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Foodtech

April 14, 2021

Yes, Mealworms Are Gross. Here’s Why They Matter

This is the web version of our weekly Spoon newsletter. Subscribe now to get the latest food tech news delivered direct to your inbox.

Another step was made this week towards edible insects as a source of protein for humans. Question is, Will bugs ever become an ordinary part of the ordinary American’s diet?

This is not a new question. For years, the food industry, the media, and even the United Nations have urged cultures not historically acclimated to bugs to consider insects like mealworms and grasshoppers as more sustainable forms of protein. Mealworms, for example, are high in protein and require less land to produce than traditional meat sources like cows or chicken.  

And speaking of mealworms, this week, insect protein startup Ÿnsect announced it had acquired Dutch agtech company Protifarm, which raises mealworms for human food consumption. A press release from Ÿnsect noted that the deal will let the company speed up its manufacturing process for foods geared towards humans, providing yet another source of alternative protein for the planet. The news comes a few months after the European Food Safety Authority granted its approval of mealworms for human consumption. Ÿnsect also plans to file for GRAS (generally recognized as safe) status in the U.S.

Additionally, France-based Ÿnsect will be able to expand internationally with the integration of Protifarm, which has food customers in Germany, the Netherlands, England, Denmark, and Belgium. In fact, the acquisition makes Ÿnsect the world’s largest producer of insect food and animal feed, and bumps its portfolio of patents to nearly 300.

Were we talking about anything other than mealworms for human consumption, all the above points would suggest mainstream success is a likelihood if not a foregone conclusion.

But we are, in fact, talking about bugs, and any hope of eliminating (or lessening) the “ick” factor involved is going to require a seismic change in perception for many consumers. Roughly 2 billion people around the world eat insects on the regular, but they don’t typically live in the countries Ÿnsect is eyeing for expansion, which includes those listed above as well as the United States.

One way to potentially enable a perception change is to make insects an ingredient, such as a powder, that gets added to other foods, rather than a standalone item. Consumers might be more likely to buy a pasta made with mealworm powder than, say, dried mealworms in a vacuum-sealed bag for snacking.

Ÿnsect, for example, has a Buffalo mealworm ingredient that is part of biscuits, pastas, sport nutrition bars, and meat substitute products. The company also told AgFunder this week that it is targeting athletes first, who might be attracted to the health benefits of mealworm protein. Hardcore environmentalists are another group that could potentially be swayed, particularly those that want alternative sources of protein but are skeptical about the nutrition profile of the current pack of plant-based meats on offer. Making insects part of an experience, say, at a theme park, is also another avenue in. After all, Doritos were invented from trash at Disneyland, and so who’s to say cookies made with cricket powder wouldn’t be a hit in Fantasyland? 

Insects becoming a staple of the average Western household, however, still feels like a long shot. At the very least, it would take some serious marketing genius to even start to change mainstream consumers’ perceptions around eating bugs, to say nothing of the research and development that would have to go into creating products that taste as good or better than traditional protein sources. And there will always be those consumers that turn their noses up at the stuff on principle.

These issues aren’t actually unique to mealworms and other insects. In fact, as I write this, cultured meat is dealing with its own consumer perception challenges, albeit on a different scale, as well as hurdles around creating a product that tastes as good as traditional protein. 

All of which is to say, mealworms, crickets, and the like may yet have their moment. It will just probably look a whole lot different than what most of us still imagine when we hear the phrase “edible insect.”

Alt-Protein News From the Week

Revo Foods Raises €1.5M to Advance its 3D-Printed Alternative Salmon – The company will use the funding to accelerate its 3D food printing process, as well as expand its team.

Cultured Decadence Raises $1.6M to Make Lobster in a Lab – The Wisconsin-based cell ag company will use to the new funds to create what it says will be the first cell-cultured lobster meat in North America

Beyond Meat Boosts European Retail Presence – The plant-based meat giant said it is bolstering its presence at retail stores across Europe this spring, including those in Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

April 14, 2021

Square Roots Unveils Its Third Modular Indoor Farm, Built in Just 3 Months

Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) company Square Roots today unveiled its newest indoor farm. The facility is located in Grand Rapids, Michigan and growing micro-greens to serve grocery stores, e-commerce platforms, and restaurants in the Great Lakes region. Produce will be available “in the coming weeks,” according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Square Roots broke ground on the farm in December of 2020 and planted the first seeds just three months later, in March of this year. The company’s ability to move this quickly can be largely attributed to the types of farms it builds, which company cofounder and CEO Tobias Peggs calls “prefabricated modular farms.” For Square Roots and others, these are typically built inside of upcycled shipping containers (though Peggs suggested over a call this week that the setup could live in any properly insulated space, not just a container). As the word “modular” suggests, farming units can be added or subtracted based on the needs of the individual farm.

