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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Business of Food

Shiok Meats Closes Bridge Funding Round, Plans R&D Facility for Cultivated Seafood

Cultured seafood company Shiok Meats has raised an undisclosed amount of investment in a bridge funding round from Woowa Brothers Asia Holdings, CJ CheilJedang Corporation, and Vietnamese-based seafood exporter Vinh Hoan Corporation. This brings Shiok Meats’ total funding to date to $30 million, according to a company press release. 

The round also included existing investors IRONGREY, Big Idea Ventures, Twynam Investments, Henry Soesanto, The Alexander Payne Living Trust, Beyond Impact Vegan Partners, Boom Capital Fund, Toyo Seikan Group Holdings, and Mindshift Capital.

While Shiok Meats did not disclose the exact amount of the bridge round, it likely clocked in around the $10 million mark, a figure based on publicly available information about the company’s financials.  

The new funds will go towards building an R&D production facility in Singapore, where the company is based. To date, Shiok Meats has developed cultivated shrimp and lobster, and aims to eventually produce those products at scale via its production facility.

Several other cultivated protein companies, including Future Meat, MeaTech 3D, and fellow cultured-seafood company Willdtype, have also announced production facilities over the last few months. BlueNalu, another seafood-focused company, announced a production facility back in 2020 that is slated to be operational towards the end of this year.

For its part, Shiok Meats says it plans to launch in Singapore by 2023 at the latest. The company received the prestigious Startup SG Tech Proof-of-Value grant, which helps companies fast-track development of their technologies/products and which could help Shiok Meats get to market faster.

In Singapore, at least, Shiok already has competition. San Francisco, California-based Eat Just nabbed the world’s first-ever regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat from Singapore and is currently selling its “chicken” at restaurants in the city-state.   

Delivery Service Swiggy Raises $1.25B

Indian delivery service Swiggy has closed a $1.25 billion round of Series J funding led by Softbank Vision Fund 2 and Prosus Ventures, according to TechCrunch. Qatar Investment Authority, Falcon Edge Capital, Amansa Capital, Goldman Sachs, Think Investments and Carmignac participated in the fundraising, as well as existing investors Accel Partners and Wellington Management.

The “heavily oversubscribed” round includes the $800 million the company raised earlier this year. To date, Swiggy has raised $2.9 billion in funding and has a post-money valuation of $5.5 billion.

Like its rival Zomato (who filed to go public in April 2021), Swiggy is best known across India for its restaurant food delivery service. However, Swiggy’s Chief Executive Sriharsha Majety said that this new funding will also help accelerate its non-food categories in addition to traditional restaurant delivery. “I believe the next 10-15 years offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for companies like Swiggy as the Indian middle class expands and our target segment for convenience grows to 500 million users,” he told TC.

In 2020, Swiggy expanded its service to include delivery of grocery, household items, and laundry, among other categories. 

Zomato, too, has branched out beyond restaurant delivery with its Zomato Marketplace that connects restaurant owners with suppliers of non-food items. The company raised $1.3 billion in its IPO recently. 

The move to offer more than just restaurant meals is similar to developments in other parts of the world. A chief example is DoorDash, the U.S.-based company that added grocery services in 2020 and has also since expanded its “dark convenience store” service. Uber has also started offering non-restaurant food delivery.

In addition to the major companies, an entirely new pack of speedy delivery services has emerged and promises basic food and household items in a fraction of the time it takes a restaurant meal to get cooked and delivered.

Speedy delivery has yet to reach India in any major capacity. When it does, it will add yet-more competition to the already uber-competitive Indian delivery market.

Zenput Raises $27M to Manage Operations for Multi-Unit Restaurants

Restaurant operations tech company Zenput has raised $27 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Golub Capital with participation by existing investors, including Jackson Square Ventures, MHS Capital, and Goldcrest Capital. It brings Zenput’s total funding to date to over $47 million, according to a company press release. 

San Francisco-based Zenput calls its tech an “operations execution platform.” With it, multi-unit restaurant operators, grocery stores, and convenience stores can release new operating procedures and health and safety protocols and enforce them across all units. Businesses can update all of their locations at the same time whenever a new policy or procedure gets rolled out. Zenput can also track how well each unit is complying with standards and procedures. The system can also be used to distribute new promotional campaigns across all units. 

