Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Plant-Based

Sodexo to Deploy SavorEat’s Plant-Based Burger Printing Robot at the University of Denver

This week, food service giant Sodexo and plant-based 3D printing specialist SavorEat announced they will be rolling out SavorEat’s 3D printing robot at the University of Denver. The deployment of the SavorEat Robot Chef marks the first deployment of the Israel-based company’s 3D printing technology in the U.S.

SavorEat, which went public on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in 2021, has been building its plant-based 3D printing technology for half a decade. The printer, which both prints and cooks plant-based burgers, was first rolled out in Israel last fall through a partnership with catering company Yarzin-Sella. The printer enables customers to customize their burger, choosing the size of the burger, doneness, protein level, and cooking style.

SavorEat, which initially pushed its product’s plant-based 3D printing angle, started focusing on promoting its burger printer as a robotic chef over the last year-plus with the launch of its second-generation platform. The company has published several blog posts hailing the benefits of automation in restaurants and says it plans to help restaurants reduce costs through back-of-house automation.

The partnership with Sodexo was inked back in 2021, and at the time, the two companies indicated they would deploy the plant-based meat printer in 2022. From the announcement:

Sodexo will examine the robot chef system and the first product developed by SavorEat, a plant-based protein burger, within higher education institutions across the U.S. In parallel, both parties are working on reaching an agreement for the distribution of SavorEat products.

In 2020, SavorEat CEO Racheli Vizman told The Spoon that their plans extend beyond food service and that the company would someday build a home-based 3D meat printer.

“That’s our goal,” said Vizman. “Where we can also have, next to a microwave, we can have machines that you know can create a variety of products.”

While you may need to wait a while for the home version of SavorEat’s Robot Chef, in the meantime, you can try out a SavorEat printed burger at the University of Denver’s Rebecca Chopp Grand Central Market in Community Commons starting this week.

Meati Opens Up ‘Mega Ranch’ Production Facility, Plans to Produce “Tens of Millions of Pounds” of Fungi-Based Meat

Meati Foods, a producer of plant-based whole-food protein made from mycelium, announced the opening of its largest-yet production facility in Thornton, Colorado. The 100 thousand foot facility, dubbed the “Mega Ranch,” is expected to hit a production rate that could produce tens of millions of pounds of the startup’s fungi-derived meat product by late 2023.

The funding for the new facility comes in the form of a $150 million Series C raised last year and a recent $22 million extension round. The company’s total funding to date is more than $250 million.

Meati claims the Mega Ranch will be able to match and even exceed the scale of the United States’ largest individual animal-based ranches. The company says the Ranch is vertically integrated, which means it will allow for the growing, harvesting, processing, and packaging of Meati products under one roof.

Meati Foods’ CEO and co-founder, Tyler Huggins, said, “Investors and consumers recognize that Meati is a new, differentiated food. They only need to read our simple ingredient list and taste Meati to recognize that this is the cut-through option people have been waiting for.”

Meati’s product line, called Eat Meati, includes Classic Cutlet, Crispy Cutlet, Classic Steak, and Carne Asada Steak. The company sells them online through its website and through retail and food service partners like Sprouts Farmers Market, Sweetgreen, and Birdcall.

Meati’s announcement is yet another in a long line of alternative protein startups announcing scaled-up production capacity for their products in recent months. Earlier this month, fermentation-focused seafood specialist Aqua Cultured unveiled it has started construction on a new production facility in Chicago, and last month Believer Meats broke ground on what it claims will be the biggest production plant for cultivated meat, producing over 10 thousand tons of cultivated meat when running at capacity.

Asia Pacific Leads in Plant-Based Meat IP According to Report

While many think innovation in plant-based meat is a fairly recent phenomenon, companies, researchers and entrepreneurs have looking for ways to leverage plants as an alternative to animal agriculture since the sixties.

However, there’s no doubt the pace of innovation has accelerated in recent decades amidst a worsening climate crisis and a rising global population, and one way to quantify the innovation is through an analysis of the growth in intellectual property. And now, thanks to a new report published by researcher Roots Analysis, we can do just that.

