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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

fermentation

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.

Kiverdi Uses NASA Technology To Make Protein, Fish Food, and Palm Oil from CO2

What if there was a single solution to food supply issues, plastic waste and soil degradation — and it was something that’s in front of you right this very second?

Hayward, California-based Kiverdi is working to solve a variety of daunting problems facing our planet by leveraging carbon filtered from the air. Kiverdi co-founder and CEO Lisa Dyson was looking for solutions to solve climate change on Earth when she stumbled upon a technology that NASA was exploring to feed astronauts over long interplanetary journeys. Scientists discovered particular single-cell organisms, that, when fed carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen from the air, would output protein in a process she called carbon fermentation. In 2011 Dyson and her co-founder John Reed decided to use this technology to solve food supply issues on Earth and started Kiverdi.

“We built this company to be able to commercialize solutions to the world’s tough issues,” Dyson told me over the phone this week. Those issues include protein supply, of course, but that’s only one facet of Kiverdi’s business. The company is also using carbon fermentation to create sustainable fish feed, fertilizer and palm oil. It’s even transforming waste through a very rad-sounding process called “gasification,” in which plastics are broken down into carbon and hydrogen, then reformed into biodegradable materials.

The whole process may sound something you need to have a PhD in science to understand (and Dyson does), but she described it to me as very similar to brewing beer or making yogurt. The company currently has over 46 patents granted and pending on their technology.

Dyson said that they’re going to commercialize through partnerships and enter the market over the next few years through multiple verticals. She couldn’t name any specific air protein partnerships that are in the works, but did mention meatless meat and protein powder as potential products. Kiverdi also has several investors and some government funding, though Dyson wouldn’t disclose exact funding numbers.

It’ll be a while — probably two years or so — before anyone gets to bite into a plant-based burger made with air protein. The company is not going to commercialize until their product is “economically attractive,” as Dyson put it. And for that to happen, they’ll need to scale up significantly.

The company currently ferments all of its protein in-house in its manufacturing facility. But since their technology relies on so few outputs (air, water, and electricity) and requires no land, they can actually scale up relatively easily. All they have to do is add more fermentation tanks and voila — more protein.

Kiverdi’s technology is akin to gas fermentation, a technology we’ve covered before on the Spoon in which genetically engineered microbes turn air, water and electricity into edible proteins. The process is used by companies Solar Foods, Novo Nutrients and Deep Branch Biotechnology, but Dyson claims that Kiverdi’s technology separates itself from the pack since it uses a unique metabolic pathway.

Solar Foods seems to be Kiverdi’s closest competitor, as they’re the only other company using gas fermentation to make protein meant to go into marketable foods. The Finnish company plans to have its protein to market by 2021, so they’re on a similar timeline to Kiverdi.

But Solar Foods seems to be slightly further ahead in certain ways: it has already started pre-engineering on its factory, and has applied for a novel food license in order to legally sell its ingredients in Europe. Kiverdi hasn’t disclosed anything so concrete in terms of manufacturing or timeline, though Dyson did say that she didn’t anticipate any regulatory hurdles since their production methods are very similar to that of yogurt, beer, and even Impossible Foods’ heme, all of which are FDA-approved. Kiverdi’s protein is currently approved for specific applications in Europe.

Then again, I don’t think competition will be too much of an issue at first. Solar Foods is based in Europe while Kiverdi is in California. And when it comes to a food ingredient as novel — and sustainable — as protein made from air, odds are there will be ample market opportunity.

That’s just on Earth: Solar Foods is currently developing technology for the European Space Agency and Kiverdi is working with SRI International. But while gas and carbon fermentation could help sustain astronauts traveling through space, they also have the potential to solve pressing issues here on Earth. Good thing we’re not running out of air anytime soon.

Perfect Day Launches Ice Cream Made from Cow-Free Milk, and We Tried It

Since we first heard about Perfect Day, the Silicon Valley startup making dairy without animals, we’ve been eagerly waiting to see what their first product would be.

That time has finally come. Today Perfect Day is doing a limited release of three ice cream flavors made with its cow-free dairy. They’re selling 1,000 orders of an ice cream trio that includes a pint each of dry ice-packed Vanilla Blackberry Toffee, Milky Chocolate, and Vanilla Salted Fudge. The cost will be $20 per pint (so $60 total) plus shipping. That’s pretty significant, but compared to some of the fancier plant-based ice creams out there, it isn’t completely outrageous — especially when you consider the level of tech that went into making Perfect Day’s product.

Perfect Day makes its dairy by genetically modifying microflora to produce the two main proteins in milk: casein and whey. They combine the dried proteins with plant fats, water, vitamins and minerals to make a lactose-free product that has the same properties — taste, consistency, and nutritional breakdown — of milk.