The aim he and company cofounder Kimball Musk share is to be able to build a farm quickly in response to demand for local produce in a given area. The new farm in Michigan, for example, is partly in response to the increase in demand for local produce across the Midwest during the Covid-19 pandemic. And it doesn’t get much more local than placing the farm in the same zip code as its customers, as Peggs said is the case here. 

The Michigan farm also shares a location with U.S. food distributor Gordon Food Service, with whom Square Roots has an ongoing partnership. The companies first joined forces in 2019 and plan to build more of these these co-located farms across the country.

One bonus of the prefabricated modular model versus something like a large plant factory (a la Plenty or AeroFarms) is that the size of the farm can be scaled up or down to meet demand relatively quickly by adding or subtracting containers. Each container is its own grow environment, with temperature and lighting adjusted to meet the needs of a specific crop.   

All containers are cloud-connected and run by a combination of human growers and Square Roots in-house software called The Square Roots Farmer Toolbelt. The latter guides farmers through day-to-day activities and collects data that can then be analyzed to improve yield, taste, and texture in addition to growing methods.

As far as competition goes, Berlin, Germany-based InFarm is probably the most similar operation to Square Roots right now. However, InFarm’s modular concept was only announced this year, and at last check is only slated for one U.S. location right now.

For now, the new farm is growing microgreens and herbs, as is the case with other Square Roots farms. Peggs said during our talk that growing other produce types, whether it be strawberries or root vegetables, is less a question of capability these days and one that’s more about economics. At the risk of oversimplifying the matter, is costs more money to grow denser vegetables, like a turnip, compared to something like basil.

That said, Square Roots mentioned in today’s press release that it has grown over 200 varieties of produce so far, including some of those denser varieties like root vegetables. 

April 13, 2021

Finistere Ventures Launches New Agrifood Fund in New Zealand

Food tech-focused firm Finistere Ventures announced today the launch of its Finistere Aotearoa Fund done in partnership with New Zealand Growth Capital Partners. The $40 million NZD (~$28.1 million USD) fund will support early-stage companies developing technologies for agriculture, alternative protein, supply chain, and other areas of food tech.

Finistere is no stranger to food tech, having invested in the past in CropX, Memphis Meats, Plenty, and several other well-known innovators in the food world. The goal of the Aotearoa Fund, besides supporting more such innovation, is to invest in specifically New Zealand startups to get them the help they need to make an impact worldwide. 

“While more than $46B has been invested in agrifood tech over the last decade – a trend likely to increase with the growing focus on sustainability – New Zealand hasn’t had the connected capital players necessary to help our companies take full advantage of this trend,” said Dean Tilyard, founder and director of Sprout who will now lead the new fund. “Our innovation cluster here is as good as anything in the Netherlands or Israel, but has been less well known. That is changing.”

Finistere, of course, already has offices in New Zealand. The new fund’s operations will be based in Palmerston North at R&D incubation center The Factory, which Finistere already has a longstanding relationship with. The fund will focus on a number of areas within food tech, including crop protection technologies, nutrient management, alternative proteins, food delivery, and supply chain advances. 

The launch comes the same week another fund, PeakBridge FoodSparks, launched in Europe with a focus on early-stage agricultural and food tech startups in that region. Both funds underscore the recent growth of the food tech sector, which nabbed more than $4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2020, according to Pitchbook data.  

Finistere hasn’t yet said how many companies it is looking to invest in with the fund, but did note that over the next year, it plans to garner more investment from partners including Rabobank, RIV Capital, and Yamaha. 

April 13, 2021

Hazel Technologies Raises $70M in Series C Funding to Fight Food Waste

Hazel Technologies announced today it has raised $70 million in Series C funding. The round was co-led by the Pontifax Global Food and Agriculture Technology Fund and Temasek. S2G Ventures, Pangea Ventures, Rhapsody Venture Partners, Asahi Kasai Ventures, Jordan Park Group, and the Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Foundation also participated. Including the Series C round, Hazel has raised $87 million to date, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Hazel is among those companies using technology to extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables and in doing so cut down on food waste. Its packaging insert, called a sachet, gets placed in bulk boxes of produce after harvest. The sachet emits 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP) gas to inhibit ethylene, which plants produce they age. Different crops have different respiration rates and production levels of ethylene, so there are different sachets for different produce types. Currently, Hazel has sachets for 14 different produce types, including avocados, mangos, plums, pears, and cantaloupe. In December of 2020, the company announced Hazel Root, designed to slow the growth of sprouts in potatoes and other root vegetables.  

