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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Foodtech

Israel’s Profuse Technology Raises $2.5M for Technology That Lowers Cost of Cultured Meat

As the world awaits the arrival of cultured meat, manufacturers and their suppliers strategize to cope with the realities of this potentially mammoth market. Infrastructure and product scaling for growth remain a challenge from the supply side. Still, concerns over the pricing of lab-grown meat, poultry, and seafood might be the most significant roadblock to consumer acceptance.

Israeli-based Profuse Technology believes it has a solution to bring manufacturing costs down to a point where a pound of cultured beef could achieve price parity with meat from a live animal. A step forward, the company has announced the completion of a $2.5 million seed funding round (and a total of $3.75m since its establishment). The round is led by New York-based investment firm Green Circle and existing shareholders – OurCrowd, Tnuva, and Tempo. Other new investors include Siddhi Capital, a leader in investments in cultivated meat, and Kayma, the investment arm of De-Levie, a meat industry specialist.

According to the announcement, the company will use the funds to collaborate with cultivated meat producers, obtain FDA regulatory approval, and expand the research and development team and its laboratories. The funds will also position the company to source significant capital raising at the end of the second quarter of 2023 to commercialize its customer collaborations.

Profuse’s solution is based on what it calls “a cocktail” that is added during the period when a harvested animal stem cell begins its proliferation process. As founder and CTO Dr. Tamar Eigler-Hirsh told The Spoon: “You would start with a biopsy, and it could be directly from the muscle tissue or an embryonic stem cell harvested from an animal. The cultivated meat companies would take these cells, bank the most successful ones, and optimize them. They would grow them in bioreactors and expand and expand and proliferate these cells until they have hundreds of millions of cells per milliliter. And then, at some point, they have to differentiate the cells to become muscle tissue or muscle fibers. This is where our media supplement comes in.”

“What we’ve basically found a way was to target this natural biological mechanism of regeneration by understanding the biological pathway that that that’s responsible for that,” Dr. Eigler-Hirsh continues. “There’s one protocol to make muscle, and everybody follows it, and it’s very inefficient. Right now, we’re hearing numbers being reported about between 10% to 30% efficiency in converting stem cells into muscle. And using our technology, we can bump that number up from 30% well to over 90% efficiency in conversion of stem cell to muscle.”

Greater efficiency yields more muscle which in turn leads to cultured meat. The math is simple: a more significant and efficient supply can bring down manufacturing costs, which can be passed on to the consumer.

Profuse founder and CEO Guy Nevo Michrowski goes into further detail on the issue of price parity. . First, you won’t need as many cells to start with because your efficiency of using the cells will be 95%. So instead of going for 30 days, you’re going for only 25 days. And most important, the most expensive days are being saved. So, in the last ten days, where over 85% to 90% of the median cost is consumed, those days are cut by half because you don’t need as many cells. And then also, the differentiation and fusion maturation phase of creating them is now reduced to two days instead of ten. Your overall process is only 27 days versus 40 days, which means your factory can produce 33% more yearly.”

Using technology developed at the Weitzman Institute, the company started in 2021. In 2022 it began collaborating with cultivated meat companies and others who potentially would be our distribution partners. Michrowski said that Profuse is working with the major players in the cultured meat and poultry space” And I would say that of the ten leading companies worldwide, we are working with the vast majority together “to demonstrate and quantify the effects of our cocktail on their specific production environment. We operate with different customers to demonstrate our value in different viable development environments and methods.”

From Robotics to Alt Protein, Layoffs and Shutdowns Have Begun to Hit Food Tech

What a difference a year can make.

Last year, it seemed a day didn’t go by without word of a big new funding round in food tech. Alt proteins, restaurant tech, food robotics, food waste, and other sectors benefited from the combination of low-cost capital and a newfound urgency among investors to reinvent our antiquated food system post-pandemic.

But as the economic outlook darkens and investor eagerness gives way to caution, some startups and publicly traded companies in food tech find themselves in situations where they need to pare back their ambitions, tighten their belts to extend their capital runways and, in some cases, shut down altogether.

Here are some examples of bad news from the last couple of weeks:

Ghost Kitchens & Restaurant Tech: NextBite, one of the high-flyers in the virtual restaurant and ghost kitchen space, has laid off employees for the second time this year. The news comes a couple of months after Reef laid off 5% of its workforce. Restaurant payments app startup Sunday is shutting down operations in a number of its markets and laying off a large percentage of its team.

Food-Making Robots: Doordash, the publicly traded food delivery startup, is shutting down Chowbotics, the food robotics startup it acquired last year. The shutdown of the salad-making robot kiosk comes just a couple of months after we learned that Basil Street Robotics, a maker of pizza-making robotic kiosks, had put its assets up for sale.

Delivery Bots: Speaking of robots, the original sidewalk delivery robot startup Starship (which we started covering back in 2016), has recently laid off 11% of its workforce.

Alt-Protein: Last week, we learned that Motif Foodworks, the well-funded alt-protein ingredient spinout of Ginkgo Bioworks, has laid off an undisclosed number of employees.

Fast-Grocery: The ultra-fast grocery business has fallen further from its 2020-2021 highs than perhaps any other sector, as investors realize how much more capital is needed to build out their hyper-local dark store and delivery networks. Over the past few months, we’ve seen startups Buyk and Fridge No More shut down and others, like JOKR and Gorillas, pare back and exit some markets to preserve capital.

