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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Startups

PepsiCo Is Taking Applications for Its Fifth Annual Greenhouse Accelerator Program

PepsiCo is now taking applications for the fifth installment of its Greenhouse Accelerator Program, which looks for young startups reinventing in the food and beverage industry. One major focus for this year’s cohort will be on food innovations and technologies that “improve the aging process through wellness and health management,” according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

The program selects 10 companies to participate in the six-month-long program. Each startup gets a $20,000 grant and the opportunity to work with mentors, who will advise on product and brand development, supply chain management, customer acquisition, and other areas of running a food business. One company will be rewarded a $100,000 grant at the end of the program. 

Companies worldwide are eligible for the program. They must have a product or service currently available in the market, and have more than $1 million.

This year, PepsiCo’s program is looking for companies addressing issues around health, wellness, and aging. According to the Greenhouse Accelerator website, some focus areas include products that assist with tracking and managing wellness, functional ingredients, wearables that promote health awareness, and other innovations that encourage healthy diets and lifestyles.

The focus makes sense, given the ongoing global health crisis that has disrupted the way people both shop and eat for food. Snacking may be on the rise, but so too is a need for healthier food choices. Making health and wellness more accessible is in turn becoming a priority for many companies in the food industry.

PepsiCo will select the 10 companies for this cohort in January 2021. The application process is open until December 9.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that the Greenhouse Accelerator Program was only open to companies in the U.S. and Canada.

The DFA CoLab Accelerator Is Now Taking Applications for All Things Dairy Tech

Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) announced this week that applications are open for its 2021 accelerator program, newly renamed the DFA CoLab Accelerator. Any early-stage food product company working in some portion of the dairy supply chain is welcome to apply, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The DFA, a decades-old cooperative of U.S. dairy farms, has run the accelerator program for the last five years, using it as a way for startups to get a foothold in agtech and for the dairy industry to keep an ear to the ground when it comes to new technologies and processes. The solutions that come out of this program showcase just how much milage the food industry could actually get out of dairy products. The 2020 cohort, unveiled last May, included, among others, a company that makes sustainable fashion from excess milk and one brewing up premium alcoholic spirits from whey.

“On the food front, the sky is really the limit as long as one of the main ingredients is dairy,” Doug Dresslaer, director of innovation at DFA, said in this week’s press release. 

To that end, the 2021 program is looking for early-stage companies that are “dairy-focused or dairy-based” and using “applications or technologies related to any portion of the dairy value chain.” Some areas include supply chain optimization, traceability, data management, herd health management, and sustainability. 

The 90-day program will be a mix of virtual and onsite training that takes place from April through June, 2021. Participants get mentorship opportunities with DFA executives as well as training around business development, finance, product development, brand building, supply chain logistics, and several other areas of running a business. 

Applications are open through December 29, 2020.

NapiFeryn’s Technology Upcycles Post-Processed Rapeseed Into Usable Protein Powder

Rapeseed, also known as canola, is one of the largest sources of vegetable oil in the world.

The seeds are pressed to get the oil, which becomes the final consumer product. Let behind is a byproduct referred to as rapeseed “cake”, chunky greenish clumps that are sometimes used in animal feed.

Beyond that, however, rapeseed cake has had little functional use as a human food product, but thanks to technology by Polish startup NapiFeryn, rapeseed processors can now upcycle the leftover rapeseed cake into a human-consumable protein powder.

The process developed by NapiFeryn to convert the leftover cake into a usable protein involves several steps and is currently in the scale up phase. Once converted into human-consumable protein powder, the neutral flavor and odor profile of rapeseed protein powder means it can be used in a variety of foods types such as bread, protein bars or as a meat or egg substitute.

This move to create higher-value outputs from agricultural byproducts is just another example of the momentum around upcycling. The market, which now has its own industry association and is sized at $47 billion, has startups creating products from inputs ranging from from cacao pulp to spent beer grains.

