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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Total Online Grocery Sales Down 6% in March, But Grocer’s Home Delivery Business Still Growing

According to a new report by market researcher Brick Meets Click, total US online grocery sales were down 6% in March versus 2021, dropping to $8.7 billion versus March 2021’s record sales of $9.3 billion.

Bricks to Click defines the online grocery market in three segments: Ship-to-Home, Pickup, and Delivery. Ship-to-Home, which includes grocery delivered via parcel carriers (UPS, FedEx, USPS), saw the biggest decline, dropping by 30% from $2.1 to $1.4 billion. Pickup, which includes curbside, in-store, lockers, and drive-thru pickups, was down by 11%, dropping from $4.3 to $3.8 billion.

But it wasn’t all bad news. Delivery – which includes both grocer first-party (Kroger, etc.) and third-party service provider (Instacart, Shipt, Doordash) delivery – was up year over year, going from $2.9 billion to $3.5 billion.

In its analysis, Brick to Click pointed to the emergence of fast-grocery delivery as one of the reasons for the category’s growth.

“Two factors continued to drive Delivery’s strong performance in March,” said David Bishop, partner at Brick Meets Click. “First, the aggressive expansion of third-party providers into grocery is enabling additional ways for people to shop online, and second, newer services focused on faster cycle times are appealing to a broader range of trip missions and usage occasions,” he added.

One of the things we wondered early on in the pandemic was how much behavior change, such as online grocery adoption, would stick over the long haul. From the looks of it, many consumers are continuing to use online grocery shopping as the country emerges from the pandemic, but look to be mixing home delivery with trips to the grocery store.

You can read the full release from Bricks Meets Click here.

Enzymit Raises $5M For Bio-Manufacturing Platform It Claims Can Replace Fermentation

Enzymit Inc., a syn-bio production platform company, today announced the close of a $5 million seed round. The company is creating a new computational design platform based on what it terms ‘enzymatic manufacturing’, which it claims is superior to traditional biomanufacturing techniques utilizing fermentation.

In biomanufacturing industries such as alternative protein, precision fermentation utilizes microbes to act as cell factories to create new and novel products. The microbes are computationally programmed to express these products, but according to Enzymit these expressions often also result in toxins or are not highly productive due to their complexity. Enzymit’s solution involves designing what it calls ‘new-to-nature enzymes’ and using them in what the company describes as a ‘cell-free’ system. According to Enzymit, this avoids the difficulties related to cell-based manufacturing through fermentation.

The company’s computational enzyme design platform utilizes AI to process what it claims are billions of different enzyme structures. An enzyme’s structure defines its function, and Enzymit claims that its AI-driven process will allow it to unlock new functions at a much lower cost than traditional protein sequence research techniques.

“While there is no dispute that humanity’s future relies on biomanufacturing, if we expect to maintain our standard of living in the face of increasing global pressures and growing population, nature hasn’t supplied us with all of the enzymes humanity needs,” said CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Gideon Lapidoth in the release. “This is the bottleneck Enzymit aims to solve.”

According to the company, one of the first applications of its enzymatic manufacturing platform is to develop a novel process for manufacturing allulose, a calorie-free sugar substitute.

The Spoon Weekly: Tobacco Plant Bioreactors, Roboburgers & Starbucks NFTs

Welcome to the Spoon Weekly. The Spoon Weekly features some of our favorite food tech stories from the past week. Make sure to subscribe to get it delivered directly to your inbox.

BioBetter is Turning Tobacco Plants into Bioreactors to Drive Down the Cost of Cultivated Meat Growth Media

Food tech startup BioBetter has developed a novel way to create growth factors for cell-cultivated meat utilizing tobacco plants.

Based in Kiryat Shemona, Israel, the company announced that it has developed a method to create growth factors via molecular farming techniques by essentially turning the tobacco plant into a bioreactor. BioBetter’s technology employs plant cells to produce growth factors instead of more traditional techniques which utilize yeast, bacteria, or CHO in a bioreactor to produce growth factors.