While some sectors (like alt protein) seem less impacted than others, the overall food tech market is recalibrating to a new normal after a year where post-money valuations were too high, and capital was still relatively cheap. In 2022, the rising cost of capital and pessimism about the economy has resulted in investors becoming more cautious, meaning new investments and follow-on rounds are harder to come by.

It also means investors are putting much more pressure on their existing portfolio companies to cut costs and get to profitability quickly. That can mean layoffs, bringing in professional manager types (as with NextBite), or exiting from new markets. For publicly traded companies like Doordash, which face the quarterly pressure of reporting to Wall Street, it means experiments that are not a part of their core business (like automated food kiosks) get dropped.

The question facing the food tech industry (and, let’s face it, all tech-adjacent industries) is whether things get worse before they get better. My guess is the answer is yes, as some startups that benefited from the abundance of capital over the last few years will have a harder time raising their next round and will have to work hard to lengthen their runways. In some cases, those runways will run out.

Despite all of this, I remain optimistic about the future of food tech. There are too many inefficiencies and problems with the current food system, and, because of this, innovative companies will always find opportunities to reinvent an industry. And much like we saw with the first dot-com downturn, those companies that find ways to survive in moments of austerity emerge stronger and built for long-term survival.

But before we get to the other side, we would all be wise to prepare ourselves for a rocky year or two.

Here Are Four Tech-Powered Lunchboxes That Might Help You Fight Lunchflation

Everything is getting more expensive lately, and food is near the top of the list.

For those of you who work outside of the home (and don’t have free and tasty food as a work perk), you’re probably trying to figure out how to fight the suddenly very real problem of lunchflation. The easiest and most obvious way is to pack your own lunch, but often times food tossed in a brown bag or a plain old lunchbox (Evil Knievel or otherwise) doesn’t stay warm or cold enough or whatever needs to be done to optimize freshness.

Luckily for you, we live in an era of feature-packed lunchboxes. Models with everything from temperature zones to hydro flasks to stackable compartments and more give everyone from school kids to lunch-toting nine-to-fivers an abundance of options for bringing a meal along for the day.

And things are about to get even better. A new generation of tech-powered lunchboxes is on its way to help make eating homemade lunches outside the home an even better experience. Below I take a look at four of these new options coming to market for those looking to pack up their lunch for work or school:

The Sunnyside Solar-Powered Lunchbox

The Sunnyside lunchbox features a solar panel on the top of the lunchbox to charge its 10000mAh power bank, which powers the onboard cooling and heating (or both). The Sunnyside’s heating system utilizes induction coils to heat the food, and the built-in cooler uses coolant and fans to chill the food.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the company claims the whole thing can be thrown in the dishwasher – including the solar panel top and the electronics-filled bottom. Even so, I would definitely hand-wash the box and lid since I don’t think it’s a good idea to put any electronics in a dishwasher.

For some, a solar-powered lunchbox may not make sense, especially if you mostly work inside an office, live in a less-sunny locale (hello from Seattle), or don’t get a chance to put the box outside during your busy workaday routine. That said, my guess is the Sunnyside – which has a USB port to charge phones with the power bank – can also be charged via USB like a typical power bank.

The Sunnyside debuts on Kickstarter later this week and will go for $59 backer price and for $125 retail.

The Steambox Steam-Heating Lunchbox

While a plain-old thermos or insulated bowl might keep your meal mostly warm until lunchtime, why not add a little steam to heat things up and keep your food moist? That’s the idea behind the Steambox, a steam-enabled lunchbox that debuted on Kickstarter last year and made a splash at CES in January.

The Steambox features a sealable inner container, two steam outlets, an app, and Bluetooth connectivity to control and monitor your device (it also has on-device on/off controls) and a bamboo lid.

The Steambox has shipped to backers, but if you want to buy one now, you can order on the website (if you’re ordering this month, you’ll have to wait a couple of months before it’s shipped).

The Jarsty Food Storage System

The Jarsty system isn’t a lunchbox so much as a food prep system, where the food containers can be used to store meals, either raw or fully cooked. The Jarsty can also be used in the microwave and heat (or fully cook) the meals. The containers, which are vacuum-sealable and can be thrown in the dishwasher, come in various colors.

I could envision committed meal-preppers storing a week’s worth of meals in advance in a Jarsty system. The company behind Jasty just wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign, but I imagine they’ll make a purchase option available on their website soon.

The Forabest Electric Lunchbox

While all o of the other lunchboxes above are not quite here yet, there are a variety of electric lunchboxes you could buy today on Amazon and other online retailers. The Forabest electric heating lunchbox is one of the most popular, and you can buy it on Amazon today for about $40. The system features a car charger and 110V power cord and takes about 30 minutes to warm a meal.

The Weekly Spoon: Electrolux’s Kitchen of the Future & Taco Bell’s Reimagined Restaurant

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Electrolux Launches GRO, a Kitchen System Designed to Encourage More Sustainable Eating

Can a kitchen’s design help us eat more sustainable, plant-forward diets?

Swedish appliance manufacturer Electrolux thinks the answer is yes and, to that end, has launched an ambitious new kitchen system concept to help us get there.

