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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Future Food

Planeteer Is Cutting Down on Plastic Waste with Cutlery You Can Eat

We all know that single-use plastics — like disposable cutlery, straws, and cups — often end up hanging out in landfills and clogging up the oceans. Some companies opt for biodegradable options, but those can also take a long time to break down.

Planeteer LLC is trying to solve the problem of single-use cutlery waste by making single-use spoons that are meant not to be thrown away or composted, but eaten. The company will be pitching live onstage at the Smart Kitchen Summit {SKS} for our first ever Future Food competition this October! Read a short Q&A with co-founder Dinesh Tadepalli below and grab your tickets to see (and taste) his innovative cutlery for yourself.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity.

First thing’s first: give us your 15-second elevator pitch.
Did you eat your spoon today? It’s time to ditch the single-use disposable plastic — which, though only used for a few minutes of comfort, hurts nature for hundreds of years. Let us be more creative and innovative in helping the planet be a better place for future generations by eating your spoon! Our edible cutlery revolution starts with spoons that are all-natural, vegan, protein-rich and compost in just days! They come in two shapes and fun flavors, and will stay firm up to 25 minutes in a hot soup and 50 minutes in a cold dessert.

What inspired you to start your company?
We owe our future generations the same planet we enjoy. Our mission started after our kids were born. We felt responsible not just to secure their education but also to provide them clean oceans and environment. This started our path to exploring and innovating the way to make edible cutlery. Every spoon eaten is one less plastic one in the ocean!

What’s the most challenging part of getting a food startup off the ground?
Being a new concept and more expensive than a plastic spoon, our most challenging part is convincing customers that they can eat the spoon, literally! Our flavors and win-win pricing strategy helped all the sections of the business from manufacturing to the end customer. Now, we have about 20 shops selling these spoons for a minimal add-on cost, where the customer can leave the shop with gratitude and empowerment that they have not wasted another plastic spoon today.

How will your company change the day-to-day life of consumers and the food space as a whole?
We strive to replace all the single-use plastic spoons with a spoon you can eat. Edible Coffee stirrers are next. Take-out food is a huge market in US, so just imagine how many plastic spoons can be saved from oceans and landfills if we make a conscious switch.

A few minutes of eating ice cream with a plastic spoon leaves 500 years of impact on the planet. Our only goal is to help customers provide better alternatives to single-use plastic.

Get your tickets to SKS 2019 now to meet all the Future Food companies and give their products a taste!

Tastewise Raises $5M, Releases New Report on the Importance of Functional Foods

Tastewise, a startup that uses data and AI to help CPG companies gain deeper insights into food trends, announced today it has raised a $5 million Series A round led by food tech investment firm PeakBridge. The round brings Tastewise’s total funding to $6.5 million.

The Tastewise platform, which launched in February of this year, analyzes over 1 billion food photos shared each month, along with a database of U.S. restaurant menus that numbers over 180,000 at this point. The goal of the platform is to provide CPGs and other food companies with granular information about not just what foods are trending but why they’re popular. Companies working with Tastewise can use this data to get a faster, more accurate view of what consumers are looking for with their food, and to create the kinds of products they’ll actually buy.

Over the phone this week, Tastewise CEO Alon Chen used sauerkraut as an example of how the Tastewise platform operates. Right now, according to him, it’s a popular food, but the trend is less about raw cabbage and more about the process behind it, which is fermentation. Of late, fermentation’s become a popular item on consumers’ food lists in part because of its associations with good digestive health as well as brain health. Food companies analyzing data via the Tastewise platform can see such data and consider how they might implement fermentation into their offerings.

“If you want to be ahead of the game and you want to make sure you’re not just hopping on a fad, you need to understand these deeper trends,” says Chen.

Plant-based meat is another hot topic he mentions. Right now, it’s hard to dispute the popularity of plant-based alternatives to meat, beef in particular. But rather than simply follow the lead set by companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, CPGs should instead analyze the data around these trends to they can ask 1) Why people eat meat in the first place and 2) What are their motivations for wanting plant-based alternatives. As Chen says, food companies need to ask, “Is my protein going to actually help these causes?”

