Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cubiq Foods

Alt-Fat Gets Heavy Push From New Startups Creating Building Blocks For Realistic Meat Alternatives

As some of us work to shed pounds as bathing suit season approaches, a growing cohort of new startups developing new forms of healthier and more sustainable fat alternatives is bulking up on funding to scale production and roll out new products.

The latest alt-fat startup to raise funding is CUBIQ Foods, which announced today they have raised €5.75 million Euros ($6M USD) from Cargill and other investors. CUBIQ, which plans to use the new investment to expand commercial and production operations in North America and Europe, is developing a range of products that include plant-based fat replacements and cell-cultivated fat ingredients.

The company rolled out its first product in 2021, a plant-based fat replacer called GoDrop that improves juiciness with fewer calories and less saturated fats. The company, which initially had hoped to release its cell-cultivated fat by the end of 2020, is now eyeing a 2023 release of its cultivated fat in the US market.

The news of CUBIQ’s latest funding round comes a week after Melt&Marble announced they’d raised a €5 million Seed round to scale up production for its precision fermentation-derived fat alternative. Last year, Mission Barns raised an impressive $24 million for its cell-cultivated fat technology it hopes will plump up the flavor profile of alt-bacon, breakfast patties, burgers, nuggets, and more. And in March, Sunnyvale-based Lypid raised $4 million for its technology that microencapsulates plant oils in water to create spongy fats with high melting points.

The race to create new fat alternatives is part of the broader maturation of a future food industry where new startups work to create building blocks for other companies hoping to develop more realistic meat alternatives. This same “horizontalization” of future food is similar to what has occurred in other technology industries where startups can focus their funding and attention on single attributes or components of the end product. Other future food building block cohort sectors include sweeteners, collagen, scaffolding, and the many companies making alt-protein and flavor components for alt-meat and dairy products.

Barcelona’s Cubiq Foods Raises €5M to Produce Better-for-You Cultured Fat

Cubiq Foods, a Barcelona-based startup making cultured fats for food products, announced today that it had raised €5 million ($5.4 million) from Blue Horizon Ventures and Moira Capital Partners (h/t Tech.eu). This bumps the company’s total amount of funding up to €17 million ($18.4 million).

Founded in 2018, Cubiq Foods cultivates fats and fat/water emulsions for use in industrial food products. The process is very similar to what companies are doing with cultured meat, only they’re doing it with fat. Specifically, Cubiq Foods makes oils that are rich in omega-3s, which have a laundry list of health benefits.

With its new funding, Cubiq Foods will scale up the production of its fats to industrial levels. It aims to make its cell-based fats commercially available to companies around the world by the end of 2020.

In addition to its omega-3 fat, Cubiq also converts liquid oils — like olive oil — into solids, which are intended as replacements for vegan fats like coconut oil. This could have real benefits in plant-based meat, specifically. Many options on the market right now, like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, use coconut oil to give their ground “beef” a juicy richness. Coconut oil is high in saturated fat, which can raise cholesterol levels. Adding Cubiq Foods’ new fats to their products could help plant-based meat companies make their foods more healthy and better fight critiques around health they’ve struggled against over the past year.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, plant-based meat has been getting more attention than ever — and attracting a boatload of funding, to boot. In this climate, I doubt that Cubiq Foods will have difficulty finding alternative protein companies to partner up with.