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Future Food

July 28, 2021

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. 

 

 

July 24, 2021

Food Tech News: Online Food Bank, Upcycled Cacao Fruit Bites, and $10M for Gluten-Free Snack Brand

If you feel like you’ve fallen behind in the fast-paced world of food tech, you’ve come to the right place. In this week’s Food Tech News roundup, we have stories on Feeding America’s new online platform, Costco’s partnership with Uber, a snack brand’s $10 million funding round, and one of the first companies to receive the Upcycled Food Certification.

Food bank launches online grocery ordering for those facing food insecurity

Feeding America is one of the largest food banks in the country, and this week the non-profit began offering online ordering. Called Order Ahead, food is ordered through a Feeding America network food bank or partner food on a smartphone, tablet, or computer. The order can then be picked up at schools, libraries, or a drive-thru distribution center. Certain markets will also be offering home delivery. Those requiring food assistance unfortunately might feel embarrassed or stigmatized, so offering an online platform allows for the option of being more discreet.

CaPao is one of the first companies to receive the Upcycled Food Certification

CaPao has created a snack product that is made from upcycled cacao fruit. The brand was developed in Mondelēz International’s SnackFuture innovation and venture hub, and this week announced that it is one of the first companies to receive the recently launch Upcycled Food Certification. After cacao beans have been extracted from the cacao pod, there is about 70 percent of the pod remaining goes to waste, and this remaining fruit is used in the snack product. CaPao sources this potential food waste from Cabosse Naturals, a food and beverage company that uses cacao pods to make various ingredients. Using the upcycled cacao fruit, CaPao produces three flavors of snack bites: mango cashew coconut, golden berry apricot chia, and cherry almond cocoa. The products are available for purchase on the company’s website and retailers in Southern California.

Photo by Henry & Co. on Unsplash

Costco partners with Uber to trial same-day delivery

Costco is currently trialing same-day grocery delivery with Uber at 25 Texas locations in Dallas, Houston, and Austin. Uber has announced that its drivers will be able to deliver groceries in minutes to a few hours. To use the service trial in Texas, customers must order at least $35 worth of Costco groceries and products. Costo currently also works with Instacart to offer same-day delivery.

Gluten-free snack maker raises $10 million

Quinn produces various gluten-free snacks, and this week the company secured $10 million in its Series B funding round. NewRoad Capital Partners led the round, and Echo Capital, Boulder Food Group, and Sunil Thakor also participated. The capital will be used for product innovation, company growth, and be put towards Quinn’s mission of supporting regenerative agriculture. Quinn uses gluten-free ingredients like sorghum, cassava, and corn for its pretzels sticks and chips, stuffed pretzels, and flavored popcorn. The company provides a map of where its ingredients are sourced and a list of farmers (who are taking steps to reduce their environmental impact) it buys from to provide transparency to consumers. Quinn’s products are available for purchase in approximately 10,000 retailers nationwide.

July 21, 2021

Why Plant-Based Nuggets are Gold

When I think of chicken nuggets, I think of my young son. More specifically, I remember how at one point I surreptitiously replaced his animal-based chicken nuggets and tenders with plant-based ones… and he didn’t notice (or didn’t care). That small bit of deception is why I think the plant-based chicken nugget market could be a very big deal.

Plant-based chicken nuggets are nothing new. Companies like Quorn, Morningstar and Gardein have been selling them in the frozen aisles of grocery stores for years now. But things really heated up this month when both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods jumped into the faux poultry ring. Beyond, which had previously piloted plant-based chicken with KFC, announced a couple weeks back that its new tenders are available at 400 restaurants across the country. That announcement was quickly followed by the news that Impossible was unveiling its nuggets to potential restaurant customers this week for a fall rollout.

While both of their plant-based chicken products will debut at restaurants, it’s a no-brainer that their nuggets will eventually make it to store shelves. Both Beyond and Impossible spent a great deal of time last year vastly expanding their national retail sales footprint, all the heavy lifting of getting into stores in done, they now just need to roll out their nuggets.

And it’s on the store shelves where things get interesting, as there will be ton of competition. Not only are the stalwarts like Quorn, Morningstar and Gardein already there, but giants like Tyson has its Raised & Rooted plant-based nuggets, and Target has its own Good & Gather brand. Not to mention there is also a new crop of plant-based nugget startups like Rebellyous, SIMULATE, Nowadays, and Daring Foods competing for your dollar.

