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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Business of Food

Vive La Veggie Burger! EU Says Plant-Based Meats Can Keep Their Name

There’s good news for European vege- and flexitarians! Instead of having to order and shop for veggie “discs” and “tubes” they can order veggie burgers and sausages.

The European Parliament today rejected a proposal from the EU agriculture committee submitted last year to ban the use of meat labels like “burger” and “sausage” on similar plant-based substitutes. Proponents of the legislation believed that terms like “burger” on veggie products would cause confusion in the marketplace. Thankfully, common sense prevailed and you don’t have to shop for plant-based “pucks.”

We’re having our own labeling fight here in the U.S., where a number of states have put forward their own legislation banning plant-based products from using terms like burger and meat. Mississippi, one of the states advancing the restrictive re-naming agenda, wound up easing its policies, allowing terms like “veggie burger” to be used.

These labeling laws seem meant to stifle competition, especially at a time when sales of plant-based meats are on the rise. As we wrote last year:

Big Meat trying to quash alterna-meats’ popularity by telling companies how they can or can’t label themselves feels protectionist and ineffective, not to mention desperate, at this point. After all, the flexitarian movement is gaining strength not because consumers are unclear about whether the burgers they’re buying are made from plants or beef; rather, it’s bolstered by growing environmental and ethical concerns, health reasons, or because meatless meat is a media darling.

Since the time of that writing, the pandemic sparked a surge in sales of plant-based meat, and illuminated the ethical and logistical shortcomings of our existing traditional meat processing infrastructure. And with companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat rapidly expanding their retail presence across the country, the innovation and mainstreaming of plant-based burgers and hot dogs could quickly outpace any legislation aiming to curb it.

That doesn’t mean existing entities won’t try to inhibit plant-based alternatives. It wasn’t all good labeling news in Europe today. While you can order veggie burgers, the EU Parliament also imposed stricter rules for dairy substitutes, saying even the terms such as “milk-like” cannot be used on dairy-free products.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impossible Is Prototyping a Plant-Based Milk Product

At a press conference today, Impossible Foods revealed a prototype for a plant-based milk alternative as part of its ambitious plans to eliminate animal protein from the food supply chain. The product will be called Impossible Milk and will look and function just like cow’s milk. 

To illustrate the differences, Impossible showed its prototype off alongside other alternative milks at the press conference, even mixing it with a cup of coffee to demonstrate how it does not curdle as other plant-based milks do.

Though the milk won’t be available to customers at any point in the near future, It is part of Impossible’s plan to diversify its products to include a range of plant-based alternative proteins. The company is also working on alternatives to chicken and steak, and CEO Pat Brown told MIT Technology Review that Impossible is on a mission to “completely replace the world’s most destructive technology by far, which is the use of animals, by 2035.”

“We will succeed or fail based on whether we build a complete technology platform that creates all the foods we get today from animals,” he added.

To help realize that lofty goal, Impossible also said at the press conference that it intends to double the size of its R&D team over the next year and launched the “Impossible Investigator” project to entice scientists to join the team.

Today’s news follows Impossible’s just-announced expansion onto retail store shelves in Hong Kong and Singapore. And overall, 2020 has been a busy year for the company. It raised another $200 million in August, expanded distribution of its products to Walmart, Trader Joe’s, and other food retailers, and launched a direct-to-consumer e-commerce store. 

The company’s ambitions to branch out from faux beef into dairy, fish, poultry, and other areas of alt protein comes as the entire sector is seeing enormous growth and investment. Impossible’s chief rival Beyond hasn’t exactly rested on its laurels this year, either, having also expanded its product line, launched its own D2C store, and launched products at retail stores in China.

One area we won’t see Impossible branch into, at least for now: cell-based meat. Pat Brown didn’t waffle about at SKS last week when he said the idea of commercially produced meat from a lab was never going to happen. Of course, the company could always change its stance. For now, though, expect Impossible ton continue its focus on plant-based proteins for the foreseeable future.

Eat Just and Impossible Foods Both Made Major Expansions to Asia This Week

Two alt-protein heavyweights in the U.S. took major steps this week in their expansions across Asia, underscoring the growing demand (and need) for alternatives to animal protein in that region.

