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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Q1 2021: AppHarvest Bets on Robots, Strawberries and More Data in the Greenhouse

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce, Robotics, AI & Data

Control ag company AppHarvest is adding more of both crop types and technologies to its budding greenhouse network, according to the company’s Q1 2021 earnings call this week. That includes strawberries, leafy greens, harvesting bots, and lots of data.

The company, which went public in February, is best known at this point for the 60-acre greenhouse facility it operates in Morehead, Kentucky, where it grows beefsteak tomatoes. AppHarvest sent out its first shipment of these tomatoes to grocery stores earlier this year. Customers now include Kroger and Wendy’s.

CEO Jonathan Webb said on the company’s earnings call this week that two more Kentucky greenhouses, one in Richmond and one in Berea, will be operational next year, and that with them, AppHarvest will start growing leafy greens and strawberries. Webb pointed out that while his company may have started with tomatoes — a fairly traditional crop when it comes to greenhouse growing — the eventual aim is to “grow the company into a trusted high-tech sustainable food company.”

As far as that tech goes, AppHarvest’s CTO Josh Lessing said on the investor call that the company is investing in “robotics, artificial intelligence, teleoperation, and proprietary seed genetics.” To date, its biggest move has been the acquisition of Root AI, a startup best known for its crop-harvesting bot Virgo. (Lessing was the cofounder and CEO of Root AI before the acquisition.)

“Presently, we are training our intelligent robot Virgo to manage crops and inform growing decisions,” Lessing said on the call, adding that Virgo could eventually be configured to harvest multiple different crops, including delicate ones like strawberries — hence the company’s announcement to move into the realm of berry growing. 

As a crop, strawberries are highly suited to the controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) realm because they are extremely delicate, perishable, and normally require boatloads of pesticides when grown outside. Moving the grow process indoors, to a fully controlled environment, means better protection for crops from weather hazards, no pests and therefore no need for pesticides, and more consistent temperatures and humidity levels that can ensure better-tasting plants with a more robust nutritional profile. 

Given the amount of sunlight strawberries need for optimal growing, greenhouse settings are obvious candidates, since they rely largely on the sun with only supplemental LEDs. However, vertical farms, which use LEDs to mimic the sun’s light spectrum, are also now growing strawberries. Plenty, Oishii, and SinGrow are just a few of the names on that list. Whether one method will wind up superior to the other will (among other things) depend on what the end product tastes like as well as how much it costs to grow, sell, and buy.

For AppHarvest, though, the real win with technology will be not so much about the crops it can grow but the data Virgo and other tools can collect. That data can in turn get analyzed and turned into actions and insights applicable across the AppHarvest greenhouse network. “Granular plant level data from each fruit means we can learn exactly how to optimize quality, production, sales and logistics,” said Lessing. “This foundation will give us the opportunity to restructure the world’s food supply in order to mirror the hyper efficient e-commerce landscape.”

Along those lines, the company will expand beyond these first three facilities in the future. Two more projects will be announced this summer and are slated to be operational in late 2022. Webb said on this week’s call the company is on track to operate 12 greenhouses by 2025. By then, one imagines those facilities will grow a whole lot more than greens, strawberries, and tomatoes.

On-Demand Pay App DailyPay Raises $500M in Capital

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

On-demand payment service DailyPay announced today it has “secured” $500 million in capital, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Of that number, $175 million comes from a Series D round led by Carrick Capital Partners with participation from existing investors. The remaining $325 million comes in the form of “credit capital from various sources.” DailyPay says it will use the capital to make its platform available in new markets.   

Through the DailyPay platform, restaurants (among other business types) can offer employees instant access to wages earned that day with the DailyPay app. For employees, this means not necessarily having to live from paycheck. For restaurant owners and operators, the ability to offer a better pay structure for employees theoretically means happier workers and hopefully less turnover. 

DailyPay’s fundraise and planned expansion comes at a time when the restaurant industry is grappling with an industry-wide labor shortage. As the world reopens again, restaurants of all sizes say they are having trouble getting old employees to return to work or new ones to take their place. Frequently, former restaurant employees are leaving to work in other industries or choosing to live off unemployment benefits. In major cities like NYC and Los Angeles, the shortage can also be attributed to people leaving for more affordable places to live. 