The company’s technology involves identifying the gene of the target protein, cloning it, and transferring it into the tobacco plant. They then select the highest-yielding plants, breed them to develop higher yields, and then ultimately grow and harvest the plants.

As the tobacco plants mature, their cells express the growth factors and store them until harvest. The company then uses a proprietary protein extraction and purification technology that enables it to exploit nearly the entire plant, producing a high purity product at lower overall costs.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

As Meat Prices Rise, Could Plant-Based Meat Become a Value Option for Consumers?

Have you seen the price of meat lately?

It’s not pretty. The average price of a pound of ground beef in the United States has jumped over 20% in the past year and seems to just keep going up.

Meanwhile, the cost of a 12-ounce package of Impossible ground has continued to drop and is showing up at under $6 at some retail establishments, about the same price of a pound of extra lean ground beef.

Not quite price parity…yet. But as Impossible and other plant-based meat providers continue to ramp up volume, it’s worth asking: when meat alternatives reach price parity and, eventually, sell at a discount to animal meat, could customers start reaching for plant-based meat to save a buck?

You can read the full post at The Spoon.

Here Are Four Ways Starbucks Could Get Into The NFT Business

Starbucks is getting into the NFT business.

That’s according to company CEO Howard Schultz, who recently held a company town hall to discuss what the company’s plans are for the coming year. Schultz, who retook the reigns of the coffee giant this week, said the company would be in the NFT business before the end of the calendar year.

“If you look at the companies, the brands, the celebrities, the influencers that are trying to create a digital NFT platform and business, I can’t find one of them that has the treasure trove of assets that Starbucks has, from collectibles to the entire heritage of the company,” Schultz said.

While it can often be cringe-inducing when CEOs talk about new digital formats – something Schultz acknowledged by admitting he’s not a digital native – he’s right that the company has many assets that could be tokenized and create new ways to engage with its customers.

You can read the full post here. 

The Spoon is Hiring!

Do you love food tech? Are you a dynamic sales leader who can close? We want to talk! The Spoon is looking for a sales lead to help generate new sales, expand existing relationships and help build our business! Check this and other positions out at the Spoon Job Board!

Smart Kitchen

Holy Smokes: FirstBuild’s Arden Indoor Smoker Hits Crowdfunding Target in Two Minutes

FirstBuild, GE Appliances’ innovation arm, has launched its latest crowdfunding campaign, and this one looks like a potential home run.

The same group that brought you the Opal ice machine and the Paragon induction cooktop are now bringing an indoor pellet smoker called Arden to market via a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. The Arden can smoke up to two racks of ribs at a time or a small brisket, all inside your home without setting your fire alarms off.

The Arden uses a smoke-elimination technology that requires no additional filters to clean or replace. According to FirstBuild, the technology was first developed for GE’s smart hearth oven and has now been incorporated into the Arden.

The unit uses the same pellets used with other smokers. Once the smoke is pulled out of the chamber and into the smoke eliminator, it eliminates all smoke and just CO2 and water are exhausted into the kitchen. This allows users to sit the Arden on a countertop and smoke a slab of meat without any special venting.

To read the full story, head here.

Lomi, Unboxed: A First Look at The Lomi Smart Food Waste Composter

I find food tech fascinating – especially the products and solutions that have a shot at fixing a real problem in our food system. Tackling issues like food waste, food insecurity, nutrition, and accessibility, technology can give us the tools to change habits and systems.

But, I admit I haven’t always adopted tech in my own home that has made a huge change in our own food habits outside of our beloved sous vide, and nothing that stuck when it came to food waste. With growing kids, our grocery bills keep increasing, but I throw out more food on busy weeks than I’d ever like to admit.

Composting at home has never been an easy or…neat endeavor; we’ve tried several times, using smaller receptacles to collect food scraps to bring out to a larger pile. But no matter what, we abandoned our efforts for lack of time and patience. One year, we even subscribed to a service that would drop off nutrient-dense compost soil for us to use in our vegetable garden. We paid someone for THEIR broken-down food scraps — and it turns out, nutrient-rich, locally harvested, hand-delivered compost is not cheap.

