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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Foodtech

Wrap It Up: Innovation in Edible Solutions to Extend Food Lifespans (a Spoon Plus Report)

Suppliers, especially large warehouse distributors, have several strategies they currently use to extend the lifespan of produce. One is refrigeration. Produce can be stored in cold warehouses to slow down the ripening process and make it last longer. Another is to install vents in the warehouses to remove ethylene, the gas that causes fruit to ripen, from storage. Some warehouses even use gases like nitrogen and sulphur to counteract the effects of ethylene, thus keeping fruit preserved in an unripe state until they’re ready to ship to retailers. Some fruits, like lemons and apples, are also coated in an artificial wax to keep them from rotting.

All of these solutions have their drawbacks. Vents are expensive to install, using gases to regulate ethylene is not proven to be effective, and artificial wax is unappetizing. Regulating produce freshness at warehouses also does not help once that fruit or vegetable has left the supplier and is sitting on a retail shelf or in a consumer kitchen.

However, over the past several years, innovators have begun experimenting with new ways to extend the lifespan of fresh produce. These solutions are meant to be a more sustainable, healthy, and versatile alternative to current practices used in warehouses.

This report is available to subscribers of Spoon Plus, includes analysis of key players Apeel, Sufresca, Stixfresh, and Hazel Technologies, a look at opportunities in this fast-changing space, the impact of COVID and a look forward at what’s next.

New subscribers to Spoon Plus can use discount code NEWMEMBER to get 15% off an annual plan today. Go here to learn more. 

Karana Raises $1.7M to Develop ‘Pork’ Products From Jackfruit

Singapore-based Karana announced today it has closed a $1.7 million seed round to further develop its plant-based meat products, the first of which are derived from jackfruit. The round was led by Big Idea Ventures, Monde Nissin Corp CEO Henry Soesanto, and Germi8, along with angel investors Kevin Poon and Gerald Li.

Karana says it will use the funding to launch its pork product made from jackfruit in restaurants in Asia, and to further its research and development around jackfruit and other plants as meat substitutes. 

Jackfruit makes a good alternative ingredient for pork products because it can be cooked and shredded like the real thing. If prepared the right way, it can mimic the textures of pork (or in some cases chicken), which is a key element to get right when it comes to plant-based proteins. The plant is native to India and also grows in Southeast Asia, Mexico, and South America. 

Karana says it uses a proprietary “innovative mechanical technique” to process the fruit, while retaining its nutritional profile and other health benefits. In other words, Karana’s products aren’t as highly processed as, say Impossible’s “bleeding” burgers or Beyond’s patties.

Karana cofounder Blair Crichton made mention of that point to AgFunder today, saying, “There are plenty of consumers — myself included — that really like those other products on the market, but don’t want to eat a heavily processed burger or sausage every day.” Substitutes derived from jackfruit are one possible alternative.

Karana’s funding announcement lands in what’s been a very busy week for alternative proteins. Since Tuesday of this week, cell-based meat companies IntegriCulture and Shiok Meats announced a new partnership, Motif FoodWorks said it is doubling down on its quest to find the perfect alt-meat texture, and fake chicken company NUGGS raised $4.1 million. In the alt-dairy space, Perfect Day made its own funding announcement, the expansion of its Series C round to $300 million. Meanwhile, sales of plant-based meat in general have gone up since the start of the pandemic, thanks in no small part to meat shortage scares and panic shopping sprees.

Karana’s choice of plant-based pork as its first product is a wise bet. Pork is the most widely consumed meat in Asia, but between the aforementioned pandemic-induced problems with meat supply and calls from Asian governments to cut meat consumption, the time is ripe for plant-based alternatives.

Aquaponics Company Seed & Roe Rebrands as Upward Farms, Announces $15M in Fresh Funding

Seed & Roe, an indoor farming and aquaponics company, announced today it has rebranded as Upward Farms and plans to build a new headquarter farm in Brooklyn, NY to increase production of both leafy greens and fish. Today’s announcement also comes just as the company has closed a $15 million funding round led by Prime Movers Lab. The company has raised $20 million total to date.

The company, which was called Edenworks before it was Seed & Roe, said in today’s release that it plans to open its Brooklyn facility in 2020 and increase production by more than 20x its original facility (also located in Brooklyn). 

