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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Education & Discovery

Choco Is Challenging L.A. Chefs to Curb Food Waste With Food Creativity

As the world’s food waste problem gets literally bigger each year, so too does the amount of creative effort tech companies are putting into fighting it. The latest of these comes in the form of the Waste is Gold campaign, a pop-up event in Los Angeles in which three restaurants will serve dishes created from the food byproduct in their own kitchens. Powering the event is restaurant tech company Choco, which has big ambitions for fighting food waste both now and in the future.

The pop-up event will take place from Nov. 19–21 at Counterpart Vegan in Echo Park, Strings of Life in West Hollywood, and Beelman’s in Downtown L.A. These restaurants’ chefs will create dishes made from food byproduct (e.g., tomato soup from leftover vegetables) that will be available for takeout or outdoor dining. Customers can order online via the Waste is Gold website.

Choco is best known for its mobile platform that connects restaurant kitchens directly with suppliers to more easily order and manage their inventory. The company raised $30.2 million back in April, around the time it also launched a direct-to-consumer channel in response to the pandemic and ensuing restaurant industry meltdown. 

But speaking to me on a call this week, Chelsea van Hooven, the Global Industry Advisor at Choco, said that the company’s overarching goal was to fight food waste, and that Choco is working on a number of different projects to raise awareness about the problem, including the Waste Is Gold campaign.

She noted that the inspiration for this campaign came after working with Matt Orlando, owner and chef at Amass, a zero-waste restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark. In keeping with Orlando’s idea of building creative menus from food byproduct, Choco has given chefs participating in the Waste is Gold campaign a similar challenge.

For example, Mimi Williams, the executive chef for Counterpart Vegan, has created a ratatouille with spaghetti made from various parts of squash — parts that might normally be thrown out. Using more of the entire food, whether a squash, a pumpkin, or whatever else happens to be in the fridge, is lesson more chefs could take advantage of, and one that doesn’t necessarily require a lot of tech to execute on.

Tech, however, definitely has a role to play in the fight against food waste. For her part, van Hooven said that Choco is exploring the role of data in this area and how her company can provide a layer of it that will bring awareness and understanding of food waste to more restaurants. Tracking inventory data, and therefore food waste data, needs to become a part of daily business for restaurants. “We’re analyzing data in every field of our life, we should definitely use it for the better and optimize our food system,” she said. It’s a sentiment the food industry is voicing more these days as data’s critical role in fighting waste becomes more and more apparent.

While it’s still early days for Choco’s ambitions around creating that data layer, the pop-up restaurant events will definitely be making their way to more cities in the future. 

ReFed Launches a $10M Campaign to Reduce Food Waste, Announces New Insights Engine

ReFed today made two big announcements around its continued fight against food loss and waste. The U.S.-based nonprofit has launched a $10 million fundraising campaign to support projects and initiatives that reduce waste in the supply chain. Additionally, ReFed will release an online hub for food waste data and insights next year, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The campaign is meant to support initiatives across the entire food supply chain that help to reduce food loss and waste. Crown Family Philanthropies, the Fink Family Foundation, The Kroger Co. Zero Hunger | Zero Waste Foundation, the Posner Foundation of Pittsburgh, and Wiancko Charitable Foundation are already involved and have helped to raise $3 million so far. The Robert W. Wilson Charitable Trust has made a matching grant.

Additionally, the campaign is part of an ongoing effort to aid in the goal of the United Nations, the USDA, and the U.S. EPA to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2030. As we discussed in a recent Spoon Plus report on food waste innovation, many companies and solutions exist in the space, but a great many more are needed in order to “make food waste less possible” for producers, retailers, and consumers alike.

Also supporting the 2030 goal is ReFed’s forthcoming Insights Engine, an online hub for both data and insights around the global food waste problem. Some features will include in-depth analyses on existing food waste solutions, a directory of these existing solutions and companies, a calculator that shows food waste’s impact on both the environment and food insecurity, and financial analysis that will help direct the private and philanthropic capital needed to fund new solutions.