Called GRO, the new system is comprised of a collection of interconnected modules that utilize sensors and AI to provide personalized eating and nutrition recommendations. According to the company, the system was designed around insights derived from behavioral science research and is intended to help encourage more sustainable eating behavior based on recommendations from the EAT-Lancet report for planetary health. The company will debut the new system at this week’s EuroCucina conference.

“How can a thoughtful kitchen slowly nudge you to more sustainable choices,” asks Tove Chevally, the head of Electrolux Innovation Hub, in an intro video to the GRO system. “To make the most of what you have, to buy smarter, and eat more diverse?

To see a video of the new GRO and to read the full story, head here.

Do you have the next big idea for the future of food & cooking? Apply to tell your story at SKS INVENT!

Taco Bell’s Vision of the Future Includes High-Tech Dumbwaiters & Lots of Drive-Thru Lanes

I’ve always been fascinated with dumbwaiters. An elevator built specifically to deliver food between floors of a building, the dumbwaiter is an idea that is both ridiculous and fascinating.

And while I can’t be sure that someone like Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos doesn’t have dumbwaiters built into their homes (though Bezos would probably prefer robots and Trump manservants he could yell at), what I am sure of is the dumbwaiter has, for the most part, largely gone extinct as part of modern life.

Until now. That’s because Taco Bell sees them as a potentially integral part of their restaurant of the future. Called Taco Bell Defy, the taco chain’s new restaurant concept includes an elevated restaurant with multiple drive-thru lanes, food lifts, and a lot of digital integrations.

While I wouldn’t, unlike others, claim this new concept possibly “the most ambitious” prototype in restaurant history, I would say it makes a whole lot of sense for a restaurant chain that does most of its business through a drive-thru. While many chains have developed drive-thrus that have multiple order lines, the choke point always comes later when cars zip-up into a single line to get their food. By spreading out the hand-off of food to four lines, the choke point of a single window for food handover is eliminated.

You can read the full post here. 

Smart Kitchen

Meet Celcy, a Countertop Oven With a Built-In Freezer That Will Cook Meals For You

Say you’re leaving for work and want to come home to a fully cooked meal? Or better yet, you want to line up a work week’s worth of meals and just want them prepared when you get home?

You might be a good candidate for the Celcy, an autonomous cooking appliance that combines a countertop oven with a freezer that stores the meals until ready for cooking.

The Celcy, which is currently in development, will store up to four meals in a freezer. Cooking can be rescheduled via an app or on-demand via request. When it’s time to cook, the meal is shuttled from the freezer compartment on the left side into the cooking compartment side on the right. A built-in elevator lifts and deposits the frozen meal in the top upper right cooking chamber where it is cooked for consumption.

You can read the full post here. 

Food Retail Tech

Circle K Planning To Deploy Seven Thousand AI-Powered Self-Checkout Machines

Mashgin, a maker of computer-vision-based self-checkout machines, announced today it has signed a deal with Circle K parent company Couche-Tard to deploy seven thousand self-checkout machines at the convenience store chain over the next three years.

The move follows the initial deployment of Mashgin systems at nearly 500 Circle K stores across the United States and Sweden since 2020. The move by the second-largest convenience store chain in North America with almost seven thousand stores will represent one of the largest ever deployments of self-checkout systems to date.

For Mashgin, the deal represents its biggest customer win yet and is yet another sign of why the company was able to recently raise a $62.5M Series B round at an impressive $1.5 billion valuation. The move represents a 700% total increase in deployments over its current installed base.

The Mashgin self-checkout system is installed at the checkout counter and enables customer checkouts without scanning barcodes. As seen in the video interview from CES in January, customers can essentially toss their items onto the small checkout pad, and the system will automatically recognize and tabulate the products.

To read the full story, head here.

Future Food

Cocuus Raises €2.5M to Scale Industrial 3D Food Printing for Plant & Cell-Based Meat Analogs

According to a release sent to The Spoon, 3D food printing startup Cocuus has raised €2.5 Million in a Pre-Series A funding round to scale up its proprietary 3D printing technology platform for plant-based and cell-cultured meat analogs. The round was led by Big Idea Ventures, with participation by Cargill Ventures, Eatable Adventures, and Tech Transfer UPV.

Founded in 2017, the Spanish startup has developed a toolbox of different 3D printing technologies under its Mimethica platform to enable the printing of different types of foods. These include Softmimic, a technology targeted at hospitals and eldercare facilities that transforms purees into dishes that look like real food (think of a vegetable or meat puree shaped into a “steak”), LEVELUP, an inkjet printing technology that prints images on drinks like coffee or beer (like Ripples), and LASERGLOW, a laser printer platform that engraves imagery onto food.

Read the full post at here.

SCiFi Foods Raises $22M With Andreessen Horowitz’s First Investment in Cultivated Meat

SCiFi Foods, a Bay Area-based food tech startup, announced that it has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), making it a16z’s first investment in the growing cultivated meat market. The company, formerly known as Artemys Foods, also announced that it will be adding a new board member, Myra Pasek, the General Counsel of IronOx, who will be utilizing her expertise from Tesla and Impossible Foods to help SCiFi Foods bring its novel plant-based and cultivated meat hybrid through regulatory approval to the market. 

The new funding raises SCiFi Foods’ total funding to $29 million and will primarily be used to scale R&D efforts, build out the leadership team, and market the company. 