On-demand pay can’t fix all of these problems, but certainly doesn’t hurt if a restaurant offers such a system to its employees. And many do nowadays. Over time, DailyPay has added the likes of Captain D’s, Boston Market, Sprinkles, and other chains to its list of customers. Other chains, such as Domino’s, McDonald’s, and Chili’s, use similar services from apps like Branch and Instant.

The DailyPay platform also lets restaurants disperse tips immediately, reward employees with financial commissions or bonuses, and offers workers some financial assistance tools to help them better manage their earnings.

Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Raises $170M, Brings Its Cultivated Meat to More Restaurants

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

Eat Just announced today that its GOOD Meat division has raised $170 million in new funding. The round included UBS O’Connor, Graphene Ventures, K3 Ventures, and others, and officially makes GOOD a subsidiary of Eat Just.

The company said today it plans to use the new funds to increase capacity of GOOD’s cultured meat production in addition to furthering research and development. 

Eat Just became the world’s first company to receive regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in December of 2020 in Singapore. It quickly followed that up with the actual sale of GOOD meat at the 1880 restaurant in the city-state. Since then, 1880 customers have continued to order GOOD’s cultivated chicken product at the restaurant, and can now even get it for delivery via foodpanda.  

With the new funds, Eat Just will expand the availability of GOOD’s cultivated meat from that single restaurant to another, the JW Marriott Singapore South Beach’s Madame Fan. Notably, the JW Marriott location has said it will outright replace its conventional chicken with GOOD’s cultivated version at certain times of the day. To start, GOOD meat will replace conventional chicken for delivery items ordered on Thursdays, starting May 20. GOOD will be available “for once-a-week dine-in starting soon.”

Eat Just CEO and founder Josh Tetrick has said before that he sees a world in which “restaurants remove conventional meat from their menu[s].” Eat Just’s plant-based egg products have already fully replaced their traditional counterparts at some restaurant chains, and more restaurants around the world are now exploring alternative protein as a regular staple on the menu.

For cultivated meat, the march into restaurants won’t happen overnight. Eat Just remains the only company in the world that can currently sell cultivated meat, and Singapore is still the only place in which the company can do that. However, other countries and companies are already in the process of granting and getting regulatory approval, which means in the next year or so, we’ll see more restaurant menus around the world debuting cultivated meat products.

Pizza Robot Company Picnic Raises $16.3M Series A, Adds Strategic Partners

Robotics, AI & Data

Picnic, which makes pizza assembly robots, announced today that is has raised a $16.3 million Series A round of funding. The new round was led by Thursday Ventures, with participation from existing investors Creative Ventures, Flying Fish Partners and Vulcan Capital (and includes the $3M bridge funding from October of last year). This brings the total amount of funding raised by Picnic to $34.2 million. At the same time, Picnic also announced new strategic partnerships with with food service industry company Orion Land Mark, Ethan Stowell Restaurants, National Service Cooperative and Baseline Hardware Financing.

Seattle, Washington-based Picnic makes modular pizza assembly robots capable of topping hundreds of pizzas an hour. These automated machines can be placed in a row, with each one dispensing their own ingredients. Pizza crusts are place on a conveyor belt, which runs under the dispensers which dish out the proper amounts of sauce, cheese and other toppings. Picnic announced its second generation robot in October of last year, which featured a switch to transparent walls and containers so operators could see in real time when toppings need to be refilled.

Interest in food robots and automation has accelerated thanks largely to the pandemic. Not only can robots work 24 hours a day and not call in sick, they also reduce human contact with food and create more social distancing in kitchens. But Clayton Wood, CEO of Picnic, told me by phone last week that the pandemic has ushered in entirely new thinking about foodservice. “What we really see as we come out of the pandemic is the foodserice industry has been reimagined,” Wood said. “It’s divorced the idea that the kitchen has to be attached to a dining room.”

As such, there are new opportunities for Picnic and other food automation companies where there are high volumes of takeout and delivery. Wood cited ghost kitchens and even grocers as two examples.

In addition to adapting to new post-COVID workplace realities, Wood is quick to point out that Picnic also helps food operators with ingredient cost. “There’s a lot of denial about food waste, even though the industry average is 10 percent,” Wood said. Robotic systems like Picnic’s can help lower waste and cost because they dispense the exact same amount of toppings every time without any overages.