Tastewise has bundled these topics and more into its latest new report, also released today and based on findings from Tastewise data, called “Putting Food to Work in the Age of Wellness.” The report looks at the global functional foods market, projected to reach 275 billion by 2025, and examines “a category of ingredients, meals, and preparations that serve a particular function and purpose beyond mere sustenance.” In the context of the report, functional foods include those ingredients and meals that promote things like sleep, weight loss, stress relief, brain health, gut health, and focus, to name a few of the categories mentioned.

Meanwhile, Chen says the new funds will go towards expanding and improving Tastewise’s computer vision analysis in order to further train its AI to “understand the depth of the consumer motivation” behind certain food and ingredient choices.

There is some competition for Tastewise in this sector, from players like Analytical Flavor Systems and Spoonshot, who use AI to help CPGs predict food trends and consumer behaviors. However, the Tastewise platform differentiates itself somewhat by focusing more on analysis of behavior than flavor, acting almost as a fast-tracked version of market research that relies on real-time data rather than focus groups and surveys.

“We have a responsibility to better understand consumers,” says Chen, adding that the AI components in a platform like Tastewise are “critical to moving faster” in terms of helping companies decide which areas of food to focus on and products to develop. Now we’ll see if this new funding helps Tastewise move fast enough to edge out the competition.

Nestlé’s Sweet Earth Foods to Launch Plant-Based Awesome Burger in US this October

Today Sweet Earth Foods, a U.S.-based vegetarian brand owned by Nestlé, announced it would begin selling its plant-based Awesome burgers and ground meat in retail on October 1.

The burgers will launch at a variety of retailers across the country, including Safeway, Fred Meyer, and more. I connected over the phone with Brian and Kelly Swette, the co-founders of Sweet Earth Foods, who told me that pricing will vary at each location but would be competitive with other plant-based burgers in retail: likely around $5.99 for two quarter pounders.

Nestlé launched its cook-from-raw vegan Incredible burger in Europe this April. Unlike the Incredible burger, which is soy-based, the Awesome burger is made from yellow pea protein. According the Swettes, relying on yellow pea protein gives their burger a higher nutrient density than most of their competitors: 26 grams of protein and 6 grams of fiber per 4-ounce burger patty, to be exact. They may win the title of the most protein per plant-based burger, but the margin is slim. For context, Lightlife and Beyond’s quarter-pound burgers both have 20 grams of protein.

Photo: Hardy Wilson

The Swettes told me they also have foodservice partners in the works, though they wouldn’t disclose who. Could it be that the Awesome Burger is headed to McDonald’s? After all, Nestlé’s Incredible burger is already on McDonald’s menus in Germany and Israel.

True, Micky D’s has been pretty vocal that it’s not ready to embrace faux meat on its menus yet, at least in the U.S. But if the Incredible Burger proves to be driving significant sales for McDonalds’ overseas, they could change their mind in the U.S. And since their competitors, such as Burger King and Carl’s Jr., and are already embracing Impossible and Beyond, respectively, the Awesome burger could be a logical choice — provided it actually tastes good.

The cook-from-fresh plant-based burger category is becoming more and more crowded by the day, as everyone from startups to grocery brands to Big Food debut their own take on a meatless burger. Within the past month alone, Impossible Foods, Kroger, and Hormel have all made an entrance into the refrigerated grocery aisle. But the Swette’s aren’t sweating it (sorry). “We think it’s an incredibly positive thing that the plant-based burger space is so dynamic,” Kelly Swette told me.

The Swettes believe that they can differentiate themselves from the competition because of the beefy taste and nutritional density of their burger. But I think the bigger advantage is their parent company, Nestlé. After all, being owned by one of the largest CPG companies in the world has its perks. Sweet Earth is able to take advantage of Nestlé’s massive R&D and manufacturing resources to bring their product to market quickly and on a large scale. They’ll also presumably be able to get into more grocery shelves by taking advantage of Nestlé’s preexisting retail partners. “It’s true — Nestlé will help give us an edge,” Brian Swette told me.

