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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

The New CPG

Impossible Goes the Meal Kit Route With Home Chef Partnership

Meal kit company Home Chef announced today it is partnering with Impossible Foods to offer the latter’s plant-based burgers in its kits. This is the first time Impossible has shown up in the meal kit realm, and it comes at a point when consumer demand for plant-based meat is rapidly growing.

Home Chef will offer multiple recipes that give customers the option to swap out regular ol’ protein for Impossible’s burger, which will come as a 12-oz, package of ground meat for use in a range of recipes that would ordinarily call for beef.

The addition of Impossible to the Home Chef roster is part of the meal kit company’s new “Customize It” feature, which lets users adjust their weekly order to fit their needs, whether that’s extra protein, more veggies, or additional servings. Think Chipotle for meal kits. It’s also the latest way in which the Kroger-owned meal kit company is trying to diversify its offerings to meet different consumers’ lifestyles.

Meal kits are just the latest expansion for Impossible, which up until recently had only been available in restaurants. The company launched its direct-to-consumer online store in June. Those in the lower 48 states can buy bulk orders of Impossible products through it.

But while Impossible may be ahead of its rival Beyond in terms of D2C (Beyond has announced but not yet launched its own e-commerce site), it lags behind in meal kits. Beyond has been available in Blue Apron and HelloFresh kits for some time.

Since the start of the pandemic, Impossible has grown its grocery store footprint by more than 30x and its products are now in about 5,000 grocery stores. Meal kits are another road into consumers’ homes, an important destination seeing as how a lot more people are staying home these days. It doesn’t hurt, either, that the long-struggling meal kit market is actually making something of a comeback.

Pepsi and Diageo Will Launch Paper Bottles in 2021

Spirits company Diageo, best known for the Johnnie Walker, Guinness, and Smirnoff brands, announced this week that it’s created the world’s first plastic-free, paper-based bottle. Along with Monday’s announcement, Diageo also said it has partnered with venture management firm Pilot Lite to launch a sustainable packaging tech company called Puplex Limited.

First, the bottle. Puplex Limited designed and developed a bottle made from what the press release calls “sustainably sourced pulp” that is 100 percent free of plastic and also food safe and recyclable. The bottle will debut in 2021 with Johnnie Walker scotch whiskey.  

Scotch won’t be the only beverage available via these new bottles. Puplex Limited created a consortium of companies that includes PepsiCo and Unilever to further develop these bottles and launch their own branded versions in 2021, based on Puplex’s designs and tech.

More than 1 million plastic bottles are sold globally every single minute, and each of of those takes about 450 years to completely degrade. When it comes to recycling said bottles, the U.S., certainly wouldn’t win any prizes, unless they’re for not recycling: in 2017, just 8 percent of plastics were recycled, according to data from the EPA.

Given our broken recycling system, major beverage companies (among others) are now under pressure to reduce their overall reliance on plastic. For example, in 2019, PepsiCo teamed up with Coca-Cola and Keurig-Dr. Pepper for the Every Bottle Back program, which aims to reduce plastic use as well as invest in the improvement of the recycling of plastic bottles. 

So far, developing alt-packaging for the plastic bottles has proved challenging. It seems Diageo has made something of a breakthrough with its product announced this week. How scalable that breakthrough is across the entire beverage industry remains to be seen. 

Purple Carrot Launches Frozen Meals at Whole Foods Stores

Purple Carrot, best known for its plant-based meal kit subscription service, is getting into the retail game. The company today announced the launch of a line of frozen, single-serve meals that are now available at Whole Foods stores in the U.S.

Like the rest of Purple Carrot’s offerings, the meals are 100 percent plant based and developed in partnership with CPG company Conagra Brands, which owns Health Choice, Earth Balance, and Gardein, among other names. 

These frozen meals will be available for purchase at “nearly all” Whole Foods stores in the U.S. this week for $5.29 each, according to the company press release.

The move to retail is a first for Massachusetts-based Purple Carrot. It has long been known for its subscription-based meal kit company, which specializes in plant-forward, vegan-friendly meal kits. The company was acquired by Tokyo, Japan-based Oisix ra daichi Inc. in 2019. 