To read the full story, head here.

Smart Kitchen Platform Company Drop Changes Name to Fresco

Drop dropped Drop.

The startup that started with a connected scale eight years ago announced it has a new brand identity. The company is now called Fresco, a name which “(reflects) the company’s priority to connect dots in the kitchen between appliances, home cooks and recipes to make cooking effortless,” said the announcement.

Fresco CEO Ben Harris said that the company needed a new brand given its evolution beyond its hardware roots.

“Drop was a great name for a physical product, but we pivoted to become a smart kitchen platform, providing end-to-end solutions to make appliances connected, from firmware development to IoT expertise and an app that pulls all the appliances together,” Harris said. “As a result, we needed a brand that better represented this.”

Drop is part of a cohort of smart kitchen startups that offer software and connectivity solutions to power kitchen appliances and help consumers cook and plan meals. While some of its peers have increasingly focused on shoppable recipes and looked to help power online grocery integrations, Drop has doubled down on expanding its solutions and increasing its partner roster in the connected kitchen and guided cooking space.

To read the full story, head here.

Future Food

Plant-Based Eggs Starting to Crack Open The European Market
 

Here in the US, a version of a plant-based egg from Eat Just, Inc. has been on the market since 2013, starting with an earlier version from when the company was Hampton Creek. The company’s current product, which uses its flagship mung bean formulation, began selling in the US market in 2019.

But if you wanted to try JUST Egg in Europe, you were out of luck.

That’s about to change. That’s because the company just got approval for its mung bean protein from the European Commission. The approval, which follows an earlier greenlight last fall by the European Food Safety Authority, paves the way for the introduction of JUST Egg to the European market by the fourth quarter of 2022.

That’s not the only good news if you are looking for an egg alternative in Europe. Berlin-based Perfeggt has been working on an egg alternative that derives its protein punch from fava beans, and is starting to ship in Germany.

Read the full post here.

Israel’s Vanilla Vida Wants to Expand and Improve the World’s Favorite Flavor

Here’s a fun fact: Did you know that vanilla is the world’s most popular flavor? In addition, how about the idea that 95% of all vanilla sold is synthetic, generally made from an oil or lab-developed chemical compound. Sounds like a supply and demand issue for a real deal vanilla pod.

Vanilla Vida has done its homework and sees an opportunity to tickle the universal taste buds by using technology and data to produce large quantities of top-quality vanilla anywhere in the world. Madagascar and Indonesia are the top crop producers but face issues with uncertain weather, quality control issues, and a long drying process. With proof of concept completed, Vanilla Vida CEO Oren Zilberman is ready to expand beyond Israel and launch climate-controlled farms worldwide.

Zilberman’s experience as a VC is instrumental in the success of his new company. “When you are building a startup, you are always looking about what is the chance it can do a major impact and some change in the world and at the same time, have a really good business,” the company’s CEO said in a recent interview with The Spoon. He also explained that his experience led him not to want to develop something new or go into an unproven segment. By expanding the opportunity for a wildly popular product, such as vanilla, Vanilla Vida can hit the ground running instead of requiring a great deal of marketing to drive customer awareness.

Read the full post here

Food Robots

Chili’s is Trialing a Sidewalk Delivery Robot From Serve Robotics

Hankering for some Chili’s but don’t want to jump in your car? It might not be long before that grilled chicken and bowl of chili arrive at your front door via sidewalk robot.

That’s because Chili’s parent company Brinker has been secretly piloting a trial with sidewalk delivery startup Serve Robotics and is evaluating the possibility of a wider rollout.

The first hint of the Brinker-Serve pilot came via a small mention last week in an article in a Dallas publication about the company’s drone delivery trials with Flytrex. Both Brinker and Serve have since confirmed to The Spoon that they are running an early stage sidewalk delivery pilot but were not ready to discuss further details of a wider rollout.