Pizza is becoming a popular food for robotics. In addition to Picnic, xRobotics has its own take on automated pizza assembly, and Middleby launched its PizzaBot 5000 last year. In addition to pizza making robots, we’re also seeing a number of pizza vending machines come to market like Piestro, API Tech and Basil Street.

“It’s a sign of the industry maturing,” Wood said of all his competition. For its part, Picnic will use its new funding and partnerships to separate itself from the pizza pack. The company says it will use its new money to hire out its team and expand commercial operations, which will most likely be made easier by the company’s new strategic investors. Orion Land Mark is one of the biggest suppliers of pizza and pizza supplies to convenience stores around the world and Ethan Stowell Restaurants operates a number of eateries in the Seattle area.

Mosa Meat Achieves an ‘Over 65x Reduction’ in Costs for Its Cultured Fat

Business of Food, Education & Discovery, Foodtech

Dutch cultured protein company Mosa Meat said over the weekend it has reduced the cost of its fat media by 66 times thanks to the work of a group the company refers to as its Fat Team. Without listing actual price numbers, Mosa Meat said its fat medium now costs 1.52 percent of what it did less than two years ago, in September of 2019.

In the cultivated meat-making process, the nutrient-rich growth medium fed to cells triggers those cells to grow into muscle, fat, and tissue, all of which are put together to create a final end product. A company might grow fat cells for use in its own meat analogues, or it could sell the fat as an ingredient to other businesses. Fat is also a crucial component in achieving a “meatier” taste, texture, and mouthfeel when it comes to cultured protein.  

Mosa Meat, of course, is well known as the company that created the world’s first cultivated hamburger back in 2013 — for a cool $325,000. A huge part of this cost was (and still is for many) the growth medium, which at the time was made using fetal bovine serum (FBS). FBS is as expensive as it is controversial. As the Good Food Institute puts it, “The use of animal-derived components in cultivated meat production has prohibitive economic, food safety, and ethical constraints.”

In July of last year, Mosa Meat said it had achieved a more than 80x cost reduction for its growth media, a milestone largely driven by the company’s ability to develop FBS-free media. The company now uses an “animal component free” media that is part of the reason the Fat Team was able to announce its own cost reductions recently.

“We’ve definitely checked yet another box on our journey towards a product that meets the expectations of critical meat lovers,” company cofounder Peter Verstrate said in this weekend’s announcement. 

Mosa Meat’s announcement comes not long after MeaTech 3D, an Israeli company, said it would produce cultivated fat at a new pilot production facility. Additionally, last month Mission Barns raised $24 million to build up a production facility in San Francisco for its cultivated fat business. Meanwhile, multiple companies, from Avant Meats to Future Meat, have announced price slashes in production costs over the last several months.

Lowering costs, whether of fat, medium, or other components, will help the entire cultured meat industry get products closer to price parity with their traditional counterparts. Price parity is only of many other milestones that have to be achieved in order to make cultivated meat a commercial reality. However, it is seen by many as an extremely crucial step in the process. 

Mosa Meat doesn’t yet have a timeframe for when it might have burgers in front of customers, or how much they’ll cost once that happens. At last check, the company was working with European regulators to get approval for its products. 

Burger King Launches a Ghost Kitchen Initiative in the UK

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

Burger King said over the weekend it is trialing its first-ever delivery-only restaurant, a location in London, UK that opened on Sunday. The burger chain said this new venture has the potential to reach over 400,000 customers in the North London area.

For its first delivery-only initiative, Burger King has partnered with FoodStars, the commissary kitchen company bought by Travis Kalnick’s CloudKitchens back in 2019. Customers will be able to order meals for delivery via third-party service Deliveroo. Service from Just Eat and Uber Eats will be available soon, too. 

The expansion to delivery-only service comes just as the UK is in the process of opening back up. From today (May 17), restaurants, cafes, pubs, and bars in England, Scotland, and Wales are finally allowed to serve customers inside, with certain restrictions around social distancing and the size of groups. But while consumers will no doubt flock back to restaurant dining rooms, food delivery is expected to remain a popular option for many. This is less about a fear of the dining room and more about new habits getting established during COVID-19-related lockdowns. Many consumers who had never before ordered delivery got comfortable with the concept during the last year or so, and will continue that behavior for the long term.