Purple Carrot’s launch in physical retail outlets comes at a time when more people are ordering their groceries online thanks to the pandemic. And recent research suggests the pandemic is also causing something of a resurgence in the previously struggling meal kit sector. Finally, COVID-19 may be ushering a new trend into the food world: frozen food as medicine. Given Purple Carrot’s plant-forward, healthy menu, the new line of products is a prime contender for this category.

One might wonder why Purple Carrot is focusing on physical retail stores right now. But despite what the headlines would have us believe, not everyone is avoiding the brick-and-mortar grocery store. Presumably online shoppers will still be able to purchase Purple Carrot’s frozen meals along with any other item they throw in their virtual cart. And with more people working from home, these single-serving meals could easily become a regular staple of someone’s freezer, and a quick way to grab a healthy bite in the middle of the workday.

Beyond Meat Arrives at Alibaba Stores in China

Beyond Meat continues its expansion in China, this time into the retail sector. The company is bringing its Beyond Burgers to Alibaba’s Heme supermarkets, first in Shanghai, then elsewhere in the country later this year, according to TechCrunch. 

Beyond debuted in China earlier this year with a Starbucks partnership, selling its plant-based meat products in cafes across the country. Availability of Beyond products expanded to the Yum China empire, where they were at Pizza Hut, KFC, and Taco Bell for a limited time.

The company’s arrival in Alibaba stores is its first foray into retail in China. Though it makes sense. China has the world’s largest population and is also the world’s largest consumer of meat. The Chinese government has been urging citizens for some time now to cut down their meat consumption, which makes China a lucrative market for plant-based meat products.

This move is also the latest salvo in what has been a busy few months of back-and-forth expansion news for both Beyond and its main plant-based rival, Impossible Foods. Impossible launched a direct-to-consumer sales channel at the beginning of June. Shortly after, Beyond released bulk packaging that narrowed the price gap between its burgers and traditional meat. Beyond also announced plans for its own D2C site, which has yet to launch. Then earlier this week, Impossible announced that its Impossible Sausage is now available to all restaurants in the U.S. 

This latest deal with Alibaba helps bolster Beyond’s foothold in China. Impossible is not yet in Chinese markets, though the company has suggested in the past it plans to eventually launch products there. As demand for plant-based meat offerings has surged since the start of the global pandemic, it’s a safe bet to expect the back-and-forth news from both companies to continue throughout the year.

The Food Tech Show: Investing In Consumer Brands With Elizabeth Edwards

Investing in consumer brands can be tough.

Not only do these startups need to navigate numerous channels to market and face competition from large corporate multinationals, but they’re also faced with having to build brand awareness with limited resources with what are almost always fickle consumers.

But the rewards can be enormous for those that invest in brands that become a category leader (or creates a new category altogether).

Elizabeth Edwards learned this early in her career when she invested in companies like Peloton and Farmer’s Fridge. And now as managing partner for her own venture capital firm H Venture Partners, she’s more excited than ever about investing about finding the next big consumer brand.

Elizabeth joined me to talk about how she identifies investible consumer-focused startups, why food is her favorite category, and how she thinks COVID has impacted the investment landscape.

You can find The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, download direct to your device, or just click play below.

Planterra’s Plant-based Meat Brand Ozo Hits Retail Store Shelves, E-Commerce

JBS-owned Planterra Foods announced this week it will launch its first Ozo product on grocery stores shelves in June, and will also make them available direct to consumers via its e-commerce site. To start, the brand will launch its burgers (two-4 oz patties), its Ground product (12 oz), and Mexican-Seasoned Ground (12 oz).

Colorado-based Planterra first announced Ozo in March of this year, saying the new line of plant-based products would include burgers, grounds, and meatballs. All Ozo products are a mix of pea protein and rice protein fermented with shiitake mycelia (root). 

According this week’s press release, Ozo products will hit store shelves in several different states:

Albertsons and Safeway locations in Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota and Wyoming; Kroger* stores in 12 states (Alabama, Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee) and, as well as military bases across the country.

Customers will also be able to order Ozo’s meatless meat through the brand’s website and through Wild Fork Foods for customers in Florida.

