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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Kitchen Summit

SKS 2019: For Gen Z, Eating is all about “Access, Portability, and Fluidity”

When you hear about new trends in the food and CPG space — plant-based, sustainable, snackable, etc. — they’re usually credited to younger generations: specifically millennials and Gen Z. But what exactly are younger eaters looking for, both in and out of the kitchen? And what will they demand next?

That’s exactly what Michael Wolf asked two analysts, Susan Schwallie and Joe Derochowski, from the market research firm the NPD Group at SKS 2019 last week. Schwallie looks into where, why, and how consumers are preparing food and eating at restaurants, and Derochowski focuses on kitchen space — and its appliances.

If you’re at all curious about how younger generations are reshaping dining habits, it’s worth watching the whole video below. But here’s a quick rundown on what millennials and Gen Z are looking for:

Schwallie said that millennials prioritize experiential eating — they want to cook or eat something Instagrammable that will give them what she called ‘The Betty Crocker effect.” Gen Z has some similarities, but above all they prioritize “access, portability, and fluidity.” In short, they want to get exactly the food they want, where and when they want it — be it getting a Domino’s pizza delivered to their park bench or having groceries sent to their doorstep to make a recipe they discovered just an hour before.

Generations may have different dining habits, but Derochowski pointed there are some unifying factors that all groups share — like prioritizing health and wellness and the desire to entertain more at home. These “consistencies between generations,” as he put it, are exactly what kitchen appliance makers are trying to target with convenience products like slow cookers.

Watch the full video below to hear what younger generations are eating, and how companies are hustling to figure out how to capitalize off of changing dining habits. Then keep an eye out for more content from SKS 2019 coming your way!

SKS 2019: Eaters of the Future: A Look at Millennials, Gen Z & Food

SKS 2019: Naveen Jain Thinks We’re 5 Years Away from Making Sickness Optional

Back in 2010, entrepreneur Naveen Jain co-founded Moon Express, a privately held company gunning for the Moon. “When you have literally taken the moon shot, what do you do for an encore?” he asked the audience at the Smart Kitchen Summit 2019.

For Jain, the answer was, tackle healthcare. (No big, right?) To do so, he started personalized nutrition company Viome in 2016. Last week Jain told SKS attendees that he believes we’re just five years away from making sickness “optional.”

If you want to hear Jain’s vision for curing some of society’s most persistent diseases, you can watch the video of his conversation with moderator Brian Frank at SKS 2019 below. But for you impatient folks out there, the (very) short solution to curing chronic disease is to eat better.

Easier said than done, of course. You may think you know what “eating healthy” means — greens, lean proteins, etc. — but as Jain says, “What is healthy for one person is actually maybe toxic for someone else.”

Jain gives an inspiring argument for why we should all take a much closer look at what’s going on in our gut, and why personalized nutrition could help make disease a thing of the past. Check out the video below to hear why and keep an eye out for more content from SKS 2019 coming your way!

SKS 2019: The Power of Personalized Nutrition

SKS 2019: Security in the Connected Kitchen is a Process, Not an Endpoint

You’re only as strong as your weakest point, and this is especially true for cybersecurity, where automated brute force attacks can barrage your network. As more devices in your home get connected to the internet (hello, smart oven!), they represent more opportunities for hackers to gain access to your home network to use your connected devices for botnet attacks or worse.

The growing importance of security is the reason we held the Hacking the Oven, Cybersecurity and the Connected Kitchen panel at our 2019 Smart Kitchen Summit this month. It was led by The Internet of Things Podcast host Stacey Higginbotham and featured Gonda Lamberink, Cybersecurity Senior Business Development Manager at UL, and Steve Nackers, Manager, Electronic Controls at Sub-Zero Group, Inc.

You should watch the full video of the panel below, but for the TL;DR crowd, here are three big takeaways:

Proper security comes from having a corporate culture that values it. Security isn’t something that you just tack onto a product as near its final release. It needs to be baked in as a core component from the very beginning.

Both manufacturers and consumers have a role to play. Manufacturers need to make sure they are building secure devices (no chips directly on boards) and that over-the-air updates are easy to install. Consumers too need to take responsibility for their role in owning a connected device (change those passwords!).

