Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

meat

Good Dot Paves Way for Plant-Based Meats in India with Vegan “Mutton”

Plant-based meat companies are largely based in two continents: Europe and North America. But in places where alterna-meats could have the largest impact on health and the environment, there are very few options available.

One company working to change that is Good Dot, a startup making plant-based meats, as their website states, “in India, for India, by India.”

Founded in 2016, the Udaipur-based company makes meat alternatives out of soy, wheat, and pea protein. Its flagship product is a vegan mutton, and it also has a dehydrated plant-based “chicken” product and an “egg” scramble in its lineup (some Indians don’t consider eggs vegetarian). The company is also working on a shredded-chicken alternative.

When I first heard about Good Dot, I wondered: in a land where 80 percent of the population believes that cows are sacred, and where vegetarian dishes like palak paneer, lentil-based dal and curried bhindi are the norm, is there really a need for meat alternative?

Apparently, I — and many others — am completely off base here. “It’s a huge misconception that India is a primarily vegetarian country,” said Abhishek Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Good Dot. In fact, he told me that around 72 percent of Indians do consume meat.

In a country of 1.3 billion, that still leaves over 360 million vegetarians. Like most alterna-meat companies, however, Good Dot isn’t just targeting vegetarians. Instead, it markets its products as an easy replacement that tastes as good as meat but is healthier for you (lower saturated fat, etc.) and better for the planet. Good Dot’s products are also shelf-stable, which means that people can store them for long periods of time (up to one year) without worrying about spoilage, as they would with meat.

In order to gain a foothold in the market, however, Sinha knew that Good Dot needed to get its products to cost the same — or less — than regular meat. “We believe that to make plant-based meat mainstream it is important to have cost parity with real meat,” he said. “This is where our strength lies.” Good Dot’s “mutton” is at price parity to its traditional counterpart, and its vegan egg product is cheaper than traditional eggs.

Another challenge Good Dot had to tackle was distribution. Chain grocery stores aren’t common in India; locals rely on smaller neighborhood shops and outdoors markets. To get around this hurdle, Good Dot sells its products through RCM, a direct selling company in India with 7,500 stores, as well as online via the Good Dot website and Amazon. In addition to its direct-to-consumer channel, the company also supplies its plant-based meats to hotels and restaurants throughout India.

In addition to its CPG business, Good Dot also has a food stall franchise called GoodDo which sells fried “chicken” made with Good Dot’s plant-based meat. GoodDo currently has four locations in India, and Sinha told me they plan to open 30 more.

Good Dot currently has a team of around 120 people and has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from New Crop Capital, as well as angel investors.

Its products are only available in India for now, but Sinha said Good Dot is in “advanced stage” talks with Canada and UAE about distribution opportunities. The startup can carve out some space in these markets thanks to the novelty of its products: while Beyond and Impossible already offer vegan burgers and sausages, no one is offering plant-based mutton (yet).

However, the place where Good Dot can make the biggest impact is on its home turf. Demand for meat in India is growing rapidly: as national wealth increases, more and more people are turning to a meat-heavy diet. This shift puts pressure on environmental resources, especially water, and also leads to more greenhouse gas emissions.

A similar dietary change is happening in China, where there’s a growing demand for pork despite the government’s goal to cut meat consumption in half.  There, Omnipork is trying to do with pork what Good Dot is doing with chicken and mutton: feed the local demand for meat with a plant-based alternative, one that’s developed specifically for the tastes of the local population instead of the Western world.

The lack of consumer demand for plant-based meat in India is partly because, up to now, there haven’t been good options available. “Bleeding” vegan burgers from Impossible and Beyond wouldn’t make sense in the Indian market, since more than three-quarters of the country are Hindu and don’t eat beef in the first place. By targeting culturally appropriate meats (mutton and chicken), Good Dot has a chance to catalyze demand in the second-highest populated country globally and pave the way for more alterna-meat companies outside the Western world.