At the tail-end of yesterday, San Francisco-based food tech company Eat Just announced a partnership with a consortium led by food investment fund Proterra to expand JUST Egg across Asia. Via the partnership, Eat Just will build its first production facility in Asia.

The consortium will invest up to $100 million and Eat Just will invest up to $20 million to build the production facility in Singapore. According to the press release from Eat Just, the factory will “generate thousands of metric tons of protein.” From this deal will also come the subsidiary Eat Just Asia, which will serve JUST egg manufacturing and distribution partners across the region. 

The new production facility is the largest of its kind in Singapore and will serve a growing demand for plant-based protein in Asia. Eat Just’s flagship plant-based egg product is already available in South Korea, Thailand, and Hong Kong. The company also mentioned, via the aforementioned press release, a “yet-to-be-announced” partnership in mainland China, where it already sells products via e-commerce. 

Eat Just and Proterra are also in talks to expand commercial production of cell-based meat, which Eat Just is already in the midst of developing.

Also at the end of yesterday, Impossible Foods announced that its plant-based meat products will be available in retail stores for the first time in Asia. Impossible’s Beef product is now available at 200 grocery stores across Hong Kong and Singapore. 

In Hong Kong, consumers can buy Impossible products at 100 ParknShop locations and ParknShop subsidiaries, as well as for delivery online at parknshop.com. Customers in Singapore can find the company’s plant-based beef at 100 FairPrice stores and on grocery e-commerce platform RedMart.

Impossible debuted in the Asian market at restaurants in 2018, but this week’s news marks the first time the company’s products will be available to home chefs.

But while Impossible may be expanding its plant-based empire, one area we shouldn’t expect to see the company branch into is cell-based meat. In fact, when asked about cell-based meat at last week’s Smart Kitchen Summit, Impossible CEO Pat Brown flatly said, “It’s never going to be a thing.” Brown called it “irreversibly expensive” and added that meat grown in a lab would never be a commercial endeavor.

Eat Just doesn’t share the same view. Company founder and CEO Josh Tetrick, who was also at SKS, shared his views on the eventual reality of cell-based meat and gave us a rough timeline and included steps his company and others have to take in order to go from prototype to retail shelves with cell-based meat. It won’t be soon. Tetrick said “north of 15 years” for cell-based meat, and others have cited similar timeframes.

Were cell-based meat to become a commercial reality, Asia is an obvious region to aim for. Increasing urbanization and population growth, particularly in Southeast Asia, has led to a growing demand for animal proteins. This demand has consequences both for the environment and for human health.

Those are challenges plant-based proteins can address, too, hence the quickly rising number of companies in Asia, from Omnipork to Black Sheep Foods and now Eat Just and Impossible. While we wait for cell-based proteins over the long terms, we can expect both demand for and production of plant-based products to continue rising in Asia and beyond.

New WSJ Report Shows How Much CloudKitchens Has Spent on Real Estate and Where

CloudKitchens, the secretive ghost kitchen startup founded by ex-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, has purchased more than 40 real estate properties across two dozen cities for more than $130 million, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal analyzed a number of different limited-liability companies, tracing their origins back to the business addresses of City Storage Systems, the parent company of CloudKitchens.

CloudKitchens has been notoriously secretive about its operations, and the Journal’s work not only gives us a glimpse into how much the company is spending, but where it could potentially be setting up ghost kitchen operations.

Ghost kitchens are centralized commercial kitchen spaces for restaurants to fulfill off-premises and delivery-only restaurant concepts. They have all the infrastructure needed for a restaurant to prepare food and serve as a delivery hub, without any of the additional overhead that comes with dine-in eating.

According to the Journal’s analysis, it looks like CloudKitchens has acquired buildings in:

  • Portland, OR
  • Las Vegas, NV
  • Columbus, OH
  • Memphis, TN
  • Nashville, TN
  • Miami Beach, FL
  • Queens, NY
  • Los Angeles, CA
  • Seattle, WA

As the Journal notes, CloudKitchens doesn’t say much about its business, including its locations. The company has evidently been just as hush-hush during these real estate transactions and not directly identifying itself with some sellers.

