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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Non-Tech

FryAway Turns Your Used Cooking Oil Into a Disposable Solid

When used cooking oil gets poured down the drain, it doesn’t disappear. It ends up in sewer systems, where it congeals. Over time, more oil and other debris amasses, forming blockages called fatbergs—which cost some cities millions of dollars per year to clean up, and can also cause sewer overflows that pollute surrounding waters.

The alternative method for getting rid of cooking oil—pouring it into a plastic container or glass jar, waiting for it to congeal, and then throwing it away—isn’t perfect, either, as it relegates a recyclable container to a landfill.

FryAway offers another solution. The plant-based powder transforms liquid oil into a solid that can be scooped out of the pan or fryer and thrown away. This week, The Spoon joined FryAway’s founder and CEO Laura Lady on Zoom to find out where the idea came from, and how the product works.

The story of FryAway starts with Lady’s own love of cooking. “Not only am I from New Orleans, I’m also a Latina from New Orleans, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that we love fried foods,” she told The Spoon. “I cook a lot at home. I fry a lot. I am guilty of having poured oil down the drain and not really thinking about where it went.”

Lady first learned about fatbergs and sewer overflow through conversations with friends. At one dinner party, a friend brought up a Japanese product that solidified cooking oil, making it easier to throw away. The idea caught Lady’s interest, and after looking into the product, she decided to develop a similar solution for the U.S. market.

Before FryAway, Lady worked in marketing and product development for children’s toys. “I think product development in general is very much about solving problems creatively. When it comes to toys, you’re trying to figure out how to bring a character to life,” she said. In founding FryAway, she carried over that problem-solving experience into the food space. “It was like bringing two universes together—one being my love for building brands and products, and the other being my love for food.”

During the product development process, Lady drew on chemistry knowledge from her undergraduate years. “I started researching, reading, trying to figure out how an oil could be solidified,” she said. “And I came across the process of hydrogenation, where you add hydrogen to a molecule to harden it.”

Hydrogenation is a familiar term because the process is used in the food industry. Margarine, for example, is made by solidifying vegetable oil using hydrogen-rich saltwater. And that’s basically how FryAway works: You stir the product (a hydrogenated fatty acid) into your used cooking oil while it’s still hot, and a reaction occurs between the two, causing the fat to solidify.

“Once the mixture cools down to room temperature, you start seeing that transformation from liquid to a gelatinous form to a waxy, hard substance that can then be tossed in the trash,” Lady said. “As it solidifies, it will also trap all of that gunk and debris that’s left behind when you’re frying, so that all of that comes out of the pan in one easy step.”

Two versions of the product (one for pan frying, and one for deep frying) are available to consumers on the company’s website and via Amazon. The team is mostly relying on word-of-mouth marketing to raise awareness about the product.

While larger commercial kitchens are already required to use oil remediation services and grease traps, there could be applications for FryAway in smaller restaurants and catering operations, Lady said.

The company has plans to launch a third product in early 2022, and after that, Lady will continue to explore other solutions for repurposing used cooking oil. Driving that expansion and exploration is the idea that we all want to take care of our shared infrastructure and environment—but need simple ways to improve our habits. “At the end of the day,” Lady said, “it’s about making life easier for those of us who love to cook.”

Soylent Relaunches in Canada as Meal-in-a-Bottle Sales Fuel Up

Starting today, Soylent’s meal-in-a-bottle drinks and powder will again be available for delivery to Canadian consumers, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

This comes after the more than two-year hiatus in Soylent sales in the Great White North. In the fall of 2017, Soylent had to halt Canadian distribution of its products after, as it wrote in the press release, there were “challenges with certain Canadian government filings.” Chiefly, it did not meet Canadian food inspectors’ standards of what constitutes a meal replacement.

Almost three years later Soylent has finally caught up on the proper regulatory paperwork and is returning north of the border. The company will relaunch in Canada with a more limited lineup, including three beverage flavors and two powders flavors. The product will initially be available only online through Soylent’s website.

Now is an ideal time for Soylent to expand its sales footprint. The aforementioned press release noted that the company’s return to Canada “comes at a time when many people are looking for shelf-stable, nutritious products that can be delivered directly to their homes.” In short, a pandemic — when people are panic shopping and anxious about having enough food that won’t go bad quickly — is actually kind of a perfect situation for meal replacement drinks like Soylent.