The Spoon sat down with CEO and co-founder, Joshua March, to learn more about SCiFi Foods’ new name, a hybrid meat product, and what it looks like to raise funding from one of the most famous venture capital firms during a recession.

Read the full interview with Joshua March here.

Food Robots

Xook Raises $1.3 Million to Roll Out Robotic ‘Food Courts in a Box’ in The US

If you’ve ever visited a cafeteria at a tech giant like Google or Facebook, you probably found that the food is just as tasty (or tastier) and often better for you than what you might order at a corner restaurant or make in your own kitchen.

But according to Xook CEO Raja Natarajan, this kind of access to an abundance of tasty, healthy, and free food is more the exception than the rule for US office workers. This is very different from countries like India, said Natarajan, where most corporate employers provide access to cafeterias stocked with food options for employees. This is why, after trialing a prototype for what he and cofounder Ratul Roy describe as a “food court in a box” in Bangalore, they are eyeing the US for the rollout of their robotic kiosk.

“In countries with high labor costs and high food costs, it is very hard to offer this kind of experience unless it comes with automation,” Natarajan told The Spoon in a recent interview.

To read the full story, click here!

Sea & Believe is Making Plant-Based Whole Cut ‘Cod’ That Flakes Like Real Fish

Sea & Believe is a little different than the typical IndieBio company in that they already have a successful product on the market. The Ireland-based company sells two alt-fish products, an Irish seaweed burger and seaweed goujons, and today they are available in 50 stores across Ireland.

But as the company showed last week at IndieBio’s Demo Day, they are close to launching what they see as their biggest breakthrough yet: a plant-based whole-cut filet of ‘cod’ that flakes like real fish.

For company founder Jennifer O’Brien, Irish seaweed is a natural choice as a foundational building block for an alt-seafood product. Growing up in Ireland, O’Brien would eat seaweed to find relief for chronic asthma. The more she studied it, the more she realized the other benefits of seaweed, including its ability to deacidify the ocean, sequestering carbon at a rate three times higher per acre than forests.

“I knew then that there was something special about Irish seaweed,” O’Brien told IndieBio. “I wanted to learn about its properties and figure out how to scale that into a business some day.”

Sea & Believe’s Jennifer O’Brien and Piyali Chakraborty

That dream eventually led her to found Sea & Believe, where she and Chief Technology Officer Piyali Chakraborty would eventually launch their first couple of products and start to develop their white cod filet. The company believes the filet, which will have up to 25 grams of protein, will be the first plant-based seafood product to flake just like the real thing.

The company is raising funds to continue the development of its cod and to build out its seaweed supply chain, including a seaweed farm in northwest Ireland. They are working with two Irish agencies – Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM), the Irish seafood development agency, and Údarás na Gaeltachta (UnAg), a regional Irish economic development agency – to help train local fisherman to harvest seaweed on 500 meter rope lines.

The company is looking to raise $3 million in seed funding. With a product already on the market and a successful prototype for flaky plant-based cod, I imagine it won’t take long given the growing interest in alt-seafood.

You can watch their pitch video below to learn more.

Sea & Believe (IndieBio SF Demo Day 12)

UPSIDE’s New Investment Dollars Pushes The Company To the Front of the Cultivated Meat Line

Picture this: It’s late 2023, or perhaps 2024. Renowned Austin pitmaster and entrepreneur Aaron Franklin finishes up tending to his smokers after a long night of preparing to feed the onslaught of barbeque fans. Those queued up along Branch Street in East Austin are in for a surprise; that day, instead of the usual prime brisket rubbed with Aaron’s secret coffee-based rub, the star of the day is meat that comes from a place other than a ranch and slaughterhouse. Welcome to the world of cultivated meat.

In such a scenario, UPSIDE Foods is likely to be at the forefront of cultivated meat choices for restaurants and later consumers. Armed with an additional $400 Million in Series C financing, the Berkeley, Calif.-based company is among the leaders in the cultivated meat, poultry, and seafood industry. With these new funds, UPSIDE (formerly Memphis Meats), reaches the milestone of a $1 billion valuation. The funds will be used to expand its production footprint, additional R&D for the next generation of products, consumer education, and enhance its supply chain.

Yes, it is a gamble to fund companies in the cultivated meat space given the lack of governmental approval in the form of the FDA and USDA. Amy Chen, UPSIDE’s COO, admits she has no crystal ball, regarding when cultivated meat will get the green light in the U.S., but is confident the market demand will encourage governments-not just in the U.S.—to provide thoughtful oversight without becoming a roadblock.

“We have had years of extensive dialogue and collaboration with the regulators,” Chen told The Spoon in a recent interview. “We are fully confident that globally there is a market for it and there are eager governments that will pursue it.”

The Series C round is co-led by Temasek, a global investment company headquartered in Singapore, and the Abu Dhabi Growth Fund (ADG), a new investor. Other new investors include Baillie Gifford, Givaudan, John Doerr, SALT fund, and Synthesis Capital. They are joined by existing investors Bill Gates, Cargill,  Cercano Management, CPT Capital, Dentsu Ventures, Singapore-based global investor EDBI, Kimbal and Christiana Musk, Norwest Venture Partners, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, SOSV’s Indie Bio, and Tyson Foods.