Seattle Food Tech Raises $1M, Will Ship its Plant-Based Chicken Nuggets this Month

Seattle Food Tech, a startup that creates plant-based “chicken” nuggets, has raised a fresh $1 million in capital from investors including Liquid 2 Ventures, Sinai Ventures Fund, Uphones Capital and VegInvest (h/t Food-Navigator). This brings the total amount raised by Seattle Food Tech to $2 million.

Seattle Food Tech separates itself from other alterna-meat companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible in a few ways. First, the company uses a specialized means of production to better replicate the texture of “real” chicken nuggets through a combination of wheat, oil, chicken flavoring and more. The company says it can implement this manufacturing at large scale production.

Large scale production is important, as unlike its competition, Seattle Food Tech is not going after the consumer market and instead targets commercial customers like school and hospital cafeterias. As my colleague, Catherine Lamb wrote earlier this year:

By opting not to sell their nuggets as a CPG, Seattle Food Tech would be able to offer them at roughly the same cost as meat — around $2 per serving. Lagally says that eventually, once they get their volumes up, they might consider putting their products in large grocery stores, such as Walmart and Costco.

Since the time of that article, Seattle Food Tech’s B2B go-to market strategy remains a smart one as competition in the fake meat space has certainly become more fierce. Next year Beyond Meat will go public, and Impossible will bring its heme-burgers to grocery store aisles. Beyond is already rapidly expanding its product line, and by sticking with institutional customers, Seattle Food Tech can sidestep costly marketing battles with better funded companies.

That strategy seems to be already paying off. Even though Seattle Food Tech has only been around for nine months, the company said in a press release that it will start delivering alterna-nuggets to select customers this month.

We had a chance to taste Seattle Food Tech’s nuggets at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit show here in Seattle, and they were actually pretty good! You can check out the company’s Founder and CEO, Christie Lagally in this video from the Summit, talking about the future of meat:

Plant-Based, Cellular & Sustainable: Exploring The Future of Meat

USDA and FDA Will Tag Team Regulation of Cell-Based Meat

Last Friday, we got one step closer to figuring out the regulatory future of cell-based meat.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a statement stating that they would work together with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to oversee production of what they called “cell-cultured food products derived from livestock and poultry.” The statement comes almost a month after the two organizations led a joint meeting to focus on regulation and labeling of the new technology.

We knew from the get-go that the two organizations would work together on the regulation of this new technology, so that part isn’t exactly news. But the statement also outlines exactly which roles each organization will take on. From the USDA (bolding our own):

Agencies are today announcing agreement on a joint regulatory framework wherein FDA oversees cell collection, cell banks, and cell growth and differentiation. A transition from FDA to USDA oversight will occur during the cell harvest stage. USDA will then oversee the production and labeling of food products derived from the cells of livestock and poultry. 

So the FDA will oversee everything from gathering the tissue to cultivating it (growing it into enough muscle fibers to eat). Once the meat is complete, the USDA will take over and oversee the process of labeling. This division “leverage[s] both the FDA’s experience regulating cell-culture technology and living biosystems and the USDA’s expertise in regulating livestock and poultry products for human consumption.”

True enough, the USDA typically oversees meat at the point of slaughter. Since there’s no slaughter when meat is cultured outside the animal, it makes sense that the closest equivalent would be the point of “harvest” in which the cells are done reproducing and ready to be processed and eaten.

Dr. Mark Post with the world’s first burger made of cells grown in a lab.

Sentiment seems to be positive about the new division of power. Initially, cell-based meat companies advocated for the FDA to be the primary regulatory body involved, but they seem to be okay with this arrangement. Jessica Almy, the Director of Policy of the Good Food Institute, a non-profit which supports meat and dairy alternatives, issued a statement writing that “This announcement is an exciting indication that FDA and USDA are clearing the way for a transparent and predictable regulatory path forward.”

Big Beef is also pleased(ish) with the division. In a statement emailed to Food Dive, The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association wrote: “This announcement that USDA would have primary jurisdiction over the most important facets of lab-produced fake meat is a step in the right direction.”

In the end, it seems that the USDA will have the trickier job of the two. Labeling is one of the most contentious issues surrounding cell-based meat: In the last few years alone, it has been called in-vitro, lab-grown, cultured, clean, and, most recently, cell-based meat. Traditional meat companies are pushing back on calling it meat at all (see “fake meat” reference above). The fact that USDA has the power in the labeling department could mean an uphill battle for cell-based companies who want to use the term “meat”.

