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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Culture Biosciences

As Future Food Companies Look to Grow, A New Crop of Startups Lend a Hand on Biomanufacturing Scale-up

While companies creating precision fermented and cell-cultured food products continue to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, the reality is their products are still years away from making a significant dent in the overall consumption of a growing global population.

The primary reason for this is that these products still aren’t being produced at nearly the scale they need to feed billions of people. Some estimates have put the biomanufacturing capacity needed by 2030 at 10 billion liters in order to meet the projected demand for fermentation-based animal proteins.

The good news is that a growing number of companies are building out technology and services platforms to help these companies move towards scaled production. One such company is Solar Biotech, which makes customized plant architectures to help future food and other companies scale up their biomanufacturing capacity. The company has been working with startups such as Motif Foodworks and TurtleTree Labs to help them develop their product and move towards higher capacity production.

With Motif, Solar helped them move into pilot production manufacturing for their new plant-based meat ingredient building block, HEMAMI. In partnerships like this, Solar will assist a company with technology transfer of their early products towards higher-scale manufacturing using what it calls its SynBio Hyperintegration Algorithms (SHAs). The end result of its proprietary algorithms is creating customized and modular production facilities built around what the company calls BioNodes.

The partnership worked so well for Motif in developing its HEMAMI product line that the company recently extended its collaboration with Solar.

“The continuation of our partnership will help secure the infrastructure needed to build out Motif’s pipeline of future products,” said Jonathan McIntyre, CEO of Motif FoodWorks, of his partnership with Solar. “Companies like Solar Biotech are an essential link in the move to create a more sustainable food-supply chain that has a positive impact on people, animals and the planet.”

Pow Bio is another company that brings scale-up expertise to new food startups. Pow helps startups building alternative proteins with the necessary fermentation capacity and infrastructure to help move their product concept off the bench and into production scale.

“We have a complete fermentation lab that scales and can take you from a flask you can hold in your hand to 1000L liters of fermentation capacity, which covers the entire ‘pilot’ stage of scale-up,” said cofounder Shannon Hall.

Pow helped alt-cheese startup New Culture take its early lab work and scale-up for pilot production. Before New Culture worked with Pow, their product cost roughly $100,000 to produce a kilogram of cheese. After working with Pow, the company’s product has dropped significantly and is approaching price parity with traditional cheese.

And then there’s Culture Biosciences, a startup that investor Dave Friedberg has described as an ‘AWS for bioreactors’. The company initially started with cloud-connected 250mL stirred tank bioreactors for fast-cycle bench development as a service, and in October of last year took on funding to expand and build out 5L and 250L bioreactors to help move from bench to pilot-scale production.

“Through Culture, we now have the option of a one-stop-shop for bench-scale testing and pilot-scale production,” said Ranjan Patnaik, CTO of alt-egg startup The EVERY Company. “We can develop a process with Culture and easily make a large batch of material. Other benefits include accelerating product pipeline development, data-driven, and lower-risk scaling, and saving them time and money required to build additional fermentation capacity.”

As innovators in the future food industry work on developing their products, these three companies look to play a pivotal role in helping them make the leap. But these three aren’t the only ones, and I expect to see more startups emerge to help fill the biomanufacturing commercialization gap for future food products as investors realize the future food industry doesn’t lack for good ideas, but what it does lack the scale-up and production capacity needed to feed billions of people by 2030.

The Week in Food Tech Funding: Culture Biosciences & Tufts Nab Funding as Interest in Scaling Cell Ag Grows

Over the past 12 months, money has poured into cultivated meat startups as venture investors, celebrities, and governments look to get in on what many believe is the next big thing in alternative protein.

However, as the excitement grows, some are taking a harder look at how to scale the production of lab-grown meat to make a dent in the larger animal-based meat market. According to one estimate, the industry will need up to $30 billion invested in cell-based/fermentation production capacity if the alternative protein market hits just 11% of total meat consumption by 2035 and significantly more if consumer adoption exceeds expectations.