The Journal article is worth highlighting because it gives us some sense of just how big CloudKitchens is and could get. The ghost kitchen market is expected by some to hit as high as $1 trillion by 2030, and there are already a number of players in the space including Kitchen United, Zuul, Yummy and more (see our Ghost Kitchen market map for more). But if CloudKitchens has already attained national level reach, then it could be poised to quickly dominate the space.

Though CloudKitchens has reportedly spent $130 million on real estate, the company raised $400 million from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund last year. And given Kalanick’s track record with Uber, chances are good it could easily raise more.

With the pandemic still in full swing around the planet, the restaurant biz will still need to rely on delivery to stay afloat. Ghost kitchens will play an increasingly important part of that survival plan.

For more on ghost kitchens, you should read The Spoon Plus Guide to Ghost Kitchens (membership required), which outlines where the market has been and where it’s going.

Imperfect Foods’ New Snack Box Lets You Fight Food Waste Through Holiday Gifting

A key tactic for fighting food waste at the consumer level is to incentivize folks with easy, affordable solutions that don’t require a whole lot of work. Bundling food-waste-fighting concepts into holiday gift ideas seems like one surefire way to do that, and it’s something food redistribution platform Imperfect Foods will be doing in 2020. The company today announced the launch of its first-ever holiday gift box containing a mix of so-called “imperfect” snack items, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Imperfect, which raised $72 million earlier this year, “rescues” surplus and cosmetically imperfect food items from grocery stores and delivers them to consumers at discounted prices. That includes fruits, vegetables, and pantry items as well as meat and dairy. 

It follows, then, that all snack items included in the newly announced holiday gift box come with their own rescue stories. Those include:

  • Dried mango considered too “sunburnt” to sell at grocery
  • Almond butter toffee that broke into pieces
  • Peppermint- and dark chocolate-covered pretzels that broke into pieces during production
  • Surplus seasonings
  • Leftover snack mix bits like peanuts, pretzels, and sesame sticks
  • Almonds with “blemishes”

While the above list would satisfy most snack lovers’ cravings, it more importantly offers a quick snapshot of the many ridiculous reasons retailers throw food out — food that could otherwise be purchased for lower prices or given to those without access or means to regular grocery store items. In high-income countries like the U.S. and many places in Europe, the majority — more than 80 percent — of food waste happens at consumer-facing levels like retail. Needless to say, there are a lot of blemished almonds out there that need a home, and a lot of people in the country who could benefit from keeping them out of the landfill.

Nor is Imperfect the only food rescue service out there. Two other notables include Misfits Market, which operates similar to Imperfect and recently raised $85 million, and Flashfood, a Canada-based service that currently works with Meijer grocery chains to rescue food.

Packaging rescued snack items as holiday goodies may also be a way for a company like Imperfect to make the concept of fighting food waste more appealing and, well, fun. No other food waste apps besides Imperfect have yet to surface with a holiday offering, though it wouldn’t be surprising if they did over the next few weeks.

The Imperfect Foods Holiday Box will be available for both Imperfect subscribers and nonmembers for $24.99 starting November 16. The company said in today’s press release will save about nine pounds of food from going to waste. Proceeds from the boxes go towards Feeding America.  

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.

Popmenu Raises $17M to Expand Its Restaurant Software Capabilities

Popmenu, a platform for digital ordering and reservations for restaurants, announced this week it has raised a $17 million Series B round. The round was led by Bedrock Capital, with participation from existing investors Base10 Partners and Felicis Ventures, as well as new investors Mantis Ventures and Chapter One Ventures. This brings Popmenu’s total funding to $22.1 million. 

In a press release sent to The Spoon, Popmenu said It will use the new funds to develop new features for its platform, which currently allows restaurants to manage online ordering and menus, collect direct feedback from customers (as opposed to getting it via third-party platforms), manage reservations, and integrate with delivery and reservations services. 

Right now, one of the company’s main selling points is that it gives restaurants more control over their own branding, which is tough to do in the age of online delivery platforms and user-driven review sites like Yelp and Google. To give restaurants more of that brand control, Popmenu creates customized websites that include the aforementioned features and that allow the restaurants’ customers to upload their own photos, feedback, and reviews.