But the USDA’s timeline to deciding on a name for the stuff is ticking down. JUST, Inc. is still planning to bring a cell-based poultry product to market by the end of 2018, provided it gains regulatory approval. With just over a month remaining, it seems ambitious that they will indeed be able to get the regulatory thumbs-up to meet their goal.

Progress may be slow, but all involved — traditional and cell-based meat companies — seem pleased that the government is taking steps to address this new technology. However, there’s still a lot to work out. It remains to be seen what information the two organizations will share, how and to what extent they’ll collaborate, and, of course, what we’re going to call the stuff.

The public comment period of last month’s meeting has been extended will be open until December 26th. Speak now, or forever hold your peace (of steak).

Video: Plant-Based, Cellular, and Sustainable — What is the Future of Meat?

Cell-based meat (also known as “clean” and “lab-grown” meat) is set to hit the market by the end of 2018, even though the FDA and USDA are still figuring out how to regulate it. At the same time, plant-based meat companies are seeing unprecedented levels of consumer interest and investment, even from Big Meat companies.

Watch as our panel from the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, featuring Tom Mastrobuoni of Tyson Ventures, Christie Lagally of Seattle Food Tech, and Thomas Bowman of JUST, Inc., explores the challenges and opportunities of the future of meat: plant-based, cell-based, and otherwise.

Plant-Based, Cellular & Sustainable: Exploring The Future of Meat

Look out for more videos of the panels, solo talks, and fireside chats from SKS 2018! We’ll be bringing them to you hot and fresh out the (smart) kitchen over the next few weeks.

Allergy Fears and Transparency Among Issues at latest USDA/FDA Meat-ing

Earlier this week, scientists, entrepreneurs, and concerned members of the public got together to discuss the future of cell-based (also called “cultured” and “lab-grown”) meat during a joint meeting put on by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). According to the FDA news release, the meeting was intended to “focus on the potential hazards, oversight considerations, and labeling of cell cultured food products derived from livestock and poultry.”

The FDA held the first meeting on cultured meat back in July, and while it succeeded in starting the conversation around regulation of meat grown outside an animal, not much was concluded. From the people I spoke to who attended the meeting, everyone agreed that something had to be done to regulate this new edible technology, but no one could agree exactly what — or even what to call it.

Watching recordings from the meeting and scanning through Twitter, one topic seemed to be the most divisive, contentious, and downright critical: labeling. It’s where I think that the real stakes (steaks?) are: nomenclature will be a determining factor in consumer perception of this new technology. Here are a few interesting points that came up during the meeting:

Labeling is actually a health concern

“We cell-based food producers do need to use the terms ‘fish’ and ‘meat’,” said Michael Selden, the CEO of cultured seafood company Finless Foods. “If one is allergic to animal-based seafood, that person has a high probability that they’ll be allergic to the seafood made with our technology.”

His company is working to create fish meat that is identical, on a cellular level, to traditional fish. If they succeed, labeling cultured salmon something like “cell-based artificial salmon product,” consumers with a life-threatening allergy to salmon might not realize that it posed just as big a threat.

Given, not all that many consumers are allergic to meat and seafood. But it’s still an important point: cultured meat is meat on a molecular level.

Photo: Flickr, by Adactio

Should labeling address how the product is made?

“It’s clear that consumers care about the way that their food is produced,” said Liz Holt of the Animal Legal Defense Fund. If cultured meat is required to disclose all the substances that went into it, should traditional meat be held to the same standards?

As of now, meat companies can choose whether or not to display information about the animal’s life and diet, such as “grass-fed” or “free-range.” They don’t have to disclose what the animal ate, or where it was raised.

Some consumers might not want to know exactly what type of life the cow in their bargain ground beef had before making its way onto their plate. Specht’s point shows that more information is generally good — but sometimes the consumer doesn’t want or need it.