Jamie Sullivan, Director of Sustainability and Corporate Affairs for Soylent, told me over email that the company had seen “ebbs and flows” with their online sales that “seem to be aligned with the demand and worry about access to meals, groceries, and nutrition during this time.” She also noted that most of the company’s sales right now are coming from D2C channels — unsurprising, considering the rise in food delivery and grocery e-commerce as people shelter in place.

Soylent isn’t the only meal-replacement drink that’s navigating shifts in demand during the pandemic. James McMaster, the CEO of Huel, another complete nutrition company, told me that sales of their meal beverage have been “unprecedented.” He pointed out that Huel’s long shelf life (12 months), D2C sales channel, and low price point ($1.90 a meal) are all contributing to its popularity as we enter a time where people want to stay in more, shop less, and, with a recession looming, save money.

Meal replacement drinks could do more than just serve as back-up consumer nutrition for the pandemic. Sullivan also told me that Soylent is making donations to food banks. Thus far Soylent has donated more than 500,000 Soylent meals.

Normally I’d shy away from including blatant PR-y announcements like this in a piece. However, food banks are currently in desperate need of nutritious food, and meal replacements could actually be a viable solution to help pad nutrition gaps in donations. As well as in your pantry.

When It Comes to Food, What Compromises Will We Make in the Age of COVID-19?

This weekend I went to my favorite neighborhood coffee shop and, just like always, reflexively brought along my takeaway mug. But when I got there I saw the signs that — duh — coffee shops aren’t using takeaway mugs anymore in an attempt to cut down on potential contamination. So I got my coffee in a paper cup and, once outside, poured it into my own mug so that it would be easier for travel.

That interaction got me thinking: with restaurants shifting from dine-in to all takeout and delivery, what will the toll be on packaging? Americans already throw out a staggering amount of food and beverage to-go containers, most of which ends up in a landfill. It’s too early to see any new data from the past few weeks, but I’m willing to bet that that number is increasing.

Really, we’re between a rock and a hard place: on one hand I want to support my local restaurants and cafés however I can, which, right now, means ordering takeout. At the same time I feel guilty when I end up throwing away a clamshell container, cutlery, napkins, and a cup and plastic straw every time I get a veggie taco meal with a drink to go.

This quandary brings up a bigger question that will only grow as we continue into the great unknown of post-COVID-19 life: what are we willing to sacrifice? The question applies to several sectors of the food world.

Grocery. Ordering groceries for delivery has the benefit of convenience and brings less risk of contamination. However, if you’re ordering from Instacart or Amazon, you’re supporting an enterprise that doesn’t necessarily take care of its workers the way it should.

On top of that, you might not be able to get exactly what you want, when you want it. Our own Chris Albrecht wrote about his not-entirely-pleasant experience with online grocery delivery, which was both “misleading” and “confusing.”

Food delivery. If you want to support local restaurants/eat delicious food that you don’t have to cook yourself but aren’t leaving the house, food delivery is an easy option. But as our resident restaurant expert Jenn Marston wrote, delivery is not without its fair share of compromise. Third-party delivery services often take large percentages of each sale from restaurants, despite deals that they’re implementing in the face of COVID-19. They’re also notorious for treating drivers poorly.

However, if you’re trying to really do the social distancing thing or are in quarantine, delivery might be one of your few viable options for feeding yourself.

Health. If you’re working from home right now, like most of us are, staying healthy might be a real struggle. Snacking is all too easy when your pantry is right there all the time and filled with dark chocolate peanut butter cups.

Admittedly, eating healthy is likely not the highest priority for a lot of folks right now. And there are tools that you can use to help stick to a balanced diet, if that’s a goal for you right now. But if this crisis lasts significantly longer and people are stuck eating canned foods and takeout with nary a fresh vegetable in sight, we could start having another health crisis on our hands.

Image via Blue Bottle.

Packaging. As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, single-use packaging for food is a humongous issue plaguing our planet. Before ish hit the fan with coronavirus, a crop of companies were stepping up to reduce their waste. Sweetgreen and Chipotle were rolling out fully compostable to-go containers with no “forever” chemicals. Pre-prepped meal delivery services like Daily Harvest were also transitioning to compostable packaging. These companies are hopefully still moving forward, but other initiatives, like Blue Bottle’s drive to transition to all-reusable cups by 2020, are likely put on pause.

