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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Where to See Food Tech on the Show Floor @ CES 2022: Day 1

While CES 2022 will be smaller this year as the show returns to in-person after hosting an all-virtual show in 2021, we’re excited to see food tech as an official category on the show floor. The Spoon team will be in the Sands Expo in Booth 53752 talking to leaders from startups to funders and execs across agtech, robotics, future food and kitchen tech.

We’ll have videos and reports as the show goes on. To start, here’s a quick list of booths where you’ll see food tech and smart kitchen innovations and the companies behind them:

  • Bear Robotics — Booth #53755 — Bear Robotics is utilizing AI and autonomous robot technology, deploying bots to take care of everything from drink and food serving to bussing. Bear Robotics works with top chefs and restaurants, providing front of house labor support.
  • MycoTechnology — Booth #53753 — MycoTechnology harnesses the metabolic engine of mushrooms, known as mycelium, using natural fermentation to create novel ingredients that solve the food industry’s biggest challenges. (Stay tuned for a story on their consumer facing brand launching at CES.)
  • Yo-Kai Express — Booth #53758 — Yo-Kai debuted as a robotic ramen vending machine and announced a 2021 expansion into other autonomous food and cooking devices at the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan.
  • Edamam — Booth #53860 — Edamam structures and organizes food and nutrition data and sells it as a subscription to businesses in the food, health, and wellness sectors. They have worked with food and retail giants include Nestle, Amazon, and The Food Network and according to the company have close to 100,000 developers using Edamam’s APIs.
  • Northfork — Booth #53959 — Northfork is a Swedish-based startup that enables shoppable recipes online, bridging the world of digital recipes and food retail.
  • Apex / “OrderHQ” Smart Food Locker — Booth #53958 — Apex Order Pickup Solutions is the creator of the OrderHQ smart food locker, a secure, contactless solution for food pickup and delivery services. The lockers combine front and back of house technology, including hot and cold storage as well as integration with fully automated order fulfilment.
  • Uvera — Booth #54058 — Uvera is a Saudi cleantech startup that wants to reduce food waste with a device that claims to increase the shelf-life of fresh food up to “97% on average within only 30 seconds of using the device, without any chemicals.”
  • Yangyoo / Armored Fresh — Booth #53761 — Yangyoo is a Korea-based food tech company launching Korea’s first vegan cheese alternative first developed by its US subsidiary, Armored Fresh. The future food brand uses a similar fermenting process that produces natural cheese on plant-based protein milk.
  • Endless West — Booth #54061 — Endless West is a beverage technology startup founded by biotechnologists using science to create a blend of wines and spirits; its first product – Glyph – is the first molecular-made whiskey, created without aging or barreling.

(Shared) Booth #51830

  • Picnic — Robotic pizza machine designed for back of house operations in restaurants; they first launched onto the scene at CES 2020 and started filling orders in the middle of 2021.
  • iUNU — iUNU (you knew) is a Seattle agtech firm creating an AI-based platform for greenhouses and vertical farms that assists indoor growers with yields, farming waste and overall operations.
  • Minnow was the winner of the 2020 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase for their contactless food delivery solution called the Minnow Pickup Pod. An IoT-enabled locker for businesses and multifamily properties, Minnow streamlines food delivery on site.

We’ll add more companies to the list as we cover news and discover additional companies! Follow us at @TheSpoonTech on Twitter and LinkedIn as well as hashtags #CES2022 and #CESFoodTech for social updates.

UPSIDE Foods Develops Animal-Free Cell Growth Medium

If you want to grow a cell-based steak, you’ll need a good growth medium — a nutrient-rich soup that feeds the cells as they proliferate. We’ve written previously about the cell-based meat industry’s push to ditch fetal bovine serum, a growth medium extracted from cow fetuses, and develop animal-free alternatives. By cutting animal inputs, companies can cut the costs of cell-cultivated meats, as well as the products’ environmental footprints.

Californian cell-based startup UPSIDE Foods switched away from fetal bovine serum years ago, and set a research and development team to the task of developing an alternative medium with zero animal inputs. Last week, the company announced that it has achieved that milestone, converting to an animal-free medium.

“Since day one, we knew that developing animal component-free cell feed would be crucial to fully realizing our vision of meat that’s better for the planet and its inhabitants,” company founder and CEO Dr. Uma Valeti said in a press release. “Cell feed is among the biggest drivers of cost and environmental footprint for the cultivated meat industry, and optimizing it is key to maximizing our positive impact. Our ultimate goal is to remove animals from our meat production process entirely.”

UPSIDE has used its animal-free medium to grow cell-cultivated chicken nuggets and hot dogs, demonstrating the versatility of the substrate. The company plans to grow all of its products with the new medium in future.

The achievement will help UPSIDE to scale as the company moves toward commercialization. Last month, the company unveiled its new production and development facility in Emeryville, Calif. The facility can produce 50,000 pounds of meat per year, and the company plans to boost that capacity to 400,000 pounds over time. Commercialization is still on hold as the industry waits for the USDA and FDA to create a regulatory framework — but with lower costs and increased capacity, UPSIDE is poised to take its products to the public.

Voyage Foods is Creating the Future of Coffee, Peanut Butter, and Chocolate

I don’t want to live a world where coffee and chocolate don’t exist. First off, I love all of these things dearly. Secondly, I imagine if the supply of these precious items runs out, this will lead to utter chaos amongst self-proclaimed coffee and chocolate “addicts.” Unfortunately, climate change threatens the ability to continue to produce these crops to the extent that they are produced today. However, a company called Voyage Foods wants to “future-proof” these foods by creating sustainable alternatives that taste exactly like coffee and chocolate and peanut butter.

To understand how exactly Voyage Foods is doing this, I spoke with the CEO and founder of the company, Adam Maxwell. Founded about a year ago, Voyage Foods focuses on foods that pose environmental, ethical or health issues. Maxwell explained that there are already many companies making vegan products in response to a demand for sustainable products, and said “There is a tunnel vision kind of focus on really where we should put effort in the food system.” So many other parts of the food system are being ignored, and this is why Voyage Foods landed on coffee, cacao, and peanut butter.

