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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

genetic engineering

Newsletter: Yeast Could be the Key to our Plant-Based Food Future — and CBD, Too

Happy Friday from L.A., where I came for a weekend of fancy toast, museum-hopping, and sipping as much green juice as my wallet can handle.

Just a short way down the coast is the headquarters of Beyond Meat, the startup whose plant-based burgers are making their way onto the plates of vegetarians and carnivores alike, including Bill Gates. This week, the Microsoft founder curated MIT Technology Review’s annual list of Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2019, and named plant-based burgers one of his picks. (He has invested in both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods in the past.)

That wasn’t the only news around plant-based protein this week. Impossible Foods announced that it was bringing its famous “bleeding” meat to Singapore!

Impossible’s burgers get their bloody appearance from heme, which the startup’s scientists make through a process that involves genetically engineered yeast. They’re not the only ones using yeast to make better-tasting meat alternatives: New company Motif Ingredients (a spinoff of Ginkgo Bioworks), which just launched this week, uses modified yeast to “brew” proteins intended for use in plant-based foods. This could lead to an influx of new meat alternative startups, as companies would no longer need their own expensive R&D lab and team of scientists in order to develop an animal-free product.

But genetically modified yeast can make a lot more than just protein. This week, scientists from Berkeley announced they had developed a way to use genetically modified yeast to create CBD and THC.

That’s right, the active components of Mary Jane can be grown in a lab. So in addition to bread, protein, beer, and milk, we can now add weed to the list of things that yeast can make. That’s one mighty microbe.

A bloody Impossible burger.

Let’s shift gears a minute to one of our all-time favorite topics: robots. Also pizza.

This week resident Spoon robo-expert Chris wrote about FedEx’s new delivery robot which can navigate stairs to deliver packages — or a piping-hot pizza — to your doorstep. He also covered Basil Street, a company developing automated pizza vending machines that can cook a pie in three minutes flat. In non-pizza robot news, the makers of Julia, a countertop cooking robot, raised an undisclosed amount of funding this week.

Seems like there’s a lot of really exciting innovation a-brewing in the world of food robotics, eh? If you want to join the conversation, we’re having a Slack Chat dedicated to the topic of automation in food TODAY at 10:30 a.m. PST. Experts from Byte Foods, Augean Robotics, and Kiwi Technology will be joining, and it’s sure to be valuable and, most importantly, fun. Sign up for our Slack Channel (it’s free and super easy, promise) to join. See you then!

Still can’t get enough robots? (We can’t, either.) Our food robotics and automation summit ArticulATE is happening April 16 at General Assembly in downtown San Francisco. If you want a teaser, this week we spoke with Linda Pouliot, CEO and founder of Dishcraft Robotics (yep, she’ll be at ArticulATE!), about what sort of kitchen tasks robots are suited for — and which ones are best left to humans. Early Bird Tickets for the summit are on sale now — get ’em while they’re hot.

With that, it’s time to eat tacos until I can’t eat tacos no mo. Peace.

Catherine

“High” Tech: CBD Can Be Made with Genetically Engineered Microbes (AKA Yeast)

When you think of what yeast can do, your mind probably goes to bread or beer. But in a paper published today in Nature, scientists from UC Berkeley announced that they had successfully created the chemical compounds in marijuana — both THC and CBD — from bioengineered microscopic fungi. AKA yeast. (H/t Quartz.)

To do this, the team of scientists extracted THC and CBD genes from cannabis, then implanted them in yeast (specifically Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the same yeast used to brew beer and wine). When the yeast is put into a liquid solution with the sugar galactose and other nutrients it outputs the chemical compounds in marijuana.

Basically, scientists can now grow cannabidiol (CBD) in a lab.

There are a few benefits to this. According to Quartz, producing THC and CBD via genetically engineered yeast is cheaper than extracting the chemicals from hemp or cannabis plants (over 99 percent cheaper, in fact). That means that companies purchasing these chemical compounds to make, say, CBD-infused soda, can pass those savings onto consumers. While CBD products aren’t astronomically expensive right now — a twelve-pack of that CBD soda will set you back fifty bucks — but if they want to reach a larger audience, a cheaper price tag can’t hurt.

Secondly, using this technology scientists can create new cannabinoids, ones that could be tweaked to have specific effects (e.g., high levels of relaxation). Finally, creating THC and CBD in a lab could reduce the surprisingly high environmental footprint of cannabis crop cultivation, both indoors and outdoors. However, as with cultured meat, there is a counter-argument that keeping the lab running requires a level of energy tantamount to just producing the crop the old fashioned way.

Bioengineered yeast is opening doors for scientists to grow all sorts of food ingredients in labs. Perfect Day is using yeast to produce dairy-free milk. Impossible Foods uses genetically engineered yeast to make heme, the molecule that makes their burgers ‘bloody.’ And earlier this week, new company Motif Ingredients launched (with a cool $90 million in funding) to use yeast to create proteins to replace animal products.

This innovation is coming along at an exciting time for CBD. After the passage of the Farm Bill in late 2018 made hemp-derived CBD legal in the U.S., analysts (ourselves included) began predicting that 2019 would be the year of CBD. It’s unclear if CBD derived from genetically engineered yeast — as opposed to hemp — will be legal, and regulators probably won’t tackle that can of worms for a while.

This news got me thinking. I wonder if we’ll see major cannabis and hemp companies pushing back against CBD made in a lab, much as we’ve seen big meat producers take issue with cell-based meat calling itself “meat.”

More immediately, this sort of research could help shed more light on the properties of CBD and maybe even accelerate the process for the FDA to decide if cannabidiol is a food-safe ingredient.