Leading brands in the restaurant and convenience store industries, including Chipotle, Five Guys, P.F. Chang’s, and 7-Eleven, are current customers of Zenput.

Zenput says it has “approximately” 100 percent revenue growth over the last year and saw daily activities on the platform increase by 150 percent per store. The platform’s apparent popularity makes sense, given that restaurants have had to continually change and update policies in order to accommodate COVID-19-related restrictions and regulations. “The challenges of the past year really underscored for our customers the criticality of being able to manage the complexities and overall execution of work in one central place, especially when an operator might have dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations,” Vladik Rikhter, Zenput’s CEO and cofounder, said in a statement.  

He added that the new funds will largely go towards building new products that can address additional areas of operations. 

Zenput currently serves over 500 customers across 50,000 locations in 40 different countries. The funding will also go towards expanding this customer base. 

Collectiv Food Raises $16.3M for B2B Food Supply Distribution

Collectiv Food, a London-based B2B food marketplace, announced today that it has raised £12 million (~$16.3 million USD) in Series A funding. The round was led by VNV Global, along with VisVires New Protein, Octopus Ventures Norrsken VC, as well as existing investors Partech, Colle Capital and Mustard Seed. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Collectiv Food to £15.8 million (~$21.5 million USD).

Currently servicing Europe, Collectiv operates a network of thousands of food producers that supply items such as meat, seafood, plant-based proteins, dairy, beverages an more. Collectiv’s marketplace allows restaurants, hotels, caterers, meal kits companies, ghost kitchens and more buy food directly from the producers, cutting out the wholesaler middle man and their markup.

In addition to promising cheaper prices for food, Collectiv says it has developed a greener, more sustainable approach to last-mile delivery. Collectiv operates a number of “Points of Delivery” (PODS), which are like chilled shipping containers placed in underutilized parts of a city. Instead of big delivery trucks all coming from a centralized distribution center and driving long delivery routes through a city, Collectiv’s system intelligently routes smaller delivery vehicles from this network of PODS for last mile delivery. The company says this decentralized distribution results in 50 percent less CO2 emissions than traditional last mile shipping methods.

Collectiv is among a number of B2B startups looking to improve our food supply chain. Other players include IFoodDS, which offers a cloud based system that provides more transparency into fresh food supply chains, as well as Shelf Engine and Afresh, which help food buyers better predict inventory needs.

In a press announcement sent to The Spoon, Collectiv said it will use its new funding to further develop its delivery and sourcing models, hire out its team and continue its expansion across Europe.

Choco Raises $100M to Digitize Restaurant Food Procurement

Restaurant tech company Choco announced today it has raised $100 million in in Series B funding led by growth equity firm Left Lane Capital. Insight Partners along with existing investors Coatue Management and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Choco has raised $171.5 million to date.

The company’s mobile app effectively digitizes the relationship between restaurants and their suppliers, allowing the two groups to chat with one another through the app. Restaurants can place orders directly through the Choco app as well as view and edit all order sheets. Choco also released a new feature at the beginning of 2021 specifically designed for multi-unit restaurants to give them a more comprehensive overview of not just what they’re ordering but where it comes from and who is in charge of that relationship. At the time, Choco’s Global Industry Advisor, Chelsea van Hooven, said multi-unit restaurants make up about 40 percent of Choco’s current user base.

The company’s original pitch was around fighting food waste in the restaurant industry. While that remains a part of Choco’s overall benefits for restaurants, wasted time and money are also now part of the overall package of benefits the company is pitching. Replacing siloed paper-and-pen processes with digital ones, where all data is viewable from a single place, has the potential to cut hidden costs in the back of house and in doing so improve restaurant margins. 

Digital was largely seen as a “nice-to-have” feature before the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. Now, many claim that digitizing operations is a “must have,” and that those who don’t will wind up getting left behind.

While that may be true for large chains (think McDonald’s or Chipotle), it remains to be seen how much this full digitization of the back of house can actually help smaller independent restaurants. In other words, we have yet to see whether the cost to implement and run technology is worth the returns it brings to these smaller restaurants.

Choco says demand for its platform is up and partly driven by the pandemic pushing more restaurants to go digital. The company currently has over 10,000 active restaurants and suppliers on its platform. It will use the new funding to expand within its six current markets: the United States, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, and Belgium. The company will also expand into several new markets, and has plans to double its head count by end of the year.