Source: Roots Analysis

According to the Roots report, the number of cumulative IP publications for plant-based meat has grown by nearly 3x over the past decade, going from 2,388 in 2012 to 7,126 by 2022. In addition, the growth in patent filings, granted patents, and amended patents (the three of which make up the bulk of IP-related publications) has grown nearly every year over the past decade, with the annual growth of publications going from just over one hundred per year for the decade prior to 2012, to around 900 per year in both 2020 (915 new IP documents) and 2021 (891 new documents).

Source: Roots Analysis

According to the report, most IP documents in the plant-based meat space are patent applications (77.4%) and granted patents (18.7%). When breaking the documents down by region, Asia Pacific is responsible for over half of all IP (3,717), compared to about 18% for North America (1,277 documents) and Europe (1,310 documents).

While Asia Pac dominates in terms of the total number of patent filings and granted patents, the report points out that some of the most valuable intellectual property in the early market is owned by larger North American and European food companies. The report points to Impossible Foods, Cargill, Mars, and Solae as some of the leading IP stakeholders in plant-based meats.

The report also broke down the key phrases used within the intellectual property documents to give an idea of the focus of the innovation. The top categories of keywords within the filings are production methods, proteins, preparations, and products. The report also analyzed the various types of plant-based meats in which researchers and companies create intellectual property. Some of the different plant-based meat categories include plant-based seafood, structured/textured meat analogs, plant-based meat for pet food, processed meat analogs, amorphous meat analogs, and dehydrated meat analogs.

You can find out more about the report here.

Israel’s Profuse Technology Raises $2.5M for Technology That Lowers Cost of Cultured Meat

As the world awaits the arrival of cultured meat, manufacturers and their suppliers strategize to cope with the realities of this potentially mammoth market. Infrastructure and product scaling for growth remain a challenge from the supply side. Still, concerns over the pricing of lab-grown meat, poultry, and seafood might be the most significant roadblock to consumer acceptance.

Israeli-based Profuse Technology believes it has a solution to bring manufacturing costs down to a point where a pound of cultured beef could achieve price parity with meat from a live animal. A step forward, the company has announced the completion of a $2.5 million seed funding round (and a total of $3.75m since its establishment). The round is led by New York-based investment firm Green Circle and existing shareholders – OurCrowd, Tnuva, and Tempo. Other new investors include Siddhi Capital, a leader in investments in cultivated meat, and Kayma, the investment arm of De-Levie, a meat industry specialist.

According to the announcement, the company will use the funds to collaborate with cultivated meat producers, obtain FDA regulatory approval, and expand the research and development team and its laboratories. The funds will also position the company to source significant capital raising at the end of the second quarter of 2023 to commercialize its customer collaborations.

Profuse’s solution is based on what it calls “a cocktail” that is added during the period when a harvested animal stem cell begins its proliferation process. As founder and CTO Dr. Tamar Eigler-Hirsh told The Spoon: “You would start with a biopsy, and it could be directly from the muscle tissue or an embryonic stem cell harvested from an animal. The cultivated meat companies would take these cells, bank the most successful ones, and optimize them. They would grow them in bioreactors and expand and expand and proliferate these cells until they have hundreds of millions of cells per milliliter. And then, at some point, they have to differentiate the cells to become muscle tissue or muscle fibers. This is where our media supplement comes in.”

“What we’ve basically found a way was to target this natural biological mechanism of regeneration by understanding the biological pathway that that that’s responsible for that,” Dr. Eigler-Hirsh continues. “There’s one protocol to make muscle, and everybody follows it, and it’s very inefficient. Right now, we’re hearing numbers being reported about between 10% to 30% efficiency in converting stem cells into muscle. And using our technology, we can bump that number up from 30% well to over 90% efficiency in conversion of stem cell to muscle.”

Greater efficiency yields more muscle which in turn leads to cultured meat. The math is simple: a more significant and efficient supply can bring down manufacturing costs, which can be passed on to the consumer.

Profuse founder and CEO Guy Nevo Michrowski goes into further detail on the issue of price parity. . First, you won’t need as many cells to start with because your efficiency of using the cells will be 95%. So instead of going for 30 days, you’re going for only 25 days. And most important, the most expensive days are being saved. So, in the last ten days, where over 85% to 90% of the median cost is consumed, those days are cut by half because you don’t need as many cells. And then also, the differentiation and fusion maturation phase of creating them is now reduced to two days instead of ten. Your overall process is only 27 days versus 40 days, which means your factory can produce 33% more yearly.”

