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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Impossible Foods

A Plant-Based Tour of What I Ate at the Good Food Conference

You don’t attend the Good Food Conference (GFC) for the food. You go there to hear the Big Guns of the meat alternatives movement — like Seth Goldman of Beyond Meat, Mark Post of Mosa Meats, and Uma Valeti of Memphis Meats — speak onstage. You go there to watch new startups pitch their company’s vision for reducing (and eliminating) industrial meat production. You go there to hear about the latest breakthroughs and challenges in the plant- and cell-based meat spaces.

But at the same time, you kind of do go for the food. Because the whole point of the conference is to promote alternatives to traditional meat — and in order to be successful, the first thing those alternatives have to do is taste good. Like, good enough that a carnivore would choose them over a burger or hot dog.

As cell-based meat isn’t to market yet, all the alterna-meats from the two-day conference were plant-based. Here’s a brief overview of all the ones I tried:

Photo: Veggie Grill.

Breakfast

The Good Food Conference fueled their first-day attendees with a breakfast burrito featuring JUST Egg, a vegan egg replacement made of mung beans. The resulting scramble is yellowish and color and, while the texture is pretty spot-on, still has an unmistakeable beaniness. However, camouflaged in a tortilla with black beans, roasted potatoes, and spicy salsa, said beaniness was pretty well concealed.

Sadly I didn’t take a picture of this since I just grabbed one to eat while watching the opening panels, but the photo from Veggie Grill, who teamed up with JUST to launch an all-day breakfast burrito featuring the scramble, is pretty similar. While I think JUST Egg still has a ways to go before it fools any egg-lovers out there, it’s still a reasonable stand-in for huevos when combined with other, stronger flavors, like salsa, peppers, and cheese (vegan or otherwise).

The Beyond Meat spread.

Lunch

Beyond Meat provided the lunch for Day 1, and boy did they do it right. Their grilled sausages (in Bratwurst and Italian flavors) accompanied corn with vegan aioli, as well as several salads. I got a “bratwurst” and really enjoyed it; the sausage had a nice snap and the interior texture was realistically sausage-like. The flavor was also super heavy on the umami, without tasting overly of soy. Overall, two thumbs up.

Photo: JUST

Snack

To combat that afternoon lull, I had an individual serving of JUST cookie dough, which comes in a nifty plastic container with a detachable spoon built into the top. The two flavors I tried were birthday cake, which was overly sweet with sprinkles, and chocolate chip, which tasted just like Tollhouse. (That’s a good thing.)

Overall it’s not that hard to make good-tasting vegan cookie dough — I’ve done it at home with just a few simple substitutions — but the individual serving packages are pretty genius. Now you can get a sugary snack on the go without worrying about salmonella from raw eggs — and they know just the shade of millennial pink to use to draw in customers.

Day 2

Breakfast

Day 2’s breakfast was courtesy of MorningStar Farms, but all I saw were bagels, granola (with almond milk!), and fruit. Not that I’m complaining. I did have a latté made with Oatley oat milk however, which I thought was pretty darn delicious.

Oat milk is definitely the next non-dairy milk trend, at least when it comes to coffee: it doesn’t separate as easily as almond milk and froths much better than soy, meaning your barista can make fancy latté art with it. Oats also require far less water to grow than almonds, so it’s comparatively sustainable, and also doesn’t affect those with nut or soy allergies.

Photo by Nick Klein for The Good Food Institute.

Lunch

For lunch on Day 2 we had Impossible Burgers. Which, after the awesome Beyond sausage the day before, were fine but a little lackluster. They were super savory and tasted mainly of soy, and I kept thinking there was a fishy flavor in there — though that could be attributed to the mishmash of toppings I layered on the patty.

However, the burger was cooked medium, meaning I could see a little bit of the heme-powered “bleeding” action. Overall I would have gone with a smaller bun or thicker patty (or maybe White Castle-esque slider!) so the burger didn’t get lost under everything else.