Alongside the Insights Engine, ReFed will release its Roadmap to 2030, which the organization says will serve as its guide for the next decade around the actions it and other players in the food system take to strengthen the fight against food waste.

The U.S. 2030 Food Loss and Waste Reduction Goal was launched back in 2015 by the USDA and the EPA as a companion to the UN’s Target 12.3. Over the five years since, we have seen the number of companies working to fight food waste grow, particularly around waste at consumer-facing levels (grocery, household, etc.). Even so, 40 percent of the world’s food continues to be wasted, resulting in 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases and economic losses of about $750 billion annually.

ReFed said today the $10 million campaign will help make a significant reduction in the amount of food being wasted each year. Meanwhile, Insights Engine is expected to be released in early 2021.

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.

ADIO Invests $41M to Improve Farming on Land, at Sea, and in Space

The Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) announced today it will invest AED 152 million (~$41 million USD) across three ag tech companies to develop new ag tech innovations on land, at sea, and in space. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, ADIO has partnered with U.S.-based Nanoracks, India-based FreshToHome, and UAE-based Pure Harvest for the initiatives. 

ADIO said in today’s press release that the new partnerships will promote more innovation in ag tech specifically as it relates to food security challenges. One major issue highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic is the fragility of the global food system. In response, various countries, including Singapore, China, and those in the European Union, are fostering innovation at the government level in an effort to improve local food production, build more traceability into the supply chain, and establish more trust between consumers and food producers.

In the United Arab Emirates, one regionally specific challenge is growing more food in a desert climate, in which the ag industry deals with minimal water supply, non-arable land, and climate change issues like drought and rising temperatures. ADIO’s investments are in companies that can both assist in solving these regional challenges and address the issue of food security on a global scale.

Hence, space farming. Nanoracks, one of ADIO’s three new partners, uses the International Space Station and is building the first-ever space research program for ag tech. Its StarLab Space Farming Center in Abu Dhabi will research facility focused on food production both in space and in “equally extreme climates on Earth.” (Spoon readers will recognize Nanoracks as the company that made the Zero G oven, capable of baking cookies in space.)

ADIO’s FreshToHome partnership, meanwhile, will expand the latter’s operational and processing capabilities across land and sea in the UAE. FreshToHome operates an e-commerce platform for fresh produce and controls every point along the supply chain. ADIO said in today’s release that the partnership will also focus on innovations for fish farming and cold chain technology.

Finally, Pure Harvest will use the new partnership to advance its technology and processes for produce grown in controlled environments. That includes more artificial intelligence, robotics and automation, and machines optimized for desert temperatures. The company will also advance work on its commercial-scale algae bioreactor facility to grow Omega-3 fatty acids.

The new partnerships are part of ADIO’s AgTech Incentive Programme, which the Abu Dhabi Government’s Ghadan 21 Accelerator Programme established in 2019. Previous investments from the AgTech Incentive Programme include the $100 million (USD) investment ADIO made in April across four companies: AeroFarms, Madar Farms, Responsive Drip Irrigation, and RNZ.

Food Waste Friday: Face Shields Made From Excess Food, Cooking Tips That Reduce Waste

As we often discuss at The Spoon, food waste remains a major problem worldwide and is getting bigger each year. The upside, though, is that nowadays, chefs, non-profits, tech companies, consumers, artists, and many more are constantly on the hunt for ways to stop it.

And while much of this week’s headlines were taken up with election news and pandemic updates, there were multiple noteworthy pieces of news around food waste innovation. I’ve rounded a few of them up here to give an idea of the creative lengths people will go to in order to curb the world’s massive food waste problem.

First up: face shields made from food scraps (h/t Waste 360). It was only a matter of time before someone came up with an environmentally friendly face mask for the COVID-19 era. London biotech designer Alice Potts has created 20 bioplastic face shields from a combination of food waste and flowers collected around London. The idea was to create a biodegradable face shield made from sustainable materials, rather than single-use plastics.