Cell-based meat wants its own labels

Both sides of the table agreed on one thing: cultured meat should be labeled differently than traditional meat. Cultured meat startups want to indicate to the consumer that their product is meat, but is also different than meat from a slaughtered animal.

Peter Licari, CTO of JUST, said that there should be a regulatory nomenclature that “sufficiently differentiates cell-cultured products from traditional meat products but appropriately acknowledges these products as meat.”

What exactly that elusive final term will be — one that effectively communicates both that the product is meat, but not meat from a slaughtered animal — isn’t clear. But companies and regulatory bodies need to figure it out pretty quickly. JUST is still planning to be the first company to bring cultured meat to market by the end of this year, and Finless Foods will launch its cell-based tuna in 2019. By 2021 Mosa Meats and Memphis Meats will join them.

Isha Datar of New Harvest said it best, speaking at the meeting: “This is not just a product, but a new paradigm for food production.” Now the FDA and USDA need to figure out what to call it.

Meatable Claims to Hold the Key to Scalable Cultured Meat In a Single Cell

Meatable, a new startup creating cell-based meat, claims it will be able to change the world with a single cell. It’s a tagline, sure, but it might also be true. The Netherlands-based company works with pluripotent cells to create cultured meat quickly and without a need for fetal bovine serum (FBS).

They’re not the only ones who believe in their potential. Last month the startup, which was founded in early 2018, raised a $3.5 million seed round led by BlueYard Capital, with participation from Atlantic Food Labs, Backed VC, and angel investors.

Pluripotent stem cells are superior to other stem cells (which cultured meat companies have been using up until now) for two reasons: versatility and speed.

A muscle stem cell can only ever proliferate to create muscle, and a fat stem cell can only be fat. Pluripotent cells, however, can transform into whatever type of cell the scientist chooses. “They’re very malleable, with a high proliferation capacity,” Meatable CTO Daan Luining explained to me over the phone. “Like a blank slate.” Before Meatable, Luining cut his teeth with Dr. Mark Post, creator the first cultured burger, and spent time at New Harvest, an NGO which finances research into cell-based meat.

Pluripotent cells also divide 2 to 2.5 times faster than non-pluripotent cells, proliferating to create a burger-sized amount of meat in just three weeks. “You have to wait three years to raise a cow,” said Luining.

Significantly, Pluripotent cells require minimal animal intervention. Instead of gathering a tissue sample from a living animal, which is what most cultured meat companies are doing, Meatable scientists collect blood from the clipped umbilical cord of a just-birthed calf then filter it to harvest the special cells.

Perhaps most importantly, they don’t rely on fetal bovine serum (FBS), the controversial media many startups making cell-based meat take from the necks of baby cows in slaughterhouses and use to grow their product. But FBS is expensive and, well, requires animals to be killed. “FBS defeats the purpose of cell-based meat,” said Meatable CEO Krijn De Nood.

The independence from FBS alone would be enough of a reason to get jazzed about pluripotent cells. Add in their speed and agility, however, and they’re Meatable’s ticket to culture meat a lot quicker than their competitors in a completely non-invasive, animal-free way. And make it cheaper, to boot.

Meatable CTO Daan Luining, left; CEO Krijn De Nood, middle; Ruud Out, who runs Meatable lab in Leiden, right.

So why don’t all cultured meat companies take advantage of these miracle cells, you might ask? Up until now, pluripotent cells were difficult to control. However, recently Dr. Mark Kotter, a scientist at the University of Cambridge, collaborated with Dr. Roger Pedersenat of Stanford University to develop a technology which can better manage the cells and dictate their growth. Luining told me that Meatable has an exclusive license to use this tech in cell-based meat production, which should theoretically give them a leg up on the competition.

But first, they’ll have to debut the cells in a taste test. Meatable is currently focusing on beef, but they hope to rapidly expand into pork, poultry, and even liver, for ethical foie gras. They expect to present their first burger to the public in three years, by which time they’ll already have a production process in place so they can quickly scale. Commercial sales are probably five years down the road.

This timeline puts them behind other cell-based meat companies. Memphis Meat and Mosa Meat have stated that they will bring cultured meat fully to market by 2021, and Just Inc. claims it will make the first sale of cell-based meat by the end of this year. But Meatable isn’t necessarily in a rush. “We’re not necessarily going for first; we’re going for best,” Luining told me.

