Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

News

Chris Young’s Combustion Launches Predictive Thermometer for Presale

When Chris Young first announced his new product a year ago, he made it clear he wasn’t making just another Bluetooth-connected thermometer.

“I started building the first thermometer in the world to actually measure the real cooking temperature which can profile your food so that it can estimate things like how big is the food and how fast is it cooking,” Young said.

Young made a convincing case at the time, explaining how the product, the Combustion Predictive Thermometer, would utilize eight sensors to monitor the core, surface, and ambient temperatures and give a cook an idea of the food is done. Getting that gradient temperature is important because, according to Young, only with that can you (or your thermometer) correctly calculate the true cooking temperature and how fast an item will cook.

Now, a year later, Young’s first product from his new company is finished and is available for presale on the company’s website.

Outside of making the industry’s first predictive thermometer, Young also wanted his new product to be extremely simple to use. That drive for simplicity was motivated by his experience at Chefsteps, where the team working on the Joule spent lots of time and resources troubleshooting the sous vide circulator’s networking technology (the Joule sous vide circulator requires a paired smartphone to operate).

In short, Young learned that sometimes simpler is better when it comes to cooking, and with the Predictive Thermometer, simplicity comes in the form of a paired timer that has a big display and doesn’t require an app or set up out of the box (though an app is available for those who want one). According to Young, the thermometer utilizes the built-in beacon technology to broadcast the cooking data to the timer and any other Bluetooth-connected appliance that wants to communicate with it.

Young didn’t reveal pricing last year when he announced the product, but now we have it: The thermometer and timer are regularly $199 but are available now for presale for $139. You can preorder one on the company’s website.

I Tried Viome’s Health Intelligence Test to Understand My Gut Microbiome and Biological Age

In recent years, the gut microbiome has drawn a lot of attention in the field of nutrition science for being able to tell us an extraordinary amount about our health. Viome, a personalized nutrition company founded by executive and entrepreneur Naveen Jain, offers at-home testing that allows users to get insight into their microbiome and overall health. As someone who is deeply interested in cutting-edge personalized nutrition, I was excited to try out one of Viome’s at-home testing kits.

Taking the test

Viome sent me its Health Intelligence Test, which measures stress response, biological age, and the health of your immune system, gut microbiome, cells, and mitochondria. Taking Viome’s at-home test is straightforward, and simply required both a blood and stool sample. The testing kit included all the materials needed to gather this, and supplied extra testing materials just in case you made a mistake during the collection process. I appreciated that the instructions were detailed but also easy to follow.

Once the stool and blood samples are gathered, packaged, and sealed, I just had to drop them off in a prepaid package at my local post office. Once the samples are received, Viome states that it takes about four weeks to receive the results, which is about the amount of time it took for mine.

Before you receive the results, you must take a lengthy intake survey in Viome’s user portal that asks questions about what you eat, how you sleep, stress levels, and other lifestyle questions. It took me about 40 minutes to answer all of the questions.

Background on my health

Prior to disclosing my results and experience with using Viome’s test, I think it is important to share my perceived health and lifestyle to give you more background. For the past eight years, I have followed a whole-foods, plant-based/vegan diet that incorporates a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains. I do yoga and walk every day, and rock climb multiple times a week. I get plenty of outside time because I hike, stand-up paddleboard, and forage for wild foods. I do not smoke, am not a heavy drinker, and have no chronic illnesses. I have rarely taken antibiotics in my life.

The results

In general, I consider myself to be a very healthy person and feel great most of the time. Therefore, I was surprised when I received my results.

Overall, my results were not terrible, but they were not great, and certainly did not meet my expectations. The results were graded on a scale from 0 to 100 (0 being the worst, 100 being the best), and the classification of being not optimal, average, or good.

How my mitochondrial health, immune system health, and stress response health were rated in my Viome portal

My cellular and mitochondrial health were classified as “not optimal”. My gut microbiome health and immune system health was rated as “average”, while my stress response health was “good”. I am 25 years old, but my biological health was considered to be that of a 21-year-old.

Within these larger categories were subcategories that were also graded. For example, within the “gut lining” category, there were other subcategories like butyrate production pathways and gut lining health.

The number of different ingredients recommended to me

One of the things that surprised me the most was that based on my results, the company recommended 56 different ingredients for me to supplement with. This included vitamins, herbs, minerals, food extracts, amino acids, prebiotics, and probiotics “we’ve identified to improve or help maintain your scores.”

Within the Viome portal, you can see what bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes, viruses, and probiotics, are present in the “My Active Microbes” section. My test results show that my sample contained several viruses: Paprika mild mottle virus, Pepper mild mottle virus, Tobacco mild green mosaic virus, Tomato brown rugose fruit virus. These are plant diseases, so I did not understand why this showed up in my gut.

As I mentioned before, I eat a diverse whole-food diet, eat pro-and prebiotic foods, forage wild foods, and even brew my own fermented beverages. Despite my efforts to maintain a healthy gut, only one probiotic strain was identified in my sample and my active microbial diversity ranked low.