What’s next?

For now, people are going to prioritize feeding themselves and their families — packaging and ethics are not necessarily the highest concern. Nor they should they be. But I have to wonder: will these questions start to factor in again once things go back to normal?

The truth is we don’t know when things will return to the way they were — or what parts of the meal journey will be permanently altered. Will we go back to our old balance of dining in and takeaway? Will we continue to order out more since many folks have struggled with unemployment and thus have less spending power? How many restaurants will even survive to reopen?

The scary answer is, we don’t know. But you can bet your bottom dollar we’ll be here to report on the shifting food space throughout the coronavirus pandemic — with a cup of to-go coffee in our hands.

Dark Days, Resets and the Eventual Birth of Good Things

If you’re old enough to remember 9/11, you remember how crazy and upended everything felt in the days, weeks and years following that day.

There was the immediate shock of watching the planes hit the buildings – I still remember the sound of my wife’s voice when she called me into the room and pointed at the television – and then there was the long period of uneasiness in the following days of entering a time where there was no defined playbook.

It’s been a couple decades since and memories have faded, but I’ve never forgot how that moment in time not only altered things in a big societal way – politics, travel, international relations – but also how it set into motion lots of smaller changes in so many lives, changes that ultimately sprouted into new relationships, careers, and even new businesses.

One former coworker of mine quit his job as a technology analyst and went into the FBI to fight terrorism. Another woke up and realized he needed to get serious about his life and went on to start one of tech industry’s most well-known tech blogs. There are million other stories like this of lives inalterably changed across the country and around the world.

And while it’s too early to tell just how extensive the damage of the COVAD-19 coronavirus will be, it’s pretty obvious at this point that there will be many more deaths, economies will continue to slow and many jobs will be lost.

My suspicion is the impact will be big, on the scale of what we saw in 2001, and because of this we’re going to go through a reset that we’ll all have to grapple with. Resets can be bad in many ways – sickness, death and job losses are all very bad things – but I hope down the road we’ll also see some good.

We talked on this week’s podcast about the potential ways in which the coronavirus could accelerate change in the world of food, increasing adoption of fairly new technology and ways of doing things such as human-less check out, automated food dispensing and more.

But I think the bigger impact in the world of food and most other industries will be realized over a longer time horizon, in ways that only come with the way a reset makes us, societally and individually, rethink things in meaningful ways.

Forced to say home, cancel travel, and social distance? Difficult, no doubt, but such down time also means an opportunity to think about what it all means and to reassess. New business ideas, many of them taking into account our new mutual reality, will spring up and over the next year, two years, decade.

We still need to be realistic. There could be many dark days ahead. But, while many of us are going to have to grapple in the near term with potentially big disruptions to our lives, careers and businesses (I run an event business and I’m thinking about what this all means), I am still hopeful for what will be millions of inspiring stories of human resourcefulness and ingenuity that spring out of this globally shared experience in the coming years.

GoSun Crowdfunds Reusable Cutlery Set The Size of a Credit Card

For those who give a fork about single-use plastic waste, there’s a new crowdfunding project with your name on it.

GoSun, maker of the eco-friendly battery-powered fridge and solar oven, just launched a Kickstarter campaign for its GoSun Flatware, a patent-pending set of reusable cutlery that’s so small it fits in your wallet. The stainless steel fork and spoon come in two pieces in a thin metal case roughly the size of a credit card. The pieces are dishwasher-safe and can be snapped together to make small (but functional) cutlery. The theory is you can keep the case in your wallet, so that whenever you go out to eat or pick up to-go food you can use it then and there and don’t need to take the single-use plastic utensils restaurants offer.

With the popularity of food delivery and our collective obsession with convenience, single-use cutlery has become a massive problem. According to National Geographic, more than 100 million plastic utensils are used every day in the U.S. alone. Since single-use cutlery varies in shape and material, they’re super difficult to recycle — which means that the vast majority of spoons, forks, and the like wind up clogging landfills or killing ocean turtles.