And for those looking to try before they buy, Planterra is also sending out its own fleet of vans to offer curbside-pickup samples of its products during the rest of June. Those vans will make stops in Denver, Boulder, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Additional cities are planned for the next 12 months, including Seattle, San Francisco, and Nashville, among others. Finally, “special deliveries will be made to fire stations, hospitals and other locations to serve frontline workers this summer,” according to the company press release.

Selling meatless meat directly to consumers is fast becoming a standard trend for companies, particularly with the restaurant industry — formerly a key channel for plant-based products — still in the throes of its pandemic-induced upheaval. Earlier this month, Impossible launched a direct-to-consumer channel for its “bleeding” meat products that’s available to anyone in the lower 48 states. Its chief competitor Beyond followed with an announcement of its own forthcoming D2C store, which is slated to launch at some point this summer. 

Meanwhile, demand for plant-based meat keeps rising, thanks in no small part to panic buying sprees and meat shortage scares, and online grocery shopping has hit record numbers in the last couple months. That makes now an ideal time to launch direct-to-consumer stores, and also to get new meat alternatives onto store shelves across the country.

It’s unclear if the demand for online grocery shopping will keep now that economies are reopening, so Planterra’s Ozo shop, not to mention those of other plant-based retailers, may or may not be a hit. That said, Ozo’s website says products can be stored frozen for up to 60 days, so flexitarians wanting to stock up may find a D2C e-commerce site a convenient addition to their online shopping.

Your Next Alt-Milk Latte Could Be Made With Barley

Whether it’s for sustainability reasons or those related to health, more folks nowadays are looking for alternatives to animal-based dairy. Oat milk, chickpea milk, almond milk, and others have all made strides in the alt-dairy market, and now they have a new competitor: barley milk. Plant-based dairy company Take Two Foods just launched its “Barleymilk” product, the first of its kind to use what it calls “rejuvenated barley” to create milk for human consumption.

Portland, OR-based Take Two was founded this year, and launched “Barleymilk” this past March. Right now it’s available in coffeeshops and cafes around the Pacific Northwest and in Los Angeles, according to a recent company press release. 

The company claims Barleymilk is a first of its kind. Over an email exchange with The Spoon, Take Two cofounder and CEO Sarah Pool said that in terms of a source for plant-based milk, “nobody knows about barley because the majority of companies are just fast-following trends.” In other words, plenty of companies are coming to market with almond milks and coconut milks, but barley is an untapped resource in terms of an ingredient for alt-milk.

That’s especially true when it comes to upcycled barley, which is made from the spent grain that goes to waste during the beer brewing process. Pool said about 8 billion pounds of spent barley goes to waste annually around the globe as the result of beer brewing. Take Two “rescues” this grain and uses it to make its Barleymilk, which Pool says can be used for everything from lattes to smoothies. The drink contains about 5 grams of protein per serving and has more than 50 percent less sugar than other milks. 

Of course the acid test for plant-based products these days is taste. And actually, that’s one of the major gripes about plant-based dairy products. They rarely taste like the real thing, and according to Pool, the more nutritious they are, the worst they taste. “Even though the plant-based milk category is booming right now, brands haven’t been able to solve converting the mainstream consumer to non-dairy,” she said. “First and foremost, because plant-based milk doesn’t taste amazing.”

There’s some debate on that point. Plant-based milk is “the most developed of all the plant-based categories,” according to the Good Food Institute, which also notes that plant-based products like dairy are “increasingly competitive with animal products on the key drivers of consumer choice: taste, price, and accessibility.” So plenty of folks are buying alt-dairy products.

That said, taste is subjective, and not everyone agrees on the taste of current plant-based milks. Even my former colleague Catherine Lamb, a die-hard when it comes to plant-based anything, has written about the “bitter aftertaste that comes with, say, pea protein or soy.”

Take Two says its Barleymilk tastes good enough to drink by the glassful, and can also be used as a cooking ingredient. Whether consumers agree is to be determined. The milks currently come in four flavors: original, chocolate, vanilla, and something called “chef’s blend.” Online, a two-pack costs $9.98 (plus $5.99 for standard shipping), and, as mentioned above, the products are also available in cafes in parts of the Pacific Northwest and L.A.

At The Spoon, we haven’t yet gotten the chance to taste Take Two’s take on alt-milk, and we’ll keep you updated when we do. In the meantime, the company says it plans to expand Barleymilk nationally across both retail and foodservice by the Fall of 2020. 