Competing for your top dollar, that is. Right now, you have to pay extra for plant-based chicken. A quick look at Safeway shows that an 8-ounce package of Raised and Rooted nuggets is $4.99, compared with a 32-ounce package of traditional animal based nuggets for $7.79. That’s almost four times as much food for a few dollars more.

But this is where Beyond and Impossible can help. While both of their burger products are still more expensive than traditional meat, consumer prices for Beyond and Impossible have steadily come down over the past couple of years. It’s a safe bet that the same will happen for their chicken products. With the brand recognition both Beyond and Impossible have, they should be able to quickly gain market share at retail and exert price pressure on other players in the space.

Another big opportunity for plant-based chicken nuggets and tenders is in schools cafeterias, where nuggets are menu staple. The USDA reports that schools served 5 billion lunches in fiscal year 2019, so it’s no surprise that schools were actually one of Rebellyous’ primary markets before the pandemic shut everything down last year. Also consider that this past May, Impossible received the Child Nutrition (CN) Label authorized by the USDA, which will make it easier for schools to purchase the Impossible Burger. With Impossible running pilots programs with a number of school districts across the U.S., it’s a safe bet the company will get the same regulatory approval for its nuggets.

But the big reason plant-based chicken nuggets and tenders will be huge goes back to my son. Nuggets and tenders are really more of a kids’ food (though, who doesn’t love a good nugget?), and if you can create a reasonable facsimile, they aren’t going to care. It’s not like trying to replicate a filet mignon at a fine dining establishment. Creating a plant-based filet requires “muscle” and fat structures. Plus, consumers have a heightened expectation around what a filet is and should be, so the uncanny valley is much greater. Nuggets, on the other hand, are junk food. (I say that with love) There doesn’t need to be a ton of complexity to make a good nugget. Bread it, flavor it, make sure it looks enough like meat on the inside and there you go. Kids will knock ’em back no fuss no muss.

Until now, burgers have been the star of the plant-based meat world, but don’t be surprised if next year plant-based chicken nuggets take center stage.

Photo from Nature’s Fynd website

More Headlines

Nature’s Fynd Raises $350M Series C for its Microbial Protein – The protein originates from a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park.

Gathered Foods is Bringing Plant-Based Options to Long John Silver’s – Five locations in California and Georgia now serve Good Catch’s Crab-Free Cakes and Fish-Free Fillets

Multus Media Raises $2.2M for Cultured Meat Serum Replacement – The company says its growth media lasts twice as long as existing serum.

Mzansi Meat Co. is Bringing Cultured Meat to Africa – Representing the food and farming culture of Africa is important to Mzansi Meat Co., and the company will be extracting cells from indigenous cattle breeds.

July 19, 2021

Nature’s Fynd Raises $350M Series C for its Microbial Protein

Nature’s Fynd, which makes protein from microbes that originated in geothermal springs of Yellowstone National Park, announced today that it has raised a $350 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, with participcation from new investors including Blackstone Strategic Partners, Balyasny Asset Management, Hillhouse Investment, EDBI, SK Inc. and Hongkou, as well as other existing investors. This brings the total amount raised by Nature’s Fynd to more than $500 million.

The company’s protein is called Fy, and it’s a fermented fungi protein derived from the Fusar­i­um strain flavolapis microbe. Because Fy is grown through fermentation, the cultivation of the protein requires less land, water and energy than traditional agriculture. Fy is a complete protein with 9 essential amino acids, and it can be used to make alternative meat and dairy products. In February of this year, Nature’s Fynd announced its first two Fy-based products: a dairy-free cream cheese and a meatless breakfast patty. The company also makes a dairy-free yogurt that was eaten on camera by Bill Gates (a Nature’s Fynd investor) and Anderson Cooper during a segment on 60 Minutes earlier this year.

Fermentation has been dubbed the third pillar of alternative protein, alongside cell-based and plant-based protein. We have seen a wave of startups using fermentation technology to bring variety of animal-free products to market. Perfect Day and Remilk use fermentation to create dairy proteins. Nourish Ingredients ferments yeast to make plant-based fats. SuperBrewed ferments microbes to create a vegan protein powder than can be used in plant-based cheese and milks. And Better Meat Co. recently launched its own fermentation production facility to create its mycoprotein-based Rhiza ingredient.