We’ll have to see if that edge is enough to help Sweet Earth edge out the other plant-based meat competition.

The Meatless Farm Gets Investment from UK’s Channel 4, Trades Equity for Air Time

Yesterday news broke that British broadcaster Channel 4 invested an undisclosed seven-figure sum in The Meatless Farm Co, a plant-based meat company based in Leeds, UK that makes vegan burgers, ground “beef,” and sausages. Under the terms of the deal, Meatless Farm will also give the broadcaster equity in exchange for regional TV advertising on both Channel 4 and its streaming services.

Well we haven’t seen this before. Plenty of VC firms and Big Food companies have invested in alt-meat, but a television broadcaster?

It makes sense, though. As the plant-based meat section in retail gets more crowded, brands have to think up new ways to differentiate themselves from the masses. TV advertising is a great way for Meatless Farm to quickly expose a wider number of consumers to its brand name, which will hopefully translate to more sales in the grocery store.

From Channel 4’s perspective, there are a few benefits to partnering with Meatless Farm. One, they get to invest in the white-hot alternative meat space, which, thanks chiefly to Beyond Meat’s eye-catching IPO last year, is drawing lots of capital.

By showing an ad for plant-based meat, it’s also a way for Channel 4 to frame itself as hip to the trends to younger audiences — especially Gen Z and millennials — which are increasingly embracing flexitarian lifestyles. Vinay Solanki, Head of Commercial Growth Fund at Channel 4, said in a blog post on Meatless Farm’s website: “The Meatless Farm Co’s innovation and sustainability credentials are inspiring, and we hope that through advertising across our channel portfolio and reaching our valuable core 16-34 audience, we’ll help support their impact and growth journey.”

This deal just applies to UK air time, but Meatless Farms isn’t siloed in Britain. Founded in 2016, Meatless Farms made headlines this summer when it jumped across the pond and onto retail shelves at U.S. Whole Foods stores. The deal was only supposed to last for six months, and it hasn’t been revealed if the company will continue to sell its wares in the U.S. after December. Maybe we’ll see ads for the company’s meatless mince — er, ground “meat” — popping up on local TV states stateside sometime soon, too.

I Tried the New Impossible Burger from the Grocery Store, Here’s How it Tasted

I was once a Vegetarian. For 11 years I did not eat meat or meat products of any kind except the occasional sushi. Being a big fan of burgers and fries and steaks, the only thing I missed being a vegetarian was beef.

Back then, there were no reasonable substitution attempts. A mashed yellow disc was called a veggie or garden burger. Sometimes they were made from beans or some other dry grain – and that’s how they behaved on the grill and tasted on the bun: Dry.

Impossible Foods released its new burger product in stores today, but I dipped in to Gelson’s last night to see if by chance they had put it out already. Turns out the early bird gets the plant-based worm because they had it in stock and I bought it.

It was in the Natural-Organic-Vegan section of the Hollywood Hills Gelson’s, a perfect place for “Burger Made From Plants.” It was frozen, but there were plenty still in stock. A 12 oz. package cost $8.99, has 3 servings per package, with 240 calories, 19g of protein and 14g of fat per serving. For comparison, the Beyond Meat ground costs around $10 for a 16oz package, has 4 servings per package, with 250 calories, 20g of protein and 18g of fat per serving.

I let the meat thaw over night in the fridge and got up this morning to make breakfast burger (that’s a regular hamburger eaten at 7 a.m. with coffee).

I made the patties and noticed that the texture was meat-like and some red juices to emulate a “bleeding” burger. I like my burgers medium rare and would have to experiment a bit to get it like that with Impossible burger. Though the cooking time was about the same as regular beef, it came out a little more done than I had wanted.