Security is a process, not an endpoint. There is no secure today = secure tomorrow in cybersecurity. Connected kitchen appliance manufacturers need to stay up to date on vulnerabilities and have a plan to address them as they come up.

As the panelists agreed, just as we see an Energy Star rating sticker on appliances that are more electricity efficient today, it won’t be long until we something similar that touts a device’s security. As more consumers become aware of cybersecurity, the more they will demand it.

SKS 2019: Hacking the Oven, Cybersecurity and the Connected Kitchen

SKS Hot Seat: WPC’s David Baarman Says the Future of The Kitchen is All About Simplification

As kitchens get smarter, they also tend to get more cluttered and complicated, especially if the various connected devices involved don’t communicate with each other. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some sort of universal standard that allowed all smart appliances to be interoperable?

That’s exactly what the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) is trying to achieve with its new Ki wireless power standard. The consortium works with over 600 companies to simplify the smart kitchen, making various connected devices simpler to use in tandem — and, of course, wireless.

We sat down with David Baarman, Co-Chairman of the Kitchen Application & Promotions Group at WPC, at SKS 2019 last week to ask a few questions about how his company is working to make the kitchen not only smart, but also simple to navigate. Check out the video below and be on the lookout for more videos from SKS 2019 to hit The Spoon soon!

SKS Hot Seat Interview: David Baarman, Wireless Power Consortium

SKS Hot Seat: Millo’s Aivaras Bakanas on The Ripple Effect of Smart, Silent Kitchen Appliances

I always feel a little guilty because I wake up a good hour before my roommates and one of the first things I do is make my morning smoothie. And our blender is loud.

Maybe I should think about investing in a Millo. The startup makes a platform with a powerful motor run by magnets, which is much quieter than a traditional motor. Their first product is a cordless, stylish blender, which impressed folks at SKS 2019 so much that Millo ended up winning the Innovation Award for the SKS Startup Showcase.

After collecting their award, we invited Aivaras Bakanas, co-founder and COO of Millo, to our SKS hot seat to answer a few questions about the company’s technology and what kitchen appliances they’ll be tackling next (hint: coffee grinders). Check out the video below and be on the lookout for more videos from SKS 2019 to hit The Spoon soon!

SKS Hot Seat Interview: Aivaras Bakanas of Millo

SKS Hot Seat: CocoTerra’s CEO on Why You (Yes, You) Should Make Chocolate From Scratch At Home

When you think about things you can make at home — bread, pasta, juice — chocolate is probably not something that jumps to mind. It’s a complicated, time-intensive process that takes skill and special equipment to master.

But what if there was a machine that could do it all for you? CocoTerra is a new startup lowering the barrier to entry to home chocolate making with the world’s first countertop chocolate-making machine. The device lets even the most basic home cooks create their own bespoke chocolate in just two hours.

We were so intrigued by this idea that we chose CocoTerra as one of the finalists for the SKS 2019 Startup Showcase, which just happened this week. In between giving out (very tasty) samples of chocolate, CocoTerra CEO Nate Saal sat down in the SKS Hot Seat to answer a few rapid-fire questions on his device, the potential of personalization, and how he envisions the future of the food ecosystem.

Check out the video below! And keep your eyes peeled for more videos from SKS 2019 coming your way soon.

SKS Hot Seat Interview: Nate Saal of CocoTerra

SKS 2019: An Industry Working Together To Solve Hard Problems in Food Tech and the Future Kitchen

At the first SKS in 2015, a group of like-minded folks in the world of food tech and connected kitchen got together in an old cannery for a day because we knew change was afoot, but had only just started to think about maybe doing something about it. Sure it was noisy, crowded, and we had an old couch on the stage (I still feel bad about making three full-grown adults sit on it), but the connections that started that day have continued to grow ever since.

Fast forward to SKS 2019, and it’s clear that we as an event and an industry have come a long way.

Not only were we in a beautiful waterfront venue with lots more space for breakout talks, startup and sponsor displays and dedicated meeting spaces, but the conversation itself had moved on from the theoretical to finding practical solutions and figuring out how to get things done.