All of this activity has also helped attract plenty of funding over the past year and a half. According to data from the Good Food Institute and Pitchbook, fermentation startups received $590 million in funding in 2020. In addition to Nature’s Fynd’s haul announced today, last month Motif Foodworks, which uses microbial engineering and precision fermentation to create novel food ingredients, raised $226 million.

Nature’s Fynd said it will use its new funding to expand its production capacity, add new products to its lineup, and set the stage for its international growth.

July 14, 2021

FreshRealm Raises $32M for Fresh, Prepared Meals

FreshRealm, a prepared fresh meals company based in Ventura, California, announced this week that it has raised $32 million. The institutional investors were not disclosed, and this brings the company’s total funding to $46.6 million.

This most recent round of funding will be used to expand FreshRealm’s production facilities, with the goal of opening additional facilities throughout the country for increased distribution. The company plans to focus on product innovation and developing proprietary ingredients for its meals. FreshRealm has plans to accelerate its growth strategy for its upcoming nationwide rollout in grocery retailers.

FreshRealm claims to be the only fresh meal company with a nationwide reach. Its prepared meals are not frozen, and the company applies “just-in-time” logistics to ensure all ingredients are fresh. The capital will also be used to develop different products, including ready-to-heat meals, ready-to-cook meals, and meal kit offerings.

Quite a few direct-to-consumer prepared meal companies already exist, including Freshly, Daily Harvest, HungryRoot. Companies like Blue Apron and HelloFresh ship meal kit boxes filled with various ingredients to the consumer with directions on how to assemble the meal at home. Sunbasket and Purple Carrot are now a hybrid service offering both prepared meals and meal kits. FreshRealm is taking a slightly different approach by offering fresh, not frozen, prepared meals that will be offered in grocery stores and retailers rather than shipped directly to the consumer’s home.

FreshRealm has not announced which exact retailers it will partner with but did say its meals are currently available in a few select retailers. The company has plans for a national rollout in Fall 2021.

July 14, 2021

Schools Around The World Are Racing to Create Future Food Curriculum. Here’s Why it Matters.

Anyone familiar with the story of Silicon Valley knows just how fundamental the university system was in creating the center of the technology universe.

Colleges and universities have long served as launch pads for the world’s biggest tech companies, from the education of integrated circuit founding fathers William Shockely and Robert Noyce (at Caltech and MIT, respectively) to the creation of Yahoo! and Google by graduate students at Stanford, to Mark Zuckerberg hacking away at Hot or Not in his dorm at Harvard.

And now that food companies big and small are embracing new technologies to create alternative forms of meat, universities around the world are racing to create curriculum and innovation centers to create the food workforce of the future.

In the U.S., future food activity is popping up at schools from coast to coast, with notable efforts that include UC Berkeley’s Alt Meat Lab, a cellular agriculture course at Tufts, CRISPR courses at Harvard and ReThink Meat courses at Stanford.

But it’s not just American schools. Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University has created an alternative protein course called “Future Foods—Introduction to Advanced Meat Alternatives.” In Israel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem launched a pilot course titled “Cultivated Meat and Plant-Based Meat.” An introduction to cell-based meat is now available for postgraduates at the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil.

So what’s driving all this interest in future food in the halls of academia across the globe? According to long-time future food pioneer and lecturer Ron Shigeta, one of the main forces is advocacy organizations.

Groups like the Good Food Institute “are leveraging money from ethical vegans and others interested in animal welfare,” Shigeta told me. “They are offering incentives to schools and programs, as well as driving the economic incentives by helping grants come through. This is happening in Davis, CA, Singapore and elsewhere.”

Amy Huang, who heads up the Good Food Institute’s efforts to encourage the academic community to embrace alternative protein education, says the reason we’re now seeing alt-protein education flourish around the world is simple: a fast-growing industry needs good people.

“People are the very backbone of our quest to reimagine the protein supply,” said Huang via email. “So, it’s essential that we equip students and industry professionals with a deeper, stronger foundation of specialized knowledge they’ll need to join the alternative protein sector.”

According to Huang, higher education institutions want to prepare students for what promises to be a potentially massive shift by helping them understand the enabling technologies and systems underpinning these changes.

“These courses are being driven by forward-thinking faculty and university administrators who are challenging the educational status quo and asking themselves: What emerging technologies have true disruptive potential? How can we equip our students with the skills they need to be leaders in these fields?”