 

Snack

Visually, this snack spread was one of the most trompe l’oeuil meat-like of the entire weekend. Provided by Worthington, a meat alternative food company, there were “chicken” nuggets and even a vegan charcuterie plate with plant-based bologna. Both tasted primarily of soy, but I liked them — especially the nugget, which had the semi-spongy trademark chicken nugget texture nailed to a T.

 

Photo: Good Catch Foods.

What I Didn’t Eat:

I missed the fish-free tuna sushi from Ocean Hugger foods (made of tomatoes!) and the plant-based tuna salad from Good Catch Foods. I also didn’t get to try Morningstar Farms’ “meat lover” vegan burger, which is clearly trying to capitalize off the buzz around the meat-like patties from Beyond Burger and Impossible Foods. Next year.

 

Conclusions:

Overall, a lot of things tasted pretty heavily of soy, reminding me of veggie breakfast sausages and “soy”-rizo products I’ve eaten in my five years of vegetarianism. The food items that really impressed me were the Beyond Sausage, whose texture was spot-on, and the look of the Worthington charcuterie. I’m sure at next year’s summit there will be even more alterna-meats, milks, and eggs, from even more new, hungry young companies. I can’t wait to try them all.

Impossible Sliders Roll Out at all White Castles Nationwide

Today Impossible Foods, the company famous for their plant-based “bleeding” burgers, announced today that it’s expanding its partnership with fast food chain White Castle. The Impossible slider is now available in all of White Castle’s 377 locations, from New York to St. Louis.

The meat-free sliders debuted at 140 White Castle locations in New York, New Jersey, and Chicago in April to generally positive reviews. They feature a two-ounce Impossible patty, smoked cheddar cheese, pickles, and onions, and sell for $1.99. As I wrote last month, making Impossible burgers more widely available — and for a smaller price point — is key to the company’s strategy to edge in on the beef market. The plant-based patties are available in over 3,000 restaurants globally, and some Air New Zealand flights, and they just added 237 new locations with this White Castle news.

Impossible’s expansion is well-timed to feed the growing demand for plant-based meat. The Good Food Institute released data today which showed that plant-based meat sales increased by 23 percent over the past year alone and have a U.S. retail market value of $684 million.

Impossible debuted in 2016 at high-end New York restaurant Momofuku Nishi, where it cost $18. Now it’s available for almost a tenth of the price at one of the most low-brow fast food chains around (no shade, White Castle). As meat alternatives’ popularity grows, Impossible will no doubt continue to make their products more mainstream and affordable for people with all budgets.

Now, Impossible, if you could please make your fast food debut in Seattle, this writer would be very grateful.

Let’s Unpack Impossible Foods’ Strategy to Edge in On the Beef Market

By now, you may well have sampled an Impossible Burger. (We certainly have — and liked it.) If you haven’t, you’re probably at least curious about the plant-based burger which claims to taste, cook, look, and even bleed like real beef.

The Redwood City-based startup released their 2018 Impact Report this week, touting three of their achievements over the past year: their growing reach (and growing customer demand), their ace-in-the-hole ingredient, heme, and their sustainability mission. With their progress, they hope to continue on their quest to replace beef burgers with their plant-based patties. Here’s how:

  1. Larger availability, smaller price point

Last year Impossible patties were available in only 40 restaurants. Now, you can find them in 3,000 restaurants in the U.S., Hong Kong and Macao. To keep up with rapidly increasing demand, Impossible Foods had to hire a second shift of employees to work in their large-scale commercial plant in Oakland, California, which produces about 500,000 pounds of plant-based meat each month.

In addition to widening their availability, Impossible has also been dropping its price point. Initially they were available only at Momofuku Nishi, David Chang’s hip NYC restaurant, for $18 (albeit with fries). Now you can pick on up at one of 140 White Castle locations for only $1.99.

