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Someday, We’ll Look Back and Laugh

If you’re in the alternative protein industry, you’ve probably seen an article from Bloomberg titled, “Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods wanted to upend the world’s $1 trillion meat industry. But plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop.”

And if you haven’t read it, you’ve almost certainly read about it. That’s because, over the past week, there’s been no shortage of blog posts, newsletters, Linkedin think pieces, and full-page ads in the New York Times declaring why – depending on where you fall on the matter – Bloomberg had it right or wrong. 

Much of the reaction from those in the alt-protein industry centered on the article’s focus on two companies, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. Many argued (rightly) that the plant-based meat industry is much bigger than just these two companies, and any analysis of the space and its prospects that doesn’t include a fuller look of the new products on the horizon (like those based on fungi/mycelium) misses why so many are still so excited about the industry’s prospects. 

But as Rachel Konrad, former head of comms for Impossible Foods, said on this week’s Spoon podcast, the industry “doth protest too much.” 

After all, it’s just one article, right? Why was there so much pushback?

The strong reaction can be partly attributed to Bloomberg’s place in the media ecosystem. Not only is its journalism viewed on par with the Wall Street Journal from a business reporting perspective (though they don’t have as many journalists covering as many beats at the Journal), but unlike the Journal, it’s a weekly news magazine with cover stories. 

I mean, just look at that cover: 

Despite print media’s long and slow death spiral, a story like this still has an outsize impact, especially in publications like Bloomberg. They can become, in a sense, self-fulfilling prophecies.

Don’t believe it? Just ask Juicero’s founders. Those familiar with Juicero’s demise will remember the final nail in the coffin for the connected juicer startup was a Bloomberg piece. Within days after publication, the company and its high-priced juicer became a symbol of Silicon Valley excess and over-engineered solutions. It wasn’t long before the company’s venture backers backed out, and soon after, the company was toast.

But the plant-based meat industry is not Juicero. It’s an industry made up of literally hundreds of companies, backed by billions of dollars of venture funding, and it has achieved some measure of success in that many of these new products have become established on quick service menus and occupy space on grocery store and warehouse store meat aisles. 

I suspect the real reason, though, the article touched a nerve was it pointed out a truth that not enough executives in the plant-based industry and food retail are ready to admit: some of the earliest and loudest voices in the plant-based industry over-promised early on about how quickly consumers would embrace their products. 

Take these quotes from Pat Brown, founder of Impossible, made on stage in 2015 at a TED talk and later in an interview with the New Yorker: 

“I know it sounds insane to replace a deeply entrenched, trillion-dollar-a-year global industry,” he said, “but it has to be done.” Four years later, when the New Yorker profiled Impossible, Pat predicted his company would “take a double-digit portion of the beef market” by 2024 before sending it into a “death spiral.” Next he would target “the pork industry and the chicken industry and say, ‘You’re next!’ and they’ll go bankrupt even faster.”

Ethan Brown has spoken in similar terms about how he felt his company would transform people’s diets around the world. From the Bloomberg piece:

Just like technology had rendered the horse-drawn carriage obsolete, he told the crowd at the New York Times’ climate conference this past fall, so, too, would his system of breaking down plants transform the protein at the center of the plate. “This,” he said, “is something that I feel is inevitable.”

I don’t blame either founder for articulating what they see as the ultimate goal of plant-based meat. Both are visionary founders and are driven to change what they see as a cruel industry that is, according to them, steering the planet toward a calamity caused by the climate impact of industrial agriculture. The goal of the plant-based meat industry – to replace industrially-produced meat from animals with a more sustainable alternative – makes sense and should be the goal.

But the reality is that these visionaries overpromised early market acceptance because, in part, they underestimated how difficult it would be to convince consumers to change their diets. Part of this has to do with the product themselves; neither Beyond nor Impossible are what you could describe as healthy when compared to a pure, simple ingredient plant-based diet. Even more importantly, the products’ taste profiles aren’t nearly close enough to what they are replacing, residing still in what chef Ali Bouzari describes as the ‘Uncanny Valley of Food.’

As a result, the consumer dietary profile that Pat Brown has said many times he most wanted to target – the carnivore – doesn’t believe these products are suitable replacements for something they’ve been eating their whole lives. Arguments about animal welfare don’t resonate with the vast majority of consumers, and the health arguments – which have the potential to resonate with a wide swath of consumers – haven’t convinced the vast majority of people who have been told – rightly or wrongly – that these products are going to be better for them. 