Using technology developed at the Weitzman Institute, the company started in 2021. In 2022 it began collaborating with cultivated meat companies and others who potentially would be our distribution partners. Michrowski said that Profuse is working with the major players in the cultured meat and poultry space” And I would say that of the ten leading companies worldwide, we are working with the vast majority together “to demonstrate and quantify the effects of our cocktail on their specific production environment. We operate with different customers to demonstrate our value in different viable development environments and methods.”

Better Meat Co. Serves Legal Foie Gras To Hungry Silicon Valley Workers

No trip to Silicon Valley would be complete without a visit to one of the sumptuous dining experiences at companies such as Yahoo, Google, Adobe, and LinkedIn. We’re not talking private dining rooms with white table clothes; employees and guests (especially employees) are treated to five-star dining every day, at no charge. And, if someone is hungry between scheduled meals—no worry; there are more snacks on hand than you would find at your neighborhood grocery store.

Thanks to its relationship with Bon Appétit Management Company, a Palo Alto-based café and catering service, Better Meat Co. is pulling a sleight of hand by offering foie gras to the employees at LinkedIn’s Sunnyvale officer cafeteria. The trick here is that foie gras is illegal in California, so Better Meat substitutes fungi for duck or goose liver. For good measure, Better Meat is showcasing its deli turkey slices, also made from mycelium called Rhiza. Rhiza (the Greek word for root) is a whole food, complete protein that’s allergen-free, neutral in taste, and has the texture of animal meat.

Showcasing is the keyword here. At this point in its lifecycle, Better Meat Co. is more of a supplier than a producer, offering its mycoprotein to partners such as Hormel for inclusion in its existing and new products.  As CEO Paul Shapiro explains, Better Meat Co. is focused on what it does best—“Our real expertise is in the fermentation and creating this extremely meat-like and versatile ingredient,” he told The Spoon, “But every once in a while, we like to showcase what the ingredients can do and the fact that it can make things as diverse as a turkey slice and foie gras really showed that. And so, in California, it’s illegal to sell foie gras, but now there is an option to enjoy that same delectable experience.”

Better Meat Co. walks a tightrope like others in the plant-based protein and cultured meat sector. Once a viable product has been developed, they face the option of taking their creations directly to the market (B2C) or taking the safer B2B route where a company offers its product to food manufacturers for their use in existing or new products. Shapiro, known throughout his industry as a visionary, realizes his company can take both paths to success.

In October 2021, Better Meat Co. and Hormel’s venture division entered an exclusive partnership to bring new mycoprotein and plant-based protein products to the marketplace. “Companies like Hormel have dramatically larger product development teams than we do,” Shapiro said. “Once our ingredients are in the hands of experts at companies like Hormel Foods, we are confident that the next generation of alternative meats will be more convincing and economical than ever.”

Perdue is another partner of Better Meat Co. In June 2019, the Sacramento-based company launched a national partnership with Perdue Farms – a leading chicken producer in the U.S. The company will provide Perdue with plant-based blends mixed with Perdue chicken to create the Chicken Plus product line.

While relationships with Hormel and Perdue make sense in the short run, neither, at his point, shows the breadth of Better Meat’s possibilities. In-house products developed by its food scientists and chefs range from Rhiza-based beef to fish to pork and may lead to the company—at some point—going directly to consumers.  “I think you can expect to see that,” Shapiro said of such future plans. “We want to be able to bring our micro protein to as many people as possible, and we want to make it humane, easy to eat and affordable for everyone.”

According to Crunchbase, Better Meat has raised $9.6 million, the bulk of which came in a July 2020 round of $8.1 million. The new funding is led by Greenlight Capital and Green Circle Foodtech Ventures, and Johnsonville, the maker of Johnsonville Sausages. Another financing round would be expected for Better Meat Co to scale enough to bring its branded crabcakes and deli slices to hungry, healthy consumers.

Shiru’s Partnership With Puratos Adds Further Credibility to its Protein Discovery Platform

In the world of food tech, decisions made on viable data are good, and a lot of data is even better. But with Shiru, a functional ingredient discovery company, with a dataset of more than 450 million known proteins, you are in rarified air and a welcome partner to forward-thinking companies.