Impossible Foods has chosen to market their meatless patties in restaurants because of chefs’ trendsetting power with one highly influential demographic: millennials. Millennials are driving the explosive growth of the plant-based meat market and are leading the charge on flexitarianism. Impossible Foods knows this, and is taking advantage; about three-quarters of its customers also eat meat.

“We want meat eaters globally to happily prefer our plant-based vegan products because they think it’s just better,” David Lee, COO and CFO of Impossible Foods, told crowds at TechfestNW earlier this year. It’s a smart move on Impossible Foods’ part to take any self-righteous guilting out of the equation. In fact, they seem to be moving towards a branding strategy where they don’t differentiate themselves from meat at all. Their website’s slogan is: “We make delicious meat from plants”.

Not to be nitpicky, but technically, they don’t — they make vegetarian burgers out of plants, which happen to mimic the things we love about meat (umami flavor, juicy fattiness, etc.). The secret to their burger’s taste-alike success? Well, that would be…

2. The buzzy molecule behind the “bleeding” burger

A big part of Impossible’s branding is their patties’ uncanny ability to “bleed” just like beef. This is thanks to heme, a molecule found in red meat — and also plants, which is where Impossible creates and harvests it. When we sampled the Impossible burger, we could taste the animal almost-metallic funkiness (yes, that’s a good thing) that comes from heme. Heme not only gives the patties a distinctly beef-like flavor — it’s also one of the most important aspects of their marketing strategy. The reason that a burger made from plants can be dubbed as “meat” is because it has some of the same chemical flavors, down to the molecule.

A few months ago the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) flagged heme as a potential allergen after Impossible sent in their burger for a voluntary food safety test. Recently, however, the FDA gave heme the green light, declaring it safe. The FDA holdup wasn’t much of a roadblock; Impossible could (and did) sell their burgers widely. More of an issue, at least to some, is the fact that the patties aren’t GMO-free. In fact, heme is made through genetically engineering. But the GMO aspect doesn’t seem to cool excitement over this molecule, which is one of Impossible’s biggest selling points — one which allows them to position their products as a “burger,” not a “veggie burger.”

3. Mission Earth 

Plants have a smaller environmental footprint than animals — they just do. And beef is one of the worst culprits of all. In the impact report, Impossible Foods’ CEO and founder Pat Brown said that his company was on track to “eliminate the need for animals as a food production technology by 2035.” He told Time that by doing so, we can save Earth and “keep it habitable” so we won’t be forced to relocate to Mars.

Obviously, this is super ambitious — and optimistic. Even if we could eliminate the need for animals as food (that is, come up with enough plant-based protein to sustain the world) many people would be hard-pressed to give up meat — no matter how realistic the veggie burger.

There’s no question demand for (and acceptance of) plant-based protein is on the rise. The market is increasing at a CAGR of 5.9% and is projected to reach $14.22 billion by 2022. Almost 40% of people are trying to incorporate more plant-based proteins into their diets.

Which sounds super encouraging, until you realize that 2018 is also the year we’re projected to eat more meat than ever before. So while Impossible’s sales might be growing, is it moving any closer to its goal of replacing beef? Or is it just becoming a supplementary option for our protein-crazed selves?

Right now we’re at a critical juncture for the future of meat alternatives; they’re clearly gaining popularity and reach, but are they actually making a dent in meat production? As of yet, not so much. But with continued technical innovation, and new manufacturing methods, they might become so good that they might reach Impossible’s self-professed goal to be so good that carnivores choose their burgers over the real thing.

Conclusions

With heme now FDA-approved, and its continuing march towards affordable ubiquity, Impossible seems to show no sign of slowing down its growth, both to new marketplaces and new heights of media attention. Apparently, the company also has patents on the flavor chemistry used to create pork, chicken, and fish flavors, and plan to make plant-based alternatives to all three in the future.