How’d it taste? Well, like a burger. And as a former-vegetarian-who-missed-cheeseburgers, I mean that as a compliment. It had a nice umami flavor and the texture when eaten was like beef. But that’s what it’s supposed to be. I dare say it would fool a meat eater. I would have been fooled by it.

Right now, you can only get the Impossible Burger from Gelson’s in Southern California. But given how quickly the Impossible Whopper at Burger King expanded nationwide, and how good this tastes, I can imagine that the store bought Impossible Burger will rapidly expand across California and the country as well. Assuming they don’t have another production shortage.

I can recommend buying the Impossible Burger, especially if you’re worried about the ethical and environmental issues surrounding eating meat. With Impossible and Beyond Meat now readily available at stores, being a vegetarian for 11 years (or longer) would be a lot easier.

I Tried the JUST Egg Frittata at Le Pain Quotidien. It’s Another Win for Plant-Based Foods.

Quick service and fast food restaurants, from Burger King to Dunkin’, are clamoring to add plant-based options to their menus. You can now count Le Pain Quotidien among them, which teamed up with JUST for a chicken egg-free frittata that is now available at U.S. locations as of Wednesday.

The “Plant-Based ‘Egg’ Frittata” is made of the mung-bean derived egg substitute, roasted butternut squash, broccoli, caramelized onions and almond milk. Le Pain Quotidien feels so strongly about the plant-based version that it will replace its previous frittata.

I had the chance to try the JUST Egg frittata a week before it launched, and it’s clear why Le Pain put it on the menu: it’s delicious, and if I wasn’t told it was egg free, I wouldn’t have known. The way my fork slid into it felt natural, and nothing about the look and texture of the frittata would tell you that it was made with an egg substitute. It’s amazing how mundane, and I mean that in a good way, plant-based foods have become.

Many of other people who got a preview, which included nutritionists and influencers, came away with the same impression.

JUST says in a press release that the liquid version of its egg “has nearly as much protein as conventional chicken eggs, is free of cholesterol, saturated fat and artificial flavoring and its ingredients require considerably less water and emit fewer carbon emissions than chicken eggs.”

The company, which is also working on cultivated meat, has seen other restaurant partnerships hatch: restaurant chain Silver Diner and burger chain Bareburger (where you can also order an Impossible or Beyond Burger) will include JUST Egg on their menus. The company also announced that the liquid egg replacement will be available at Walmart and Kroger stores.

It’s been an impressive run for a product that only launched last year.

Future Food: What’s Going on with Grandmas? Memphis Meat and Fake-un!

This is the web version of our weekly Future Food newsletter. Subscribe to get the most important news about alternate and plant-based foods directly in your inbox!

Hey everyone, Chris here. I’m covering alternative proteins as the alternate Catherine, while she goes all Northern Exposure in Alaska.

I realize that it’s mostly the olds who will get that TV show reference, but that’s actually a good way to start off this newsletter because I want to talk about grandmas. Specifically whether grandmothers are some kind of bellwether for the alternate food market.

Two things happened in the past week that got me thinking about this. First, my own mother, who is herself a grandma (hi, mom!), is in town visiting, and over dinner the other night she told me how much she liked Oatly’s non-dairy ice cream. This stood out because my mother does not typically eat ice cream, let alone ice cream made from oats.

To be fair, my mother is biased. She reads The Spoon regularly because her son works there, and she got the Oatly ice cream recommendation from Catherine in this very newsletter. So she’s probably more hip to the alternative food space than most.

But then on Monday this week, Impossible Foods announced an event called Impossible Grandma’s House. It’s a free event being held at the Century City mall in LA tomorrow to celebrate the launch of Impossible’s ground product at retail. “Come celebrate (and taste) Impossible Foods’ launch in grocery stores! Grandmas unite under one roof to #CookImpossible and share their culinary wisdom,” the invite reads.

Why is a company that counts celebrities like Jay-Z, Katy Perry and Serena Williams among its investors going out to the retail market with grandmas? In LA, no less, and at a mall that is literally across the street from the Creative Artist Agency, one of the most influential talent agencies in the world.

