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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Podcasts

Food Tech Show Live: Shake Shack, Delivery Bots & Cultivated Meat

Listeners of the Food Tech Show podcast know that in addition to our regular interviews with smart leaders in the food tech space, we also like to get together once a week on the podcast to talk about the top stories in food tech.

And now, this weekly wrapup includes a live studio audience (kind of) on Clubhouse. Like many other food tech and future food nerds, we’ve been having lots of fun over on the social audio app, and one of the best parts is the live interaction with listeners.

If you’re on Clubhouse, make sure to join us weekly every Friday at 1 Pacific on Clubhouse by following the Food Tech Live club. Here’s the link to this coming Friday’s show so make sure to add it to your calendar.

But before you do that, you’ll want to check out last week’s show (with special guest commentator Zoe Leavitt). The stories we discuss on Friday include:

If you’d like to listen to our latest news wrapup, you can do so now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or just by clicking play below.

Jim Mellon Has Done the Math and Thinks Cultured Meat Could Hit Price Parity in 5 Years

While some future food leaders like Pat Brown don’t believe the economics of cultured meat make sense, longtime investor and entrepreneur Jim Mellon thinks exactly the opposite.

In fact, Mellon thinks that in the future, cultured meat will be more affordable than both factory farmed and the plant-based alternatives.

“The price of plant-based foods has been coming down – Impossible has just lowered its price by 20% in the US – but there is a limit to that,” said Mellon, whom I recently interviewed for The Food Tech Show podcast. “I think you’ll get parity [with traditionally produced meat], possibly in 18 months time, with some of the plant based foods. But I don’t think it’s going to go a lot below that.”

In contrast, Mellon believes meat made via cellular agriculture will eventually be more affordable than that of farmed meat prices.

“At scale, and we’ve got a pretty good scientific advisory board, we think that it will be 2.5 milliliters [of stem cell material] from a cow will produce the equivalent of seven or eight cows worth of meat in 40 days,” said Mellon. “So if you can do this in 40 days, we think the input costs will be 2.5 to one. And that compares to as you all know, a cow twenty five to one, a chicken nine to one.”

In short, Mellon believes the raising of animals through traditional farming is hugely inefficient. By moving meat production to cellular agriculture – or what will essentially meat brewed in a bioreactor – Mellon believes we’ll see what is effectively a 10x increase in efficiency.

So when does he think we’ll see pricing drop to parity with traditionally farmed meat? Sooner than most think.

“In the US, 60% of your meat is bought in the form of ground meat, sausages, patties, etc. I think we’ll be at price parity within five years,” said Mellon. “Five years is not a long time in the history of mankind. Within five years, the whole of the intensive farming industry will face a very dramatic threat to its existence.”

Mellon’s understanding of the cultured meat space was shaped in part by his conversations with many of the early leaders in the market, which he talked to for his new book, Moo’s Law: An Investor’s Guide to the New Agrarian Revolution. I suggest you check it out, but before you do that you can listen to my full conversation with Mellon for the Food Tech Show via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or by clicking play below.

Chris Young on MrBeast: “Everything Just Changed About Restaurants” (Podcast)

If you want to be a chef, the first thing Chris Young thinks you should do before parting ways with a king’s ransom in the form of time and money at culinary school is to just jump directly into the fire.

“If you think you might want to be a professional chef, the best thing you should do is go intern at a restaurant for maybe six weeks,” said Young. “And if you still think that’s a good idea, after six weeks of getting your ass kicked, then by all means be a professional chef.”

This response from Young came during a live podcast interview on Clubhouse where Young and I started talking about the future of restaurants.

One of the biggest changes the onetime Fat Duck employee and coauthor of Modernist Cuisine sees on the horizon is how new models powered by technology, like ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants, will reshape the restaurant. While Young still thinks there will always be demand for places where people can go, sit down, and have great food made by a chef a few yards away in the kitchen, that world – in other words what we’ve known for centuries as a restaurant – will be increasingly upended by the arrival of new models created by the likes of virtual restaurant concepts like that MrBeast Burgers.