And now, thanks to NapiFeryn, rapeseed cake.

You can learn more about NapiFeryn’s technology via the nifty 360 degree video produced by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT)’s food innovation initiative (EIT Food) for its Food Unfolded digital content platform.

Rapeseed Protein | A Sustainable Source Of Plant Protein (360 Video)

Startup CPG’s Free Databases Help Emerging Brands with 3PL, Logistics and Donations

The phrase “The Passion Economy” refers to the increasing ability for people to build real businesses around whatever they are, well, passionate about (it’s also an excellent book).

And while there are a ton of fledgling founders passionate about food and launching a ton of upstart CPG brands, those same founders probably don’t hold the same zeal for things like logistics or inventory management.

That’s where a trio of free online databases from Startup CPG can help. Startup CPG is a volunteer organization of various experts and founders that provide knowledge, networking and community to small brands. Startup CPG membership is free, and includes access to an ongoing Slack Channel as well as events where members can learn more about things like venture capital, product law and marketing (full disclosure that I have volunteered and spoken at a Startup CPG event).

Earlier this year, Startup CPG created three free databases for its members that serve as national and regional directories for direct to consumer third-party logistics companies, e-commerce retailers where goods can be sold, and places where food about to expire can be donated instead of being destroyed. Last week, the list was migrated to a Google spreadsheet to make it more accessible, and its available to any brand that provides their email address to Startup CPG.

The database was created by Startup CPG volunteers crowdsourcing information and searching the web to include the name of relevant companies/services, as well as things like what regions they serve, the types of food accepted and the appropriate contact to reach out to.

In other words, these databases can help answer a lot of the business type questions a new brand just starting out might have. And with at least some of those questions answered, founders can continue to focus on what they are most passionate about.

SKS 2020: Watch the SKS Startup Showcase Finalist Pitches

At last week’s Smart Kitchen Summit, ten finalists made their case on the virtual stage why they should be chosen as winner of the Startup Showcase competition.

The Startup Showcase, which started back in 2015 and is one of the longest running dedicated food tech startup pitch contests in the world, had its most diverse and interesting mix of companies yet, with products ranging from cultured seafood to a food robots to a taste-enhancing cutlery.

While SKS attendees got to see the finalists from the main stage last week, we figured Spoon readers might also like to see the pitches.

Here’s how the Showcase worked: The pitch sessions were one of two portions of the showcase. After the founders pitched from the virtual stage on the first day, the next day they headed to their virtual breakout rooms where they showed off their products and answered questions from the judges.

The judges for this year’s Startup Showcase included Wired’s Joe Ray, Good Housekeeping’s Nicole Papantoniou, test kitchen expert Jane Freiman, Modernist Cuisine author/ChefSteps founder Chris Young and rlTLK/Pieshell founder Cheryl Durkee. The judges went into virtual “exhibit” areas where the founders could show off their wares and answer questions.

Since contactless pick up pod startup Minnow was declared the winner, we thought we’d also include a clip from the Minnow booth explaining how the product works.

Applications Are Open for THRIVE’s Ag Tech Accelerator Program

SVG Ventures’ THRIVE platform, which connects farmers, food tech companies, corporations, and investors, is now taking applications for Cohort VII of its THRIVE accelerator program. Typically, the program looks for seed-stage startups from all over the world whose solutions have a tech angle and aim to make the agricultural system more efficient, sustainable, and secure.

The upcoming cohort will run March through June, 2021, according to email from THRIVE sent to The Spoon. Selected companies will participate in the three-month-long program. Like other accelerator programs operating in the midst of the pandemic, Cohort VII will be a mix of virtual and onsite work, with the latter being in the Salinas and Central California growing regions.

THRIVE’s program looks for early- to growth-stage startups working in a number of different areas of food tech: robotics and automation, indoor farming, supply chain management, and biotech, to name a few. Trace Genomics, FarmWise, and Harvest Automation are a few notable alumni of the program. 