And it almost goes without saying that by preparing their students with programs about disruptive new alt-meat technologies, these institutions are setting a foundation for their own future success.

“By prioritizing innovation over convention, they’re positioning their institutions as the centers of gravity for students seeking a groundbreaking education,” said Huang. “And they’re also establishing their regions as potential hubs for the explosion of entrepreneurial activity and economic growth that the alternative protein industry will bring.”

And it’s not just the schools who are driving change. Students, many of whom have value systems that align with a move away from industrial animal agriculture, are asking for classes and sometimes even creating their own.

This is something both Shigeta and Huang agree on.

Shigeta noted that, “Millennial and GenZ students (sometimes vegan) are much more focused on climate change, looking for socially positive ways to make changes they believe in. With the students advocating for movement from within, the doors are opening for sure.”

Huang believes the students themselves are perhaps “are perhaps the most powerful changemakers within academic ecosystems.” She adds that, “We see this playing out through The Alt Protein Project, like at Wageningen, Stanford, and UNC Chapel Hill, with students advocating for and successfully launching courses at universities around the world.”

The Alt Protein Project is the Good Food Institute’s own program to develop and encourage alt-protein education within the world of academia. The program has five objectives: building courses and majors, expanding open-access research, stimulating entrepreneurship, building awareness, and creating an inclusive and interdisciplinary community.

One example of this student-led change helped by GFI is at the Netherland’s Wageningen University. A group of five students wondered why there wasn’t a class in protein transition. To create one, the group, under the name of The Wageningen Alternative Protein Project, worked with the Good Food Institute on a student-led effort to build up both a community interested in this area as well as a group of teachers willing to lead such courses. The effort paid off, as teachers within the food science department have indicated they plan to teach the course the students proposed next year.

All this progress is exciting, but in many ways it’s still early days. Wageningen, after all, is widely recognized as the world’s top university in agriculture education and the school is just now getting around to creating a class on protein transition. UC Davis, one of the US’s leading ag research universities, created its Cultivated Meat Consortium in 2019 is just now launching the second phase of its formal cultured meat programming and research.

But according to Huang, what is early today in terms of future food education could become commonplace in a few years as colleges look to build a workforce and create a foundation for the world of alt protein.

“In five years, we hope to see alternative protein courses at every major university around the world,” said Huang. “The educators and institutions that begin cultivating these kinds of educational pathways today will hold the attention of alternative protein startups and companies as they expand their teams, build infrastructure, and establish industrial centers.”

Let’s hope she’s right. Just as the rise in computer science curriculum has helped fuel growth and an explosion in huge societal shifts (both good and bad) over the past century, we’re gonna need some serious creativity to help us manage and expand our food systems over the next 100 years. The pandemic exposed our food supply chains’ fragility and opacity while also illustrating how our continued over-reliance on industrial animal agriculture is not sustainable.

In other words, we’re gonna need lots of smart people to help us feed 10 billion people, and much of that will start with an education system that creates a qualified future food workforce.

Editor Note: This post originally said the alt-protein transition efforts at Wageningen University were started by one student. This has been changed to reflect the efforts of all the students involved.

July 13, 2021

Air Protein, GOOD Meat, IntegriCulture Among the Semifinalists for XPRIZE’s Alt-Protein Competition

Nonprofit XPRIZE has announced 28 semifinalists teams that will move forward in the Feed the Next Billion competition. The multi-year competition will support companies developing compelling chicken and fish alternatives that replicate or outperform the real thing in terms of nutrition, environmental sustainability, animal welfare, and taste and texture. 

The competition, first announced at the end of 2020, is being conducted in partnership with ASPIRE, the project management arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC). Grand-prize winners will not be chosen until 2024. when multiple winners will collectively receive $15 million.

For now, the 28 finalists chosen to continue the competition will have the next year to work with the competition, ASPIRE, and The Tony Robbins Foundation to develop the first iterations of their products. Up to 10 finalist teams will be chosen towards the end of 2022 and will split a “milestone award” of $2.5 million. 

Those 10 finalists will have one last round of competition where they will need to create “at least twenty-five cuts of structured chicken breast or fish fillet analogs of 115 gram or four ounce that replicate the sensory properties, versatility, and nutritional profile of conventional chicken or fish.” One grand prize winner will receive $7 million, with second- and third-place winners getting $2 million and $1 million, respectively.