The massive global demand for coffee and cacao has led to some negative consequences like illegal deforestation, child labor, and increased water usage. The land available for growing these crops (which can only be grown in certain regions) is shrinking. “The production of these things is going to go down and down,” Maxell said. “The world’s consumption is projected to go up, so part of it’s how can we archive these things for the future?”

While there aren’t necessarily environmental concerns associated with peanut butter, it has other problems; approximately 1 percent of the population in the U.S., or about 3 million people, are allergic to peanuts.

Voyage Foods sent The Spoon a sample of its bean-free coffee and cacao-free milk chocolate bar. I first took a swig of the coffee, and it tasted like a smooth cold brew coffee. It also had unique tasting notes that I had never tasted in coffee, leaving a slight smokey mesquite flavor in the back of my throat (for me, this was a good thing). I appreciated that the coffee had no acidity and thoroughly enjoyed it poured over ice with a splash of oat milk. Maxwell could not disclose what ingredients were in the alternative coffee but did say it still contained caffeine.

The milk chocolate bar was fully vegan and made from a base of grape seeds, shea butter, sunflower meal, and a few other ingredients. It certainly tasted like chocolate and reminded me of the milk candy bars I would eat as a child, like a Hershey’s bar. I am someone who typically only eats dark chocolate, but was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, and was sad when it was all gone.

When asked about how Voyage Foods makes all of its products, Maxwell responded with “A lot of our process and our technology is, how do we manipulate different feedstocks into the same outputs? How do you roast something that is not a cocoa bean, to make it taste like cocoa?”. Voyage Foods starts with whole food ingredients, like sunflower meal or grape seeds, and manipulates them in a certain way to achieve flavors found in the products they are trying to mimic. Maxwell also said the company’s facilities look similar to existing chocolate, coffee, and peanut butter production facilities.

Although I did not get to try it, Voyage Foods’ peanut butter product is made from various grains and seeds. This product is slated to be the first to launch and available for consumers to purchase in early 2022. The chocolate will likely launch in mid-2022. I would love to get my hands on more of Voyage Foods’ coffee, but we will all, unfortunately, have to likely wait until 2023 for this product.

IndieBio Cofounder Ron Shigeta Launches Virtual Accelerator

Longtime food and biotech investor and entrepreneur Ron Shigeta is rolling out a new virtual accelerator called iAccelerate.tech.

Shigeta established himself as a food tech pioneer as a cofounder of one of the very first future food and ag accelerators in IndieBio, where he helped some of today’s biggest names in future food such as Geltor and Upside Foods (then Memphis Meats) get off the ground. Since that time, Shigeta helped launch plant-based pet food company Wild Earth and more recently has been acting as an independent investor and advisor to various biotech and food tech startups.

From Shigeta’s Linkedin post announcing the move:

It’s a big day! I’m rolling out my advisory work as a virtual accelerator and I’d like to invite my network and their friends to join us!

Building at IndieBio has created a $4B+ portfolio. in the past 2 years TurtleTree, Inner Cosmos, SolarBioTech, Orbillion Bio (YC W21) , BloodQ, Inc, Juicy Marbles, Finless Foods (and some who are not out in public yet) has taken things to a new level for me and the #BioTech Startup world.

With iAccelerate, Shigeta is essentially taking his consultancy and investing work and formalizing it.

“I worked to find what I thought would be a next-generation accelerator structure,” Shigeta told me over Linkedin. “It’s a very small operation – 5-10 companies a year with lots of attention to detail.”

According to Shigeta, his new accelerator will take in 1-2% in equity for each company, a significantly smaller share than a traditional accelerator like TechStars that typically takes roughly 5% of a company.

As part of the launch of iAccelerate, Shigeta is also launching an investor syndicate.

“My latest stage in the evolution is to offer some investments on AngelList,” said Shigeta. “The Syndicate just lets investors elect to take the deals they like and offers the terms that the VC sees.”

While Shigeta has made a name for himself helping biotech-focused startups get up and running, his new accelerator shows he will look beyond the future food space. One of the first companies in the accelerator is Bite Ninja, a startup from Memphis that helps staff quick service drive-thrus with remote workers via telepresence.

“I really like to work with companies who are are just wrestling with an outrageous idea and we work together sometimes for months just to get it together to present and show MVP,” said Shigeta.

Food Tech News: Future Food Tour in Dubai and Beer-Infused Spices

Welcome to this week’s Food Tech News round-up! For this round, we’ve gathered news from CHEQ, a multi-sensory futuristic food tour, and new spices that make your food taste like beer.

If you didn’t sign up already, The Spoon’s virtual Restaurant Tech Summit will be next week on August 17, starting at 8:00 am PT. Tickets are still available on the event page.

Future Food Tour at Expo 2020 Dubai

The “Novacene” is a new era hypothesized by scientist James Lovelock where humans have made large-scale changes to our environment and robots and artificial intelligence rule the world. “The Future of Food: Epochal Banquet” has taken inspiration from this idea for its planned food exhibit at Expo 2020 Dubai.

The culinary tour is two hours long and it will specifically focus on how humans using artificial intelligence can find solutions for food waste, feed a growing population, and improve nutrition content. The immersive experience will be orchestrated by Bombas & Parr, a multi-sensory experience design studio in the UK. Based in the year 2320, the tour will feature food history from caveman to spaceman, replications of extinct foods, and 1,000 different flavors. The dining portion will include three courses paired with drinks. Edible concoctions that will be served include flavor-changing desserts, glow-in-the-dark food, rare ingredients, unique plants, and delicacies created from the technique that NASA uses to collect comet dust.