A few of the foods on the “minimize” list

The company recommends foods that you should avoid and minimize, and also foods that are considered “superfoods” for your body. My avoid list had five foods listed (tomato, paprika, alfalfa sprouts, bell pepper, and mung bean sprouts), while my minimize list consisted of nearly 80 different foods. My superfood list consisted of 17 different foods, including cabbage, apple, artichoke, and broccoli.

Understanding the results

I first felt overwhelmed and stressed about receiving my test results, and decided to share them with my primary care physician. After looking over my results she said she was not concerned at all, especially since I did not have any symptoms I was worried about. I asked her specific questions about why some of my scores were not optimal, and she said that was not her field of specialty, and in all honestly, she wasn’t even sure of who would be best to bring my test results to.

I then decided it would be best to speak with someone from Viome to discuss my results further. I was able to talk with Grant Antoine, a naturopath by training and clinical expert at Viome. The Viome test results are intended to be self-explanatory, and Antoine said, “They’re straightforward, and hopefully, you’re doing a lot of the interpretation on your own.” When I asked who would be best to take the results to for a deeper explanation, he stated that a nutritionist or health coach would be a good option.

I actually have completed my health coaching certification and felt that I still needed to take the results to someone who was more qualified than myself.

Personally, I felt as if supplementing with 56 ingredients is excessive, especially since as a young, plant-based, athletic female, I already take a decent amount of supplements. When I asked Antoine to elaborate on why this is necessary, he said that this recommendation is based on my results, questionnaire, goals, and scores, and then seeing where there might be an opportunity to improve my scores. The recommendations are based on the company’s artificial intelligence engine that calculates the best way to support your scores and gaps with food and supplement.

Purchasing 56 different supplements would be extremely pricey (and take up a lot of cupboard space), but Viome offers personalized supplements it creates for you based on your results. If I did want to follow these supplement recommendations, it would really only make sense to purchase from the company. Viome offers customized supplements for a monthly subscription fee of $150 per month, which includes all of the recommended ingredients.

When asked why I had plant viruses present in my gut, Antoine said that when we eat plants that contain these viruses, they can linger in our gut, potentially causing an immune response or affecting the gut lining. He also said, “What exactly they’re doing, how harmful they are, we don’t exactly know if I am being 100% upfront, but there are indications that they’re inflammatory.”

Conclusion

When I asked Antoine if anyone had perfect scores across all health categories, he said, “For most people, there’s, room for improvement. We do have some all-stars that come through and they’re green across the board. I would say that those are elite athletes; there are some superstars out there.”

After already spending years figuring out what foods I should avoid, and creating health and wellness routines that make me feel great, I have decided to not follow Viome’s recommendations. Even though my results were slightly alarming, Antoine said, “But you actually have a very good result. You have a really good report of your biological age. I consider that to be kind of like your overall report card grades.” Maybe if I did follow the recommendations and take the supplements, I would feel better than I could have ever imagined.

If you are interested in giving Viome’s Health Intelligence Test a try yourself, it is currently available on sale for $199 (It is normally $299). For $129 (normally $199), the Gut Intelligence Test can be purchased on its own.

GFI: $27B in CAPEX Needed by 2030 to Meet Global Demand for Plant-Based Meat

As the demand for plant-based meat grows, we’re gonna need a whole lotta infrastructure investment to serve up all those patties and nuggets according to a new report from the Good Food Institute.

The report, titled, Plant-Based Meat: Anticipating 2030 Production Requirements, breaks down how much money is needed for plant-based meat production over the next decade. GFI estimates the plant-based meat industry will require $27 billion in cumulative capital spending by 2030 for new plant-based meat manufacturing infrastructure and will require another $17 billion in annual operating costs.

So how do they come up with these numbers? It all starts with their assumption that the plant-based meat industry will account for 6% of all meat consumption by the end of this decade, translating to about 25 million metric tons (MMT) of plant-based meat consumed annually by 2030. That 6% estimate and the corresponding 25 MMTs are based on an assumed 18% year-over-year growth rate for plant-based meat consumption. While one could quibble with that growth rate given the recent slow down from the 2020 surge in plant-based meat growth, I don’t think it’s unreasonable over a longer time horizon.

According to GFI, the bulk of this CAPEX will go into facilities that can pump out the required amount of plant-based proteins to serve the overall demand. These ingredients will be made using modern ingredient extrusion technologies, which are used to process raw materials into structured plant-based proteins. The analysis factors in the building of facilities that employ modern extrusion technologies such as low moisture extrusion (LME), a production technique which results in products like minced and flaked plant-based meat, and high-moisture extrusion (HME), which makes more realistic products that mimic real meat cuts. It also factors in the addition of newer production techniques such as 3D printing.