Their timing might actually be an advantage. When cell-based meat products first come to market, it will no doubt take time for consumers to warm up to the idea of chowing down on a hamburger grown in a lab. By the time there’s a hungry demand for cultured meat, Meatable will be there — with cheap, scalable beef — to meet it.

“Eventually, people will choose a product that tastes the best and is the cheapest,” said Luining. “We will have the edge there.”

Italian Bioengineer Spins Plants into Meat with 3D Printer

Texture and mouthfeel are big hurdles faced by manufacturers of meat alternatives. Making plants imitate the texture of a burger, a chicken nugget, or even a sausage can be tricky, sure; but imitating a chicken breast or fat-marbled steak is a whole other beast.

Italian bioengineer Giuseppe Scionti is working to find a way to do just that by leveraging a technology that’s been popping up throughout the food world: 3D printing. He has invented and patented a technology which uses a special 3D printer to produce plant-based meat with the same fibrous, “muscley” texture of animal meat. According to 3DPrinting.com, the printer uses syringes of plant protein pastes to create the steak and chicken simulacrums.

According to Il Fatto Quotidiano, Scionti can print 100 grams of meat in 30 minutes at the cost of two euros. However, the patent is meant to work for large-scale industrial processes, and he’s confident it will cost less as it increases in scale.

The use of 3D printing in the food world is still in its early stages. For now, it’s mainly used for its cool factor; after all, who doesn’t like watching a machine “print” out pasta noodles or geometric sugar sculptures or sushi? But as the technology evolves and the cost drops, 3D printing is poised to have a big impact on the food industry.

Interestingly, 3D printing has been touted as more of a manufacturing method for cell-based (or cultured) meat than for plant-based. San Francisco-based startup Just, Inc., which claims it’ll bring the first cell-based meat to market by the end of this year, has named 3D printing as part of their plans for large-scale production. By printing meat muscle strands, companies can mimic the texture of cuts of meat beyond burgers, meatballs, and sausages.

I couldn’t find any accounts of how Scionti’s 3D printed meats measured up in taste tests, but I’m optimistic about the potential of his technology. As we’ve covered extensively on the Spoon, there’s a strong and growing market for plant-based meats — especially ones that cook, taste, and bleed like the real thing. There are quite a few companies making burgers and sausages from plants, with reasonably good results. When we venture into chicken breasts, pork chops, and ribeyes, however, offerings become slim. And there’s clearly a market for them: Dutch company Vivera recently had to amp up production of their plant-based steaks to keep up with demand.

If companies can harvest 3D printing to expand their plant-based meat offerings, they may be able to reach a larger range of consumers. Chew on that.

3D printing company Nu Food will be showing off their printer and whipping up treats at next week’s Smart Kitchen Summit. We have a few tickets left, so snag yours now!

Beyond Meat Dishes Up Plant-Based Options at Del Taco

Today Beyond Meat announced that it’s teaming up with Del Taco to “beef up” their menu.

The plant-based meat startup will launch two branded tacos: the Beyond Avocado Taco (which is vegan), and the Beyond Taco (which is just vegetarian). Judging from photos, they look like hard shell tacos with Beyond crumbles, lettuce, and tomatoes — the vegan option also has an avocado slice, while the vegetarian one has cheese. Customers can also sub Beyond Meat into any other Del Taco dishes (burritos, nachos, etc.). I wasn’t able to find any pricing information online, but as customers are allowed to swap in Beyond, I’m assuming that it’s on par with the meatier options.

This marks the plant-based meat company’s first partnership with a fast-food chain, and, according to Beyond Meat’s press release, it’s also the first time a Mexican fast-food restaurant will serve plant-based meat.

The announcement comes just a few weeks after Impossible Foods rolled out their vegan “bleeding” burgers to White Castles nationwide. It doesn’t take a genius to see that Beyond Meat, which typically markets itself directly to consumers in supermarket aisles, is now trying to establish itself as a strong player in the plant-based B2B market — for all price points.