If it can fix a few training issues, and avoid the roadblocks that Beyond Meat has experienced with meeting growing demand, maybe they can take some of the wind out of beef’s sales — and then conquer the rest of the animal kingdom. Of course, as long as lab-grown meat doesn’t knock them out of the water first.

 

 

Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Get Label Wins, Score Big for Plant-based Meat

Yesterday plant-based burger startup Impossible Foods officially got the green light from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that their patties are safe to eat. Impossible voluntarily submitted their burger to the FDA for testing last year and was surprised when the regulatory body came back to them with a big red flag concerning the burger’s not-so-secret star ingredient: heme.

Though heme is typically found in animal tissue, it also occurs naturally in plants — albeit in smaller amounts. Impossible uses genetically modified yeast to produce large amounts of the stuff, which lends the trademark “bleeding” appearance, and meaty taste, to their burgers.

While the FDA was initially wary of approving heme, stating that there wasn’t enough information to establish its safety, it reversed its stance yesterday, claiming that the ingredient is “generally recognized as safe.”

Though it has cleared the FDA hurdle, Impossible Foods still gets flack for using genetically modified ingredients. Plant-based meat competitor Beyond Meat, however, made headlines today when it officially secured its status as non-GMO after a one-year review. Though many people, including Beyond Meat investor Bill Gates, believe that GMOs are “perfectly healthy,” the International Food Information Council Foundation revealed last month that nearly half of consumers avoid genetically modified food, believing it to be unhealthy.

These pieces of news are big wins for the respective alterna-meat startups. Business has been booming lately for both companies: Impossible recently started selling its vegan burger patties at White Castle and on select Air New Zealand flights, and Beyond has been selling out in grocery stores around the country, with plans for international expansion.

Impossible Burgers Take to the Skies in L.A. – N.Z. Flight

Airplane food gets an (admittedly deserved) bad rap, but airlines are working to change all that with fresh, vertically-grown lettuce, local craft beers, and, now, plant-based burgers.

Yesterday, Air New Zealand sent out a tweet announcing that the buzzed-about Impossible Burger will be available to Business Premier passengers on their Los Angeles to Auckland flight from now until late October. Air New Zealand is the first airline to put the Impossible Burger on their in-flight menu.

Unlike plant-based competitor Beyond Burgers, Impossible has been taking a chiefly B2B approach, selling their burgers in generally upscale fast-casual restaurants and, recently, select White Castles.

We’ve covered Impossible Foods’ training problem on the Spoon, which could pose more of an issue when the burgers are being par-cooked in a facility and reheated in at 35,000 feet. Regardless, the media buzz surrounding this announcement (no doubt helped by their cute promotion video (see below) shows the level of excitement around plant-based meat alternatives isn’t going down anytime soon.

In fact, it’s going sky high. (Sorry.)

Air New Zealand serves up the Impossible

 

Food Tech News Roundup: Plant-Based Updates, Beverage Fundraising, & (Near) Instant Cake

This was a very meaty week for food tech! No — literally. From Crowd Cow’s $8 million fundraise to our Future of Meat meetup last night, there was plenty to sink our teeth into. Plus we wrote about a French pizza-making robot and Microsoft’s visual food logging patent.

But now it’s (almost) the weekend and time for our food tech news roundup! And since Monday is a holiday, you have plenty of time to sit back and peruse at your leisure.

Photo: Beyond Meat.

Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods unveil news (and new products)

This week at the National Restaurant Association Show Beyond Meat debuted a new product: breakfast “sausage” patties. According to Food Business News, the patties, which are made of pea, mung bean, sunflower and rice protein, as well as sage and nutmeg, cook just like a pork patty and have twice the protein. This is the latest product from Beyond Meat, who already offer Beyond Sausage, Beyond Chicken Strips, and Beyond Beef Crumble in addition to their iconic Beyond Burger. It’s expected to hit grocery shelves in fall of this year.