Catherine had a theory, when she wrote:

I think I get what Impossible is going for here. The company is trying to show that its plant-based meat is so versatile and delicious that even traditionalists can easily use it in their favorite family recipes. However, I think the strategy rings untrue, especially since the launch event is at a trendy, glitzy shopping mall and not, say, a community restaurant or local market.

I don’t know if one cancels the other out necessarily. I mean, grandmas like a little glitz now and then, too. But I think there is something to the idea that of getting granny on board the plant-based food wagon. Of anyone’s family, grandparents have been around the longest, and at the risk of painting with too broad a brush, they are the most traditional. If you can get someone who has probably eaten meat and dairy for the better part of six or seven decades to give it up for Impossible or Oatly, then getting the whippersnappers to follow suit should be a lot easier.

Which reminds me — is it really that hard for you to call your grandmother every once in a while?

Memphis Meats’ cultured meatball

See Future Food firsthand at SKS next month
Our flagship Smart Kitchen Summit show is mere weeks away. We are hard at work making it the best show of all time, and part of that involves lining up a bunch of great speakers in the alternative meat space. (Get your tickets now! The show always sells out.)

One of those speakers will be David Kay, Senior Manager of Communications and Operations at Memphis Meats. Memphis is working on lab-grown, or cultured meat and made the world’s first cell-based meatball. We posted a Q&A with Kay this week to give you a preview of what he’ll be talking about. And to give you a sneak peak of that sneak peek, here’s an excerpt from that post:

When will we actually be able to eat cell-based meat? When do you guess it will first enter the market and how long will it take before it’s available in your average supermarket?

While we are working as fast as we can to bring a product to market, we are also cognizant that our number one priority as a food company – and as a nascent industry – must be ensuring product safety and consumer trust. Key to this is establishing a sensible regulatory framework. We are committed to providing consumers with Memphis meat through appropriate regulatory channels. While other innovative industries might follow the “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley ethos, we firmly believe that our product release must be done in a responsible and transparent manner.

You should read the full Q&A for more insight on why consumers will love cultured meat, or even better, come to SKS and see Kay speak in person!

Hooray’s plant-based bacon

Hooray for plant-based bacon!
Finally, let’s end my first guest appearance on Future Food with something everyone generally loves — bacon. Or in this case, fake-un.

Hooray Foods is makin’ bacon out of plants, and while it’s just a side hustle for its sole employee right now, bacon is like the holy grail of plant-based meats. Catherine tried it and reported that it was “in the ballpark” of bacon and would pair well on top of an Impossible or Beyond Burger.

I think the bigger point is that with sales of plant-based meat taking off, we’ll start to see more of this very narrow specialization among startups. Burgers and ground beef are already locked up by Impossible and Beyond, but there’s opportunity for startups now who can recreate a killer bacon, or pork chop or chorizo.

Thanks for listening. Catherine will be back next week with pop culture references more suited to millennial tastes (I assume they are all from Tik Tok).

Apeel to Launch Its Longer-Lasting Produce in Kroger Stores Across the U.S.

Apeel Sciences, whose plant-based coatings extend the shelf life of produce, announced today it has partnered with Kroger to make its longer-lasting avocados available at over 1,100 of the grocery retailer’s stores in the U.S.

This widespread launch follows a pilot the two companies launched in 2018 in select stores around the Midwest.

Apeel was born out of a concern over the amount of food in the country that gets wasted every year due to food spoilage. Roughly 40 percent of food waste happens in the home, as anyone whose ever bought an avocado and had it go bad almost immediately knows.

To fight this, Apeel makes a plant-based powder food producers can mix with water to and coat over produce items before they get shipped out for distribution and retail. That coating creates a barrier that retains the water in side the produce and regulates how fast oxygen gets into the plant. Cloaked in this powder, produce stays fresher longer and requires less refrigeration. According to the company’s website, this has led to a more than 50 percent decrease in food waste. Bonus: the produce doesn’t have to be coated in the usual wax covering, either.