CHEQ and Miami Marlins announce a multi-year partnership

CHEQ, a restaurant tech platform, announced in a press release sent to The Spoon that it has partnered with the baseball team Miami Marlins. The mobile payment app developed by CHEQ will be implemented at the Marlin’s home stadium, LoanDepot Park. The app will allow fans at the ballpark to order food and drinks from concession stands on their mobile devices from their seats. After this 2021 season, fans will have the ability to order from their seats and then have the food delivered to certain areas of the ballpark.

Infuse your food with beer flavor through Spiceologies’s blends

A chef-operated spice company call Spiceology shared with The Spoon in an email this week that it had launched a new line of beer-infused spices to encapsulate the unique flavors that different beers can contribute to the cooking process. The company has partnered with Derek Wolf and New Belgium Brewing to develop two beer spice products lines. The Derek Wolf line includes flavors like Imperial Coffee Stout, Honey Mustard IPA, and Hickory Peach Porter. The New Belgium line incorporates some of the brewery’s popular beers like the Voodoo Ranger Hazy IPA in the Citrus Ginger seasoning, while the Sweet & Sour uses the Sour IPA. A “six-pack” of the Derek Wolf blends cost $69.99 while a “four-pack” of the New Belgium blends cost $52.

Why Plant-Based Nuggets are Gold

When I think of chicken nuggets, I think of my young son. More specifically, I remember how at one point I surreptitiously replaced his animal-based chicken nuggets and tenders with plant-based ones… and he didn’t notice (or didn’t care). That small bit of deception is why I think the plant-based chicken nugget market could be a very big deal.

Plant-based chicken nuggets are nothing new. Companies like Quorn, Morningstar and Gardein have been selling them in the frozen aisles of grocery stores for years now. But things really heated up this month when both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods jumped into the faux poultry ring. Beyond, which had previously piloted plant-based chicken with KFC, announced a couple weeks back that its new tenders are available at 400 restaurants across the country. That announcement was quickly followed by the news that Impossible was unveiling its nuggets to potential restaurant customers this week for a fall rollout.

While both of their plant-based chicken products will debut at restaurants, it’s a no-brainer that their nuggets will eventually make it to store shelves. Both Beyond and Impossible spent a great deal of time last year vastly expanding their national retail sales footprint, all the heavy lifting of getting into stores in done, they now just need to roll out their nuggets.

And it’s on the store shelves where things get interesting, as there will be ton of competition. Not only are the stalwarts like Quorn, Morningstar and Gardein already there, but giants like Tyson has its Raised & Rooted plant-based nuggets, and Target has its own Good & Gather brand. Not to mention there is also a new crop of plant-based nugget startups like Rebellyous, SIMULATE, Nowadays, and Daring Foods competing for your dollar.

Competing for your top dollar, that is. Right now, you have to pay extra for plant-based chicken. A quick look at Safeway shows that an 8-ounce package of Raised and Rooted nuggets is $4.99, compared with a 32-ounce package of traditional animal based nuggets for $7.79. That’s almost four times as much food for a few dollars more.

But this is where Beyond and Impossible can help. While both of their burger products are still more expensive than traditional meat, consumer prices for Beyond and Impossible have steadily come down over the past couple of years. It’s a safe bet that the same will happen for their chicken products. With the brand recognition both Beyond and Impossible have, they should be able to quickly gain market share at retail and exert price pressure on other players in the space.

Another big opportunity for plant-based chicken nuggets and tenders is in schools cafeterias, where nuggets are menu staple. The USDA reports that schools served 5 billion lunches in fiscal year 2019, so it’s no surprise that schools were actually one of Rebellyous’ primary markets before the pandemic shut everything down last year. Also consider that this past May, Impossible received the Child Nutrition (CN) Label authorized by the USDA, which will make it easier for schools to purchase the Impossible Burger. With Impossible running pilots programs with a number of school districts across the U.S., it’s a safe bet the company will get the same regulatory approval for its nuggets.

But the big reason plant-based chicken nuggets and tenders will be huge goes back to my son. Nuggets and tenders are really more of a kids’ food (though, who doesn’t love a good nugget?), and if you can create a reasonable facsimile, they aren’t going to care. It’s not like trying to replicate a filet mignon at a fine dining establishment. Creating a plant-based filet requires “muscle” and fat structures. Plus, consumers have a heightened expectation around what a filet is and should be, so the uncanny valley is much greater. Nuggets, on the other hand, are junk food. (I say that with love) There doesn’t need to be a ton of complexity to make a good nugget. Bread it, flavor it, make sure it looks enough like meat on the inside and there you go. Kids will knock ’em back no fuss no muss.

Until now, burgers have been the star of the plant-based meat world, but don’t be surprised if next year plant-based chicken nuggets take center stage.

Photo from Nature’s Fynd website

More Headlines

Nature’s Fynd Raises $350M Series C for its Microbial Protein – The protein originates from a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park.

Gathered Foods is Bringing Plant-Based Options to Long John Silver’s – Five locations in California and Georgia now serve Good Catch’s Crab-Free Cakes and Fish-Free Fillets

Multus Media Raises $2.2M for Cultured Meat Serum Replacement – The company says its growth media lasts twice as long as existing serum.

Mzansi Meat Co. is Bringing Cultured Meat to Africa – Representing the food and farming culture of Africa is important to Mzansi Meat Co., and the company will be extracting cells from indigenous cattle breeds.

Schools Around The World Are Racing to Create Future Food Curriculum. Here’s Why it Matters.

Anyone familiar with the story of Silicon Valley knows just how fundamental the university system was in creating the center of the technology universe.

Colleges and universities have long served as launch pads for the world’s biggest tech companies, from the education of integrated circuit founding fathers William Shockely and Robert Noyce (at Caltech and MIT, respectively) to the creation of Yahoo! and Google by graduate students at Stanford, to Mark Zuckerberg hacking away at Hot or Not in his dorm at Harvard.

And now that food companies big and small are embracing new technologies to create alternative forms of meat, universities around the world are racing to create curriculum and innovation centers to create the food workforce of the future.