The company said that in 2021, its products will be used with “over 6.3 billion pounds” of fresh produce, preventing more than 500 million pounds of food from going to the landfill. 

In 2019, 35 percent of all food in the United States went unsold or uneaten, according to the most recent numbers from nonprofit ReFed. Both national and international goals aim to cut food waste in half by 2030. To do that, waste will have to be reduced at every step of the supply chain, from the farm itself all the way down refrigerators inside the average person’s home.

Hazel’s technology currently aims to prevent loss and waste earlier in the supply chain, just after harvest. Apeel is the other notable competitor here, though it has a completely different approach to extending the lifespan of produce that involves coating individual pieces of produce with a plant-based protection.

Hazel hinted that funds from the Series C round could go towards commercializing a solution meant for further down the food supply chain, at consumer-facing levels like retail and restaurants. 

April 12, 2021

Cultured Decadence Raises $1.6M to Make Lobster in a Lab

Wisconsin-based cellular agriculture company Cultured Decadence announced today it has raised $1.6 million in an oversubscribed round of pre-seed funding. Investors include Bluestein Ventures, Joyance Partners, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, gener8tor, GlassWall Syndicate, Bascom Ventures, and China-based Dao Foods. The company also received non-dilutive funding from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation administered by the Center for Technology Commercialization (CTC). 

Cultured Decadence will use to the new funds to create what it says will be the first cell-cultured lobster meat in North America. This financing follows work by Cultured Decadence in developing novel cell lines and reducing the cost of its cell-culture media. Cell-culture media is typically one of the key elements driving up the cost of a cultured meat product, so any company making progress on this step is good news for the whole industry.

Lobster may be the first dish Cultured Decadence is recreating in a lab, but the company said its technology can be applied across a range of seafood analogues, including carp, shrimp, and scallops. The goal is to help decrease the planet’s reliance on traditional seafood. Overfishing, ocean pollution, and human rights abuses are just a few of the issues plaguing the industry, and they were around long before “Seaspiracy” hit Netflix.  

The promise of cell-cultured seafood is that it doesn’t require the actual ocean to produce — a point underscored by Cultured Decadence’s Wisconsin headquarters, which is thousands of miles away from any major body of water. 

The company joins Singapore-based Shiok Meats in the quest to provide more sustainable lobster meat to consumers. Shiok unveiled its lobster meat to the world for the first time at an invite-only taste-testing event in 2020.

Besides today’s, other recent fundraises in the cultured seafood space include Avant Meats’ $3.1 million round, also in December 2020, and BlueNalu’s $60 million fundraise in January 2021. While all of these companies focus on different products and specific processes, they share the end goal of advancing the cultured seafood industry, which is still an extremely nascent one.

Cultured Decadence said it would use the new funds to continue developing its lobster prototype and eventually launch commercially. No specific timeframe was given. 

April 9, 2021

Report: Impossible Foods Planning to Go Public

Impossible Foods, best known for its plant-based meat analogues, is preparing for a public listing, according to sources that spoke for an exclusive report by Reuters. The public listing could value Impossible at more than $10 billion.

Those sources note that the company is exploring going public via either an initial public offering (IPO) “in the next 12 months” or through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC). 

SPACs, also called blank-check companies, are a route to going public that involves less regulatory scrutiny than a traditional IPO. Going public via SPAC is a current “hot trend” on Wall Street, and an option becoming increasingly popular in the food world. AppHarvest made its public debut in February via SPAC, and AeroFarms, which just announced its plans to do the same.

Reuters’ sources also warned that Impossible’s public debut is subject to market conditions, and the company may change course and instead decide to do another round of private fundraising. To date, the company has raised $1.4 billion in funding, including a $200 million fundraise from August of last year. 

Its chief rival, Beyond Meat, went public back in May 2019, becoming the first-ever plant-based meat maker to do so. Both companies are in high demand right now, as sales of plant-based proteins totaled $7 billion in 2020, with meat analogues being the leading category. 

News of a potential public debut for Impossible comes the same week the company released its first ever national TV ad campaign, which is in part aimed at converting traditional meat eaters into devotees of Impossible’s plant-based wares. 

The company has in the last 12 months opened a direct-to-consumer e-commerce store, increased its geographic reach to more than 20,000 locations, and slashed its prices, putting products a little more on par with traditional meat.

April 8, 2021

Solar Foods Receives €10M to Scale Production of its Protein Made Out of Air

Solar Foods, which literally makes protein out of air, announced today that it has received €10 million (~$11.98 million USD) in funding from the The Finnish Climate Fund. The subordinated load will go towards revving up commercial-scale production of the company’s product, Solein. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Solar Foods to €35 million (~$41.6 million USD).