Far left, plant-based ice cream. Perfect Day’s ice cream in the middle and right. (Photo: Catherine Lamb)

A few weeks ago I got the opportunity to visit Perfect Day’s labs and give their ice cream a taste. Co-founders Perumal Gandhi and Ryan Pandya laid out three ice cream samples for me to try: two were theirs, and one was from an unnamed plant-based dairy company.

After I tasted the first bite, I could tell immediately which of the three were Perfect Day’s; they tasted just like ice cream. Creamy and smooth, I was almost surprised how much it didn’t surprise me at all. All I could think was “yep, that’s ice cream.”

According to Pandya, the company landed on ice cream as their first product because it’s “synonymous with dairy delight,” and because there’s not a really good plant-based option for ice cream on the market right now. “They all lack the right mouthfeel,” he said. Perfect Day’s, however, exactly copied the experience of eating a spoonful of ice cream — without the odd iciness or aftertaste that can come with plant-based alternatives.

Left: Perfect Day’s protein alone. Right: Mixed with water and fat to make “milk.” (Photo: Catherine Lamb)

In tandem with their new product launch, Perfect Day is also doing a rebrand of sorts. They’re now calling their core product “flora-based” dairy, as the milk proteins are made by genetically engineered microflora, not plants or lab-grown cells. “We want people to know it’s plant-based but not from plants, it’s an animal product but without animals,” Pandya explained.

Since it doesn’t come from an animal, the company has to be careful about how they refer to the ice cream on its packaging. To avoid ruffling the FDA’s feathers, the flora-based ice cream will actually be labeled “frozen dairy dessert.” Pandya pointed out the importance of keeping the “dairy” term in there for safety, as Perfect Day’s milk would trigger dairy allergies just like the stuff made by cows.

Perfect Day’s master plan is to focus on B2B sales and provide their dairy technology to large CPG companies in order to “make the greatest change possible,” according to Pandya. However, they decided to do this initial launch under their own brand to get their name out there and establish the legitimacy of their product. Eventually they envision partners putting “powered by Perfect Day” on their packaging.

Photo: Perfect Day.

In short, Perfect Day wants to become synonymous with their animal-free milk. And they might actually have a good chance. Startup New Culture is also creating dairy proteins through fermentation, though they’re still a ways away from being able to do a product launch. Of course there are all the plant-based dairy competitors, from oat milk to almond milk and beyond. But while some of these options do a pretty good job of imitating dairy, they can’t hope to have the exact same nutrition, taste, and physical properties of milk. Perfect Day can.

Ice cream — er, frozen dairy dessert — is just the start. Pandya told me that they’re working on dozens of prototypes. Just the other week I saw an Instagram post from the company featuring bagels topped with cream cheese made from their dairy. So far the startup has raised $61 million in funding and has a staff of 60.

Today’s release is a one-time deal. Pandya said Perfect Day’s ice cream will be more widely available in 2020, either through partners or under their own brand. Based off of my taste test, I think their technology has the potential to (and I hate this word, but it fits here) disrupt the way that we make and consume dairy alternatives. If you want to try Perfect Day’s flora-based ‘scream for yourself, you can order it starting now on their website.

Perfect Day co-founder Perumal Gandhi will be speaking about forging the future of protein at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) in Seattle this fall! Early Bird tickets are on sale here. 

Podcast: Making Food Out of Thin Air

If you’re a foodtech nerd like me, chances are you’ve seen a few articles lately about a small group of startups working on a new technique to essentially food “out of thin air”. What makes this technology even more intriguing is it creates a new food source that is entirely disconnected from agriculture-based resources – yes, both animal AND plant-based inputs – to create proteins with a negligible impact on our the environment. The method they use is called “gas fermentation”.

Our own Catherine Lamb had a great piece diving into the tech behind gas fermentation and looking at the companies working on creating products for embryonic market. I found myself so fascinated by this new method of creating protein that I decided to invite the CEO of Solar Foods, Pasi Vainikka, onto a podcast so I could learn a little more about this space and just when we can expect food created with this new process to hit our plates.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below, through Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast app, or just by downloading it direct to your machine.

Introducing Future Food: Our Alternative Protein Newsletter

Have you checked what’s in your hamburger recently? It might be plant-based, made with “bloody” heme, or even grown in a bioreactor. (Just kidding — that last one isn’t here yet. But it will be soon.)

We’re fascinated by the fast-evolving alternative protein space. And clearly, so are you: the plant-based food industry increased by 20 percent in 2018, and is worth over $4.1 billion. In the cell-based (also called cultured) space, companies are doing everything from cheese to steak without the animal.