Nature’s Fynd Raises $350M Series C for its Microbial Protein

Nature’s Fynd, which makes protein from microbes that originated in geothermal springs of Yellowstone National Park, announced today that it has raised a $350 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, with participcation from new investors including Blackstone Strategic Partners, Balyasny Asset Management, Hillhouse Investment, EDBI, SK Inc. and Hongkou, as well as other existing investors. This brings the total amount raised by Nature’s Fynd to more than $500 million.

The company’s protein is called Fy, and it’s a fermented fungi protein derived from the Fusar­i­um strain flavolapis microbe. Because Fy is grown through fermentation, the cultivation of the protein requires less land, water and energy than traditional agriculture. Fy is a complete protein with 9 essential amino acids, and it can be used to make alternative meat and dairy products. In February of this year, Nature’s Fynd announced its first two Fy-based products: a dairy-free cream cheese and a meatless breakfast patty. The company also makes a dairy-free yogurt that was eaten on camera by Bill Gates (a Nature’s Fynd investor) and Anderson Cooper during a segment on 60 Minutes earlier this year.

Fermentation has been dubbed the third pillar of alternative protein, alongside cell-based and plant-based protein. We have seen a wave of startups using fermentation technology to bring variety of animal-free products to market. Perfect Day and Remilk use fermentation to create dairy proteins. Nourish Ingredients ferments yeast to make plant-based fats. SuperBrewed ferments microbes to create a vegan protein powder than can be used in plant-based cheese and milks. And Better Meat Co. recently launched its own fermentation production facility to create its mycoprotein-based Rhiza ingredient.

All of this activity has also helped attract plenty of funding over the past year and a half. According to data from the Good Food Institute and Pitchbook, fermentation startups received $590 million in funding in 2020. In addition to Nature’s Fynd’s haul announced today, last month Motif Foodworks, which uses microbial engineering and precision fermentation to create novel food ingredients, raised $226 million.

Nature’s Fynd said it will use its new funding to expand its production capacity, add new products to its lineup, and set the stage for its international growth.

Rise Gardens Raises $9M in Series A Funding

Rise Gardens has raised $9 million in an oversubscribed Series A Round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. The round was led by TELUS Ventures with participation from existing investors True Ventures and Amazon Alexa Fund and new investor Listen Ventures. It brings Rise’s total funding to date to $13 million. 

New funds will go towards product development and expansion, according to the company. As of right now, Rise Gardens makes an IoT-connected hydroponic grow system for the consumer home. The company provides the farming system, seed pods, nutrients for the water, and accompanying mobile app that users can rely on to monitor and manage plant growth. The garden comes in three sizes, plus a tabletop version that was released at the end of last year. 

As of right now, there are no voice control features on the gardens. But Rise CEO Hank Adams hinted last year at an eventual collaboration with Amazon that would bring Alexa functionality to the system. The Amazon Alexa Fund’s involvement in today’s funding round suggests that ambition is still very much in the plans. Rise will also in the near future sell its gardens via Amazon, marking the first time the product will be available via something other than the company’s direct-to-consumer channel.

Rise is one of a number of companies trying to bring the concept of high-tech gardening into consumers’ homes. Other notables right now include Gardyn, which makes a compact indoor-only unit, Lettuce Grow’s Farmstand, which can work both indoors and outdoors, and Hong Kong-based Aspara’s countertop unit.

All of these systems use hydroponics to grow leafy greens and herbs. They also all, at this point, come with a hefty price tag: Rise’s Single-Family Garden starts at $549 USD, for example, while a Lettuce Grow unit that holds 24 plants and includes LED lights costs $849.

Adams said today that part of its new funds will go towards reaching “an even wider audience in the U.S., Canada and around the world.”  

Virtually Staffing the Physical Drive-Thru

Generally speaking, restaurants with drive-thrus have often fared better than most over the last year and a half of shutdowns, dining room restrictions, and overall uncertainty. But even as demand for this format rises and major QSRs say they’ll focus more on it in future store designs, wait times at the drive-thru have gotten longer, the accuracy of orders more dubious.