Burger King is one of many major QSR chains responding to this change. Chipotle announced its own ghost kitchen initiative in 2020, for example. And many chains are redesigning overall store designs to accommodate more off-premises formats. On its recent earnings call, Wendy’s said 30 percent of a planned 1,200 new locations will be “nontraditional units,” a label that includes delivery-only locations and ghost kitchens. Like Taco Bell and Burger King, the chain has introduced new store designs that feature little or no dining room space.

Burger King has not yet said if its ghost kitchen initiative will expand to other UK locations and eventually to other countries. Presumably, the chain will first test the success of this endeavor before announcing any new delivery-only locations.

Aryballe Launches New NeOse Advance, Digital “Smelling” Device

Business of Food

Digital olfaction company Aryballe announced today the launch of its new NeOse Advance hardware device and Aryballe Suite software. NeOse Advance is the company’s first product derived frorm its silicon photonics-based platform, which detects, records and recognizes smells.

Aryballe’s device works by attracting odor molecules emitted by different products and “smelling” them by analyzing peptides with chemical sensors and spectroscopy. It then creates a unique digital signature for each item, so bananas will have a specific odor signature while coffee will have another. The NeOse then records and creates a catalog of all these digital signatures in a database and uses them to help authenticate other items it encounters.

In the food world, the NeOse technology could have a number of applications. It can be used by food manufacturers to ensure consistency in production. Or it could assist with the verification of ingredients — for example, whether the vanilla or cocoa beans companies paid for are indeed the real thing. Another application the NeOse is currently being used for is to detect mold in grain storage.

In addition to the new NeOse Advance, Aryballe also launched the Aryballe Suite, which is the company’s first cloud-enabled software platform. With Aryballe Suite, users can access and customize odor data analysis for help with R&D projects and product consistency.

There are actually a few players in the digital smelling space. Aromyx uses AI to help analyze different odors. And Koniku uses protein molecules to detect different compounds that objects emit.

Aryballe will start delivering the NeOse Advance in June of this year. The company will sell the product directly, though it did not disclose pricing.

Ryp Labs, Formerly StixFresh, Goes Beyond Stickers to Protect Produce

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce, Foodtech

Back in 2019 at The Spoon’s Smart Kitchen Summit, judges were so impressed by a company called StixFresh they dubbed it the winner of the event’s Startup Showcase competition. At the time, StixFresh was wholly focused on a single product, a food-safe sticker that, when affixed to a piece of produce, could protect against post-harvest bacteria, over-ripening, and premature spoilage.

Fast forward to 2021, and the company has since rebranded as Ryp Labs and expanded its capabilities for protecting crops after they are harvested. Its flagship product remains a sticker (which is still called StixFresh), but company cofounder and CEO Moody Soliman told me over the phone recently that Ryp Labs is now testing multiple technologies on different types of produce.

The company’s “core competency,” he says, isn’t simply about making stickers that prevent food waste. It’s about “develop[ing] formulations that can be applied to a variety of surfaces to combat post-harvest disease.” Hence the recent name change.

Protecting any given type of produce involves a two step process: finding the right formulation that can fight post-harvest disease and spoilage, and engineering a release vehicle for that formula.

Plants naturally emit compounds that can protect against disease and environmental hazards. What Ryp Labs essentially does is capture these compounds and use them in formulations that can then be applied to the produce to better protect it after harvest, a process that also extends the food’s shelf life. The specific application, or release vehicle, depends on the type of produce.

Stickers, for example, work well for larger pieces, such as apples, pears, avocados, and mangos. Ryp Lab’s patent-pending StixFresh product contains the aforementioned plant-produced compounds. When those compounds vaporize, they “cloak” the fruit, protecting it from bacteria and over-ripening.

Applying a sticker to a mango is one thing. Fixing them to every single berry in a case, on the other hand, would be far too unwieldy and time-consuming a process to be feasible. Smaller pieces of produce, such as grapes or berries, are better suited to other release vehicles, according to Soliman. 

Berries have actually been on Ryp Labs’ radar since 2019, and partly provided the inspiration for the company to explore release vehicles beyond stickers. For berries, a sachet that emits protective vapors can simply be dropped into a crate post harvest.

Other companies are also putting formats like sachets and edible coatings to work: most notably Hazel Technologies and Apeel, respectively. 