Architecture and design magazine Dezeen has photos of the face shields, which use food elements for the material and are dyed with walnut husk, beetroot, purple iris, and other natural elements. The color of the shield depends on the food and flowers from which it was made.

Potts’ masks, which she has dubbed Dance Biodegradable Personal Protective Equipment (DBPPE) Post Covid Facemasks, will be on show at the NGV Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Post-show, the face shield design and bioplastic formula will be available as an open-source design.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., four professional chefs are joining forces next week to teach consumers kitchen techniques that can help reduce food waste in the home, according to the Adirondack Almanac.

The ReCook Cafe, which previously took place in person, will be held virtually this coming Tuesday, Nov. 10. It’s a mix of live and pre-recorded programming that features four chefs sharing tips and techniques to help home cooks get more out of their food items, reduce food waste, save money, and hopefully get a tasty meal out of the deal. 

In the U.S., the bulk of food waste happens in our own homes. Our recent Spoon Plus report on food waste outlined some of the companies and tech tools currently available to help consumers fight their own food waste habits. An online workshop that could help folks do that while improving their cooking skills seems like another logical addition to the list.

Best part: it’s free. Register here.

Speaking of food waste at the consumer level: a new study suggests FOMO causes food waste among Gen Z. 

Cook Clever, an EIT Food-funded project, surveyed 18- to 25-year olds and found that peer pressure to be “adventurous” in their food choices deters them from meal planning and eating leftovers. According to the study, this generation wants “new and exciting meals and are very opposed to suggestions of being more resourceful with leftovers.”

The study goes on to say that traditional approaches to food waste (see cooking class) don’t appeal to Gen Z. Dr. Natalie Masento, a lead researcher for the project, said we need more “specialized” efforts specifically geared towards the Gen Z age group will be more effective in fighting food waste.

Food Navigator has more thoughts from Dr. Masento, which are worth reading in full.

 

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.

Talking With Harold McGee about Smells, Culinary Gastronomy and The Future of Food

Whether you’re someone who is in awe of the mastery of great chefs like Heston Blumenthal, enjoys the work of The Modernist Cuisine, or are just a fan of modern cutting-edge cooking, you owe a debt of gratitude to one Harold McGee.

That’s because McGee helped change the world of food with the publication his seminal book, On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen, in 1984. The book would go on to influence a generation of young chefs over the coming decades, including the likes of Blumenthal and Alton Brown, the latter of which described McGee’s book as “the Rosetta stone of the culinary world.”

I recently had a chance to sit down with McGee (a Zoom call is “sitting down”, right?) to talk to him about that original book and his new one, NOSE DIVE: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells.

Smells?

“I just got kind of sucked into figuring out as much as I could about the molecules that escaped the things of the world, and fly into our noses and give information about what they are and what their histories are,” McGee told me.

McGee originally planned to write a book on flavor, but changed course after having something close to a religious experience eating a meal of grouse in an English restaurant. That change of course would ultimately take him on a ten year journey exploring the world’s smells.

“I ordered grouse at this traditional English restaurant and the first bite was just so unlike what I was expecting that it knocked me for a loop,” said McGee. “I actually couldn’t speak for 30 seconds. The people I was eating with looked at me and thought maybe I was having a stroke or something. It was it was just the most powerful flavor experience I’ve ever had in my life.”

From there, McGee went on to learn more about grouse and how it makes it to the plate. He realized that unlike so many of the processed foods we eat today, an animal like grouse is presented to the person in a much more primitive form: It’s caught wild, generally has parasites, and is cooked very rare.

The end result is an overwhelming flavor explosion that, if you’re someone like Harold McGee, leaves you speechless.

“A lot of that flavor is all still right there and right in front of you,” said McGee. “Learning all that made me realize there’s probably a lot like that to learn about many things that we encounter in everyday life, not just foods. And that’s the beginning of the push that ended up putting me into the world of smells.”

A book on smells makes lots of sense if you think about it, since smells make up such a critical part of how we taste food and experience the world we live in. In fact, the way McGee explains it, our sense of smell is our most direct way of actually taking in the world around us.