The hard truth is consumers are creatures of habit. They eat what they know, and convincing them to change their behavior is difficult. When consumers do change their diets, it’s often due to exposure to a mix of influencer-fed trends and ideas passed on to them by friends or family. Plant-based meats just haven’t caught on, and in fact, you could point to an opposite trend, where a contingent of consumers argue (again rightly or wrongly) against these foods because they’ve come to believe they are too “processed” and this is somehow unhealthy. 

The purchase price also factors in. While consumers with plant-forward diets may be ok paying a premium for an alternative product that satiates a desire for meat, most consumers are not. They wonder why not just buy the real thing at a lower price? And sure, the price premium for plant-based meat has gotten smaller, but the products are still, on the whole, more expensive than those spit out by the fine-tuned, highly-scaled machinery of industrial animal agriculture. 

Now, the plant-based meat industry finds itself in a tricky spot in 2023. A majority of consumers not only don’t believe these products are any healthier than the real thing but they also aren’t convinced plant-based alternatives taste as good as meat yet. In other words, the average consumer sees plant-based meat – as represented by Beyond and Impossible – as expensive processed food, and no amount of New York Times full-page ads will change that.

But all hope is not lost. The plant-based meat industry is still in the early innings, with much of its promise ahead of it in a pipeline of new products that are either on the market or slated to arrive soon. Tasty meat analogs that use mycelium, jackfruit, or other ingredients are already here, and most consumers have yet to try them. Products using novel ingredients derived using new approaches that use some combination of artificial intelligence, precision fermentation, and genetic engineering are on their way. New formats, like plant-based whole-cut meat and fish, have yet to make their way onto the vast majority of consumer plates. And let’s not forget to mention those products made with real animal cells in the form of cultivated meat, which are now on the fast track toward consumer plates in 2023.

The alternative meat industry has a lot of work ahead of it, but the best way to move forward is to examine its challenges in the cold light of day. That’s what we’re doing now, and we’ll look back at the Bloomberg article in 5 or 10 years and laugh and wonder what we were all worried about. 

How will new tools like ChatGPT impact the world of food? We’ll be discussing just that during the Spoon’s mini-summit on February 15th. The event is free, so register here today before the session fills up. 

The Cell Ag Infrastructure Buildout

A little over a week ago, the leaders of the nascent cellular agriculture industry got together at Tufts and held a day-long state of the industry conference. The Tufts team did an excellent job getting the right people together, and the sessions spanned several topics that have been top of mind for me, including scaling and funding, two things that are integrally intertwined.

One of the points made during the day was the need for more government funding. Bruce Friedrich of GFI said he’s seeing progress on this front, as we’ve seen governments go from “almost zero to hundreds of millions of dollars” in funding in the span of a few years.

Friedrich pointed to how the government helped get the EV industry off the ground by allocating tens of billions of dollars over the past decade and thinks governments could be convinced to eventually do the same for cellular agriculture. 

So the question becomes what this type of funding would look like and how it would be spent. Are tax breaks for large-scale biomanufacturing similar to what we saw for the chip industry with the CHIPS act the right approch? Or what about direct investment in infrastructure, like we’re seeing with the EV charging network buildout spending allocated from the infrastructure bill? The devil is definitely in the details, but one that is sure is that private capital alone won’t get us there alone. 

Who knows, maybe someday we’ll see a biomanufacturing infrastructure plan akin to the CHIP act. For that to take place, the Biden administration or one that follows will need to be convinced that cellular agriculture is not only a growth industry that will provide millions of new jobs (which I think it could), but it’s also strategically important for the US to become a leader in biomanufacturing, something other countries – China and Singapore to name a couple – already have recognized. 

Food robots are popping up everywhere, from fast food to stadiums to even some homes. So what’s the food robot industry look like in 2023? Join us for the Food Robotics Outlook 2023 on March 1st to find out! 

You can register for this free event here. Better hurry before the tickets are gone!  

Sigh. I Guess The Gas Stove is Now Part of the Culture War

Over the past couple of years, food-related matters have become an ever-bigger part of the political culture wars, and the latest one to enter the fray is gas stoves. The recent fuss resulted from some poorly worded remarks from Consumer Product Safety Commission Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr, who told Bloomberg that “any option” was on the table regarding gas stoves: “Products that can’t be made safe can be banned,” he said. 

Some on the right, ever eager for a new political cudgel with which to hit the Biden administration over the head, seized on the words. Trumka later clarified his remarks and said no ban was being considered, but by then, it didn’t matter; gas stoves were fodder in a new culture war.