That’s why we decided it was timely and relevant to devote an entire newsletter to the topic of alternative protein products: meat, sure, but also eggs, dairy, bugs, seaweed, etc. It’s called Future Food, and this is the very first one!

We hope you like it. If so, you should sign up for the Future Food newsletter to get it in your inbox every Thursday. Now, to the news…

Photo: Beyond Meat.

Last week Beyond Meat, the El Segundo, California-based startup making plant-based burgers, chicken, sausage, and more, set the terms of its IPO.

The numbers were pretty eye-popping: the company could raise as much as $184 million, and might be valued at a whopping $1.2 billion. Beyond’s sales are also going through the roof, with revenues almost tripling from 2017 to 2018.
Whether Beyond Meat’s impending IPO fails or succeeds will be a be a sort of canary in the coal mine for the plant-based meat industry. It’s set to go public in early May, so keep an eye on this newsletter for ongoing analysis.

But all is not rosy in Beyond’s world right now. News broke that Tyson Foods had parted ways with the plant-based meat startup and sold its 6.5% stake, just days before Beyond goes public.

The news wasn’t shocking, since Tyson had recently announced plans of its own to get into the plant-based protein game. And we all know it’s bad practice to compete with a portfolio company. We analyzed the full reasonings behind Tyson’s exit — as well as the potential effects the move might have on Beyond’s IPO — here.

Photo: Stewart Butterfield via Flickr.

People are abuzz with excitement over cell-based meat: that is, meat that’s grown outside the animal. But we’re still not sure what it will be called, when it will come to market, or where it’ll first launch.

I have a theory, though: Asia. Specifically Hong Kong. Recently I explored the reasons why Asia is an ideal launch pad for cultured meat, from regulation to consumer interest. Feel free to @ me if you disagree.

Photo: A burger topped with a prototype of plant-based bacon grown on Ecovative’s mycelium.

A big struggle for all meat alternative companies — both plant-based and cell-based — is texture. They can do burgers, sure. But steak? That’s a lot more of a challenge.

Ecovative, a biotech company in New York, is growing scaffolds for meat alternatives out of mycelium. For all you non-mycologists out there, that basically means mushroom roots.

This method is cheap, quick, and scalable. But will it be enough to make animal-free steak that can fool even the most discerning of carnivores?

Photo: Meringues made with animal-free egg whites from Clara Foods.

But there’s a lot more going on in the protein alternatives world than just meat:

  • Clara Foods, a startup developing chicken-less egg white proteins with genetically engineered microbes, just raised an undisclosed Series B financing round led by ingredient giant Ingredion. They’re hoping to have a product to market as early as 2020.
  • Using a similar technology, New Culture is creating milk without the cow. Their end game is to make animal-free mozzarella cheese that tastes as creamy as the real thing.
  • There’s a nascent group of startups creating proteins not out of plants, sugar, or animal cells — but out of thin air. For real. Called ‘gas fermentation,’ the only inputs are electricity and air, making it a prime candidate for space travel.

Photo: Nestle.

Protein ’round the web

  • Eater L.A.: Los Angeles restaurants are using Impossible’s “bleeding” plant-based meat for a lot more than burgers. Think: taquitos, dumplings, and even tartare.
  • Beyond Meat is BBBTB: Bringing the Beyond Burger to Belgium. And the company is going Dutch with an expansion into the Netherlands.
  • Mcdonald’s Germany has chosen Nestlé’s Incredible burger for its vegan option.

    • I’m off! If you enjoyed this newsletter, be sure to subscribe here (it’s easy) and we’ll send it to you every Thursday. See you next week.

    Eat well,
    Catherine

    The Future of Protein Might be ‘Gas Fermentation,’ or Growing Food Out of Thin Air

    We know that relying on animals — especially methane-producing cows — for the bulk of our protein is unsustainable. But creating protein alternatives in labs or out of plants can also have a significant environmental cost.

    What about if we nixed the agricultural bits altogether and just made protein out naturally occuring elements in the air around us? Sounds like science fiction, but Finnish company Solar Foods is working to do just that. The company is creating a new platform for food production using two inputs: air and electricity.

    Solar Foods’ technology captures CO2 and water from the air and introduces them to genetically modified bacteria, which form single-celled proteins the company calls ‘Solein.’

    Founded in 2017, Solar Foods came about when its CEO Pasi Vainikka, who was in charge of the largest renewable energy resource program in Finland, wanted to develop new technology to push the world towards carbon neutrality. He discovered that one big way to sequester carbon was by making it into food.

    As Vainikka explained it, their technology is similar to what Impossible Foods is doing to create its heme or how Perfect Day is making milk without cows. Only instead of feeding sugar solutions to the microbes, as those two startups are doing, Solar Foods feeds them carbon dioxide and hydrogen extracted from the air.