While their products are already available in over 10,000 restaurants, their Del Taco launch is their first fast-food drive-through partnership in the U.S. (they’re already available in Canada’s A&W chain). We’ll see if the company can keep up with the high demand of quick service restaurants (QSRs), especially if they decide to offer Beyond Meat at all 564 Del Taco restaurants nationwide.

The Beyond Meat tacos will be available in two California Del Taco locations, one in Santa Monica and the other in Culver City. If you live in the area and are lucky enough to give them a taste, drop us a line and let us know about your experience!

Good Food Institute Launches $3M Grant for Meat Alternatives

Today the Good Food Institute (GFI) announced a $3 million grant program to support plant- and cell-based meat research.

GFI is a nonprofit working to shift the food system away from industrial animal agriculture and towards both cell- and plant-based meat alternatives. According to their press release, less than 0.3 percent of the world’s universities are currently working on research in the meat alternatives sphere. With this grant, GFI is hoping to change that and jumpstart more projects in the field.

They even called out 24 universities, from Cornell to the University of Tokyo, which they identified as having the greatest potential for advancement due to their “relevant technical expertise, research capabilities, and private-sector partnerships.”

GFI’s strategy of targeting universities is a smart move. There are already quite a few startups popping up in the plant- and cell-based meat fields, and Big Food has been making investments in the space as well. Universities are an under-tapped resource of young, eager scientists looking to make a positive change in the world, and GFI is hoping its $3 million in grants can help tempt them to focus their work on meat alternatives.

This announcement comes on the heels of the inaugural Good Food Conference, a two-day event put on by the GFI meant to unite leaders in the meat alternative space. If you want to apply for a research grant from GFI, submit a proposal by November 21st, 2018.

Clean Meat Is Out — Cell-Based Meat is In

One of the biggest news stories from last week’s Good Food Conference (GFC) happened after all the speakers had left the stage. Over email, Brian Spears, the CEO and co-founder of cellular agriculture company New Age Meats, told me that:

1-2 reps of all the existing “clean meat” companies, except for just a few, met on Friday after the Good Food Conference. We decided that, for the purposes of working with traditional meat companies and US regulators, we are abandoning the term clean meat in favor of cell-based meat. We also decided to form an industry trade association.

Now, this is not the first time that clean meat (also known as in-vitro, lab-grown, and cultured meat) has rebranded. But unlike previous name switches, which were mostly working to quiet public fears and make meat grown in a lab environment sound palatable, this new term is targeting traditional meat companies and U.S. regulators.

In recent months, the question of what to call cultured meat has stirred up some serious controversy with both parties. A coalition of big meat production groups penned a letter to President Trump, asking for equal regulation for cell-based and traditional meat. A few months ago the FDA had a public meeting to open dialogue about regulation, terminology, and safety of cultured meat technology, and most recently a Missouri law went into effect which only allows food “derived from harvested production livestock or poultry” to be called “meat.”

By rebranding as “cell-based meat,” these companies are hoping to walk a fine line that will appease both consumers and the governing bodies who will eventually regulate food produced through cellular agriculture. “Cell-based meat” is certainly more revealing than “clean meat,” which, while it sounds nice, doesn’t exactly reveal why it’s clean.

That term is also pretty passive aggressive towards traditional meat companies. “Clean” implies that the alternative — that is, meat from slaughtered animals — is dirty. And if you compare the pristine lab environment in which cultured meat is made to a slaughterhouse, it certainly is cleaner. But that terminology is already ruffling lots of feathers in Big Meat, who are responding by writing letters and pushing laws to block “clean meat” from calling itself meat at all.

Honestly, I’m torn on whether the name change is a good idea — or even necessary. If cultured meat is as safe as its producers say (and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be), it will eventually get regulatory approval and make its way to market — no matter what it’s called. To me, the bigger issue around naming is consumer acceptance. My guess is that people would gravitate to something called “clean” meat more readily than the comparatively clinical “cell-based” meat. But all that will lie with the marketing team, and right now most cultured meat companies are made up chiefly of scientists.