Admission to the program is competitive: THRIVE has said in the past it has an acceptance rate of less than 3 percent and pulls from an applicant pool of more than 500 startups from around the world. Of those, just eight are chosen to participate in the accelerator program.

Selected companies receive $75,000 investment ($37,500 in cash and $37,500 in program value). The program website notes there is opportunity for follow-on investment. Startups also receive mentorship opportunities and access to corporate partners and farmers via the THRIVE network. The program ends with a Demo Day at the annual Forbes AgTech Summit.

Separate from the accelerator program, this year SVG /THRIVE have also launched the THRIVE Global Initiative in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S Department of State. Through a series of “challenges” in different regions around the world, THRIVE will award startups for innovative solutions, beginning with the THRIVE Australia Challenge on December 17, 2020. Challenges in Canada and Africa will follow in 2021.

Meanwhile, the THRIVE accelerator program kicks off in March 2021. Applications are open until November 20, 2020.

Mosa Meat's steak tartare on white plate with garnishes

Cultured meat takes sides on CRISPR

In 2017, a patent assigned to Memphis Meats detailed a way to overcome one of cultured meats biggest obstacles. The startup would use CRISPR gene editing to create a small mutation in their cells. The mutation would inactivate two proteins and ultimately increase “replicative capacity of the modified cell populations indefinitely.” They had transformed unpredictable cells with a limited capacity into hyper-proliferative ones  equipped for industrial production.

Longevity and predictability are the obstacles all cultured meat start-ups face in the effort to bring production to scale. Commercial scale cultured meat will require a mass production of cells like no other project to date, but cells in question aren’t inherently capable of that kind of output. After a certain number of replications, the fat, muscle and connective tissue cells max out. They  begin to die off or lose control. Left to itself, cultured meat eventually becomes self-contaminating. 

CRISPR gene editing offers a work around, a cheap and accurate way to equip stem cells for industrial capacity and consistency. Muscle and fat stem cells that naturally peter out can be edited to divide forever. Induced pluripotent stem cells that easily veer off course can be reprogrammed to exclusively produce muscle cells, fat or connective tissue. 

“Technologies like CRISPR allow us to safely increase the quality of our cell growth, which means we will make meat that is tastier, healthier, and more sustainable than slaughtered meat,” Brian Spears, the co-founder and CEO of New Age Meats, told Business Insider last year. Ostensibly, genetic tweaks made using CRISPR could make industrial cell culture faster to market, more predictable, and more cost effective.

But while some start-ups make CRISPR gene editing intrinsic to their process, others are intentionally separating themselves from the technology. They’re concerned that genetically altering their cell lines could lead to regulatory hang-ups — if not in the US or Asia, then in Europe. They’re calling their cultured meat non-GMO.

Whether CRISPR is a GMO has been hotly debated since the technology was first adapted for research from bacterial defense systems. Unlike genetically modified organisms, which have had foreign genetic material inserted into their DNA and been edited in a way that couldn’t occur naturally, CRISPR alters an organism’s own DNA to exhibit the most desirable traits. 

“Scientifically I buy that it’s not a GMO,” Paul Mozdziak, a cell biologist at North Carolina State told me via Zoom, “but regulation is often based on more than science.” Mozdziak is also an affiliate of Peace of Meat, a B2B cultured meat company that’s decided against CRISPR. “Our profile is we are not going to do anything that can be construed in any way shape or form as GMO,” Mozdziak said.  The same is true of Mosa Meat, a cultured meat elite who produced the first lab-grown burger in 2013. The decision is partly because Mosa is in the European market which doesn’t have a favorable attitude toward CRISPR at all, said Joshua Flack, cell biologist and leader of Mosa Meat’s Stemness & Isolation team. But “It also makes scientific sense. It is a lot of work to engineer your cell lines in this fashion.There’s a lot of ground work in the beginning if you’re using CRISPR and engineering.”