GFI forecasts the industry will need to build a total of 810 new structured plant-protein extrusion facilities by 2030. They peg the price of operating these new facilities at $17 billion annually, a cost that includes labor, utilities, and the raw materials that go into making structured plant proteins.

While it goes without saying this is a lot of money, it isn’t out of line with infrastructure investments seen by other new and fast-growing industries. The GFI points to the renewable energy industry as an indication of what we should expect in terms of required capital for plant-based meats: It’s important to note that there is ample precedent for this level of infrastructure investment expansion. Global renewable energy capacity investments grew from $40 billion in 2004 to $282 billion in 2019, a 14% compounded annual growth rate.

Finally, it should be noted that all this new capital is only for plant-based meats, which is only one segment of the emerging alternative meat industry. Other alt-protein categories such as precision fermentation or cell-cultivated meat will require additional billions of dollars invested in infrastructure to meet expected demand.

The Spoon Weekly: Food Replicators, Pizza Hut Robot, Scaling Future Food

Cana Unveils a ‘Netflix for Drinks’ That Can Make Nearly Any Type of Beverage

In late 2018, food tech entrepreneur and investor Dave Friedberg got together with a few scientists for dinner and drinks and talked about a research study that suggested most any beverage is made up almost entirely of water, with only about one percent or so making up a drink’s unique flavor.

It wasn’t long before someone wondered aloud if it would be possible to create a machine that could synthesize nearly any drink.

“Why not just make the Star Trek Replicator and let people print any drink they want, when they want, right in their own home?”

That night the concept for the Cana, a ‘molecular drink printer’, was born.

The device, which one investor describes as a “Netflix for drinks”, uses a single cartridge filled with flavor compounds that Friedberg claims can make a nearly infinite number of drinks: “We know we can print an infinite number of beverages from a few core flavor compounds. We know we can do this across many existing beverage categories — juice, soda, hard seltzer, cocktails, wine, tea, coffee, and beer. Consumer taste testing panels score our printed beverages at the same or better taste levels as commercially available alternatives. Our hardware designs will print beverages quickly and accurately. Our pricing and the footprint of our hardware can yield significant savings and advantages for most households..”

To read the full article about Cana’s molecular beverage printer, head over to The Spoon.

Virtual Event: The New Restaurant Tech Stack

For today’s restaurants, it’s no longer enough to rely on disjointed technology systems cobbled together over time. Creating a great customer experience that attracts dining dollars starts with having the right technology in place. It starts with a stack, built from the ground up, with the future in mind.

Join us on February 16th at 10:00 am Pacific for The New Restaurant Tech Stack webinar; we will explore the challenges for restaurant operators to build a modern technology infrastructure to power their consumer experience across all consumer touchpoints. 

This event is sponsored by Paytronix. 

Register for a free spot now!

Food Tech Predictions for 2022

You want food tech predictions? We got em! Last week we look at restaurant tech, food robotics, plant-based meat and consumer kitchen tech. Below are excerpts from each.

Five Predictions for Consumer Food & Kitchen Tech in 2022

Meet The Smart Food Delivery Locker

For the last few years, companies like Walmart, Amazon, and others have been trying to figure out how to deliver food when we’re not home. Ideas have run the gamut, from delivering products directly to our fridges, onto our dinner tables, depositing groceries in our garage, to even dropping deliveries into our car trunk.

All this effort would be unnecessary if homes just had temperature-controlled storage lockers, something that – at least until lately – hadn’t existed.

Until now. This month Walmart and HomeValet announced a pilot program that will deliver fresh groceries to the HomeValet smart outdoor delivery receptacle. Another company, Fresh Portal, is building a temperature-controlled home delivery box that is accessible both outside (for delivery companies) and inside the home. And then there’s Dynosafe, who appeared on Shark Tank in the spring of 2021 and got an investment from Robert Herjavec.

While companies like Yale have been making smart boxes for delivery for a little while, there hasn’t been a widely available temperature-controlled smart storage box. In 2022, I expect we’ll start seeing more deals like the Walmart/HomeValet deal, as well as some integration deals with third-party delivery providers.

To read all of our predictions for consumer kitchen tech, head to The Spoon. 

Five Plant-Based Meat Predictions for 2022

The Year of the Whole Cut

After years of countless plant-based burgers and other minced alt-meat product introductions, the plant-based meat industry will see lots more whole cut analogs make it to market in 2022 and beyond.

We first got a hint at CES 2019 that Impossible was interested in whole cuts when The Spoon broke the story the company was working on a steak, but since that time we’ve seen a bunch of companies announce they are working on building whole cut alternatives.

Juicy Marbles, Novameat and Redefine Mean are also working on whole cut steak analogs. Others like Atlast are offering mycelium-based whole cut bacon. Then there are those making whole-cut seafood analogs like that from Plantish.

Many of these companies are looking to deliver their products in 2022, and you can expect a wave of new plant-based whole cut concepts introduced throughout the year.

You can read all of my plant-based meat predictions on The Spoon. 

