Uncategorized

This is the web version of our weekly Future Food newsletter. Be sure to subscribe here so you don’t miss a beat!

Welcome back. Last week was a short newsletter because I had to zip off and grill up Beyond burgers for a crowd. But now I’m back with some pretty sweet news. Perfect Day, the Silicon Valley startup making dairy without the cow, just released its first product: ice cream. And I was lucky enough to taste it.

The ice cream of the future?

A few weeks ago I got in a rental car, cranked up some tunes and drove to Berkeley, CA, to the offices of Perfect Day.

I won’t get into the nitty-gritty science behind it all, but basically the startup is making dairy proteins with genetically modified microflora (AKA bacteria), which they can combine with fats, water, and vitamins to make milk that tastes and acts exactly like the real thing. And they’ve raised a whopping $61 million along the way.

So, how did it taste? Honestly, awesome. The ice cream had the same creamy texture and smooth melt as ice cream made from actual milk, without any sort of funky aftertaste that often comes with other alternative dairy products. After I finished my first spoonful, all I could think was “yep, that’s ice cream.”

Not exactly melodramatic, but that’s the point. Perfect Day’s ice cream tastes exactly like the real thing because, well, it basically is — at least on a molecular level. The dairy in it may not have come from a cow’s udder, but it contains the same key proteins (whey and casein), as well as a similar amount of fats and liquid. It also behaves in the same ways.

Going forward, one thing Perfect Day will have to navigate is what exactly to call their newfangled dairy product — and how to label it.

First, there are regulatory hurdles. Perfect Day is actually branding its ‘scream as “frozen dairy dessert” to avoid any kerfuffles from the FDA, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some pushback from Big Dairy on them using the word “dairy” at all — after all, they’re already up in arms about plant-based alternatives using the word “milk.” However, as CEO Ryan Pandya pointed out, they need to keep the label on there so people with severe dairy allergies know that they should steer clear.

Perfect Day is also figuring out how it wants to label its product for the consumer. Their dairy isn’t made from plants, but it’s animal-free. It also isn’t grown in a lab, like cultured meat, but it is made using biotechnology. For now, they’ve settled on flora-based — a nod to the microflora that make the milk proteins. We’ll see if consumers embrace the definition, but honestly, if it tastes this good, they might not even care what it’s called. They’ll just be screaming for more.

Starting today, Perfect Day is selling 1,000 three-pint units of its ice cream for $60 (that becomes $100 when you include shipping (jeez, dry ice is expensive)).

Mystery solved

When Burger King Sweden first announced it was introducing new plant-based Rebel Whoppers and Rebel Chicken Kings a few weeks ago, we started speculating about which companies might be behind the meatless products. Could it be fellow Swedish company, Oumph? Maybe Nestlé, who was already providing its meat-free Incredible burgers to McDonald’s in Germany and Israel?

As it turns out, none of the above. Yesterday we got an email this week from BK Sweden’s General Manager Iwo Zakowski, who revealed that they sourced their plant-based products from Vivera — the Dutch company that makes vegetarian versions of steak, chicken, and more.

It’s curious that Vivera made its Burger King debut not in its home country of the Netherlands but in Sweden. Then again, the Scandinavian countries have a huge appetite for plant-based products, especially the younger generations. And seeing as Vivera is one of the three largest alternative meat companies in Europe, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see their products on more BK menus coming soon.

Protein ’round the web

• Costco is now selling two-packs of JUST Egg, the chicken-free egg product made of mung beans, for $9.99 — around half the price of a single bottle at most stores (h/t Livekindly).
• Talk about a price cut: Reuter reported this week that cultured meat could cost under $10 in as little as two years. Considering the first cell-based burger cost $280,000, that’s quite the discount.
• Scotland’s largest foodservice company, Brakes, is now serving meat alternatives from startup DARING Foods at its partner hotels and restaurants.

Eat well,
Catherine

This is the web version of our weekly Spoon newsletter. You should sign up for it.

When it comes to dining out, your average person wants at least some consistency in the way their food is made. But at what point does consistency and predictability cross the line and become . . . boring?

I started thinking about this when writing about Nectar, which provides IoT-enabled bottle caps that monitor in real time how much booze is poured. Sure, for bar owners, this granular detail provides greater inventory management. But if a bartender knows they are being watched, will that then kill their creativity when it comes to mixology? Will they just dutifully pour the exact amount each time to keep a manager off their back?

For drinks it may not be as big a deal, because you typically don’t go to a bar for the taste of a cocktail. You go to be social, the drinks help fuel that.

But what happens when this type of real-time data insight comes to the restaurant and starts dictating every inch of the food journey there — from menu planning to which ingredients get bought and how they are used — to optimize dishes for portion control and popularity? Further, what happens to dining out when robots move further into the kitchen and make meals exactly the same way each time, every time?

It’s a question I pondered over the weekend in my post Will Data Ruin Dining Out? It’s an issue that’s only going to get bigger as more tech enters the restaurant space, and I’d love your thoughts on the subject. Do you think Google Analytics-style insights coupled with automation eradicate everything interesting on the menu?