For those that don’t go the CRISPR route, the key is identifying the optimal cell line, finding out exactly what those cells want, and then catering the entire process to them, Flack said. The non-GMO approach is about optimizing the process while CRISPR offers a way to “turn the thing on its head” by genetically optimizing the cell line.  

From a scientific standpoint, no one is challenging CRISPR’s potential. Mozdziak called it a “promising technology” for the entire industry and even expects US regulatory bodies to be fairly amenable to the technology. Meanwhile, Mosa Meat has invested in inhouse explorations using CRISPR for R&D purposes. “We have to understand the risks of not employing these strategies,” Flack said. “The potential upside is really massive.”

CRISPR could very well be the fastest and cheapest way to commercial scale, but it’s unclear how much that will matter in the long run. Which process will be first to market or which will be stalled in regulations? These questions are just proxies for the one question that we can’t answer yet. That is, what will people buy–and buy enough to disrupt the meat industry? Maybe this new age GMO debate ends like the last one: both sides proceed so customers have the option. But one thing is for sure, Flack said,  “if you can’t sell it at the end, the effort is wasted.”

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article contained a quote from Daan Luining, CTO of Meatable. For administrative reasons, that quote has been replaced with a quote from Brian Spears, CEO of New Age Meats, originally published by Business Insider.

Meet the Startup Showcase Finalists for Smart Kitchen Summit 2020

While much of the food world has been impacted by the pandemic, there’s been no shortage of investors, inventors and innovators looking to reinvent the food system.

To me, this excitement about food tech is especially evident from the flood of interest in our sixth annual Startup Showcase, which takes place at this year’s (virtual) Smart Kitchen Summit. We were overwhelmed with applications from companies wanting to participate at our annual event that showcases the most interesting new startups building innovative new products for the future of food and cooking.

And so we’re excited today to announce the 10 finalists that will be showcasing at the Smart Kitchen Summit Oct. 13th-15th. These startups are innovating in everything from cultured meat to food waste to restaurant robotics to taste-altering utensils.

If you’d like to watch the founders of these companies pitch and go into a virtual session where they will show off their products and answer questions, get your ticket for the Smart Kitchen Summit today!

Minnow Technologies

Minnow Technologies is making an Amazon Locker for fresh takeout food. The connected food pickup pod can house takeout meals in an antimicrobial environment. Pods can be placed virtually anywhere and restaurants, food halls and other food businesses can leverage them to provide their customers and delivery providers with a safe and way to grab and go.

Cultured Decadence

Cultured Decadence is a cell-based tech startup creating a system that can produce seafood like crabs and lobsters sustainably. It does this using cell culture and tissue engineering techniques for the high-value portions of crabs and lobsters, producing no shells or wasteful organ pieces. It can also potentially eliminate the need for wild harvesting altogether and help create a more sustainable ocean ecosystem.

Satis.ai

Satis.ai is a full-stack operating system for restaurant kitchens. The system uses live camera feeds in kitchens to analyze cooking processes and provide actionable feedback to back-of-house staff in real time as well as give owners/managers business intelligence to help increase efficiency, inventory ordering and customer order accuracy.

Zymmo LLC

Zymmo’s platform is a meal marketplace and foodie social network that gives chefs a place to connect with local food lovers and potential customers. Zymmo allows chefs to publish their menus, promote their events and facilitate ordering and payments all in one app.

Bonbowl

Bonbowl is a small appliance startup making an induction-based heating cooktop along with patent-pending cookware that can be used to cook with and eat from safely. Their induction technology enables power efficient cooking that uses half the power of electric stoves of similar size. The Bonbowl pot doubles as a bowl that consumers can eat right out of, eliminating a longer cleanup process and additional hardware.

Nymble Labs

Nymble Labs makes Julia, a domestic cooking robot that helps consumers cook healthy meals for their families. The cooking robot only requires users to select a recipe, chop up or gather the ingredients for said recipe and insert them into the device. Users press a button and Julia does the rest: heating at the right temps, adding ingredients at the right time, stirring and simmering until the meal is done and ready to be served.