In the U.S., future food activity is popping up at schools from coast to coast, with notable efforts that include UC Berkeley’s Alt Meat Lab, a cellular agriculture course at Tufts, CRISPR courses at Harvard and ReThink Meat courses at Stanford.

But it’s not just American schools. Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University has created an alternative protein course called “Future Foods—Introduction to Advanced Meat Alternatives.” In Israel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem launched a pilot course titled “Cultivated Meat and Plant-Based Meat.” An introduction to cell-based meat is now available for postgraduates at the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil.

So what’s driving all this interest in future food in the halls of academia across the globe? According to long-time future food pioneer and lecturer Ron Shigeta, one of the main forces is advocacy organizations.

Groups like the Good Food Institute “are leveraging money from ethical vegans and others interested in animal welfare,” Shigeta told me. “They are offering incentives to schools and programs, as well as driving the economic incentives by helping grants come through. This is happening in Davis, CA, Singapore and elsewhere.”

Amy Huang, who heads up the Good Food Institute’s efforts to encourage the academic community to embrace alternative protein education, says the reason we’re now seeing alt-protein education flourish around the world is simple: a fast-growing industry needs good people.

“People are the very backbone of our quest to reimagine the protein supply,” said Huang via email. “So, it’s essential that we equip students and industry professionals with a deeper, stronger foundation of specialized knowledge they’ll need to join the alternative protein sector.”

According to Huang, higher education institutions want to prepare students for what promises to be a potentially massive shift by helping them understand the enabling technologies and systems underpinning these changes.

“These courses are being driven by forward-thinking faculty and university administrators who are challenging the educational status quo and asking themselves: What emerging technologies have true disruptive potential? How can we equip our students with the skills they need to be leaders in these fields?”

And it almost goes without saying that by preparing their students with programs about disruptive new alt-meat technologies, these institutions are setting a foundation for their own future success.

“By prioritizing innovation over convention, they’re positioning their institutions as the centers of gravity for students seeking a groundbreaking education,” said Huang. “And they’re also establishing their regions as potential hubs for the explosion of entrepreneurial activity and economic growth that the alternative protein industry will bring.”

And it’s not just the schools who are driving change. Students, many of whom have value systems that align with a move away from industrial animal agriculture, are asking for classes and sometimes even creating their own.

This is something both Shigeta and Huang agree on.

Shigeta noted that, “Millennial and GenZ students (sometimes vegan) are much more focused on climate change, looking for socially positive ways to make changes they believe in. With the students advocating for movement from within, the doors are opening for sure.”

Huang believes the students themselves are perhaps “are perhaps the most powerful changemakers within academic ecosystems.” She adds that, “We see this playing out through The Alt Protein Project, like at Wageningen, Stanford, and UNC Chapel Hill, with students advocating for and successfully launching courses at universities around the world.”

The Alt Protein Project is the Good Food Institute’s own program to develop and encourage alt-protein education within the world of academia. The program has five objectives: building courses and majors, expanding open-access research, stimulating entrepreneurship, building awareness, and creating an inclusive and interdisciplinary community.

One example of this student-led change helped by GFI is at the Netherland’s Wageningen University. A group of five students wondered why there wasn’t a class in protein transition. To create one, the group, under the name of The Wageningen Alternative Protein Project, worked with the Good Food Institute on a student-led effort to build up both a community interested in this area as well as a group of teachers willing to lead such courses. The effort paid off, as teachers within the food science department have indicated they plan to teach the course the students proposed next year.

All this progress is exciting, but in many ways it’s still early days. Wageningen, after all, is widely recognized as the world’s top university in agriculture education and the school is just now getting around to creating a class on protein transition. UC Davis, one of the US’s leading ag research universities, created its Cultivated Meat Consortium in 2019 is just now launching the second phase of its formal cultured meat programming and research.

But according to Huang, what is early today in terms of future food education could become commonplace in a few years as colleges look to build a workforce and create a foundation for the world of alt protein.

“In five years, we hope to see alternative protein courses at every major university around the world,” said Huang. “The educators and institutions that begin cultivating these kinds of educational pathways today will hold the attention of alternative protein startups and companies as they expand their teams, build infrastructure, and establish industrial centers.”

Let’s hope she’s right. Just as the rise in computer science curriculum has helped fuel growth and an explosion in huge societal shifts (both good and bad) over the past century, we’re gonna need some serious creativity to help us manage and expand our food systems over the next 100 years. The pandemic exposed our food supply chains’ fragility and opacity while also illustrating how our continued over-reliance on industrial animal agriculture is not sustainable.

In other words, we’re gonna need lots of smart people to help us feed 10 billion people, and much of that will start with an education system that creates a qualified future food workforce.

Editor Note: This post originally said the alt-protein transition efforts at Wageningen University were started by one student. This has been changed to reflect the efforts of all the students involved.

So I Guess I Should Move to Singapore

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I’m not sure how to break this to my wife, but the family needs to pack up and move to Singapore. Because let’s face it, if you want to experience the future of food today, Singapore is the place to be.

This isn’t a new idea, and it’s something we’ve touched on before at The Spoon. In fact, we held an entire panel on Singapore as a food tech superpower at the 2020 Smart Kitchen Summit back in October. Since that time, however, Singapore seems to have stepped on the gas.

The world really took note in December when Singapore granted an alt-protein company, Eat Just, the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured meat. A couple of weeks following that announcement, that cultured meat went on sale in a Singapore restaurant. More recently, Eat Just teamed up with delivery service foodpanda to offer home delivery of cultured meat, marking another first for the industry.

In addition to having its own bustling startup scene featuring companies like Shiok Meats and Next Gen, Singapore is also quickly becoming a go-to place for outside startups to build out R&D facilities. Perfect Day, which uses fermentation to create animal-less dairy proteins, announced in December that it was building an R&D facility in Singapore. And just this month, Liberty Produce, Avant Meats, and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) each announced they were building their own innovation centers in Singapore.

