “world’s first” plant-based shredded salmon. Food Navigator ran a profile of the company today, detailing how the company wants to address the unsustainable nature of the seafood industry and why they chose shredded salmon and tuna as their first plant-based products. 

Demand for seafood is growing — and harming the health of the planet at the same time, Hooked founders Emil Wasteson and Tom Johanson told Food Navigator. 

“By consuming Hooked’s products, consumers can enjoy seafood without any of these negative consequences. We are meeting the rapidly increased seafood demand with healthy and tasty alternatives with a production that can scale without harming the planet.”

Those products include plant-based shredded salmon and tuna, which are made from soya protein isolate and meant to be used in pastas, pizzas, wraps, and more.

‘We want to mimc the real nutritional value of [conventional seafood]. Most of the plant-based meat the you see on the market…may have good texture and taste, but the nutrition is not there,” said Peter Liu, Hooked’s CTO.

Hooked is focusing on European markets to start, though they may find a greater demand for their seafood products if the salmon and tuna do indeed deliver on taste, nutrition, texture, and price point.

If 2019 was the year alternative protein infiltrated the mainstream, 2020 is shaping up to be the year companies improve these products, both in terms of taste and variety.