Based in Finland, Solar Foods uses a combination of captured carbon dioxide, bacteria and electricity to create Solein, which can make multiple food items including alternative proteins. A big promise of Solein’s is its narrower impact on the planet than traditional animal agriculture or even plant-based protein. It doesn’t require land or water, and is not dependent on weather. According to today’s press announcement, Solar Foods said that Solein creates roughly one percent of the greenhouse gas emissions of meat protein and 20 percent of those from plant protein production.

The technology was borne out of research from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and LUT University of Finland. Solein is now in the commercialization stage, and the new funding will be used to build a pilot production facility. The new facility will include a food bar and is scheduled to start operations in early 2023.

The nothingness of air is really turning into something in the alternative protein space. In addition to Solar Foods, the aptly named Air Protein does much the same thing and recently raised $32 million. Deep Branch calls itself a carbon dioxide recycling company because it turns CO2 into protein for animal feed, and recently raised nearly $10 million. And Swedish researchers at RISE have developed technology to turn air into fat.

For more on this nascent science and protein sector, check out our The Spoon Plus Insider Guide to Air Protein.

April 7, 2021

Gathered Foods, Maker of Good Catch Secures $26.35M for Plant-Based Seafood

Gathered Foods, which makes the Good Catch brand of plant-based seafood, announced today that it has secured $26.35 million in a B-2 bridge funding round from investors including Louis Dreyfus Company, Unovis Asset Management and Big Idea Ventures.

This new financing follows the $36.8 million Series B round the company raised in January 2020. With the B-2 round, Gathered Foods has raised more than $75 million to date.

The Good Catch brand currently offers lines of plant-based fish products, including tuna, frozen fish burgers, fish cakes and crab cakes. Good Catch has a distribution partnership with Bumble Bee Foods and its products are currently available in the U.S. and Canada as well as in various European countries.

While plant-based burgers from the likes of Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat grab most of the headlines, we’re starting to see more plant-based seafood products enter the marketplace. Revo Foods (formerly Legendary Vish) is launching plant-based salmon strips and salmon spread, and is developing a 3D-printed plant-based salmon filet. Tyson-backed New Wave Foods launched a plant-based shrimp product last month. And Ocean Hugger is back, making its plant-based eel and tuna after ceasing operations because of the pandemic.

All of this activity is buoyed by the fact that the entire plant-based food sector has seen rapid sales growth over the past couple of years. According to recent data from the Good Food Institute and the Plant-Based Food Association, retail sales of plant-based foods hit $7 billion in 2020, growing 27 percent over the past year, nearly two times faster than total U.S. retail food sales.

In its funding announcement today, Gathered Foods said it will use the new funding to ramp up product innovation, increase the number of products it offers and fuel international retail expansion.

April 7, 2021

Where’s the (Plant-Based) Beef? Impossible Foods TV Ads Target Meat Eaters

This is the web version of our weekly Future Food newsletter. Subscribe today to get all the alternative protein news delivered direct to your inbox.

For those old enough, the phrase “Where’s the beef?” Is indelibly burned into our conscious. That early 80s Wendy’s TV ad had a trio of elderly ladies complaining about a diminutive burger patty on a comically large bun.

I’m not sure that Impossible Foods’ new (and first) national TV ad campaign will become part of the cultural zeitgeist like Wendy’s ad became. But I do know that the company’s ads are trying to capture the mind (and dollars) of full-on meat eaters.

Impossible isn’t shy about its meat conversion ambitions. The spots have not-so-subtle titles like “We Love Meat” and “Meat Places.” Famed ad agency Wieden+Kennedy produced the ads, which feature sumptuous imagery of Impossible’s plant-based burgers sizzling on a grill, melted cheese cascading around the edges, piled high on a golden bun. The voice, which kinda sounds like Sam Elliot but might be Scott Glenn, is done with the same slow, intentional, salt-of-the-earth drawl as beef commercials. But if you muted the audio and just watched the ads, you would honestly think you were seeing a regular burger joint grilling up traditional beef.

Yes We Do

The timing certainly seems right for Impossible to, uhhh, beef up its marketing with a big, national TV campaign. According to data released this week from SPINS and the Good Food Institute, sales of plant-based meat hit $1.4 billion dollars in 2020, growing 45 percent over 2019. So interest in and money spent on plant-based meat is at an all-time high. (Even friend of The Spoon, WIRED writer, and longtime Impossible holdout, Joe Ray recently succumbed to Impossible’s plant-based siren call.)

