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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Future Food

Is Home Fermentation The Next Big Kitchen Tech Opportunity?

There’s been a fermentation boom in restaurants over the past decade. Chefs everywhere are using the age-old technique to make everything from kimchi to katsuobushi, and nowadays, it’s not out of the ordinary for high-end restaurants to have a head of fermentation on staff.

And now, thanks in part to the pandemic and the rise of experimentation in food making, more people than ever are doing fermentation at home. Anyone who’s tried to create a sourdough starter, brew kombucha or make sauerkraut has dabbled in fermentation whether they know it or not.

Still, fermenting is still viewed as something of a black art. Part of it is the weird and slightly creepy terminology (mother, anyone?). Mostly, though, it’s also because the act of farming bacteria to create tasty and healthy new foods is a far cry from the usual activity of assembling and cooking our meals in our kitchen.

The New Sous Vide?

But what if it wasn’t? What if, like other pro cooking techniques that have entered the consumer kitchen, fermentation got an assist from technology to help would-be home fermenters with their craft? Could some innovation and little cool hardware help make fermentation more mainstream, like the sous vide wave that started nearly a decade ago?

That is the hope of a couple of entrepreneurs I caught up with recently at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Fred Benenson’s Breadwinner helps home bread bakers know when their sourdough starter is ready. Tommy Leung’s company Hakko Bako is making a fermenting appliance for the home.

Both see a big future for home fermenters, a future that starts with making the process a little less mysterious.

“I remember I was talking with a close friend of mine when I was starting work on Breadwinner,” said Benenson. “I could tell he was like a little sketched out by the idea that there was this jar of goo.”

Benenson knew that his friend wasn’t alone. There are millions of people around the world who see these jars as mysterious and a little scary. If he could just provide a little more clarity, they wouldn’t be as scared of fermentation. They’d also end up making better bread.

That’s where Breadwinner comes in. Originally conceived as a “social network for yeast” where home cooks could share their stories of loave-making, Benenson also started working on a hardware device that monitors starters. The idea behind both was to give more information.

“Humans have had kind of an innate relationship to fermentation for a long time,” said Benenson. “In terms of making it more approachable, you think of any situation that’s got a lot of uncertainty and confusion, and you’re trying to learn it for the first time, the more you can reduce that uncertainty, the better you feel about engaging with it.”

Leung also wants to make fermentation more approachable. To do that, he is creating both a home and professional kitchen appliance to bring precision to the process.

“Our goal is just to make fermentation easy,” said Leung. “So it means to provide temperature control and then use the technology to make the process easier.”

That precision and control is necessary, in part, because fermentation is so different from the usual act of cooking in the kitchen.

“Most of the things you’re doing in the kitchen, then you’d like to be prepping in the morning and then like serving and cooking it,” said Leung. “Fermentation happens over hours, days, weeks and months.”

Both Benenson and Leung are bullish about fermentation as being potentially the next big professional kitchen technique that could be mainstreamed through innovation.

“The top chefs are already fermenting,” said Leung. “They’re already creating these like amazing flavor experiences. I think like with food usually starts in the Michelin restaurants and then it moves to more like casual dining, and then to the home. So I definitely think it’s going to be a huge part of the future.”

“I’m bullish there,” said Benenson. “I think it will be a while before we have all of our ducks in a row to make the case but it’s what I’m hoping for. I think fermentation is gonna start to sound a lot less scary.”

So is home fermentation the next big kitchen tech opportunity? You can decide for yourself after watching my full conversation with Benenson and Leung below.

“Have Your Bagel and Eat It Too”: Better Brand CEO Aimee Yang Wants To Change Our Relationship With Carbs

So many of our favorite foods contain refined carbohydrates like white flour and white sugar. These ingredients reliably produce delicious foods, but they’re also associated with health problems like Type 2 diabetes and obesity.

California-based startup Better Brand is on a mission to hack refined carbohydrates, recreating their flavor without the health consequences. The company’s first product, the Better Bagel, has the carbohydrate content of two banana slices, the protein content of four eggs, and the sugar content of a single stalk of celery.

In a Zoom interview this week, company founder and CEO Aimee Yang told The Spoon that she set out to develop products that would make healthy eating easier while improving consumers’ relationships with food.

“We have always lived with this underlying belief in pre-imposed limitations,” says Yang. “That the foods that we crave can’t be good for us, and we have to deprive ourselves. We’re posing the thought that you don’t have to do that anymore. You can have your cake—well, your bagel—and eat it too.”

Better Brand CEO Aimee Yang


That cycle of craving and self-deprivation has personal significance for Yang. “It was the largest pain point that I felt throughout my life,” she says. “I’d always been on the cycle of wanting to eat something and questioning if I should. It consumed so much of my mind space and was just so anxiety-inducing for me.”

As she worked toward her M.B.A. at The Wharton School, Yang realized that that personal pain point could also be an opportunity to make an impact in the food space. During her second year of business school, she delved into research on the science of food.

Yang says that upon founding Better Brand, she chose the bagel as the company’s flagship product because “turning the most carb-heavy food, which is the equivalent of multiple slices of bread, into the carb equivalent of two banana slices is so exciting. When you’re a consumer and you hear that, it promotes a mind shift in terms of what’s possible.”

Using some of the insights from Yang’s research, Better Brand collaborated with food labs to develop a bagel dough with novel ingredients. “If you brought this dough to a bagel manufacturer or a bakery, they would have no idea what to do with it,” says Yang. “If you tried to use it in the conventional way, it would be impossible.”

