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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

fat

Estonia’s ÄIO Raises €1 Million to Make Alternative Fats Out of Sawdust

Estonian start-up ÄIO has raised €1 million ($1.2 million) to develop alternative oils and fats for the food industry. The biotechnology firm, founded by TalTech bioengineers Petri-Jaan Lahtvee and Nemailla Bonturi last year, aims to replace environmentally depleting oils such as coconut and palm oils with sustainable, full-value alternatives.

ÄIO’s edible fats and oils are produced from agricultural and wood industry side-streams using processes derived from biotech research. The company’s proprietary production technique uses a fermentation process which the company says is similar to brewing beer or raising bread with yeast. During the fermentation process, the company uses what it calls a “red bug” microbe, created and patented by Bonturi. The result, according to ÄIO, is fats rich in healthy fatty acids and antioxidants.

“Our “red bug” cannot turn water into wine, but it can turn sawdust into food,” Bonturi said.

Nordic Foodtech VC, EAS, and other partners provided the funding. Mika Kukkurainen, partner and founder of Nordic Foodtech VC, said the global food industry is constantly searching for sustainable and healthy alternatives to palm oil and coconut oil. “Turning low-value side-streams into something so valuable is very futureproof and has great scalable business potential,” said Kukkurainen.

The company says it will use the funding to increase its production capacity, test products with the food industry, and apply for novel food permits to enter the European market. The company plans to begin industrial-scale production by 2026.

The news of ÄIO’s funding is the latest in an increasingly crowded field of startups looking to develop more sustainable fat alternatives for makers of alternative proteins. Last year CUBIQ raised €5.75 million, just 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. In March, Lypid raised $4 million for its technology that microencapsulates plant oils in water to create spongy fats with high melting points. And last November,  Cultimate Foods announced it had raised a pre-seed €700 thousand to develop cultivated fat for hybrid alt-meat products.

Cultimate Foods Raises €700k To Develop Cultivated Fat for Hybrid Alt-Meat Products

Fat is sexy, don’t you know? In particular, the type of fat made without killing any animals.

One company working on such a fat is Cultimate Foods, a Berlin-based startup developing cultivated fat for hybrid alt-meat products. The company announced it has raised a pre-seed €700 thousand round led by Big Idea Ventures, ProVeg International, and Realum.cloud.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Cultimate plans on targeting its cultivated fat at food companies interested in developing hybrid plant-based meat products. The company, which claims its cultivated fat replicates the structure of animal fat tissue, says it uses a “unique technological approach to 3D cultivation creates the structure of their ingredient and reduces the costs of production.”

“Our ultimate goal is to deliver a game-changing ingredient for the plant-based meat industry,” said Cultimate cofounder George Zheleznyi. “We are focused on developing the most important part of meat experience, fat. Cultimate will deliver all the properties of meat that are currently lacking in the available meat alternatives.”

Zheleznyi previously cofounded a Russian-based alt-meat startup called Greenwise. His cofounders at Cultimate include Eugenia Sagué (co-CEO, ex-ProVeg) and Oskar Latyshev (CTO, ex-Partner M).

Cultimate enters an increasingly crowded market for alt-fat products. San Francisco-based Mission Barns raised a significant round last year to help it scale up its cell-cultured fat, and Steakholder Foods (previously MeaTech 3D) is also working on a cultivated fat for its 3D-printed alt-steaks.

Cultimate says it plans to use its new funding to validate its cultivated fat product and begin to prepare for pilot-stage production.

Zero Acre Farms Launches a Healthy Cultured Cooking Oil That Tastes Good and Saves the Planet

By his own admission, Zero Acre Farms founder Jeff Nobbs is a thinking man’s entrepreneur. And while he has taken a somewhat circumventous route to the world of healthy food and environmental well-being, diet and nutrition have always been at the forefront of his life.

“Looking backward, even in middle school, I was, you know, the weird kid who brought in chicken breast and radishes for lunch,” Nobbs told The Spoon in a recent interview. “And because I thought that was just the healthiest thing. And I didn’t drink sodas growing up because I thought they were bad. So why would I do something bad? Even then, it always kind of puzzled me that there was so much conflicting advice regarding diet and nutrition.”

Years later, with e-commerce and food industry successes under his belt, Nobbs’ Zero Acre Farm is bringing to market a cultured cooking oil (actually a multipurpose oil) that checks all the boxes. Not only is it healthier than alternatives such as corn oil, soybean oil, and canola oil, Nobb’s new entry into the market uses less water in its production and engages in no deforestation.

Some of the benefits of Zero Acre Farm’s oil include a higher smoke point than heart-healthy olive oil; heat-stable monounsaturated fats (35% more than olive oil; and low linoleic acid (aka 10x less “bad fats” than even avocado oil). By comparison, one cup of corn oil, one of the more common cooking oils, contains 28 grams of saturated fat and 199 grams of polyunsaturated fat.

Moving from e-commerce Extrabux to starting a healthy restaurant in 2015 in San Francisco allowed Nobbs to tap into his lifelong passion for food and forced him to “turn on the fire hose” and gather as much information as he could from varied sources.

“I did not want to make the same mistakes that others have made and learn from others,” Nobbs said. “So I gathered knowledge from my co-founders and a long list of people that each contributed a little bit. And I kind of take each conversation and create my own mosaic.”

One of the lessons Nobbs learned, which has been steadfast in his restaurant, Kitava, and now with Zero Acre, is that creating good-tasting food is as essential as providing health benefits and helping with climate change.