Five Food Robotics Predictions for 2022

Restaurants-in-a-Box Start Rolling Out

Get ready for the restaurant in-a-box. There are a number of startups with robo-restaurant concepts already in fully operational pilot tests who are looking to expand with multiple self-contained robot restaurants in 2022.

Hyper-Robotics, which makes fully automated containerized robot pizza restaurants that can pump out up to 50 pies per hour, is beginning to roll out its pizza robot restaurants in Israel. Cala, a French startup that makes fully autonomous pasta-making robots, is already operating a robot in Paris’ fifth arrondissement district. Another startup called Mezli, which is currently running its containerized bowl-food restaurant in Kitchentown, has plans to eventually launch more locations.

These are just a few self-contained robo-restaurants and we expect to see many more rollout in 2022.

Check out all of my food robotics predictions for 2022 on The Spoon. 

Five Restaurant Tech Predictions for 2022

Restaurants Will Deploy More AI, Automation & Cloud-Powered Labor to Offset Labor Challenges

Like many other restaurant chains, Checkers has struggled in recent years to find enough workers to cover the various shifts. Going forward, they won’t have to worry about that when it comes to manning the drive-thru as the company rolls out AI-powered voice bots to 267 of their restaurants.

This is only one example of how we’ll see restaurants embrace more technology to deal with what has become a permanent labor shortage in the restaurant space. Of course, automation and robotics will also be a part of the equation, but I think we’ll also see more restaurants find help through remote labor through platforms like Bite Ninja.

See all my restaurant tech predictions for 2022 on The Spoon.

Planning food tech world domination in 2022? Run a campaign with The Spoon!

We are experts in virtual events and webinars, have massive reach with our hugely popular newsletter, and reach hundreds of thousands of readers every month at The Spoon. 

Reach out for a media kit and we’ll be in touch!

Here Are The Details About Flyfish Club, Gary Vaynerchuk’s NFT Restaurant Opening in 2023

While we already knew some of the basic details about Gary Vaynerchuk and VCR Group’s NFT restaurant concept, we’ve learned more in the last week about how the whole thing will work.

Here’s some of what we’ve learned and my quick thoughts:

Token as Membership. At a high level, the Flyfish Club and its NFT membership is essentially a new, crypto-ized spin on an old idea: a member’s only dining club. To start, VCR initially made a total of 1,501 membership tokens for the Flyfish Club available to the public and reserved 1,534 for the company. Membership remains valid as long as a person owns the token. As just like most NFTs, the owner can resell the token (and many are already trying to do just that) on marketplaces like Opensea.

Flyfish Has Two-Tiered Membership. Flyfish has two types of tokens available: a Flyfish token and a Flyfish Omakase token. The Flyfish token, initially offered at 2.5 Ethereum (~$8,400), gets you into the restaurant and cocktail lounge while the Omakase token, offered at 4.25 Ethereum (~$14,300), gets you all that plus entry into the exclusive Omakase room.

To read all the details about Gary Vee’s NFT restaurant, head over to The Spoon.

ALSO!: David Rodolitz, the CEO of the Flyfish Club, will be speaking at our Food NFT and Metaverse mini-summit. Use discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets!

As Future Food Companies Look to Grow, A New Crop of Startups Lend a Hand on Biomanufacturing Scale-up

While companies creating precision fermented and cell-cultured food products continue to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, the reality is their products are still years away from making a significant dent in the overall consumption of a growing global population.

The primary reason for this is that these products still aren’t being produced at nearly the scale they need to feed billions of people. Some estimates have put the biomanufacturing capacity needed by 2030 at 10 billion liters in order to meet the projected demand for fermentation-based animal proteins.

The good news is that a growing number of companies are building out technology and services platforms to help these companies move towards scaled production. One such company is Solar Biotech, which makes customized plant architectures to help future food and other companies scale up their biomanufacturing capacity. The company has been working with startups such as Motif Foodworks and TurtleTree Labs to help them develop their product and move towards higher capacity production.

You can read the full story about the new crop of startups helping to scale future food at The Spoon

Pizza Hut Launches a Fully Robotic Restaurant-in-a-Box (Video)

This month, Pizza Hut debuted a fully automated robot-powered restaurant.

The ‘restaurant-in-a-box’ is based on technology from Hyper-Robotics, an Israel-based food robotics startup that makes containerized restaurants.

The restaurant is operating out of the parking lot of Drorim Mall, a shopping mall located in the central Israel city of Bnei Dror. The restaurant is fully self-contained, doing everything from dropping toppings to baking and boxing. About the only thing it doesn’t do is make the dough, but according to Hyper its pizza restaurant can hold up to 240 types of dough in different sizes.

When Hyper launched its robot pizza restaurant in November, it had a capacity of 50 pies per hour. It also had 30 warming cabinets, two robotic dispensing arms and dispensers for up to 12 toppings.