    Motif Ingredients and Sustainable Bioproducts are two other companies using microbes to spin out protein, though they also don’t rely on CO2 as the main input. “We are a branch parallel to [them],” said Vainikka. “Not sugar fermentation, but gas fermentation.”

    Not the sexiest of names, admittedly. For the less nerdy folks, though, Vainikka said he also calls their process “making food from air.” In fact, visit the Solar Foods lab in Finland and you (yes, you) could actually breathe into their device and make protein.

    By disconnecting completely from agriculture, animal and otherwise, Solar Foods can produce protein with a negligable environmental footprint. As it’s not reliant on irrigation, feed, or weather, Solar Foods’ production capacity is also pretty much indefinite.

    The technology is way beyond the theoretical stage. As of now, Solar Foods can produce one kilogram of protein per day. The company is also in the early stages of constructing a full-scale factory, filing for patents on their organisms, and starting food application tests.

    It raised €2 million (~$2,273,000) in funding from Lifeline Ventures last year. In terms of timing, the company plans to have a global commercial launch of Solein in 2021 and, by 2022, is hoping to scale up to produce enough protein for 50 million meals per year.

    Vainikka may have established Solar Foods to make the Earth carbon neutral, but one of the main applications for his technology is actually space travel. The company is working with the European Space Agency to make a prototype device which could theoretically be used to sustain astronauts on a mission to Mars.

    Launching their technology into outer space makes things a lot more complicated for Solar Foods. To function on a spacecraft their protein has to last seven years, according to Vainikka. Since the contained environment of a spaceship is a closed loop, the platform will also have to function off of recirculated water and CO2 sourced from inside the ship, as well as recycled energy. “We need super efficient circulation of these factors,” explained Vainikka.

    Here on Earth, Vainikka hasn’t yet decided on the best application for Solein. It might be used in a meal replacement product à la Soylent, or even in the Impossible burger as a more sustainable alternative to soy. He told us that Solar Foods will be a protein supplier for food producers and isn’t looking to create their own branded consumer goods.

    Photo: Kiverdi.

    Gas fermentation may sound kind of out there, but actually Solar Foods is part of a nascent group of startups using carbon dioxide and electricity to make food. Based in San Francisco, Kiverdi is using microbes to upcycle CO2 into edible products like palm oils and proteins. Nearby, Novo Nutrients is leveraging a similar technology to turn CO2 into feed for aquaculture farms. In the U.K., Deep Branch Biotechnology is also focused on animal feed, making single cell proteins out of CO2 in industrial waste gas. Vainikka also pointed out a few university research groups, including ones in Ghent and Nottingham, U.K., which are working on a similar technology.

    While gas fermentation makes a lot of sense for space travel, I could also see it having a significant environmental effect here on Earth. Demand for protein is skyrocketing: ResearchandMarkets.com projects that the global protein market will grow from $49.8 billion in 2019 to $70.7 billion in 2025. The world’s population is also projected to hit almost 10 billion by 2050. Combine those, and it means we’ll need to find protein wherever we can — especially if it can replace less sustainable ingredients (like meat) and sequester carbon in the process.

    Clara Foods Raises Series B, Partners with Ingredion to Launch Animal-Free Egg Whites

    Today Clara Foods, a startup using cellular agriculture to develop animal-free proteins, announced it has raised a Series B funding round. The round was led by ingredients corporation Ingredion with participation from Hemisphere Ventures, SOS Ventures and B37. The amount of funding was not disclosed.

    Based in San Francisco, Clara Foods has been working to create animal proteins without the animals. They use a similar technology to Perfect Day or New Culture, feeding sugar to genetically engineered yeast to “ferment” protein in various forms. So far, Clara Foods has been focused on creating egg whites to use as vegan alternatives in baking.

    Under the agreement, Ingredion will work with Clara Foods to distribute and market multiple animal-free proteins means to be used as egg substitutes.

    Photo: Meringues made with animal-free egg whites from Clara Foods.

    This partnership gives a big leg up to Clara Foods. The startup has been developing its chicken-less egg whites since 2014. When I visited the Clara Foods team a few months ago at the Winter Fancy Food Show, they told me it would likely still be a while before they brought a product to market. Now, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that their “egg” proteins could be available as soon as 2020.

    Clara Foods’ partnership with Ingredion is a smart way for them to leverage the massive ingredient provider’s manufacturing capabilities, supply chain, and retail partnerships to get to market much more quickly. Perfect Day made a similar strategic partnership last year when they teamed up with ADM to accelerate production of their animal-free whey.

