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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Cafe X’s Robot Barista is Now Slinging Coffee in Tesla’s Berlin Giga Factory

This week, Cafe X CEO Henry Hu retweeted Elon Musk, who had tweeted out a video showcasing a flythrough video of Giga Berlin. The reason? Tesla’s newest Giga Factory serves coffee and tea using one of Hu’s robotic coffee shops.

While the robot barista’s arms are painted red with the words Tesla printed on them, anyone familiar with the Cafe X robot coffee shops will instantly recognize them.

Cafe X was one of the early arrivers in robot-powered front-of-house food service, but in the last couple of years, the company’s been quiet as it closed most of its San Francisco locations. In recent months, however, Hu has been tweeting about the company shipping out new Cafe Xs and getting Tesla merch, so it’s probably not too surprising one showed up in a Giga Factory. It probably didn’t hurt that one of Cafe X’s original investors is Jason Calcanis, a close associate of Elon, who has been actively pushing the idea.

Cafe X’s last venture round that was disclosed was in 2020, and it recently raised money via the crowdfunding platform Republic. The company’s disclosure on Republic said its robot cafes at SFO generated $700 thousand in 2022 alone and that the company had shipped five robotic coffee shops in 2022. As of early spring, the company said it had orders for ten more in 2023 and expected to ship a total of 50 this year. The company listed the cost for a Cafe X at $285 thousand with an annual software and service cost of $15 thousand.

Remy Launches in U.S. With Robot-Powered Virtual Restaurant in NYC Called Better Days

This week, Remy Robotics opened in the U.S. with a robot-powered virtual restaurant brand in New York City called Better Days, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The launch comes after the Spain-based startup spent the last few years operating a hub-and-spoke model of robotic-enabled ghost kitchens in Spain and France, where the company says it has produced and delivered over 100,000 meals.

According to company CEO Yegor Traiman, he hopes to merge the convenience of fast food with the quality associated with fine dining, all powered by robots.

“Remy Robotics exists to do what was previously thought impossible – make high-quality, delicious food consistently, accessibly, and profitably at scale,” said CEO and Founder Yegór Traiman. “With the launch of Better Days in New York, we are taking major steps, we’re just starting to show what is possible. Our goal is to make good food at an affordable price available and accessible to everyone while creating better jobs and improving the work environment for chefs.”, said Traiman.

Readers of The Spoon may recall that Traiman and his engineers created an entire food production flow around robots instead of designing the robots to mimic human chefs. Remy has redesigned the cooking process to be more robot-compatible, focusing on the precision and consistency of machines. The result is a system where AI-powered robots prepare food based on algorithmic recipes that factor in delivery times and other logistical elements.

“We develop all the equipment,” Traiman told The Spoon in an interview last year. “Robots, freezers, fridges. Because again, in a world where everything was designed and built by humans, for humans, there is no place for robots. You’re not able to make the system flexible enough.”

According to the company, the new restaurant will utilize human chefs to prep the food in a central commissary before it is transported to what it calls “node kitchens” where robots do all of the cooking. The food is refrigerated before being transferred to an oven and cooked using what the company calls “algorithmic recipes” in robotic ovens. From there, Remy says AI algorithms work with sensors to control food’s quality by monitoring the food’s internal temperature and uses a scale that calculates moisture reduction. According to Remy, they can adjust cook times automatically for orders depending on whether they are placed for delivery, takeout, or dine-in.

While the company is calling Better Days a “restaurant”, it is, for the time being at least, what looks to be only a virtual brand, serving up meals through delivery via the company’s own app and third-party delivery companies such as Grubhub, DoorDash and Uber Eats. According to the announcement, Better Days will feature main courses built around meals with rice, veggies and proteins such as chicken and salmon. All the entrees are priced between $7 and $16.

If you live in the New York City market, you can check out and order a meal from Better Days via their website or their app.

Bear Brings Its Robots To Hospitals Through Partnership With Sodexo

When John Ha started Bear Robotics, he was a computer scientist with a restaurant side hustle who thought he might make the lives of his servers easier through automation technology. Since then, his robots have shown up in restaurants across the globe to lift some of the burden of physically demanding restaurant service jobs.

As it turns out, there are many other physically demanding jobs, one of which is nursing, which is why this week’s announcement by Bear of their deal with Sodexo makes sense. According to the company, they’ve closed a deal with food service giant Sodexo, where Bear’s robots will support staff and patient care within healthcare facilities.