Chen is especially proud of the large cross-section of investors that represent varied interests from venture firms to companies entrenched in the agricultural space that produce conventional meat and poultry. It is that wide range of support, she believes, that will help in consumer education as well as a long-term presence in the new food chain.

That said, there’s a lot of work that goes into convincing consumers to bite into a new type of food that is, to say the least, unconventional. Chen suggests that there is a group of early adopters in place ready to sample something new that offers a premium taste while providing the start of a solution to creating a more sustainable global food supply.

“When I think about the adoption of any new technology,” UPSIDE’s COO commented, “There are always the cutting-edge early adopters. Folks who have two characteristics – one is they love food and are open to the next thing in food with an openness to innovation and new things. The other trait is being aware and an interested in addressing some of the challenges of conventional meats.”

The bottom line for Chen is the fact that her company’s cultivated meat has the taste of the real thing. “One of the things I am super passionate about, coming from the food world, is the taste of the Product,” she said.  “Ultimately, if it doesn’t taste good when the consumer puts it into their mouth, we have lost the journey.”

UPSIDE is not alone in this quest to bring cultivated meat to the masses. There’s Brazil’s JBS, Israel’s SuperMeat, GOOD Meat, and Mosa Meats, just to name a few. There are also other companies offering technology to aid in the process that facilitates the cultivation process. According to the Good Food Institute, 21 new companies in the cultivated meat space launched in 2021, a 32% increase from the previous year.

 Approval from the FDA comes in the form of a “no questions” letter from the FDA, followed by the USDA’s investment in plant inspection and labeling guidelines. Beyond those hurdles, there are other questions: will cultivated meat be considered Kosher/Halal (given there is no ritual slaughter)? And how will this new product be merchandised in stores? Does it belong in the current meat section alongside 80/20 ground round? Lastly, how will vegans react? No animal is killed, so how will those avoiding all things steak, hamburgers, et al react?

Only time will tell.

The Digital Twin Emerges as Tool For Rapid FoodTech Product Iteration

Changing eating habits and preferences, accelerated by a pandemic, demand different product designs and SKUs. Start-up food companies are increasing their market share with innovative new products. Added up, all of this continual competition in the food space is causing pressure for brands of all sizes for the rapid iteration of food products and their processes.

A new application is emerging that helps food companies deal with all this change, something that at once tracks consumer demand and product details to provide actionable insights for brands in their operations and with their supply chain partners. This new tool is the digital twin.

IBM is one company investing in the digital twin application as software for food companies and manufacturers. From their perspective, a digital twin is a virtual model designed to accurately reflect a physical object. Informed by data, the virtual model can be used to run simulations, study performance issues and generate possible improvement scenarios, all with the goal of developing valuable insights – which can then be applied back to the original physical object.

Transparency becomes increasingly important as consumers seek healthier ingredients and knowledge of food origins. Some brands provide details on their working conditions, plans for a smaller carbon footprint, sustainable packaging design, or community benefits as reasons to purchase their products. The digital twin improves the responsiveness of food brands by gaining deeper insights via consumer- and market- feedback data from multiple sources. Organized data helps food companies reformulate recipes, formats, or product designs in response to those signals.

At BMO’s 15th annual Global Farm-to-Market conference in 2020, Mike Duffy, CEO of New Hampshire-based C&S Wholesale Grocers noted how the ongoing pandemic made it clear that technology will play a key role in efficient and flexible supply chains. Duffy added ‘it is important how you increase collaboration with all your [supply chain] partners. How do you get to better connectivity, forecasting, and faster decision-making? [There has been] a lack of visibility of products moving through the supply chain. There is a big disconnect from demand signal to production [response]. How do you shorten the cycle time to make manufacturing more responsive to shifts in consumer demand so that there isn’t obsolete or excess inventory?’. It is the goal of digital twin software to provide actionable and product-specific information responding to changing demands from consumers or supply chain partners.

Leading food companies (and rising start-ups) are building a framework with their suppliers and end-customers in an integrated response system facilitated by the digital twin. It allows them to gain the insights to produce products or modify them. For example, the digital twin can estimate modifications with IoT feedback from retail, foodservice, or digital consumer surveys. Digital threads incorporate a range of information and benchmark performance to identify potential opportunities. It simulates the impact of changing raw materials or packaging, factors that may see rising market preference. As part of the support function for the food company, the digital twin more accurately validates production with real-world supply chain and operations information.

For automation leader Siemens, the digital twin helps the food sector become more flexible to drive sustained innovation through the timely use of information. The physical and digital are integrated for continual improvement of products through process updates. Siemens’ software manages data security, protection, and privacy as required, along with transparency where regulated or expected by governments or consumers. As a long-time leader in manufacturing innovation and operations design, Siemens supports how brands respond to change. Combined with lifecycle management techniques, digital twinning accelerates ‘on-point’ production, and ensures faster responsiveness.

Siemens’ Simcenter digital twin software relies on continual feedback supporting the testing and iteration of production lines, from supply chain logistics with partners at the source, to grocery retail or foodservice. Simulations in the digital twin help validate product prototyping with internal operations tests. The cost of failure is significantly less for a virtual prototype compared to a physical, in-market version. For example, UK-based TrakRap works with Siemens digital twinning software to reduce the costs of operations modifications such as packaging. The transparency of the application builds trust across the value chain.