That production includes both leafy greens and fish — striped bass, specifically. The forthcoming facility will farm these fish, which it says will be available to those in the New York area by 2021. Keeping the entire operation something of a closed loop, the water produced by fish feeds (which is nutrient-enriched) then goes on to feed the plants in the facility’s greenery. 

Upward Farms provided this handy diagram of the new facility to explain its operations:

It’s approach to indoor farming is somewhat unique in that most companies aren’t yet combining indoor vertical farming with any other type of farming. Though there is plenty of activity currently in the vertical farming space, thanks in no small part to the pandemic surfacing the many insufficiencies of our current food supply chain. Also this week, Hong Kong-based Aspara launched its high-tech indoor farm for consumers in the U.S. Over in Singapore, the government has allocated more than $40 million (USD) to aid agtech and aquaculture startups grow more food locally. Finally, here in the U.S. South, AppHarvest is building a vertical farming powerhouse to feed the Appalachian region.

Because of its Brooklyn location, Upward Farms will service consumers in the New York area for now, including Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. The company plans to expand in the future, though a timeframe is not yet clear. 

Motif FoodWorks and University of Illinois Are on a Quest to Find the Perfect Texture for Plant-based Meat

Food ingredient innovator Motif FoodWorks announced today it has struck partnerships with two universities to further research the properties of plant-based foods and develop technologies to improve elements like texture. For the research, Motif will work with the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana.

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of Motif forming a partnership with the the University of Guelph to research plant-based fats in order to make them more like the real thing.

Fat is a key part of what makes meat taste good. And so is texture and mouthfeel. Achieving better versions of those latter two elements in plant-based meat is the driving motivation behind Motif’s partnerships with the University of Illinois. As we’ve written many, many times before, texture is one of the keys to making plant-based meat more appealing to mainstream consumers. 

In its press release today, Motif’s lead for food science, Stefan Baier, said that in order to get textures more precisely like those of actual meat, “we need to continue to evolve the way we approach food design” rather than relying on decades-old tools and technologies that might work for meat-meat but not so much for alt-meat.

Baier will lead the two-year-long project with UIC and UICU, working with the schools’ experts on advanced rheological techniques from the fields of mechanical and chemical engineering.

This isn’t the first time Motif has partnered with higher education to solve the texture riddle. In 2019, the company said it was working with the University of Queensland in Australia on improving texture of plant-based meats.

Motif’s quest to make plant-based meats replicate the properties of animal meat comes at a time when demand for plant-based meat is steadily on the rise. Many companies in the space are expanding in response. Impossible launched its direct-to-consumer site recently, and its chief rival Beyond has plans to launch a similar e-commerce store. And other companies are tackling the texture issue, too, from Redefine Meat‘s 3D-printed steaks to Ecovative’s mycelium scaffolding to Emergy’s fermented fungi steaks.

One thing Motif will need to consider in its research is just how closely consumers actually want their plant-based staples to replicate the real thing. Catherine Lamb, the Spoon’s former expert on all things plant-based meat, often said plant-based meat was too meaty. This nine-year-old concurs. But Catherine is a longtime vegetarian and the nine-year-old is, well, nine. Which is to say, adults who’ve been eating real meat for decades may prefer a more exact replication. At the moment there isn’t too much data out there on this subject, but it’s one Motif and others will most definitely need to tackle on the quest to make the perfect plant-based meat.

IntegriCulture and Shiok Meats Partner to Scale Up Production of Lab-Grown Shrimp

Cell-based meat companies Integriculture and Shiok Meats announced this week that they have officially entered into a collaboration to scale up production of the latter’s cell-based shrimp, according to Vegconomist.

For the partnership, Integriculture will provide its CultNet System, which allows other businesses to culture their own animal tissues. In this case, Shiok Meats will use the CultNet System to create shrimp cell cultures. Doing so would bring the overall cost of producing lab-grown shrimp down because the system doesn’t require animal serums, which are extremely expensive, not to mention controversial.

Dr. Sandhya Sriram, co-founder of Shiok Meats, told Vegconomist that at this point, most cell-ag companies are looking for alternatives to serum, as animal serums are “neither ethical nor sustainable.” 

IntegriCulture’s CultNet System lets cell-based meat produce bypass animal serums altogether. (This democratization of meat production is one of the reasons the company landed on our Food Tech 25 list for this year.)