“We can confirm Serve is working with Brinker International to roll out robotic delivery for Chili’s customers,” a Serve spokesperson told the Spoon. “We will have more to share once service is launched.”

To read the full story, click here!

Watch This Video of RoboBurger, a Robot Burger Vending Machine, Cooking Up Burgers

Over the past couple of years, there’s been no shortage of robotic vending machines cooking up everything from salads to bowl food to ramen to pizza. But, what we haven’t seen – until earlier this week – is a machine that makes the cornerstone meal of the American fast food marketplace, the hamburger.

The RoboBurger, a robotic burger vending machine, arrived at its first location in a New Jersey shopping mall. The machine, a fully autonomous machine that makes a complete burger in minutes, showed up at the Newport Centre mall in Jersey City, New Jersey. The box measures 12 square feet, plugs into a 220-volt wall socket, has a built-in refrigerator and an automated griddle and cleaning system. The self-contained machine holds up to 50 frozen burger patties and cooks each burger one at a time.

You can read full post here.

Here Are Four Ways Starbucks Could Get Into The NFT Business

Starbucks is getting into the NFT business.

That’s according to company CEO Howard Schultz, who recently held a company town hall to discuss what the company’s plans are for the coming year. Schultz, who retook the reigns of the coffee giant this week, said the company would be in the NFT business before the end of the calendar year.

“If you look at the companies, the brands, the celebrities, the influencers that are trying to create a digital NFT platform and business, I can’t find one of them that has the treasure trove of assets that Starbucks has, from collectibles to the entire heritage of the company,” Schultz said.

While it can often be cringe-inducing when CEOs talk about new digital formats – something Schultz acknowledged by admitting he’s not a digital native – he’s right that the company has many assets that could be tokenized and create new ways to engage with its customers.

So what exactly could Starbucks’ entry into the NFT business look like? Here are a four ideas about how Starbucks could leverage NFTs:

Create a Loyalty Program That Gives Special Rewards for Starbucks’ Most High-Value Customers

Back when Adam Brotman, who used to run Starbucks digital and now is CEO of Starbucks-invested Brightloom came on The Spoon podcast, he suggested that restaurants could reward their most loyal customers by issuing them an NFT.

They could say “here’s a code to claim your free NFT,” Brotman said. “And by the way, we’re only giving there’s only ever going to be 300 customers that can own the Portofino’s NFT.”

Brotman – who Schultz called out in the video above as a ‘digital native’ – highlighted different benefits restaurants could give such as special events, exclusive offers and more. In Starbucks’ case, I can imagine benefits like first access to special drinks or coffee roasts, a monthly free menu item, or digital assets like special coffee recipes.

A Membership Coffee Club

Another potential avenue for a Starbucks NFT could be a subscription coffee club. A club could be something like the Bored Breakfast Club, an NFT-powered subscription service that sends NFT holders special coffee roasts by mail. It could also include some Flyfish-club like benefits like special access to Starbucks’ unique venues like their roasteries.

Access to Unique Digital Experiences

A Starbucks NFT could also be a ticket to unique online experiences such as a tour of coffee locations or virtual online event with coffee experts. When asked about where he sees the metaverse going, Adam Brotman even suggested this as an idea.

“If I’m a Starbucks in the metaverse, I’m not just serving coffee. I’m growing coffee. I’m giving people tours of my farm in Costa Rica. What are the things that I wish I could transport people to experiences that I can’t scale in real life because of distance or cost or physics?”

NFTs Could Be Deep Insights Into Starbucks’ Coffee

One thing that makes NFTs and the blockchain interesting is their ability to provide proof of provenance for food and beverage products. Starbucks has long made noise about its use of fairtrade coffee, so it’s easy to envision how NFTs could be proof of where the coffee was sourced and provide deep insights to the coffee purchaser about the coffee chain of custody and provenance.

