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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

alternative protein

Waring and Planit Protein Debut Fermentation Appliance for Chefs to Create Plant-Based Proteins

This week at the National Restaurant Show, commercial equipment provider Waring and Planit Protein debuted a new commercial fermentation system to create plant-based proteins in commercial kitchens. The new system, called the Planit POD Fermentation Chamber, uses single-ingredient bases provided by Planit Protein combined with a proprietary starter culture to create eight pounds of customizable protein base in 24 hours.

The origins of the Planit Pod and its development into a kitchen fermentation appliance date back 40 years when an inventor named Gunter Pfaff, along with his partner Joy DuPuis, began making homemade tempeh. Eventually, Pfaff designed an appliance constructed from plywood, which he perfected in 2015. He collaborated with a product development firm, the DuPuis Group, to finalize the U.S. patent. Although Pfaff passed away shortly after perfecting his appliance-powered fermentation process, the DuPuis Group continued to refine and test the appliance until they could ferment a variety of plant-based proteins from bases such as chickpea, lentils, and mushroom protein.

After working on the fermentation process and system, the team formed a separate company in Planit Protein and started to work on building a commercial system in partnership with Waring. Waring’s General Manager Dan DeBari recalled to The Spoon the day he got the call from the company to see if there was any interest in helping to develop the fermentation appliance.

“They had worked with (Pfaff), who had a patent on a small machine that was actually made of plywood, and they came to us and said this is something they knew they couldn’t manufacture themselves. They asked if we were interested. That was on a Wednesday, and I hopped on a plane to California the next day to go meet with them.”

DeBari explained that at the time, the company was looking for new and innovative new types of product concepts that would be differentiated in the marketplace.

“We were looking to sort of get away from the creation of the me-too products and go into some real innovation,” said DeBari.

The system, which will cost around $2 thousand when it ships in Q4 of this year, will give restaurant and food service chefs a turnkey fermentation appliance that enables them to make their own custom-built plant-based proteins in-house, something that, except for the most adventurous of chefs, doesn’t really exist today in the form of commercial kitchen system.

Initially, users of the Planit POD fermentation chamber will have three base options: a roasted chickpea base, hybrid lentils, and a “burger” blend—a proprietary mix of mushroom protein, pea protein, and chickpea. To start the process, chefs prepare the base, such as boiling chickpeas for 45 minutes until soft, adding the starter culture, and then placing them on a sheet that is inserted into the appliance. After 24 hours, they obtain a fermented base ready for making tempeh, koji, or plant-based meat.

I’m pretty intrigued by this system, especially since most chefs’ efforts to do on-premise fermentation usually involve Macgyver’d contraptions that can include fish tanks, water pumps, and humidifiers. As more restaurants look to put plant-based proteins on the menu, this type of system could help create a new appliance category and an associated protein-based supply chain that helps them turnkey the whole process.

And this says nothing of the potential for bringing this type of system into the home, something that Planit Protein already has on its product roadmap. According to Planet Protein, the “Planit Pod Home will be next and ideal for the foodie’s countertop at home.”

Planit POD by Waring Fermentation Chamber Sizzle

GFI: U.S. Plant-Based Meat Sales in Food Service Hit All-Time High in ’22, Retail Sales Remain Flat

According to a new report from the Good Food Institute (GFI) examining plant-based meat sales in the U.S. food service sector, sales of meat derived from plants sold to restaurants and other food service institutions hit $730 million in 2022, up 7.8% and $53 million in total dollars compared to the previous year. GFI also says that total U.S. retail sales for plant-based meat – still the biggest overall category – remained flat at $1.4 billion last year.

The GFI report detailed total U.S. sales of plant-based meat, including food service, retail sales, and e-commerce. According to the report, total plant-based meat sales revenue grew slightly from $2.1 billion in 2021 to $2.2 billion in 2022, amounting to an increase of 2%. However, while total plant-based meat revenue was up year over year, GFI’s report says that total pounds of U.S. plant-based meat sold dipped slightly from 349 million to 336 million in 2022, a dip of 4%.