Unfortunately, your average consumer won’t be able to taste this cell-based shrimp yet. The companies did not give a timeline for this cell-based shrimp, and cell-based meat in general is still some time away from landing in the consumer market. IntegriCulture has said it will launch its first product, a cell-based foie gras, in 2021. Shiok Meats did its first public taste testing, of its cell-based shrimp dumplings in the spring of 2019, but the company is still most likely three to five years out from commercializing anything.

Both companies recently raised money. Integriculture raised $7.4 million this past May. Shiok Meats raised $3 million in bridge funding at the end of June.

The cultured meat and cell-ag space overall has seen much activity of late in terms of both new funding and expanding production. Memphis Meats raised $161 million at the beginning of 2020, doubling global investment in cultured meat. BlueNalu announced in June it will expand its facilities to bring cell-based seafood to test markets. Both Turtle Tree Labs and BIOMILQ have raised money for their cultured human breastmilk. 

While we’re still a ways away from grabbing cell-based meat off our grocery store shelves (or growing it at home), the flurry of new developments and funding news in this space make clear that cell-based ag is less the stuff science fiction now and inching closer to reality.

Aspara’s High-Tech At-Home Farm Launches in the U.S.

Hong Kong-based Aspara, which makes high-tech, tabletop-sized farming units for homes, is now shipping devices across the U.S. through retailers like Home Depot, Wayfair, and via its own website.

The Spoon flagged Aspara back in January as a company to watch in the up-and-coming at-home farming space because of the device’s small size, lowish price point, and approach to hydroponics. At the time, the company was selling its system, which can fit easily on a countertop, to customers in Hong Kong and in very, very limited quantities via Amazon to other parts of the world.

This official U.S. launch makes the device available to all U.S. consumers. Speaking on the phone today, Rob Alexander, the Owner of Conducted Sales, the sales agent for Aspara in North American markets, said that Aspara has another eight retailers in the works, though he couldn’t at this point use specific names. 

High-tech, hydroponic farms have historically been the territory of industrial-scale indoor farming companies — the AeroFarms and Plentys of the world. But following this past January’s CES show, both major appliance makers like LG and Miele along with smaller startups began to heavily publicize a new kind of indoor farm, one created for the at-home consumer. These devices are typically quite small and meant to feed a single household, rather than supply a grocery retailer. 

Alexander said Aspara’s homegrown system differs from others on the market in the way it tackles the hydroponic element of the farming. It uses what he calls an “ebb and flow” design, where water for the plant roots is constantly replenished from the side unit (see image above), making the water supply easier to refill than many at-home farms. Aspara’s also has sensors that determine nutrient levels in the water, the current level of humidity in the air, and whether a plant is getting too much light. An accompanying app notifies the user when any of these elements need attention.

“It’s trying to give you feedback to create the optimum growing environment,” Alexander said.

Another differentiation: the device is repairable. While that might first sound like a weird selling point (no one wants to buy tech that might break), it actually speaks to how seriously Aspara is pursuing the idea of making its high-tech grow system the kind of kitchen appliance that’s on par with a dishwasher or refrigerator. You don’t throw out a dishwater the second something goes wrong. In the same way, Aspara users can replace parts like sensors and light canopies, rather than having to go out and buy a whole new farm.

The company’s approach recently won them the Green Product Audience Award. 

Price-wise, Aspara is on the lower end of the at-home farming spectrum. The device goes for $349 right now at Home Depot online.

Of course these days you can’t have a conversation about at-home food production without brining COVID-19 up. Since Apsara wasn’t available to North Americans at the height of shelter-in-place mandates, the company wasn’t measuring demand for its product in that region. However, Alexander told me they did see a spike in Hong Kong, where the device has been available for some time. 

My guess is that with the product available Stateside, that demand will surface quickly. Other at-home farming systems have seen huge jumps in demand recently as the pandemic, panic-buying sprees, and other factors have made many consumers question their total reliance on the traditional food supply chain.

Next up, Aspara wants to do a widespread launch in Canada, and also broaden the types of plants its system can grow to include other types of plants, including fruits and vegetables. 

Singapore to Allocate $40M to Help Agtech and Aquaculture Startups Grow More Local Food

Singapore agtech is about to get an investment shot in arm, one that could give the whole world a clearer vision of alternative farming’s role in our future food system. Enterprise Singapore, the government agency committed to startups, said last week it will invest roughly $40 million USD into agtech and aquaculture companies, according to AgFunder News. 

Koh Poh Koon, Singapore’s senior minister for trade and industry, said during the announcement that “Using agritech can help to make [Singapore’s] food supplies more resilient by building a bigger margin of local food capacity.”