 

Dining With Mannequins: Max Elder on How to Think Like a Futurist About Our Food System

“Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.”

So said Max Elder, Research Director at Food Futures Lab for the Institute for the Future. Elder joined The Spoon yesterday for a virtual workshop on how to think like a food futurist during these uncertain times, and he had a wealth of tools and advice to offer attendees.

Besides the aforesaid quote, one of those nuggets was that you might be dining beside a mannequin next time you go out to eat. Sounds a little William Gibson-esque, right? Personally, I thought immediately of the ’80s film Mannequin, and some folks are no doubt creeped out by the whole idea.

But whatever images it conjures in your head, the concept actually already exists in some places. During yesterday’s workshop, Elder highlighted a Michelin-star restaurant in the Washington, D.C. area, The Inn at Little Washington, that is using mannequins to fill empty tables now that social distance guidelines require restaurants to run at reduced capacity in the dining room. 

This isn’t a widespread trend — yet. It’s what Elder calls a “signal.” Signals, as we discussed at the virtual workshop today, are facts about the present we can use to make predictions about the future. They’re especially important at a time when there’s so much uncertainty about so many parts of the food system, from the supply chain to restaurants to how we’ll get our groceries in future.

So how does one restaurant seating its empty tables with mannequins become an actual trend in the restaurant biz? For that matter, do we want it to become a trend? To answer these questions, Elder led the group in discussing the consequences, good and bad, of restaurants using mannequins as stand-in customers.

Ideas included:

  • Monetizing mannequins with ads
  • Mannequins becoming an extra item in the restaurant to clean and sanitize
  • Creating a Walking Dead-themed restaurants with mannequins
  • Ensuring mannequins are inclusive from racial, gender, and cultural angles
  • Mannequins becoming robots and therefore potential diner companions that could talk to you
  • Said robot-mannequins becoming holograms

The list goes on and on.

As a side note, mannequins and other doll-like figures aren’t just at the Washington Inn. A restaurant in Tokyo, Japan has strategically placed them around its establishment and even partnered with a clothing brand to make the mannequins as stylish as possible. And restaurant in Thailand uses stuffed animals, because who doesn’t want to eat across from a giant stuffed panda bear? 

If it all sounds a tad ridiculous, that’s the point. And as Elder and the workshop audience showed, seemingly ridiculous ideas can sometimes lead to us pondering the bigger implications of signals poised to become trends.

That’s just a smidgen of what we talked about at the workshop. To learn more about what signals are and how they become trends, what a future wheel is and why it’s important to making forecasts, and a bunch of other tools, watch the full video.

Become a Food Futurist

DAIZ Raised $6M to Become ‘The Fourth Meat’

Japanese plant-based meat startup DAIZ raised a $6 million Series A round in the second half of May. According to a DAIZ press release, the round included participation from the Fisheries Growth Industrialization Support Organization fund and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital. The $6 million figure marks DAIZ’s total funding to date.

While the actual funding was announced a couple weeks ago, it’s worth noting because of DAIZ’s ambitions and how the company plans to take on big-name players in the plant-based space with its so-called “miracle chips,” which are raw plant-based meat components created using DAIZ’s patented Ochiai High Pressure Method technology.

According to the press release, this germination method brings out the umami flavor of soybeans and lessens the unpleasant aftertaste that are found in a lot of vegan meat offerings right now. The soybeans are then put in an extruder, where molding technologies recreate the texture of actual meat.

With the new funds, DAIZ says it will build out one of the largest factories for plant-based meat in Japan in 2021. They also plan to raise Series B funds at some point in 2020. Initially, the company will focus on selling to major food manufacturers as well as distribution companies, and eventually wants to expand globally. 

Notably, DAIZ is aiming to become what it calls “the fourth meat” alongside chicken, beef, and pork. In other words, they have no plans to replace the real thing. Rather it aims to have plant-based meat co-exist on the table with animal-based meat. Many plant-based meat companies have similar goals that target the “flexitarian,” which means when DAIZ finally does expand internationally, it will be competing with the likes of Impossible, Beyond, Néstle, and a growing number of others in the space. 