The customer initiates an order for a pizza directly from a touchscreen kiosk on the restaurant exterior or through the Pizza Hut app. After the pizza is made and boxed, a Pizza Hut employee takes the pizza from a dispensing tray and hands it to the customer. In future versions, the restaurant will be able to dispense the pizza directly to the customer.

To read the full story and see a video of the Pizza Hut containerized robot, click here. 

Podcast: Building The Star Trek Drink Replicator With Cana’s Matt Mahar

This week, Cana came out of stealth and announced their “molecular beverage printer”, a device the company says will be able to create almost any beverage from the same 80 or so flavor compounds.

In our conversation we talk about the development of Cana, drink personalization, the business model, the future of beverages and much more.

I’m glad I had this conversation because I had so many questions which Matt addressed, including:

Will the Cana beverage printer cartridge include alcohol and sweeteners, etc?

One thing I wasn’t entirely clear on from the initial announcement was whether the Cana will make a complete beverage, including alcohol, sweeteners, etc. According to Matt, the answer is yes. The Cana will make complete beverages, no matter if it’s a glass of wine, beer or whatever, complete with alcohol, sweeteners, etc.

Will Cana unlock personalized beverage market?

That’s their plan. I will write more about this later, but it looks like Cana not only will allow you to make whatever unique beverage you want (chocolate peanut butter coffee beer anyone?), but it seems they are also thinking about possibly partnering with drink and culinary creators to unlock special recipe concepts.

Pricing?

They addressed this in their initial posts, but Matt shed additional light on it for me when he said they expect their drinks to be 50% cheaper than anything you get at retail. The discount will be even steeper compared to bar and restaurant pricing.

Matt discusses a lot more details and their plans for the future, so give it a listen! You can also find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

As Future Food Companies Look to Grow, A New Crop of Startups Lend a Hand on Biomanufacturing Scale-up

While companies creating precision fermented and cell-cultured food products continue to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, the reality is their products are still years away from making a significant dent in the overall consumption of a growing global population.

The primary reason for this is that these products still aren’t being produced at nearly the scale they need to feed billions of people. Some estimates have put the biomanufacturing capacity needed by 2030 at 10 billion liters in order to meet the projected demand for fermentation-based animal proteins.

The good news is that a growing number of companies are building out technology and services platforms to help these companies move towards scaled production. One such company is Solar Biotech, which makes customized plant architectures to help future food and other companies scale up their biomanufacturing capacity. The company has been working with startups such as Motif Foodworks and TurtleTree Labs to help them develop their product and move towards higher capacity production.

With Motif, Solar helped them move into pilot production manufacturing for their new plant-based meat ingredient building block, HEMAMI. In partnerships like this, Solar will assist a company with technology transfer of their early products towards higher-scale manufacturing using what it calls its SynBio Hyperintegration Algorithms (SHAs). The end result of its proprietary algorithms is creating customized and modular production facilities built around what the company calls BioNodes.

The partnership worked so well for Motif in developing its HEMAMI product line that the company recently extended its collaboration with Solar.

“The continuation of our partnership will help secure the infrastructure needed to build out Motif’s pipeline of future products,” said Jonathan McIntyre, CEO of Motif FoodWorks, of his partnership with Solar. “Companies like Solar Biotech are an essential link in the move to create a more sustainable food-supply chain that has a positive impact on people, animals and the planet.”

Pow Bio is another company that brings scale-up expertise to new food startups. Pow helps startups building alternative proteins with the necessary fermentation capacity and infrastructure to help move their product concept off the bench and into production scale.

“We have a complete fermentation lab that scales and can take you from a flask you can hold in your hand to 1000L liters of fermentation capacity, which covers the entire ‘pilot’ stage of scale-up,” said cofounder Shannon Hall.

Pow helped alt-cheese startup New Culture take its early lab work and scale-up for pilot production. Before New Culture worked with Pow, their product cost roughly $100,000 to produce a kilogram of cheese. After working with Pow, the company’s product has dropped significantly and is approaching price parity with traditional cheese.

And then there’s Culture Biosciences, a startup that investor Dave Friedberg has described as an ‘AWS for bioreactors’. The company initially started with cloud-connected 250mL stirred tank bioreactors for fast-cycle bench development as a service, and in October of last year took on funding to expand and build out 5L and 250L bioreactors to help move from bench to pilot-scale production.

“Through Culture, we now have the option of a one-stop-shop for bench-scale testing and pilot-scale production,” said Ranjan Patnaik, CTO of alt-egg startup The EVERY Company. “We can develop a process with Culture and easily make a large batch of material. Other benefits include accelerating product pipeline development, data-driven, and lower-risk scaling, and saving them time and money required to build additional fermentation capacity.”

As innovators in the future food industry work on developing their products, these three companies look to play a pivotal role in helping them make the leap. But these three aren’t the only ones, and I expect to see more startups emerge to help fill the biomanufacturing commercialization gap for future food products as investors realize the future food industry doesn’t lack for good ideas, but what it does lack the scale-up and production capacity needed to feed billions of people by 2030.