According to a report from McKinsey & Company, the potential for automation to take on mundane tasks could free up nursing activities by 15 percent, allowing healthcare workers to focus more on patient care. Furthermore, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the healthcare industry will grow 16 percent from 2020 to 2030, adding about 2.6 million new jobs.

“In partnership with Sodexo, we will be enhancing the future of work for healthcare professionals and maximizing the value of their time with patients through seamless integration of technology and efficiency,” said Juan Higueros, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Bear Robotics.

According to Bear, the pilot programs are set to launch in the United States in 2024.

Drone Delivery Operator Flytrex Receives FAA Go Ahead to Fly Without Visual Observers

Drone delivery startup Flytrex and its partner Causey Aviation Unmanned (CAU) announced today they have been granted an exemption by the FAA to operate drones ‘Beyond Visual Line of Sight’ (BVLOS) without the requirement of visual observers.

The newly acquired authorization enables both companies to scale their delivery services across American suburbs as the waver permits their drones to fly longer distances beyond a pilot’s visual line of site.

According to Flytrex, BVLOS approval is one of the most advanced regulatory approvals to date and paves the way for the scaling of CAU and Flytrex’s delivery operations, contingent upon meeting certain conditions and limitations.

Automatic Drone Pickup | Flytrex

The news comes on the heels of the company’s unveiling of its autonomous pickup feature, which enables Flytrex to automate food delivery via drone fully. With the new capability, a Flytrex drone flies to the restaurant, picks up the food for delivery, and takes the order to the customer’s home.

Flytrex drones, which can carry up to 5.5 pounds of food, fly up to speeds of 32 miles per hour. And while the drones can handle each mission entirely autonomously, the company says that they still have FAA-certified drone operators overseinge each mission.

The BVLOS approval comes after CAU, the operator for Flytrex, received Part 135 certification in January, essentially giving the the company the official go ahead to deliver food, beverages, and other goods across the country.

Key Takeaways From The First-Ever Food AI Summit

Last week, we convened some of the leading voices in AI and food at the inaugural Food AI Summit in Alameda, California, to discuss how this technology is transforming the food industry.

The conversation spanned the entire food system, examining the impact of AI on farming, food development, restaurants, personal nutrition, and household use.

It’s All About The Data

Throughout the day, it became clear that one of the most significant drivers for achieving highly functional and powerful AI systems is building them around the right data. Once you’ve trained the AI on good data, the insights derived from these platforms will far surpass what was previously possible.

Erica Bliss, the Chief Operating Officer of Mineral, believes where AI will really excel is in aggregating ‘multimodal’ data into a unified, synthesized analysis.

“It’s about integrating satellite imagery, soil data, weather data, historical yield data, camera data, and scouting notes from someone walking the field. The real power is in aggregating diverse and complex data types,” she said.

The Biggest Advances Will Come From a Combination of Human Knowledge with AI

The question of whether AI can replace human knowledge and innovation was a recurrent theme throughout the day. Oliver Zahn, the CEO of Climax Foods, believes that AI will not replace human knowledge. Instead, he sees the combination of technology and humans as a game-changer.

“People have this romantic notion that we have an algorithm, and you just tell it to make whatever cheddar, egg scramble, and then it will just tell you exactly how to make it,” said Zahn. “It’s vastly more complicated than that. In many cases, the humans are actually much better than the algorithms. And in real life, I don’t think anybody will ever write an algorithm and create a data set that is rich enough to do that. The algorithms give us a little bit of an edge over traditional food science companies, and in some cases, they give us a bigger edge.”

Erica Bliss believes that while AI will increasingly help farmers at both a systemic and individual farm level, it will be the combination of AI and human knowledge that will form the “Iron Man suit” amalgamation of capabilities that will lead to transformational outcomes.

“There are things that humans are incredibly good at that AI is not good at,” said Bliss. “And so if you’re aiming to get the best yield forecast, it is really the human plus machine that’s driving a far better outcome.”

AI Will Power Much More Personalized and Accessible Health and Nutrition Advice

Noosheen Hashemi, CEO of January, which offers a personalized nutrition and glucose tracking platform, believes AI will empower individuals with chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes to better monitor and anticipate the effects of their diet.

“There are things we have done you simply cannot do without AI,” said Hashemi. “We can build a digital twin of a person using wearable data and user-reported data. We’re then able to predict their glycemic response to any of the foods in the 32 million food database. With AI, we can also give counterfactuals like ‘you ate this, but if you had eaten this, this would have been your response.'”