Tastermonial Lets You Scan Grocery Items to See Which are the Best Fit for Your Diet

Sticking to a diet — or avoiding an allergen — is hard enough without having to worry about potentially hidden ingredients in grocery products. Does that jerky have soy in it, or do those potato chips actually contain dairy?

One startup is trying to make grocery shopping more transparent and personalized. Tastermonial is a new startup based in the Bay Area which offers a link between personalized nutrition services and actual food brands. Users can download the Tastermonial app and use it to scan products on grocery shelves. The app then extracts nutritional data and gives viewers a readout of the item, noting whether or not it would be a good fit for them to eat, based off of their pre-saved dietary profile. If it’s not, Tastermonial will recommend other, better-suited grocery products available via delivery through one of their retail partners.

Founded in July 2019 by Bude Piccin, the startup launched a beta version of its app in January 2020 and currently has about 200 users. Thus far Tastermonial’s database includes over 400,000 SKUs, including everything from CPGs to frozen and refrigerated foods. Piccin said that they pull nutritional data from public databases.

On a recent phone call, Piccin told me that the app can only scan items and give both a general evaluation (good choice for many diets) and a personal evaluation (not suitable for you based on your profile). They plan to roll out the ability to purchase through retail partners later this year, starting with Piccin’s former employer, Amazon.

Thus far, users have to input their own dietary preferences and any food allergens, however, Tastermonial plans to let users link its app to microbiome- or DNA-driven food personalization services to automatically upload their nutrition profile. The company is already in talks with DAYTWO, a personalized nutrition company which recommends recipes to individuals based on their microbiome.

Tastermonial’s app is free to use. The company plans to make money by adding a small fee (5 to 10 percent) onto each sale through their retail partners. There’s also a SaaS play. Piccin said that Tastermonial will partner with personalized nutrition services, like DAYTWO, to provide the ingredient layer to those recipe recommendations. She explained that Tastermonial’s database could help users select the most health-appropriate foods for their suggested meals — all of which could be delivered to their door.

Since the company is so early-stage, it’s hard to predict if it’ll be able to follow through on its plans to become the go-to interface for grocery shopping based on your nutrition. But Tastermonial is tapping into a trend that, like Hansel, is so hot right now: personalization. (So hot, in fact, that we had a whole conference dedicated to personalization a few weeks ago in NYC.)

In addition to Tastermonial, there are several other companies racing to bring personalization to the grocery store. Pinto (formerly Sage Project) and DNA Nudge are two startups that pull from individuals’ nutrition profiles to help them decide which retail products are best suited to their needs. According to Piccin, Tastermonial’s differentiator is its ability to connect users with alternative products that are better for them, if the grocery options don’t cut it. “We’re connecting to that practical side,” she told me.

My question is whether or not consumers will actually take that extra step. Will people really create an entire online grocery order for one or two items, pay a premium for delivery, and wait for it to show up at their door?

Tastermonial is betting on it. Considering that 81 percent of consumers never order groceries online, that’s a risky bet, which is why I think that Tastermonial’s SaaS play has more potential than the app itself. As personalized nutrition services become more popular, more and more people will be looking for ways to easily shop for the best ingredients for their individual needs. If it becomes part of the personalized nutrition services themselves, Tastermonial could help make the process just a little bit easier.

InFarm’s High-Tech Vertical Farms Head to Canadian Grocery Stores

InFarm is bringing its in-store vertical farming systems to Empire supermarkets across Canada, according to a press release from Empire. The partnership will launch this coming spring and put InFarms’s high-tech farm pods in stores across that country, including at Empire subsidiaries Sobeys, Thrifty Foods, and Safeway Canada. 

Berlin-based InFarm, which raised $100 million in June of 2019, has struck multiple deals with grocery store chains around the world over the last several months, including Irma in Denmark, M&S in the UK, and Kroger stores in the U.S. The company is one of many startups developing vertical and/or indoor farming solutions meant to shorten the food supply chain by growing greens closer to food stores.

With InFarm, that means growing those leafy greens and herbs inside the produce section of stores. The company’s indoor farms come in the form of enclosed pods that use the hydroponic grow method, meaning plant roots are submerged in a nutrient-enriched water supply and no soil is involved. Cloud-based software controls the temperature, watering schedule, and light and humidity levels of the farms, adjusting those elements based on plant type. 