Sinapore relies on imports for about 90 percent of its food. As the pandemic has shown us, that reliance on external sources can be problematic if the supply chain gets disrupted. The city-state already has one initiative in place to address this, the “30 by 30” program, which aims to have 30 percent of Singapore’s food produced domestically by 2030. 

The newly announced funding will go towards agtech and aquaculture startups that apply through the Singapore government’s Business Grants Portal. 

Singapore has become something of a hotbed in the last couple years for food tech, especially when it comes to alternative proteins and alternative farming methods. Last year, the city-state’s National Research Foundation allocated $535 million (USD) to increase R&D efforts in cell therapy manufacturing, digital technology, and sustainable urban food production. Food-focused accelerators like GROW’s Singapore Food Bowl program are also emerging as a resource for startups. Meanwhile, individual companies are also developing ways to make Singaporean food more local, from SinGrow’s proprietary strawberries, to Turtle Tree Labs’ cultured human breastmilk.

Those uses of alternative farming and food production could be a clue for the rest of the world about how technologies like high-tech farming systems, post-harvest technology, and raising alternative protein sources fit into the broader picture of the future food system. Many of these technologies are nascent and have yet to prove themselves economically scalable. If Singapore can use them to meet its “30 by 30” goal and beyond, it could provide a blueprint for the rest of the world as the population increases and demand for local food production grows.

Up Next for the Astronaut’s Diet: Space Peppers

Two things we love here at The Spoon: space food and indoor farming tech. So I got pretty excited to come across a HoritDaily article today about  Jacob Torres, who works at the Space Crop Production Lab at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and is currently researching how to grow chile peppers in space. 

The idea is to eventually supply astronauts that spend a lot of time in deep space with fresher foods to accompany their packaged items. Torres is starting with peppers, which can add more important vitamins to astronauts’ diets, not to mention bring some much-needed flavor to the food.

For those peppers, Torres uses the Española Improved pepper, which performs especially well in a space environment compared to other breeds. Conducting research inside the NASA-developed Plant Growth Habitat, he is also experimenting with different light “recipes” and finding a solution to watering plants in an environment without gravity. “Existing hydroponic systems are largely inoperable in microgravity,” he told HoritDaily.

He finally settled on the Passive Porous Tube Nutrient Delivery System (PPTNDS), which forces water upwards to water the plants and, he said, could eventually be used on earth for those hard-to-reach upper levels of vertical farms that growers can’t get to as often.

An underlying goal of the project is to create an indoor grow system that needs little input from the astronauts themselves, who wouldn’t have the kind of time to devote to plant cultivation that other indoor growers have.

But back to space. One of the reasons we’re seeing an uptick in food projects beyond planet Earth is what Spoon Publisher Michael Wolf calls “the renewed interest in space travel.” NASA wants to put people on the moon again, and there’s of course interest in Mars. As Mike says, “Whether it’s the actual habitation of Mars or some other place in the galaxy, simply packing up freeze dried food won’t cut it.” And from Japan’s Space Food X initiative to space-friendly bake ovens to tomatoes, there’s a ton of companies and projects out there now figuring out how to feed people in space. Torres’ ongoing research is certainly bringing some new spice to this mix.

If you’re into space food, join us for our free live virtual event on Tuesday June 30th where we’ll talk with the inventors of the Zero G Space Oven.

AppHarvest Partners With the Dutch Government to Make Kentucky an Indoor Farming Powerhouse

Agtech startup AppHarvest this week announced a partnership with the Dutch government, the state of Kentucky, and several other organizations including universities to turn Appalachia into an “ag-tech epicenter,” according to the Louisville Courier Journal. 

The partnership comes just as AppHarvest is building out its massive 2.76-million-square foot indoor farming facility in Morehead, KY that’s scheduled to open in Fall 2020. That facility will grow 45 million pounds of fresh produce each year, with an emphasis on tomatoes. The company says it expects to eventually deliver produce to not just grocery stores in Appalachia but also those in surrounding states that are within a day’s drive.

The AppHarvest facility will use hydroponics to vertically grow produce inside high-tech greenhouses. In addition to supplying more local produce to surrounding regions (as opposed from shipping that produce in from Canada or Mexico), the new facility will also create about 285 jobs encompassing everything from “head growers” all the way down to entry-level positions. The addition of those jobs is especially important to Appalachia — an area of the U.S. ravaged by persistent poverty. 