Looking forward, Ari Tulla of Elo Health thinks AI-powered coaches could make healthcare much more personalized and accessible.

“Today, we live in a world where a doctor has 10 minutes to half an hour a year for you,” said Tulla. “What if you could have a bot or somebody that can talk to you like your personal trainer at the tune of 30 to 50 hours a year? That could have a very big impact.”

AI Will Have An Impact at the Macro and Hyperlocal Levels

David Lee, the CEO of Inevitable Tech, believes that AI will not only address the challenges of increased production due to a rising global population and climate change but also aid in making individual farms more financially sustainable.

“Around forty percent of farms break even or do any kind of variable profit, which means most farms operate at a constant loss,” said Lee. “AI isn’t just about serving these big global problems like food security. I can also address the very individualistic, local problem, which is to create financial sustainability, local and specific, to the unit of a farm anywhere in the world.”

The First-Ever Food AI Summit Could Be The Start of Something Big

During his comments, Ari Tulla commented on the event itself, believing it could be the beginning of something big.

“I’ve been at those events where there are a hundred people in the room, and you know this is the beginning of something,” said Tulla. “Ten years from now, some of us will look back and say, ‘I was at the first Food AI Summit.'”

We sure hope so! Thanks again to our speakers, sponsors, and attendees for making the first Food AI Summit a huge success!

Cow NFT Platform CattlePay Paves the Way for Direct Sales With Heartland Deal

The last time we checked in with Rob Jennings of CattleProof, he was getting his cattle NFT platform off the ground. The idea was to create a permanent record of the life of a cow that followed it along the supply chain so that current and prospective owners all the way to a restaurant down the line that purchased beef would have a record of age, genetics, ranch of origin and more.

The idea is an interesting one, not only because it helps create better transparency into the history of a head of cattle, but also because it opens the door to more efficient way for prospective buyers and sellers to do business. Nowadays, if someone wants to buy a head of cattle, a sales transaction typically involves using a sale barn, an auction marketplace that facilitates the sale between buyer and seller. All well and good, except the resulting transactoin can take a week to ten days to process and often involves marketplace fees and commissions that can reach up to 10% of the total transaction.

Instead of using this slow and costly process, Jennings wants to make buying and selling cows as seamless (and low-fee) as buying or selling a stock – or NFT – through a digital marketplace. To that end, his company CattleProof has done an integration with Heartland, a payment processing company to launch CattlePay, an electronic payment system that allows cattle owners to buy and sell cattle via credit and debit cards and ACH payments.

“The idea is how do you create a more direct buyer to consumer payment system, minus all the fees and blockchain payments?” said Jennings in a interview with The Spoon. “And then, how do you inch your way towards getting real time settlement? Because that’s the other big thing: how do I get my money now?”

According to Jennings, the bigger vision of not only creating a lower-cost way to buy and sell cattle, but to create a friction-free way for buyers and sellers to connect. This means creating something akin to an Openseas for cattle, but without the complexity of having crypto wallets and all of the other blockchain related tech that often intimidates and turns off the uninitiated and non-crypto-pilled among us. To get there, CattleProof system will handle all of the web3 in the background, and offering the benefits of a blockchain proof of record and transaction system to the cattle buyers.

“Our goal is to in order to get cattle producers to participate, there’s got to be a return on investment,” Jennings told The Spoon in a recent interview. “And part of that return on investment is trying to find them ways to reduce these middleman fees.”

Jennings says he expects that the CattleProof system to launch in the first quarter of 2024.

Want to Try AI-Powered Cheese & Sausage? Join Us on October 25th at the Food AI Summit

So, what does food designed by AI taste like?

Next week at the Food AI Summit, you’ll have a chance to find out! That’s because not only will we have sessions by founders, inventors, and executives exploring how to bring food to our plates using the latest in artificial intelligence, but we’ll also get a chance to taste it!

After a full day of sessions that includes leaders from Pepsi, Afresh, ReFED, Chefman, Innit, Mineral and more, we’ll network and sample food from Shiru and Climax Foods! The founders of both companies will be on hand to talk about the process behind developing AI-powered plant-based food, so you will definitely want to stick around and join us!

You can check out the full-day agenda and great list of speakers over at the Food AI Summit page. If you’d like to join us, use the coupon code SPOON at checkout for $100 off tickets.

We’ll see you next week!