After the dough undergoes some processing (the details are a trade secret), Better Brand’s enzyme technology is applied. The company extracts its enzymes from plants, and adds them to the dough to improve the flavor, mouthfeel, and texture of the finished product. Though the enzymes are the last part of the ingredient deck, and are used sparingly, Yang says that without them the Better Bagel “would be a completely different product.”

The Better Bagel launched over the summer on the company’s online store. Rather than waiting to perfect every detail in the lab before launching, the team wanted to introduce the product quickly and make improvements based on consumer feedback—which Yang says is a focus point for the organization, right up to the investor level.

“Our investor base is a group of incredible people who care about more than the bottom line,” says Yang. “That’s never a point of conversation; it’s always about how we’re driving impact, what the product is like, and how we can improve the customer’s journey.”

By launching online with a direct-to-consumer model, Better Brand hopes to take advantage of reviews and sales data. “If a product is on a grocery shelf, there are so many levels in between you and that purchase point that you don’t really get a complete data set,” says Yang. “It’s important for us to be consumer-first because we need that feedback in real-time. There’s also an element of wanting the consumer to have a certain experience, and it’s a lot easier to control that experience if you’re DTC.”

The company is working on building strategic partnerships, starting with Ojai Valley Inn, a luxury resort in Southern California. The team is also in talks with a few large food service companies, considering relationships that would mirror Impossible Foods’ symbiosis with Burger King. Yang says that they plan to work closely with partners to maintain some control over branding and keep a close eye on consumer experience.

In the future, Better Brand plans to expand its product offerings, keeping a focus on refined carbohydrates. Having hacked the bagel, titan of carbohydrates, Yang says the company will be able to replicate other carb-heavy foods more easily.

“If it’s something that you crave and feel guilty about eating,” she says, “we’re going to be innovating in that space.”


Black Sheep Foods Launches Plant-Based Lamb in San Francisco Restaurants

This week, alternative protein startup Black Sheep Foods’ plant-based lamb made its debut in San Francisco restaurants. The launch is a big step for the Black Sheep team, which wants to offer more variety to plant-based meat eaters.

“Our first product is lamb because it’s both alien and familiar in America,” company co-founder Sunny Kumar told The Spoon this week over Zoom. “Everyone knows about lamb, but no one really eats it at a high cadence.”

Kumar points out a few reasons for relatively low lamb consumption in the U.S. For one thing, lamb and mutton popularity plummeted when World War II GIs returned home, having lost their taste for the gamy, canned meat they had had to eat abroad. Then there was the influence of Lamb Chop, the adorable host of a 1990s PBS program for preschoolers. (“As these kids grew up, they would be like, ‘I don’t want to eat lamb, this was one of my favorite characters on TV,’” says Kumar.) And of course, there’s the general guilt factor of eating a baby animal.

Black Sheep wants to decouple the taste of lamb from some of the negative cultural connotations in the U.S. market—both by taking the actual lamb out of the picture, and by making a great-tasting product. To do that, the team had to figure out how to reproduce the meat’s flavor using plant-based ingredients.

Unlocking the taste of game

Kumar says that he and co-founder Ismael Montanez had an “aha” moment while working together at Finless Foods. “We realized that the taste of an animal really comes from what it’s eating, and how that food is processed by the animal itself,” he says.

The team ultimately came up with what Kumar calls the company’s secret sauce: A class of compounds called branched chain fatty acids, which account for the gamy flavor of lamb. After that, there were the hurdles of building a reliable supply chain and getting FDA approval for the ingredient.

“You can’t go for regulatory approval until you know the levels of the compounds you want to use, and the levels of the compounds are directly dictated by the texturing,” says Kumar. “And so you have to understand what you’re putting in, and as you add a little bit more fat or a little bit more water, you have to understand how those changes affect each other.”

Though the regulatory process was long and complicated, Kumar expects the team to enjoy a certain amount of competitive insulation as a result, making the investment in research and FDA approval worthwhile.

By unlocking the flavor of lamb, Black Sheep has been able to create a product that stands out among other plant-based meat options. Moving forward, Kumar says that flavor is one of the key elements that Black Sheep wants to focus on developing and producing in-house. The company currently works with a manufacturing partner to produce the branched chain fatty acids that create that gamy flavor—but, according to Kumar, they plan to take on more of the ingredient production internally over time.

The lamb launch strategy

Black Sheep has tested its formula in consumer panels, and judging by the results, Kumar expects the restaurant launch to be a success. “So far, the reviews are highly positive,” he says. “Some people have told us, ‘I don’t eat a lot of lamb, because I don’t like some of the notes in it.’ But the cool part about building it from the ground up is that we don’t have to add those negative notes—we only add the positive, gamy elements.”

With Mediterranean restaurant chains like Cava growing in popularity, Kumar sees plenty of room for more restaurant partnerships in the future. The team is tentatively planning to introduce products in grocery stores by the end of 2022. But first, they’re focused on ironing out the flavor and texture of their consumer products.

“We bought a small extruder and we’re going to get some learnings on it,” says Kumar, “but we’re going to be limited by the output of that machine. Hopefully with the next round of funding, we’ll be able to unlock a little bit more capacity.”

When The Spoon interviewed Black Sheep in 2019, the company was planning to launch its products in Asia. Kumar says that the team shifted its strategy due to the relative ease of co-packing and sourcing supplies domestically. After expanding in the U.S., they’re eyeing Europe and the U.K., where North African cultural influences have boosted the popularity of lamb.