New companies, such as Twinthread use digital twin applications to make it easier for small and medium-sized food companies to model their factory and in turn gain insights that optimize production. Utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning, Twinthread provides rapid value via operations cost savings, such as greater energy efficiency, and quality control.

Companies such as Twinthread and Siemens are supporting a revolution in food tech with the digital twin serving as the end-to-end applied tool in both the supply chain and for product management. Digital twins are timely in their ability to quickly respond to and improve product design, one day potentially anticipating pandemic impacts, or climate-, social-, trade- and geopolitical- related implications to food product development and innovation. Digital twins are design thinking in action, placing emphasis on consumer- and market-centric innovation ecosystems which remove the silos between demand signal and production response.

With Food Scan, Snapchat is the Latest Company Trying to Create a ‘Shazam for Food’

Last week, Snapchat became the latest company to add an AI-powered food scanning and recognition feature to their product. Called Food Scan, the new feature enables Snapchat users to scan food items and get recipe suggestions and other information about the food.

Here’s how it works:

Snapchat users can scan food by opening up the AR bar within Snapchat from the main camera menu option. From there, they choose to scan and click a picture of the food item. Snapchat’s AI will process the image and suggest a recipe from partner Allrecipes, as well as serve up other information, such as a Wikipedia page, about with the item.

According to Snapchat, the feature has access to over 4 thousand recipes and can process up to 1500 ingredients. However, based on my own attempts, the product may need to add a few more items to the list to be helpful.

When I scanned Campbell’s Cream of Celery Soup, it offered up recipes for Campbell’s bacon soup. A scan of Adam’s peanut butter resulted in recipes for tahini. The closest match came from a scan of a navel orange, which resulted in a Wikipedia page for a mandarin orange and recipe recommendations for mandarin orange cake and mandarin orange salad.

Here at The Spoon, we’ve written a lot over the years about attempts by companies to create a ‘Shazam for food.’ Big tech companies such as Microsoft, Pinterest, and Google have been at work at this for some time, as have appliance brands like Samsung and Whirlpool. Part of the reason so many have dedicated resources to building augmented reality and AI products for food recognition is, quite simply, because food is one of the easiest product categories to recognize and create databases around. But it’s also because food recognition unlocks numerous commerce, health and nutrition tracking, and kitchen management scenarios if done right.

Snapchat’s new Food Scan feature, while pretty rudimentary at this point, clearly has designs on building potential revenue through shoppable recipes and product recommendations. However, I can also see it becoming a broader food-related augmented reality recommendation tool that suggests, similar to Alexa’s new What to Eat skill, restaurants, meal kits, and other potential monetizable recommendations.

Nuritas Raises a $45 Million Series B Round For AI-Powered Peptide Discovery

Ingredients startup Nuritas announced earlier this month that it has completed a $45 million Series B round. The new funding will help the company to expand globally and scale its tech platform for peptide discovery.

Like proteins, peptides are made up of amino acids. But while proteins consist of long chains of amino acids, peptides are smaller and easier for the body to break down. Nuritas uses its artificial intelligence-powered tech platform to look for new, bioactive peptides in familiar food sources. The resulting ingredients are likely to find applications in the next wave of plant-derived nutritional supplements.

After the artificial intelligence platform makes its predictions about useful peptides, the Nuritas team produces them in experimental quantities and performs in vitro, cell-based testing. If that initial testing confirms the platform’s predictions, the team scales up production, and then moves to preclinical and clinical testing phases to understand the peptides’ effects on human health.

Since its founding in 2014, Nuritas has launched PeptiYouth™, an ingredient that the company says improves cellular regeneration to slow visible signs of aging. They’ve also introduced PeptiStrong™, discovered in fava beans, which improves muscle synthesis and reduces muscle loss. The company plans to introduce both products to the market in early 2022.

The team has established partnerships with big food industry names, including Nestle and Mars. They also plan to explore applications for peptide ingredients in the medical food and cosmetics industries.

Nuritas’ Series B round was led by Cleveland Avenue, a Chicago-based venture capital firm and accelerator for food and restaurant tech startups. (Also in Cleveland Avenue’s portfolio are Beyond Meat and Bartesian, the countertop cocktail-mixing robot.) Participants included food and agriculture investors Wheatsheaf Group and Cultivian Sandbox Ventures, and the European Circular Bioeconomy Fund.

“Our new investors bring a wealth of invaluable expertise,” company founder and CEO Dr. Nora Khaldi said in a press release, “and this latest round will help to build our US headquarters, continue to expand our team, scale our platform to discover more life-changing ingredients and accelerate our route to market.”

Last year, The Spoon noted the rise of computational biology startups taking a targeted approach to ingredient discovery. Nuritas currently boasts the largest peptide knowledge base in the world—and with tools like machine learning becoming more and more relevant to food innovation, that invisible infrastructure could position the company to play a big role in the ingredients supply chain of the future.

Researchers Have Developed a Chameleon-Inspired Solution to Keep Fish Fresh

Red light, green light. Your first thought may be Squid Game, but these two colors are part of new food technology used for real squid.

Researchers invented a material that changes color to measure how fresh seafood is, inspired by (you guessed it) chameleons. It can save consumers from eating spoiled fish and can keep food waste out of landfills.

Why does your fish smell so fishy?