Pitchbook: Food Tech VC Deals Inch Up After Receding For the Past Two Years

Like many segments across the venture investment landscape, the food tech sector has seen a significant pullback in investment over the past couple of years. However, according to a new report from Pitchbook, there are early signs that investors who have kept on the sidelines may slowly be pushing their chips back on the table.

According to Pitchbook’s Q2 2023 food tech investment segment analysis, total food tech deals for Q2 increased over the previous quarter by 13.3% to 268 total deals, up from 197 deals in the first quarter of 2023. Total deal value was down just a smidge, dropping to $2.2 billion in Q2 2023 from $2.3 billion in the first quarter.

The Pitchbook report states that the uptick in total deals in Q2 could be an early sign of a potential return of investors to the sector. According to the report, there are indicators that investors have “significant dry powder reserves and may be slowly returning from the sidelines to resume deploying capital.”

Looking at how the Pitchbook analysis breaks down the food tech sector by segment, the biggest overall sector in Q2 was food e-commerce, which accounted for over $1 billion in Q2. According to Pitchbook, food tech e-commerce deal values were driven by late-stage investment in companies like Getir, which nabbed a $475 deal in 1H 2023. Other big deals of note in the first half included a $230 million deal in meal replacement startup Yfood (a deal which had Nestle acquiring a majority ownership stake in the company) and a $172M series C investment in alt protein startup Meati.

Speaking of alt protein, the Pitchbook analysis is somewhat bullish on the sector, predicting that the global alt protein market will grow from $76 billion in 2023 to $423 billion in 2033, a compound annual growth rate of 19%.

If you want to read the Pitchbook report, you can download a copy here.

Elo Health Partners With Nourished For Launch of 3D Printed Gummy Supplements

This week, Elo Health, a personalized nutrition startup, announced they have partnered with UK-based Nourished to offer Elo customers an option to take their personalized supplements in gummy form.

The new partnership, which will allow Elo customers to replace up to 7 pills with a single 3D-printed gummy as part of a daily supplement regimen, is the result of a year and a half of collaboration between the two companies, according to Elo Health CEO Ari Tulla.

“We’ve been trying to find and build a better product for delivering the nutrients to people,” Tulla said in an interview with The Spoon. “Nourished has developed this unbelievably good modality of 3D printed gummy vitamins, and we’ve been working with them to formulate the ideal formulation based on the Elo Health AI.”

According to Tulla, while some of Elo’s customers are perfectly okay with taking multiple pills with a daily regimen, some would prefer a different delivery method for their supplements.

“Now they can take the equivalent of seven pills in one gummy,” said Tulla. “Seven layers equals seven pills. And we’ve worked with Nourished to dose them appropriately, so they actually have the same outcomes as the pills.”

Another new option to the Elo Health platform is the company is now allowing its customers to build their initial personalized supplement profile with a questionnaire instead of a blood panel. Initially, Elo required a finger prick blood sample to get a panel determining cholesterol, lipid, vitamin D levels, and more than a dozen other biomarkers. Understandably, some customers didn’t like the expense (up to $150 per test) or the discomfort of a blood test.

Tulla says the company’s AI model has optimized its platform so customers get similar outcomes with personalized supplements without an initial or ongoing blood testing.

“We have taken the learning from the last two and a half years and thousands of people who went through the funnel. And we’ve been optimizing the questionnaire to get very close to the same way we can get with a panel.”

For those who want to continue to use blood testing for an initial panel and on an ongoing basis, Elo will continue to offer them.

For Nourished, the Elo partnership continues the company’s momentum over the past year. This summer, the company announced they were entering Japan at Smart Kitchen Summit Japan, and they are also in the market in the northeastern US, the UK, and Europe.

In the future, Tulla sees his company’s AI-powered personalized coaching and nutrition counseling.

“When you have a question about nutrition, you want to get the response right then and there. And that’s what the AI can provide. It can provide a dialogue that happens right then.”

You can listen to my full conversation with Ari in the latest episode of The Spoon Podcast. If you’d like to hear from Ari in person, join us next week at the Food AI Summit.

Three Years After CES Debut, ColdSnap Readies Launch of Countertop Ice Cream Making Appliance

Nearly three years after it stole the show at CES 2021 with its countertop ice cream machine, ColdSnap has readied itself for a commercial rollout of its system this fall.

In a recent blog post, the company shared a glimpse of the product’s development over the past few years, detailing its pod production capacity expansion, the development of its production partner ecosystem, and the continuing refinement of the ColdSnap machine itself.