    This is also a smart move on Ingredion’s part. The ingredient supplier has had its eye on the vegan protein space for a while. In fact, its investment in Clara Foods comes months after Ingredion committed to investing $140 million in plant-based proteins. True, Clara Foods’ proteins are made through fermentation, not from plants, but still: Ingredion knows that alternative proteins are a hot investment opportunity, and it’s making moves.

    In its press release Clara Foods stated that it had raised a $15 million Series A in 2016. (Though Crunchbase reports that the startup’s total funding — prior to the Series B — was only $3.5 million.) In addition to jumpstarting manufacturing, Clara Foods will also use its new funding to expand beyond egg proteins and develop other animal-free products.

    3 Low-Tech Solutions That Could Impact a High-Tech Food Industry

    Innovative food-related gadgets and practices don’t always have to rely on things like sensors, apps, and machine learning to have a positive impact. In fact, in some parts of the world, these “low-tech” (that is, technologically simple) solutions are often all that’s needed to prevent waste, improve farming practices, and even boost the local economy.

    That is to say that low tech, while maybe not as alluring as, say, using sensors to save the bees, plays a bigger role in advancing food than one might initially think. Their simplicity is effective, and often just as interesting, or at least thought provoking, as a high-tech alternative.

    Consider fermentation, specifically as a way to curb food waste. Instead of just chucking food that’s about to decay (or selling it at a discount on a digital marketplace), some countries turn to a kind of “controlled decay” through fermentation. This isn’t new. The idea of preservation through decay has been around for thousands of years. And around the world, it’s still a food preservation practice.

    This post gives a pretty good rundown of some of the delicacies you can find in Vietnam that exist due to preserving food through fermentation, including rượu nếp, which many Vietnamese believe kills parasites. There’s also fish sauce — the kind you’ll find on restaurant menus anywhere in the world — as well as kimchi, Sauerkraut, and Filmjölk, to name a few. True fermentation connoisseurs, I dare you to try this.

    Fermentation honestly seems like kind of a no-brainer in terms of a way for, say, restaurants to preserve food and reduce waste. It’s already a trend amongst foodies, which makes me wonder if, as more and more people make efforts to curb waste, fermentation has a chance to go from delicacy to staple.

    Speaking of food spoilage: typically, the closer one gets to the Equator, the faster food decays. So it makes unfortunate sense that in Kenya, fruit and vegetable vendors are constantly losing money because their produce goes bad after only a couple days. The same is true for many places of similar latitude where refrigeration isn’t always readily available.

    A company called FreshBox (not to be confused with hydroponic produce company FreshBox Farms) came up with a pretty simple solution: a solar-powered cooling unit — the “box” — that looks a bit like a walk-in fridge, but reportedly costs way less to operate. Each unit can hold 70 crates of produce. Vendors pay 70 Kenyan shillings ($.068) per crate per day.

    Food waste is one of the main contributors to millions of people in Africa facing starvation. According to the Rockefeller Foundation, 50 percent of all produce is lost in the post-harvest stage of production. FreshBox may not be able to solve such a massive problem overnight, but it’s proof that serious problems don’t always require a high-tech answer. Sometimes a cold box powered with cheap solar energy will do.

    Another pervasive problem the food industry faces is scarcity of arable land. An oft-quoted figure is that by 2050 we’ll have to feed 2 billion more people worldwide. But it’s also generally agreed on that farmers will have to produce more food on less land. Indoor farms that raise plants without soil are one solution, but there’s no proof yet that these “modern” farming systems will be enough.

    And some haven’t given up on traditional agriculture land yet. Regenerative agriculture is a land-management strategy that restores soil fertility and resilience and, in the process, sequesters CO2 emissions to mitigate climate change. Like fermentation, practices in regenerative agriculture have been around almost since the dawn of agriculture itself. They include everything from crop rotation, low tillage, installing cover crops, planting borders for bee habitats, and composting, to name a few.

    One especially interesting aspect of regenerative agriculture is the role livestock can play — a definite counterpoint to the idea that livestock production is only harming the planet. Some farmers have taken to a practice called “rotational grazing,” where livestock is strategically moved around to graze, so no one part of the land is entirely depleted.

    Some farmers and ranchers are already exploring the possibilities of how this seemingly low-tech action could integrate with various high-tech components in order to mitigate the burden of livestock production while also helping the actual soil. And more software is becoming readily available when it comes to overall land management, so it will be interesting to see if it can work in tandem with these age-old farming methods.

    A lot of these “low-tech” innovations are currently happening in the developing world, more as a necessity than for some “oh cool” factor. At the risk of over-simplifying the matter, it would be worthwhile for food companies in more developed nations to explore these practices in more detail. Would, for example, something like FreshBox be of use to those at farmer’s markets, or the fruit and vegetable vendors who set up on the streets here in NYC? Could restaurants make more use of fermentation instead of throwing out huge percentages of their inventory?