For Ryp Labs, the release vehicle and specific formulation each produce type gets depends on a number of factors, from when the formulation is being applied to the conditions in which the food will travel (e.g., cold storage versus room temperature). Ryp Labs works with each individual customer to understand the issues in their specific food supply chain. The goal is to match that customer with the best formulation and release vehicle without drastically interrupting the day-to-day operation.

Ryp Labs says it is already doing pilot studies with retailers and distributors and have seen a 15 to 30 percent reduction in losses on strawberries, blueberries, nectarines, and mandarins with its sachets and stickers.

Meanwhile, the company is in the final stages of development for its StixFresh product and plans to launch it to the consumer market in early 2022, most likely in the U.S. and Europe. Other products, including sachets, may be more of a B2B play, with Ryp Labs licensing them out to food producers and distributors. Soliman did not officially confirm as much, only suggesting that licensing its tech is an option on the table for the company.

Preserving other types of food and even flowers is also a possibility. As Soliman explained, Ryp Labs is essentially building a library of formulations that could eventually protect everything from mangos to poultry to freshly cut roses. That focus on the formulation could greatly differentiate Ryp Labs in the future. So while we might be seeing StixFresh stickers in grocery stores soon, those are just the beginning of Ryp Labs’ technological journey to better protect crops and fight food waste.

BEERMKR Opens Up About its “Shark Tank” Experience

Business of Food

It’s important to remember that reality TV isn’t “real.” Even a show that’s pretty cut and dry like Shark Tank is edited down for broadcast. That’s why when I watched the guys at BEERMKR ptich their connected, all-in-one home beer brewing system to the Sharks last week, I wondered what was cut out. Thankfully, BEERMKR CEO Aaron Walls gave us a peek behind the curtain in a blog post this week, talking about their experience on the show.

SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t watched the episode and don’t want to know how it ended, stop here. If you do know or it doesn’t matter to you, then continue reading.

First off, it may surprise you to learn that BEERMKR actually filmed their episode back in September of 2020. And while they shot for an hour, fielding all types of questions from all of the Sharks, the segment was edited down to just eight minutes. As Walls wrote:

Since our aired segment was only 8 minutes long, the show producers had to cut roughly 90% of what we discussed to focus on the stuff that would make for a great TV show: beer and drama!

But the bigger issue for BEERMKR was the timing of their episode taping. After COVID-related productions delays (an issue for a lot of companies last year), BEERMKR still hadn’t shipped its product. When asked about units and revenue, the BEERMKR team had to admit there were only 24 of its machines out in the world. This was a huge stumbling block for the Sharks, and all but one passed on the deal. Kevin O’Leary (who seemed oddly fixated on the fact that the BEERMKR guys went to Cornell) was the only Shark who was interested.

If you want to know the specifics of his deal proposal, I suggest you go watch the episode segment (pay TV subscription required). Long story short, the BEERMKR guys didn’t like O’Leary’s numbers and passed. As Walls writes:

So did we miss an opportunity to partner with a Shark? Absolutely. The problem in my view was one of timing, and the deal we got was a direct result of us being in an awkward pre-shipping / pre-revenue stage when we filmed. There was nothing we could do about the Sony Entertainment / MGM / ABC’s production schedule, and there was nothing we could do about covid delaying us by 9+ months. If we had the choice, we would have chosen to pitch AFTER we had shipped product, had sales to prove our model, and had positive reviews from our early brewer base. Unfortunately, you don’t get to choose when to pitch on Shark Tank, and if you get the opportunity to pitch, you have to take it, so we went in with the valuation we believed in and stuck to it. We did succeed in introducing BEERMKR to millions of new people, so I consider that a success.

The story does have a happy ending. The same day its Shark Tank episode aired, BEERMKR had launched an equity crowdfunding campaign, which raised more than $250,000 of its $1 million goal in its first week. No Sharks needed.

EBar Automates Beer Pouring at Events, Aims to Equity Crowdfund £275,001

Delivery & Commerce, Robotics, AI & Data

As people return to sporting and live events, they won’t have to wait as long for a beer. Well, they won’t have to wait as long in Europe, because a number of robotic beer-pouring solutions are coming to market there.