While there is little chance we’ll ever see an outright ban on gas stoves at the federal level, we are already seeing some restrictions being put in place at the state and city level. Berkeley started it all in 2019, followed by San Francisco and LA, and the state of California is looking to ban gas hookups to new builds by 2030. More recently, states like Washington have passed legislation banning gas in commercial buildings set to kick in this year.

Somewhat lost in the frenzied debate is the momentum we’ve seen for induction cooking over the past couple of years. The technology, which a number of chefs have started to see as superior to that of gas, has become more mainstream in the US in the past couple of years, and forecasts have it continuing to outpace the growth of gas or coiled-electric cooktops. 

The biggest hurdle for induction cooking today is price. On average, a new induction stove still costs more than a gas or coiled electric stove and costs even more if a consumer has to swap out their cookware for induction-compatible pots and pans. The good news is many pans sold today come induction compatible, so many consumers may already be equipped to start cooking with induction. 

For now, organizations like the Decarbonization Coalition are busy making the rounds, doing the hard work of trying to convince more of the benefits of electrification. We wish them luck and hope they don’t get caught in the crossfire!

That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend and we’ll talk to you next week.

Michael Wolf

P.S. The CES food tech report will be out on Monday. There was so much to cover we wanted to make sure to get all of it!

New Alt Protein and Bioinnovation Hubs Are Popping Up From NYC to Israel

This week was a big one when it came to incubating the next generation of future food.

Not only did GFI Israel and Technion announce a new Sustainable Protein Research Center (SPRC), but the city of New York also announced it would build a “bioinnovation hub” with $20 million in new funding earmarked from NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ administration.

The SPRC, which Technion and GFI Israel claim is the first of its kind in the world, “will coordinate the collaborative activities of dozens of researchers from more than ten different academic departments at the Technion and with additional universities and companies to address the world’s most pressing challenges of sustainability and human health.”

The new facility will have a 5-year budget of $20 million and will facilitate the recruitment of new faculty members in the field and support “the construction of a building for the Carasso FoodTech Innovation Center.” The new center will purchase and maintain capital equipment and recruit professional technicians and ” fund collaborative seed research and train graduate students and post-docs in related fields.”

You can read the full story here on The Spoon.

Meati Opens Up ‘Mega Ranch’ Production Facility, Plans to Produce “Tens of Millions of Pounds” of Fungi-Based Meat

Meati Foods, a producer of plant-based whole-food protein made from mycelium, announced the opening of its largest-yet production facility in Thornton, Colorado. The 100 thousand foot facility, dubbed the “Mega Ranch,” is expected to hit a production rate that could produce tens of millions of pounds of the startup’s fungi-derived meat product by late 2023.

The funding for the new facility comes in the form of a $150 million Series C raised last year and a recent $22 million extension round. The company’s total funding to date is more than $250 million.

Meati claims the Mega Ranch will be able to match and even exceed the scale of the United States’ largest individual animal-based ranches. The company says the Ranch is vertically integrated, which means it will allow for the growing, harvesting, processing, and packaging of Meati products under one roof.

Read the full story at The Spoon.

Food Retail

GreenSwapp Wants to Make Figuring Out the Climate Impact of a Bag of Chips as Easy as Snapping a Pic

While the climate impact of our food has finally made the main stage as a topic at the world’s most high-profile summit, the average joe has no idea how good or bad that bag of chips or can of soda is for the environment.

A Dutch startup called GreenSwapp wants to change that by making information about the climate impact of practically any CPG product instantly available to anyone using its technology.

The Amsterdam-based company started as an online grocery app for climate-friendly products, but more recently has focused on building a climate impact data platform for both consumers and companies. To that end, the company debuted a new scanning tool at CES which gives instant scoring (low, medium, or high impact) of practically any packaged food product when the product’s barcode is scanned with a smartphone.

You can read the full story at The Spoon. 

Food Robotics

SJW Robotics Raises $2M as It Eyes Launch of Autonomous Robotic Restaurants This Spring

SJW Robotics, a maker of autonomous robotic restaurants, has raised a $2 million seed funding round, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The Canadian startup’s newest round includes investments from Alley Robotic Ventures and celebrity chef Tom Colicchio.

Company CEO and cofounder Nipun Sharma told The Spoon the new investment would be used to fund the rollout of the company’s robotic kitchen system with partner Compass Canada. The two announced their partnership last summer, with Compass disclosing that they had plans to pilot three RJW robotic restaurant kitchens in select markets. According to Sharma, the first Compass autonomous kitchen pilot will launch at a hospital in the Toronto market under Compass’s Bok Choy brand this spring.

To read the full story, click here!