Lots of companies are throwing tech at the problem to try and solve it. One of the more interesting we’ve come across recently is from Bite Ninja, which supplies restaurants with “virtual” cashiers and drive-thru operators that can take orders remotely. This has the potential to speed up the order-taking process and simultaneously addresses the labor issues currently impacting the restaurant industry.

Bite Ninja essentially lets restaurants outsource their staffing needs for the drive-thru lane to gig workers that take orders from their own homes, or wherever they happen to be. Workers — also known as “ninjas” — sign up for a shift via the Bite Ninja platform, which manages the scheduling and logistics of getting the worker set up with their shift at the restaurant. It also trains workers on both the technology (it’s Bite Ninja’s own proprietary system) and how to take a restaurant order, both generally and for specific brands. 

Customers pulling into the drive-thru lane will see the cashier’s face appear on the ordering screen. The cashier will then walk the customer through the ordering process. From a customer experience perspective, the drive-thru process isn’t significantly altered. You just happen to be talking to a person that’s not actually at the restaurant (and through a system with reportedly better audio quality).

Bite Ninja’s cofounders are no strangers to the QSR world. The idea for the platform started at one of cofounder Will Clem’s own restaurants, Baby Jack’s in Tennessee. Clem, who is also one of the original cofounders of cultivated meat company Memphis Meats (which as since rebranded as Upside), decided to use his laptop and a videoconferencing tool one evening to take orders at his drive-thru remotely. After realizing how well the concept worked, he and cofounder Orin Wilson decided to try offering the Bite Ninja platform to the wider industry. 

Clem and Wilson say their platform can increase order accuracy and upsell rates for restaurants. For workers, it’s a way of making extra money without having to clock in at the actual restaurant. And it goes without saying that having your drive-thru cashiers work remotely is more social-distancing-friendly than on-premises work.

While the technology is currently only up and running at Baby Jack’s, Clem and Wilson told The Spoon they have been contacted by “most of the major fast food restaurants in America” and are currently onboarding a few of them. (Actual names of brands will be disclosed once a trial period is completed.) And drive-thru isn’t the only place we may soon be able to find Bite Ninja. The company says its platform is also currently available as a front-of-house kiosk, and that curbside, phone, and online ordering capabilities are in the works.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more about Bite Ninja’s place in the restaurant industry, join The Spoon and guests on August 17 for a virtual Restaurant Tech Summit. Bite Ninja will join the likes of Wow Bao, Fat Brands. Sevenrooms, Kitchen United, and many more companies and individuals from the restaurant industry. Grab a ticket here, and come ready to ask some questions. 

More Headlines

86 Repairs Nabs $7.3M in Funding for Restaurant Maintenance Tech – The Chicago, Illinois-based company says the new funds will help the company build out more products for its maintenance and repairs management platform for restaurants.

Gorillas is Hiring Up to Expand its 10-Minute Grocery to San Francisco, LA and Chicago – The speedy-delivery service is prepping to make a move out west and hiring for a number of different positions across the state of California.

FreshRealm Raises $32M for Fresh, Prepared Meals – This most recent round of funding will be used to expand FreshRealm’s production facilities, with the goal of opening additional facilities throughout the country for increased distribution. 

Impossible Foods Unveiling Plant-Based Chicken Nugget Next Week

Impossible Foods will unveil a new plant-based chicken nugget product next week, with plans to launch to launch it at restaurants in the fall, according to a story on Bloomberg this morning. The nugget will be made from soy protein and sunflower oil, but will not include heme, an ingredient used in its plant-based burgers to make them “bleed.”

Honestly, it would be more surprising if Impossible didn’t make a plant-based chicken nugget because everyone is getting into that game nowadays. In addition to the smaller upstarts like Rebellyous, Daring, SIMULATE and Nowadays, Impossible’s big plant-based burger rival, Beyond Meat, just announced its own chicken tenders for restaurants last week. With two well-known brands in Impossible and Beyond now getting into plant-based nuggets, what will that mean for those other companies just starting out?

Chicken is the most consumed meat in the U.S., and the Good Food Institute reports that sales of plant-based meat have grown 72 percent over the past two years, with the market now worth $1.4 billion. Combine those two data points and it’s no wonder so many companies are vying for your dollar. The opportunity in plant-based nuggets is also slightly different than plant-based burgers. Kids eat a lot of chicken nuggets and are (at least in my experience) less likely to notice a plant-based substitute. Burgers, however, are enjoyed by kids and adults alike, and adults are less likely to be “fooled” by a plant-based burger analog (or may even be hesitant to try them out at all). Nuggets could also be the tip of the spear for both Impossible and Beyond to get into other breaded chicken products like patties.