The goal of the new partnership is to create even more jobs in addition to getting more locally grown food into surrounding regions. The agreement, signed yesterday by the different parties involved, will create a series of research programs as well as a “center of excellence” for agtech innovation. 

Why The Netherlands? According to the Courier Journal, that country has spent decades building its own sustainable food supply chain through a network of more than 10,000 high-tech green houses. “The year-round, temperature-controlled farms have made the Netherlands the world’s second largest agricultural exporter and a leading ag innovator,” AppHarvest founder Jonathan Webb said at a press call cited by the Courier Journal.

The new partnership also includes participation from two higher education institutions in The Netherlands as well as Morehead State University, Berea College and Eastern Kentucky University, University of Kentucky and University of Pikeville. 

AppHarvest closed an $11 million funding round in January, bringing the company’s total funding to $120 million.

No Whey! A Rundown of Alternative Cheese Startups

With summertime here, vegans across the country will be grilling up sizzling Beyond and Impossible burgers . While the burgers themselves may be delicious, there is still a deficit when it comes to non animal-based cheese they want to melt on there.

But the days of lackluster vegan cheese will soon be a thing of the past, as there are a number of startups working on non-dairy cheese — and raising millions to do so. Here’s a list of companies rising up to the cheese challenge:

  • Heartbest is a Mexican startup that recently raised $2 million for its plant-based cheese that uses ingredients like amaranth, quinoa and peas.
  • GOOD PLANeT Foods makes plant-based cheese from coconut oil, potato starch and natural flavorings and is widely available at retail locations like Walmart, Costco and Whole Foods . The company raised $12 million last month to expand production.
  • Grounded Foods uses cauliflower to create cheeses like camembert guyere and roquefort, and is part of the Big Ideas Ventures alternative protein accelerator.
  • Noquo Foods has ditched traditional plant-based ingredients for its product and instead relies on a “stable matrix” of legumes to better replicate cheese. The company raised $3.6 million at the beginning of this year.
  • Legendairy Foods ferments microbes in a process similar to creating insulin and has already created prototypes for mozzarella and ricotta. The German company raised $4.7 million in funding last year.
  • New Culture is also creating mozzarella cheese in the lab, using “recombinant protein technology” that also uses genetically modified microbes to make milk protein. It raised $3.5 million last year.
  • Perfect Day uses fermentation of microbes to recreate cream cheese and feta in the lab and has raised $201 million in funding so far.

Though most of these startups won’t save vegan bbqs this summer, saying (non-animal) cheese, please, is something they’ll definitely be able to do in the not too distant future.

Your Next Alt-Milk Latte Could Be Made With Barley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The LIVEKINDLY co. Acquires Swedish Plant-Based Meat Brand Oumph!

Alt-protein collective the LIVEKINDLY co. announced this week it has acquired Oumph!, a plant-based brand from Sweden. Oumph! is one of several different brands now in the LIVEKINDLY co portfolio, and the deal furthers the collective’s mission to “make plant-based eating the new normal,” according to a press release. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The LIVEKINDLY co. is itself a relatively new venture, formed in March of this year after Foods United bought vegan media company LIVEKINDLY and rebranded as LIVEKINDLY co. As my former colleague Catherine Lamb wrote at the time, the LIVEKINDLY co. is the only company that owns and operates “the entire value chain of production” when it comes to plant-based protein.

Besides this new acquisition of Oumph!, the LIVEKINDLY co. also holds a majority stake in South Africa-based Fry Family Food Co. and German startup LikeMeat, and has an equity stake in PURIS Holding, a maker of plant-based ingredients like pea protein. 

Oumph!, meanwhile, was founded in 2015 and currently serves the Nordic countries, the U.K., and The Netherlands. Its products, which include “meat” products made from SOYA protein concentration, are sold at both restaurants and grocery retailers across those countries. The brand will launch in other global markets later this year, though this week’s press release didn’t specify which ones.

Regardless, it’s an apt time to be expanding a plant-based protein brand. The market for plant-based food is currently worth $5 billion, and sales of plant-based food grew 11.4 percent in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic has also played a role in this growth. Meat shortage scares and general wariness about where our food comes from has made more consumers open to the idea of buying and eating plant-based meat. 

That’s exactly the audience the LIVEKINDLY co. and Oumph! aim to sway: a wider group of flexitarians trying plant-based meat for a variety of reasons, be they ethical, sustainable, or health related.