During the GFC, I was also struck by a point made by Barb Stuckey, President and Chief Innovation Officer at Mattson. She said: “I don’t know if what we call clean meat matters as much as what these companies do with their marketing. My family doesn’t think of Impossible burgers as “veggie burgers,” they’re just Impossible Burgers.” Maybe terminology won’t matter at all, and instead of asking for a “clean” or “cell-based” burger in 10 years, people will request a “Memphis” or a “Mosa.”

Though the number of cell-based meat companies is growing, there are still relatively few — only 27, was the number given at the GFC. A group that small can be agile, as long as they’re all on the same page. It wouldn’t surprise me if we see another rebrand, either for regulatory or consumer acceptance purposes, over the next few years.

If you’re curious about how plant- and cell-based meat will disrupt the consumer meal journey, join us at the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th for our Future of Meat panel featuring innovators from Seattle Food Tech, JUST, and more. Get your tickets before they sell out!

Better Meat Co. Says to Make Meat Better, Just Add Plants

Picture a corporate cafeteria. One day, the food director decides to add a vegan sausage option to the menu, just to see how it’ll sell. What percentage of people do you think would opt for the vegan sausages over pork?

That’s the question that Better Meat Co.’s co-founder and COO Joanna Bromley asked onstage at the Good Food Conference yesterday as she pitched her company before an audience of the future meat-curious. According to her research, a safe bet is that five percent of people would go for vegan sausages. Maybe ten.

Better Meat Co. hopes to increase the number of people eating plants over meat — knowingly or unknowingly — by creating a plant-based protein that can be blended seamlessly into processed meats. Their wheat protein product can replace 30% of the meat in processed foods, such as sausages and dumplings, creating an end result that’s healthier and more sustainable — but tastes indistinguishable from the real thing. “The idea is that you can’t see or taste the difference,” Bromley told me in an interview.

Founded in early 2018, the Sacramento-based startup’s first product is specifically suited to blend with pork, but Bromley said that they’re currently working to develop blending agents for other meats, too.

Others are also pushing the blended burger agenda by adding mushrooms into their ground chuck. Sonic recently launched a blended burger which contains 25% mushrooms, playing up the health and taste angle. High-end chefs like Richard Blais (see him at the Smart Kitchen Summit this October!) have also jumped on the plant-blended burger bandwagon. And the James Beard Foundation recently launched the Blended Burger Project, challenging top chefs to create burgers partially made with mushrooms. According to Bromley, however, the problem is twofold: mushrooms cost more than meat and don’t contain the same amount of protein.

Better Meat Co.’s plant-based alternative, on the other hand, costs roughly the same as meat and has a comparable level of protein, making it a more feasible option for industrial meat processors. With the recent boom of plant-based and clean meat companies, you might wonder why we need to bother with blended meat at all. For one thing: scale. Plant-based meat companies are having difficulty meeting growing demand for their products, and even when you can track them down they can be prohibitively expensive. Clean meat isn’t commercially available yet, and it’ll be a while before it’s cost-competitive with the traditional stuff.

“By all means, clean meat and plant-based meat will continue to evolve over the years to come,” Bromley explained. “But for now, we have blending.”

And we do need something now if we want to cut down on the shockingly high environmental footprint of meat production. Americans are projected to eat more meat in 2018 than ever before, despite a growing demand for plant-based proteins. Blended meat can draft off of both of these trends.

Better Meat Co.’s overall strategy is refreshingly realistic. Besides the current constraints around clean and plant-based meats, there will always be carnivores who think that a meal without meat is no meal at all. For those who don’t want to opt for the vegan sausage, for whatever the reason, blended meat offers a nice — and affordable — compromise. “It’s a bridge between where we are now and where we’ll be ultimately,” said Bromley. “It’s a continuum.”

As of now, Better Meat Co. has raised over $800,000. They’re currently in pre-sales and are planning to launch with several meat processing partners over the next month.

Tyson Is Trying (Successfully) to Take Over the Protein Market. Is That a Bad Thing?

Last week, food traceability company FoodLogiQ announced that protein giant Tyson Foods will use its tech to improve food safety and increase transparency.