Of course all of that hinges on these nuggets reaching price parity with traditional animal based ones. Though the price of Impossible’s burger has come down over the years, it’s still more expensive than actual beef.

An Impossible rep told Bloomberg that unlike with its burgers, the company isn’t using heme for its nuggets because they are a white meat product. Also worth noting in the Bloomberg story is that Beyond’s new chicken tender uses titanium dioxide as an additive, which the In May, the European Food Safety Authority no longer considers safe.

Bloomberg writes that Impossible will be showing off its new nuggets to potential customers next week at a trade show. Like it did with its Impossible burgers, the plant-based nuggets will then first appear in restaurants this fall before heading to retail. One big difference this time around is that Impossible now has an extensive retail network already in place that will make the launch of its nuggets that much easier and faster.

Impossible CEO Doubles Down on Doubting Cultured Meat: “Complete Vaporware”

You can’t say Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown is a flip-flopper when it comes to downplaying the future of cell-based meat. At our Smart Kitchen Summit in October of last year, Brown declared that cultured meat was “never going to be a thing,” and based on a Washington Post interview that ran this morning, he’s only strengthened his resolve over the past nine months.

In a Q&A, Post reporter Laura Reilly asked Brown whether he thought the labeling battles currently being fought over plant-based meat will repeat with cell-based meat. Brown responded:

Cultivated meat is complete vaporware. Don’t hold your breath. The fact is that the economics of animal cell cultures as a food production system in no conceivable way can compete with the current industry. If you could use cultured cells to make any reasonable replica of an animal tissue, which would you do: Sell it for $5 a pound as meat, or sell it for $1 million a pound to treat people with muscle-wasting diseases?

It’s actually hard to make a reasonable facsimile of an animal tissue from cultured cells. Theoretically it’s doable, and there’s no question that it will be done at some point. But it will never be done with anything remotely like the economics you need for food.

He went on to make an analogy about transportation and recreating a horse instead of building a car. His point being, trying to recreate existing animal meat means your stuck with the same limitations of those animals. Both points are pretty much the same arguments he made at SKS last year, but what’s interesting is that so many advances have happened in the cultured meat space since that time.

Perhaps the biggest milestone hit was that cultured meat is being sold to consumers. Sure, right now it’s just one company (GOOD Meat) selling it in one country (Singapore), but people are actually consuming cultivated meat right now. They’re even getting it delivered to their homes.

We’ve also seen a ton of investment in the cultured meat space, funding a range of startups tackling a variety of issues. The aforementioned GOOD Meat raised $170 million, Aleph Farms just raised $105 million, Misson Barns raised $24 million, and Meatable raised $47 million, just to name a few.

At the same time we’ve seen some companies drastically bring down the costs of their cultured products. Mosa Meat generated more than a 65x cost reduction in the creation of its cultured fat. Future Meat has reduced the production price of its cultured chicken breast twice this year, bringing it down to $4 per 110g serving. And Avant Meats said it has achieved a 90 percent reduction in the cost of producing its cultured functional proteins.

And finally, just this month, it was reported that CPG giant Nestlé has partnered with Future Meat to develop some type of plant-based/cultivated meat hybrid product. If this bears out, having a massive company like Nestlé involved could definitely push the cultivated meat sector forward and closer to a reality for consumers.

As the CEO of Impossible Foods, which has raised $1.6 billion in funding and is in the plant-based meat business, Brown obviously has a horse in this race. Part of his poo-pooing cultured meat is protecting his company, and part of it is generating headlines and discussion. He’s right to have some skepticism, cultivated meat still needs to reach price parity with animal meat, regulations need to be created in markets around the world, and we need to see if consumers will even want “lab-grown” meat. But doubling down on the exact same arguments against cultivated meat year after year, when so many obvious advances have been made, seems to just deny the reality of an evolving situation.