While there are plenty of other reusable cutlery options out there, GoSun’s convenience sets it apart. If you keep the set in your wallet, you can’t forget it when you go pick up your Chipotle burrito bowl. It’s self-contained, which means you don’t have to worry about cleaning your cutlery after use, lest you walk around with a dirty fork in your pocket until you find a sink

Clearly I’m not the only one intrigued by this credit card-sized solution to cutlery waste. The GoSun Flatware Kickstarter campaign has raised over $179,000, way more than its $2,500 initial goal, with nine days left in the campaign. Early backers can snag their own set for $20 before the price doubles as it heads to retail on the GoSun website.

The GoSun Flatware is set to deliver in February of 2020. As always, it’s good to be healthily skeptical towards crowdfunded hardware projects. However, this is GoSun’s seventh crowdfunded project, and several of its products are already shipping, so it seems like a relatively safe bet that backers will actually get the goods.

GoSun isn’t the only one thinking outside of plastic when it comes to single-use cutlery waste. Another notable company is Planeteer, which nabbed first prize at the SKS 2019 Future Food competition. The startup makes edible single-use spoons, so instead of ending up in the trash or recycling bins they truly leave no trace.

Single-use cutlery waste is an immense problem, so it’s refreshing to see companies developing creative solutions. I actually ended up backing GoSun Flatware myself, so hopefully that means at least a few plastic forks in the ocean.

The Hatchery is an All-in-One Incubator for Chicago’s Food Entrepreneurs

Say you want to start a company to start selling your granola, vegan burgers or world-famous kombucha. How do you make the leap into a bona-fide business?

It’s definitely not easy. Budding food companies have to find an industrial kitchen space, funding, co-packing facilities and distribution partners. It can be really, really expensive.

That’s where The Hatchery, the Chicago-based food business incubator comes into play. “Company owners would normally have to spend 80-100K to build out their own kitchen,” Natalie Shmulik, CEO of The Hatchery, told me as I toured the facilities this week — a huge financial risk when you don’t even know if your product is going to be successful. With The Hatchery, however, nascent food entrepreneurs can rent out kitchen space, coolers, storage space, and other necessary pieces to run their own business, without investing a massive amount of capital up-front.

The Hatchery was founded three years ago when ICNC, a small business incubator, suddenly started receiving a massive influx in applications from food and beverage companies. It didn’t have a suitable kitchen space for these startups so it teamed up with Accion, which provides small business loans, to create a non-profit that would foster food businesses and provide them with a startup space and the potential for investment.

In addition to physical space, members also get free access to The Hatchery’s series of events on topics like restaurant technology, accounting, and branding. The public can attend the events for a fee. Hatchery members also get connections to some of the incubator’s partners, including large food corporations like Mondelez, Kellogg, and others. For example, ingredient provider Ingredion has a permanent chef on-site to help entrepreneurs figure out how to make their products shelf-stable, etc.

The majority of The Hatchery’s entrepreneurs work in the CPG space, but the incubator also has companies in food tech and catering (both Tovala and Farmer’s Fridge are members). According to Shmulik, a few top trends they are currently seeing are ghost kitchens, healthy snack food, plant-forward foods, and even CBD products. (Though CBD food and drink is technically illegal, Shmulk told me that the state of Illinois had approved it for food use.)

Pricing varies, but Shmulik gave me a number of $2400 per month for an entrepreneur, which covers storage, coworking space, kitchen use and member coaching. The incubator currently has about 200 members and 20 businesses operating out of its space.

Lately food business incubators have become quite en vogue. Notable players besides The Hatchery are the Chobani Incubator program, D.C.’s Union Kitchen, and The Kitchen in Israel. However, The Hatchery is different in that it doesn’t take any equity, offer any funding, or limit membership to any sort of timeline. In that way they’re almost more akin to straight-up shared industrial kitchen spaces, like Boston’s Commonwealth Kitchen or Pilotworks, which offered commercial kitchen space for budding food entrepreneurs.

Of course, Pilotworks ended up having to shut down after failing to raise enough capital to continue. This doesn’t seem as much of a risk for The Hatchery, as it’s backed by companies with pretty deep pockets.

That’s a relief for aspiring food entrepreneurs in Chicago. Shmulik told me that there are only two shared kitchen spaces in the city, so it can be very difficult for entrepreneurs to secure a spot. As demand for local food rises and more entrepreneurs step up to fill that need, all-inclusive food incubators like The Hatchery will become even more of a hot commodity.

Natalie Shmulik will be speaking about the food tech startup ecosystem at SKS 2019 this October! Early Bird tickets are on sale now. 