What’s worth noting about all the new facilities announced this April was that they all address different areas of food tech. Liberty Produce is developing controlled-environment agriculture systems. Avant Meats is working on cell-based fish. And ADM’s facility will further develop plant-based protein. Not only that, but all three of those companies are building facilities that will also produce food, not just research it.

So what’s behind Singapore’s sprint towards the food of tomorrow? As my colleague, Jenn Marston wrote back in October:

Arguably the biggest driver is that, at the moment, Singapore imports 90 percent of its food. That’s a precarious position to be in during the best of times, never mind during a pandemic that’s disrupted the global food supply chain. In response, the Singapore government launched a $21 million grant fund this year as part of its 30×30 initiative, which aims to have 30 percent of Singapore’s food produced locally by 2030. 

Because of that initiative, Singapore’s regulators are a lot more open to innovation without lobbying from entrenched, protectionist legacy players. This means Singapore really has the power and flexbility to push the food tech envelope.

There’s an old saw in business that dominance perpetuates itself. Singapore has quickly established itself as a dominant force in the food tech space, which means that it will be shaping the global future of food for some time to come.

Guess I should start packing my bags.

More Headlines

Beyond Meat to Launch Newest Version of its Burgers in U.S. Stores Next Week – New version no longer uses mung bean protein and promises to be “meatier” and “juicier.”

Finally! Prime Roots’ New Koji Bacon is a Really Good Vegan Bacon – Our resident vegan tried (and liked!) this plant-based breakfast meat.

Clara Foods Teams Up With AB InBev to Make Animal Protein at Scale – The partnership will combine AB InBev’s “centuries of expertise in scaled, food-grade fermentation and downstream processing gained from large-scale brewing processes” with Clara’s technology to develop more sustainable protein at scale.

Exploring Consumer Acceptance of Alt-Meat with Red to Green

There are lots of factors that play into the success of a food product: Price, taste, cultural norms and acceptance.

Sometimes it helps when a chef embraces a type of food and popularizes it through media or a new restaurant concept. Other times, a new type of food takes decades to become an overnight success.

With plant-based proteins, I’d say it’s a mixture of both. More and more chefs are exploring new ways to move meat off the center of the plate, and many non-vegan consumers are trying plant-based alternatives for the first time.

Looking to the future, it’s hard to say how consumers will react to the next big tectonic shift in alt-proteins — cultivated meat. Since most companies in the space are focused on scaling their early prototypes for wider scale production, there’s been very little work done in these early days to educate the consumer about what this cultured meat is and why they should eat it.

That better change soon since, with cell-cultured meat, the battle for the minds is as big a hurdle as the science. Not that some aren’t trying. Companies like Eat Just are beginning to experiment with ways to raise awareness of this very early product, while others like Blue Nalu are working with young research chefs to have them think about the future of sustainable food like cultured seafood.

Still, there’s a lot more work to do to help educate the consumer about what this food is and why they should eat it. That’s why I’m excited for a new podcast season from the folks behind Red to Green, a Berlin-based media and consultancy firm that is headed up by Marina Schmidt. When Marine told me about how the latest season of her podcast would focus on how these companies will win consumer acceptance of their products, I was excited because it’s an area we think a lot about here at the Spoon and one that needs more discussion.

Then when she asked if we would like to cross-publish her podcast, I jumped at the chance. Each week for the next few months we’ll be publishing each episode of the Red to Green season three here on The Spoon complete with transcripts.

Below you can see the first episode of season 3, which includes yours truly. Marina and I decided it would be fun to first have us both on the show to go behind the scenes and talk about the topics she’ll be discussing this season. You can also see the transcript of the conversation below.

The next episode of Red to Green, which we’ll publish tomorrow, will feature Isha Datar, the executive director of New Harvest, talking about building community, safety and brands in cultured meat.

For now, you can check out the first episode below or subscribe to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

Promoting Alternative Proteins - PODCAST│S3E1 Introduction & Red to Green behind the scenes

Transcript:

Michael Wolf

We’re having this conversation because we are excited to have you as a content partner. You’re putting together this interesting season where you’re having conversations with leaders in the cellular agriculture and alternative protein space. And the third season, we’re going to actually be putting up on the spoon, kind of as a partnership with you guys. So you guys also have it on your own outlets as well, but yeah, let’s, let’s talk a little bit about what you’re building. So tell people about,  Marina Schmidt and Red to Green.

Marina Schmidt

Well, I think to start right now with the status quo Red to green is doing deep-dive research. So I started out with Red to Green because I found two types of content in the food tech and sustainability space. On the one hand, you have this diverse array, like one episode on vertical farming, one on food waste, and another one on the latest quinoa chocolate chip goji berries chocolate bar.

And then there’s the other type of content, which is really, really extremely in-depth. for example, I found a podcast with 245 episodes just on precision farming. So we started Red to Green to get the middle ground to choose one topic at a time, specifically in food tech and sustainability, and cover it really in-depth.

So that means we approach each podcast season like a book. We think about what would people need to know to get a very well-rounded diverse perspective on the topic? As an example, we started out last year in May with a season on cultivated meat, or actually more broader cellular agriculture. 

And it starts with an introduction. What is it?  What is the concept behind it? How is it produced? Then we covered all the different important topics.  We covered beef, dairy, cheese, eggs, gelatin, seafood, fish, and then had also the NGO perspective and the investor’s perspective. And by choosing the interview guests very well with a diverse set of backgrounds and companies that they work for, we create this well-balanced overview of what’s going on.

Michael Wolf

So you ultimately decided to create Red to Green as kind of a new focus for your career. And part of that journey, interestingly enough, and not that’s something that I think a lot of people always consider when they make a new move is a spreadsheet was at the center of this, this kind of switch.

Tell us a little bit about that story.