Another plant-based meat company also unveiled some news this week. Impossible Foods announced on Tuesday that its “bleeding” vegan burgers are officially kosher. They announced this after they received their official kosher certification from the Orthodox Union, the world’s largest kosher certification agency. Which means that those who keep kosher can now officially have a cheeseburger — sort of. Impossible is hoping to get their Halal certification later this year.

 

Craft beverages snag serious funding

Two non-alcoholic drink companies — High Brew Coffee and REBBL — announced $20 million investment rounds this week, according to BevNet. This was the Series C funding round for Austin, TX-based High Brew, whose canned cold brew coffee attracted investment from celebrities like the band Kings of Leon and former MLB pitcher Huston Street. High Brew is part of the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group allied brands family.

One of High Brew’s investors, CAVU Venture Partners, also contributed to REBBL’s recent fundraise. Their coconut milk-based beverages are infused with natural supplements like matcha, turmeric, and maca. REBBL (which stands for roots, extracts, berries, bark and leaves) also has a philanthropic bent; it donates 2.5% of its net sales to efforts by Not For Sale to end human trafficking in the places where it sources ingredients.

 

Miss Jones debuts healthy, convenience-focused dessert

Millennial-targeted baking mix company Miss Jones Baking Co. announced this week that it will be rolling out a new product at Whole Foods: Desserts-in-a-Cup. We’ve all had a microwaved mug cake before (and if you haven’t, you should), but the Miss Jones version come already mixed and pre-packaged — all you have to do is add water and zap for 30-40 seconds. At 150-250 calories per single-serve cake, they’re targeting the health-conscious, convenience-seeking millennial audience that wants to satisfy their sweet tooth, guilt-free.

Did we miss some food tech news? Leave us a comment or tweet us @TheSpoonTech!

Does Impossible Foods Have a Training Problem?

Both of my parents were professors, and my wife of ten years does professional development training, so I have developed a very strong appreciation for power of good teaching. Perhaps because I’ve been surrounded by educators my first reaction after being let down by the Impossible burger wasn’t a problem with the product, but it was assuming there was a problem in the way people were taught to cook it.

After years of anticipation to try the meatless burger that “bleeds,” I was extremely disappointed with my first Impossible experience. The problem, in my case, was that the burger was overdone to the point where it didn’t really have a taste. The outside was was a hard shell with a crunch that overrode the rest of the patty. While the inside did have a meat-like texture, it was grey and didn’t “bleed” at all.

And I’m not alone in this. My colleagues Mike and Catherine tried the Impossible burger at a different restaurant, and theirs was overcooked as well. The folks at Ars Technica had mixed experiences, but they too noticed the crust and the dryness of the burger.

As Impossible Burger scales its availability–it’s now available in more than 1,000 restaurants across the U.S. and Hong Kong–how is the company scaling its operations to make sure those burgers are cooked properly?

I talked with the restaurant that served me my Impossible burger and they said that they bought it through a third party food provider who did provide a day of in-person training on how to cook and how to talk about it. The manager at this restaurant said that Impossible burgers cook in about half the time of meat patties, and that my Impossible burger should have been pink in the middle. They went on to say that training one cook doesn’t mean that person trains everyone else in the kitchen properly.

This isn’t just about customer complaints. The question of training is important for two reasons. First, Impossible is among the first wave of companies making meat-like veggie patties at scale. This will be the first experience many customers have with meat-like plant based burgers. If customers are turned off by a bad experience, you reduce the likelihood that they will try another one or adopt it into an ongoing diet (and reducing meat consumption has many benefits for the planet.)

Second, Impossible, which has raised $387.5 million in funding, is essentially handing over the customer experience to a third party that sells lots of items, and may not care. A consumer can have a good experience at a restaurant even though they have a bad meal. If a customer doesn’t like the Impossible Burger, so what? As long as they come back, they can order something else, and the restaurant still makes its money.