And so in this week’s Spoon newsletter, we thought we’d reflect on some of the biggest takeaways from the last two days in Seattle. Below Chris, Jenn, Catherine and myself each wrote about what we took away from SKS 2019.

CHRIS: Robots are Ready to Grapple with Bigger Issues

When it comes to food robotics and automation, the questions are evolving from straight technical ones like “Can a robot do X?” to deeper, existential ones like “Great, but what does that mean for the people using and working with them?”

During our panel discussion, Chas Studor, Co-Founder and CTO of Briggo spoke about before installing its automated Coffee Haus at SFO, the airport required changes to make the kiosk accessible to the visually impaired. Briggo’s solution was to attach something akin to a Bat Phone on the side of the machine. Visually impaired customers can pick up the phone and speak directly with a Briggo rep, who places their order.

Elsewhere, Shawn Lange of Lab2Fab made a compelling presentation on why $15 an hour is not the real problem for food companies looking at automation. Lange posited that automation can actually make jobs more rewarding and easier by removing the monotonous and dangerous tasks, and in doing so, companies can embrace higher wages.

There are still a lot of societal issues that need to be addressed as automation makes its way deeper into our lives. I’m just glad to see that companies aren’t just recognizing the issues, but engaging with it and creating solutions.

JENN: Wellness Is Now a Design for Living . . . and Your Kitchen

It’s no secret that “wellness” is on the minds of many these days, and a recurring theme at SKS was how a trendy term is evolving from buzzword to business driver as companies create solutions to design healthier eating habits into daily life.

A major example of this was when architects Veronica Schreibeis Smith, of wellness-focused kitchen company Vera Iconica, and MIT Media Labs’ Suleiman Alhadidi took the stage to discuss how wellness is changing the way home kitchens get designed — literally. Both speakers showed off solutions that utilize everything from robotic cabinets to temperature-controlled pantries to space in the cabinetry for hydroponic grow systems. The idea behind these up-and-coming designs is to make it easier for the average consumer to access fresh ingredients daily, utilize space, and make the home-cooking process for healthy meals much more efficient.

In a different panel, Sherry Zhang, CEO of GenoPalate, explained that 40 percent of health is due to human behavior, and that all the health data in the world won’t help consumers if they can’t figure out how to change their behavioral patterns. How will we get there? Zhang suggested AI will play a big part in this, with intelligence eventually embedded into our actual cooking devices, like ovens.

We’re still some ways off from that day. Cost remains a big barrier for some of these health-focused kitchen solutions. As more companies start to focus their innovation efforts in this area, we’ll see those costs start to come down, hopefully for both devices and the food itself.

CATHERINE: Alternative Protein is On the Cusp of a Major Revolution

When most people think about the future of protein, their thoughts turn to plant-based meats like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, both of which have been grabbing tons of media headlines.

But at SKS 2019, we dove into new worlds of alternative protein. Sure, plant-based was one — but it extends far beyond faux burgers. I spoke with Bjorn Oste of Oatly, Daniel Scharff of JUST, and scientist Dr. PK Newby about the trajectory of plant-based revolution and why it’s only going to keep growing (thanks, Gen Z).

Plant-based protein popularity may be growing, but so is our desire for protein in general. Plants can help feed this protein hunger, sure, but the solution may also lie with cell-based meat and aquaculture. That’s what Lou Cooperhouse of BlueNalu and David Kay of Memphis Meats told me in our discussion on what’s next for cultured meat. I was interested to learn that they don’t envision this new protein source replacing all traditional meat, but rather helping to fill the delta between how much protein we can grow on earth, and how much we’ll need to feed the world. Just as soon as it gains regulatory approval, of course.

One of the most futuristic talks of the day was our panel on next-generation protein building blocks. Perumal Gandhi of Perfect Day, Dr. Lisa Dyson of Air Protein, and Morgan Keim of Motif FoodWorks dove into the emergent field of fermentation protein, a technology that can help us have our animal-free ice cream and save the planet, too. As long as we can figure out what to call it…

Perhaps the biggest question of all was tackled at the very end of the conference, when I spoke with Jaime Athos, CEO of Tofurky, which is suing two states over product labeling restrictions, about what exactly defines meat — and who gets to say so. That’s a question that will likely guide the availability (or lack thereof) of many of these new sources of protein going forward. If you want to stay up to date with the latest, make sure to subscribe to our Future Food newsletter!