While all of this is speculation, I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two of my guesses is close to the direction Starbucks heads with their NFT effort. The company is a leader in digitization of the customer experience and is recognized for having one of the industry’s best loyalty programs.

Finally, given Adam Brotman’s presence at the Starbucks town hall and that the company he now leads, Brightloom, was essentially the result of Starbucks’ attempt to spin out its digital program assets into a standalone company, I wouldn’t be surprised if Brightloom plays a part in whatever NFT efforts emerge out of Starbucks this fall.

Smart Kitchen Platform Company Drop Changes Name to Fresco

Drop dropped Drop.

The startup that started with a connected scale eight years ago announced it has a new brand identity. The company is now called Fresco, a name which “(reflects) the company’s priority to connect dots in the kitchen between appliances, home cooks and recipes to make cooking effortless,” said the announcement.

Fresco CEO Ben Harris said that the company needed a new brand given its evolution beyond its hardware roots.

“Drop was a great name for a physical product, but we pivoted to become a smart kitchen platform, providing end-to-end solutions to make appliances connected, from firmware development to IoT expertise and an app that pulls all the appliances together,” Harris said. “As a result, we needed a brand that better represented this.”

Drop is part of a cohort of smart kitchen startups that offer software and connectivity solutions to power kitchen appliances and help consumers cook and plan meals. While some of its peers have increasingly focused on shoppable recipes and looked to help power online grocery integrations, Drop has doubled down on expanding its solutions and increasing its partner roster in the connected kitchen and guided cooking space.

The company emphasized the word neutral when describing itself in a new intro video: “What started with a shared love of food and technology has evolved to become the neutral, cross-brand platform that seamlessly brings appliances, home cooks, and recipes together.” That emphasis on neutrality may be a reference to other smart kitchen software platforms that have sold large stakes to appliance brands (Chefling) or others that have been acquired outright (Whisk/Samsung, Yummly/Whirlpool).

The move to change a brand identity nearly a decade into a company’s existence isn’t without risk. Many in the kitchen and consumer cooking technology space are familiar with the Drop name and its products. Now it’s up to Fresco to educate the market about its new identity. However, because Fresco is a B2B brand, the lift won’t be nearly as heavy a lift for the company since it doesn’t have to educate consumers.

UNC Launches Cellular Agriculture Course to Prepare Students For the Cultivated Protein Revolution

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill may have lost to Kansas in the NCAA men’s basketball final last night, but Tar Heels everywhere can take small comfort in the fact their school in helping to prepare future competitors in an altogether different game: the cellular agriculture revolution.

That’s because this quarter UNC-Chapel Hill has launched one of the country’s first classes focused exclusively on cellular agriculture.

The class was developed in partnership with students from the Chapel Hill Alt Protein Project, a student organization developed with the support of the Good Food Institute. The group worked with three UNC Chapel Hill professors to develop and launch the course over the past year. The class was designed with the goal of creating a pipeline for new talent in the North Carolina market for this rapidly growing industry.

Sophia Retchin, a student at UNC-CH and cofounder of The Chapel Hill Alt Protein Project, was driven to help create the class because she was frustrated that none of her classes addressed the topic and its importance in solving the world’s environmental problems.

“Incorporating alternative protein education into universities is extremely important because if our professors are not teaching students about this amazing field, then how are we going to fuel it with amazing talent?.” Retchin said in a post about the course.

The class, which was full after the first day of registration, started in January and included lectures on scaffolding, molecular farming, cell line, and cell culture development. Guest lecturers include a number of founders from some of the well-known names in the space, including Stephanie Michelsen of Jellatech, Michelle Egger of Biomilq and Fayaz Khasi of Elo Life.

UNC-CH follows other universities that are starting to pioneer new courses focused on alternative proteins and cellular agriculture. In the US, Tufts has been teaching about cellag for a couple years and recently received a large grant to develop a cultivated protein center of excellence. Universities in Singapore and Israel have also developed courses to teach students about this new field.