This is in contrast to the Beyond Meat burger that I loved, and whose go-to market strategy is to be in the supermarket aisles. Though I felt like I may have overcooked my first Beyond Burgers, I realized that was my fault, and knew how to correct it. So a less-than-perfect first try didn’t stop me from running to the store to buy more.

But I’m less likely to buy another Impossible burger, because I’m counting on the person behind the counter to get it right. I’m hesitant to say that Impossible should follow Apple and build it’s own restaurants–that would be expensive and distract from the company’s core mission–but it would ensure quality and better curate the first time experience with the product.

I reached out to Impossible to find out more about its training procedures, and didn’t hear back in time for publication. If they get back to me, I will update this post.

For now though, the possibility of my ordering another Impossible burger does not look great.

Food Tech News Roundup: SmartPlate Updates, Localized Meal Kits, & Food Alternatives

Forget the crossword and stack of pancakes — get ready for the best part of your weekend. We’ve rounded up the food tech and innovation-related stories that caught our eye around the web this week for your perusing pleasure. From plant-based sliders at White Castle to (maybe) smart plates, get ready for your weekly dose of news.

Photo: Kitchen 1883

Kroger to expand in-store restaurant chain

Kroger recently announced that it will open a second in-store restaurant in the Greater Cincinnati area. Dubbed Kitchen 1883, its menu features new American comfort food. Kroger launched the first Kitchen 1883 restaurant last November in Kentucky.

As grocery sales move online, this is a bid from Kroger to get shoppers to physically go to their stores, and to stay awhile. It’s a similar concept to this frozen yogurt kiosk or Ikea’s beloved meatballs and cinnamon rolls; keep people around, and they’ll buy more.

 

Photo: Smartplate.com

Smartplate (Might Be) About to Finally Ship

A few days ago Anthony Ortiz, founder of Smartplate, the plate/app combo that tracks the nutrition of what you’re eating, posted an update on their IndieGo page stating that they had built the first 15 production-grade Smartplate TopViews. These new plates are flatter, with updated software.

We’ve covered Smartplate before on the Spoon, with some healthily skepticism. Their update claims they’ll be ready to ship by July 2018, but they’ve already missed a few ship dates. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Smartplate is finally ready for the real world — but in the mean time, you can go ahead and download the Smartplate app.

 

Photo: Soylent

Soylent at Walmart!

Soylent, the powdered meal replacement drink aimed at busy millennials, became available at Walmart this week. The beverage made the leap into brick-and-mortar retail last year when it launched in 2,500 7-Eleven stores. Previously it was only available online.

Rosa Foods, the maker of Soylent, announced that it will be available in 450 Walmart stores across 14 states. This latest expansion signifies that the beverage, which had a few ups and downs over the past few years, is becoming more mainstream. It also indicates a strong market for meal replacements aimed not at people who want to weight loss, but who want to save time and brainspace.

 

Photo: Local Crate

Local Crate Raises $1.4M for Fresh Food Delivery

Minnesota-based meal kit service Local Crate raised $1.4 million this week. The startup focuses on sourcing local ingredients from smallholder farmers and local producers, which they pre-portion and deliver in their meal kits, along with chef-inspired recipes. With this new fundraise, they plan to expand into Wisconsin and Iowa. They also want to develop their brick and mortar presence, following recent announcements by Weight Watchers, Walmart, Plated and others who also placed their meal kits on supermarket shelves.

 

Photo: White Castle

White Castle Now Offering Impossible Burgers at Affordable Price

On Thursday, April 12th, White Castle, the fast-food chain known for its tiny, square hamburgers, will offer a version of its sliders made with Impossible Foods’ plant-based patties. The sliders will come with smoked cheddar, pickles, and onions, but customers can nix the cheese to make it vegan.

White Castle is rolling out the plant-based sliders in 140 locations and will eventually offer them nationally. We tried the patties last month and decided that while they tasted pretty good, their high price point could be a barrier to widespread acceptance. This partnership will make Impossible’s “bleeding” burgers much more widely available — and more affordable, too. White Castle’s Impossible sliders will cost only $1.99 each. It will be interesting to see how the bleeding burgers fare in a fast food environment, instead of the fast casual and high end restaurants where they have been offered up until now.