Part of the reason for that sales growth is that Impossible cranked up its retail machine last year as we were all stuck at home cooking more. Impossible says its products are now available in 20,000 grocery stores nationwide, which also means people swayed by its TV spots can take action and buy it at their local store. It also helps that Impossible has been cutting the price of their burger to bring it closer to that of animal meat.

And last but not least, Impossible’s ad blitz comes after a year of back-and-forth news announcements with rival Beyond Meat that saw both companies expanding at retail, launching new products and direct to consumer sales channels. A big flashy national TV campaign could give Impossible an edge — especially since summer grilling season is almost here and this summer we can actually invite (vaccinated) people over to our backyards.

The only question now is whether Impossible’s ads will sway its target audience. Anecdotally speaking, beef eaters I know are a tough crowd to win over with plant-based alternatives. There is still a mindset of “if I’m going to have a burger, I’m going to have a burger.” But who knows, maybe seeing the Impossible TV spots will have a whole new segment of people asking, “Who needs the beef?”

Image via GFI

More Headlines

GFI: Plant-Based Retail Sales Reach $7B in the U.S. -- Dairy alternatives are still tops, but sales of plant-based ground products doubled.

Netherlands-Based Schouten Launches Plant-Based Beef and Chicken -- Schouten has been producing meat alternatives using plant-based ingredients since 1990.

MicroSalt Reformulates Salt So You Use Less of It -- MicroSalt affixes nano-sized salt crystals to maltodextrin. The result is the same flavor using half the salt.

Welldone Aims to Reach Price Parity With Meat in Russia -- Welldone uses an extrusion process to craft its alternative burger patties, cutlets, and minced meat. Each of the products are made from a combination of soy, coconut oil, and cellulose.

April 7, 2021

Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick on What It Will Take to Normalize the Concept of Cultured Meat

Will we ever reach a day when fast food restaurant serve nothing but plant-based or cultured meat? Many hope so, including Josh Tetrick, founder and CEO of Eat Just. But Tetrick’s ambitions for alternative protein stretch far beyond the QSR sector.

As of this writing, Eat Just is selling its cultured meat product at a restaurant in Singapore (where it got regulatory approval late last year). Stateside, the company has sold enough of its plant-based egg product to equal 100 million chicken eggs, and has been rapidly expanding throughout the restaurant industry.

As to wether we’ll ever see a day where the plant-based restarant is the norm, there are a lot of steps needed to get there. Tetrick and I chatted recently about these along with many other topics on the alt-protein front. Always a wealth of information when it comes to this subject, Tetrick explains what exactly it will take for cultured meat to reach parity with traditional meat, how experience matters when introducing it to consumers, and why he hops we reach a day when cultured meat becomes boring.

You can listen to the interview read the transcript of our conversation below. Note that the transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Jenn Marston: You’ve had a few different announcements in the last few months around JUST getting into more restaurants. Do you ever see a point where we’re going to have restaurants, and I mean, big restaurants, McDonald’s, or, you know, Starbucks or something, only offering alternative proteins on their menus?

Josh Tetrick: I think that one, if we don’t get to that point — similarly if we don’t get to a point where every car dealership only sells an electric car — that our planet will not be in a good state 30 years, 50 years, 100 years from now. So before I tell you what I think it should happen, I’ll say I think it’s a necessity that it does happen, given the urgency that we have around oceans, rain forests or [the danger of] another zoonotic disease outbreak. 

I don’t think it will only be plant based. I see a world in which restaurants remove conventional meat from their menu. So they remove fried chicken, they remove hamburgers, they remove steaks or remove fish, they replace it with cultivated cultured meat. And some restaurants end up having plant based on the menu. That’s what the restaurant menu in the next 10, 20, 30 years will look like. I don’t think there’ll be a need for conventional meats. 

When you have actual meat cultivated, it doesn’t require slaughtering animals. So we’ve done a lot of really important research around this particular topic. [We did a lot of work] in Singapore, looking at restaurant operators and surveys and I’ll give you one finding from that: About 80 percent of restaurants said that they would put cultivated cultured meat on their menu. And about 70 percent of people said that if [cultured meat] meets the tastes and the cost demands, there would be no reason to have conventional meat on the menu at all. So I think that’s what you’ll see. And I think there will always be people that want plant. My girlfriend Shelley is a good example. I gave her some my chicken and she almost spit it out. She said, ‘I don’t want something that tastes like an animal.’ And I think there’ll be a lot of people like that. And that’s okay.

Jenn Marston: I definitely know some people who, if it tastes too much like the real thing, they don’t want anything to do with it. So that’s definitely a good point.

Josh Tetrick: I think it was a combination of [the product] literally being an animal, not a plant. It tastes very much like an animal. But it literally being an animal, combined with it tasting just like an animal was too much for her to take.