“I saw that and went ‘everything just changed about restaurants,'” said Young.

Young pointed to Apple and the consumer electronics industry to explain his thinking.

In the world of electronics, “the people that design the product are very rarely the people that also manufacture it,” said Young. “That’s something we figured out in a lot of things. Apple designs. Apple engineers. Apple does not assemble [products], they have somebody else who specializes in assembly do that.”

But restaurants – unlike most other industry nowadays – remains for the most part vertically integrated.

“Restaurants are kind of weird because you’ve coupled the creative with the manufacturing,” said Young. “You might not think of a restaurant as a factory, but it’s a small micro scale, horribly inefficient factory.”

And according to Young, what MrBeast and others like him has showed is the restaurant can be unbundled.

“What MrBeast showed is we’re going to be able to take apart the creative, the marketing, and everything about the concept and we’re gonna be able to completely divorce that from the manufacturing. If you have a great idea and if you have an audience that gives a shit, then you’re going to be able to do a deal with people who specialize in the manufacturing of recipes and you’ll be able to roll out a national chain of your bagel joints. Within a couple of weeks and everybody who wants one of your bagels can get one of your bagels.”

So what exactly should a young would-be culinary empire builder do if they are excited about this crazy unbundled restaurant future according to Young?

“Learn to cook,” said Young. “But maybe you should [also] build a YouTube channel, rather than trying to invest in a restaurant.”

In other words, you should know your way around a kitchen, but also understand that might not mean a career cooking in a dine-in restaurant.

“My advice is you really want to be thinking about what the restaurant is going to be in the future,” said Young, “and a little less about, ‘do I go get a culinary education and start cooking in a restaurant?’ I think that world is largely over.”

You can listen to my full conversation with Young on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen by just clicking play below.

Podcast: Arturo Elizondo on Hatching A Startup That Makes Eggs Without the Chicken

If you were to ask Clara Foods CEO Arturo Elizondo what came first, the chicken or the egg, the answer you’d get is probably not the weighty philosophical waxing you might expect from a former intern for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer.

Instead, chances are you’d probably hear about how it’s time to do away with the factory farming system we currently use to produce the trillion plus eggs consumed annually and how he may just have the answer for how to do that.

That answer would be Clara Foods, the company Elizondo cofounded with Dave Anchel in 2014 after the two struck up a conversation at a conference. It wasn’t long after that first conversation before the two were working on their idea for using microbial fermentation to create eggs without the chicken as part of biotech accelerator Indiebio‘s inaugural cohort.

Fast forward almost seven years and Clara released their first product in 2020 – a digestive supplement. The company plans on launching its second product later this year, a protein targeted at protein beverage market. After that, the company will release it’s flagship product, an egg white replacement.

But Elizondo doesn’t plan to stop there. When I talked to the Clara Foods CEO for the Food Tech Show, one of the first questions I asked was whether Clara’s technology could emulate more than just a chicken egg. The answer is yes.

“We wanted to have a real kick ass platform that is not just a chicken egg plant protein platform, or an egg protein platform, but a true animal protein production platform, so that we can flex in and out of different products,” said Elizondo.

From there, he and Clara hope to bring forth new flavors and combinations that aren’t even possible with old fashioned eggs.

“We’re truly entering the age of molecular food,” said Elizondo. “Not just molecular gastronomy, but instead how do we leverage the molecular element of it in producing the next generation of ingredients to build food 2.0 with new textures, new properties, new flavors that are not even possible to achieve right now with our current animals as a technology?”

If you’d like to hear about our chicken-less egg future, you can listen to the podcast below, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or on wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast: BlueNalu CEO on Building a Cell-Based Fish Tech Company

As a long-time food industry exec, BlueNalu President and CEO Lou Cooperhouse knew there were established food industry techniques his company could borrow from when building cell-based seafood.