UPSIDE Foods Adds Cell-Cultured Seafood to the Menu With Acquisition of Cultured Decadence

Today UPSIDE Foods announced they have acquired Cultured Decadence. The deal adds cell-cultured seafood products, including lobster and other crustaceans, to the UPSIDE portfolio.

Cultured Decadence, which was a Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Show finalist in 2020, was founded in Milwaukee the same year and will remain in the midwest, serving as UPSIDE’s ‘midwest hub.’

The news comes just a couple of months after the opening of UPSIDE’s flagship scale-up production facility in Berkeley. While the company has announced that cultivated chicken will be its first commercially available product, they have made it clear that their new facility will be able to produce a variety of different cell-cultured animal products.

“Seafood has a rich and delicious culinary tradition that makes it a favorite across the globe,” said Dr. Uma Valeti, Founder and CEO of UPSIDE Foods. “Cultured Decadence’s technology is incredibly promising, and their team is filled with passionate, smart individuals who want to make our favorite food a force for good. We’re thrilled to welcome the Cultured Decadence team to the UPSIDE family and are excited that the scientific, technological, and production infrastructure we have built over many years can help accelerate the mission impact of this team.”

One factor that may have made Cultured Decadance attractive – outside of the addition of cell-cultured seafood to the UPSIDE’s portfolio – is the difference in regulatory oversite in the US between seafood and poultry. The USDA and the FDA struck an agreement early on that the USDA will oversee the labeling framework for livestock and poultry, while the FDA will be the sole body regulating food products made with fish (except, for some reason, catfish, which the USDA oversees). Not only has the FDA had a year’s head start on the USDA in seeking public comments for the labeling of cell-cultured products, but some in the industry believe that the FDA might provide an easier regulatory glide path towards commercial availability when it comes to cultivated meat products.

Outside of regulatory considerations, it’s likely that UPSIDE’s development of its cell-cultured poultry products is further along than the much younger – and smaller – Cultured Decadence’s products, which may still require some significant cell-line development. UPSIDE has already had tastings of its products and they have been working towards commercial scale-up in their new flagship facility.

Finally, the acquisition by UPSIDE could also be an early sign of forthcoming consolidation by cell-cultured meat companies. Guessing by size of some of the recent funding rounds (including UPSIDE’s), it’s clear that the cost of bringing a cell-cultured meat product to scale will likely be in the tens to hundreds of millions, and at some point, it makes more sense for companies in this space to leverage existing investment in pilot and scale-up production infrastructure.

Pizza Hut Launches a Fully Robotic Restaurant-in-a-Box (Video)

This month, Pizza Hut debuted a fully automated robot-powered restaurant.

The ‘restaurant-in-a-box’ is based on technology from Hyper-Robotics, an Israel-based food robotics startup that makes containerized restaurants.

The restaurant is operating out of the parking lot of Drorim Mall, a shopping mall located in the central Israel city of Bnei Dror. The restaurant is fully self-contained, doing everything from dropping toppings to baking and boxing. About the only thing it doesn’t do is make the dough, but according to Hyper its pizza restaurant can hold up to 240 types of dough in different sizes.

You can see the robot in action here:

When Hyper launched its robot pizza restaurant in November, it had a capacity of 50 pies per hour. It also had 30 warming cabinets, two robotic dispensing arms and dispensers for up to 12 toppings.

The customer initiates an order for a pizza directly from a touchscreen kiosk on the restaurant exterior or through the Pizza Hut app. After the pizza is made and boxed, a Pizza Hut employee takes the pizza from a dispensing tray and hands it to the customer. In future versions, the restaurant will be able to dispense the pizza directly to the customer.

That Hyper’s biggest named customer is also the biggest name is pizza shouldn’t be a surprise, in part because its founder, Udi Shamai, is also the president of Pizza Hut Israel. Shamai is a master franchisee that oversees 90 Pizza Huts across the country.

When I wrote our food robotics predictions last week, one of the trends I predicted for food robotics was the rise of the robot restaurants-in-a-box. It looks like Hyper and Pizza Hut didn’t waste any time getting the ball rolling on this trend.

Integriculture Raises $7M to Build Cell Ag Infrastructure Platform for Scaling Cell Cultured Meat Production

This week Japan-based startup Integriculture announced they had raised $7 million to accelerate its efforts to build a cellular agriculture infrastructure platform to scale cell-cultured meat production.

Integriculture, which grew out of founder Yuki Hanyu’s ShojinMeat Project – an early effort to create a DIY cell-cultured meat community – is creating an end-to-end cell-cultured meat production system in CulNet. According to Integriculture, CulNet is a framework concept that incorporates all the steps and related technology required for the cell-cultured meat production process, from the creation of culture medium to processing to the end-product bioreactor.