Taste Boosters

Taste Boosters is the startup behind SpoonTEK, the world’s first taste-altering utensil. Using taste buds, the human body’s sensors and their patent-pending ionic technology, SpoonTEK can alter and enhance taste and flavor of any food dish.

Vobil

Vobil is a startup that’s developed a voice-based e-commerce technology platform that links food ordering to connected car interfaces, allowing for entirely voice-based ordering, checkout and navigation to the store in real-time.

Kitche

Kitche is a free app for iOS and Android phones that helps users reduce food waste at home by helping change personal habits with what they buy and consume. The app uses a connection with an OCR (optical character recognition) engine and a food ontology database to help users know what they already have at home, even when they’re on the go. The app helps users understand how much money they waste every time they throw food out at home.

Piestro

Piestro is an automated pizzeria startup that has created a standalone, fully-integrated cooking system for artisanal pizzas. From start to finish, it takes three minutes to make a pizza. Piestro will be able to press pizza dough, spread sauce and shredded cheese, add up to six desired toppings, and calculate the perfect cooking time based on the ingredients and humidity. Orders can be placed either in person at a public location (e.g., shopping malls, college campuses, movie theaters, hospitals or airports) and cooked in front of the customer. Customers can also opt to get the pizza even closer to their door by ordering through an app for delivery.

Scrum Ventures Launches a New Program, Food Tech Studio – Bites!

San Francisco-based VC firm Scrum Ventures just announced Food Tech Studio – Bites!, a food tech-focused program that looks to bring together a variety of companies innovating across the food industry.  

Speaking on the phone this week, Michael Proman, Managing Partner at Scrum Ventures, said the program is something of a reinvention of the traditional accelerator model. Instead of early-stage companies receiving investment and mentorship in exchange for equity, Food Tech Studio is more about helping companies at any stage cultivate long-term relationships across the food industry: with corporations, other entrepreneurs, and industry thought leaders alike. And since the program’s partners include several Japan-based companies (see below), building relationships in the Japanese market will be a major (though not the only) focus.

As to the types of companies Food Tech Studio is looking for, the range is intentionally broad. Applicants might include everything from supply chain management solutions to food waste companies to food producers reimagining how a CPG brand could change what we eat.  

“We’re trying to create a very diverse community of companies,” Proman said. He adds that many food tech companies nowadays fit into more than one category (e.g., food waste and food traceability), and that casting a wide net will allow the program to bring together companies, partners, and mentors who might not normally mix in a traditional accelerator setting. In Proman’s own words, it’s “bringing together folks that would otherwise not have come together but have common points of interest.”

“Anytime you have upwards of 100 startups coming together from around the world, particularly startups that are at different stages or areas of the industry, I think there are a lot of opportunities [for] conversations that wouldn’t normally be taking place,” he adds.” This in turn can lead to more collaboration between the different verticals within the food tech industry.

Adding to the diversity is the list of the program’s partners, which includes Fuji Oil, instant-noodle innovator Nissin, tea company Itoen, Juchheim, the Otsuka group, and food distribution company Nichirei. 

A virtual format helps with the program’s cross-discipline-like approach. Like other programs that have kicked off in the last several months, Food Tech Studio will be online, as the pandemic makes it difficult to conduct any in-person sessions. 

Proman said the program will choose between 75 and 100 companies to participate, though they’re not married to a specific number. (“We don’t have a quota,” says Proman.) Applications are open right now and the program is slated to begin in early 2021.

Firstchop Shuts Down as COVID Crushed its B2B Pivot

Firstchop has a special place in my food tech journalist heart. I was there when the company first launched back in the Fall of 2017, and today, nearly three years later, I’m writing about its collapse.