“It’s a much bigger toolbox,” said Cooperhouse. “You can embrace some of the technologies that industry uses, and create a product that absolutely can meet the sensory expectations and experiences of fish, which will be much more challenging on the meat side.”

One of the tools from the food industry toolbox, according to Cooperhouse, is layering.

“The concept of layering plays itself very nicely with the food industry,” said Cooperhouse. “There’s extrusion technologies, there’s folding technologies and there’s lamination technologies like in packaging.”

But while BlueNalu was able to leverage some of the technologies and processes from the food industry, the company had a much smaller set of knowledge to borrow from when it comes to replicating fish cells. That’s because the vast majority of work in the cell-based meat space has been done with mammal cells, while fish cell replication for human consumption was largely unchartered waters.

“There was little to no intellectual property around anybody ever growing and propagating successfully stable cell lines of fish,” said Cooperhouse. “So we began with a clean piece of paper on the technology side.”

And so BlueNalu set about to build a set of IP to create cell-based fish products, which Cooperhouse describes as an “end game” of a “product that has the same nutritional, functional, and sensory characteristics as seafood.”

Three years later, the company is ready to move to pilot production with the goal of creating up to 500 pounds of fish per week in its new pilot production plant it has started building in San Diego.

If you want to hear about Lou’s story and how he went from concept to pilot production of cell-based seafood, you won’t want to miss this podcast. You can hear my full conversation with Lou Cooperhouse, and all of our podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or by clicking play below.

Podcast: The Future Grocery Store

While I may have missed my annual sojourn to sin city for CES this year, I may soon be able to get something akin to walking the Vegas strip just by heading on down to my local grocery store.

That’s because, at least according to The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht, grocery stores will soon resemble the floor of a casino with all the screens that will show up there in the future. Whether it’s smart carts with a touch screen or digital displays up and down the aisles, we can expect lots more digital signage and screens in our lives as shopping becomes more connected and digitized in the future.

And, as I say on this week’s editor podcast, I’m totally on board with more tech in the corner store as long as it includes bread-making robots filling up the aisles with the smell of fresh-baked loaves.

In addition to talking about smart grocery carts this week, we also discuss:

As always, you can check out the Food Tech Show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Soundcloud, or just click play below.

Podcast: Talking Plant-Based Cheese With Grounded Foods’ Veronica Fil

While the plant-based meat and milk space has seen incredible momentum the last couple of years, cheese has been another story.

It’s not that anyone hasn’t tried. Companies like Treeline have been making vegan cheese for a while, and they’ve certainly found their niche among vegans. Still, for those of us non-vegans who want to try some plant-based alternatives for health or sustainability reasons, there hasn’t really been anything out there that’s really close to the real thing.

Until now. Grounded Foods new line up of plant-based cheese, which will start shipping early in 2021, tastes just like the real thing. I had a chance to try some of their early prototypes in February and was blown away. It had the taste, mouth feel and true cheese funkiness that you expect from the real thing.

In short, if what I tried early last year is anything close to the final product, Grounded Foods might do for cheese what Impossible Foods did for beef.

In this episode, I talk with Grounded Foods CEO and cofounder Veronica Fil. who shares the story of how she came up with the idea for a plant-based cheese that appealed to non-vegans. She also shares how she convinced her co-founder and husband, who was running one of the top restaurants in Australia, that making cheese – not running a restaurant – was the big idea they should pursue.

If you haven’t heard Veronica Fil and Grounded Foods’ story, you’ll definitely want to give it a listen. Just click play below, download direct to your device, or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast: The CES & Food Tech Live 2021 Review

On this week’s episode of Food Tech Show, the Spoon editorial team talks about what they found walking the virtual exhibit halls of CES 2021 (answer: not much).

The good news is we also had Food Tech Live, the Spoon’s annual food tech showcase that happens during CES week. Normally we’re in Vegas for FTL, eating cookies with our faces on it and checking out the latest in food tech gadgets, but this year we took things online and had a bunch of cool product demos, interviews and breakout sessions.

Finally, we also talk about the June oven acquisition by Weber and what that means for the smart oven space.