“I like to remind people that vision and hearing, which are the senses that we usually pay the most attention to, are very indirect. We’re seeing light waves reflected off of things or being emitted by things.”

“The amazing thing about smell is that it gives us detailed information about what it is that that thing is. And smell is this bridge between the outer world and our inner experience of food because we inhale and we exhale.”

In fact, according to McGee, the reason we often taste flavors or smell smells that remind us of other things – what he describes as flavor “echoes” – is that these things often share some of the same molecules.

“Why they echo each other is that they’re both emitting exactly the same fundamental particles of the world. And we’re noticing that. And even though it maybe doesn’t make total sense that a wine would smell like a saddle, our brains are picking up on that fact, and registering it.”

Just as he once broke down and analyzed the act of cooking at the molecular level and unleashed a new wave of culinary creativity, I expect McGee’s new field guide to the world of smells might just help us all better appreciate the world are breathing in and out everyday.

You can find McGee’s book on Amazon and other booksellers, but before you read it, you can watch my entire interview with him below, or listen to it on the latest episode of the Food Tech Show podcast on Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app.

Hive’s Online Market Makes Ethical and Sustainable Shopping Easy

For many people during this pandemic the notion of shopping for sustainable or ethically sourced grocery products was probably tossed in favor of old comfort foods and just making sure our shelves are stocked.

Plus, shopping for more sustainable products is certainly harder than just grabbing the big CPG brands right there on display at your local grocery store. Or, at least it was. Today a startup called Hive officially launched its online marketplace that only sells sustainable and goods that do social good. The company curates the products it sells by only stocking those that have low impact ingredients, environmentally-friendly packaging, a low-carbon footprint and a commitment to social good. Oh, and the products need to taste good, too.

But in addition to selling these types of products, Hive tells you how the company (and by extension you, for buying from them) is doing good in the world. At checkout, you get a full report on your cart that shows how your purchases made a positive impact in terms of recycling, fighting deforestation or causes donated to. As you buy more, Hive keeps track to show you the cumulative effects of your purchases (and the positive reinforcement could keep you shopping on Hive!).

Of course, there are some products on Hive that are better for the planet than others. Take for example, chips, which come in plastic bags that can’t be recycled by most curbside pickup services. In these cases, Hive has partnered with TerraCycle. So if you purchase a bag of chips, you can pay an additional $1 and Hive will send you a pre-paid envelope. Put the chip bag and any other hard-to-recycle items you purchased from Hive in the bag and send it back to the company. Once they have a critical mass, Hive sends it to TerraCycle to be turned into something else.

Hive’s launch comes at a time when many food businesses are looking at what they sell and how they sell it. Zero Grocery recently raised $3 million for its plastic-free grocery stores. And if the name TerraCyle sounds familiar, that’s because it’s powering the new Loop service that sells well-known CPG brands in re-usable containers.

Hive is also coming along during a renaissance of sorts for smaller CPG brands, many of whom feature more sustainable attributes like upcylcing and plant-based ingredients. Many are also selling direct to consumers through their own websites. By stocking all these products together on a single marketplace, Hive creates a one-stop shop for conscious consumers.

Hive’s market is open to the public and shipping nationwide. The company is using ground shipments, so orders typically take two to five days to arrive. Which will give you plenty of time to think about the good your Hive purchases are doing.

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.

Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick on the 4 Phases of Bringing Cell-Based Meat to the Masses

When will cell-based meat be available to the masses?

It depends on who you ask. At one SKS 2020 panel this week, participants said maybe 10 years. In another, Impossible CEO Pat Brown more or less said never.

Josh Tetrick, founder and CEO of Eat Just, reckons the timeline is “somewhere north of 15 years.” 

Eat Just, which is best known at this point for its plant-based egg products, is in the process of developing its own cell-based meats, including chicken nuggets and chicken breast. The north-of-15-years timeframe for those and other cell-based meat products comes from an important factor Tetrick pointed out when we chatted this week at SKS: that a successful prototype in a lab does not automatically equal commercial success. 