The 28 finalists chosen this week represent all three pillars of alternative protein: plant-based, cultivated, and fermentation. Some of these companies are better known than others. Eat Just’s GOOD Meat, for example, is the only company in the world that has regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat (in Singapore). MeatOurFuture, on the other hand, is a public-private partnership that is known primarily in South Africa at this point. Others, including plant-based seafood company Brew51 from India, Japan’s IntegriCulture, and Air Protein, are all at various stages of development in terms of their products.

You can read the full list of companies, which span 14 different countries, here.

XPRIZE’s Feed the Next Billion competition was developed in response to the organization’s Future of Food Impact Roadmap, where the organization pinpointed 12 “breakthrough opportunities” that could help build a better food system. Alt-protein is a major area.

No one company developing alternative proteins has yet proven their technology and/or ingredients can feed the next billion. There remain many, many questions around the nutrition of products, the cost of making them, and, for some, whether or not they can ever really be produced at that scale. XPRIZE’s competition will no doubt go some ways towards answering those questions over the next few years.  

June 30, 2021

Could the Budding Home Chef Biz Give Alternative Meats a Boost?

This is the web version of our weekly Future Food newsletter. Subscribe today to get all the best news about plant-based, cultured and fermented food in your inbox every week.

Not to brag, but I make a mean Impossible burger. The trick is frying it on an electric griddle in butter to get a nice crust on it and loading it up with grilled onions (chef’s kiss).

While I am proud of my plant-based burger cooking and assembly skills, I have no aspirations of going into business selling them. But I’m sure there are others out there who do. I started thinking about the nascent home chef business sector, where everyday people can sell the meals they make at home to other people, when Foodnome got approval to operate its first Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation (MEHKO) in the Bay Area this week. Foodnome is similar to other startups in the space like Shef and Woodspoon, creating a marketplace to connect home chefs and customers. As I was thinking about these startups and my Impossible burgers, I wondered whether home chefs could give plant-based foods a market boost.

At first, it seems premature to even ask this question. The home chef space is currently very small as rules and regulations about what food people can sell out of their kitchen are still being developed. So there aren’t a lot of home restaurants out there. Additionally, it’s not like plant-based meats need a boost from this small segment. According to the Good Food Institute, plant-based meat sales have grown 72 percent over the past two years and the category is currently worth $1.4 billion.

So right now, the idea of a tiny home cook sector moving the needle on plant-based proteins seems academic at best. But if home chef-ing becomes a viable (and legal) money-making option for people, we could see a wave of independent restaurants pop up out of people’s homes. My guess is these businesses will probably start out as side hustles for most as people dip their toes in to test the waters, and won’t involve a ton of capital expenditure (they’ve already got the kitchen and the pots and pans!). As such, these home restaurants can take more risks. Risks like serving up a delivery-only menu exclusively full of plant-based offerings.

In the case of plant-based burgers, sure, sales are growing, but the sector is still dwarfed by traditional animal-based meat. Business Insider reported in May that beef sales in America grew to $30.3 billion in 2020. So if you were to open your own burger joint, you’d have a much bigger audience selling conventional burgers than you would selling plant-based ones.

But as with movies, books and blogs, the home chef business is about the longer tail. Building out a restaurant, buying equipment, hiring staff — all of that takes a lot of money and you want a safer bet with the food you sell. If you run your own food operation out of your home, you are free to take more risks (especially if it is a side hustle and not your main source of income). So you could experiment with plant-based meat (and dairy and eggs) menus because you don’t have to please as many people.

Take my Impossible burgers for example. I believe they are delicious enough that someone paying $7 or so for one would find that was money well spent. I do not believe, however, that I could justify the cost of launching a traditional restaurant to serve them. I’m not sure there are enough plant-based burger fans in my geographic area to support that type of standalone business, and there are already a number of animal-based burger places where I live so launching my own restaurant for them seems like a fool’s errand.

But if I could make and sell them from my kitchen… well, that’s a different story. I wouldn’t need as much money to start, and I could determine the hours I want work (e.g., dinners and weekends only), making the idea of running a food business more enticing. And since I’m not spending as much time or money, I could cater to the smaller number of people in my town who want plant-based burgers.

Chances are good that I’m not alone in this type of thinking. There are probably a lot of people who make unique plant-based burgers, burritos and pizza out there. Being able to launch such a business from the comfort of their own kitchens means we could see a lot of new plant-based virtual restaurants spring up across the country.