Jenn Marston: On the subject of cultured meat, there have been a ton of developments since we last spoke, including Eat Just serving customers in Singapore.

Josh Tetrick: You know, we’ve served almost 300 people, but 80 percent of the people said they feel good about eating it, about 70 percent of the people who paid for it say they’d be open to substituting [cultured meat] for not only conventional meat, but even plant based. So we’re going to be expanding to more restaurants and building a larger manufacturing facility in Singapore to make sure that we’re able to meet all the [demand].

Jenn Marston: Why did you choose Singapore? Was it just that Singapore was most realistic to get regulatory approval first? Or is there something about that specific market you were interested in? 

Josh Tetrick: There’s a few reasons. Their regulatory approach is often very evidence-based. The more science- and evidence-based you are, the less politics are involved. Second reason is that Singapore is a global melting pot. You have people from all over the world there. So when you’re wanting to learn how consumers think about this, why they like it, why they don’t like it, what is causing them to hesitate, you get lots of different cultures. Within those 300 people, we got people from all over the world, young, old everywhere in between. That’s another important reason. And then the third reason is, you know, more people consume meat in Asia than anywhere else in the world. So that was, that was another important reason why we chose Singapore.

Jenn Marston: Is it is the plan that get into more restaurants next? 

Josh Tetrick: It is.

Jenn Marston: It seems like there is a lot of hype happening right now around cultured meat. And it seems like a lot of folks are very confident that cultured meat is gonna just explode very, very quickly. What do you think of some of these comments about it’s going to reach price parity quickly, it’s going to scale up very quickly. 

Josh Tetrick: Well, there are a lot of factors involved. So I guess I’ll just start with the things that I think are certain, then I’ll go to things that are higher and lower probabilities. 

What is certain is that cultured meat will eventually get to the price and then below the price of conventional animal protein. I do feel certain about that. 

The next [issue] is when we’ll get there [to parity] — a year or five or 15 years. This is where there is not 100 percent probability. But I would say more likely than not, that in the next 10 years, this production process will get below the cost of chicken. Now, in order for that to happen, other things need to happen. And those other things include more countries allowing for the sale of [cultured meat]. If you can only sell in Singapore, your market is restricted to the million plus people on the island. You’re not going to be producing tens of billions of pounds, which is what is ultimately required to get to the kind of efficiencies necessary to get below the cost of chicken. 

And then the third thing has to do with where we are in the US. I can’t tell you whether we are going to get regulatory approval this year or not, or whether [regulators are] going to approve it ’22. I think it’s more likely than not that we’ll see clearance sometime in the next two years. I hope it’s this year — we’re going to be ready if it is. But it’s hard to tell. A lot of companies will go out of business trying to get there. [Making cultured meat] is incredibly capital intensive, it is not easy. It is not straightforward. It requires hundreds and millions of dollars, if not a billion-plus dollars in investment, ultimately, to get there. It’s not for the faint of heart. And much like electric car production, you’re not going to have tens of thousands of companies making electric cars. You might have tens of thousands of companies making different sub components of electric cars, you know, the engine, the battery, the software.  But we only get to have a handful of companies doing the whole thing. I think that is very analogous to the cultured meat industry. 

The final thing I’ll say is, it is one of the real bright spots for us of what’s happening in Singapore. It’s one thing to talk about where production costs are going if you’re only making stuff for your friends and family and boyfriend and girlfriend and your fancy investors. That was the case for us up until we got clearance, and it’s the case for every other company. It’s another thing when you need to scale up to meet the demands of hundreds and thousands, then 10,000, then a million people. You learn a lot about producing more when you actually can produce more. So there’s going to be a ton of learnings that happen. As that scale up process happens, some things might be surprising on the downside, and some might be surprising on on the positive side, but we’ll learn as we make that happen.

Jenn Marston: How challenging is that? Part of getting consumers on board with this is obviously not just price parity, but also parity around taste and texture and the actual product. So how difficult has has that been for you all?

Josh Tetrick: Certainly at some point, whether it’s 5, 10 years (I sure hope it’s not 30 years), cultured meat will be below the cost of traditional meat. The second thing that I am certain about is we’ll eventually get to the point where not a single person can tell the difference because there’s literally no difference at all. Today, in the work that we’ve done, about 70 percent of the people think it tastes as good or better than traditional meat. There’s still a lot of work we want to do on texture. We’re going to be rolling out a chicken breast, which is a more advanced structural product.