If you’re curious how total revenue went up while pounds shipped went down, that’s due to price increases for plant-based meat brought on by inflation. According to GFI, wholesale prices for plant-based meat in broadline distribution increased by 4% in 2022 over the previous year, half that of the 8% increase in prices for animal-based meat products. Animal meat product price increases were in line with the estimated increase in food service pricing, which was an estimated 8% in 2022. According to GFI, overall plant-based meat price per pound has decreased by 11% since 2019, which they attribute to increased scale and more favorable sourcing agreements with distributors.

GFI also broke down where plant-based meats were sold in the food service category. According to the report, 39% of alternative meat was sold through quick-service restaurants (i.e. fast food), while full-service restaurants accounted for 19%. Education came in a distant third, accounting for 16% of plant-based meat sales in the food service category for 2022.

You can read the full GFI report here.

Molecular Farming Startup Moolec Shows Off ‘Piggy Sooy,’ Its Animal Protein Producing Soybean

Today molecular farming startup Moolec showed off its new soybean platform for producing animal proteins, the “Piggy Sooy.”

According to the company, the new soybean reached an expression level of up to 26.6% of total soluble protein in soy seeds, which they say is four times higher than initially projected. Moolec says that the results can be observed visually in the pink color of the bean, which is essentially the same color as a pig. The company says the success of its soybean platform has led them to “file a new patent utilizing a novel approach aiming to provide the company with a frictionless regulatory pathway going forward.”

Moolec, a spinout of Bioceres Crop Solutions, is one of the first companies to utilize molecular farming to create alternative proteins. Molecular farming is that it uses crops as a protein factory, compared to traditional microbial fermentation techniques that utilize more capital-intensive fermentation infrastructure. Genetic engineers introduce animal DNA directly into the seeds, and once the genetically engineered seeds are planted, traditional farming management techniques can be employed to grow the crops until they are ready for harvest.

The efficiency of the technique recently led to the Good Food Institute declaring that molecular farming as the ‘fourth pillar’ of alternative protein. According to GFI, there are currently 12 companies worldwide using this technology to grow various products, including casein and lactoferrin (Forte Protein and Greenovation Protein), animal-free dairy proteins for cheese, ice cream, and yogurt (Miruku, Mozza, and Nobell Foods), growth factors for cultivated meat (Tiamet Sciences and Bright Biotech), and more.

Prime Roots Raises $30M Series B for Deli Meat Made With Koji Mycelium

The average supermarket deli is a sad carnival of sulfites, nitrates, and preservatives that go bump in your belly. There have been a handful of upstarts in the plant-based food space attempting to create a healthy alternative to sliced cotto salami or chunks of smoked roast beef. One Berkeley-based company believes it has a healthy, tasty solution.

Prime Roots, producer of deli-style meat made from koji mycelium, announced $30 million in Series B funding this month from True Ventures, Pangaea Ventures, Prosus Ventures, Top Tier Capital, Diamond Edge Ventures, bringing their total funding to $50 million. The fresh funding will enable Prime Roots to scale and expand to deli counters and restaurants. The company’s alternative deli product currently is available primarily in the San Francisco Bay area.

Growing up with family in the food industry, Prime Roots founder and CEO Kimberlie Le knew that the focus had to be a multi-barreled approach: taste was a must; nutrition was also a consideration, and sustainability also was vital.

“Because I come from a food background, I really wanted to emphasize taste,” Le told The Spoon in a recent interview. “We wanted to make sure the products taste good first and foremost. When we started six years ago, we were also thinking about really the nutrition and the cleanliness of the products. At the time, legacy brands had long ingredient lists and a lot of unpronounceable ingredients. I really wanted to fix that because it wasn’t anything that my mom, who’s a chef, would want to serve in her restaurants or at home. And so really took it upon myself to find a solution that really met the consumer where they are and really solved a personal problem for conscience eaters.”

Prime Roots approaches the deli case with the identical microscopic texture of meat, along with its umami taste made from plants. Experienced chefs helped develop the most popular deli products-including cracked pepper turkey, black forest ham, hickory bacon, salami, and pepperoni to emulate the savory, meaty taste, and texture that consumers demand for meat substitutes. According to the company, Prime Roots’ turkey and ham have no nitrates, preservatives, cholesterol, soy, wheat and are lower in sodium than the leading brands.

Koji is a strain of a fungus used for various culinary purposes, including the production of alcoholic beverages like sake or invaluable condiments like miso and mirin. In the case of creating deli meats, koji ignites the fermentation process when added to other base ingredients. Other companies such as Meati and Aqua Culture Foods use koji in their production of alternative proteins.

Le said that as part of her due diligence, she toured a number of delis across the country including New York, the center for all things corned beef and pastrami. The goal was to see how receptive these landmark eateries would be to a new product.

“When we were working on the concept, the deli concept,” Le recalled, “The first thing we did when we had initial prototypes was go to New York, which is really deli mecca and had prototypes which we would take into some of the most iconic delis and say, ‘Hey, try this’ to see how open and receptive these deli folks were and how the deli culture would be receptive to a plant-based product.”

 “Surprisingly, we didn’t get kicked out of a single place, and everyone was super excited to put the meats on their slicer. They were wowed by the texture, the slicing capabilities, and were just very open and excited.”

XPRIZE Announces Finalists For $15M Competition to Develop More Sustainable Protein

XPRIZE, an organization that hosts competitions to seek out solutions to global challenges, announced the six finalists of its $15 million XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion (FTNB) competition. The contest, kicked off in 2020, seeks to stimulate the development of more sustainable and accessible chicken breast and fish filet alternatives that can satisfy the rising demand for meat products amid a growing global population.

According to the release, the six finalists have developed “multiple consistent cuts of a meat alternative that replicate the look, taste, smell, feel, cooking behavior and nutritional properties of a structured filet of fish or chicken breast.” The finalists were selected by a judging panel of “diverse experts in international sustainability, agricultural and biological engineering, the food industry, and experts working at the highest levels of academia and research.” 

The finalists, which were selected from a semi-finalist group of 28 companies (later expanded to 31), include a mix of cell-cultured, fermentation, and plant-based platforms. The mix between chicken and fish is 50/50, with three for each:

  • CellX: Cell-based chicken team from China
  • Eternal: Fermentation-derived chicken team from Argentina
  • The PlantEat: Plant-based chicken team from South Korea
  • ProFillet: Plant-based fish team from Canada
  • Revo Foods: Plant-based fish team from Austria
  • TFTAK: Plant-based fish team from Estonia

What’s just as interesting as which companies were named finalists are which ones didn’t make it to the final round. The list of semi-finalists included some of the biggest names in alternative protein across cell-cultured (UPSIDE, Good Meat, Blue Nalu to name a few), mycelium-based (Atlast/MyForest, Good Meat Company) and gas fermentation (Air Protein) based products, and none of these companies made the finalist round.

Also surprising is that none of the companies chosen were based in the United States, the country which has seen the biggest overall amount of venture capital go into alternative protein. Two of the finalists are from Asia, two from Europe, one from Latin America, and one from Canada.

One reason some of the bigger names didn’t end up on the finalist list is no doubt due in part due to the withdrawal by up to about 11 companies earlier this year due to a revision to the contest’s rule changes last year that said Aspire, one of the co-sponsors of the event, would have a right of first refusal on investment in the finalists. The rules were revised slightly in September, but the restrictions still proved too much for many finalists such as Eat Just, Wild Type and Better Meat Company.

The FTNB competition was modeled after XPRIZE conducted an analysis of global food system challenges in which it identified 12 breakthroughs that could establish a more food-secure and environmentally sustainable world by 2050. From these 12, the group chose the need for alternative proteins at-scale as a critical impact area that requires significant technological advances, decreased price points, and notable shifts in consumers’ preferences.

From here, the finalists will head to the next round of tastings. The semifinalist round was hosted in Abu Dhabi, which is the home to Aspire, which cosponsored this XPRIZE competition alongside the Tony Robbins Foundation. According to XPRIZE, the winning team, which will be selected in 2024, will develop multiple consistent cuts of chicken breast or fish filet alternatives (115 grams / 4 ounces) that can replicate the sensory properties, structure, versatility, and nutritional profile of conventional chicken or fish, while having a lower comparable environmental footprint than animal-agriculture derived products.  

New School Foods Swims Against the Current In Its Approach to Alternative Proteins

In business, the daring entrepreneurs zig when others zag. In the world of plant-based alternative proteins, Chris Bryson, CEO and founder of New School Foods, decided to zig his way into a new approach, introducing a new patented freezing process to create whole cuts of salmon.

New School Foods, based in Toronto, comes out of stealth mode with a strong ambition fueled by research, investment capital, and a mission. As Bryson told The Spoon in a recent interview, companies in the plant-based protein space have primarily focused on small cuts such as nuggets and burgers using a process that uses heat in the extrusion, which precooks the food.

Bryson described how New School differs on both counts.

“We always intended to be a company that focuses on what we call whole cuts, he said. “We see that as sort of the next frontier of alternative protein. “Burgers and nuggets are great, but there’s a much bigger opportunity, and I wanted to work on that. With alternative proteins, if you can create the equivalent of a Tesla for food, it becomes exciting for people to switch and feel like there’s no compromise, and we can create real impact.”

Bryson said that before diving into the company’s approach to alternative proteins, he funded a lot of research, much of which yielded inconclusive results. One, however, hit the jackpot. “One of those projects came up with this complete alternative to extrusion. And it doesn’t use heat to create texture, and it uses cold or freezing to create texture.” And it is with freezing that New School can more easily produce whole cuts and offer healthy fats.

High moisture extrusion, Bryson said, is used in products such as Beyond Burger. As such, the food is precooked and often “uses color tricks” to make the transition more closely resemble an aminal product such as a hamburger.

Another differentiator for New School is its scaffolding.

“We create a mold with empty slots– thousands of these small vertical channels that we fill up, and we turn those vertical channels into protein fibers because it’s a mold. It gives us the flexibility to work with different proteins. And based on the animal that we’re trying to emulate, we can pick proteins that transition or cook at the same temperature that the animal protein does”.

Bryson goes on to say that the company’s focus is to create a salmon that looks and tastes like the fish that swims against the current and provides the “right mouth feel.”

“We spent countless months, if not years, focusing on how we recreate that no feel. And that comes down to recreating muscle fibers. So, our technology allows us to tune the width of the muscle fiber, the length of the muscle fiber, and the resistance of the muscle fiber,” he said. It also provides a platform that can be used for other types of fish, seafood, and alternative proteins in general.

New School aims to have a product commercially ready in 2024, first for restaurants and then for consumers. Armed with $13 million in funding from Lever VC, Hatch, Good Startup, Blue Horizon Ventures, Clear Current Capital, Alwyn Capital, Basecamp Ventures, and Climate Capital, Bryson said the funds would be used to build out a pilot facility in the Toronto area.

Multus Biotechnology Raises $9.5m Series A To Build Growth Media Production Plant

Multus Biotechnology, a UK-based startup, has announced the close of a $9.5 million Series A investment round to build a growth media production facility. The funding includes an equity-free grant of $2.5 million from Innovate UK through the EIC Accelerator. The round was led by Mandi Ventures, with key investors including SOSV, Big Idea Ventures, SynBioVen, and Asahi Kasei Corp.

With new funding in hand, Multus plans to build a growth media production plant in the UK that it hopes will accelerate the cultivated meat industry towards price parity with affordable food-safe growth media at commercial scale. The London-based startup will also accelerate product development in advanced growth media formulations and food-grade raw materials. This week’s funding follows a $2.2 million raise in 2021 and the launch of the company’s first product, Proliferum® M, an all-in-one solution to eliminate the use of foetal bovine serum in cell culture.

Last week, the Spoon discussed the new funding round and the company’s plans with Multus CEO and cofounder Cai Linton.

Tell us about Multus platform.

“At Multus we combine novel ingredient discovery with intelligent formulation design to create high performance growth media suited for the cellular agriculture industry. For example, we use precision fermentation and computational protein design to make growth factors affordable and unlock capabilities in growth media design.”

Like many in this space, Multus is focused on creating animal-free growth media. Tell us about your thinking here and how your platform gets there

Growth factors have historically been a leading cost-driver in serum-free growth media. Another area we are investing heavily is nutrient-rich plant-derived ingredients that are food-safe, affordable and scalable using well-established food-manufacturing practices. These complex ingredients allow us to design high-performance growth media for a variety of cultivated meat-relevant cell types with no animal serum and a clear route to scale. To capture the complexity of a large ingredient library and new cell types and performance objectives, we combine machine learning with high-throughput formulation screening to optimise our growth media efficiently in our MediOp platform.

How did the Multus founding team get started and how did you decide what problem to tackle?

We have taken the challenge of designing affordable, food-safe growth media for the cellular agriculture industry to be an engineering challenge. At Imperial College London, I met my co-founders – Kevin with a background in data-science, Reka with synthetic biology and regenerative medicine, and myself with bioengineering – to combine data science and engineering principles to biology and build enabling technology to accelerate the cellular agriculture industry’s time to market and time to price parity and scale.

There is no silver bullet in growth media. Every aspect from amino acids and growth factors to the formulation optimisation and manufacturing is considered in our interdisciplinary approach. With growth factors, we realised in 2020 that similar proteins are already produced at much larger scale and lower price points than we will ever need in the cellular agriculture industry by companies in the industrial enzyme industry. The difficulty with growth factors is that they inherently have a short half-life due to their function as cell-to-cell signalling molecules in dynamic systems (i.e. humans/animals). When the system is stable (i.e. a large bioreactor), the rapid degradation of growth factors creates an expensive problem. Therefore, we decided to utilise readily scalable and affordable technology in precision fermentation and focus our innovation in computational protein design to create biodesigned growth factors with enhanced potency and prolonged activity.

Can you tell us more about how you are using computational biology and machine learning to solve the problem of growth media.

We also recognise scientific understanding of cell metabolism in the new cell types used in cultivated meat is not sufficient to prompt rational design of growth media, especially when using complex or food-grade raw materials. As such, we have turned growth media optimisation into a data-science problem by capturing large amounts of data on cell behaviour and using computational modelling and machine learning to analyse the data and efficiently find the best combinations of ingredients to maximise performance.

As time goes on, we are accumulating more and more data with different ingredients and different cell types to continue improving the efficiency of our platform and thus the control we have over cell growth. One of the unique benefits of our MediOp platform is that we can efficiently customise growth media to meet multiple objectives in a short time-period. This will be especially important when large-scale production of cultivated meat puts constrains on access to raw materials and rapid re-formulation becomes an important business need Multus will be able to meet.

Tell us your plans post-funding.

To bring our novel ingredient discovery and intelligent formulation design, we are investing in a first-of-its-kind production facility to make food-safe growth media at commercial scale with non-dilutive funding from Innovate UK through the EIC Accelerator. We recently announced we achieved ISO22000 certification in our production lab, a major step forward in becoming the all-in-one solution and preferred supplier of growth media to the cellular agriculture industry. Our facility is being built in the UK and will be able to support several companies scaling from bench to pilot, and pilot to commercial manufacturing.

No Meat Factory Raises $42 Million to Expand Plant-Based Meat Manufacturing Capacity

No Meat Factory, a leading plant-based alternative protein manufacturer, announced today that it has closed a Series B funding round, raising $42 million USD. The funding round was led by new investor Tengelmann Growth Partners, with participation from existing investor Emil Capital Partners (ECP). The company plans to use the funding to expand its production footprint in North America and build out its manufacturing capabilities to service the global market, increasing access to affordable alternative proteins for mainstream consumers.

No Meat Factory will use its new BRC-certified facilities in British Columbia to produce plant-based alternative protein products for its brand partners. Products will include meat alternatives for convenience products like nuggets and hamburgers and whole-muscle alternatives. Its second production facility, which will begin operations in early 2023, will increase production capacity and provide additional manufacturing capabilities for plant-based deli and sausage alternatives.

“The traction No Meat Factory has experienced in just a few short years is evidence that consumers want greater access to plant-based alternative proteins and brands are looking for ways to deliver quality at an affordable price,” said Dieter Thiem, CEO and cofounder of No Meat Factory. “With this latest funding round, we are excited to not only expand our operations to meet the needs of our partners, but to take advantage of the support and expertise of our investors as we expand our footprint globally.”

No Meat Factory will also continue to make significant investments in its global research and development organization that focuses on commercializing the latest innovations in alternative protein.

“No Meat Factory has an exceptional founding team with decades of experience in the plant-based industry, and we are thrilled to come on board to support the company’s next phase of growth,” said Patrick Schaich, Investment Partner at Tengelmann Growth Partners.

The funding is notable because it comes at a time when the plant-based meat industry has been struggling and has seen overall VC capital going into the space decline significantly. One factor in No Meat’s Factory’s favor may be its cofounder team, which includes Dieter Thiem, who was the former president of plant-based meat manufacturing company Flora Protein (which sold to Garden Protein) and COO Leon Bell, who was previously with ADM, where he helped launch the company’s plant-based meat solutions.

Here Are Some Alternative Protein & Future Food Innovations Heading to CES 2023

Ever since Impossible stole the show at CES with the debut of the Impossible Burger 2.0 in 2019, a growing number of future food startups head to Vegas each January to try to repeat the feat or, at the very least, build momentum for the coming year.

This year will be no different, and companies making everything from new types of fat to bug protein infrastructure will be on the show floor starting this Thursday.

Below are some of the alternative protein and future food startups on our radar for CES 2023:

Armored Fresh – If you’ve ever wanted to try plant-based cheese, this is your chance. Armored Fresh which launched their plant-based cheeses in the US in October, creates its cheese with almond milk and plant-based lactic acid. The company, which has a number of patents for its process, will be showcasing its cheese starting January 5th at booth 53314.

Koreasoft – If cheese isn’t your thing, how about bugs? Koreasoft showing off its 3rd generation edible insect smart farm machine and system on the bottom floor of the Venetian Expo in Eureka Park in the Korea Pavilion.

SavorEat – Israel-based SavorEat is has built a 3D-printing robot that makes plant-based meat. The company’s focus for now is food service, but they intend to create a home machine in the future. SavorEat will be in the Food Tech Pavilion in the Venetian Expo at Booth #53117.

Kwang Jin Corp – This Korean startup will be showing off its plant-based food product, ‘DNS Da Neung Sik’, which originated from Chungguk jang, a traditional Korean fermented food. DNS’s main ingredient is soybeans and the company says it is a futuristic fermented alternative milk rich in protein and probiotics. You can find DNS Da Neung in the Korea Pavilion in Eureka Park.

Lypid – Lypid makes PhytoFat, a proprietary plant-based fat line that it claims mimics the texture, mouthfeel, transfer of flavor, and cooking behavior of animal fats. The company plans to sell its product to manufacturers to add animal meat-like juiciness and mouthfeel to plant-based meats. The company will in the Taiwan Tech Arena, booth 62500, starting Thursday.

Nuldam – Nuldam makes a variety of plant-based food, including vegan macarons and vegan aquafaba. They will be in the Food Tech Pavilion at booth #52914.

Nature’s Fynd – Nature’s Fynd makes alternative meat products utilizing a hearty new microbe called Fusarium strain flavolapis, which they discovered in the remnants of acidic volcano springs of Yellowstone National Park. Nature’s Fynd will be sampling their product outside of CES in a food truck.

The Spoon will be covering all the food tech news they find at CES. Check back regularly!

Perfect Day is Building an AWS for Precision Fermentation

Back when Amazon was still just an e-commerce company, founder Jeff Bezos became so frustrated that every project took so long to get going that he asked his then-chief of staff, Andy Jassy, to investigate. What Jassy found is that everyone was spending all their time reinventing wheels:

“…(Jassy) found a running complaint. The executive team expected a project to take three months, but it was taking three months just to build the database, compute or storage component. Everyone was building their own resources for an individual project, with no thought to scale or reuse.

The internal teams at Amazon required a set of common infrastructure services everyone could access without reinventing the wheel every time, and that’s precisely what Amazon set out to build — and that’s when they began to realize they might have something bigger.

That something bigger eventually became AWS, which Jassy visualized as something he called the Internet OS, where the company would provide all the necessary ingredients for an Internet company to run a successful business.

While both Bezos and Jassy were visionaries to realize they could offer Amazon’s industry-leading Internet infrastructure as a platform to help Internet companies could build products, no one – not even Bezos or Jassy – could have predicted the company’s cloud services would eventually become a $46 billion annual business.

Since then, we’ve seen the infrastructure-as-a-service playbook applied to new verticals, from delivery to food service production. But when it comes to building the future of food, we’ve yet to see any companies create a full-stack production platform for alt protein.

Enter Perfect Day. The company, which has made a name for itself with its pioneering precision-fermentation derived animal-identical proteins, has begun to put together the pieces to help create essentially what is an AWS for alt-protein, particularly precision fermentation.

The latest move in the company’s evolution towards becoming a full-stack microbial fermentation services company is its acquisition of Sterling Biotech Limited (SBL), an India-based biomanufacturing services company that currently serves the pharmaceutical and food industries. According to the announcement, the acquisition will double the company’s production capability by adding four high-value assets. These manufacturing facilities include fermenters that provide precision fermentation capabilities, which Perfect Day will use to expand its precision fermentation capabilities while continuing to service existing SBL customers.

This news comes just a couple of months after Perfect Day announced the formalization of their enterprise services business, which the company is calling nth, under which it plans to offer expertise and technology services to partners developing food and other products that utilize precision fermentation-derived inputs. According to Perfect Day, the company worked for two years to develop the nth services business, building out its scale-up production, IP licensing, strain engineering services, and other precision fermentation solutions.

nth is the only enterprise biology company in the world that offers end-to-end expertise and services from the earliest stages of molecular development to commercial-scale manufacturing, and the many steps in between.

While Perfect Day has a lead in creating an alternative protein services platform, they aren’t the only ones trying to become an essential partner for others. For example, Gingko and its Motif subsidiary are working to build an ingredient platform business, and BioBrew is offering scaled manufacturing services to companies like Clara. Others, like Pow, provide scale-up services and infrastructure to companies in the early stages of product development. But none of these have the depth of services that Perfect Day has, at least now.

There’s been much conversation as of late around how companies in alternative protein will scale their products to make them more affordable and plentiful enough to make a dent in traditional animal agriculture. Perfect Day’s answer this to make their processes, technology, and production infrastructure available to others, so these early-stage companies don’t spin their wheels trying to recreate the wheel.

The Secret to Scaling a Plant-Based Meat Startup With Nowadays’ Max Elder

In his previous life, Max Elder worked as a futurist, where he helped food brands develop strategies for the future.

One of his primary motivations in this work was the belief he could help steer these brands away from animal agriculture and toward a future centered around more humane and sustainable foods. Over time, however, Elder realized that to have a meaningful impact, he’d have to create his own product.

“I always thought that I could sneak into the boardroom and try to shift the Titanic,” Elder said. “That was meaningful work, but it’s quite hard to do. Structural sort of incentives aren’t aligned in these kinds of companies. And Titanics sink. That’s the story, right?”

So in late 2020, Elder left his job as a futurist and created a plant-based meat company. With Nowadays, Elder envisions a future where he can have a bigger impact by scaling meat utilizing production techniques perfected for traditional animal agriculture.

“To truly scale these products efficiently so that the category can realize its potential, we have to think more creatively about our manufacturing process, our finishing process, and partnering with existing players across the meat value chain,” Elder said.

He sees many plant-based meat startups trying to create entirely new ways to make their products when, in truth, many existing processes built for the world of animal agriculture work and are already highly scalable.

“A lot of work is being done to recreate wheels,” Elder said. “And the (existing) wheels are cheap, ubiquitous, and super efficient. They’re just pumping out conventional protein that isn’t as good for people or the planet.”

So while Titantics may sink, Elder thinks he has created a way to leverage much of the existing know-how from the old world to lift the tide of alternative proteins by making them more efficient and affordable.

“As a founder, Nowadays is my version of a speedboat. Hopefully, one that we can grow to have impact.”

Elder was this week’s guest on The Spoon podcast, where we talked about his transition from strategist to entreprenuer, and Elder put his futurist hat back on to look at where things are going in the world of alternative protein.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below or get it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Vienna’s LIVIN Farms Receives €6 million to Upcycle Food Waste Into Insect-Powered Protein

Turning food waste into a usable commodity might seem like magic, but it’s a reality for companies such as Vienna-based LIVIN farms. The company has announced a €6 million Series A round led by venture Investor Peter Luerssen, allowing it to expand its team and solution.

As a player in the alternative protein space, LIVIN Farms developed HIVE PRO, a modular system for fully automated insect processing. HIVE PRO allows waste management companies and large-scale food producers to upcycle organic waste and by-products into valuable proteins, fats, and fertilizers.

In an interview with The Spoon, Katharina Unger, Founder of LIVIN Farms, explained her company’s process. “Livin Farms customers are largely food and feed processing companies and agricultural players that have access to at least several thousand tons of organic by-products every year. They typically make a loss on it by having disposal costs. Generally used feed substrates include by-products, surplus production from the bakery, potato, vegetable, and fruit processing industry, and pre-consumer wastes from retail and grain by-products.”

One of the critical elements of the LIVIN Farms solution is the use of black soldier fly larvae in its “plug-and-play” solution. A module is set up at a customer site, after which, as Unger says, her company operates it as a Farming as a Service (FaaS) model. The first step is when the organic waste of the customer is recycled on-site by being processed and prepared as feed for the insects. After that is completed, using a robotic handling machine moves the feed made from the organic food waste into pallet-sized trays. The machine then inserts seedlings (baby larvae) and empties the harvest-ready larvae from the trays.

At this point, insect Larvae are fed on recycled organic food waste in a climate-controlled environment. The insects are then ready to be harvested within seven days only. The final step is processing the insect larvae into protein powder and oils. The end product is three animal feed types high in protein, antibacterial, and antiviral properties.

LIVIN Farms LIVIN farms recently opened a fully up-and-running 1,400 square meter pilot site in Vienna where the HIVE PRO is demonstrated to interested customers.

Unger began her journey to building LIVIN Farms in 2013, she said. “The idea for Livin farms started when I developed the first device to grow the entire lifecycle of the black soldier fly larvae in a kitchen device to turn kitchen scraps into proteins ready to harvest. This prototype was patented and then turned into a tabletop farm for mealworms (The Hive) later on that was sold in the hundreds to more than 45 countries worldwide. Since 2019, Livin Farms has used our years of R&D to focus on industrial insect farming technologies.”

The company is working on projects throughout Europe, Unger said. LIVIN Farms hopes to have several installations over the next several years.

LIVIN Farms has previously secured a Seed investment round, grants, and subsidies from the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), Austrian Promotional Bank (AWS), and the European Innovation Council (EIC) under the European “Green Deal,” totaling more than $4 million €. The company believes its latest investment will lead to the “further growth of the company and will be used for expanding the LIVIN farms team, standardization of the technical solutions, and driving the initial scale-up phase.”