Afresh CEO Matt Schwartz Explains How AI Can Help Grocery Retailers Place “the Perfect” Order

For grocery stores, measuring demand and managing orders for fresh foods can be a maddeningly difficult task that more often than not ends in lots of unused food getting thrown out. After all, bananas have a much shorter shelf life than, say, a bag of rice, and a lot of existing supply-chain technologies and processes were designed with the latter in mind.

“Existing tools don’t work for fresh food,” says Matt Schwartz CEO and cofounder of a San Francisco, California-based tech company called Afresh.

Afresh often gets labeled a “food waste” company and listed among other efforts to curb the problem of food waste at consumer-facing outlets like grocery stores. While Afresh’s store-level ordering platform can certainly help grocery retailers cut down on food waste, that’s not necessarily the main driving force behind the company. 

Over a call recently, Schwartz told The Spoon he thinks of Afresh as more of a “fresh food company” than food waste company. The system uses AI to analyze store-level data around customer demand, shipments of fresh food, sales of it, pricing and other factors. Gathering all that disparate data together, the system then makes ordering recommendations for grocers to help them create what Schwartz calls “the perfect order.” That is, “an amount that keeps you in stock for the shopper but also doesn’t cause you to drive waste from having it sit there.”

By way of example, he says it’s the difference between 14 cases of blueberries and 18: “Those four cases make all the difference when it comes to billions of pounds of waste.” 

Getting that perfect number can be complicated. Continuing with the blueberry example, Schwartz says there are a few major things grocery retailers have to consider, the first of them being customer demand. In other words, How many blueberries will shoppers want over the next few days? Retailers also have to consider existing store inventory, which can be tricky to calculate for something like berries. 

Reconciling these two things — how much a retailer has versus how much they think they will sell, also requires other types of data. That includes how many cases the shelf can hold, the shelf life of the blueberries, and the frequency of shipments, to name a few. The Afresh system connects to grocery retailers’ existing systems, then compiles the above data into a single place that a retailer making an order can view from an iPad.  

“In the long term our systems will drive decisions around inventory, forecasting, etc.,” said Schwartz.  

In a recent post for The Spoon, food tech investors Seana Day and Brita Rosenheim noted that “increased workflow and data automation solutions in the food supply chain holds significant power to help the food supply chain leapfrog into digitalization.” That includes grocery retailers, and Afresh is among several companies trying to enable this leapfrog movement. Seattle, Washington-based ShelfEngine offers a similar fresh food inventory management platform, as does a company called Crisp. Rising consumer demand for both fresh food and a more reliable supply chain (hello, panic shopping) mean we can expect a lot more software in this area in the near future.

For its part, Afresh is currently live in hundreds of stores, says Schwartz. He declined to name specific stores or chains, but said his company’s biggest partner does about $10 billion in sales every year. 

The company has raised a total of $32.8 million to date, with its most recent round being a Series A fundraise towards the end of 2020.

NASA Is Growing Chile Peppers In Space

Astronauts onboard the International Space Station are aiming to grow the first-ever peppers in space via the Plant Habitat-04 (PH-04) experiment. PH-04 will grow “Espanola Improved” New Mexico Hatch Green Chiles. These are a medium-heat chile peppers NASA says have been suitable for use in controlled growing environments.

The pepper seeds were planted in April of this year and sent to the International Space Station on SpaceX’s 22nd Commercial Refueling Services (CRS-22) mission. Astronauts will grow the plants for four months in the Space Station’s “advanced plant habitat” (APH), which contains more than 180 sensors and can regulate temperature, moisture levels, carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. NASA says the growth habitat is “mostly autonomous” and that it sends data from the sensors to scientists on the ground at Kennedy Space Center.

The PH-04 experiment is meant to help NASA in enabling long-duration deep-space exploration, for which adequate food supply is needed. Peppers are a good source of nutrients and could be used supplement astronauts’ packaged food, according to NASA. PH-04 will also monitor whether elements like texture and flavor change when the peppers are grown in space. NASA notes that the whole experiment may also be able to inform the processes for growing peppers via traditional outdoor agriculture as well as through indoor farming.

Another goal of the project is to create an indoor grow system that needs little input from the astronauts themselves, since they would not have the time to devote to growing plants that those of us on Earth would.

There’s a growing interest from multiple different countries to develop new novel concepts for feeding people in space. The PH-04 joins a growing list initiatives, including 3D-printed pizzas, tomatoes, and cell-based steaks, that have been researched or tested.