Apeel avocados are already available in the European market through a partnership with Belgium-based importer Nature’s Pride. And this past August, Apeel raised a $70 million Series C round.

The company is also using its partnership with Kroger to release two new produce items: limes and asparagus. According to the press release, those will be available at stores in Kroger’s hometown of Cincinnati this fall.

Apeel’s expansion comes at a time when more companies fighting food waste in the home are starting to emerge. What was only a few months ago a very small category in the food waste landscape now has players like Hazel Technologies, whose biodegradable packaging inserts extend the life of produce, Stix Fresh, who says it can double your avocado’s shelf life with a sticker, and Cambridge Crops, who also makes a protective layer for produce. We’ll undoubtedly be seeing many more companies come to market as consumers start to wake up to the reality that the food waste battle has to be fought first and foremost at home.

Looks Like L.A. is Where Impossible Foods will Launch in Retail

If you bet that Impossible Foods would be doing its retail launch in L.A., congratulations! You’re probably right.

The Spoon came across a Facebook post from Impossible Foods today advertising an event called Impossible Grandma’s House. The free event will be held on Friday September 20 from 11am-6pm at the Cabana at Westfield Century City in Los Angeles. “Come celebrate (and taste) Impossible Foods’ launch in grocery stores! Grandmas unite under one roof to #CookImpossible and share their culinary wisdom,” reads the invite.

This event also gives us a probable candidate for first grocery store to sell Impossible: Gelson’s is located in the same Westfield Century City complex as the Grandma event.

Details are pretty scant about the event itself. Is it just a PR event with free Impossible Foods grub? Will people migrate over to Gelson’s for the first Impossible retail sale? Are grandmas actually involved?

It’s the grandma bit that trips me up. Why is Impossible, a startup that’s all about leveraging technology to reinvent meat with plants, whose bright branding and hashtag-heavy PR strategy is clearly geared towards the millennial crowd, focusing so heavily on grandmas for their retail launch?

I think I get what Impossible is going for here. The company is trying to show that its plant-based meat is so versatile and delicious that even traditionalists can easily use it in their favorite family recipes. However, I think the strategy rings untrue, especially since the launch event is at a trendy, glitzy shopping mall and not, say, a community restaurant or local market.

As I pointed out in the latest issue of Future Food, it doesn’t really matter where Impossible Foods decides to do its retail launch. Eventually it’ll probably be as ubiquitous on grocery shelves as Beyond Meat — provided Impossible doesn’t come up against anything drastic like a food safety scare or another production shortage.

The bigger questions will be what products Impossible decides to roll out in retail in order to compete with competitors Beyond Meat and bigger players like Hormel, Kellogg, and, as of just two days ago, Trader Joe’s — and how they stack up, taste-wise. Impossible may have built up a recognizable brand through its many restaurant partnerships, especially fast-food ones like Burger King, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to success in the crowded retail aisle.

We’ll be doing deep dives into the Impossible retail launch and rollout on our Future Food newsletter! Make sure to subscribe.

Lumen Raises $8.5M, Says it Has Sold 11,000 Breathalyzers for Metabolic Hacking

Lumen, which gives you personalized diet recommendation based on your breath, announced today that it has raised $8.5 million in funding. The news was first reported by CTech, which writes that the new money was led by Hong Kong-listed H&H company and Unorthodox Ventures, with Disruptive Venture Capital and Gigi Levy participating. This brings the total amount raised by Lumen to $15.5 million.

Lumen launched its handheld breathalyzer on Indiegogo a little more than a year ago. At the time, we described it like this:

The eponymous Lumen device looks (sadly) like a vape pen. Blow into it and the device measures the CO2 of your exhale to see if you are burning carbs or body fat. According to the promotional video, you can breathe into Lumen in the morning to get a personalized meal plan for the day, adjust that meal plan with breath check-ins throughout the day, and check your breath before a workout to see if you need to carb up for additional energy.

The device was a crowdfunding hit, selling roughly 11,000 devices and generating $2.3 million in sales, according to CTech.