According to the company, they’ve expanded their production facility in the Boston suburb of Billerica, adding 20,000 square feet with an additional 24,000 square feet of space leased across the street. After producing their initial batches of liquid in small batches in their test kitchen, the enlarged factory that is part of the company’s headquarters will support 300-gallon batches of their liquid mix that will fill the ColdSnap aluminum cans (think energy drink-size) on-site.

In addition to the company’s ice cream and frozen treat mix production within its own factory, they are working with co-manufacturers to ramp up production. According to ColdSnap, initial tests of its mix showed the product was too thick to flow through the pipes at third-party manufacturers because the liquid was different from commercial ice cream mixes commonly made at manufacturing facilities. The company’s food science team reformulated the mix for production in external factories and for large-scale production in-house.

Another big step towards its commercial launch was the addition of packaging automation. It’s hard to believe, but until now, the company has hand-packaged all of the pods to support the roughly one hundred trial machines in the field. Now, as they look to scale, they’ve added automation equipment and project they will be able to manufacture 30 million pods per year.

ColdSnap also detailed improvements to the countertop machine, including adding a QR code reader that will tell the machine which type of drink it is making and what the company describes as a ‘more powerful’ refrigeration machine.

Part of what makes ColdSnap intriguing is its ability to make instant ice cream from room temperature, shelf-stable liquid. As company CEO Matthew Fonte told me last year, a product like this could be potentially transformative for markets where cold chain storage is not widely available or cost-prohibitive.

“China’s ice cream market is as large as the United States, but they have 25% the amount of refrigeration per capita that we do here in the States,” Fonte said. “If you could circumvent the cold supply chain and give them shelf-stable pods, they can freeze their ice cream on demand, they can reach the masses there and grow that market four times.”

I agree that this type of machine could be really interesting in markets without substantial cold chain storage, my guess is clones would pop up pretty quickly in markets like China once the concept is proven out.

ColdSnap’s initial target is the office and business markets, but in the long term, Fonte says the company will enter the consumer kitchen. He said he’s open to partners for any expansion into the home market, and I’m sure he’ll be able to find him if he and ColdSnap can prove the technology works and there’s demand for it in the commercial space.

A Conversation With BioCraft On Building an AI to Accelerate Cultured Meat Development

Over the past few years, companies in food tech product development have begun to utilize machine learning and other AI techniques to accelerate the development of their products. One of those companies is Biocraft, a company focused on developing pet food utilizing cultured meat as its primary protein input.

The company announced in May they would focus exclusively on B2B (they had previously been developing a consumer-facing product under the brand Because Animals), and this week started talking about how they are utilizing AI to assist in product development.

I sat down with Biocraft CEO Shannon Falconer and AI lead Chai Molina to learn more about the company’s AI and the future direction of the company.

Tell us why you decided to investigate how AI could help you develop cultivated meat.

Falconer: My background is my PhD is in biochemistry, and so mostly I was working on drug discovery and antibiotic research. And you know, when AI really hit the pharmaceutical industry in a meaningful way about a decade ago, it dropped the time and the cost of bringing a drug to market, so I’ve been very bullish on integrating this technology into what we’re doing for cultured meat.

I asked Chai if there are any types of tools that are available or that could work for us to actually do what we want to help in dropping our costs, and getting the right ingredient and nutritional profile of our products. Chai looked around and said, “No, there is not.” And so it was then really that we decided if there’s nothing available that we can purchase and use, then we’ve just got to build this ourselves.

Molina: I come to this with a view that this is a mathematical problem, that we just have to find the connections between kind of modeling out how human reasoning sort of works and connecting the dots between pieces of machinery in the cell. To try to understand how we can tweak this Rube Goldberg machine. How we can push it into the direction that we want it to go.

How did you start building the AI model?

Molina: There’s a machine learning component that is along the lines of natural language processing, where we collect our data from lots of publicly available papers and databases. From there, we process the data and basically build out a picture of the machinery inside the cell.

What do you mean by that?

Molina: These databases and papers might show a tiny glimpse of one piece of that machinery inside a cell. In a way, we’re superimposing little pictures and little parts of that machinery to build out the bigger picture. From there, we try to understand if you pull this cable or take this step, what’s it gonna do? There are all these threads of biochemistry in the cell, I like to think of it like dominoes where you push one, and then you see downstream effects. And so that is more of a mathematical modeling approach, involving network theory.

You’re using the analogy of a machine to describe a cell and understand what the domino effects of a certain action or input within a given hypothesis about that cell.