There are two major benefits to this in-store approach to vertical farming. Zero pesticides are used in the grow process, and greens can be harvested onsite, reducing carbon emissions since food doesn’t have to be transported to the store from a distribution center. 

Better-tasting greens is another one of InFarm’s claims. By precisely adjusting light, temperature, water levels, and other elements, vertical farmers can create ideal growing “recipes” for each plant type meant to bring out the optimal amount of flavor.

Many vertical farming companies make this claim, along with those about reduced water usage and carbon footprint. What the indoor ag industry needs next is more public data backing these claims up. With other companies — notably Square Roots and Freight Farms — striking deals of their own to get vertical farms closer to food stores, more hard numbers will be needed to show us when, where, and how these high-tech farms can be most useful in the overall food system.

InFarm will launch a range of herbs at two Safeway stores in Vancouver this spring, according to the press release, and Empire will also put farms in stores across seven Canadian cities.

Newsletter: So How the Heck Do We Deliver on The Promise of Food Personalization?

People have always wanted personalization in their products and services. That much was said multiple times last week at Customize, The Spoon’s daylong summit on food personalization. Event attendees and panelists alike also agreed that technology has increased our expectations around what personalization can even be when it comes to our food. Getting your name on a Coke bottle was once the extent of customized eats and drinks. Now we have software that analyzes our microbiome to tell us which foods are best for our unique bodies and restaurant systems that promise McDonald’s will never forget that I hate yellow mustard.

The promise of personalization was discussed in other areas of the food industry during the event, too. Companies like Kroger are using it to fill “food prescriptions” in the grocery store for diabetes patients. Digital kitchen platform Yummly wants to personalize your recipes, shopping lists, pantry, and, well, pretty much your entire kitchen and home cooking experience. 

The question is, How on earth are we supposed to deliver on all this promise? It’s one thing to talk onstage about the benefits of microbiome-based eating or reinventing the restaurant loyalty program. It’s quite another to convince the mainstream these operations actually do what they say, are based on sound science, and, most important, responsibly handle all that user data required to create truly personalized experiences. 

Are we there yet? No. The next steps for food personalization need to be around investing in the infrastructure to scale these technologies and, for investors, funding the kinds of companies that treat both users and their data with the utmost respect. These are the kinds of conversations we can expect to have more of as personalization evolves from buzzword to actual practice and we start to separate hype from reality.

The Latest Coronavirus Victim? Trade Shows

Had Customize been scheduled to take place this week rather than last, it’s quite possible the event wouldn’t have happened at all. Trade shows left and right are now getting canceled due to concerns over the widespread coronavirus outbreak. 

The Spoon’s publisher Mike Wolf has been keeping up with the closures. Yesterday, he reported that the Inspired Home Show had been canceled. “It’s an extraordinary move to cancel a trade show less than two weeks before it opens, but it’s an illustration of how fluid and fast-moving the situation is around the coronavirus,” he wrote.

Even more extraordinary? Postponing a show the day before it officially starts, which is what the Natural Products Expo West just had to do last night.

These are likely just the start of trade show cancellations and postponements. There are dozens of food industry events, both in the U.S. and overseas, slated for the next few months. As the number of coronavirus cases worldwide grows, and with it concerns from both conference-goers and organizers, more shows will likely be affected by the outbreak.

We’re in the Golden Age of Meat Vending Machines

Let’s end this thing on a brighter note.

My colleague Chris Albrecht got a tip this week about an automated vending machine in South Korea called Meatbox 365. Users can choose from a range of meats in a variety of cuts, using a touchscreen to select their choices. As Chris wrote, “Meatbox 365 is basically a 24-hour butcher shrunk down into a very small physical footprint.” 

The machine is currently getting a lot of press because it’s the kind of automated, unmanned machine cities and countries greatly affected by coronavirus need in order to keep crowds out of places like supermarkets. It’s also the kind of high-tech vending machine that could be the perfect testing ground for personalization. Someday, the Meatbox 365 or a similar machine will automatically know which cut of beef I like, and what kind of meat I should be eating in the first place (if plant-based beef hasn’t taken over by then).

Just hold the yellow mustard, please.

Stay sane,

Jenn