Plant-Based Eggs Starting to Crack Open The European Market

Here in the US, a version of a plant-based egg from Eat Just, Inc. has been on the market since 2013, starting with an earlier version from when the company was Hampton Creek. The company’s current product, which uses its flagship mung bean formulation, began selling in the US market in 2019.

But if you wanted to try JUST Egg in Europe, you were out of luck.

That’s about to change. That’s because the company just got approval for its mung bean protein from the European Commission. The approval, which follows an earlier greenlight last fall by the European Food Safety Authority, paves the way for the introduction of JUST Egg to the European market by the fourth quarter of 2022.

That’s not the only good news if you are looking for an egg alternative in Europe. Berlin-based Perfeggt has been working on an egg alternative that derives its protein punch from fava beans, and is starting to ship in Germany.

And then there’s Le Papondu (formerly known as Les Merveilloeuf). The French startup, which has been working on an alt-egg, started to work with restauranteurs in France to distribute its egg. The company originally planned on its egg arriving in a plant-based eggshell, but it looks like the egg is showing up, for now at least, sans shell.

Before both of these companies, there was Oggs. The UK startup, which uses aquafaba (the liquid left over from cooking chickpeas) as the secret sauce for its plant-based egg, started shipping in the UK market starting in 2020.

While Europe looks like it will see many new plant-based egg products on the market by the end of this year, newer products derived from techniques using precision fermentation or cellular agriculture might take a while longer. Europe’s strict GMO regulations apply to genetically modified microorganisms utilized in precision fermentation techniques used by the likes of The Every Company. Fiction Foods plans to introduce a cell-cultured egg in the third quarter of this year, but cultivated eggs are likely years from being approved for consumption in the European market.

Chili’s is Trialing a Sidewalk Delivery Robot From Serve Robotics

Hankering for some Chili’s but don’t want to jump in your car? It might not be long before that grilled chicken and bowl of chili arrive at your front door via sidewalk robot.

That’s because Chili’s parent company Brinker has been secretly piloting a trial with sidewalk delivery startup Serve Robotics and is evaluating the possibility of a wider rollout.

The first hint of the Brinker-Serve pilot came via a small mention last week in an article in a Dallas publication about the company’s drone delivery trials with Flytrex. Both Brinker and Serve have since confirmed to The Spoon that they are running an early stage sidewalk delivery pilot but were not ready to discuss further details of a wider rollout.

“We can confirm Serve is working with Brinker International to roll out robotic delivery for Chili’s customers,” a Serve spokesperson told the Spoon. “We will have more to share once service is launched.”

Chili’s Serve pilot is just the latest move into robotics by the casual dining chain. Last October, robot servers named Rita from Bear Robotics started showing up across the country. And as mentioned previously, the company started testing out a Flytrex drone in North Texas.

As more restaurant revenue share comes via off-premise delivery, chains like Chili’s are exploring drone and sidewalk delivery to counter the high cost of traditional delivery from the likes of Uber and DoorDash. Wade Allen, Brinker’s SVP of innovation, told Dallas Innovates that drone delivery is “a lot cheaper” than solutions that involve a human and a car. Likewise, the cost economics of sidewalk delivery robots are also likely to be much lower than that of traditional delivery.

For Serve, which began life as a division of Postmates and spun out of Uber last year, Brinker represents a massive opportunity with over 1,600 Chili’s locations worldwide. The trial comes on the heels of last year’s seed round with strategic investors Uber, 7-Eleven, and Delivery Hero, all of which represent potentially interesting opportunities for the company.

The Food Robotics Market Report 2022

Imagine sitting down at a restaurant to a meal cooked entirely by robots instead of human chefs, would you taste the difference? 

Or imagine walking up to a sleek vending machine and ordering a bowl of hot, freshly made soup or a tossed green salad.

This future is here today as the food robotics industry has been one of the fastest growing sectors in food tech. This growth is in part due to the challenges faced by the restaurant and food service industry over the past couple years, as well as confluence of advancements in automation and robotics that have fueled a new cohort of startups to enter this space. 