Plant-Based Impossible Foods Raises $114 Million

Perhaps the universe is trying to tell us something this week. The day after 7,000 pounds of raw beef was recalled across nine states, Impossible Foods, maker of a meatless burger, announced that it had closed $114 million in convertible note financing.

The latest money comes from Sailing Capital and the Singapore government-backed Temasek, and brings Impossible’s war chest up to a total of $396 million.

Impossible makes the meat-like, meatless burger that “bleeds” and is sold through restaurants (check out our recent field trip to try one). Impossible burgers are available in more than 1,000 restaurants in the U.S., and company co-founder Pat Brown told TechCrunch that his production facility will be making 2.5 million pounds of its product per month by the end of the year.

Fake meat is having a moment right now as consumers become more conscious of what they eat and the impact it has on the planet. Nielsen research shows that over the last year the plant-based foods category grew 8.1%, hitting $3.1 billion in sales. Plant-based meat sales have grown by 6% in this time.

Impossible Foods isn’t alone in the meatless burger category. Competitor Beyond Meat also offers a (delicious) burger, though theirs is sold in grocery stores. This new generation of beef-like burgers — ones that are plant-based but scientifically formulated to closely mimic meat — are catching on to such an extent that Kraft Heinz had to reformulate its Boca Burger to better adapt to modern tastes.

With five billion pounds of ground beef sold in the U.S. every year, meatless burgers still have a long way to go before they usurp meat ones. But with its new fundraise, Impossible’s mission to reduce the world’s meat consumption just got a little more possible.

Building Wine and Meat Molecule by Molecule

“Engineering wines to perfection molecule by molecule.” That’s the tagline of Ava Winery, which is creating synthetic wines without grapes, yeast, or even fermentation.

Mardonn Chua and Alec Lee are the entrepreneurs behind Ava Winery. They create compounds with ethanol that mimic the chemical composition of wines, but that will sell for much less money. The full process involves experimenting with mixes of amino acids, sugars, and ethanol, and they have also tried mimicking the taste of 1992 Dom Perignon.

If you’re interested in the detail-by-detail mechanics involved in mimicking wines, read Mardonn Chua’s Medium post here, where he lays out recipes tried during experiments.

Ava Winery has shown tenacity in the face of critics, too. The editors at New Scientist grabbed headlines when they compared Ava Winery’s Moscato to a plastic “pool shark,” with “essence of plastic bag,” which prompted the winery to respond: “Nothing resembling plastic is an ingredient in the wine, taste is deeply subjective.”

Ava Winery sees the promise of its form of “hacking” extending beyond just wine, and its founders note: “This is what the future of foods looks like: food will be scanned and printed as easily as photographs today. These digital recreations will be identical chemical copies of the originals, capturing the same nutritional values, flavors, and textures of their ‘natural’ counterparts. Part scientists and part artists, our canvas will be macronutrients like starches and proteins; our pixels will be flavor molecules.”

Indeed, Ava Winery’s vision of creating synthetic wine is hardly the only game in town on the synthetic food and wine scene. Memphis Meats, impossible Foods and other companies are focused on synthetic meat and food, and Beyond Meat has gotten rave reviews for its synthetic burgers and also gained interest from both Bill Gates and his former Microsoft buddy Nathan Myhrvold.

In fact, Gates has penned a very interesting post titled “Future of Food,” where he notes the following: “The chicken taco I ate was made using Beyond Meat’s chicken alternative. I wasn’t the only one fooled by how real it tasted. New York Times food writer Mark Bittman couldn’t tell the difference between Beyond Meat and real chicken either. You can read his review here.” Gates has put his money where his mouth is and invested in Beyond Meat, as have others.