Plant-based possibilities

Down the line, Kumar says that the team’s dream is to create plant-based, formed foods like burgers, nuggets, and sausages—“but with flavors that are insane.”

Ethics and environmental impacts are on the team’s mind. But beyond reacting to those concerns by replacing common frozen aisle products with similar-enough alternatives, Black Sheep wants to delight consumers with unique tastes. They hope to win over flexitarians by offering the chance to enjoy flavors they wouldn’t otherwise try.

With the plant-based space becoming increasingly competitive and crowded with similar products, the strategy makes sense. As Kumar says: “Why eat chicken nuggets when you could have duck nuggets with hoisin barbeque sauce?”

Photo credit: Nicola Parisi

With Series of Partnerships, Givaudan Positions Itself for an Alt Protein Future

Swiss flavor manufacturer Givaudan recently announced plans to open a new Cultured Food Innovation Hub by 2022. This is the latest in a flurry of new initiatives that suggest the company is positioning itself as a major player in the alternative protein industry.

Givaudan and its partners hope to support cell-cultured protein startups as they perform research and development and bring new products to market. At the Innovation Hub, startups will have access to cell-culture and bio-fermentation equipment, as well as a product development laboratory.

With many countries awaiting regulatory decisions for cell-cultured products, Givaudan appears to be anticipating a growing demand for business-to-business services in the industry. The company already partners with plant-based meat and dairy startups to develop, prototype, and test products. This foray into cultivated protein territory means they’ll stay on the cutting edge as cell-culture products make their debuts.

The facility will be built outside of Zurich, and will be owned in partnership with plant equipment manufacturer Bühler and retail food giant Migros—a partnership that’s interesting in its own right. Pooling their ranges of expertise, the companies should be able to offer comprehensive, turnkey services to would-be cell-cultured meat manufacturers. Fabio Campanile, Givaudan’s Global Head of Science and Technology, Taste & Wellbeing, commented on the partnership in a recent press release:

“Bühler contributes with industry-leading solutions that are used in the scale-up and production of thousands of food products around the world; Givaudan brings in centuries of experience and knowledge in every aspect of taste, including all kinds of meat alternatives, and deep expertise in biotechnology, to product development; Migros is known for its competence in customer interaction and market cultivation.”

Givaudan has also been keeping busy with its own research and development efforts, working on producing sustainable flavor ingredients for alternative meats and other products. Last month, The Spoon reported on Givaudan and Ginkgo Bioworks’ joint effort to develop new flavor and fragrance ingredients through bio-fermentation. More recently, the company announced another partnership with Danish biotech company Biosyntia—this one focused on transforming natural sugars into flavoring agents.

We may see more companies from outside of the alternative protein industry take an interest in cell-cultured meat. German life sciences and electronics manufacturer Merck KGaA is now offering technology solutions (from process design to growth medium formulation) for cell-cultured manufacturers. These big-name partners should help smaller startups to bring their products to market more quickly.

A Cuppa Joe Grown in a Lab? That’s Right, Cell-Cultured Coffee Is Now a Reality

Cellular agriculture has given us hope about the future of sustainable meat production, but what about coffee? After all, many of us (this author included) would happily give up that great steak or burger to make sure we get that first cup of coffee in the morning.

Well good news, caffeine addicts: A research lab in Finland announced they have made coffee using cellular agriculture techniques. According to an article today in Phys.org, the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland “is developing coffee production through plant cells in its laboratory in Finland. In the process, cell cultures floating in bioreactors filled with nutrient medium are used to produce various animal- and plant-based products.”

The process by VTT includes establishing the cell lines in the lab and then transferring the cell cultures to a bioreactor where they produce biomass. Once harvested, the biomass is roasted into something resembling the coffee we purchase from the store.

“In terms of smell and taste, our trained sensory panel and analytical examination found the profile of the brew to bear similarity to ordinary coffee,” said VTT Research Team Leader Dr. Heiko Rischer. “However, coffee making is an art and involves iterative optimization under the supervision of specialists with dedicated equipment. Our work marks the basis for such work.”

While we’ve seen a few startups such as Atomo working on building “molecular” coffee, those approaches use upcycled plant-based ingredients with similar compounds to coffee beans. VTT’s research project is the first example we’ve seen of cellular agriculture techniques used to replicate coffee bean cells in a bioreactor.

Whether it’s cell-ag coffee beans or derived using molecular magic, discovering new approaches to create coffee is urgent given the state of traditional crop farming. Mega-producers like Brazil face severe droughts due to climate change, which has resulted in big jumps in coffee bean prices.

But don’t expect coffee from a bioreactor to show up on store shelves anytime soon. First, researchers must figure out how to scale the process, and regulatory approval would be needed.

You can see the full article on Phys.org here.

David Welch on GMO Controversy and Its Lessons for the Cell-Cultured Meat Industry

The introduction of GMO crops in the 1990s was a moment of opportunity for international agriculture—yet communications with consumers went wrong.

GMO crops have been called frankenfoods, mutants, and carcinogens. According to the Pew Research Center, roughly half of U.S. adults believe that GMO foods are less healthy than GMO-free foods. The Non-GMO Project reports that its butterfly graphic is “the fastest-growing label in the natural products industry.”