You probably are familiar with fish that smells… well, too fishy. This unpleasant odor comes from volatile gases in seafood, such as dimethylamine or ammonia. As the temperature of fish rises, its acidity changes, and ammonia is released.

Your salmon or shrimp has definitely spoiled if you can smell this gas — but ammonia can increase to dangerous levels before your nose can detect it. “Seafood easily spoils due to microbial growth that produces volatile amine gases,” said researcher Tao Chen in an interview.

A key part of seafood production is the ability to detect these volatile gases. Current standards take about four hours to find ammonia or dimethylamine in just one sample of fish.

Imagine if the commercial fishing industry had to set aside four hours for every piece of fish in their warehouse. The process would take days, and all the food would be at risk for spoiling. In reality, most fish inspections are done visually and are highly prone to error.

Here is where a team of food scientists and chemists enters the picture. New technology from Chen and his team at the Key Laboratory of Marine Materials detects when seafood has spoiled.

Chameleon skin inspired this material.

The skin of a chameleon can shift its hue to blend into different environments in just a few seconds. In a similar show of colors, the hydrogel can change its fluorescence from red to blue to green in a few minutes. These three colors allow scientists to visualize changes in response to stimuli.

The hydrogel changes color as heat and ammonia levels rise. The technology is easy to use, as the hydrogel can be placed directly into any package to check if fish or shellfish are safe to eat. Though customers should not eat the gel, it will not affect the product’s taste.

The soft material is unique in its ability to change colors. Both chemists and material engineers have struggled to design a synthetic fabric that could change colors. Until this study, scientists have been unable to model the structure of panther chameleon skin in a lab.

“Is it possible to mimic this unique structure into artificial color-changing materials? As described in our paper, the answer is yes,” Chen said.

“Up to now, the responsive color-changing capacity of synthetic materials was still far inferior to that of the natural chameleon skin,” researcher Patrick Théato said in an interview. Théato collaborated with the team in China for this bio-inspired project.

Science: Taste the rainbow.

The team discovered that the secret was in the separation. Instead of placing all fluorescent materials onto one sheet, each color has its own layer.

As seen in the diagram below, at the core of the hydrogel is a red layer that stays true to its hue. A middle blue layer measures the temperature of the seafood, and an outer green layer tests acidity and ammonia levels.

The hydrogel changes color in the presence of ammonia (NH3) or heat. It shifts to a green hue when ammonia is present or becomes more purple as the temperature rises. At either end of the spectrum, the fish in question is unsafe to eat.

The blue hydrogel layer changes color from purplish red to blue when the temperature rises. At 20º Celsius, the material appears to be purple or red, and when the heat rises to 50º Celsius, the hydrogel turns blue. The whole hydrogel turns green when ammonia is present and has no color change if ammonia is not present in the sample.

Not only do the different layers mimic the skin of a chameleon, but they also let scientists test the environmental variables on their own. Existing methods combine heat and ammonia into one reading and are less accurate. For example, current technologies would likely miss a slight change in acidity if the temperature stayed static.

Almost one-third of food in China is wasted.

Chen spoke to his personal motivation to create seafood-focused technology. His team hails from Ningbo, a coastal metropolis in China. “Many people in this city love seafood very much,” Chen said.

However, a significant amount of this catch ends up in landfills. A new study shows that 27% of all food in China is wasted per year. To put that number in perspective, food waste emissions in China are equal to total emissions in the United Kingdom.

How is the country keeping food out of the garbage? Well, President Xi Jinping declared war on food waste last year. As of April 2020, it is illegal to order too much food at a restaurant. ‘Mukbang‘ videos are similarly discouraged and were removed from many social media sites.

Another potential solution? The hydrogel. It can help reduce food waste on an industrial level. Commercial fisheries can use the gel for faster and more accurate readings and take immediate action if some of their seafood is beginning to spoil.

Color in cephalopods.

Théato, Chen, and many of their collaborators are working on a new project inspired by a different type of animal: Cephalopods.

These ocean dwellers – cuttlefish and squids, to name a few – are masters of camouflage. They can change their color faster than a chameleon. The researchers are creating a fluorescent hydrogel that takes notes from octopuses.

The team’s original hydrogel looked to acidity or temperature as the catalyst for color change. The new version has an electric stimulus, which is easier to control and free from any chemicals. It is currently under development for larger-scale applications.

Seems that octopuses are teaching us, after all.

How New Culture and Moolec Science Are Growing Cow-Free Dairy Proteins

Most of today’s vegan cheese startups face the challenge of reproducing cheese using ingredients like plant-based oils and nut milks. That’s no easy feat, as unique dairy proteins are responsible for some of the taste, stretch, and melt properties of cheese.

But alternative cheese may soon be getting a tech upgrade. A handful of startups have developed cow-free processes for replicating those key dairy proteins. Last week, The Spoon got on Zoom with the CEOs of two of those companies—New Culture and Moolec Science—to ask about the state of alternative cheese technology.

New Culture & precision fermentation

When California-based startup New Culture set out to develop a better alternative cheese, the company’s founders surveyed a range of processes that could be used to grow dairy proteins. Company CEO and co-founder Matt Gibson says that precision fermentation stood out because the technology had already been used by the conventional dairy industry at commercial scale.