    Doing so would obviously require a lot more effort than just casual interest or enthusiasm. Still, it would behoove us to step away from the burger-flipping robots for a sec and explore such possibilities.

     

    Ten Trends That Will Shape The Future of Cooking In 2018

    With 2017 in the rearview mirror, it’s time to look forward and make some predictions about the next year in food and cooking. While I often wait until after CES to look into the crystal ball since there are always lots of announcements at the annual consumer tech mega-show, I think it’s safe to point to a few big trends we can expect over the next 12 months.

    With that in mind, here are ten trends I think you’ll see the shape the future of the kitchen over the next twelve months (Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date on our coverage of all of these trends over the next year):

    Digital Recipe At The Center Of Action

    With apologies to Tyler Florence, the recipe is not dead. In fact, if anything the recipe is becoming increasingly important in the digital kitchen. It’s becoming our automated shopping list, the instruction set for our appliances, and the content is becoming dynamic, atomized and personalized depending on our personal preferences and the context of our current day, meal plan, and food inventory.

    I expect all of this to continue in 2018 and even accelerate as recipes become shoppable, connected to cooking guidance systems and fuse with new interfaces such as voice assistants and chatbots to help with the cooking process.

    New Cooking Boxes

    While “cooking box” isn’t exactly a standard industry term, it’s an apt way to describe the wide variety of exciting products coming to market that allow consumers new ways to prepare food.

    Last year we started to see new takes on steam ovens like the Tovala, the first consumer market RF cooking appliance announced in Miele’s Dialog, and even combo devices that combine fast-cooking with flash-freezing like the Frigondas. In 2018, I expect to see lots more innovation with built-in and counter top products as old-school appliance manufacturers and housewares brands realize there’s opportunity in deviating from the same-old cooking appliances and offering consumers new options when it comes to preparing food.

    Smart Grow Systems Move Towards Mass Market

    While home grow systems have been around for years, adoption has remained fairly narrow. That will start to change in 2018 as the idea of using technology to grow and create our food at home enters the mainstream consciousness. Driving this trend will be the ever-increasing consumer desire to source food more locally. After all, what’s more local than our own homes?

    The great thing about this space is there’s already a wide gamut of interesting options available for consumers today. Whether it’s low-cost offerings like seed quilts, to the growing number of soil-less home grow systems like those from Aerogarden or Ava, to crazy backyard farm robots like those from Farmbot, I think we’ll see more innovative products – and greater consumer adoption – in 2018.

    Home Fermentation

    There’s no doubt one of the most interesting trends we’ve seen in consumer food over the past couple years is the embrace of interesting fermented products like kombucha, and I think this interest will start to generate more interest in consumers fermenting their food at home.

    We’ve already seen companies like Panasonic show off fermented food cookers, and beer appliance startup PicoBrew is starting to offer Kombucha as an offering. With interest in fermented products likely to increase, I expect more innovators will look to make creating these products at home easier.

    Desserts Meet Tech

    Like most, I love myself a good dessert, and I expect we will see an increasing number of interesting ways to fuse technology with sweets in the coming year. Some of these innovations will focus on convenience (like the CHiP cookie maker), but some will enable consumers to create hard-to-make sweets like chocolate, ice cream and other types of desserts that are normally time and knowledge intensive.  Expect to see some interesting announcements in this space in the next 12 months.

    Sensing Kitchen

    When the Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman got on stage at the Smart Kitchen Summit with startups creators of digital food sensing tech and demoed live in front of a huge audience, you could hear the audience murmur as Wilson and crew smelled cheese with a digital nose or tried out the Scio infrared spectrometer. This technology that has long been gestating for commercial and supply chain applications is finally making its way into the home, and I expect that to continue in 2018, particularly as some find new ways to apply AI to better prediction and understanding around flavors and food characteristics.

    Meal Services And Connected Hardware

    One of the trends we’ve been watching for a while is the pairing of meal kits with connected hardware.  That trend accelerated in 2017 as Tovala shipped product, Nomiku created their sous vide ready meals and Innit hinted at new products powered by Chef’d as we ended the year.

    It makes sense. Recurring revenue has long been the mantra of venture capitalists (just ask Tovala, which just got a $9.2 million series A), and in the connected cooking space, the way to get recurring revenue is offer food.  I also expect meal kit companies to also increasingly look for ways to partner with kitchen tech innovators (much like Chef’d has with Innit) as they look for ways to raise adoption and retention for consumers.