With that in mind, Shiru has announced a new partnership with Puratos, a Belgium-based company that supplies food ingredients for bakeries. Shiru’s Flourish platform will evaluate naturally occurring proteins that could serve as a next-generation egg replacement.

“At Puratos, we truly believe that collaborations can fuel innovation within the food ecosystem,” stated Paul Baisier, Chief R&D Officer at Puratos. “As a company rooted in biology and science, Shiru is the perfect partner in the Puratos’s journey to finding novel uses for proteins discovered by Shiru’s Flourish platform as functional food ingredients that are sustainable, healthy, and delicious. Together with Shiru, we will be able to accelerate our plant-based product innovation pipeline for the benefit of our customers and consumers.”

Julian Lewis, Shiru’s Vice President of Business Development, told The Spoon why his company is excited about this partnership. “(Puratos) will help us scale up these (egg replacement) proteins using their fermentation facilities to a large kind of food grade sample, where we can then do more extensive food application testing. And through this partnership, we have a clear path to fully scaling these ingredients and bringing them to market.”

At this stage of its life cycle, Alameda, Calif.-based Shiru lives for such a partnership. Its database Flourish Flourish uses AI and machine learning to analyze its database of nearly 450 million proteins found in nature. Each application—for example, a plant-based meat company that wants to add taste to its burgers—identifies ingredients that will solve that specific functional ingredient challenge. This business model, Lewis explains, might expand to his company by commercializing some of its discoveries.

“There’ll be other food categories where we might collaborate, or we might do it ourselves,” Lewis said of opportunities down the road. “We might end up in a hybrid where we’re doing some stuff ourselves and collaborating with experts in other fields just to accelerate its market path.”

Functionality is Shiru’s secret sauce, which is the ability to target a specific property of a particular food product. Lewis explains:

“There are three categories we can play in. There’s replace in which we substitute an ingredient for one that, for example, doesn’t work properly. A second is taste. And what we mean by that is some plant-based foods are not that good, and I have yet to find a vegan cheese that works. Lastly, it is to transform. What new foods could be generated in the future that is not replacing traditional products, which are just new things? And maybe we can do that by discovering new functional protein.”

One of the side benefits of working with a complex database is the ability to help food manufacturers get away from using relatively unhealthy ingredients in some plant-based products that give the impression of being a clean alternative. “We’re aiming to provide a much better toolkit of ingredients to the food developers trying to create plant-based foods,” Lewis said.

Lewis adds that while Shiru is currently generally focused on the plant-based world, there’s no reason it will not be a player as the cultured food business develops. “All food has, I would say, taste and texture challenges, so with cultured meats, some additional ingredients may be required. And we’re already working on the early stage with players in that space as well. Our goal is to create more sustainable food ingredients that are both required and interesting.”

Germany-Based Mushlabs Scores An Infrastructure Partnership with Bitburger Brewery Group

Hamburg-based biotech startup Mushlabs may have created the perfect storm in its approach to creating a clean, nutrient-rich plant-based meat alternative. The company can hit the ground running without worrying about costly infrastructure and potential distribution partners by applying its proven technology and a sound business approach.

Mushlabs has announced a relationship with Bitburger Brewery Group, a large private brewery in Germany. Bitburger will provide capacity and sidestream byproducts from its beer production as raw materials. Mushlabs intends to enhance and use these local byproducts to cultivate edible mushroom mycelium in a precision fermentation process. The mycelium will be used to produce nutrient-rich, minimally processed foods.

“(Bitburger) has a valuable sidestream that would otherwise get burned to produce energy or go to cattle, but is also not necessarily super stable,” Thibault Godard, Chief Science Officer at Mushlabs, told The Spoon in an interview. “So we are offering them a solution to upcycle in a way that is also better for the planet.”

Godard boils the complex process down to a simple example: “I like the example of coffee. For instance, coffee has 80 to 90% of waste from the crop to the cup. And this is also something where you have valuable nutrients there that you can recycle and produce food. So we are basically taking the leftovers and injecting them into the food system.”

The approach—that is, using mycelium, which has a property that acts as a natural decomposing agent in precision fermentation to create a healthy plant-based protein is what Mushlabs called fulfilling the goal of a “circular economy.”