In response to the pandemic, Popmenu, like other restaurant tech companies, also launched its own version of contactless software that lets guests scan a QR code with their own smartphones to view and order from restaurant menus. 

In addition to contactless features, having more control over their own branding (and customer data) has surfaced as a priority for restaurants since the start of the pandemic. SKS panelists noted yesterday that more restaurants, from large chains to mom-and-pop shops, are starting to bring more elements of the off-premises experience back into their own control. ShiftPixy, a company that provides not just custom-branded websites but also delivery drivers, is a huge supporter of restaurant-controlled customer data. Square just launched a similar function.

Even delivery services, like Uber Eats, now offer restaurants the ability to process orders via their own websites. The catch with that last one, of course, is that Uber Eats still owns the customer data, which kind of renders the whole point of maintaining one’s own website null and void.

As more companies like Popmenu bring features to the table that put branding and data back in the hands of restaurants, there will inevitably be more pushback from third-party delivery.

Report: Indian Delivery Service Zomato Raises an Additional $52M

India-based food delivery service Zomato has raised $52 million in funding from Kora Investments. The Mint was first to report the news, citing a person close to the matter who asked not to be named. The $52 million is, according to that person, part of Zomato’s ongoing Series J funding round that could eventually be as high as $600 million. The new fundraise brings Zomato’s current total funding to $1.2 billion.

Even amidst difficulties brought on by the pandemic, it’s been a very busy year for Zomato, and one filled with more ups than downs. The company bought Uber Eats’ India business in March for $206 million, then raised $5 million in funding in April as part of its ongoing Series J. Like chief rival Swiggy, Zomato also unveiled a grocery delivery service as a way of diversifying its business model.

While Zomato did have to make cuts to its workforce in May, that hasn’t seemingly hampered the company’s overall growth. As of September, Zomato said it had recovered about 80 percent of its pre-pandemic sales. To top all that off, the company plans to go public in the first half of 2021.

Prosus-backed Swiggy is currently Zomato’s main competitor in India, and has raised $1.6 billion to date. However, Amazon’s recent entry into the India food delivery market could mean formidable competition for both Swiggy and Zomato, especially since Amazon already has a presence in India through its PrimeNow and AmazonFresh services.

Last month alone, Zomato closed a $62 million funding from Temasek unit MacRitchie Investments and a $103 million from Tiger Global. The Mint’s source said Kora is expected to make a follow-up investment “of a larger amount,” though no exact figure was given. 

SKS 2020: Ghost Kitchen’s Changing Tech Trends

The definition of “ghost kitchen” is changing rapidly as more restaurants go off-premises and even non-restaurant food entities, like grocery stores, hop onboard the trend.

But as was discussed during our ghost kitchen strategy panel at SKS 2020 this week, the common denominator beneath all shapes and sizes of ghost kitchens is the technology powering them. As Ashley Colpaart, CEO of The Food Corridor, said on the panel, ghost kitchens are all about “going direct to the consumer through technology platforms.”

Joining Colpaart and myself were Michael Schaefer, global lead for food and bev at Euromonitor, and Bolt Kitchen CEO Nick Avedesian. Everyone agreed there is a lot of technology being thrown at restaurant owners and ghost kitchen operators nowadays. This makes sense because, as Schaefer said, more of our dining experiences are getting mediated by the smartphone. Keeping that in mind, panelists pointed to a few different areas of tech that are especially important to the ghost kitchen operation right now.

One is software that can integrate the many different channels orders flow through from customer to kitchen. Most restaurants, large and small, work with more than one delivery partner, which causes a deluge of different orders from different channels in what’s commonly referred to as “tablet hell.” Using a delivery integrator (Olo and Chowly are two such companies) lessens the chance of an order getting lost in translation on its way to the kitchen and, Avedesian said, creates “a better experience for your staff.”