The latest entrant to the robo-beer pouring space is EBar, a startup based in Aberdeen, United Kingdom, which makes what is essentially a beer dispensing vending machine. From the video description (see below), the EBar is more about volume than variety. There are just two kegs plugged into the back of the machine, so don’t expect an extensive menu of artisanal beer choices. Customers order via on-board touchscreen, take cups from the built-in dispenser and place them in the machine. The EBar then pours out what looks like a pretty perfect cup of a beer, complete with appropriately-sized foamy head, in under 30 seconds.

The EBar is built for large venues like stadiums and outdoor festivals, where people want their drinks quickly and don’t care as much about whether the beer they are getting is an IPA or a Stout. Additionally, since there is no server, the machine reduces the amount of human-to-human contact when getting a drink — an important factor in this emerging post-pandemic world.

EBar calls its business model Beer as a Service. Rather than installing and leasing machines in a single location, they move the machines around from venue to venue and charge a commission on all the sales. This is a smart play for the company because potential venues don’t have to spend money up front for the machine, and EBar can look at the data to determine which are the best events/times/locations to set up their machines to maximize revenue.

EBar is in the middle of an equity crowdfunding campaign and aiming to raise £275,001 (~$387,827 USD). The company says that despite the pandemic shutting most events down in 2020, its machines were still being used by thousands of customers. As venues re-open and people return to sporting events and concerts, it’s easy to see how having multiple EBars on-hand could come in handy. (This news post should not be considered investment advice.)

Europe appears to be a hotbed of automated beer pouring activity. In Poland, the Revolmatic is a smaller, counterop machine also built for large events that cranks out cups of beer. And over in Spain, Macco Robotics’ humanoid Kime robot pours beer, but isn’t really built as much for speed and volume.

Large events are actually good use cases for automation because attendees are at a venue to see a concert or a game, not stand in long lines for drink.

If you want to know more about the future of vending machines, then be sure to attend ArticulATE, our food robotics and automation summit on May 18. We’ll have speakers from smart vending companies like Yo-Kai Express, Rotender and Calvary Robotics. Get your ticket today!

Join the Spoon for a Virtual Restaurant Tech Summit This August

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

For many, 2020 will go down in history as the year the restaurant biz changed forever. It could also be remembered as the year restaurants absorbed about 10 years’ worth of technological evolution in the span of a few months.

But while last year was all about adopting restaurant tech to survive, the next few years will be all about using tech to create a better restaurant experience. I don’t just mean faster service and the ability to pay for meals with your own phone. The most valuable restaurant tech in the future should also create safer dining and working environments, help us reduce food and packaging waste, promote healthier eating habits, and create better new and more fulfilling jobs.

The bottom line is in order to survive, restaurants need to understand how technology will change their business. To that end, The Spoon is announcing our latest event, The Restaurant Tech Summit. The Restaurant Tech Summit will bring together the most important players from across the restaurant industry, from large QSRs and independent establishments to ghost kitchen providers and companies creating the next generation tech stack for restaurants. Together, these companies and individuals will discuss not only how they survived the chaos of 2020 but also what they are doing to thrive — and help others do the same — as they move forward into a digital-first era for restaurants.

The Restaurant Tech Summit will feature founders from building new platforms, to those leading the digital innovation efforts for the largest chains in the country, to chefs and operators using these tools everyday, we’ll have leaders from every side of the restaurant business come together to discuss how technology will transform business and operational models over the next decade.

We already have some great speakers from companies like Wow Bao, Perfect Company, Slice, and we’ll be keeping you updated over the next several weeks as more speakers are added and the full agenda is released.

If you’d like to participate as a sponsor at The Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Summit, drop us a line.

If you’d like to buy a ticket to the Summit, early bird pricing is available through July 15th.

In the meantime, reserve your ticket today.

 

A Mid-Year Assessment for Alternative Protein

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce, Foodtech

More companies, more investments, and many more scientific breakthroughs. Those are just a few predictions for the future of alternative protein the Good Food Institute (GFI) sets out in its latest State of Industry reports. Three different papers — one each on plant-based protein, fermentation, and cultivated protein — go in-depth into the trends that drove alternative protein in 2020 and what we can expect for the rest of 2021.

As we’ve written before, investment in alternative protein topped $3.1 billion in 2020, which is more than three times the amount raised by the sector in 2019. Driving those investments are, says GFI, numerous developments across the commercial landscape, investments, scientific and technological developments, and regulatory and government activity.