So listen in on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, download direct to your computer or just click play below. And, if you’re a regular listener, we’d appreciate it if you throw us a review to start the year!

Talking The Future of Biomanufacturing With Culture Biosciences’ Will Patrick

Will Patrick has spent much of his career thinking about how to build things. During his stints at places like Google[x] where he worked on projects such Project Wing, Google’s drone delivery service, he’d gained an appreciation for the toolsets that helped innovators in the world of hardware and software rapidly innovate and accelerate their products into the market.

Over time, Patrick eventually became interested in the world of biomanufacturing. As his interest in biotech grew, one of the things he realized was that many tools he’d grown accustomed to in the world of mechanical and software engineering to help makers rapidly iterate were not there in the world of synthetic biology.

And so he decided to build them. Out of this Culture Biosciences was born, which offers a digital biomanfacturing platform in the form of cloud bioreactors as a service. Before long, some of the industry’s more interesting future food startups as well as CPGs and big pharma companies were running experiments in Culture’s bioreactors and monitoring them on the company’s data dashboards.

I talked to Patrick about this journey and where he sees Culture going in the future. To learn more about Patrick and his vision for the future of Culture, just click play below or head over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Making Honey Without The Bee: A Conversation With Darko Mandich

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that bee colonies are collapsing around the world due to a number of persistent threats such as global warming, pesticides and yes, murder hornets.

And while that may present a challenge to the $7 billion honey industry, the focus on honey production is itself problematic for the broader bee ecosystem, since farmed honeybees compete with wild bees for food and ultimately can hurt biodiversity.

All of which is why a Serbian bee industry executive by the name of Darko Mandich became fascinated with the idea of making honey without the bees. If this sounds crazy to you, don’t worry: Darko’s soon-to-be cofounder, Aaron Schaller, initially thought it was crazy too when they first discussed the idea.

But eventually, Schaller (a molecular scientist from the University of Cal Berkeley) saw the potential in bee-less honey and soon after, MeliBio was born. From there, the nascent startup pitched their concept to Big Idea Ventures and was accepted into the future food accelerator.

Now the company is busy developing its technology to create a honey that replicates the taste, texture and mouthful of real honey, all without bees. As Darko tells me on this podcast, MeliBio is using fermentation to essentially recreate the process through which bees convert nectar to honey. The startup hopes to have its first product on the market by late 2021.

You can listen to the full conversation with Darko Mandich by clicking play below or by subscribing to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and leave a review if you like the show). You can also download the episode directly to your computer by clicking here. And, as always, you can always find more food tech news and podcasts at The Spoon.

The Food Tech Show: Ghost Kitchens are Complicated

In this week’s podcast, the Spoon team talks about some of the lessons learned from last week’s ghost kitchen deep dive.

One of the key takeaways from the day is there are lots of different approaches to rolling out a ghost kitchen strategy. Some operators simply leverage unused kitchen space in their own facility to roll out a single virtual brand, while others partner with a full stack ghost kitchen operator that has everything from the kitchen space to optimized tech to fully realized and operational virtual restaurant concepts ready to go.

The bottom line? The ghost kitchen market is changing quickly and strategies are becoming more nuanced as restaurants explore ways to tap into the benefits of this new model.

Jenn summarizes the day in a couple posts. You can also watch the full sessions here if you are Spoon Plus subscriber. Or, you can just listen to this podcast!

Other stories we talk about on this episode include:

As always, you can find The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you like the show, please give us a positive review!

You can also listen to the show below by clicking play.

The Food Tech Show: Cultured Meat’s Big Month

This week the Spoon editorial team got together to talk about the latest food tech news, including whether or not cultured meat would venture into, well, humans.

We all got grossed out (well, most of us) and decided a Mike Burger is a bad idea. But we did agree the food industry will have to address some of the more ethical questions around cultured meat as the ease and cost to replicate cells comes down over time.

Other (not so gross) stories we discuss on the pod also include:

As always, you can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) or just click play below.