It’s not just the back-of-house that needs optimizing, though. Colpaart mentioned the need for “the shopping experience” — that is, the experience a customer has finding and ordering from a restaurant — to be as easy as possible. Along the same lines, restaurants themselves will need technologies that can help them become more visible in this brave new world of online delivery marketplaces and virtual food halls. Some solutions, like Lunchbox, are working very closely with restaurants on this visibility and marketing aspect.

Then there’s delivery, one of the restaurant biz’s most controversial topics right now. Among the (many) griefs with third-party delivery services a la Uber Eats and DoorDash right now is that restaurants can’t control their own branding or customer experience through these platforms. Some white label delivery services, like DoorDash Drive, are emerging to address this. Avedesian said said we will see a lot more of these white label, custom-branded solutions in future.

We may also see more delivery go in-house at restaurants. That trend was actually happening long before the pandemic, with Panera being a notable early adopter of the practice. Now, panelists said everyone from large enterprises to mom-and-pop shops are considering the native delivery experience. One group we may see doing this in large numbers in future is QSRs like the aforementioned Panera or Panda Express, which recently launched its own delivery program. 

Not discussed on the panel but something that sprang to my mind is this: Is this shift to native delivery creating an opportunity for restaurant tech companies to improve the in-house delivery experience? And will those innovations be enough to disrupt third-party delivery as we know it?

Stay tuned on that one.

SKS 2020: Why Singapore Is Fast-Becoming Food Tech’s New Superpower

That Singapore is a fast-rising superpower in food tech is something that’s become apparent over the last several months. And yesterday, during a SKS 2020 panel on the Asian food tech landscape, the city-state came up in conversation again as an enormously important location to watch when it comes to food innovation and investment.

“If I had to place my bet I would place it on Singapore,” said Michal Klar, an angel investor who also writes the Future Food Now newsletter. Joining him on the panel were Winnie Leung of Bits x Bytes and Spoon Publisher Mike Wolf, and together, the group unpacked some of the reasons why so much food tech innovation is coming out of Singapore right now.

Arguably the biggest driver is that, at the moment, Singapore imports 90 percent of its food. That’s a precarious position to be in during the best of times, never mind during a pandemic that’s disrupted the global food supply chain. In response, the Singapore government launched a $21 million grant fund this year as part of its 30×30 initiative, which aims to have 30 percent of Singapore’s food produced locally by 2030. 

At the same time, that reliance on imports for the majority of its foods may actually help Singapore innovate on food tech faster for the short term. Since so much of the city-state’s food comes from outside its own borders, Singapore lacks some of the constraints other countries face when it comes to getting pushback by established players.

Alternative protein is a good example. Here in the U.S., both plant- and cell-based meat companies must go toe-to-toe with Big Meat producers and lobbyists over labeling of their products, shelf placement, and other issues. By contrast, Klar suggested that because Singapore’s meat supply is imported there’s nobody to push back on new developments and regulations happening in the city-state around alternative forms of meat. That, Klar reasoned, is one of the reasons Singapore is home to Asia’s best-funded cell-base meat startup, Shiok Meats, as well as a number of other up and coming players.  

Indoor agriculture/vertical farming is another area that could potentially thrive because of a lack of existing incumbents. Last year, local farms produced just 14 percent of leafy vegetables consumed by Singaporeans, so there’s little in the way of traditional agriculture to disrupt. At SKS, Leung noted that Singapore’s “highly urbanized” environment makes it an ideal setting for high-tech innovations in indoor farming. We’ve seen this in recent months with companies like SinGrow, which is growing a proprietary breed of strawberries in its vertical farm, and ag tech accelerators like GROW. Leung also flagged aquaculture as a sector to watch in Singapore.

Both Klar and Leung also pointed to Singapore’s regulatory environment as a reason for the city-states speedy growth in food tech innovation. There is only one agency in Singapore that regulates foods, said Klar. In other words, when companies prepare for the phase in which they must get government approval for their products, there’s no doubt or confusion as to who they must go to. This could speed up the process of regulatory approval, which in turn would mean a faster time to market for many companies. 

The above factors are just a smattering of reasons for Singapore food tech’s continued growth, and over the next several months we will continue to see new advances in ag tech, alt protein, packaging, and other areas of the food supply chain emerge.

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.