A lot must happen in between those two endpoints, prototype and commercialization, and during our talk, Tetrick broke the journey down into four distinct phases. These are as applicable to other food businesses as they are to Eat Just.

The first is getting that prototype out of the lab. Launching in a single restaurant is one example. To do this, companies need to have not only developed a prototype, they must also have gotten regulatory approval for their product. Tetrick told me that Eat Just hopes this step happens for his company this year or next.

The second phase moves companies out from a single location and into some restaurants, say 50–100, and perhaps smaller retailers. At the moment, there are no cell-based meat companies with products at this stage.

Phase three is even further off. That’s the point when a company’s products are on food retail shelves across the country, from Whole Foods in San Francisco to Walmart in Dyersburg, Tennessee. Eat Just is currently at this point with its plant-based egg products, which are in more than 17,000 locations in the U.S.

That final phase is what Tetrick calls “the Coca-Cola phase.” The product is available everywhere and at a low cost. He believes this is “the phase that will transform the planet,” meaning it will curb the larger population’s reliance on animal protein. To get to that kind of world, phase four is ultimately where Eat Just and other companies need to be.

Not that getting there will be easy. Tetrick doesn’t agree with Pat Brown’s statement that cell-based meat “is never going to be a thing,” but he does concede that it’s no easy feat. In fact, he equated the process from prototype to ubiquity with scaling a really tall mountain. “[It’s] not confusing what needs to be done, it’s just really hard.” 

That climb, so to speak, will require the right investments in cell line development, media, and bioreactors. It will require “a thoughtful approach” to working with regulators and an effective marketing strategy. It will involve enormous amounts of risk and millions if not billions of dollars.

Ultimately, Tetrick believes companies that can get us through this enormously difficult process will enable the majority of the population to live in a world where eating meat doesn’t necessarily mean slaughtering animals or destroying the planet. For many, getting there will be a mountain worth climbing.

‘Make Food Waste Less Possible’: How Businesses Can Help Consumers Fight Food Waste at Home

Tackling the food waste topic in a 30-minute panel is something of an impossible undertaking, given the size of the problem. That’s why at Day 2 of Smart Kitchen Summit 2020, myself, Apeel Sciences’ CEO James Rogers, Chiara Cecchini of the Future Food Institute, and Alexandria Coari of ReFED zeroed in on a few major causes and solutions around food waste.

One of those was the role of consumer behavior in the fight against food waste. Right now, according to ReFed, 80-plus percent of food waste in the U.S. happens at the consumer level, with more than 40 percent of that occurring in our own homes. But is it even realistic to expect consumers — for whom convenience and speed tend to be top priorities — to alter their behaviors around cooking, shopping, and eating in order to bring that number down?

Maybe. But as panelists explained during today’s talk, one of the keys to changing consumer behavior belongs not to the individual but to consumer-facing food businesses — the grocery stores, restaurants, and other retailers of the world.

Coari pointed out that these food businesses have a lot of influence up and down the value chain. Those businesses can enable consumer behavior change by making their environments, whether in the store or in the restaurant, less conducive to food waste to begin with. They can, as Coari said, “Make food waste less possible.”

Apeel, which makes a natural coating for produce to extend its shelf life, is one such example. Selling, say, avocados preserved in Apeel’s coating means consumers have more time between buying the product and eating it at home. Extending this lifespan, there’s a better chance the avocado will get eaten before it goes bad.

Neither the coating nor the extra several days of shelf-life happen because of anything a consumer does. They’re just buying the avocado. Instead, Apeel has used a technology and process that allow a consumer to get more mileage out of the food they buy.

Cecchini pointed out that educating consumers and helping them shift their perspective around certain foods is another important area of consumer behavior change. Take the so-called ugly produce: misshapen-yet-edible fruits and vegetables that are often sold at discounted prices. Cecchini suggests removing monikers like “ugly” or “imperfect” from the food waste vocabulary and trying to put a more positive spin on the concept to make it appeal to as many consumers as possible. In that way, grocery retailers, too, might not have to put as much effort into cosmetically perfect produce and wind up throwing out the rest.