“In natural ecosystems, fungi recycle nutrients through a specific fermentation process that digests their surrounding biomass,” the company explained in a blog post. “At Mushlabs, we harness this process to produce food from agro- and food industries’ side streams (i.e., spent coffee grounds, fruit peels, and sugarcane bagasse). This is a unique form of food production with many potential applications for the circular economy, yielding tasty meat-alternative products.”

And then there’s the smart business angle. While other companies in similar adjacencies struggle to raise large sums of capital to scale out their facilities with large fermentation tanks, Mushlabs’ partnership with Bitburger will accelerate its growth. Using often underutilized brewing tanks, Mushlabs avoids the cost of new infrastructure. CEO and founder Mazen Rizk acknowledges collocating with Bitburger gives his company a giant boost.

“And not only saving the cost, but it’s also saving the time. Because if we now decide we want to build the facility, I think ordering steel would take you probably a year and a half because there are delays in even ordering steel. Then building a facility is very costly and takes time,” Rizk says.

“When you’re talking about food products. It would be best if you did it in the most economically viable way possible so we can find a sidestream that the mushroom can grow on,” Rizk says. “So part of it is understanding what kind of product you can do, what kind of taste, what kind of nutrition they provide. The other side is understanding which one is economically feasible. How can you produce it at a high yield and low cost to ensure that you have a food product that can go into the market at a price that people can afford?”

In June, the company also boasts a huge financial acknowledgment from the EU’s prestigious EIC Accelerator Program. More than 1,000 startups and small businesses from Europe applied to receive a share of €382 million in total capital. Seventh-four companies each will get funding of up to 17.5 million Euros, with Mushlabs receiving an eight-digit figure. Through the EIC Accelerator program, the EU aims to support technology startups that address societal challenges and drive breakthrough European innovations.

Are The Layoffs at Motif a Canary in the Coalmine For the Plant-Based Meat Industry?

According to an article out today from Food Navigator USA, plant-based meat ingredient startup Motif Foodworks has laid off an undisclosed number of employees.

The layoffs, which are the first for the company, are part of a broader restructuring that will “maximize ROI for our customers and investors.” According to company CEO Jonathan McIntyre, the slimmed-down company will prioritize those ingredients and finished products where the company is “experiencing strong demand.”

Motif, which has been developing ingredients such as a plant-based heme and technology to give plant-based cheese the same stretch and melting properties of animal-based cheese products, has raised $345 million in funding over the past few years, including a $226 million round 12 months ago. That funding, which came at a time when lots of alternative protein startups had access to lots of cheap capital, was spent on everything from an expansive new headquarters to new headcount as the company looked to become what is essentially an “Intel-inside” provider of future food building blocks for a new generation of alt-protein startups.

Now, however, Motif is facing increasing headwinds in the form of a legal battle and overall sluggishness in parts of the plant-based meat sector. These headwinds come at the same time venture capital’s easy-money era appears to be coming to an end, making it doubly-hard for a company with product development cycles as long as Motif’s. With fresh rounds of funding that would extend the company’s runway now drying up, Motif has no choice but to prioritize revenue-producing product lines such as its consumer-facing brands and ready-for-market ingredient products.

It’s probably too soon to tell if Motif’s problems are endemic to a company that spent relatively freely during a time of plentiful venture capital or if it’s a sign of things to come in a broader industry shakeout. Paleo, another company creating alt-meat building blocks similar to those at Motif, just announced its new product line and is raising a Series A to scale its product line. Other plant-based startups like Tender and Nowadays have been able to raise money in recent months, showing that there is still some appetite among investors for the sector.

Either way, we’ll be keeping a close eye on the company and some of its peers to see if this new era of venture capital austerity forces additional changes to business models to accelerate the road to profitability.

Coming Out of Stealth, Paleo Unveils Six Animal-Free, GMO-Free Varieties of Heme

In 2024, imagine walking into Burger King and ordering a mammoth burger. No, not one that is bigger than your head; this Whopper will taste like the extinct proboscideans that roamed the earth millions of years ago. It’s all part of the magic from a Belgium-based food ingredient company called Paleo.