Much of that $30 billion will be directed to capital investment in building out long-term production capacity. However, before we get there, the industry first needs to invest in organizations building the necessary technology and production platforms to enable scale-up. This week saw two significant investments intended for just that: Culture Biosciences ($80 million) and Tufts University & partners ($10 million).

Culture Biosciences helps companies developing future food products with its bioreactor-as-a-service platform. The company introduced its first product a couple of years ago, a cloud-connected benchtop bioreactor service for cell-culture and bioprocess development. With their new round of funding, Culture looks to move beyond the bench with cloud-connected 5L and 250L bioreactors-as-a-service that will help firms optimize for pilot scale bio-manufacturing.

The second investment isn’t a traditional venture investment, but the $10 million USDA funding award to Tufts University for a cultured protein center of excellence is a vital investment nonetheless. In partnership with others, Tufts will lead an Institute for Cellular Agriculture to develop foundational technologies and processes to enable the cultivated meat industry to progress towards scaled production. The foundational work done by this organization will include everything from research on next-generation cell-culture medium to the development of education and leadership programs for the cultivated meat industry.

As companies try to take cultivated meat from the lab to the manufacturing plant, some question if cellular agriculture will ever be able to scale upwards cost-effectively and safely enough to justify all the investment. While we won’t know the answer to this question for a few years, it’s an encouraging sign that investments are being made to address the next big challenge in cellular agriculture.

And now, the rest of this week’s funding news:

Food Supply Chain

TrusTrace – $6 Million: TrusTrace, a Sweden-based startup building food supply chain traceability software solutions, has raised a $6 million Series A funding round. TrusTrace uses blockchain, AI, and bots to track products as they navigate their way through the supply chain. The company claims to have 8 thousand suppliers and 250 thousand products on the platform. My guess is TrusTrace and other traceability platform players are getting lots of inbound inquiries as everyone from ingredient and component suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers are trying to figure out how to work through the great 2021 supply chain disequilibrium.

Plant-Based Food

Grounded Foods – $2.5 Million: Plant-based cheese maker Grounded Foods has announced a $2.5 million raise. The company, founded by the husband and wife team of Shaun Quade and Veronica Fil, makes cheese products with hemp seeds and cauliflower. Grounded is already in 160 different retail locations today and plans to use the funds to expand further in the US and to set up for expansion into Europe.

Ag Tech

Kuva Space – €4.2M ($4.9M): Kuva Space, a provider of realtime agricultural data using space-borne hyperspectral camera technology, has raised $4.9 million. The company plans on using the funding to launch a constellation of six-unit nano-satellites to gather imagery in the 400 to 1,100 nanometer band. The company provides data that helps farmers optimize fertilizer and irrigation needs, optimal harvesting times, and early-stage pest or plant disease detection. With its second generation satellites, the company plans to expand its carbon monitoring capabilities.

Food Waste

Orbisk – €2.4M: Orbisk, which provides professional kitchens with automated analysis of food usage and associated waste flow using machine vision and AI, has received a €2.4 million grant from the European Commission’s European Innovation Council (EIC). The data from Orbisk’s analysis allows customers to adapt processes and purchasing to better manage and reduce food waste. Orbisk won the EIC funding with a pitch for its ‘Binspector’ project, under which the company will invest in dynamic AI models to increase accuracy and rapid adaptation in international menus, as well as further development of its food management algorithms.

Fish Tech

OptoScale – $4.1m (£3m): Optoscale, which makes machine vision and sensor technologies real-time monitoring of fish farm stock, has raised £3 million led by SWEN Capital Partners. The Norway-based company says it can analyze up to 200,000 fish per day using its technology, which compares with 50 to 100 fish using traditional analysis methods. Optoscale, which currently operates in Norway, Canada, and Scotland, plans to use the money to expand operations to Australia, Chile, and Iceland.