Restaurants have been the largest end-market for food robotics over the past five years as they look to address the rising cost of labor and increase efficiency. Research conducted by Square found that 62% of restaurants say that automation would fill critical gaps in managing orders placed online, at the restaurant, and via delivery apps. 90% of restaurants agreed that increased automation for back-of-house operations would allow staff to focus on more important tasks. 

Automation in restaurants serves as a solution to improve the efficiency and productivity of restaurant employees, automate repetitive and mundane tasks, speed up service, streamline interactions between businesses and guests, advance guest recognition and customer relationship management, address language barriers, enhance personalization, and provide entertainment and novelty to the guest experience. In-house automation offers benefits to restaurant operating costs including labor, food waste, real estate, and rent as well as changing consumer preferences in regards to omnichannel ordering and food safety. On the other hand, consumer-facing kiosks allow restaurants to bring their food to markets it might not be able to reach with the investment of a large retail space. 

The intersection of food and robotics presents new business model opportunities including white label robotic offerings, wholly robot-powered restaurant brands, and robotics as a service business model. Food robotics can be applied to help power entirely new operating models such as ghost kitchens to make them more efficient and keep operating costs low.

This report will evaluate the factors driving food robotics innovation, explore the different contexts in which food robotics are used with a focus on in-house automation and independent consumer-facing kiosks, analyze the advantages and disadvantages of this new technology, dive into major players, explore challenges and barriers to development, overview the investment landscape, and discuss the future of food robotics.

This report is for subscribers to Spoon Plus. If you would like to subscribe, learn more here. 

Aleph Farms is About to Send Cow Cells to Space. Here’s What They’re Looking to Learn

In five days, Aleph Farms will watch as cow cells from its research labs are handed to Eytan Stibbe, the second Israeli to travel to space and the first ever to head to the International Space Station (ISS). Stibbe will be traveling with a SpaceX crew on the Axiom-1 mission, taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in a Falcon 9 rocket on April 6th. Stibbe and the rest of the crew will spend eight days aboard the ISS, orbiting an average altitude of 227 miles above Earth. 

Why is an astronaut taking cell cultures from Aleph into outer space? As described by a post published this week on Aleph’s website, the company hopes to understand better the effects of microgravity on two basic processes responsible for muscle tissue formation, which will help them better understand how cow cells can be transformed into the building blocks of steak.

From the post:

Understanding processes in such an extreme environment, like space, will allow us to eventually develop an automated, closed-loop system that can produce steaks during long-term space missions. Similar to car manufacturers and Formula One, in space, we are developing the most efficient processes under the toughest environments. The processes we are validating in space can then be transferred to our mainstream production on Earth to help us increase efficiencies, and reduce our environmental footprint. Our space program will ultimately help us develop more sustainable and resilient food systems anywhere.

The company is working with SpacePharma, an organization specializing in developing drugs in microgravity environments. SpacePharma has developed a microfluidic device called a Lab-on-a-Chip that feeds the cells and allows them to grow in transport. Once on the ISS, Astronaut Stibbe will transfer the Lab-on-a-Chip into the ICE Cubes platform, which allows scientists on Earth to do research in real-time as images and data are sent from the Lab-on-a-Chip.

Aleph isn’t the only food company looking towards space. Last year NASA announced 28 winners of the first phase of its Deep Space Food Challenge (including one called Space Cow) and announced in January a $1 million prize purse for phase 2. A consortium called Space Foodsphere in Japan is comprised of dozens of Japanese companies as well as JAXA, and last year the group was selected to help develop food systems for long-term stay on the Moon. The European Space Agency put out a call for proposals last year to expand its research around cultured meat in space.

As Meat Prices Rise, Could Plant-Based Meat Become a Value Option for Consumers?

Have you seen the price of meat lately?

It’s not pretty. The average price of a pound of ground beef in the United States has jumped over 20% in the past year and seems to just keep going up.