After two years, Paleo has come out of stealth mode to announce its technology to bring the authentic taste and aroma of meat and fish to plant-based meat and fish alternatives with a non-GMO, animal-free heme. As part of that announcement, the World International Property Organization has published Paleo’s patent application, finally allowing Paleo to share details of its precision fermentation technology. 

Hermes Sanctorum, CEO and co-founder of Paleo: “When we set out to create the ultimate animal-free meat or fish experience, we quickly zeroed in on heme. Without exaggeration, we can say that we cracked the code of heme, allowing us to produce GMO-free heme that’s bio-identical to the most popular meats and tuna – as well as mammoth.”

More about the mammoth burger shortly.

Heme, a precursor to hemoglobin, is an essential molecule found in every living plant and animal. In short, it makes meat taste like meat, giving it its mouthfeel and umami sensation. Paleo has created a bio-identical heme that, through precision fermentation, can be adapted to add a specific taste to beef, pork, chicken, and even fish. Heme is essential when it comes to resembling conventional meat products. Heme is responsible for the taste and color of meat. Before cooking, heme will give meat alternatives a red color that turns brown during cooking. Heme also offers superior nutritional value. The iron in heme is easier for the human body to absorb than iron in vegetables.

In an interview with The Spoon, CEO Sanctorum explains the process: “We make the yeast release the protein to the environment, which means you can separate your protein. It’s a pure protein that you have separated from the yeast cells, making it a non-GMO product. We can produce an animal protein identical to what you find in nature but on top GMO-free. So that’s, I think, our unique proposition.”

“It’s like basically like brewing beer,” Sanctorum goes on to explain. “Instead of making alcohol, it makes a protein that you want. Instead of brewing or making wine, it’s producing the animal heme.”

Although the company has been working on its technology since 2020, its patent announcement is a significant step forward that inches closer to realizing a finished product. Sanctorum expects to have market-ready products in 2023, even with the number of steps that need to be tackled. Given precision fermentation at scale is a cap-ex-heavy investment, one reason to share their patent with the world is to attract investors. To date, Paleo has raised $2.5 million in seed funding and $ 2.5M in seed funding and is working on a Series A round to bring its products to the market and broaden its portfolio. 

Another issue is the breadth of products. The ability to create a variety of hemes may sparkle in a press release, but, as Sanctorum acknowledges, focusing on one area to start is a more prudent approach for a young company. Part of that B2B process is working closely with prospective customers. “A lot will depend on demand from our clients,” he said. “We are talking to big and small food manufacturers like small ones, and it will be all about testing those heme proteins and to see how they behave in their commercial recipes.”

Opening its technology kimono also brings potential challenges for Paleo from other companies working on similar approaches. Impossible Foods filed a lawsuit against Motif Foodworks, claiming the company’s HEMAMI protein derived from precision fermentation infringed on Impossible’s patent for making plant-based burgers containing 0.1% to 5% heme protein. Sanctorum calls the legal battle a “side event” and refuses to let it impede his or Paleo’s vision moving forward.

Back to the mammoth burger. Creating hemes for popular foods of today’s world is obvious, but reaching back hundreds of centuries—the question is why?

“Well, it was basically it started as a challenge to us,” Sanctorum said. “I mean, we were thinking, okay, if we can make the obvious ones, can we do that for an ancient protein that doesn’t exist anymore?”

Perhaps the better answer is, why not?

Has The Era of Private Label Plant-Based Meat Arrived? Motif Thinks So With Launch of New Line

Last year, the execs at Motif Foodworks figured they’d make some finished products to showcase the company’s next-gen plant-based ingredients in alt-beef, chicken, or pork.

The tests went so well that the company, which normally focuses on making plant-based meat building blocks for other manufacturers, has decided to launch its own line of finished-format private label products targeted at the foodservice and food retail markets.

Motif announced this news today as part of a release that led with the news of Robert Downey Jr’s Foodprint Coalition investing in Motif Foodworks. In fact, the launch of the new line was almost a footnote in a press release with the headline “Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition Ventures Joins Motif FoodWorks in its Effort to Reimagine Plant-Based Foods.”

Sure, it’s exciting to announce a celebrity investor, but the truth is you can’t walk on a red carpet nowadays without turning around and knocking over an alt-protein investing movie star. So the private label launch is the more interesting news of the two and, I’m guessing, more impactful long-term for Motif’s business.