Video: How to Make Food Commercials Look Cool with Slo-Mo and Robots

With their flying ingredients, bouncing ice and sloshing liquids, slo-mo food commercials are very good at making me hungry and thirsty. But did you ever wonder how the people behind those commercials get something as ordinary as an iced coffee to look so… cool?

The answer, in this video from B&H Photo, is good lighting, a good camera, and robots! Automation continues to creep across the entire food stack, from grilling burgers to delivering them to your door and now to carefully orchestrate ice cubes, coffee and milk all cascading beautifully into a glass. Check it out in this brief video:

How to Shoot a Commercial with Robots

If you’re a food startup or Kickstarter project looking to replicate that type of professional look, but don’t have a robo-sized budget, the video also explains how you can start out small and do some basic tricks bring your visuals to life.

And if you’re just a fan of gorgeous food imagery, you should definitely check out Modernist Cuisine’s high-end photography, which transforms ordinary acts like making coffee and slicing pizza into works of art.

An Impossible Whopper Review from a Spoon Reader

Living in the Pacific Northwest has a lot to offer: Trees, mountains, a Starbucks on just about every corner. But one thing we don’t have right now is the Impossible Whopper from Burger King. It’s only available in a few areas in the country, and was recently launched in the Bay Area as it starts to roll out nationwide.

It’s hard to justify a 13 hour road trip just to try BK’s plant-based burger, which is why we were lucky enough to have friend of The Spoon, and Bay Area resident, Tom G submit his review for us. His order of an Impossible Whopper, small fries and a small Coke cost him $11.85, after tax. And what did he think?

“It was good. Probably 85% of the way there. I should have ordered with cheese,” Tom texted me, “I think with cheese and had no one told me it was fake I probably wouldn’t notice.” He went on “It did have a slightly artificial taste but since the Whoppers do already that’s ironically in their favor.”

In addition to the positive review, the good news for Burger King is that Tom doesn’t typically ever go to one of its restaurants and went specifically to try the Impossible burger. Tom’s not the only new customer Burger King has attracted with the new Whopper:

This type of anecdotal evidence helps reinforce that the Impossible Whopper could bring an entirely new, or at least long-dormant, set of customers back to BK. In St. Louis, Burger King locations that offered the Impossible Whopper outperformed the chain’s national foot traffic average by 18.5 percent. The question now is whether these Impossible-curious customers are one-offs, or if they will come back for more.

In Tom G’s case, he said he’d go back to BK for another plant-based Whopper, though there are enough other restaurants serving the Impossible burger that he wouldn’t go out of his way for it. He prefers The Melt’s Impossible burger, even though it’s more expensive.

Have you tried the Impossible Whopper? What did you think? Did it bring you back to Burger King, and will you go back for more? Drop us a line and let us know!

Proper’s Vegan, Gluten Free and Allergen Free Cookie Dough is a Raw Deal (That’s Good!)

A couple months back, I realized that I was slowly turning vegan, thanks to all of the wonderfully delicious plant-based products coming to market. So I was excited when the team behind the vegan and gluten-free Proper Cookie Dough, told me about their Kickstarter and sent me a couple batches to review.

It’s probably best to define Proper by listing what it lacks. As my colleague, Catherine, pointed out to me, it’s not that hard to make gluten-free or vegan cookies, but making them both vegan and gluten-free is tricky. If that weren’t enough, Proper is going beyond all that, making cookie dough that anyone — even those with food allergies — can eat. To wit, Proper has:

  • No dairy
  • No soy
  • No eggs
  • No nuts
  • No corn
  • No trans fat

Proper is also organic, non-GMO and can be eaten raw or baked (more on that in a moment). The company sent me jars of the Chocolate Chipper and the Triple Chocolate varieties. For each, a serving is 2 tablespoons (HA! Sure.) and contains 130 calories, 9g of sugar, 7g of fat and between 115 – 120 mg of sodium. For comparison, JUST’s brand of eggless chocolate chip cookie dough has 150 calories per 2 tbsp serving, 11g of sugar, 7g of fat, and 105mg of sodium. So the two are pretty similar, though JUST isn’t gluten-free and has soy.

So how’d it taste? Proper Cookie Dough is actually quite good when eaten raw. Both the Chocolate Chipper and Triple Chocolate had a nice, rich flavor with a pretty smooth texture. As you can probably guess, I ate more than 1 serving at a time.