Integriculture outlined the various pieces of the CulNet platform in June of 2021 when they announced the CulNet Consortium:

  • Standardized culture media: Recipes that are fundamentally different from the existing media (basal media). Basal media are the raw material for all cultured cell products, and a different type is required for each kind (food, material, medical, etc.).
  • CulNet SystemTM hardware: Hardware that lets people use the CulNet SystemTM across a broad spectrum of uses, whether it’s in mass production or just at home.
  • Product bioreactors: Bioreactors that are used to make things like the products’ edible parts. We estimate that a variety of animals used as agricultural products will be a source for the cells.
  • Cell product processing: The process control that is needed to meet the products’ processing and safety requirements (cell components and culture supernatant).
  • Cell sources: The process that is used to extract and culture cells from livestock and fishery resources and the systems that enable the whole sequence of processes to be completed right where the cell sources are produced—tailoring them to their intended use, source animal species, etc.

For the last couple of years, Integriculture has made it clear it hoped to have a cell-cultured meat industry build up around its CulNet concept, and with this recent funding, it looks like it definitely has momentum for this. However, one thing I found curious in this latest announcement was this sentence: “The proprietary CulNet System is capable of inexpensively culturing animal cells of all types and species without exogenous growth factors.”

When Integriculture announced the CulNet consortium last June, it sounded as if the company was essentially open-sourcing its technology for collaboration and development. In the latest announcement, this use of the word proprietary – and complete lack of any mention of the Consortium – makes me wonder if Integriculture is pulling back a bit and putting up guardrails around its intellectual properrty. If you’re an investor that would certainly be attractive since there is lots of money to be made in hardware, consumables, services, and technology licensing in a future multi-billion dollar industry if you own a significant amount of the IP.

Beyond the company’s designs on becoming a critical cell-cultured meat infrastructure provider, they also are looking to create their own consumer-facing product in cell-cultured foie gras. The product, which Hanyu said will be a hybrid product that combines both cell-cultured meat and plant-based components, is now expected to be introduced later this year.

Cana Unveils Molecular Beverage Printer, a ‘Netflix for Drinks’ That Can Make Nearly Any Type of Beverage

In late 2018, food tech entrepreneur and investor Dave Friedberg got together with a few scientists for dinner and drinks and talked about a recent article he had come across. The article detailed a research study that suggested most any beverage is made up almost entirely of water, with only about one percent or so making up a drink’s unique flavor.

It wasn’t long before someone wondered aloud if it would be possible to create a machine that could synthesize nearly any drink.

“Why not just make the Star Trek Replicator and let people print any drink they want, when they want, right in their own home?”

That night the concept for the Cana, a ‘molecular drink printer’, was born.

The device, which one investor describes as a “Netflix for drinks”, uses a single cartridge filled with flavor compounds that Friedberg claims can make a nearly infinite number of drinks: “We know we can print an infinite number of beverages from a few core flavor compounds. We know we can do this across many existing beverage categories — juice, soda, hard seltzer, cocktails, wine, tea, coffee, and beer. Consumer taste testing panels score our printed beverages at the same or better taste levels as commercially available alternatives. Our hardware designs will print beverages quickly and accurately. Our pricing and the footprint of our hardware can yield significant savings and advantages for most households..”

The system is about the size of a toaster and utilizes what the company describes as novel microfluidic liquid dispense technology that combines Cana’s individual flavoring ingredients in a small form factor.

The company was incubated within Friedberg’s Production Board, his investment holding company for ag and food tech businesses. The Production Board has spent $30 million building Cana’s proprietary hardware platform and chemistry system.

In Friedberg’s blog post about Cana, he talks about how this new appliance is part of a larger trend towards decentralized manufacturing.

“Making a molecular beverage printer meant inventing a new kind of supply chain. Provided that the printers can use materials mostly sourced locally (i.e. tap water), we can replace old industrial supply chains with ones that are more nimble and more redundant, moving production to the point of consumption — the home. This new decentralized supply chain would use less energy and less carbon and cost less to operate, sourcing and shipping only the flavor compounds that make up the 1% of each beverage, rather than all the water and packaging.

This great decentralization in food is something I wrote about in 2019, when I talked about how intelligence in food production systems had begun to move towards the edge: In food retail, IT, robotics and digital powered micromanufacturing start to make its way to the different storefronts. In the restaurant space, we’re beginning to see automation and robotics to create hamburgers at the quality a Michelin star chef would make them, only without the chef. And at home, we’re witnessing the emergence of digital technologies used to grow food and prepare food and beverages beyond the capability of the home cook.

Friedberg and the Cana team have smartly positioned their system as a way to create beverages without all the plastic waste, claiming that the machine can print enough drinks to save a family from throwing about a hundred containers a month into the recycle or trash bin.

From here, the company plans to move the Cana into full production. While they aren’t yet releasing pricing, Cana says their machine and the ingredients will be more affordable than buying the drinks in containers. The company says they will have more information on pricing and the initial design in the coming months.

Stay tuned…

Image Credit: Cana Technology

Five Predictions for Consumer Food & Kitchen Tech in 2022

Food tech prediction week at The Spoon continues, and today we’re looking at the home. And if you haven’t already, make sure you check out my predictions on restaurant tech, food robots, and plant-based meat.