Restaurant Tech

ResQ – $39 Million: Well that was fast. After raising $7.5 million in a June seed funding round, ResQ, which provides a software platform for managing restaurant repair and maintenance tasks, has raised a $39 million Series A. Through their platform, restaurants can request, manage, and pay for a service, as well as manage the documents for these things. ResQ also connects restaurants with a network of contractors able to perform those services. The company’s list of available services includes HVAC, refrigeration, electrical, janitorial, plumbing, pest control, grease trap cleaning, preventative maintenance, and most anything else needed to keep a restaurant kitchen up and running. Since its seed round, the company has said its customer base has grown from seven states to 36 in the US. They plan to use the funding to grow their team by 400%.

C3 – $10 Million: Virtual restaurant/host kitchen platform company C3 has raised another $10 million in strategic funding from Swiss private capital firm, Lurra Capital, just a few months after it had raised a $80 million Series B. C3 (short for Creating Culinary Communities), works with kitchen operators (host kitchens) to fulfill orders for virtual restaurant brands. As of mid-year, the company operated about 40 virtual restaurant brands. The company plans to open 1,000 virtual brand locations by year’s end and has plans to open 12,000 globally by 2023.

Food Robots

Future Acres – $1.7 Million: Farm robotics startup Future Acres has raised $1.7 million via equity crowdfunding on Seedinvest. The company makes a self-driving robot called Carry that utilizes GPS and computer vision to navigate around the field and haul up to 500 pounds of produce. The company, which has raised a little over $400 thousand in pre-seed funding, plans to use the funds for product development, payroll, marketing and operations.

Culture Biosciences Announces High-Throughput Mammalian Cell Culture Capability for Cloud-Based Bioreactors

One of the big challenges in developing cell-cultured meat products is the sheer amount of lab time needed to develop and optimize the manufacturing process so cells can be produced at scale.

This optimization process can involve working to develop the right growth media, finding the optimal growth conditions for the cells, or evaluating ways to genetically modify cell lines for better reproduction.

Traditionally much of this cell culture process development takes place in-house using a benchtop stirred tank bioreactor. But a startup called Culture Biosciences wants to take this process off the hands of cell-meat makers and allow them to utilize Culture Biosciences’ cloud-based bioreactor systems.

To demonstrate its capabilities, Culture Biosciences recently announced its high-throughput mammalian cell-culture capabilities have been proven out using CHO (Chinese Hamster Ovar) cell cultures.

The news, announced via a white paper written by the company’s senior bioprocess engineer Michael McSunas, shows the results of the work they had done using CHO cells in the company’s 250 ML cloud bioreactor. According to the white paper, Culture Biosciences was able to grow the cell lines from a customer and show reproduceability alongside internally developed cultures, as well as the ability to scale-down results from a customers 1 L glass bioreactors.

In short, Culture showed that results produced on-site are consistent, can be reproduced and scaled using their connected bioreactor technology, all important proof points for the company’s “bioreactor-as-a-service” model for cell-based meat development.

In such a model, the customer sends in vials with cells and growth media and allows Culture to thaw them and perform the studies in their 250 ML connected bioreactors. The data is then uploaded to the cloud for the customer to analyze.

If this idea of moving away from a completely “roll-your-own” infrastructure model and pushing some of development process to a service-based cloud model sounds like a concept from the Internet technology world, you’re right. That’s because Culture Biosciences CEO Will Patrick, who previously worked at Google, wondered why the world of biosciences didn’t have the same type of toolsets and accessible infrastructure such as the cloud industry with AWS or semiconductor industry with manufacturing fabs like those from TSMC.

Patrick eventually decided to build some of these tools himself in the form of his cloud-based bioreactor, and now he hopes they can act as a platform for mammalian cell development.

“Culture can help optimize the manufacturing process,” Patrick told via email. “This is important because optimizing the manufacturing process such that production is cheaper is one of the biggest R&D challenges that face cell-based meat companies.” 

Talking The Future of Biomanufacturing With Culture Biosciences’ Will Patrick

Will Patrick has spent much of his career thinking about how to build things. During his stints at places like Google[x] where he worked on projects such Project Wing, Google’s drone delivery service, he’d gained an appreciation for the toolsets that helped innovators in the world of hardware and software rapidly innovate and accelerate their products into the market.