MIKE: The Entire Food and Cooking Ecosystem Is Being Transformed and So It’s Time To Work Together 

As I said in my intro, this year was all about figuring out how to get things done. After all, we can speak about what we think will happen in the future, but unless we take stock of what is working and what isn’t, we’ll take twice as long to get to our desired destination.

So in my first session I had Joe Ray, fresh off his article for Wired about the smart kitchen, on stage with Nick Holzherr of Samsung and Mario Pieper of BSH Appliances to discuss just that.  Joe made it clear he doesn’t think many of the current connected kitchen products are ready for primetime, but agreed there are some tech-forward products that provide true value to the consumer and expected there would be more in the future once the industry figures things out. Nick Holzherr emphasized the need to focus less on gadgets and more on building well-orchestrated consumer experiences, while Mario Pieper discussed how BSH had learned many lessons early on in the connected kitchen and said the industry needs to work together to make the future kitchen vision a reality.

I also had a great session on the evolving meal journey and the potential for technology to shape it with Beth Altringer of the Flavor Genome Project, Nancy Roman of Partnership for a Healthier America and Sanjeev Kapoor, India’s most well-known celebrity chef.  While the three came to the conversation with widely varying backgrounds, all agreed there is significant potential in addressing some of society’s biggest problems through applying innovation to the food system and inside our own kitchens.

One of my favorite sessions was a discussion I had about the changing eating habits of Gen Z and Millennials with NPD analysts Joe Derchowski and Susan Schwalle. Susan pointed out that while some in the press think many consumers have given up almost entirely on eating at home in favor of ordering out or heading to the corner restaurant, in reality the data is skewed because of the high-price of outside of home dining. Joe pointed out that the future of food shopping lies in the ability to connecting our kitchens through smart home technology to food retail.

We saw how connected kitchen products hold the potential to completely reinvent how CPG product companies approach product development from Victor Penev of Edemam and Marc Drucker of Drinkworks. Drucker discussed how data gathered from consumption of cocktails with their connected drink maker helped them realize how consumers are using it during the day and identify product holes in the drink pod lineup.

I talked to those founders building software for the digitization of food and the kitchen – Kevin Brown of Innit, Ben Harris of Drop, Kevin Yu of SideChef and Jeff Xie of Chefling – who all felt that it was essential to reduce the effort required of the consumer by better connecting all parts of the meal journey from shopping to meal discovery to cooking itself.

My belief that food waste is having a moment as a critical focus for the broader food industry was confirmed throughout the two days at SKS. Many speakers made it clear their companies have made sustainability a core focus for new products, and we saw lots of excitement for our new Wise Kitchen Initiative with the Future Food Institute to foster innovation to reduce food waste in the home.

And of course, we had a great master session on how tech and innovation is reshaping food in Japan. Led by SKS Japan‘s Hirotaka Tanaka, the session illustrated the diversity and passion of the rapidly growing food tech market in Japan. This session was capped off by a fascinating look at the joint project to develop food for space, Space Food-X, which included a presentation from Yuta Kikuchi of JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency.

Before We Go

And now some thanks. Thank you to the Spoon team you heard from above – Chris Albrecht, Catherine Lamb and Jenn Marston – who worked hard all year to tell the stories of the people and companies doing interesting things in this space and then brought these stories alive on stage in Seattle.

Thanks to the SKS event team – including the always amazing Ashley Daigneault, Susan Volland, and (once-again) Catherine Lamb, who clearly does a bit of everything – for helping to bring this growing event together in so many ways.

Thanks to all the incredible speakers, who traveled to Seattle to share their expertise and experience.

Thanks for our partners from SKS Japan who not only crafted a great session, but also brought a big and enthusiastic contingent from Japan to connect with the SKS community.

Thanks to the startups finalists who took time out from building their companies to share their story with us.