Again, this is all more of a thought experiment right now. As noted, there is still a lot left to be determined around the regulation of home cooking, and it presents a new paradigm in meal ordering that customers would still need to figure out. But I think it’s worth considering because a large number of smaller, independent home restaurants could bring about big changes to where people eat.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Foodnome launched this week. We regret the error.

Image via Eat Just.

More Headlines

Report: Eat Just Aiming for $3B IPO in 2021 – To date, Eat Just has raised $440 million, with its most recent fundraise being a $200 million round led by Qatar Investment Authority earlier this year.

Wageningen University Launches the Third Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge – Competing teams will grow lettuce from seed using a fully automated algorithms.

Google Launches a Tool to Help Americans Struggling With Food Security – The new Find Food Support website aims to connect people struggling with food insecurity to resources like food banks, school lunch programs, and food pantries. 

Recon Food, a Social Media App Connecting Users Through Food, Launches Today – Users can post photos of food and drink ordered from restaurants and leave a review, or upload photos of dishes they have created themselves.

June 30, 2021

Report: Eat Just Aiming for $3B IPO in 2021

Eat Just is reportedly targeting Q4 2021 or early 2022 for its IPO, which currently has a valuation of $3 billion, according to an Eat Just investor. Forbes was first to break the news after one of its contributors spoke to an anonymous investor in the company.

To date, Eat Just has raised $440 million, with its most recent fundraise being a $200 million round led by Qatar Investment Authority earlier this year.

Eat Just is best known right now for its plant-based egg products, which are available in the U.S. through grocery retailers as well as at restaurants. The company has also steadily built a significant international presence over the last few years, too. Notably, that includes teaming up with China-based QSR chain Discos to replace traditional eggs on the latter’s menu and expanding across Canada in March of this year.

Of late, however, Eat Just has grabbed the most headlines for its cultivated meat business, GOOD, which won the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured meat this past December in Singapore. The company has since sold its GOOD cultured chicken bites on the regular at restaurants in the city-state and even partnered with Delivery Hero subsidiary Foodpanda to deliver them.

GOOD raised its own $170 million in May of this year. At the time, Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick hinted to The Spoon that regulatory approval in the U.S. was on its way for the company. In its report today, Forbes name-dropped China as another potential country that could next grant regulatory approval to sell cultured meat.

Whether the company will go public before achieving these regulatory milestones or after is not clear at this time.

June 24, 2021

Future Meat Opens Production Facility, Aims to Sell Cultured Meat in the US by 2022

Future Meat has officially opened what it says is the world’s first production facility for cultured meat. The plant, located in the company’s hometown of Rehovot, Israel, is a big step in accelerating Future Meat’s timeline for getting regulatory approval to sell cultured meat and then actually getting products onto consumers’ plates.

Future Meat says the plant can produce 500 kilograms of cultured meat per day, which is equivalent to roughly 5,000 hamburgers. Those numbers may pale in comparison to traditional meat (this McDonald’s factory produces 5 million burgers every day), but for the extremely nascent cultured meat industry, they make for significant progress. 

Prof. Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientific officer of Future Meat Technologies, told The Spoon that the new facility is currently processing cultured chicken, pork, and lamb. Beef production will arrive soon. The company’s first official products to come out of the facility will be a cultured chicken breast, chicken fingers, and hamburgers. 

Earlier this year, Future Meat told The Spoon it has been able to decrease the cost of cultured meat production by 1,000x over the last three years. At last check, the company had brought the cost of its cultured chicken breast down to $7.50 USD per quarter-pound serving. It followed that up with news that the production price could drop to $2 within the next 12 to 18 months.

Future Meat’s end products will be a combination of cell-cultured and plant-based protein. Nahmias said that his company’s products are 45 to 75 percent cultured meat, with an edible scaffold made of plant protein. Cell-based protein will replace plant-based elements in future generations of product as the cost of cultured meat continues to decrease.

No technologies out there, he said, use 100 percent cultured meat. “Meat is composed of cells and a three-dimensional protein scaffold that holds the cells together. Companies are either adding the edible scaffold to the cells or adding the cells to the edible scaffold. It is pretty much the same.”