    Speaking of food delivery…

    Automated, Smart Grocery Delivery

    With the acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, Amazon stopped dabbling around the edges with lab experiments like Amazon Go, Amazon Dash and Amazon Fresh made its intentions clear: it wants to take a big bite out of the $700 billion grocery business in the US.  And while the company has had mixed success with efforts like its Fresh delivery business, these long-gestating experiments have given them a potentially huge advantage as they start to set up central hubs and physical points of presence for the grocery business post-Whole Foods.

    And now, Amazon and others see the opportunity to fuse home delivery with smart home access control and automatically deliver groceries all the way to the fridge. Combine that with the ability of fridges to actually tell us when food needs a refresh, and you can unlock some interesting scenarios.

    New Interfaces

    While this past year saw the continued march forward towards of popular voice interfaces like Alexa, I think we’re only at the beginning of a large-scale change in the control layer for how we buy, prepare and cook our food.  Sure, we’ll see more and more Alexa skills for cooking gadgets in 2018, but also expect more manufacturers embrace chatbots and projection interfaces as ways to interact with our cooking equipment this year.

    Cooking Robots

    We cover cooking robots here at The Spoon a bunch, and while many are fun and likely never to see wide adoption over the next decade, there are a variety of interesting cooking bots we’ve seen that might have real applications for specific use cases.  Some are simple food automation devices. Others are more social robots. And, in some cases, companies are working on human-like robots that could be intriguing additions to the kitchen of the future.

    Needless to say with CES less than a week away, we’ll likely see many of these trends reinforced with news.  I’ll be at CES catching up on many of these announcements myself, so if you hear of any or want me to know about your product, DM me on Twitter.

    Kickstarter Entrepreneurs Ride the Popularity Wave of Probiotic Foods

    Probiotics are a budding segment of the food part of the crowdsourcing world. While most new efforts are focused on pickles, fermented sodas and kombucha, a team of Slovenian Kickstarter veterans are showcasing the wonders of probiotic cheese.

    Kefirko Cheese Maker comes on the heels of the successful 2015 launch of Kefirko, a device that makes homemade kefir. Kefir is a fermented milk drink made with special grains that act as a fermenter/starter. The process can be laborious done in a traditional manner. The kefir is extracted from the grains by hanging a cheesecloth-like bag over a shallow bowl, allowing the liquid to separate from the starter. In recent years, this fermented beverage, which originated in the Caucasus Mountains, has grown in popularity with a renewed focus on healthy eating and the role of probiotics.

    The team of Marko Borko and Andrej Glažar, with backgrounds in engineering and design, have extended the value of their kefir maker with their new probiotic cheese maker. The new appliance makes probiotic cheese from the kefir created by the Kefiroko or any other store-bought or homemade kefir. Beyond probiotic cheese, consumers can use the cheese maker to create mozzarella, mascarpone other non-probiotic varieties using milk that has been which has to be curdled with rennet or lemon juice.

    There is no waste in the process which starts with pouring the kefir into the cheese maker and allowing it to strain into the attached glass bowl. The company says the whey liquid that results from the kefir-to-cheese process I is very rich with proteins, primarily of α-lactalbumin and β-lactoglobulin, bovine serum albumin and immunoglobine. It also contains vitamins and minerals and a very low level of fat. When whey is derived from kefir, it does not contain lactose, because it is already gone (99 %) during fermentation of kefir.

    The length of the fermentation process determines the type of resulting cheese. The company says that fermenting overnight will result in a creamy style cheese while allowing the fermentation to go for one to two days will yield a semi hard cheese. When the cheese reaches the desired taste and consistency, users can flavor it with herbs, spices, oils or roasted vegetables.

    The Kefirko Cheese Maker comes with a recipe book which also offers alternative uses for the device which includes tips on how to use the appliance to make tea, iced coffee and even almond milk. The company says it does not know whether the cheese maker will work to create nut-based cheeses, made with pureed soaked and peeled nuts instead of kefir.

    As of June 9th, the Slovenian company has exceeded its “all or nothing” goal of $15,000. Some 1,740 backers have contributed more than $91,000. The company’s stretch goals include a larger jar and a spring-loaded lid to enhance the fermentation. At the same time, Borko, Glažar, and their team are introducing a new and improved version of their original kefir maker. According to their Kickstarter site, the new model has an easier-to-grip lid and improved airflow. They also added a Scrapper – a tool for mixing kefir grains during straining to make sure they easily separate from kefir drink. Also, by covering the hole on the Kefirko lid with the Scrapper the straining of kefir also becomes more practical and fast. Depending on pledge amounts backers can get the cheese maker, the newer kefir maker or both products. Delivery of the cheese maker and Kefirko 2 is Dec. 2017.

    Make sure to check out the Smart Kitchen Summit, the only event about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen. Also, make sure to subscribe to get The Spoon in your inbox. 