“It’s a process that has been done time and time again,” says Gibson. Precision fermentation is used today to produce chymosin, a cheesemaking enzyme. “And that means that all those risk factors that come with anything that you scale up have really been eliminated. It’s a tried-and-true method of going from a small fermentation shake flask of say 50 milliliters to a large fermentation tank of 200,000 liters.”

In New Culture’s fermentation process, microbes are genetically edited to convert sugar into a dairy protein called casein, which makes up about 80% of the protein content in cow’s milk. To grow the protein at high volumes, the microbes need to be kept at a certain temperature and pH, and fed sugars at a specific rate.

According to Gibson, another advantage of using precision fermentation is that the regulatory process is relatively simple. This is partly because the dairy industry has set a precedent for using precision fermentation, and partly because New Culture is using the process to create an existing protein rather than a new ingredient.

“So there’s no concern from a regulatory point of view about the fact that you’re using genetic engineering,” he says. “You go through the regulatory process to show that the process you’re using—like what you’re feeding your microbe—is safe and stable. So the regulatory process is expected to be very smooth sailing.”

New Culture expects to complete the regulatory approval process next year. The company’s flagship cheese will be mozzarella, which they plan to launch as a branded product in restaurants in late 2022. In particular, Gibson says the team has its eyes on the pizza industry, which is a huge consumer of mozzarella, but has been held back from using alternative cheeses because today’s plant-based options don’t stretch well or tolerate the high temperatures in pizza ovens.

Casein is the foundation for all kinds of cheeses. Someday, the company could add other bacterial cultures and age their casein curd base to create blue cheese, brie, and other varieties. For now, they’re focused on building scale and getting their mozzarella onto menus.

“To quickly transition away from animal-derived cheeses, you need a technology that can scale quickly and get costs down quickly,” says Gibson. “And that’s what precision fermentation ultimately allows you to do.”

Moolec Science & molecular farming

Moolec Science, headquartered in the U.K., is taking a different approach: The company grows animal proteins using molecular farming. Last year, The Spoon reported on Moolec’s success in producing the cheesemaking enzyme chymosin (mentioned above) in plants.

Molecular farming solves the problem of scaling up in a different way from precision fermentation. Through molecular farming, says company CEO and co-founder Gastón Paladini, Moolec can take advantage of existing agricultural infrastructure for production purposes. “There’s nothing better than low-tech farming to produce at an enhanced scale and low cost.”

In molecular farming, crops are genetically modified to produce a target molecule. The Moolec team matches the target molecule with a host plant, creating different plant-molecule combinations for different applications. The company’s proof-of-concept chymosin is grown in safflower plants; its next products, meat proteins, will be grown in soy and yellow pea plants.

Moolec is a spinoff of Bioceres Crop Solutions, an agtech company. The team at Bioceres spent over a decade building the tech platform that Moolec now uses for molecular farming, says Paladini—“from the laboratories and construction design to the new genes, new seeds, field trials, farming, and harvesting.”

While precision fermentation companies can scale up using models created by the conventional dairy industry, Paladini says that the scale for molecular farming already exists. “There aren’t many precision fermentation tanks out there to produce alternative protein right now, so the industry needs to build new fermenters,” he says. “With molecular farming, we could use the same lands that are currently used to grow animal feed right now. You only need to switch the seeds.”

Bioceres has an existing network of growers in Latin America and the U.S., which is helping Moolec to expand its operations.

The regulatory process for molecular farming is relatively complicated, requiring both USDA and FDA approval (while the precision fermentation process requires only FDA approval). Moolec is currently working its way through the regulatory process.

Moolec’s process involves farming genetically modified crops on a large scale, a controversial practice in some regions. Paladini says that the team plans to take an active and transparent approach when it comes to communicating with the public about GMOs.

“We believe that we need to inform, educate, and promote the benefits of GM techniques, when they’re used for a good reason,” he says. Toward that end, the company is working on building an NGO in collaboration with scientists and industry representatives. The organization, GM4GOOD, will “promote the benefits of using science and GM techniques.”

Moolec is currently working with R&D departments at CPG companies to develop end products using its proteins. The team plans to re-launch its plant-derived chymosin later this year, and to introduce its alternative meat proteins in late 2022 or early 2023.

Both New Culture and Moolec can leverage knowledge from previous applications of their technologies, and both companies will face challenges as they build up scale and work toward regulatory approval. And there are questions to ask about both companies’ processes: about the energy intensivity of protein extraction, for instance, and the land use implications of growing animal proteins in plants at scale.

But both companies’ uses of technology to produce native dairy proteins mark big steps forward for alternative cheese. The next wave of cow-free cheeses will likely be more versatile and convincing, and more attractive to restaurants and CPG companies.

Video: Melibio’s Darko Mandich on Making Honey Without the Bees

Honey is a$7 billion industry. While honeybees themselves are not in danger (at least today), the focus on honey production is problematic for the broader bee ecosystem since farmed honeybees compete with wild bees for food and ultimately hurt biodiversity.

All of this is why a Serbian bee industry executive named Darko Mandich became fascinated with the idea of making honey without bees. His company MeliBio uses precision fermentation, synthetic biology, and plant science that replaces bees as the honey-making medium. The result is a “honey” with the same taste, texture, and mouthfeel of natural honey without any harvesting from bees.

Since the company recently released its first plant-based honey, we thought it would be good to catch up with Darko to talk a little about his honey and how he got the inspiration to start the company.

Making Honey Without Bees With Melibio