Now Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder at Synthesis Capital, an investment management firm focused on food system transformation, David Welch has a researcher’s outlook on the rollout of GMO crops. He spent his undergraduate years studying plant biology at UC Berkeley. In his later experience as a research assistant, some of his work focused on genetically modified crops like barley and maize.

Last week, I got on Zoom with Welch to unpack the parallels between the launch of GMO crops and the advent of cell-cultured meats today.

Avoiding a communication breakdown

Around the time when GM crops were first introduced to the public, the scientific community was still debating the safety implications of modified foods. Welch believes that some of that early discourse sowed the seeds of public uncertainty about the safety of GMO foods. Even once the scientific community had reached a consensus, it was difficult to clear up the confusion that had already been created.

“I’m not suggesting that you should stop negative discussions from taking place, and I think it’s fine to have some dissenting views,” says Welch. Yet the lack of clear communication regarding the underlying science of GMOs likely had an impact on public acceptance, an important lesson for the cell-cultured meat industry: “There’s an opportunity for the industry to work closely together to make sure that the science is communicated in a non-confusing way.”

Welch hopes to see companies, governments, and academics work together to develop a common language for describing cell cultivation concepts. That language could help to smooth out issues in the regulation and labeling arena, which has already proven to be a contentious zone for plant-based products.

Importantly, that common language would also help to standardize communications with the public—“so that you don’t have 20 companies talking about the science in 20 different ways, which then creates confusion,” says Welch.

Regulation and mistrust

Even in the U.S., where some GM ingredients have been widely adopted, the regulation of modified crops is notoriously arduous.

“It’s a very expensive and multi-year process to get a GMO crop approved in basically any country,” says Welch. “And I think there’s some evidence through consumer research that that leads to distrust in the technology. People think, if they have to regulate this so stringently, then it must be dangerous.”

Here, he says, lies a potential parallel between GM and cell-cultured meat technologies. In the U.S. and most other countries, the alternative meat industry is still awaiting a regulatory framework. That framework could ultimately affect consumers’ views of cell-cultured meats.

“I’m not suggesting that we should have no regulation,” says Welch. “I think that the regulatory authorities and the companies need to work together to create a regulatory pathway that is safe, but not so onerous that the public perceives the technology as very risky because there’s so much regulation attached to it.”

The future of food work

“One of the other tensions that existed with GM crops was how they were rolled out into the market and the impact that had on some farming communities,” says Welch. From the beginning, seeds for GMO commodity crops were controlled by a few large companies, a trend that has only intensified since the technology was first introduced. “Those companies ended up with a lot of control over the farmers, and I think that’s had negative effects on some farmers.”

There’s another lesson there for cell-cultured meat companies: Many consumers’ perceptions of alternative meat products could well be affected by the industry’s impact on their own communities.

“I think it’s important for the entire food industry to start talking about this,” says Welch. “I believe there’s going to be a future where there are far more alternative meats than conventional meats on the market. And we need to think about what that means for all of the people who are employed through the conventional meat and seafood industries, and what the future looks like for them in terms of new jobs.”

As cell-cultured meat makes its first forays into the U.S. market, producers are sure to face communications challenges. However, Welch notes that there are also opportunities to build trust with consumers by being transparent about the cell cultivation process.

“The way we currently produce meat and seafood, there’s that hidden step between the field—if the animal ever lived on a field—and the point where it gets to your plate,” he says. “I think it’s really exciting that consumers will be able to see how their meat is being made much more openly in the future.”

Are Squares the Future of Food? SquarEat Thinks So

When you hear the phrase “future food”, your mind might go to cell-based meat or meals cooked and served by robots. You may consider a more dystopian direction and remember the square-shaped wafers in the film Soylent Green (set in 2022), or the company called Soylent (which took inspiration from the movie’s title) with its meal replacement shakes intended to replace food altogether. Although we don’t know what exactly our food will look like in the next 25-50 years, we do know we need creative solutions to feed a population that is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050.

A Miami-based company called SquarEat has joined this “future food” category with its full meals that come in the form of multiple 50g squares. The start-up aims to simplify nutrition for those who have a busy lifestyle or struggle to consume enough calories and proper nutrients.

It operates as a meal plan service that delivers to your house on a weekly basis, but unlike other similar services, all of the food arrives pre-cooked, vacuum-sealed, and in the shape of a square. Currently, 15 different squares are listed on SquarEat’s website, ranging from chocolate pancakes, sea bass, basmati rice, vegan burger, and asparagus.

The company is gearing up for its upcoming launch and is accepting investors through its WeFunder campaign. I recently interviewed Maria Laura Vacaflores, the CMO of SquarEat, to discuss the inspiration behind the company, the sustainability of the squares, and the upcoming launch.

This transcript has been lightly edited for the sake of clarity:

Ashlen: Do you want to start by discussing the inspiration behind launching SquarEat? 

Maria: Of course. So the idea behind SquarEat comes from one of the most common issues, people who often struggle to deal with a busy lifestyle, trying to keep up with a healthy and proper diet. So we have experienced firsthand the inefficiencies of the tradition of meal plan services. And we have seen a clear possibility of disruption by bringing a complete transformation to the sector that is growing tremendously fast, introducing a brand new concept, that is 100% natural food. The only thing is the shape, the square shape, is simply the result of the cooking process needed to achieve our goals, or ensure convenience and guarantee taste. And you know those are really practical. Our goal is to make people’s lives easier without sacrificing taste. 

Ashlen: How are the ingredients cooked to form a square?