Thanks to our fantastic volunteers, who gave us a day (some two) of their time to help pull this off.

And finally, a big thank you to our sponsors. Without your support, there is no way SKS would be possible.

With SKS 2019 in the books, we are more excited than ever about building this community, covering the innovators and disrupters, and continuing the conversation. We are already planning for SKS 2020 and are looking forward to seeing many of you in Las Vegas at FoodTech Live @ CES to discuss how we can build this future together.

Next-Gen Blender, Edible Silverware and Produce-Saving Stickers Win SKS 2019 Startup Competitions

Every year at the Smart Kitchen Summit {SKS}, one of the most exciting parts of the whole event is the Startup Showcase. The competition gives young companies on the cutting-edge of food tech a chance to pitch to our audience and show off why their product/app/CPG product will change the way we eat.

The competition is so popular that this year we decided to grow it into two separate entities. The Startup Showcase focused on food technologies in kitchens, restaurants, and grocery, while the Future Food competition highlighted edible CPG products.

We whittled down the applicants to a few top-notch finalists and this week they pitched onstage before our panel of judges. And the winners are… (drumroll please)….

Startup Showcase Winner: StixFresh (pictured above)
Judges: Menachem Katz (WeWork Food Labs), Lisa McManus (America’s Test Kitchen), Joe Ray (Wired), Nicole Papantoniou (Good Housekeeping)

Roughly half of all food waste happens in the home. (That’s the reason we’re starting our new joint initiative with the Future Food Institute, The Wise Kitchen, which we announced at SKS 2019!) StixFresh makes a small food-safe sticker that, when put on produce, can extend its shelf life by a whopping two weeks. That’s the difference between throwing away a bunch of rotten fruit and eating it.

Our judges were so impressed by StixFresh’s potential to cut down on fruit and vegetable waste that it was named winner of the Startup Showcase. We can’t wait to see where this company goes next! Keep your eyes peeled for their stickers coming to a grocery store near you…

Photo: Scott Payton

Future Food Winner: Planeteer, LLC
Judges: Victoria Sparado-Grant and Michela Petronio (Barilla), Nina Meijers (Foodbytes!), Peter Bodenheimer (Food-X), Cheryl Durkee (Mealthy), Natalie Shmulik (The Hatchery)

As the popularity of food delivery grows, one of the unintended consequences is the uptick in single-use plastic cutlery. Startup Planeteer wants to replace plastic spoons (and eventually knives and forks) with tastier options. Yep, they make edible spoons, both sweet and savory, meant to cut down on the number of plastic cutlery that ends up in landfills. In addition to a sweet trophy, Planeteer’s team will be taking a trip to Italy to visit Blu1877, Barilla’s innovation arm.

The WeWork Food Labs and Millo teams. Photo: Scott Payton

Innovation Award: Millo
Judges: WeWork Food Labs team

The blender is one kitchen appliance that hasn’t seen a ton of innovation. Millo decided to change that by developing a smart, silent, cordless blender that looks cool enough to hang out all day on your countertop. Clearly the WeWork Food Labs team thought that the world was ready for a next-gen blender, since they awarded the Millo team with their WeWork Innovation Award. Along with the award, Millo will also get a desk in WeWork’s Food Labs.

SKS 2019: The Smart Kitchen Needs to Sell Experiences, Not Products

A recurring topic at this week’s SKS North America event has been around what is and isn’t working right now in the smart kitchen. As more devices come to market and product categories emerge, today’s home cook has seemingly limitless choice around how to make their cooking more connected. But as has been discussed at length this week, not all kitchen devices are actually useful, and the challenge for smart kitchen companies now is to make solutions potential customers would actually find useful for their lives. I use the word “solutions” intentionally, because a major takeaway from this year’s conference is that the smart kitchen is no longer just about devices.

The Spoon’s Mike Wolf discussed just that onstage today with Nick Holzherr, head of Whisk for Samsung, Mario Pieper, Chief Digital Officer for BSH Appliances, and Joe Ray of Wired. One of the major takeaways from the panel was the need for companies, whether they’re making hardware or software, to focus on creating and selling an experience, not a product or service.