Molina: Yes. Once we have a picture of the machinery in the cell, it’s like, okay, ‘what can we how can we tweak that to make it do what we want?’ Say we want to add a novel medium component for a growth serum for the cells that will hopefully push them in the direction that we want, such as cell proliferation. So, for example, we look at different substances that are safe for consumption and ask how would the addition of these things at least qualitatively impacts the machinery in the cell.

And you’re running these hypotheses in the AI and then testing out promising results in a wet lab?

Falconer: If you’re a wet lab scientist, and you generate a hypothesis, there are so many things to test. Especially when you’re working on something as complicated as media optimization in order to achieve the right cocktail that will elicit proliferation as well as the nutritional profile that you are that you want that you desire. And so the time that it would take to perform all these various experiments empirically, not only of course, is very lengthy and very expensive. And so what this tool does is it allows us to trim down that list of experiments. This tool is able to prioritize for us and give us sort of a ranking order as to which hypotheses are more likely to succeed or fail. And so this shortens the time and the number of experiments.

And then and then the other thing that it does for us is, it allows us to actually get better at identifying sort of the unknowns. What this tool can do is it can identify, say, anywhere between, say, A and Z -anywhere along this line where a human brain cannot read and put into place all of the different connections – what might ultimately elicit the end desired effect. We can then go back and say, Oh, but we now know that five nodes upstream in these completely disconnected papers, we see that this domino will hit this one, and then this one hits this one, etc. And then we can actually achieve this desired effect down the road.

You announced last May you were becoming a B2B company exclusively, and you were sunsetting your CPG products. How has this new focus, combined with the AI development tool, changed your product development speed?

Falconer: Yes, so now we’re exclusively a b2b company, focused on delivering volumes and working with existing pet food manufacturers who already have that massive consumer base and who can disseminate product quickly as soon as we have it available to sell it. And so that’s what we’re focused on right now. I’d say over the past 12 months, with just focusing on this product development. I think we’ve made probably more progress in 12 months than we did in five years. And a big part of that is the development of our AI platform.

If you’d like to learn more about how AI is accelerating next-generation food development, join us October 25th at the Food AI Summit.

Survey: Parasite & Mercury-Free Fish Are Key Attributes of Cell-Cultured Seafood According to Sushi Eaters

According to a report published by cell-cultured seafood startup BluNalu, consumers value the absence of parasites and mercury in cell-cultured seafood, especially among those who frequently eat sushi. The data, sourced from a survey conducted by a market research specialist in 2022 and featured in a comprehensive report by BluNalu this week, displays how consumers prioritize specific qualities of cell-cultured seafood, like BluNalu’s toro tuna.

The survey chart below reveals the answer to the question: “How significant are the following benefits of cell-cultured seafood when deciding whether to order it in a restaurant?” The top four attributes, as ranked by sushi enthusiasts, all pertained to the “clean” attributes of food cultivated beyond our increasingly polluted and climate-affected oceans. The importance placed on seafood being free from parasites, pesticides, mercury, and microplastics suggests the kind of narratives companies like BluNalu should adopt when introducing their products to the market.

Other interesting insights from the BluNalu research compilation include a preference among chefs and food industry experts for the toro portion of the tuna – the fatty belly portion of the fish – when asked which type of fish and part of a fish that the company should emphasize when created a cell-cultured alternative to wild-caught fish. This desire for toro, according to BluNalu, is because chefs see an opportunity to present this premium cut to a wider audience. From the report:

Another intriguing insight from the BluNalu research is the preference among chefs and food industry experts for toro, the fatty belly region of tune. When inquired about which fish type and section the company should highlight when producing a cell-cultured alternative to wild-caught fish, most leaned towards the toro. BluNalu believes this is because chefs see an opportunity to offer this high-priced cut to a wider audience. From the report:

Discussions with chefs illuminated the opportunity presented by cell-cultured bluefin tuna toro to extend menu utilization in non-Japanese fine-dining restaurants for the first time at scale, given that 80% of the world’s supply of this fish has historically been consumed in Japan.

While it’s worth noting the while research in the report is obviously self-serving, the insights and data seem to ring true. Like many, I’ve become increasingly worried about the potential for toxins when eating seafood over the past few years, and I’d be interested in eating seafood that doesn’t have exposure to chemicals, parasites, and other contaminants of seafood pulled from the sea. And like many in the food tech world, I’m also interested in eating less seafood due to the threat to the seafood population from overfishing.

If you’d like to take a look at the full report, you can find it here on BluNalu’s website.