We checked in with Lumen cofounder Dror Ceder at CES earlier this year and learned that in addition to meal planning, the company is also working on ways integrate food ordering (meals and groceries) based on your results.

The Spoon look at Lumen, a handheld breath detector for measuring metabolism

It’s not a lot of hot air to say that several different companies are looking at your breath to help you hack your metabolism. The Keyto is another crowdfunded device uses your breath to measure acetone in your breath to determine if your body is in the fat-burning state of ketosis.

Having tried the Keyto, I’m curious to test out the Lumen as it seems to offer a broader application of useful advice. If it works as promised, I’d love to know if I’ve carbed up enough before a workout, and also get ongoing meal recommendations throughout the day based on my metabolic rate.

Lumens are available now for $249 directly through the company but the devices aren’t shipping until January, so I’ll have to hold my breath a little bit longer.

Hooray Foods is Trying to Crack The Holy Grail of Plant-Based Meats: Bacon

For those trying to cut down on meat in their diets, bacon is often one of the last to go. It’s just too dang delicious and there aren’t any good substitutes that mimic its fatty, smoky flavor and crisp-chewy texture.

However, that might change soon. Hooray Foods is a new startup (seriously, they just began operations in February of this year) trying to crack the as-yet unsolved code of how to create plant-based bacon. I got to speak with founder and sole employee Sri Artham last week at the Good Food Conference in San Francisco, and also try out his “fake”-un for myself.

Artham, who previously founded Ganaz, an app which helps combat labor shortages on farms, decided to focus on bacon because he thought it would have the biggest impact. “If you disrupt the pork belly market, you can disrupt the entire meat industry,” he told me. Since he doesn’t have a food science background, he just headed straight to the kitchen and started experimenting. “There was a lot of naiveté and trial and error,” he said. But after a billion failed experiments, he had his first product.

Hooray is currently more of a side hustle — Artham and makes all the “bacon” himself in just 4 hours per week — but he’s seeking funding and has plans to bring on another full-time staff person starting soon. Hooray Foods already has its bacon on the menus of two restaurants, both in San Francisco, and Artham plans to expand to more foodservice partners before eventually launching in retail. He didn’t disclose pricing details but said his product would soon be on par with premium bacon, since his product is made with readily-available ingredients and simple production methods. (Unlike other meat substitutes, it doesn’t require extrusion or custom machinery.)

A “B”LT featuring Hooray’s plant-based bacon.

Hooray Foods is smart to plant its flag in the alternative bacon space, which doesn’t have a lot of competition right now. But I doubt the space will be so open for long, though. Hooray is super small and will take a while to scale up, assuming it gets funding. In that time, Big Food companies such as Tyson, Kellogg and Kroger, which are already devoting their massive R&D teams, manufacturing facilities, and retail relationships to developing and selling their own meat alternatives, could start making a plant-based bacon of their own.

Hooray Foods will also likely face competition from smaller startups. During the Good Food Conference, Ecovative announced Atlast Foods, their spinoff company which makes scaffolding for meat alternatives out of mycelium (mushroom) roots. Their example product? Bacon.

I got to try a piece of Hooray’s bacon and thought it was in the ballpark of the real thing. It had a nice savory, fatty taste and the texture was chewy. That would work for people who like their bacon on the lightly-cooked side, but if you like it borderline burnt, like me, it wasn’t quite there, even after a long cook time. It also didn’t quite nail bacon’s smoky flavor. But if you put it on top of, say, an Impossible Burger or crumbled it on top of a plant-based taco, it would definitely approximate the bacon experience.

People love their bacon, so there’s certainly room for a couple players to take a swing at making alt-bacon. But if Hooray wants to cement its first-mover advantage, they’ll have to get their bacon on more plates — and quickly.

Future Food: Impossible’s Retail Launch, Is 3D Printing the Future of Plant-Based Meat?

This is the web version of our weekly Future Food newsletter. Be sure to subscribe here so you don’t miss a beat!