A video on Beyond Meat’s vision of taking animal protein out of the food chain is available here:

And then there’s the Impossible Burger. While Beyond Meat is working with other burger joints like Burgerfi to put their meat-alternative in the hands of consumers, Impossible Foods – the brain child of DNA microarray inventor Patrick O. Brown – decided to not only create a plant based burger that bleeds, but to create a national chain of restaurants – to sell the Impossible Burger.

While Ava Winery is focused on triggering the same pleasure receptors that are triggered when we consume a traditionally fermented fine wine, companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have the potential to create inexpensive alternatives to meat that could make a profound nutritional difference for people all around the world.

According to Ava Winery’s Alec Lee: “Today we’re on the cusp of significant technological breakthroughs in food production the likes of which have never been seen before. It took humanity nearly 10,000 years of agriculture to develop many of the crops and animal herds we consume today. It took only a few centuries to develop the farming tools that have culminated in large-scale, efficient mechanized farming. And it only took decades to marry science with food allowing us to directly manipulate the genetic constructs of our food.”

It’s worth watching Lee’s video, where he expands on these concepts and explores Ava Winery’s strategy:

Image credit: Flickr user Star5112

When Food Producers Borrow Techniques From Breweries

The future of food discussion is often focused on ways to make popular food products and ingredients in a sustainable and healthier way. The road to meeting the demand for more natural foods is filled with constraints; a supply chain that can’t always deliver natural ingredients and prices that consumers don’t always want to pay. That’s why some companies are turning to a well-worn technology, used commonly by brewers to make beer and cider.

Food companies like faux-meat startup Impossible Foods and cow-free milk producer Perfect Day are using fermentation-like processes along with food science to create natural ingredients in unusual ways.

A recent piece from Fortune explains,

Scientists identify the desired genes in a plant or animal and insert them into a host such as yeast. The yeast is fed sugars and nutrients to stimulate fermentation. Then the yeast and its genes are filtered off, and the desired ingredient is purified out of the remaining broth.

When we think of food technology, we often think of gadgets and instruments used to cook and order our food, but the work happening in food science to create foods that taste and look like the real thing is perhaps some of the most interesting. If we think about the food system broadly and the challenges the world faces – including shortages and harmful climate impact, this kind of food tech will lead the way in driving real solutions.

The big question, as Fortune points out, will be whether or not consumers will buy into fake meat that’s meant to look and taste like the real thing, or cow’s milk that’s made without the cow – or sugar that doesn’t come from a plant.

Is Cultured Meat the Future?

Tofu. Seitan. Tempeh. Blech. Current meat substitutes are—how can I say this—disgusting. And we all know that vegan cheezburger tastes nothing like a real burger or real cheese. But as Impossible Foods’ bleeding burger shows us, the landscape is changing rapidly. The next big trend? Cultured meat.

What the heck is cultured meat? Companies across the globe want to make real meat by growing a small tissue biopsy taken from a real animal (without hurting it) into a larger steak or chicken breast. Each has its own unique device to grow the biopsy and plans to market the product to grocery stores, restaurants, and even individual customers around the globe.

Of course, no one has made cultured meat at scale quite yet: They’re all about five years away from a finished product. SuperMeat, an Israeli biotechnology startup, raised over $200,000 and is now at the beginning of its R&D to create cultured chicken meat. Mosa Meat, a Dutch company, is working on ground beef and in 2013 made a single burger that cost more than $300,000 to produce. Meanwhile Memphis Meats, a California-based startup, is making cultured beef and pork and made a few meatballs earlier this year.

The World's First Cell-based Meatball - Memphis Meats

Though we’re pretty far away from an actual usable technology, the concept has deep implications. Vegans and animal rights groups like the idea that animals don’t have to suffer for us to eat meat, and those concerned with sustainability like the idea that we could produce meat without such a high tax on our land, water, and other natural resources.

So what do you think? Would you eat a burger made of cultured meat?