Firstchop started its startup life amid the consumer sous vide mini-boomlet from a few years back. Unlike Anova and Chefsteps however, Firstchop gave away its sous vide wand to get you to subscribe to its protein delivery service. The company would send you a box of chef-prepared meats that you just had to heat up in the sous vide bath.

“Sous vide really caught fire and then collapsed,” Firstchop founder Ajay Narain told me earlier this year. “Unrealistic expecations were built around what sous vide could do. People thought it would be great for all of these different use cases, but it has a lot of limitations.”

So Firstchop abandoned that business to pivot to B2B, re-launching to sell prepared microwaveable meals to offices. At first, the switch to B2B was more fruitful for Firstchop. At the time of its official launch, Narain said that Firstchop sold three times as much product in the first month than it had the entire previous year of selling D2C.

In an email exchange this week, Narain said that Firstchop had also set up distribution through KeHE and Vistar (for offices), had brokers and had meeting scheduled with retail buyers at ExpoWest.

However, those good times quickly soured. Firstchop’s new debut was at the end of February, which is right as the pandemic was starting to hit the U.S. ExpoWest was cancelled. “Getting meetings became impossible,” Narain wrote to me in our exchange. “The office vending market absolutely collapsed. Not sure when it will ever recover as people get comfortable permanently or semi-permanently working from home.”

As a result, Firstchop has shut down.

In his email, Narain wrote that he kind of wished he had stayed in the D2C market as other players in that space like Blue Apron have rebounded. Indeed, direct to consumer channels have boomed across the food tech landscape during this pandemic. Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Like any good entrepreneur, Narain isn’t done with the startup game. He said he’s already working on something new and still in the food tech space. Though he wouldn’t say more, I’m sure I’ll be writing about that when it launches.

Odeko AI-Driven Platform Aims to Boost the Supply, Demand, and Lifespan of the Indie Coffeeshop

A lot of us dread the idea of a world where speciality coffeeshops are gone “going for coffee” means getting a Starbucks latte delivered via DoorDash. 

Dane Atkinson, CEO of tech startup Odeko, clearly doesn’t want that day to happen either, which is why his company has developed a mobile ordering and supply chain management system that is, for now, specifically geared towards keeping specialty coffeeshops in business. 

Speaking on the phone this week about his company’s overall mission, he said “the really important message [is that] if we don’t sustain this industry, it really will become Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. They will consolidate in smaller locations and the community and neighborhoods will suffer.”

NYC-based Odeko, which closed a $12 million Series A round in August, recently merged with fellow coffee tech company Cloosiv, has since the start of the pandemic looked for ways to help businesses make both the front and back ends of the coffee shop more efficient, less wasteful, and more financially sustainable over the long haul.

The consumer-facing side of Odeko’s business functions similar to those of mainstream coffee retailers. Customers order and pay for pickup through the company’s mobile app or website. At the moment, Odeko has about 10,000 coffeeshops on the platform across multiple U.S. states. Atkinson says the benefit for customers is its current focus on speciality coffeeshops, which simply means less sifting through irrelevant options to find a high-quality espresso. (Odeko vets its potential merchant partners in order to ensure they actually are specialty coffeeshops.)

The coffeeshops themselves get perhaps the most benefit from the platform. Listing a business on the platform means the coffeeshop itself doesn’t have to come up with the resources to create a mobile order app from the ground up. Odeko charges a 5 percent commission fee per order, which small compared to others, including third-party aggregators a la Grubhub.

Sales data is then used, via AI, to predict volume so that coffeeshops know how much to order in terms of paper supplies, baking ingredients, beverages, and other items needed to run a coffeeshop. Businesses can browse the company’s Cafe Supply Catalog to find all of these items, which Odeko then delivers as a single shipment. 

Atkinson said this supply side of the business is “exploding” now that restaurant industry margins are so tight that any amount of money lost through inventory waste or inefficient supply chain processes can spell the end for a business. “Previously, as a shop, you could get away with some waste in your inventory,” he noted. Now, throwing out unused inventory is akin to “your own salary you’re throwing out.” He says the system is “90 percent accurate” in terms of predicting inventory needs for a week.

