If you’ve ever put meat or fish into a freezer, you’ve probably noticed it doesn’t look nearly as fresh once you thaw it out.
That’s because the process of freezing food alters and damages its structure at a cellular level. As the temperature drops, water molecules slow down, and ice crystal embryos form ice nucleation sites. From there, the ice spreads to freeze the entire piece of food. Water within the food expands by up to 9% when frozen, causing food cells to rupture. When frozen food thaws, nutrients and flavors leach out from the food, often in the form of drip loss (that red liquid dropping from a warmed piece of red meat).
But what if you could store and preserve food in a freezer at sub-zero temperatures and avoid the damage incurred by traditional freezing? That’s the idea behind a new startup called EverCase, a spinout from storied research and business incubator Xerox PARC.
The new company, announced on June 15th, is the result of almost a decade of research that started when Dr. Soojin Jun, a professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, got a three-year research grant from the USDA in 2013 to research the technology dubbed “Supercooling.”
Jun’s Supercooling technology utilizes pulsed electric and oscillating magnetic fields to cause water molecules within food stored at sub-zero temperature to vibrate, inhibiting the formation of ice crystals. The result is food that, when pulled out of a Supercool equipped freezer, has almost the exact look and texture of food that is fresh and not riddled with ice crystals.
Jun would eventually take his ideas to Xerox PARC where he would get help incubating them and preparing them for commercialization. The end result of that move is EverCase, a new spinout that plans to build systems with Supercooling that can be used in existing freezers.
You can watch a demo in the video below where EverCase shows a piece of frozen meat compared with a piece of meat stored using Supercooling technology.
The company is pitching nothing less than a revamp of the traditional “cold chain” supply network, where freezers, from packers to the retail storefront (and possibly even to the home), use Supercooling technology. The company’s pitch deck talks of a new category of smart packaging and a new preserved food category of ‘Supercooled foods.’ They also plan to work with refrigeration manufacturers and other OEMs to build Supercooling technology into freezers and refrigerators.
It’s an ambitious plan, but there’s no doubt there could be a market for technology that helps food sidestep some of the downsides of traditional cold chain freezer technology. The company does say its technology is “inexpensive to make,” but it’s still unclear to me what the total cost of upgrades for a restaurant, retailer, or food packer would be. Nevertheless, it is encouraging that EverCase says its technology works with existing freezers because forklift upgrades for the massive amount of installed freezer systems throughout a mature cold-chain network is a non-starter.
The company is headed up by Chris Somogyi, a former co-founder of cell-cultured seafood startup BlueNalu and business development exec at PARC, and other executives from IBM, Xinova, and PARC. According to the announcement, EverCase is in the process of a Series A funding round.