Marina Schmidt

Oh, my, my friends actually have a lot of insider jokes about the amount of spreadsheets that I have and the things that I manage in spreadsheets, which can be quite crazy.  Well, pretty much originally I built a company in career consulting and job consulting.  It’s a German company, we are partnering with job fairs all over the place. Twenty-five plus of the largest German job fairs. And through that, I would see hundreds, if not thousands of CVs and there would be this pattern of people going for the career and then the middle of their career, they would want to drastically change the industry, what they’re specifically doing, et cetera. And usually, it was because they would find that what they’re currently doing is not actually aligned with their values, and maybe they haven’t been looking at their values for quite a while. So I saw that as a sign and I was like, well, maybe I don’t have to go down that path. And I decided to sit down and really think about it.

And this process led me to gradually work on, on topics that got me closer to that calling of food tech and sustainability. I worked in company building and worked in digital health with some of the largest medical publishers.  I was also working with the World Economic Forum representatives to increase health and climate innovation in Europe. And it was getting warmer and warmer, but I was still tiptoeing around the actual topics. So there was a yoga retreat that really helped. Seven days, lots of meditation, lots of yoga can very much recommend that for some clarity. There I realized, okay I have to be in sustainability, but sustainability is still super broad. Very very wide. 

So that’s where a spreadsheet helped. Actually a friend of mine, he’s the founder of the regenerative agriculture company, Klim. He originally had started the spreadsheet where he has listed various, like so many different areas of impact and he created a spreadsheet detailing what is the field about what is the core problem? And what are some startups trying to address this problem and solve it. I looked at it and I filled it out. I ranked these areas on a scale of one to 10, 10 being “this is fricking amazing. I would put everything down and stop my life move to another country to work on this” and nine and down being exciting or less exciting.

 As I filled it out, I was quite surprised that all of my nines were in food tech. My nines were vertical farming, plastic alternatives, which you can sort of say as part of food regenerative agriculture, food waste, and my only 10 was alternative proteins and specifically cellular agriculture.

You have this saying in German, but not sure if it’s also applicable in English, it was like, tomatoes fell off my eyes. I love the saying. It’s very visual. That’s how it felt. Tomatoes fell off my eyes right there as I was staring at the spreadsheet and I realized, Oh wow, I have to, I have to work in this field. Otherwise, I’m going to regret it. And especially with cellular agriculture, it feels like you have to work in it right now because it’s, it’s a special time to contribute to it.

So,  I’ve been talking to a lot of people who want to get into the field or who are thinking about their purpose and their values. And I have decided to make the spreadsheet available for free to anybody who wants to just look at it, maybe broaden their scope of  on the ways of how you can have an impact. Or just maybe re-check career choices. So we can link to it and people can fill it out. Please, if you find anything where there’s startups to add, where there is a broken link, please just comment on it because we will work on updating it and making it more and more useful to more and more people.

Michael Wolf

Well, great. Well, that’s a great use of a spreadsheet. Definitely different than most people use spreadsheets. That’s a great story.

Yeah. I mean, I, and I think that podcasting allows you the storytelling arc throughout a season, and I love that approach. And  I find it’s when I go through and do podcasts, I find I’m learning every episode and I get better for the next episode. So I’m kind of curious how maybe your approach to the season changed.

Were they fairly close to what you had thought about when you set out to kind of plan this 12 episode arc or did, as you learned more and, and discovered more and talk to these experts on the way, did it change at all?

Marina Schmidt

So I think it’s very dependent on the topic. With the cultured meat topic, I had a relatively clear idea of what I’m going to cover, and that turned out to be pretty on point in the end. But with the plastics alternative season, which is the second season we had, it was like stepping in the dark.

Because the tricky thing is to create such a season we need to understand the whole field and that can be harder in some cases than in other cases. With the topic of plastic alternatives and sustainable food packaging, it was more an investigative season. We were looking for an answer. What does it mean to have sustainable food packaging?

What is bad packaging? And as these issues are very big and very cloudy and complex we were going step-by-step interview by interview, learning bits of the puzzle and finding our way. With the second season, I found that we had to have trusted people in the industry who would fact-check. The guests that we would have on and who would fact check the topics that we would be addressing and promoting. Because there’s so much greenwashing and it’s very hard to differentiate fact from fiction in this space. So it was a completely different experience in cultivated meat or cellular agriculture versus in plastics.

And here again, with the next season, we are doing on convincing consumers. We again, don’t have a clear playbook. It’s not like we are just making an overview of an existing field. We are researching for the industry. What would make consumers switch to alternative dairy, to insect protein, to cultured meat. And we’re actually looking for people who you wouldn’t think of as being interesting interview guests, like people from outside the industry who maybe don’t even know much about cultured meat in general, but who can offer a novel perspective on it. So this again is more an investigative season.

And how have you seen the messaging change? So if you look at the plant-based companies, but also the cell-based companies, how has their marketing and the way that they communicate about the  products changed?

Michael Wolf

Well, what’s interesting is just this past week Impossible launched really their first big widespread consumer advertising campaign with the message that “we are meat”. And I think what they’re saying is, you know if you’re a meat-eater if you’re a carnivore this is meat. It may be meat made from plants, but it’s really no different.

So I think it’s in a sense also pushing back against the incumbents countering the message saying this isn’t meat. This is some weird ingredient. So I think I think there’s a messaging war going on and we’re, we’re in this middle of this, this big evolutionary consumer acceptance path where you’re going to see, and going to try to understand if mainstream meat-eaters are going to accept these alternative proteins. 

I think with cellular agriculture and the cultured stuff, the time horizons a little bit longer. And I think that’s going to be a much, even more, tricky messaging campaign because it’s really advanced science and then we’re not even talking about things like precision fermentation, right?

Marina Schmidt

The more I look into the topic, the more multilayered complicated it becomes as actually with many of the themes that we have covered in Red to Green. So I’m really happy to now have a team of, we’re now 12 people, who are looking into this, who are doing industry research, who are looking for interview guests. Because that’s absolutely necessary to be able to cover these topics.

Michael Wolf

And what I love about podcasting is it’s a form, I’ve always viewed it as a form of open-source journalism. In a way that,  you know, if you’re a good journalist, if you’re a, ultimately a good podcaster, you’re having these conversations. And you know, you go back 20 years before there’s podcasting, you wouldn’t hear these conversations, you would hear like what essentially you’d read, like a 300, 400-word article.