However, Proper’s dough didn’t quite make a, well, proper cookie when baked. I balled up the dough, and used my June oven’s cookie setting to bake them. The dough never melted into a cookie shape and stayed spherical, so it was more like eating a chocolate chip lump. The cookie itself was dry (even when not burned) and not that pleasant to eat. Of course, I should probably have different expectations of a vegan and gluten-free cookie. If that’s the only way you could eat a cookie, it’ll probably be delicious. (Sidenote: Proper should send its recipe to the Big Data, Yummy Cookies guy.)

The good news, though, for this cookie dough, is that Proper has successfully met its campaign goals and raised more than $10,000 on Kickstarter. The campaign still has five days to go, so if you’re looking for an allergen-free cookie, you can still grab a sampler pack at the $45 dollar pledge level (you’ll have to wait until September for it to ship though).

FDA Chief Scott “An Almond Doesn’t Lactate” Gottlieb Resigns

Scott Gottlieb, the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and better known around The Spoon as the guy who brought the debate over what to label “meat” and “milk” to national attention, announced his resignation from THE FDA today. It will go into effect next month.

In the age of Trump, it’s easy to assume an ulterior motive for any sudden prominent agency head departure. But according to The Washington Post, Gottlieb wanted to spend more time with his family in Connecticut, and the White House did not ask for his resignation.

Whatever the reason, we’ve spilled our fair share of ink covering Mr. Gottlieb’s tenure at the FDA, as he thrust the agency into the debate over which government body should oversee the regulation of emerging lab-grown or “cultured” meat products and what they should be called. He even held a public meeting on the topic to take comment as it developed those new regulations. Meat lobbying groups were insistent that only products derived from animals that were born, raised and slaughtered could be labeled as meat.

Given that cultured meat is still a ways off, Gottleib’s prominent work in the space was more of an attempt to get ahead of an issue before it literally hit the market, and to a certain extent, he succeeded. The FDA and USDA later agreed to a framework that divvied up regulatory responsibilities for the forthcoming cultured meat, and he did bring the labeling debate to national attention.

But Gottlieb probably got a little more attention than he wanted when he extended the labeling debate over to “milk.” At a Politico Summit last summer, Gottlieb said the FDA would start more strictly enforcing existing rules around what could be marketed as milk, a move that could spell trouble for the booming plant-based milk industry. FDA guidelines say that milk comes from a lactating animal, which made Gottlieb quip “An almond doesn’t lactate.” This joke caught the ear of Stephen Colbert, who mocked Gottlieb, saying ““If it ain’t from a mammal, you can’t call it milk; it has to be ‘soy juice’ and ‘almond sweat.”

JUST Might Be Seeking $200M — Here’s What They Should Do With It

Yesterday Bloomberg reported that JUST, the company known for its plant-based cookie dough, mayo, and eggless scramble, is raising $200 million. According to Crunchbase, JUST has raised $220 million so far.

JUST and CLSA (the overseas arm of Chinese investment bank Citic Securities Co. rumored to be involved) declined to comment, but given how hot plant-based (and cell-based) foods are right now, here are a few ways the company should consider spending the investment:

What Just’s lab-grown burger will look like.

Cell-based meat

JUST was supposed to bring cell-based meat to market by the end of 2018. Suffice it to say, that didn’t happen. The production technology seemed to be in place and the taste tests went well. What kept JUST from its goal was regulatory hurdles. Last November the USDA and FDA decided they would jointly regulate cell-based meat, which was a step towards establishing a clear regulatory process for bringing cultured meat to market. However, there are still a lot of question marks, including labeling. Until those are resolved, JUST can’t move forward.

The JUST website states the company will now bring cell-based meat to market by the end of 2019 (again, pending regulatory considerations), which gives it another 10 months to get its cell-based meat approved by the FDA/USDA and figure out how it will be labeled. To facilitate the process, JUST is currently hiring a Director of Regulatory Affairs, which is a step in the right direction. But if the startup wants to be the first to bring cell-based meat to market — or to have a prayer of bringing it to market, period —  it would be wise to use the new round of funding to help hire more folks to navigate the sticky regulatory issues surrounding cultured meat.