Meanwhile, the cost of a 12-ounce package of Impossible ground has continued to drop and is showing up at under $6 at some retail establishments, about the same price of a pound of extra lean ground beef.

Not quite price parity…yet. But as Impossible and other plant-based meat providers continue to ramp up volume, it’s worth asking: when meat alternatives reach price parity and, eventually, sell at a discount to animal meat, could customers start reaching for plant-based meat to save a buck?

Meat Prices Likely to Stay High

While meat prices may crest eventually as COVID-related disequilibrium sorts itself out of the system, much of the inputs to create a pound of meat – chemical fertilizers for feed, rising labor prices for processors and distribution, etc. – may not be coming down anytime soon in an economy where inflation is at levels not seen since the 80s.

Retail price of ground beef in US 1995-2021. Source: Statista

And then there’s the demand side of the equation. The appetite for meat continues to grow worldwide, and American farmers are one of the primary beneficiaries as exports of U.S. grown beef grew over 20% in the last year. If demand continues to grow at double-digit percentages every year, prices could still go up even as labor and other price inputs plateau.

Plant-Based Meat Still a Premium Product

For now, though, plant-based meat is still more expensive. Consumers are still asked to pay a plant-based meat “tax” when substituting an alt-meat patty at many fast food joints. While found for $5.99 at some stores, a package of Impossible or Beyond Meat ground is still priced significantly higher at premium grocers.

But that all may eventually change. Back at CES 2019, Pat Brown made it clear his goal was to drive the price of his company’s product down to where it was cheaper than the price of animal meat. While he’s not quite there three-plus years later, he and others are making progress on closing the difference.

So when the two meat types reach price parity and plant-based prices possibly drop even lower than conventional meat, it will be interesting to see what happens to the demand for alternatives. One could imagine consumers reaching for plant-based as a lower-cost alternative in one scenario. But, on the other hand, there’s also a chance some will continue to prefer animal meat and be willing to pay a price premium for what they see as “the real thing.”

However it shakes out, there’s a good chance we’ll see how big a factor pricing plays in the consumer calculus in the next couple of years as the two types of meat continue on their current cost trajectories.

Watch This Video of RoboBurger, a Robot Burger Vending Machine, Cooking Up Burgers

Over the past couple of years, there’s been no shortage of robotic vending machines cooking up everything from salads to bowl food to ramen to pizza. But, what we haven’t seen – until earlier this week – is a machine that makes the cornerstone meal of the American fast food marketplace, the hamburger.

The RoboBurger, a robotic burger vending machine, arrived at its first location in a New Jersey shopping mall. The machine, a fully autonomous machine that makes a complete burger in minutes, showed up at the Newport Centre mall in Jersey City, New Jersey. The box measures 12 square feet, plugs into a 220-volt wall socket, has a built-in refrigerator and an automated griddle and cleaning system. The self-contained machine holds up to 50 frozen burger patties and cooks each burger one at a time.

RoboBurger CEO Audrey Wilson

The machine makes burgers without any human ever touching the food. The frozen meat and buns are prepackaged. The only time a human gets involved with the RoboBurger’s operation is when they come out every couple of days to restock and empty the wastewater. The wastewater comes from the 30-second cleaning cycle the machine conducts between each burger served.

RoboBurger CEO and cofounder Audrey Wilson, a Carnegie Mellon graduate who spent much of his career heading up analytics and business intelligence groups at places like Vimeo and Arkadium, has been burning the midnight oil on the RoboBurger for much of the past two decades. Wilson started to make serious headway on his robot vending machine four years ago, left his full-time job in 2020, and cofounded RoboBurger with CTO Dan Braido and CMO Andy Siegel.

You can watch the RoboBurger make a burger (actually a few burgers) for CNET’s Bridget Carey, who visited with the RoboBurger team at the Newport Centre mall to learn how the machine works, in the video below.

A Robot Made Me a Messy Burger and I’d Do It Again (RoboBurger First Look)