The need to digitize the back of house and make it more efficient is a theme that comes up a lot nowadays, with companies like Galley and Souszen applying software, automation, and IoT to change how the back of house is run. Odeko stands somewhat apart from these companies because of its accompanying consumer-facing tech, and also its focus on independent and specialty retailers. It’s main competitor in the coffee-specific mobile order space is Ritual, though Ritual does not have a supply chain side of its business.

Odeko doesn’t necessarily want to solely commit itself to coffee for the long haul. Atkinson says the system could actually work for other types of food businesses, including juice bars or full-service restaurants, and that at some point down the line the company will expand in terms of the types of food businesses on its platform. For now, keeping the independent coffeeshop, the connective tissue of many neighborhoods, alive is its main mission. 

New Report Calls Fermentation The Next Pillar of Alternative Proteins

A new report released today by the Good Food Institute adds a third pillar to the alternative protein sector alongside cultured meat and plant-based proteins: fermentation. 

In the last five years there’s been a “Cambrian explosion” of companies in this segment, Nate Crosser, start-up growth specialist at GFI and author of the report, told me in an interview this week. By mid-2020 there were 44 fermentation companies globally working on alternative proteins, up from 23 companies in 2018. 

“I was surprised to see how much traction was behind this segment, in terms of investment in particular,” Crosser said. Cultured meat gets all the press, but in 2019 fermentation-based protein companies raised 3.5 times more capital than cultivated meat companies, and in 2020 they’ve already raised $435 million of the total $1.5 billion invested in alternative proteins. 

Fermentation uses microbes to produce proteins and functional ingredients used in animal-free meat, egg and dairy products. Part of the allure to investors is that the technology is “commercializable today,” Mark Warner, a consultant on alternative proteins who specializes in scaling up fermentation commercialization told me in an interview on Tuesday. There are already companies and facilities using similar methods to mass produce enzymes. “The tech is generally proven. It’s the organisms that are being newly introduced.”

Because there are a myriad of organisms and approaches that can be used in fermentation, GFI breaks down fermentation companies into 3 categories in their report: traditional, biomass, and precision fermentation.

Traditional, as its name would suggest, refers to a long-established use of microbes to alter flavor, nutrition or texture—like the lactic acid bacteria used to make cheese or MycoTechnology’s plant protein with improved taste and functionality.

Biomass fermentation is all about mass producing protein. It relies on fast-growing, protein-dense microorganisms like algae and fungi. Meati uses this approach to make its mycelium-based steak. And last but not least, there’s precision fermentation, the process used to make Impossible Foods’ heme protein or Perfect Day’s whey protein. This approach, which can often rely on genetic modification, is used to produce highly functional proteins or ingredients that must be very precise but are needed in lower quantities.

The report is intended to give potential or existing investors an idea of the different approaches and state of the industry, Crosser said. Several major tech and agriculture players are already backing fermentation companies, including ADM Capital, Louis Dreyfus Co., Kellogg, Danone and Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Venture. Meanwhile major food and lifestyle companies like DSM, JBS, Novozymes and DuPont are working on in-house fermentation-derived alternative protein products.

But it may eventually take more than private funding if alternative proteins are really going to disrupt the meat and dairy industries, Warner said. Like with biofuels, alternative proteins may eventually require government funding to really take off.  “From my perspective, [this report] is going to be vital in framing the need for fermentation for investors,” Warren said, “but also public policy and any discussion around government funding.” 

While the entirety of alternative proteins industry is in a race to market, fermentation companies are expected to do more than join the contest. A high percentage of the fermentation segment is B2B, according to Crosser. They’ll be developing the components needed for cell culture and the ingredients needed for plant-based products.  “Their success is going to fuel the rest of the industry,” he said. “Fermentation serves as a force multiplier for the entire alternative protein sector.”