(Interestingly, the Director of Regulatory Affairs job posting calls for someone to “serve as subject matter expert for domestic and international regulations. Which makes sense since JUST recently told CBS San Francisco that the company plans to launch its cell-based meat in Asia first.)

 

Breakfast sandwiches made with JUST Scramble.

More JUST Egg

So far, JUST’s mung bean-based “egg” is its most unique offering. Vegan cookie dough and mayo are great, sure, but other companies make those products, too. But no one else so far has been able to make scrambled eggs without, well, the eggs. I’d like to see JUST Egg available more widely here in the U.S., and also internationally.

JUST has already started that expansion outside North America. In addition to the U.S., the eggless scramble is now available in Hong Kong, and China, and the company plans to move into Japan and India next.

It’s in this area of the world that JUST could make some of the greatest impact. According to World Atlas, Japan is the largest consumer of eggs in the world, and China is the third largest. If consumers there are willing to try a newfangled product like JUST Egg, it could significantly cut down on the global environmental footprint of poultry production.

New products would also be great. Imagine, say, a line of frozen breakfast sandwiches made with JUST Egg patties. Which would be especially good with…

 

Cheese?

JUST has not hinted at any plans to develop plant-based cheese, but there’s certainly a big market for it. While there are plenty of reasonably delicious stand-ins for meat, eggs, mayo, and yogurt, no one has yet been able to crack the code to excellent vegan cheese (at least in my mind). And we all need something to tide us over until Perfect Day swoops in with cheddar made without the cow.

—

Obviously to achieve all this would take a lot more than $200 million. But if the rumors are true and JUST’s coffers are about to expand, it seems like the most lucrative place to invest time and resources is in cell-based meat. After all, the company has a promise to fulfill and is racing against a timeline to do that. And as the first company to bring cultured meat to market, JUST is also paving the way for all cell-based meat and seafood companies. That’s a lot of pressure. If they want to succeed, the startup will have to invest some serious time, talent, and cash in figuring out a way around the regulatory roadblocks.

This post has been updated with information from a San Francisco CBS Local piece on JUST’s plans for the future. 

How to Host a Meatless (and Delicious) Super Bowl Party

My eating habits have been on a roller coaster so far this year. From discovering I am gradually turning vegan to switching over (temporarily) to a full-on keto diet, my eating has certainly boomeranged.

With Super Sunday almost upon us, I thought it would be a fun exercise to meld the two opposing lifestyles and create a “beefy” menu of snacks for the big game without using actual meat. This is actually easier than ever, thanks to innovations in the alterna-foods category that make meat substitutes closer to the real thing.

Here’s what I would serve:

Get more out of those (expensive) Beyond Meat burgers by breaking them apart and forming li’l meatless sliders. Beyond actually has a nice video showing you how to do just that on its site. Sadly, Impossible’s killer new burgers aren’t coming to retail until later this year, so maybe they can be on the menu for Super Bowl LIV.

Staying on the “meats,” I really like the LightLife Smart Ground crumble. It’s pretty versatile and can be used in chilis and sauces, but I would load them up on some hearty nachos, smothered in something cheese-like. Check out their recipe section for directions and more ideas.

You could also use the Smart Ground as a topping for a CauliPower pizza to spice up the plain ole cheese version. I’ve become a huge fan of the cauliflower pizza. I don’t think this is actually healthier for me (especially since I could eat an entire pizza in one sitting), but it is just as tasty as other frozen pizzas and, you know, cauliflower. If you’re feeling spicy, you could also make your own tofu-based pepperoni.

For a more snacky-snack type of food, maybe grab a handful of Coconut Jerky. I haven’t tried it, and it would be hard to get in time for the game, but if you can find it, going coconuts might be worth a try.

You can also go the way of Swedish McDonald’s and serve up falafel nuggets instead of chicken ones. Falafel is delicous! It’s just too bad Frecious veggie spreads aren’t widely available in the U.S. (yet) to serve as a dipping sauce.

For something sweet, the JUST eggless cookie dough is fantastic. Serve it raw in little spoons or whip up a mountain of freshly baked cookies for all your friends.

And finally to wash it all down, give the Bud Light a break and crack open a bottle of Kombrewcha (see what they did there?), the alcoholic kombucha. Though, I can’t imagine drinking more than one of them.

Do you have any tips, tricks or hacks for making it a meatless Super Bowl bash? Leave us a comment and let us know!