But even if we solve for taste and texture, there’s also consumer perception: the feelings, the ideas that make people want to buy the product. It’s a confusing process, making cultured meat. It’s an unnatural process. I’m not saying these things are right, I’m just saying this is what a consumer feels. And I think ultimately, you could get your costs right, you get the taste and texture just perfect. But you’re still left with the most important thing: Do the consumers want to buy your product. The process of lab-grown meat might be holding them back. So it’s really important that we address that stuff. Now. We built a brand around addressing that stuff head on. We know many consumers will think it’s unnatural. That’s okay, let’s deal with it. And we want to deal with it by explaining our process, contrasting it to the conventional meat-making process. Eventually, having a digital platform allows consumers to really interact with stuff a little bit more, so they can get familiar with it. We need to normalize this method of production, so it’s not so opaque to consumers. When it’s confusing, their brains will naturally jump. In the case of cultured meat, many brains will naturally jump to, ‘This just isn’t natural.’ And we have found quite a stark difference between consumers over the age of 20 and consumers under the age of 20.

Jenn Marston: Yeah, I get a lot of a lot of folks who just look at me like I’m crazy when I asked them if would you eat meat grown in a lab, but I think it’s, you know, what more do we do to sort of educate consumers? How do you start talking to everybody in a way that’s going to make it have the same appeal, as, say, Doritos?

Josh Tetrick: A big component is allowing people to experience it. So I’ll use a car analogy. Imagine I was in Birmingham [Alabama, where he grew up] and I was talking to some of my friends and I said, ‘Would you would you want to drive a pickup truck doesn’t have an internal combustion engine? Would you be down with buying that?’ I’m almost certain my friends would say, ‘Hell no.’ But then Tesla comes out with that pickup truck that I saw them demoing. If my friends could go to a Tesla store in Alabama, get into that truck, and take it on the back country roads, then there’s an experience of something and there’s a perception change.

The most important thing we think you can do to change perception is allow people to experience in a concrete way, not in a theoretical abstract way. We need to get out in front of more people, right, more restaurants and more retailers and allow people to have the ability to actually access their other meat analogues. 

The second thing is, I think you need to talk about this in a way that is not so technical that you lose people, but is concrete enough where you’re not hiding things from people. And that’s the hard balance. Because the more you unpack, the more you’re being open about it. But the more you unpack, sometimes people can just get lost in the science. It’s about finding the right balance of not getting so technical that people’s eyes just glaze over, but concrete and technical enough that people don’t walk away from that interaction thinking something has been hidden from them. That balance applies whether it’s a label interaction or commercial interaction or menu interaction, or a one to one interaction. One thing that we’ve actually found to be effective is to say, ‘Yes, it is true, the meat is made in a large stainless steel [container], that true statement.’ That statement can be both a little off-putting to people and a little liberating to people. But when you contrast that to how conventional meat is produced, people tend to feel a little bit better. So I think, experience number one, people just got to experience that. And then two, I think talking about in a way that is a little bit more relatable.

Jenn Marston: Something that I think there’s a huge need for more of translating the science into something that isn’t gonna insult folks intelligence or lied to them, but it is also going to, you know, the average person needs to be able to understand it.

Josh Tetrick: Especially if some of our folks are over the age of 20, if you describe the process of culturing meat, the vast majority will say it is strange. And I think the first step to effectively communicating is to acknowledge that is true. To most people, it sounds bizarre, it sounds strange. That’s okay. Let’s now let’s deal with it. Right?

Jenn Marston: Yeah, exactly.

Josh Tetrick: The more we effectively address it, the more we move [the industry] forward. For example, I understand why my mom would think it’s strange. In her mind, meat has been made her entire life (and the history of humanity) by slaughtering an animal and then cutting up their flesh. Cultured meat is different. Let’s just acknowledge that.

And what we’ve seen in other industries and with other products is that something that can be strange can also at some point in time be normalized, and can end up being pretty boring. And eventually, I want [cultured meat] to get to the point where people are sitting down at restaurants or go into grocery stores, and they don’t even have conversations about it anymore. They’re just like, yeah, I want some chicken. Sounds good. Do you have any chicken left in the freezer? Right? Yeah. There doesn’t need to be this philosophical engagement.

I think I think the truth is that whether it’s [about] not slaughtering an animal or an environmental reason, or a zoonotic disease reason, I guess all these things kind of are wound up in, “How does it make a person feel?” All of them — sometimes individually, sometimes in combination — I think, for most people, make them feel better about eating it. But I do think you have to talk about things like health, not using antibiotics, to some extent food safety. Often those things can be a bigger driver than sustainability or animal welfare. With that said, and this was a surprising result from the research that we did, the primary purchase driver, both for US consumers, and consumers in Singapore, was the fact that they could consume this meat without slaughtering an animal. Now, they might have correlated that with lots of other things like food safety and environment. So it might not have been looked at like it’s just like a purely independent variable. But I did find that to be interesting. But yeah, I mean, you have to talk about in a way that people can relate to. If I’m talking to my mom about this (my mom is not vegan or vegetarian), I would focus on you know, ‘Mom, you know, the fried chicken used to make me so it tastes like that. And it’s gonna have less antibiotics, that stuff you want and you’ll probably feel a little bit better by the day.’ That’s probably what I would say to my mom. That’s what I actually have said to my mom.