The State of Industry reports cover the obvious developments, such as the world’s first sale of cultivated meat and plant-based meat’s $7 billion in retail sales. But more interesting now is what we can expect in the future — that is, for the remainder of 2021 and on into the next few years. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of those developments:

Expect lots more pilot production environments for cultivated meat. Reaching pilot scale could be seen as the step that bridges a company’s proof-of-concept phase with its commercial phase. GFI notes that at this stage, companies would be producing “hundreds or thousands” of metric tons of cultured meat. (Millions would be required for a company to scale to an industrial level.) Reaching pilot scale would mean being able to supply “a limited number of high-end restaurants in the coming one to three years.” (Read more on why restaurants are critical to cultivated meat’s growth.)

As GFI points out, multiple companies are now transitioning into this pilot-scale phase, including BlueNalu, MosaMeat, and SuperMeat. The latter even turned its pilot production site (pictured above) into a restaurant where consumers can taste the company’s cultured chicken in exchange for leaving detailed feedback. Elsewhere, Aleph Farms and MeaTech 3D plan to have facilities running by 2022 and Avant Meats recently announced a pilot production facility for Singapore. UPSIDE Foods, formerly Memphis Meats, has also just broken ground on a facility.

Cellular agriculture will become its own field of study. One PhD candidate at Tufts University noted that we can expect cell ag to get its own degree program at universities, and have a “separate and distinct curriculum.”

Fermentation production will increase. “If we believe in the projection of 25%-30% CAGR, then for fermentation to even maintain its share of the market, there is a need for a 10x+ increase in capacity by 2030,” Jim Laird of 3F Bio states in GFI’s fermentation report. Of course, needing to increase and actually doing it are two different things, but one of the advantages of fermentation is that it is already seen as a ost-competitive, scalable, and validated process. Many, including the GFI, have begun calling it the “third pillar of alt protein.”

Meanwhile, a number of companies, including Solar Biotech, MycoTechnology, and Nature’s Fynd are developing technologies and processes that will make fermentation even more cost-effective, which could in turn increase companies’ ability to produce.

Fermentation could “revolutionize” the entire alt-protein landscape. It has the potential to influence other areas of alternative protein. As GFI’s report notes, “Fermentation can enable a new generation of proteins, fats, and other functional ingredients that combine with plant-based and cultivated components to create biomimicking whole-cut meats, egg replacements, animal-free dairy proteins, seafood products, and more.” 

Along those lines, the next few years could see hybrid blends of meat, where fermentation-derived protein could also include plant and animal cell components. Fermentation is also already part of a number of other “alt” products besides meat, including cheese and bee honey.

More restaurants will go plant-based. We’ve been mulling the future of the plant-based restaurant for a while. Now that the world is beginning to come out of its various stages of lockdown and people are returning to dining rooms, there’s an enormous opportunity for plant-based foods to take center stage at restaurants. More restaurants will move to full plant-based menus, such as those seen from Canada-based Copper Branch and, most recently, Eleven Madison Park in NYC.

Plant-based chicken will be a big part of this shift. Right now there’s a distinct lack of choices, both in restaurants and grocery stores, when it comes to poultry. Expect this to change rapidly, starting with restaurants. 

This is by no means an exhaustive list. It is also important to keep in mind the many challenges the alt-protein sector still has to face, from improving the taste and texture of plant-based meat to bringing down the cost of cell-culture media. There are also heaps of regulatory approvals to be obtained before many of these companies and solutions can actually reach consumers.

Some of these challenges will be solved in 2021; others are years away from solutions. But if there’s one overarching takeaway we can glean from GFI’s report trio, it’s that everything — from number of companies to production levels to investment dollars — is going to increase astronomically this year for alternative protein.

More Headlines

MeaTech 3D Will Produce Cultivated Fat, Whole Steaks at Its Forthcoming Pilot Facility – The Israeli bioprinting startup this week announced a pilot production facility where the company will scale up production of its cultivated fat and continue work on whole cuts of cultivated steak.

Memphis Meats Rebrands as UPSIDE Foods, Announces Cultured Chicken Product – The company rebranded and also announced that its first consumer product, cultured chicken, will be available to customers this year, pending regulatory approval.

Solar Biotech Raises $2M for Its Fermentation Tech – The Raleigh, North Carolina-based startup will use the $2 million in a debt-financing round to scale up its renewable-energy-powered fermentation technology, which it licenses to other companies.