Nailed it! BeeHex Creates Cake Decorating Robot
I realize I literally just asked if automation can put consistency in danger of becoming boring, but there are occasions when you do want that precision every time. Think specially decorated cookies for an event like a wedding or a convention.

This week, Mike Wolf covered Beehex, a startup that’s built a decorating robot that “prints” frosting on to cakes and cookies. The bot can finish 15 to 21, quarter sheet cakes in an hour, or somewhere between 120 to 500 cookies. This, according to the company is 66 percent more efficient than a human decorator.

This Beehex 3D Decorator isn’t cheap, coming in at $65,000 (or $1,600 a month lease). But for large-scale grocers or bakeries, it’s not hard to imagine them paying up for a machine that can essentially decorate 24 hours a day, every day.

Though perhaps wedding guests would prefer cookies with the bride and groom’s faces printed on them.

Last Chance to Register for The Spoon’s Food Tech Accelerator Fireside Event
If you want to take part in some lively discussion around food tech, you can do so at The Spoon’s new Food Tech Fireside online event. Every month, we’ll hold a virtual sit down with one or two food industry innovators and invite the audience to join in the talk via written questions.

We kick the series off this week with Tessa Price of WeWork Food Labs and Peter Bodenheimer from Food-X talking about food accelerators: what they are, what they’re not, and which companies and entrepreneurs should consider them as a path towards growth.

The event takes place May 30 at 10:00 a.m. PDT/1:00 p.m. EDT. Full details are here.

This is the web version of our weekly Spoon newsletter. You should sign up for it.

I really did not want to write about alternate proteins in this newsletter this week.

Really.

We have a whole other weekly newsletter called Future Food devoted to topic (you should totally subscribe!) and I didn’t want to step on its toes. But there has been so much alt-protein news already this week, that it’s impossible avoid.

See what I did there? Because, you know, Impossible Foods raised $300 million yesterday in a whopper of a funding round, which coincidentally, will go in part towards making Impossible Whoppers for Burger King (and hopefully help the company keep up with demand). This brings the total amount raised by Impossible to $687.5 million and values the plant-based burger company at $2 billion.

Impossible’s raise, of course, follows the recent successful IPO of Beyond Meat, which, two weeks after the fact continues to perform well. FWIW, as of this writing, Beyond’s stock price is almost double that of former Silicon Valley darling, Uber.

But it’s not just plant-based beef making headlines. Aleph Farms, which makes lab-grown steaks raised $12 million from investors including Cargill, which is the country’s third-largest meat producer. This is the second cultured meat investment for Cargill, which has also put money into Memphis Meats, and appears to be disrupting itself, rather than letting some upstart startup do it.

You’d be forgiven if you needed a little latte pick-me-up to keep up with all the alt-protein news happening recently. And may we suggest a splash of Oatly in that latte? Catherine Lamb spoke with Oatly co-founder, Bjorn Oste, to get the story of how this oat-based milk in conquering coffee shops across the U.S..

Or perhaps you’ll be ditching coffee altogether. No, for real, stop laughing. During his recent whirlwind trip through Europe, Mike Wolf came across the cacao-based espresso made by Chokkino. Packed with all its superfood-y goodness, Mike wondered if Chokkino could one day make your preferred morning beverage.

My morning is just getting started, and there’s still plenty of news to cover! Thanks for reading, and be sure to sign up for our Future Food newsletter.

Barre, Vermont-based vertical farming company Ceres Greens just scooped up the winning prize from foodtech accelerator Accel-VT’s recently wrapped program.

Part foodtech accelerator, part startup competition, Accel-VT — also based in Vermont — each year picks eight startups from around the U.S. and Canada to participate in its three-month program. Like many accelerators, it all ends with a pitch day, where startups present their ideas to investors. Winners are chosen from that process. This year, Ceres and Michigan-based labor-sourcing solution AgHelp came out at the top of the cohort.

Ceres, which opened for business in January 2018, is Vermont’s first vertical farm. The company’s proprietary technology uses sensors and automated controls to calculate temperature, nutrients, and amount of light its produce needs to grow. Not surprisingly, leafy greens are the main menu.

Ceres won a $25,000 equity-free prize, which the company says will go towards “expanding production.” Right now, Ceres supplies various restaurants and businesses in the state of Vermont which, though it’s one of the more rural states, imports 90 percent of its produce from the west. As we’ve previously discussed, there are significant challenges when it comes to scaling vertical farming solutions, especially when it comes to foods that aren’t leafy greens. But Ceres is a young company, and, while I speculate, the extra cash may help them expand production to areas beyond leaves.

Meanwhile, Accel-VT looks for companies who use tech to solve “pressing food system issues facing society.” If this past other cohorts are any indication, those issues include waste reduction, renewable energy, alternative proteins, and data solutions. Other notable participants in the recently wrapped cohort include edible cutlery maker Savor and Planetarians, who uses a patent-pending technology to turn defatted seeds into protein sources.

Applications for the next cohort aren’t open yet, but keep an eye out here for that date, as well as other news in the world of startup accelerators.