April 6, 2021

GFI: Plant-Based Retail Sales Reach $7B in the U.S.

Retail sales of plant-based foods in the U.S. reached $7 billion in 2020, according to new data released this week by the Good Food Institute and the Plant-Based Foods Association (PBFA). Sales grew 27 percent in total, which is nearly twice as fast as total U.S. food retail sales. The $7 billion figure includes plant-based meats, eggs, and dairy products.

Plant-based milk is still the largest category of the bunch, and grew at 20 percent over the last year to reach $2.5 billion in sales. Almond milk remains the top seller, though oat milk is catching up, according tot he report. 

Plant-based meat analogues nabbed second place in terms of retail sales, which grew to $1.4 billion in 2020. GFI called plant-based grounds — or plant-based versions of ground beef — the “breakout” product format. “Plant-based ground sales more than doubled in size over the course of 2020, in part due to the introduction and increased distribution of those products in retail.”

Findings for other plant-based categories in the report include:

  • Eggs, once a tiny category, grew 168 percent — a 706 percent increase over the past two years.
  • Ice cream grew 20 percent, to $435 million.
  • Yogurt grew 20 percent, to $343 million.
  • Butter and cheese grew 36 percent and 42 percent, respectively.

Obviously the reason for the increase in sales is that consumers are more interested than ever in eating these products, particularly as traditional meat comes under fire for both environmental and ethical reasons. GFI’s report noted a 3.4 percent jump in U.S. households purchasing plant-based foods in 2020, reaching 56.8 percent of consumers.

The new data comes on the heels of a March report from GFI that found $2.1 billion had been invested in plant-based foods in 2020, including the $700 million raised by Impossible, LIVEKINDLY’s $335 million, and Oatly’s $200 million in private equity financing.

As far as who is actually buying these products, GFI found, in this week’s report, that the demographic tends to be “from higher income brackets.” However, we can expect that to change, according to the Institute: “As plant-based food prices drop over time and begin to reach price parity with animal-based products, we can expect consumers from lower income brackets to increase their purchasing of plant-based products as well.” 

April 2, 2021

MicroSalt Reformulates Salt So You Use Less of It

It’s not until you start reading food labels that you realize just how much salt is in what we eat. It’s everywhere!

MicroSalt aims to reduce the amount of salt we consume by changing up salt delivery itself, and the company is running an equity crowdfunding campaign to help expand its market presence. MicroSalt’s crowdfunding prospectus describes its product as:

…a particle coated with nano-sized salt crystals that range in size from 0.2 um (microns) to 0.6 um. The carrier (usually maltodextrin) simply acts as a vehicle molecule to deliver the small salt crystals. These salt crystals naturally attach to the carrier through electrostatic forces. When consumed, MicroSalt® dissolves almost immediately due to the extremely small size of its crystals, which is what allows for that authentic, salty flavor.

MicroSalt says that its product can deliver the same amount of flavor using 50 percent less sodium compared to table salt. MicroSalt has created its own line of potato chips using this technology called SaltMe!, but its main business is to sell its salt as an ingredient to other packaged foods companies.

The company says that MicroSalt is better than other reduced sodium products on the market because current alternatives use potassium chloride. But potassium chloride isn’t the same salt and has a different flavor. MicroSalt still uses salt, just in a different form.

MicroSalt’s approach to reducing salt use is similar to DouxMatok’s method for reducing sugar consumption. DouxMatok makes a “more efficient” sugar by binding it to silica, the result of which is better diffusion on our tongues so you can use up to 40 percent less sugar in whatever you’re making.

You can buy SaltMe chips online, where they cost roughly $20 for a six-pack of, 5 oz. bags (they are also available in 71 stores across the Northeaster U.S. and Texas). While this is a little pricier than box of Lays, SaltMe’s pricing seems to be in-line with other specialty chips on the market.

As of this writing, MicroSalt has raised more than $380,000 of its $750,000 Seed round equity crowdfunding goal. MicroSalt plans to expand into Mexico and Latin America throughout 2021, and into Asia in 2023. The company says it is already developing an 80 percent less salt version of its product.

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