Meet The Smart Food Delivery Locker

For the last few years, companies like Walmart, Amazon, and others have been trying to figure out how to deliver food when we’re not home. Ideas have run the gamut, from delivering products directly to our fridges, onto our dinner tables, depositing groceries in our garage, to even dropping deliveries into our car trunk.

All this effort would be unnecessary if homes just had temperature-controlled storage lockers, something that – at least until lately – hadn’t existed.

Until now. This month Walmart and HomeValet announced a pilot program that will deliver fresh groceries to the HomeValet smart outdoor delivery receptacle. Another company, Fresh Portal, is building a temperature-controlled home delivery box that is accessible both outside (for delivery companies) and inside the home. And then there’s Dynosafe, who appeared on Shark Tank in the spring of 2021 and got an investment from Robert Herjavec.

While companies like Yale have been making smart boxes for delivery for a little while, there hasn’t been a widely available temperature-controlled smart storage box. In 2022, I expect we’ll start seeing more deals like the Walmart/HomeValet deal, as well as some integration deals with third-party delivery providers.

Steam-Powered Cooking Gains Traction

Although steam cooking has long been a fixture in pro kitchens, it’s never taken off in the consumer kitchen. However, that could change in 2022.

Consumer steam cooking picked up, um, steam in 2020, when Anova started shipping their countertop Precision Oven. At CES this year, LG showed off a new microwave with steam cooking. And then there’s Tovala, the food delivery and steam oven startup which has started advertising it on national Sunday night football broadcasts.

While steam cooking has followed a similar path to sous vide circulators – a pro tool making its way into the home – I think it has much wider appeal. Because they know the power of steam-cooking, some chefs have pined for an affordable home combi-oven. Now that they’ve finally got their wish, 2022 might be the year consumers take notice.

Amazon Debuts a Smart Fridge

Back in 2017 when I first asked if Amazon might build on a smart fridge, all the evidence I had to go on was a couple of patent filings. Since that time, we’ve watched as the online giant launched branded kitchen appliances and worked on making Alexa a capable home cooking assistant.

And then last fall, Business Insider wrote about Project Pulse, Amazon’s top-secret smart fridge project. According to insiders, the fridge would include machine vision and other advanced technology tell us when food’s about to expire, and automatically order & replenish through Amazon. The effort is reportedly being led by the same group that developed Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology and has been in the works for a couple years.

Truth be told, the smart fridge category could use Amazon. The market has grown stale as big US appliance brands have slowed down their efforts in this space, including market leader Samsung. While the South Korean appliance giant has historically been the most aggressive among the bigs in the category, Samsung didn’t make any substantive announcements about Family Hub at CES this year other than adding it to the Bespoke Fridge line. There are also signs that the company may be shifting its focus to its new Home Hub as the center of its smart home strategy.

Bottom line, if an Amazon smart fridge becomes a reality in 2022 (and I think it will), it would catalyze some much-needed innovation from other large appliance makers.

Home Food Waste Technology Comes Into Focus

Smart composting appliances are one nascent category within home food waste innovation coalescing into a legitimate category. Kickstarter darling Lomi has finally started shipping, Vitamix, known for lits blenders, is shipping its FoodCycler FC-50, and a variety of others are on the way.

But composting is the last stop on the food waste mitigation express, and everyone would be better off preventing food from heading to the compost bin. To do that, we need better food storage, something a startup called Uvera is working with its food storage system that uses UVC light to kill bacteria and extend shelf life. There’s also Blakbear, who is working on a food storage system that would measure gasses emitted from food to help measure shelf life. And though they’re long overdue, startup Silo has told me they should be shipping in 2022.

For their part, most appliance brands still don’t seem to have a cohesive strategy for helping consumers reduce food waste, but that didn’t stop them from talking up sustainability at CES year. I hope all the talk translates to more action in 2022.

AR Takes Guided Cooking to the Next Level

Ever since Thermomix pioneered the category of guided cooking with the launch of the TM5 (and more recently the TM6), there’s been an array of companies building tech to assist consumers as they cook. In the last few years, that’s meant voice assistants from TinyChef and Amazon, software and connected cooking hardware from Hestan and others, and we’ve even seen futuristic concepts like this one at SKS 2020 that monitors eye glances as a way to help a consumer manage meal-making.

But the biggest leap forward in cooking assistance might come in the form of augmented reality. Last fall we saw Snap release their food scanning app that utilizes their augmented reality bar to help provide contextual information for items scanned by the phone, and last month we wrote about a cool demo of how a pair of AR glasses could significantly level up the home cook’s capabilities in the kitchen. And while Lauren Cason’s demo was just that – a demo – I expect some appliance makers may have taken notice of how powerful the combo of cooking and augmented reality could be.

We have a couple more prediction posts to come, so make sure to tune in next week!