Maria: We use all-natural ingredients. For example, our chicken square is called 95% chicken breast, and then you have a little bit of rosemary, and salt and pepper. We just use normal, natural food, and the way that we cook it is low, you know, at a low temperature. We put it on the blast cooler that is thermal shocking, and that’s the way we make the form, we get the square shape. 

Ashlen: Okay, okay, that makes sense. It sounds like it’s all-natural and simple ingredients, everything you can pronounce easily. Are there any preservatives in there?

Maria: The way that we make our product last longer, is because we vacuum seal everything individually. So there’s no oxygen in the squares, like you know, completely sealed, and you can have it for up to two weeks in your own fridge. That’s also really good because you know all the foods right now, like a normal traditional meal plan, if you’re okay I’m gonna describe it. On Monday, they deliver it to you, and you have to eat it then or by Wednesday because it’s not going to be good. Sometimes they put sauces on the top or they mix it up, and it looks awfully bad. I’m telling you this because I’ve done these meal plans before. 

I know people need to eat healthily, that’s why you’re doing a meal plan, right? You can cook but you also want to be healthy and you want your food to taste good. So we came up with this idea. If you can’t eat your food by Wednesday, like I said, right so you don’t need to worry with a square. You can eat it Friday, Saturday, etc. you just, decide you don’t want the chicken, just the vegetables, and that’s okay. You have this flexibility that no other company allows you to have.

Ashlen: And so you said, it can store up to two weeks in the fridge. Can it be put in the freezer, and thawed out and eaten at another time or do you recommend that people eat the squares fresh?

Maria: Yeah, if you want you can, but you don’t need to because they’re going to be completely fresh. If you want to put food in the freezer because you want to eat it like a month later, you know, that’s up to you but I recommend always to leave the squares in the fridge. Two weeks that’s perfect timing, but it’s gonna be fresh, you’re gonna feel it. It’s gonna be fresh, like the first day you receive it. 

Ashlen: So has it been a challenge to convince people to eat food in the form of a square?

Maria: We’ve gone through some resistance. A lot of haters. However, we got a lot of love from the ones that are excited about our idea, as the squares are highly digestible and practical. For example, they are intended for people who suffer from autism who might have a sort of aversion to food. I’ve had a lot of friends, for example, they suffer because they can’t gain weight. They can’t eat the protein they need, or the calories they need, because they can’t eat that much. They’re really skinny, or they have this problem with the food. So my friend called me the next day, like, Oh, my God, this is a solution in my life. Finally, I can get my food properly, I can get my calories, I can eat healthily, I can, you know, have a healthy body. And I mean, it’s the food that you need, that your body needs, but it comes, you know, in a more digestible, practical way. And you just eat it like, like a little snack. 

Ashlen: I’ve often heard for people who are struggling to get enough calories, a nutritionist often recommends eating protein bars, but those can be kind of gross.

Maria: Yes, those are. Those are meal replacements, not ours. Yeah, for example, I can tell you that it fills my heart with joy, knowing that people with more specific needs may have found a solution that can improve their lives, you know? We are compared to the SnowPiercer and Soylent Green movies, you know, where they do the square shape of the food. The shape of the food is often associated with this dystopian future, where people are oppressed and forced to eat disgusting things. But we’re not going to force anyone to use squares. You know, we are only proposing a solution. A tasty meal for children, adults, women, men, any age, we’re seeking a healthy lifestyle. Imagine all the children who don’t want to eat their veggies. And the moms are like, Oh my god, you know, they want to do everything for the kids. You know, to eat the vegetables, they need vegetables. You need those vegetables when you’re a kid. So imagine you’re given something like the food they wouldn’t eat doesn’t look like broccoli. You know, and you’re like, my kid is now eating broccoli.

Ashlen: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Okay, yeah, I didn’t even think about using that for children. Because you’re so right. If a kid sees something that looks like food they have an aversion to they’re not going to eat it. But you know, in a different form, it might be convincing. 

Maria: That was me. Because my mom, many times, said to me, I couldn’t eat fish. I would always say it is fish, and she lied about it to me. And now you can get them to eat right, to eat healthily and all the nutrients they need.

Ashlen: So kind of going off of, I guess, the dystopian future you mentioned, do you see what SquareEat is doing kind of as the future of food? Do you see more companies doing this? I guess, processing food in the way you do and making it more convenient and simple? Or what do you see?

Maria: First of all, I strongly believe that there is an attractive and futuristic shape that communicates exactly the soul of our project, we want to revolutionize the ready-to-eat meal plan delivery service industry by giving our customers something that they never had, that they haven’t tried before. But you know, think about portion control, already seasoned and portable, long-lasting, tasty, with all the nutrients being preserved. So I think people are gonna copy these in the future, I’m telling you, and we have to re-envision a future where people don’t necessarily have to cook, where houses are built with, you know, with different comforts. And what a full kitchen may not be necessarily a future that everyone can afford. That’s what we want, not like the movies you know. We want everyone to have a better life than they can afford.

And it has to be optional but like I’m telling you, there are so many people right now who don’t like to cook and they don’t have to. So this is the present, imagine the future, how it’s gonna be. I believe that yes, it’s is gonna be like this. Yeah, I’m not, I’m not telling you that I don’t like steak sometimes. Like a nice dinner, a nice barbecue, but you know, in my everyday routine, something healthy and you know, I want something ready. That’s fine.