”We’re not going to bring products to market where people must make a sacrifice or where they feel like to do the right thing to the planet,” Nobbs explained. “I think it’s unrealistic to expect consumers to make a sacrifice on one of those critical areas such as taste, and we focused on that from the start of our product.”

Zero Acre Farms employs a fermentation process Nobbs says is between precision fermentation and biomass fermentation. Using his business acumen to its fullest, Zero Acre uses a third party to produce its product at scale, which the founder states will allow it to hit the ground running with a substantial supply of products.

“We’ve seen some companies start with the new product and have 150 units available for sale. We’re not taking that approach; we’re making thousands of units available for sale, and we’re at a commercial scale,” Nobbs says.

After its launch, Nobbs believes there are opportunities to produce food products—such as snack foods—that use cultured oil and a solid fat variety that could take the place of butter or margarine.

While Zero Acre Farms’ product is available today exclusively on its website, in the future Nobbs hopes to bring the product to retail.

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.

Melt&Marble Raises €5 Million For Fermentation-Derived Fat That Tastes and Melts Like the Real Thing

In the first wave of plant-based “meat,” the marketing challenge was about convincing customers that giving up meat needn’t create a hole in their regular diet. For the Impossibles, Beyonds, and others, developing a reasonable, tasty facsimile to the beef or chicken experience got them into millions of homes and in demand on grocer’s shelves. For plant-based meat products to become a savory choice rather than a substitute requires innovators to “kick it up a notch.”

 While the horse race to alt-burger dominance is on, off to the side, innovators have been working on plant-based beef fat that would offer the mouthfeel and umami taste to a host of faux meat products. Included in the alt-beef fat space is Swedish company Melt&Marble which secured a €5 million Series Seed financing round to scale-up production and expand its team.

 Melt&Marble uses precision fermentation to create its plant-based beef fat. Like others in the alternative protein, dairy, meat, and seafood world know, precision fermentation is a robust process but requires a lot of capital to build a proper scalable infrastructure. CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Anastasia Krivoruchko told The Spoon that her company is currently at a lab-scale but will start scaling up in the coming months. It will still be a couple of years until it is fully industrial scale.

Dr. Kriviruchko believes the opportunity for Mouth&Marble is now and in the future based on conversations with plant-based meat providers. “We have talked with many companies about the challenges they are facing with their existing fats,” she said. “When designing our yeast strains, we have been looking into the structure of beef fats and asking ourselves what elements are important for overcoming these challenges. Our prototype has a similar mouthfeel and melting profile to beef fat, which is extremely important for replicating the taste of beef.”

This begs the obvious question about the health-related issues, such as high cholesterol and heart disease, that come with consuming “real” beef fat. Dr. Kriviruchko says such concerns are not present with plant-based beef fat.

“Generally, our fats don’t contain cholesterol, trans-fats, and contaminants. With our technology, we could also potentially integrate healthy bioactive fatty acids into our fats, and this is something that we are keen to explore,” Melt&Marble’s CEO explained.

Melt&Marble’s technology platform was spun out from research work conducted over the past decade by co-founders Dr.  Krivoruchko,  Dr.  Florian  David, and  Professor  Jens  Nielsen at the Chalmers  University of  Technology in  Sweden.  Lever VC led the latest round; an early-stage venture capital firm focused on technologies and brands in the alternative protein space. Lever has previously invested in Good Plant, The Good Spoon, A Dozen Cousins, and others.

If it appears that plant-based beef fat (and other related healthy fats) is a niche market, the number of trailblazers in this emerging sector speaks otherwise. Among Melt&Marble’s competition are Meat-Tech, Mission Barnes, Nourish Ingredients, Hoxton Farms, and Cubiq Foods.

According to Grand View Research, Inc., the global plant-based meat market size will reach $24.8 billion by 2030. A likely scenario, familiar to most emerging tech markets, will be when a few of the best alt-beef fat companies survive by being purchased by either a mega food processor such as Tyson or Cargill or merge with a plant-based market leader like Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat.

Cell Ag Startup Mission Barns Raises $24M for its Cultivated Fat

Mission Barns, a cellular agriculture startup creating cultured fat, announced today that it has raised a $24 million Series A round of funding. Investors in the round include Lever VC, Gullspang Re:Food, Humboldt Fund, Green Monday Ventures, and Enfini Ventures. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Mission Barns to more than $28 million.

Mission Barns is focused on cultivating animal fat, just without the animal. The company’s technology starts with pork, poultry or beef cells and grows them using plant-based feedstock in a cultivator. The result, the company says, is an animal fat that brings the same mouthfeel and flavor of meat without animal slaughter, and does so in a more environmentally friendly way than conventional animal agriculture.

Mission Barns has developed its own meat as well as in collaboration with other meat and plant protein partners. The company says applications include bacon, breakfast patties, burgers, nuggets, and more. In August of last year, Mission Barns held curbside taste tests of its cell-based bacon outside restaurants in San Francisco and Oakland, California.

The alternative fat space has steadily been growing over the past year, with a number of startups developing their own technology. Here in the U.S., Motif Foodworks is developing its own plant-based fat. Hoxton Farms is working on cultivated fat in the U.K. And in Australia, Nourish Ingredients is using yeast fermentation to create plant-based fat.

In today’s press announcement, Mission Barns says that it will use the new funding to scale up its production and build a pilot production facility in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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.