From a business perspective, it’s a smart move to chase a market that accounts for 17% of meat in North America and almost half of all meat sold in Europe. While the private label has only been a small part of plant-based market thus far, some like Trader Joe’s and Walmart have already launched some lines of their own branded alt-meat products, and I’m sure the trend will only continue to grow in the coming years.

And that’s just food retail. The private label opportunity is probably even more significant in foodservice, where the allure of having a branded plant-based burger is probably declining for restaurants. The company is betting on its HEMAMI (Motif’s umami flavor technology) and APPETEX (its texture/mouthful tech) as differentiators in a crowded plant-based food market. I think they’re right since the reality is these types of tech-forward advances are beyond the scope of typical suppliers of meat for food retailers and restaurants.

I also think a healthy private label business is good for the broader plant-based meat industry, which still needs to work on bringing the price differential down between traditional meat and plant-based products. And with the food industry’s continuing battle with inflation turning consumers to store branded products, it seems like it might be time for the era of private-label meat to begin.

Change Foods Says Its Alt-Cheese Has A Market Beyond Plant-Based Consumers

As the name infers, Change Foods is poised to take on the world of cheese and go beyond today’s plant-based offerings and craft a cheddar or mozzarella that is identical in taste to a dairy-based product. The trick, company founder and CEO David Bucca believes, is the replication of casein, a dairy protein, that gives the cheese its signature flavor.

Using precision fermentation, Change Foods has a current war chest of more than $15 million from venture firms and food manufacturing companies and collaborations with such giants as Upfield and Mexico’s Sigma-Alimentos. Bucca believes Change Foods will have products on the market in 2023.

Recently, David Bucca spoke to The Spoon about Change Foods’ origins, its vision, and how he hopes to lure current dairy-based cheese eaters to his company’s line of products.

Why take on a market with so many companies already tackling plant-based cheese?

When you look at the limitations of current products on the shelf, unfortunately, it doesn’t cut it for many other cheese consumers in terms of certainly from a functionality point of view, let alone a taste point of view. So, when you’re talking about specifically harder cheeses like cheddars or even a very functional cheese like mozzarella, you expect to stretch and melt and do all of its usual things on a pizza, for example. Then there are clear limitations that you experience with plant-based cheeses.

I think certain products have come a long way, and soft base cheeses and fermented cheeses are all fantastic in their own use application. But you know, they just don’t consider them like cheese for the regular sort of cheese and dairy consumer.

How and why did you move from the aerospace industry to the world of alternative foods?

I was working in the aerospace industry when I started a nonprofit organization called Series Frontier in Australia, which is a think tank and industry accelerator for proteins. And so that allowed me to look at many companies, look at lots of different technologies, and sort of study and evaluate gaps in the market and opportunities. And basically, the conclusion I came up with was that microbial fermentation is such a powerful enabler, specifically when you can focus on specific compounds. One of which was the magic unlock that you find in a dairy engine, specifically, casein.

 So, once I drew that connection, we can recreate the key functional component of cheese and dairy, which is casein using a technology that allows you to produce something bio-identically the same. And suddenly, it was a magical epiphany to say that wow, if we can recreate casein exactly one for one, then there is that whole concept of cheese without compromise.

So, your goal is to provide an alternative to dairy that appeals to more than plant-based or vegan consumers.

It’s change without compromise to the average consumer.

We’re seeing high growth in the vegan and plant-based cheese market, which is fantastic. But for the average mass-market cheese consumer, we need something better. We need something that minimizes that compromise that people have to put up with. And I think this is the, and I can do that.

Your focus is on the casein, so is it the same as casein found in dairy?

The DNA is actually encoded in the gene. So, the gene itself is what we’re using one for, one from basically the same gene that you tell that encodes for the cow to produce casein. So, we take that same DNA, but then we use a microbial host to produce that same protein rather than a cow affected by it. So, we’re creating miniature cows in some sort of way whereby we can target specific compounds of interest, one of which is casein that a case is bioidentical.

Other companies using precision fermentation face the challenges of scale and cost. What’s your approach to those issues?