Ashlen: Yeah, I feel like everyone kind of has like maybe one or even two meals a day we’re just rushing around and we don’t have time to cook or we don’t want to stop and pick up food so I definitely see room for the squares in a very busy lifestyle. But I have a personal question for you actually. How often do you eat the squares yourself?

Maria: Well, well it’s gonna be a year that I’m eating the squares because the project has been developing for more than a year of trying and cooking and discovering new flavors, new things that we can add. I am the person that taste tests and I eat like every day. I will say I eat from Monday to Saturday, for lunch, breakfast I eat the squares. I can cook something maybe myself perhaps sometimes that is not the squares again. But you know what I do, I put them in the air fryer, maybe I do some chicken nuggets with my square. For the vegetable squares, cut them up like in tiny pieces. I do like tacos, I put my meat squares in them because it’s already cooked and I just need to warm it up the way I want it and give it a little flavor, extra fuel that I wanted. So if I want to eat super healthy, okay, then just the squares. I can put them just straight in the microwave. Maybe a little bit of oil. And that’s it, you know, although my mood and my daily routine, but I’ve been eating like every day for a year.

Ashlen: Very cool. Okay, thank you for answering that. So on The Spoon, we like to cover food waste as well. And I believe I read something on your website that was just a brief statement on food waste. So how are do the squares help reduce food waste?

Maria: Okay, our product, our production chain runs on minimal waste in food and energetic resources. We are eco-sustainable from the production stages to deliveries, we don’t use any gas or any other dangerous things that can be combusted into the preparation process. And thanks to our innovative techniques, we are also able to use almost 100% of the food we need to obtain this worse. That’s something unique compared to the availability of alternatives on the market. And they there’s also a significant reduction in terms of waste, both from us and the customer point of view. Because if you can see there that vacuum sealing are squares naturally extends our product shelf life, for up to two weeks. Our sealing bags are BPA-free. And it’s food-safe, and microwavable, and you can also boil them if you want safely. They are 100% recyclable. And as a food manufacturer, we are simply asking our customers to do their part when it comes to taking care of the environment as much as we do.

Ashlen: Great. Yeah, I was thinking about other like meal prep companies and such. And I was just thinking there are things like broccoli stems and peels, even that gets tossed out. So I would imagine that in a square, you could kind of combine all of that, which is also more nutritionally dense incorporating those bits and pieces. So that’s good to know. And then you could have answered this already. But to clarify, the squares, are they a direct meal replacement? And can you replace all three meals with squares?

Maria: Oh, that’s great. It’s not an alternative food. The only difference is our preparation methods and the unique shape that it has. Think of, for example, mozzarella or pasta, yogurt. They’re from soy, milk, or grains, but that doesn’t mean that they lose their natural properties during the transformation process. They are often proof. Our squares are made of 100% natural ingredients, and they are not I meal replacement like I said sorry. And I mentioned the chicken right, and chicken squares have the addition of natural spices. And our innovative production processes allow our products to have a longer shelf life, better preservation of nutrients, and consumption flexibility. So you can definitely have three meal boxes a day. And this is exactly what SquarEat is designed for.

Ashlen: One last question: When did the company launch its first products?

Maria: So hopefully, we’re gonna be ready within a few weeks. We are expecting that because we are finishing the last details for the big opening. And we were expecting that it will be like at the end of September, hopefully, if not at the first week of October, but we’re gonna keep you updated for sure.

Ashlen: Sounds great. For some reason, I thought you had already launched but that’s great that I’m talking with you before the launch. 

Maria: Yes, yes. Perfect. We’re right now running our crowdfunding campaign. When it’s closer to the end of this campaign, we’re gonna launch if that makes sense.

SquarEat’s WeFunder campaign is still active, and has so far raised a total of $165,905.

IndieBio Cofounder Ron Shigeta Launches Virtual Accelerator

Longtime food and biotech investor and entrepreneur Ron Shigeta is rolling out a new virtual accelerator called iAccelerate.tech.

Shigeta established himself as a food tech pioneer as a cofounder of one of the very first future food and ag accelerators in IndieBio, where he helped some of today’s biggest names in future food such as Geltor and Upside Foods (then Memphis Meats) get off the ground. Since that time, Shigeta helped launch plant-based pet food company Wild Earth and more recently has been acting as an independent investor and advisor to various biotech and food tech startups.

From Shigeta’s Linkedin post announcing the move:

It’s a big day! I’m rolling out my advisory work as a virtual accelerator and I’d like to invite my network and their friends to join us!

Building at IndieBio has created a $4B+ portfolio. in the past 2 years TurtleTree, Inner Cosmos, SolarBioTech, Orbillion Bio (YC W21) , BloodQ, Inc, Juicy Marbles, Finless Foods (and some who are not out in public yet) has taken things to a new level for me and the #BioTech Startup world.

With iAccelerate, Shigeta is essentially taking his consultancy and investing work and formalizing it.

“I worked to find what I thought would be a next-generation accelerator structure,” Shigeta told me over Linkedin. “It’s a very small operation – 5-10 companies a year with lots of attention to detail.”

According to Shigeta, his new accelerator will take in 1-2% in equity for each company, a significantly smaller share than a traditional accelerator like TechStars that typically takes roughly 5% of a company.

As part of the launch of iAccelerate, Shigeta is also launching an investor syndicate.

“My latest stage in the evolution is to offer some investments on AngelList,” said Shigeta. “The Syndicate just lets investors elect to take the deals they like and offers the terms that the VC sees.”