Tyson, which produces roughly one out of every five pounds of beef, chicken, and pork consumed in the U.S., plans to use FoodLogiQ’s tech to streamline supplier management and track their product throughout the supply chain. This could be valuable in the case of a recall of a contaminated product, but it’s also a useful branding tool for them in the age when people want to know everything about their chicken, from where it was raised to whether or not it had many friends.

This move in and of itself isn’t surprising, or even that remarkable. Tyson Foods is also an investor in FoodLogiQ and is already working with the Durham, North Carolina-based startup on their blockchain for food pilot. But it does illustrate Tyson’s mission to dominate the protein market throughout the supply chain.

Clearly, they’re doing pretty well. Not only does the corporation produce more meat than anyone else, they’ve also been investing pretty heavily in plant-based meat alternatives and cultured meat companies. This May, they led a $2.2 million seed round for Israeli clean meat company Future Meat just a few months after making an undisclosed investment in cultured meat company Memphis Meats. Tyson also nabbed a 5 percent stake in plant-based protein company Beyond Meat in 2016, and made a follow-up investment the next year.

Tyson Ventures CFO Tom Mastrobuoni shed some light on this investment strategy at the Smart Kitchen Europe in Dublin this June: “We’re on to disruption now,” he told the audience. “Some of the startups we’re investing in are out to get us.”

Investing in their competition is a smart move for Tyson. By diversifying their company, they’re hedging their bets; now and in the future, they want to be seen as a company that was on the cutting edge, not lagging behind. And as demand for plant-based protein grows, along with interest in forthcoming “clean meat,” their new investment strategy is getting them kudos and a ton of (chiefly positive) press.

Beyond Meat’s plant-based sausage patties.

Despite the buzz they’ve been generating about their alterna-meat investments, Tyson clearly isn’t done with its carnivorous ways. Last week they acquired meat supplier Keystone Foods — who most notably sold chicken for McDonald’s nuggets — for $2.1 billion.

On one hand, as Food Dive pointed out, this is a no-brainer. After all, Tyson Foods is known, first and foremost, for chicken production. Acquiring a company which supplies chicken to the second largest fast-food chain in the world makes sense. But it clearly illustrates that they’re not looking solely to alterna-meats for the future. Buying Keystone Foods is another step in Tyson’s journey to become the reigning global protein power; it seems like the company doesn’t particularly care which type of protein(s) that includes.

A logical investment for Tyson would be Seattle Food Tech, a startup working to industrialize the plant-based meat industry so that meat alternatives can be made at cheaply and at a large scale. We broke the news in April that the company had raised a $1 million seed round, and they were one of TechCrunch’s 10 favorite startups from the latest Y Combinator batch. They’re still pretty small-scale right now, but that would probably mean Tyson could get in at a decent price, and provide Seattle Food Tech with a way to scale its manufacturing process.

If we want to know what Tyson will do next, look to the consumer. As interest in food delivery, smart kitchen appliances, and food waste repurposing grows, Tyson has also started to invest in those spaces. Consumers have a growing interest in plant-based protein, but they’re also eating more meat than ever before. As long as people want chicken nuggets from, well, chickens, Tyson will give it to them.

Their “throw it at a wall and see what sticks” approach isn’t a bad one. In fact, their willingness to experiment and invest in newer companies — especially ones that seem to compete with them directly — is admirable, and displays some serious agility for such a large company.

It’s also unique. A few of Tyson’s competitors are also widening their scope to include meat alternatives, though none quite so thoroughly. Most notable is Cargill, which is the third-largest meat producer in the U.S., also invested in Memphis Meats. The fourth and fifth largest meat producers, Smithfield (which was acquired by the largest pork producer in China in 2013) and Hormel Foods have made no significant investment in alternative meat companies.

Tyson, which is the largest meat producer in the country, is also the one willing to experiment the most and invest in a wide range of their competitors. I think that their ability to keep a finger on the pulse of consumer trends — and then take action to get in on them — will keep them on top.

If you want to hear CFO of Tyson Ventures Tom Mastrobuoni speak more about Big Food investment strategy, join us at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle on October 8-9th! Get your tickets here.