    Alchema Brews Up An IoT Approach to Home Fermentation

    The world has discovered hard cider. With annual sales skyrocketing and a continual parade of newcomers entering the market, cider is having its moment. The sudden popularity of this age-old alcoholic beverage is a convergence of three popular food trends--interest in fermented foods, understanding of probiotic’s health benefits and DIY driven by new technology.

    At an elemental level, fermentation is the process of converting sugar, yeast or other starter into acid, gas or alcohol. In the case of such probiotic-rich foods as sauerkraut, pickles and yogurt, the method is called lacto-fermentation because lactic acid results from fermentation. In the case of hard cider (as opposed to farm-fresh nonalcoholic apple cider), yeast is added to fruit juice and over time the result of fermentation is a hearty adult beverage.

    Home brewers have long tinkered with DIY cider methods, but most of those processes are cumbersome and time consuming. Keeping the juice/yeast mixture at the incorrect temperature or having the wrong proportions of the ingredients can result in something that’s a cross between vinegar and spoiled OJ. Using some advanced IoT-driven technology, innovators are stepping up to empower any consumer to become a master cider maker.

    Enter Alchema, a Kickstarter entrepreneur led by CEO Oscar Chang, a Taiwanese entrepreneur whose idea for the appliance crystalized through his friendship with a former micro brewing expert Tung Han-ning. Han-ning, who studied home brewing in the U.K., became the perfect counterpoint to Chang’s engineering skills. Together, they sought to help DIY cider makers overcome their fear of fermentation.

    Chang says the Alchema, which resembles a fancy coffee pot weighing eight pounds and about 16-inches in height, is aimed at two target markets—pure cider lovers who will buy anything related to cider and DIY-ers who are passionate about perfecting their own recipes.

    “We want to make the process is most easy for beginner,” Chang says. “It takes water, sugar, yeast and fruit and we want users to be able to anticipate a great tasting cider.”

    The cider market in the U.S. is booming with 700 commercial cider makers making 3,250 different styles. New York, Michigan, California and Washington lead the nation in cider making, with the Empire State alone having 86 brewers creating 294 different varieties of cider. Like craft beer, devotees of the fruit-based alcoholic beverage want to treat their palates to the best professional and home-crafted beverages. Fueled by availability of heirloom fruits and berries, cidermakers are experimenting with flavors and unique tastes.

    Alchema takes full advantage of interaction between a smartphone app and the device. A user can select a recipe from the app and follow the easy directions to create a batch of cider. A UV light sanitizes the pitcher before brewing and a scale used for precise ingredient measurements works in concert with the app for accuracy. The user can control the level of alcohol desired in the finished product and a sensor will indicate when the brew has reached its finished state.

    As its name infers, the Alchema, which will retail for $499 when it hits in 2018, is a general-purpose fermentation machine which can make mead, jun, kombucha and even pickled vegetables. As Chang explains, the device’s ability to detect the proper level of fermentation is independent of the ingredients in the pitcher. The Alchema’s ability to sense exact levels of fermentation is based on proprietary technology, adds Chang.

    The Alchema is not alone in the IoT-based home fermentation space. The Ferment, showcased by Panasonic at SXSW, is a high-tech device that aims to deliver anything from fermented rice to kombucha.

    PicoBrew Adds PicoFerm In Effort To Become #1 Food Kickstarter

    Today PicoBrew announced a new stretch goal in an effort to become the #1 food Kickstarter campaign of all time.  The new goal features the PicoFerm, a web-connected fermentation monitor that lets brewers monitor the status of their fermenting beer.

    The reigning food champ is Anova, which has held the top spot ever since its highly successful Kickstarter campaign for the Anova Precision Cooker three years ago which went on to hit $1.811 million.

    The target amount PicoBrew set for its next stretch goal? $1.812 million.

    With the Pico campaign currently sitting at just under $1.5 million, Anova’s record looks very much in reach. Typically, successful campaigns follow a pattern: a surge of early backers, a mid-campaign lull, and a surge at the end as those sitting on the fence rush in. By adding extra stretch goals like the PicoFerm, campaigns hope to nudge the undecided into pulling out their credit cards.

    So what is the PicoFerm? While the details are a little fuzzy, it looks like an small keg monitor that gives users of the PicoBrew Pico C (and the original Pico) the ability to monitor the progress of fermenting beer. According to PicoBrew, the PicoFerm will send “a precise forecast on when your beer will be ready to drink. It will also send tips on how to improve or speed up the process.”

    Lastly, why would PicoBrew care about surpassing Anova? The answer is simple: bragging rights and free marketing. By becoming the #1 food Kickstarter campaign, PicoBrew will raise their profile further and generate a series of “new Kickstarter food champ” articles that will give them momentum as they make the Pico C available for presale after the campaign.