BSH has been tackling this issue for a few years now, evolving from a company that sells appliances to one combining hardware and software. Onstage at SKS, Pieper suggested that companies pay particular attention to which appliances tend to bring out a strong emotional response from the user. For example, people are much more likely to be attached to the experience of making coffee versus loading a dishwasher, which is one of the reasons, Pieper said, BHS’s attempts to sell a connected version of a dishwasher didn’t take off.

For Whisk, improving the connected kitchen experience means competing companies need to work together more. In other words, to make the connected kitchen a more seamless experience, the industry players need to be more connected to one another, offering consumers recipes from multiple providers cooked on a mix of devices that are all compatible with one another. This approach, says Holzherr, is what can truly improve the customer journey from recipe to meal and increase the amount of time a user spends with any given device. Hypothetically, that means a Samsung device or recipe platform would be compatible with ones from LG or Whirlpool, creating a completely connected ecosystem. It’s a compelling vision, though the likelihood of major appliance-makers working side-by-side in perfect harmony seems doubtful at the moment.

In the meantime, one issue the smart kitchen continues to battle is too much tech actually making the home-cooking process more complicated, not less. Moving forward, smart kitchen solutions need to be solving actual problems in home cooking — food waste, for example — as opposed to being just tech for the sake of tech. Designing concepts around an experience rather than a gadget is one more step towards making the smart kitchen truly useful for the average consumer.

Thermomix Partners with Drop for Smart Appliance Control and Grocery Ordering

Thermomix is adding Drop’s smart kitchen software to its all-in-one kitchen appliance, the two companies announced from the stage today at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) in Seattle.

Through the partnership the Thermomix TM6 will connect with other smart kitchen appliances and third-party applications through the device itself. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Thermomix will now soon be able to preheat an oven, order groceries and optimize recipe content with the push of a button. Thermomix said the first integrations will hit the market in 2020.

The TM6 has more than 20 culinary features including chopping, mixing, blending, different types of cooking including sous vide and fermentation. The device also features guided cooking for more than 50,000 recipes. All that functionality ain’t cheap, however, as the device itself costs $1,500.

But that hasn’t been a daunting price tag for people outside of the U.S. where the device is more popular. What’s more, people aren’t just buying the device, but as we also learned at SKS this week, the company has a crazy high subscription conversion rate:

In addition to appliance control, Drop’s software also does recipe discovery and re-sizing, ingredient swapping, and grocery lists. Thermomix is not the first all-in-one cooker to integrate Drop’s software. Last month Drop announced that it would expand its partnership with Kenwood to be on the CookEasy+ multi-function cooking appliance. Today’s press announcement also said that 40 million Drop-enabled appliances from brands such as GE Appliances, Bosch, Electrolux and LG Electronics will ship over the next three years.

How Wellness Is Redefining the Way We Use Our Home Kitchens

Excepting some appliance upgrades, the kitchen in 2019 is largely the same as it was in 1959. Our cabinets and pantries are still dark, enclosed spaces meant to hold food with a shelf-life of months or even years. Large refrigerators hide food that once forgotten goes bad, and countertops are cluttered by microwaves, toasters, and other gadgets. But as living spaces get smaller and consumer behavior shifts more towards healthy eating, fresh ingredients, and curbing food waste, the kitchen is desperately in need of a makeover.

At SKS 2019 this week, architect Veronica Schreibeis Smith, of wellness-focused kitchen company Vera Iconica, gave us a hint as to how the kitchen can evolve to meet those needs.

One of her biggest takeaways onstage was that what is old is new again. In other words, humans are moving away from the hyper-processed food bought in cans and boxes at the store and back towards homemade or homegrown meals and ingredients.

But most people aren’t moving back to a self-sustained farm to do those things, and her company’s vision for the kitchen shows how to accommodate the demand for healthy, local eating in your average household.

For example, Vera Iconica makes space in its kitchen design for a small hydroponic grow system built into the cabinetry. The cabinets themselves are climate controlled to better store fresh ingredients and ensure both a longer shelf life and better nutrient preservation in items.