Over time, Patrick eventually became interested in the world of biomanufacturing. As his interest in biotech grew, one of the things he realized was that many tools he’d grown accustomed to in the world of mechanical and software engineering to help makers rapidly iterate were not there in the world of synthetic biology.

And so he decided to build them. Out of this Culture Biosciences was born, which offers a digital biomanfacturing platform in the form of cloud bioreactors as a service. Before long, some of the industry’s more interesting future food startups as well as CPGs and big pharma companies were running experiments in Culture’s bioreactors and monitoring them on the company’s data dashboards.

I talked to Patrick about this journey and where he sees Culture going in the future. To learn more about Patrick and his vision for the future of Culture, just click play below or head over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Talking 23andMe For Farms, Bioreactors-as-a-Service & Other Crazy FoodTech Ideas With Dave Friedberg

But here’s the thing: most ideas about the future sound a little crazy the first time you hear them.

I had known about Friedberg for some time, in part because was the founder and CEO of agtech’s first unicorn in the Climate Corporation, a company that sold to Monsanto in 2013 for over $1 billion.

More recently I’d been tracking his progress at the Production Board, a company that is essentially an idea incubation factory for food, bio and ag tech concepts. The group is run by what Friedberg describes as “operators more than investors”.

The Production Board company portfolio is strung together by something closer to a grand unified theory about how the world should work rather than any sort of single investment theme. This theory, which Friedberg articulates in a manifesto on the Production Board website, reads as much like a science fiction short story as it does an investment guide and is centered around how the world’s existing food and agricultural production systems are antiquated relics of an inefficient industrial production processes that have taken root over the past couple centuries.

I sat down for a (virtual) meeting with Friedberg recently to talk about how the Production Board works and the progress he is making for upending some of the antiquated food and ag systems. We also talk about Friedberg thinks the future of food could look like ten years or more in the future.

You can see some excerpts from our interview below. In order to see the full interview and read a transcript of our conversation, you’ll want to subscribe to Spoon Plus.

Friedberg on how crazy it is we aren’t harnessing the full technology development to address our problems around food and agriculture:

If a Martian came down to planet Earth and they look at the way we’re doing things they would say, “that’s a little bit crazy. Not only that, but it’s crazy that you guys do things the way you do them given all the technology you have. You can do crazy shit as humans. You can like write DNA and you can like ferment things in these tanks and make whatever molecule you want. And you can pretty much print anything anywhere using different chemistry.” It’s ridiculous that the systems of production operate the way that they do.

Friedberg on the idea behind Culture Biosciences, a company he describes as an AWS for Bioreactors:

If you fast forward 50 years, Tyson Foods and these feedlots and cattle grazing, I mean, it’s so fu**ing inefficient it’s just unreal. It’s mind blowing how much energy and money and CO2 is part of the system of producing meat and animal protein. And we have the tools to make animal proteins and fermenters, so if you could have a fermenter in your home, and it just prints meat when you want it, I think that would be pretty cool. Technically the science is there, the engineering isn’t. And that’s the thing: with a lot of these things, the science is proven, but a lot engineering work still to do. But it’s, it’s feasible. All these things are feasible.

Friedberg on how the Production Board germinates ideas that ultimately become one of their portfolio businesses:

We do primary research, we spend a lot of time with scientists and researchers and identify new and emerging breakthroughs in science and technology. We also spend time in the markets we operate in: food, agriculture, human health, increasingly looking at things like energy materials. And then we try and identify what’s a better way of doing this thing in this market?

So using all these new breakthroughs using all this new science, using all this technology that might be emerging, how can we do something that can transform one of these markets and really do a 10x on it? If it’s not a 10x, if it’s just a 5% better model or a 10% better model, it’s not worth doing. If we can 10x the market – reduce cost or energy by 10 times – then it becomes kind of exciting. And so that’s how we kind of think about operating business opportunities.

The full interview and transcript are available for Spoon Plus customers. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.