Ladies and gentlemen, mark your calendars. At the time of writing, Impossible Foods is heading into retail in 7 days, 23 hours, 43 minutes and 16 seconds. 15 seconds. 14 seconds.

Obviously we’re excited. We’ve been big fans of Impossible’s “bleeding” burgers for a while now and have been anticipating the retail launch ever since the company first teased the news back in November of last year.

Now, thanks to a tweet from Impossible Foods earlier this week, we know a little more about what to expect.

  1. We know their first product will be a 12-ounce ground beef-like product, similar to Beyond Beef.
  2. We know it will debut in a city that “smells like palm trees.”

My first question is, what do palm trees smell like?? My second question is, is the tweet referring to Miami or LA? My money is on LA because of its trend-setting cred and abundance of celebrities, but my colleague Chris Albrecht is placing his bet on Miami because of its reputation as a center for testing out retail innovation.

Really though, it doesn’t matter where Impossible first launches in retail. Unless there’s some sort of catastrophe it’ll eventually roll out in grocery stores around the country. What’s more interesting is what product Impossible has chosen to launch with: a 12-ounce package of ground plant-based meat.

Honestly, I think this move makes a lot of sense. By launching with fresh ground “meat,” Impossible has to jostle with far fewer competitors to stand out in the refrigerated grocery aisle, which is becoming crowded with plant-based burgers. As of now its only really going up against Beyond Beef (which, admittedly, is pretty delicious) and Hormel, who just debuted a vegan ground meat product last week.

Starting with a ground product is also an opportunity for Impossible to show off its versatility. Thus far, the vast majority of Impossible’s restaurant partners have served the alterna-meat in burger form (the notable exceptions being Qdoba and Little Ceasars). This first product is Impossible’s way of saying “Don’t pigeonhole us!”

The flip side of that strategy is that as of now, the vast majority of consumers associate Impossible with burgers. They might not think to look for a ground Impossible product in retail, or they might not want to do the work of forming the patties themselves.

Then again, I doubt they’ll have to wait too long before Impossible follows up with a pre-formed burger product. Though it’ll certainly be longer than 7 days, 23 hours, 42 minutes and 49 seconds.

Photo: Novameat

3D printing money

When I first heard about startups 3D printing plant-based meat, I thought it was a cool, futuristic-sounding technology that would likely never be affordable or practical enough to actually scale up.

It seems I might have been a little too hasty. In the past week two companies which 3D print meat alternatives have snagged funding: first Novameat announced an undisclosed amount of funding at the Good Food Conference last week, then Redefine Meat followed up yesterday when news broke that it had raised a $6 million seed round.

The two startups have a similar go-to-market strategy. Both companies are planning to sell/rent their machine and corresponding plant protein pods to third parties — Novameat to high-end restaurants and Redefine Meat to large meat companies looking to diversify their offerings. And they’re both based in Europe! Novameat in Spain and Redefine Meat in Israel.

Clearly there’s something to this whole 3D printing plant-based meat thing — or at least investors think so.

(photo: Chris Albrecht).

Much ado about processed food

This week WIRED writer Matt Simon published a fascinating dive into why people are making such a fuss about the processing it takes to make plant-based meats.

In the piece he notes that yes, buzzed-about plant-based products like Impossible and Beyond are highly processed. But so are a lot of other staple things we eat, like yogurt, beer and bread.

I think you can also flip the processing question on its head. Plant-based meats are alternatives to meat sourced from animals. And isn’t animal meat one of the most processed foods of all? Animals themselves process plants into muscle, then are butchered to become hamburgers, steaks, or what have you. Comparatively, growing some heme through genetically engineered yeast or pushing pea protein through an extruder to mimic the texture of chicken seems relatively low-key.

In short, processing does not always equal bad. Especially when the choice is between a plant-based burger and industrially farmed meat.

Photo: JUST

Protein ’round the web

That’s it from me! I’ll be off next week exploring the Alaskan wilderness so one of my lovely Spoon colleagues will be taking the Future Food reigns in my stead.

Eat well,
Catherine