But what I always found was interesting is the conversations that take place to get there. And so I love that you’re doing these deep conversations that people get to hear these, these conversations and take this journey with you. what’s what I’ve always loved about the medium of audio and audio journalism.

Marina Schmidt

Yeah, definitely. We do go now into video, also releasing the video to the podcast, and also making write-ups. So for the work that we’re doing from this season onwards, but also for any upcoming seasons, we will create summaries and reports. Because I would say that the audience that we have is clearly the food tech nerds.

Most of our listeners from 70 plus countries are actually food tech professionals or are about to get into the field. And you do have to be quite a bit nerdy to listen to eight hours of deep-dive cellular agriculture content or nine hours on plastic alternatives. And that’s why it’s more like an audiobook.

And I recently started looking at it as audiobooks that have this beginning, middle, and end attached to them.

Michael Wolf

And I love the idea of the story arc and I’m sure people will be able to, to enjoy it and listen to both the first and second season and, and listen on for the third season on your outlets as well as on the spoon. So yeah, I’m looking forward to working with you on this and looking forward to this conversation.

Marina Schmidt

Yeah, lovely. thank you, Mike. And looking forward to also see how the content will be received by the spoon, readers, and listeners.

Michael Wolf

I can tell you already, they’re going to love it. So, all right. Thanks, Marina.

Marina Schmidt

Thank you, Mike.

A Breakdown of Cell-Based Meat’s Big Funding Quarter

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There has been a lot of funding activity in the cultured meat space since the start of the year — and we’re only three months in!

Anyway, there’s been so much investment that I thought it would be good to take a moment to take stock of the cell-based meat companies that have gotten funding so far in 2021, and see how their approaches stack up.

BlueNalu
Funding: $60 million convertible note ($84.8 million in total)
Headquarters: San Diego, CA
About: BlueNalu is creating cell-based fish, starting with a mahi-mahi. The company is building out a pilot production facility that will create 200 – 500 pounds of commercial grade fish per week.

CellMEAT
Funding: $4.5 million ($4.7 million in total)
Headquarters: Gwangju, South Korea
About: CellMEAT makes an original cell culturing medium that acts as an alternative to the controversial fetal bovine serum, and has R&D centers in the cities of Gwangju at the Cheonnam National University and Seoul at Ewha Womans University’s Mokdong Hospital.

CellulaREvolution
Funding: £1 million ($1.37M USD)
Headquarters: Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom
About: CellulaREvolution has developed a synthetic peptide coating that allows for serum-free cell culturing. The company uses a bioreactor that can continuously produce cells in an environment that takes up a much smaller footprint than other methods.

Future Meat
Funding: $26.75 million ($43 million in total)
Headquarters: Jerusalem, Israel
About: Future Meat is creating cell-based chicken and made headlines this year when it announced it had brought the cost of its meat down to $7.50 per quarter pound, shrinking the price gap with traditional animal chicken.

Mirai Foods
Funding: €3.7 million (~$4.41 million USD)
Headquarters: Wädenswil, Switzerland
About: Mirai’s take on cell-based meat involves no genetic modification. It is being developed specifically with European market preferences in mind.

Mosa Meat
Funding: $85 million ($96 million in total)
Headquarters: The Netherlands
About: Mosa is credited with creating the first cell-based burger back in 2013, which at the time cost $325,000. The company has since achieved an 80x reduction in that cost by removing fetal bovine serum, and is building out its pilot production facility in Maastricht, Netherlands.

New Age Meats
Funding: $2 million ($7 million in total)
Headquarters: Berkeley, CA
About: New Age Meats is developing hybrid cell- and plant-based meats including pork sausages and dumplings. The company grows meat from cells and adds plant-based ingredients for flavor, texture and nutrition.

Vow Food
Total Funding: $6 million
Headquarters: Sydney, Australia
About: Vow is going beyond re-creating cow and chicken meat by developing cell-based versions of 11 different animals include alpaca, water buffalo, and kangaroo.

In addition to the funding frenzy in cell-based meat, the tide seems to be turning when we’ll see cell-based meat come to market. Eat Just already sells its cell-based chicken in Singapore, and experts believe that price parity with traditional meat could happen in as little as five years.

Who knows, maybe in March 2026 I’ll be able to do a round of all the cell-based meat products hitting retail shelves.

Image via Deep Branch.

More Headlines

Deep Branch Raises €8M to Turn Air Into Animal Feed – The company turns CO2 into a protein ingredient that Deep Branch says is comparable in nutritional profile to fishmeal, which is a standard in the animal feed industry. It is also, the company says, cost-competitive with other types of animal feed on the market.

Noquo Foods Rebrands as Stockeld Dreamery, Readies Launch of Its Plant-Based Cheese – The Stockholm, Sweden-based startup’s first product will be a feta-like cheese made from fermented pea protein and fava beans.

Loca Food Makes Vegan Queso Cheese from Potatoes – it’s actually pretty delicious! (I prefer the spicy blend, myself)


Here’s Why Future Cattle Farmers and Fishermen May Work at an Office Park or Abandoned Mall

As more and more companies in the cell-based meat space migrate from prototype to full pilot production phase, one of the questions that we need to start thinking about is how exactly all this meat will be made at scale.

Sure, scaled production is likely 10 years out for many of these companies, but the reality is re-configuring an industry as big and significant as meat, poultry or fish production will be a herculean task, so it’s worth starting the conversation now.

One of the futuristic visions I keep hearing about is the idea of “meat breweries“, where buildings host giant bioreactors that grow cultured meat.

It’s a weird concept now, but in fifteen years time there’s a good chance we’ll need meat breweries sprinkled throughout the country (and globe) if we plan to get anywhere near the volume of production where cell-based meat can account for 35% of all meat consumed predicted by consulting firm AT Kearney by 2045.