Preserving food is one element of this newly designed kitchen concept. The other is making the actual space more efficient. For example, Vera Iconica’s kitchen includes a center island where users can prep food directly on its surface instead of juggling multiple cutting boards.

At SKS, Smith was joined onstage by architect Suleiman Alhadidi, who is reimagining the kitchen via MIT Media Labs’ City Science Group project. As he demonstrated onstage at SKS this week, this version of the kitchen is extremely modular, with things like robotically controlled cabinets and pantry storage that can automatically reveal or hide itself based on whether you need it.

How soon will this vision for the kitchen become a reality, not just for early adopters and those with disposable income, but any homeowner? When, for example, will a person be able to stroll into an IKEA and find an option to build an affordable hydroponic system into their cabinets? When does climate-controlled storage become built-in feature of rental apartments?

Not right away, as affordability remains an issue. That said, Smith suggested we’re moving closer to being able to incorporate some of the elements she and Alhadidi discussed this week. Most likely, modularity will rule, with users being able to pick, choose, and customize based on how much they’re willing to spend to reinvent their kitchens.

SKS 2019: 3 Things We Need to Create New and Better Forms of Animal-Free Protein

The future of alternative proteins is about way more than plants. That was the main takeaway from a talk my colleague Catherine Lamb hosted this morning at The Spoon’s SKS conference in Seattle.

Joining Lamb onstage were Dr. Lisa Dyson, cofounder and CEO of Air Protein; Morgan Keim, the Corporate & Business Development Manager of Motif FoodWorks; and Perumal Gandhi, cofounder of Perfect Day. All three are experts on the white-hot alternative protein space. All three run companies that are creating new forms of protein, using not animals or plants, but microorganisms, technology, and — in one case — the air itself.

Onstage, the three of them and Lamb discussed some elements we need more of to make alternative proteins more widely available to the average consumer and care for the planet at the same time.

1. Better Production Methods
As Dr. Dyson outlined in her talk, traditional protein, whether derived from animal or plant, requires land. As the recent burning of the Amazon forest illustrates, this way of farming is not sustainable for either the planet or the 10 billion people expected to be on it by 2025.

Air Protein’s solution is to remove land from the equation. Using a technology originally developed by NASA, Dr. Dyson’s company created a closed-loop system to feed microorganisms carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and nitrogen to create a carbon fermentation process that makes proteins.

You can read an in-depth profile of how the technology works here. Onstage, Dr. Dyson focused more on the possibilities a company like Air Protein could introduce into the food system, like saving land and preserving natural habitats. For example, a traditional soy farm would have to be the size of Texas to produce as much protein as an Air Protein farm the size of Disney World can make.

2. More Ingredients
Motif FoodWorks also uses a fermentation process to, as Morgan Keim explained onstage, create better versions of animal-based foods we know and love and, in many cases, are loathe to part with, doomed planet or no (ahem, cheese).

At SKS, Keim noted that one of the keys to making alternative protein more widespread is finding and including the kinds of ingredients that will help it function just as real meat (or egg or dairy) does. For example, is there something that can be added to alt protein that will help it maintain the right color once it’s in the form of a burger patty and cooking on the grill? What ingredients could make alternative proteins as digestible as their animal counterparts?

Motif is currently using custom microbes to try and answer some of these questions. As Keim noted during the panel, the possibilities are practically limitless with the right mindset.

3. Transparency
But all those custom microbes and genetic modification processes have to be disclosed to consumers, something Perfect Day’s Gandhi discussed onstage.

Perfect Day, for example, makes a point of calling out that its products are “flora-based” — that is, they’re made from genetically modified microflora (a.k.a. bacteria). But as Gandhi explained onstage, even when discussing GMOs, people are actually more receptive to the product when you don’t try to hide information like that. If companies can effectively explain to the average consumer (read: not vegetarians or vegans) why and how a product like flora-based ice cream is better for them, people will generally be more open to the product.

That’s the hope, at least, and so far over the last few years, consumers have shown an increasing appetite for alternative forms of proteins, even those with genetically modified elements. We’ll be digging more into this movement towards over the next day and a half, so stay tuned for more on new forms of proteins and the role they’ll play in our future food system.