While Shigeta has made a name for himself helping biotech-focused startups get up and running, his new accelerator shows he will look beyond the future food space. One of the first companies in the accelerator is Bite Ninja, a startup from Memphis that helps staff quick service drive-thrus with remote workers via telepresence.

“I really like to work with companies who are are just wrestling with an outrageous idea and we work together sometimes for months just to get it together to present and show MVP,” said Shigeta.

Food Tech News: Future Food Tour in Dubai and Beer-Infused Spices

Welcome to this week’s Food Tech News round-up! For this round, we’ve gathered news from CHEQ, a multi-sensory futuristic food tour, and new spices that make your food taste like beer.

If you didn’t sign up already, The Spoon’s virtual Restaurant Tech Summit will be next week on August 17, starting at 8:00 am PT. Tickets are still available on the event page.

Future Food Tour at Expo 2020 Dubai

The “Novacene” is a new era hypothesized by scientist James Lovelock where humans have made large-scale changes to our environment and robots and artificial intelligence rule the world. “The Future of Food: Epochal Banquet” has taken inspiration from this idea for its planned food exhibit at Expo 2020 Dubai.

The culinary tour is two hours long and it will specifically focus on how humans using artificial intelligence can find solutions for food waste, feed a growing population, and improve nutrition content. The immersive experience will be orchestrated by Bombas & Parr, a multi-sensory experience design studio in the UK. Based in the year 2320, the tour will feature food history from caveman to spaceman, replications of extinct foods, and 1,000 different flavors. The dining portion will include three courses paired with drinks. Edible concoctions that will be served include flavor-changing desserts, glow-in-the-dark food, rare ingredients, unique plants, and delicacies created from the technique that NASA uses to collect comet dust.

CHEQ and Miami Marlins announce a multi-year partnership

CHEQ, a restaurant tech platform, announced in a press release sent to The Spoon that it has partnered with the baseball team Miami Marlins. The mobile payment app developed by CHEQ will be implemented at the Marlin’s home stadium, LoanDepot Park. The app will allow fans at the ballpark to order food and drinks from concession stands on their mobile devices from their seats. After this 2021 season, fans will have the ability to order from their seats and then have the food delivered to certain areas of the ballpark.

Infuse your food with beer flavor through Spiceologies’s blends

A chef-operated spice company call Spiceology shared with The Spoon in an email this week that it had launched a new line of beer-infused spices to encapsulate the unique flavors that different beers can contribute to the cooking process. The company has partnered with Derek Wolf and New Belgium Brewing to develop two beer spice products lines. The Derek Wolf line includes flavors like Imperial Coffee Stout, Honey Mustard IPA, and Hickory Peach Porter. The New Belgium line incorporates some of the brewery’s popular beers like the Voodoo Ranger Hazy IPA in the Citrus Ginger seasoning, while the Sweet & Sour uses the Sour IPA. A “six-pack” of the Derek Wolf blends cost $69.99 while a “four-pack” of the New Belgium blends cost $52.

Shiok Meats Acquires Gaia Foods, Will Add Beef to Its Cultured Meat Lineup

Shiok Meats, a company best known for its developments in cultured seafood, has acquired a 90 percent steak in Gaia Foods, according to Tech in Asia, which broke the news. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Through the deal, Singapore’s Shiok Meats will add “a variety of red meat products” to its roster, since the company will be able to draw on Gaia Foods expertise in developing cultured beef. Gaia, also based in Singapore is also developing cultured pork and mutton.

Both companies are targeting markets in Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Japan, Taiwan, India, and South Korea. Shiok Meats hopes to blend cultured beef and shrimp in order to create a product that can be used in a variety of dishes, from dumplings and noodles to spring rolls.

Shiok raised an undisclosed round of bridge funding last month that will go towards building out a production facility in Singapore. The company said at the time of the funding that it plans to launch commercially in that market by 2023 at the latest. Speaking to Tech in Asia today, company CEO Sandhya Sriram said Shiok Meats is ready to “power through to commercialization.”

Singapore is currently the only country in the world that has granted regulatory approval to sell cultured meat, and to just one company, Eat Just. Gaining its own approval — in Singapore and elsewhere — will be a major next step for Shiok on its path to commercialization. 

Beyond regulatory approval, Shiok Meats and every other company developing cultivated meat has a host of challenges to contend with before consumers can buy their products en masse at restaurants and grocery stores. Those challenges span everything from making cell lines more available to finding cheaper, less ethically hazy growth mediums, and educating the average consumer about what cultured meat actually is and why we need to consider it as a protein source in the first place.  

Gaia founders Vinayaka Srinivas and Hung Nguyen will lead the Shiok Meats technical team’s development process for cultured red meat products for the company moving forward. Meanwhile, Sriram told Tech in Asia that deals like this one will become “priorities” in the near-term future for the company.

NovoNutrients Raises $4.7M to Complete Its Pilot Program for Alt-Protein Made from CO2 Inputs

NovoNutrients, a company that creates protein from CO2 inputs, today announced a $4.7 million fundraise to complete its industrial pilot program that will capture CO2 emissions from from oil, gas, and cement-related plants.

The round was led by Happiness Capital, a Hong Kong-based venture firm that has previously invested in Redefine Meat, Ynsect, and Beyond Meat. E2JDJ and Marinya Capital also joined the round, which included re-ups from SOSV’s IndieBio and the Grantham Environmental Trust. Other investors include Stanford Graduate School of Business Impact Fund, Purple Orange Ventures, and Joyance Partners.