If we’re going to use the brewery concept as a model to frame the conversation, it’s worth comparing the idea of meat “brewing” to that of traditional beer brewing market and ask: will meat breweries be something akin to big high-production beer breweries like those of Anheuser-Busch, producing a bunch of meat centrally and shipping around the country?

Or, alternatively, will meat brewing be something closer to the microbrewery model where meat is made city-by-city for consumption within a hundred mile radius?

My best guess based on conversations with early entrepreneurs in this space is the meat-brewing production model will be much closer to how one makes my favorite local IPA to than, say, Budweiser. In other words: There will be lots of meat breweries around the country and around the world, producing cell-based meat to be consumed locally.

So where will these meat breweries be built? The reality is that while cell-based meat production can certainly be done in a building built on farmland (and I definitely think livestock farmers should consider such a thing), the reality is that meat brewing can and will be done just about anywhere where there is space. Space like in old factories, warehouses, empty office parks and even restaurants. Just as with today’s brewpubs, you can even envision some restaurants that make their meat on site in the future.

And then there’s empty shopping malls and abandoned retail spaces. Retail real estate demand is shrinking quickly and likely won’t come back as more people buy online and work remotely. We’ve already seen some empty retail locations turned into vertical farms, so why not think about turning these spaces into the meat farms of the future?

No matter where we decide to put these future cell-based meat, poultry and fish production facilities, chances are we will need a lot of them. Those developers, entrepreneurs and city planners that start envisioning a future now that includes distributed cell-based meat production could help us usher in the cultured meat farmers and fishermen of the future.

Four Predictions for the Future of Food in 2021

It goes without saying that 2020 was a challenging year for the food industry. A worldwide pandemic that wreaked havoc on food supply chains, forced the permanent closure of thousands of restaurants worldwide, and pushed millions of people deeper into food insecurity showed us just how fragile the systems that keep us nourished and fed are.

But it’s also the recognition of this fragility that’s led to an increasing sense of urgency to invest in the future of food. The good news is the timing couldn’t be better. We are at a culmination point in the fields of bioengineering, chemistry and food science where decades of hard work and progress have allowed ideas that once seemed the domain of science fiction to leap into the labs and, now and in the not-to-distant future, onto our plates.

And while 2020 was a year of unprecedented progress across our food system, I expect 2021 to be even more impactful. Below are four predictions for some of what we could see this year.

Cultured Meat Milestones Will Accelerate

Throughout 2020, announcements of milestones for cultured meat flowed with increasing regularity. New prototypes of practically every type of meat ranging from chicken to beef to kangaroo debuted, heads of state and other famous folks got their first tastes of lab-grown meat, and at the end Eat Just announced the first regulatory approval and retail sale of cultured chicken in Singapore.

And we’ll see even more milestones this year. Investment will grow and excitement will build as more companies move out of the labs and into early pilot production facilities for their cultured meat products. Other countries will follow Singapore’s lead and give regulatory green light for the sale of cultured meat. And finally, we’ll see the debut of more cultured meat products in high-end cuisine as chefs look to achieve similar firsts for their restaurants. We may even see the rollout of cultured meat in some select experiential, high-end retail.

Fermentation Powers Growth in Exciting New Consumer-Facing Products

One of the of most exciting areas in the future of food is microbial fermentation. High-volume production of interesting new biomass proteins such as mycelium-based meat replacements and the arrival of animal-free proteins, fats and other compounds created using precision fermentation helped illustrate why the Good Food Institute called fermentation the third leg of the alternative protein market.

Looking forward, you can expect lots of new products to debut powered by precision fermentation in 2021. MeliBio, a maker of bee-free honey, expects to debut their first product in 2021, while Clara Foods plans to release its animal-free egg this year as well, and I expect to see more companies like Brave Robot rise up and offer new products built around precision fermented food platforms created by companies like Perfect Day.

CRISPR and Gene-Edited Food See Accelerated Product Pipelines

There was big news in the CRISPR and gene-edited food realm in December when the USDA proposed a change in the regulatory oversight of gene-edited animals for human consumption. The organization proposed that they take over oversight responsibility for approving gene-edited animal products from the FDA which, in 2018, famously declared that gene-edited animals should be regulated in the same manner as drugs.

Under a new USDA regulatory framework, the organization is proposing a fairly light regulatory approach to animals compared to the previous oversight of the FDA, which in turn could speed up time to market for new products. While there has been lots of focus on CRISPR-derived future food innovation, I expect changes to US regulatory oversight of gene-edited animal products to create a wave of new interest in developing CRISPR-based product lines from both startups and established food product companies.

Finally, the US may not be the only market to see a change in oversight for gene-edited food. The UK is looking to extract itself from the heavier-handed oversight of the EU post-Brexit, and some in Europe are suggesting that the EU’s classification of all gene-edited food as GMO might be overbroad and need adjusting.

3D Food Printing Moves Beyond the Cake

While 3D food printing has largely been relegated to the world of confections and cake decorating, a world with food replicators from the pages of science fiction novels seems to be inching closer to reality.

Companies like Redefine Meat are making high-volume plant-based meat printers and plan to have meat in supermarkets in a year, while others like Meat-Tech are showing off prototypes of cultured meat printers. One of the challenges for food printing will be scaling the technology to make it quicker, something Novameat is working on as it begins to enter commercial rollout phase of its plant-based meat printing technology. On the consumer front, while I don’t expect the food printers to start printing out Jamie Oliver recipes this year, companies like Savoreat are working on commercializing products for the professional space with the end-goal of eventually creating a home consumer food printer like the one you might see in a show like Upload.

Finally, these advances and technologies do not happen in a vacuum. The future of food is reliant on a multitude of new innovations and technologies. CRISPR, precision fermentation and 3D food printing are just some of the tools being interwoven and utilized together to help bring innovative new products to cultured, plant-based and other emerging food markets.

While we don’t know what 2021 will hold for us with any certainty, what we can be certain of is that progress in these important building blocks for the future of food will continue to march forward.