There are tons of other examples of business innovation influencing food waste behavior at the consumer level. While we certainly didn’t cover all of them in the span of a half-hour, today’s talk certainly left me thinking about what food businesses can do to help us get more mileage out of the food we have and waste less of it in the process. As Rogers said at one point, “We can’t hope people [will] do the right thing. We have to make the right thing the easiest, cheapest, best for the planet thing to do.”

In Texas, BioBQ is Betting on Brisket as the Next Big Thing for Cell-Based Meat

What’s next for lab-grown meat? Brisket and jerky, apparently. Thanks to an Austin, Texas-based company called BioBQ, cell-based versions of both those meats are in the works, furthering the possibilities of the kinds of proteins that can be grown in a lab versus slaughtering an animal.

Those meat choices, says cofounder and CEO Katie Kam, make sense because of her company’s location, Texas being something of a superpower when it comes to brisket. Over a recent Zoom chat, Kam and fellow cofounder Janet Zoldan said they aim to have a brisket prototype in two years. The company is actively seeking funding right now.

Kam founded BioBQ at the end of 2018. In the fall of 2019, she brought Zoldan onboard as cofounder. “I thought her research in biomedical engineering could be applied to help with the development of cell-based meat,” Kam said.

Like other lab-grown meats, BioBQ uses cells rather than the actual animal to create meat alternatives. It grows the fat, muscle and collagen cells — all components that make up a brisket — using scaffolding technology to create the layers and marbling we associate with brisket.

What makes something like brisket potentially more challenging that other types of lab-grown meat is achieving that layered structure. For that, Kam says they use a patented technology to produce prototypes of intact sheets of cells that can be stacked together. “With each sheet about two to four cell layers thick, they are working on obtaining the thickness and layered structure consumers expect for jerky and brisket,” she says.

The other major challenge for BioBQ is finding a media for growing the cells that does not use fetal bovine serum (FBS) or anything else that comes from an animal. Since FBS is harvested from bovine fetuses in pregnant cows, its use as a medium for cell-based proteins is extremely controversial (not to mention, expensive). Kam, a longtime vegan, emphasized that BioBQ does not use FBS and that the company is looking for an alternative.

Finding that alternative will help BioBQ drive down the cost of producing cell-based meat as well as make the overall process for creating protein more efficient. Bigger picture, Kam imagines a food industry that relies less on the lengthy and expensive process of raising an animal, slaughtering it, and shipping it to cities. Instead, much of our protein will be produced in labs in cities and therefore much closer to the consumer.

Plenty of others share that vision, if recent activity in the cell-based protein space is any indication. Cellular agriculture startup IntegriCulture, in particular, is working to eliminate animal-based serums like FBS through its CultNet system. Elsewhere, Mosa Meat, known for creating the world’s first lab-grown hamburger, just raised $55 million. Mission Barns is making cell-based bacon, and in Australia, a company called Vow is taste-testing cultured kangaroo and other less-common meats.

Excepting, perhaps, the kangaroo, many of these cell-based meats are easier to produce than brisket, but Kam and Zoldan welcome the challenge.

“Everybody’s telling us we chose the more difficult avenue to tackle,” Zoldan said during our chat. “But I feel that our technology is more uniquely posed to answer [that] specific challenge.”

Zoldan adds that while the pandemic may have impacted BioBQ’s ability to get back into the lab, it has also highlighted why we need alternative sources of protein and “how important it is to control what we eat.” Stories of COVID-19 outbreaks in meat-packing facilities as well as other ethical issues at those facilities has called into question our reliance on traditional protein sources. “If we really can engineer the food that we eat, we can make it healthier,” said Zoldan.

BioBQ is still a ways off from getting its product onto consumers’ plates. A major priority for the company right now is getting funding to further develop its prototype, which the company hopes to have in the next couple of years.