NovoNutrients feeds the CO2 inputs it collects to naturally occurring microbes via a fermentation process. The resulting proteins have a variety of uses, including as ingredients in meat analogues as well as animal feeds. NovoNutrients says its protein can improve the amino acid profile of food products.

That nutrition element will work in NovoNutrients favor as it continues to develop its air protein and looks to scale production. At the recent IFT FIRST event, panelists suggested that while a lot of the focus in meat analogues right now is on taste and texture, the nutritional profile of proteins will become more important to consumers moving forward.  

Actually getting a product to consumers is still a ways off for NovoNutrients, however. For the time being, the company is focused on showing its fermentation tech can work at scale. The company will co-locate its bioreactors (aka fermentation tanks) at industrial sites that produce high levels of greenhouse gases. 

The pilot project is focused on a 1,000-liter bioreactor. NovoNutrients says it will stand up a 20,000-liter industrial demo in the near future. 

NovoNutrients is one of a few companies now developing novel protein from CO2, hydrogen, and other air inputs. Others include Air Protein, Solar Foods, and Deep Branch. Last year, the European Space Agency started working with Solar Foods to develop the technology for use in space to feed astronauts.

NovoNutrients said today that its pilot project will allow the company to start raising Series A funding later this year.  

Forget Plants. Alt-Meat Needs More Mycoprotein

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Of the three pillars of alternative protein, plant-based is getting the most mainstream attention and cultivated meat is the currernt darling of VC investors. But fermentation may be the most practical in terms of both cost and scalability, and one area of that segment turning heads of late is mycoprotein. 

From an affordability and nutritional point of view, mycoprotein has a boatload of advantages over other forms of alternative protein — a point underscored this week when The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht profiled a company called Kernel Mycofoods. In their own words, the folks behind the Buenos Aires, Argentina-based company are currently on a mission to “make a product that [is] comparable without a price that will exclude the emerging markets.”

But Kernel isn’t the only company hoping to bring mycoprotein to the forefront, which makes now a good time to take a closer look into what this segment of fermentation is and why it matters to alternative protein.

Mycoprotein is a single-cell protein made from a naturally occurring filamentous fungus called fusarium venenatum. To get mycoprotein, fungi spores are fermented alongside glucose in fermentation tanks in a process similar to that of brewing beer. The entire operation produces a pasty, doughy texture that resembles a chicken breast. 

Up to now, the most well-known application of mycoprotein is as the main ingredient of Quorn’s meat analogues. But as noted above, several other companies are now getting recognition for their use of mycoprotein as an alternative to traditional meat. That list includes Kernel Mycofoods as well as Better Meat Co., which opened its production facility last month, and food giant Unilever. The latter is producing a mycoprotein called Abunda through a partnership with Scottish company Enough. 

Experts say mycoprotein is high in fiber, low in sodium, has an inherently meaty texture, and is rich in amino acids. Kernel, for example, says its mycoprotein has a higher protein digestibility-corrected amino acid score than beef, soy, or wheat gluten.

Mycoprotein falls into the “biomass fermentation” category, as opposed to traditional or precision fermentation (though the lines between all three can be blurred). Because of this, its biggest advantage compared to other forms of alt-protein is its ability to scale at a lower price point. The Good Food Institute noted in its 2020 State of the Industry report on fermentation that biomass fermentation offers “well-established examples of scalability and cost reduction suitable for alternative protein applications.” 

Mycoprotein specifically has a number of other advantages. 

Versatility is a big one. Mycoprotein can be used on its own, as Quorn does with it, or it can be blended with traditional meat to enhance the latter’s flavor and nutritional profile. For example, it could reduce the amount of cholesterol found in a traditional burger patty.

Mycoprotein also already has an established track record, having been approved for use in food products in the early 1980s. That point alone suggests companies won’t face the same types of regulatory hurdles they do with, say, cultured meat. 

And as an alternative to plant-based meat analogues like those of Beyond and Impossible, mycoprotein is a potentially much more eco-friendly operation since it doesn’t require land to grow plants or significant amounts of downstream processing to get the meaty texture consumers want.

Of all these things, though, nutrition might just be the main driver behind mycoprotein. Citing panelists at the recent IFT FIRST event, Food Navigator recently reported that “consumers increasingly want products that are nutritionally comparable to or better for them than animal protein – something the current industry is not fully delivering.” The “current industry” in this case are plant-based analogues from the likes of Beyond and Impossible, companies that talk at length about elements like texture and mouthfeel but very little about their products nutritional profiles. Nutrition will, according to IFT FIRST panelists, be the “disrupting” factor in the near term when it comes to alternative proteins.

All of those factors mean mycoprotein could well become the breakout star of the alt-protein sector by the end of the year.

More Headlines

Plant-Based Cheese Company Nobell Foods Raises $75M – The company will use the new funds to commercialize its first plant-based cheese products, including mozzarella, which the company makes from soybeans that are genetically edited to produce casein. 

Bezos-Backed NotCo Raises $235M for Plant-Based Alternatives – This new capital will allow NotCo to expand into new product categories in North America and scale its proprietary A.I. platform. 

Redefine Meat Launches 5 “New Meat” Plant-Based Proteins in Israel – Plant-based meat company Redefine Meat announced five new products are now available at select Israeli restaurants and hotels.