Well, where we’re at today, we’re at the very cusp of straddling the high-cost sort of existing process to now moving it forward into this new era of cost-effectiveness and scalability. And that’s why it’s a challenge. And the biggest challenge is how do we obviously optimize for this protein or company you’re looking for within the lab in terms of getting the microbes to produce things in as high a quantity as possible. But the second challenge is by leveraging the scales of what is the economy of scale in larger and larger fermenters because that’s truly where you start.

The other key component that drives a lot of that is also the regulatory timeline to produce products at scale and via a repeatable process, to then go through the regulatory approval process with the FDA and get aggressive approval for these specific compounds for use in the food.

If you hope to have products in the market in 2023, what do you have in place today? Something I can hold in my hand?

Yes, absolutely. We have a number of benchtop prototypes.

Lastly, please talk about the impact you believe Change Foods will have on climate change and sustainability through its cheese.

If we really want to solve some of the issues around climate and animal agriculture-related to dairy, then this is why cheese is so important. For example, it requires ten liters of cow’s milk to make one kilogram of cheddar. So, it’s a conversion ratio of 10 to 1. So not only is dairy milk unsustainable, to begin with, but then you can compound that by a factor of ten to cheese.

With that in mind, we have to be strategic about making sure there is no compromise on taste, performance cost, texture, price, and convenience for the average regular dairy consumer.

Melt&Marble Raises €5 Million For Fermentation-Derived Fat That Tastes and Melts Like the Real Thing

In the first wave of plant-based “meat,” the marketing challenge was about convincing customers that giving up meat needn’t create a hole in their regular diet. For the Impossibles, Beyonds, and others, developing a reasonable, tasty facsimile to the beef or chicken experience got them into millions of homes and in demand on grocer’s shelves. For plant-based meat products to become a savory choice rather than a substitute requires innovators to “kick it up a notch.”

 While the horse race to alt-burger dominance is on, off to the side, innovators have been working on plant-based beef fat that would offer the mouthfeel and umami taste to a host of faux meat products. Included in the alt-beef fat space is Swedish company Melt&Marble which secured a €5 million Series Seed financing round to scale-up production and expand its team.

 Melt&Marble uses precision fermentation to create its plant-based beef fat. Like others in the alternative protein, dairy, meat, and seafood world know, precision fermentation is a robust process but requires a lot of capital to build a proper scalable infrastructure. CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Anastasia Krivoruchko told The Spoon that her company is currently at a lab-scale but will start scaling up in the coming months. It will still be a couple of years until it is fully industrial scale.

Dr. Kriviruchko believes the opportunity for Mouth&Marble is now and in the future based on conversations with plant-based meat providers. “We have talked with many companies about the challenges they are facing with their existing fats,” she said. “When designing our yeast strains, we have been looking into the structure of beef fats and asking ourselves what elements are important for overcoming these challenges. Our prototype has a similar mouthfeel and melting profile to beef fat, which is extremely important for replicating the taste of beef.”

This begs the obvious question about the health-related issues, such as high cholesterol and heart disease, that come with consuming “real” beef fat. Dr. Kriviruchko says such concerns are not present with plant-based beef fat.

“Generally, our fats don’t contain cholesterol, trans-fats, and contaminants. With our technology, we could also potentially integrate healthy bioactive fatty acids into our fats, and this is something that we are keen to explore,” Melt&Marble’s CEO explained.

Melt&Marble’s technology platform was spun out from research work conducted over the past decade by co-founders Dr.  Krivoruchko,  Dr.  Florian  David, and  Professor  Jens  Nielsen at the Chalmers  University of  Technology in  Sweden.  Lever VC led the latest round; an early-stage venture capital firm focused on technologies and brands in the alternative protein space. Lever has previously invested in Good Plant, The Good Spoon, A Dozen Cousins, and others.

If it appears that plant-based beef fat (and other related healthy fats) is a niche market, the number of trailblazers in this emerging sector speaks otherwise. Among Melt&Marble’s competition are Meat-Tech, Mission Barnes, Nourish Ingredients, Hoxton Farms, and Cubiq Foods.

According to Grand View Research, Inc., the global plant-based meat market size will reach $24.8 billion by 2030. A likely scenario, familiar to most emerging tech markets, will be when a few of the best alt-beef fat companies survive by being purchased by either a mega food processor such as Tyson or Cargill or merge with a plant-based market leader like Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat.