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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

animal-free

GOOD Meat Receives Approval in Singapore to Use Serum-Free Media for Cultivated Meat Production

GOOD Meat, the cultivated meat division of Eat Just, announced today that it has received regulatory approval from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) for the use of serum-free media for the production of cultivated meat.

Many in the industry believe that using animal-free growth media will not only help the cultivated meat industry achieve what is effectively its raison d’être through the severing of reliance on a cruel animal agriculture industry, but it will also lead to greater scalability, lower manufacturing costs, and a more sustainable product. It also paves the way for the production of larger quantities of real chicken made from cells.

GOOD Meat had previously obtained approval from SFA for its first chicken product in November 2020, and subsequent approval for new formats of its poultry in November 2021. With the latest regulatory approval for serum-free cultivation media, Eat Just says its cell ag meat division will soon transition to a more efficient and favorable production process.

According to the company, its chicken has been featured on menus at restaurants, in hawker stalls, and via food delivery. And now, beginning this month, diners can reserve weekly tables to try out Good Meat’s cultivated chicken at Huber’s Butchery, a Singaporean producer and supplier of meat products.

The company is also working on a Singapore production facility with production partner ABEC. According to Good Meat, the new facility will hold the largest bioreactor in the cultivated meat industry and will be able to use the serum-free production process for its cultivated meat when it opens next year.

“Not too long ago, observers thought removing serum was a major limiting step to scaling cultivated meat,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just. “I could not be prouder of our team for doing just that and receiving approval to commercialize it this week. It’s yet another step forward for our company, the cultivated meat industry, and the health of our planet.”

This week has been a big one for animal-free growth media. On Monday, Multus announced they had raised $9.5 million to fund the production of a growth media production plant. And yesterday, cultivated meat pioneer Mosa Meat announced they had been able to grow cultivated fat without fetal-bovine serum.

Imagindairy Using Precision Fermentation to Create Animal-Free Dairy Proteins

Imagindairy, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup that re-creates dairy proteins without the cow, publicly announced itself and its technology today.

In a press release emailed to The Spoon, Imagindairy said that its micro-flora, precision fermentation technology re-creates nature-identical, animal-free versions of whey and casein proteins. These proteins can be used to develop analogs of dairy products such as cheese, milk and yogurt. Imagindairy says these analogs will have the same flavor, texture and nutritional value as conventional dairy products, and will also be lactose-free, and won’t carry the environmental and ethical complications around raising dairy livestock.

There is certainly an appetite for animal-free dairy products. Recent data from The Good Food Institute found that U.S. sales of plant-based cheese grew 42 percent over the past year and the category is now worth $270 million. More than 162 million units of plant-based yogurt were sold in 2020, up 20 percent over the last year. Meanwhile, sales of plant-based plant-based ice cream and frozen novelty was also up 20 percent with 88 million units sold in 2020.

Precision fermentation has been called the third pillar of alternative protein, alongside plant-based and cultured meat. Last year, the Good Food Institute reported that there were 44 companies working on fermentation-based alternative proteins, up from 23 in 2018. The best known is Perfect Day here in the U.S., which already has products made with its technology out in the market via the Brave Robot ice cream brand. In Germany, Formo (formerly Legendairy) said it will unveil its first precision fermented cheese this year. And over in the Asia-Pacific region, Change Foods is working on its own brand on animal-free cheese.

In its press announcement, Imagindairy said its technology can be “readily integrated” into existing dairy food production facilities. The company has raised $1.5 million in Seed funding, led by The Kitchen FoodTech hub with participation from the Israeli Innovative Authority, CPT Capital, New Crop Capital, and Entrée Capital.

Perfect Day Closes $140M Series C to Expand Animal-Free Dairy Production

Perfect Day, a startup producing animal-free dairy using microbes, today announced it has closed a $140 million Series C funding round. The round was led by Temasek with participation from past investors.

This more than doubles the total amount of funding for the Berkeley-based startup, which raised a $34.8 million Series B earlier this year. Its total money raised is now $201.5 million.

Perfect Day uses genetically engineered microbes to ferment the protein building blocks of dairy, like casein and whey. It then combines them with fat and water to create milk that’s genetically identical to the real thing. Since it’s neither made from plants (plant-based) or grown from animal tissue (cell-based), the startup has coined a new term for its products: flora-based.

Perfect Day will use its new funds to accelerate growth by upping its production capacity, deepening partnerships and developing new products. “We’re trying to scale the supply chain and bring this to the world in a big way,” co-founder and CEO Ryan Pandya told me over the phone last week. Their goal is to be making thousands of metric tons of the proteins by 2022 (right now they’re making tens of tons). The company currently works with food giant ADM to help manufacture its dairy proteins in larger quantities.

Photo: Perfect Day

It also debuted its first product earlier this year: a limited line of ice creams made with Perfect Day’s flora-based milk. (I tried them, they were delicious.) Based on photos sent to us by the company, Perfect Day has also developed animal-free cream cheese, feta, and cheese spread, in addition to straight-up milk.

Though its first product was branded by and sold by Perfect Day, the startup actually plans to sell its dairy B2B to large food companies. We won’t have to wait too long to find out whom that will be — Perfect Day will announce its first commercial partnerships early in 2020. The company is also developing animal-free milk fat which will allow it to create a wider range of flora-based dairy products using only its fermentation technology.

The flora-based dairy space is quite young (the only other player is New Culture). Once Perfect Day uses its sizeable hunk of new funding to scale up and establish a few big-name partnerships, however, flora-based dairy might not be such a niche anymore.

Geltor Partners with GELITA to Make Animal-Free Collagen, Eventually for the CPG Industry

With Halloween coming up, there’s a chance you might find yourself snacking on some brightly-colored gummy candies (my personal weakness) over the next few weeks. Though the candies may be delicious, the process for making gelatin involves grinding up assorted animal parts and is … not super appetizing.

Maybe in a few years you’ll be able to snack on gummies made from gelatin that’s derived not from animals but from fermentation. San Leandro, California-based company Geltor is currently using microbes to “grow” collagen and its constituent proteins, including gelatin.

The startup raised a $18.2 million Series A round last year and stated a goal of launching its animal-free collagen in the food industry by 2020. According to Food Navigator, yesterday Geltor got one step closer to that goal. The company has partnered with industry collagen maker GELITA to commercialize its animal-free collagen in supplements, like vitamins and skincare products, which will be for sale next year.

Geltor will also launch its animal-free collagen in other verticals too — namely the CPG industry. Referencing the GELITA partnership, Geltor co-founder Alexander Lorestani told Food Navigator: “This is the first step, but we’ll continue to look ahead to the broader food and beverage industry to strike partnership there.”

Geltor is one of a group of Silicon Valley startups making animal product alternatives through fermentation technology — that is, creating new proteins using genetically engineered microbes. Perfect Day makes animal-free dairy and Clara Foods is tackling eggs, starting with egg whites. Motif FoodWorks and Air Protein (formerly Kiverdi) are leveraging fermentation to make a broader range of alternative proteins for food usage.

Geltor may be launching in the supplement industry, but its technology could have a widespread impact in the food space. In fact, a surprising amount of everyday products contain gelatin or collagen, from broths to canned beans to caesar dressing. “We’re building the business to broadly serve the CPG industry,” said Lorestani in the aforementioned article. Which means in a few years, the process to make your gummy candies, not to mention a lot of other staple foods, could be a lot more appetizing.

Perfect Day Partners with ADM to Scale up Production of Cow-Free Dairy

Perfect Day, the startup which makes milk without the animal, today announced that it has entered into a partnership with global food processing company Archer Daniels Midland (ADM).

The two forged a Joint Development Agreement to scale up implementation of Perfect Day‘s tech, which uses fermentation to create dairy proteins without any involvement from a cow. Their initial product will be an animal-free whey protein

By taking advantage of ADM existing fermentation infrastructure, Berkeley-based Perfect Day is expecting to scale up and gain price parity with conventional whey protein relatively quickly. They plan to enter the market within the next few years.

Eager customers might not have to wait that long to try animal-free dairy, however. A statement from the founders revealed that Perfect Day is currently forming relationships with food & bev companies “big and small” to develop new products with their animal-free dairy, some of which might be available as early as next year.

Back in March of this year Perfect Day raised $24.7 million, just a month after it received a patent to use their animal-free dairy tech in food applications. This announcement comes roughly a year after the startup shifted to a technology as a service model, partnering with food and drink companies in order to scale and bring their goods to market more quickly.

And wow, did they start off with a big one. As co-founder Perumal Gandhi told us, he wanted Perfect Day’s products to “be national from Day One.” Now, with this ADM partnership, it looks like those ambitions might come true.

How Now, No Cow: Animal-Free Dairy Startup PerfectDay Raises $24.7M

Someone’s moo-ving up in the world.

PerfectDay, a food startup developing technology to make animal-free milk, just raised $24.7 million in series A funding. This brings their total funding to $26.8 million. The round was led by Temasek, a Singapore state-owned investment company, with participation from Horizon Ventures, Iconiq Capital, and Lion Ventures, among others. Berkeley-based Perfect Day is on a roll: earlier this month, they received a patent to use their animal-free dairy technology in food applications.

Though it’s been attracting a good bit of attention as of late, PerfectDay has been around for a while. The company launched in 2014 under the name Muufri, but rebranded to PerfectDay in 2016. (Fun fact: The new name comes from a study which found that cows produced more milk when listening to soothing music like the eponymous Lou Reed tune.) They plan to use their new funding to expand their staff (currently 32 people strong) and accelerate commercial marketing of their product with dairy & food companies.

Unlike other milk alternatives, which are made of plants like soy, almond, or peas, PerfectDay uses fermentation to create the exact same elements found in cow’s milk. Scientists give genetically altered yeast a “blueprint” so that, when fed with certain nutrients, they produce two key proteins in milk: casein and whey.

The resulting proteins can be used to make lactose-free, gluten-free, soy-free, and nut-free milk. They can also be used to make a myriad of dairy products such as cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. While there are plenty of vegan dairy products already on shelves, no cashew cheese or coconut-based gelato will ever taste exactly the same as the dairy original. Products made with PerfectDay’s milk proteins, however, taste just like the “real thing”—after all, the proteins are genetically identical.

When they first launched, PerfectDay was trying to do two things: create a supply chain for animal-free dairy components and put a single brand of cow-free milk on supermarket shelves. In November of 2017 co-founder Perumal Gandhi announced on LinkedIn that they would shift course to focus on a B2B model, creating a supply chain for animal-free dairy products and partnering with food and drink companies to bring their technology to market.

And this, in my opinion, is where things start to get really interesting. “Nobody else was working on the supply chain side,” Gandhi told The Spoon. “We started this company to have the largest possible impact on the effects of animal agriculture on our planet, and now we can do that by working with grocery stores across multiple channels. We can be national from Day One.”

 

Animal-free milk has significantly lower environmental impact than cow’s milk.

By joining forces with existing food manufacturers, especially large dairy companies, PerfectDay hopes to alter the system from the inside. With the recent trends for vegan products and milk alternatives, this disruption could prove to be pretty profitable—both for PerfectDay and the planet. And given their investors’ connections with large-scale food and beverage brands, PerfectDay will likely be able to commercialize their “milk” protein technology relatively quickly.

Gandhi said that, while they’re also partnering with smaller, family-owned businesses, they need to team up with big companies to truly change the food industry. He hopes that their lab-grown casein and whey will eventually be like pea protein is today: an ingredient that used to be rare, but is now fairly commonplace in animal-free products.

The path ahead is not without obstacles. PerfectDay will have to convince consumers that cow-free dairy products can taste and function indistinguishably from traditional dairy, and can be produced at a competitive price. They will also have to figure out what their new products will be called.

In fact, the PerfectDay team is currently in talks with the FDA to determine what sort of labeling use for their cow-free dairy. Unlike lab-grown meat, which is fighting Big Beef to be able to use “meat” on their labels, Gandhi said that they want to call their product something other than “milk.” “We’re trying to come up with a nomenclature to show the consumer that this is produced in a new way, without animals,” he said. “If we call it milk then we’re not being transparent.” This makes sense, especially if their products are more expensive; people want to know why they’re paying a premium.

Challenges aside, their technology as a service model has the potential to be hugely successful. By choosing to use a B2B model, PerfectDay will no doubt be able to scale more quickly than with a B2C model. It will be interesting to follow their progress and see how they compare in, say, 5 years with other food tech startups who chose to market directly to consumers.

If the current trend towards animal protein alternatives continues, PerfectDay will no doubt take home some serious (cow-free) cheddar.