Importantly, Future Meat has also developed a serum-free growth medium for feeding cells. This allows the company to avoid using the controversial fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is both expensive and ethically controversial. According to Nahmias, Future Meat’s medium is made up of a mixture of amino acids, oils, glucose, and naturally occurring hormones. “Removing serum is a critics step in market realization of cultured meat,” he said. “Companies that fail to do that require the slaughter of dozens of calves to grow a single hamburger.” The company’s chicken, lamb, and pork cells are currently growing “in scale” without serum at the production facility.

Future Meat may be the first to open the doors on a production facility for cultured meat, but others won’t be long in coming. Bioprinting startup MeaTech 3D, also based in Israel, says it will have a production facility operational by 2022. San Francisco, California-based Wildtype also opened a production facility this week, though it is focused solely on cultured seafood at the moment and is therefore not a direct competitor to Future Meat. 

Down the line, Future Meat would like to open another production facility, ideally in the United States. For now, Future Meat is working to get regulatory approval here in the U.S., with the goal of selling its products in foodservice venues next year.

June 23, 2021

Motif Adds Umami to Its Plant-Based Meat Tool Box

If you’re like me and love the umami savoriness of meat and seafoods, I’ve got some good news for you: plant-based ingredient engineering unicorn Motif just announced they’ve added the ability to create umami to their toolbox of technologies for plant-based food.

According to this week’s release, Motif’s latest protein “provides the rich umami flavor and mouth-watering aroma associated with beef — all without the animal.” Motif says the new umami technology will be available by the end of this year.

The technique Motif uses to create its umami protein is precision fermentation, the same process used by a number of companies building enabling platforms and ingredients technologies for meat substitutes. Impossible Foods, for examples, uses precision fermentation to create the famous plant-based heme that give its meat that same iron-y flavor you get in real beef.

One interesting aspect of the story not mentioned in the release is how Motif leveraged its relationship with Ginkgo Bioworks, the company it spun out of in 2019, to help build the umami taste technology. In an email, a Motif spokesperson told The Spoon they “were able to use our partnership with Ginkgo to take advantage of their throughput screening and strain development capabilities, which allows us to innovate and scale production rapidly.” It’s clear that, even as one company plans its IPO and the other raises the kind of money that will almost certainly require it to go public, the two companies remain closely intertwined.

Umami wasn’t the only new technology Motif debuted this week. The company also announced it had achieved a new way to give plant-based meat a meat-like texture that “delivers real, meaty chewdown and juiciness.” Unlike the company’s fermentation-derived umami tech, this new meat texture technology “was able to replicate the texture of animal tissue using plant proteins and plant-based carbohydrates” through “advancements in materials science and production.”

June 22, 2021

Equinom Raises $20M Series C Round for Seed Breeding Tech

Israel-based Equinom announced today it has raised a $20 million Series C funding round led by Phoenix. The round also included participation from Fortissimo, Trendlines, Maverick, and BASF, and brings Equinom’s total funding to $27.6 million.

Equinom uses AI to improve upon the existing nutrition of seeds, including a seed’s protein content. Through its natural non-GMO breeding process, seeds with desired traits are selected and then bred. Equinom’s “Product Profiler” app allows food companies to select what traits they want in a particular seed for the product they are developing. According to its website, the company is working with soy, yellow, pea, sesame, and will offer boosted versions of chickpeas, mung beans, quinoa, cowpeas, and fava beans in the future. Across the world, Equinom is growing over 100,000 acres of these crops.

With this most recent round of capital, Equinom will expand its operations in marketing, research, development, and sales. At the beginning of May, the company partnered with Dipasa, a leading producer of sesame seeds, to launch a new variety of high protein sesame seeds. In addition to Dispasa, Equinom has had contracts with major food companies like Sabra and Roquette to improve upon the nutrition content of seed for use in plant-based foods.

Seeds, nuts, and grains are more sustainable and efficient to produce than meat, yet a common complaint regarding plant-based ingredients is that they often do not have the same high protein content as meat. It’s therefore a pressing issue to find nutrient-dense crops that can support a population that will reach 9.7 billion by 2050. Plant-based ingredients like chickpea, soy, peas, and lentils are nutrient-dense and contain a high protein content, but still fall short of the protein content found in a serving of, say, beef. By increasing protein content in these seeds, Equinom’s technology could prove valuable in helping feed more mouths with more nutritious and environmentally friendly food.

In the last quarter of 2021, Equinom is set to launch the highest pea protein concentrate available on the market, called “Smarter Pea Protein.”

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