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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

meat

Food Tech News: Bye Bye Plastic Bags, Hello Beer Hotels

This week was a bit of a whirlwind for food and kitchen news. And no, we’re not just talking about Snoop Dogg’s cookbook announcement.

For all the stories we write about on the Spoon, there are a few we don’t cover but still think are worthy of a shoutout. Hence: food tech news roundup. Check out the list of stories that caught our eye this week, from craft beer hotels to President Trump-bound letters about cultured meat:

Kroger is phasing out plastic shopping bags
Grocery giant Kroger is gradually reducing their use of plastic bags. This week they started phasing them out in their Seattle QFC stores, and they plan to eliminate them altogether by the end of 2019. Kroger claims they’ll be completely plastic bag-free in its roughly 2,800 stores by 2025. This is in line with other initiatives to reduce single-use plastics; Seattle has already banned plastic straws and Starbucks is eliminating straws in all of their locations. Plastic bags seem like the next step in the march to prevent more plastic waste getting in our oceans.

 

Opposing sides work together to regulate cultured meat
Lab-grown meat company Memphis Meats and the North American Meat Institute (NAMI) teamed up to pen a letter to President Donald Trump asking his administration to “clarify the regulatory framework for cell-based meat and poultry products.” They asked that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) collaborate to oversee regulation of the new product.

This letter comes almost a month after a band of agricultural groups wrote their own letter to the President, asking for similar regulation to be applied both to traditional meat and “cell-based meat and poultry. It’s also close on the heels of the FDA’s public meeting on cultured meat, in which they examined safety and labeling issues around this emerging food. The fact that these two groups reached across the aisle to ask for the same thing — fair, consistent regulation — is a reality check for those groups who thought that cultured meat was a thing of the distant future.

 

Zippin unveils checkout-free tech to compete with Amazon Go (and others)
This week startup Zippin launched their software platform which lets retail shoppers fill their bag and walk out, without stopping to check out. Their shop, which uses a combination of cameras and smart sensing shelves to track shoppers’ selections, will open in San Francisco sometime next month. The company is trying to compete with Amazon Go, who pioneered their cashierless tech at their Seattle store, as well as rival technology Trigo Vision. Microsoft and All_ebt are purportedly working on cashierless shopping systems of their own.

 

Brewdog opens craft beer hotel in Ohio
Craft beer obsessives, we’ve got your next vacation lined up for you. This coming Monday Scottish craft beer company Brewdog will open what their website calls “the world’s first crowdfunded beer hotel” in Columbus, Ohio, right next door to their U.S. brewery. According to Food & Wine, The Doghouse has beer taps in all of the rooms, beer-stocked minifridges in the showers, and even uses beer-infused products in their spa. Guests can also play beer pong in the lobby and hop (pun intended) over to the brewery for an interactive tour. As the company’s name implies, dogs are welcome.

 

U.S. Army Lab turns plastic water bottles into 3D printed goods
The U.S. Army Research Lab (ARL) are repurposing plastic from sources like yogurt containers and water bottles as 3D printing materials. 3D Printing Industry reported that the ARL is hoping that this tech can be used within Army bases, so service members can quickly create parts for equipment and weapons. This shortens the supply chain, makes use of recyclable materials, and ensures that military members can create necessary plastic parts without having to wait for their next supply truck.

Did we miss any news? Tweet us @TheSpoonTech!

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 Delays U.K. Launch Due to Product Shortage

Beyond Meat will no longer be bringing their plant-based burgers across the pond.

The startup announced last year that it would launch in the U.K. sometime in 2018 and later finalized plans to sell their burgers in 350 locations of British supermarket chain Tesco by early August. The Grocer broke the news yesterday that this launch has now been delayed until the fall.

Executive Chair Seth Goldman told the Grocer that they had seen “much higher than expected” demand for the burger not only in the U.S., but also in their U.K. soft launch last month. He went on to say that they didn’t want to kick off sales in a new country if they couldn’t keep shelves stocked.

In all likelihood, they couldn’t. California-based Beyond Meat has indeed been experienced increasingly high demand as of late: in May, the company told Plant Based News that their patty was outselling beef burgers in some stores. In an attempt to ramp up production, they opened a new burger-making facility in Columbia, Missouri earlier this summer which could triple production output.

The Beyond burger is currently available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Germany, and Hong Kong. In the U.K., as in the U.S., the plant-based burgers will be sold alongside beef in Tesco chilled meat aisles. They are expected to retail for £5.55 ($7.12), which is on par with their U.S. price.

When I wrote about Beyond Meat’s skyrocketing sales numbers in June, I wondered if the startup would be able to keep meeting the growing demand for alterna-meat. I think I just got my answer.

Hopefully, this is a wake-up call to Beyond (and other plant-based meat producers) that creating the demand is not enough — you have to meet it, too. Which makes companies like Seattle Food Tech, a startup creating new manufacturing practices to help scale plant-based meat production, all the more important.

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P.S. Alterna-meat loving Brits, don’t despair! If you’re looking for a burger made of plants that looks, tastes, and bleeds like meat, you’ve still got some options — both in restaurants and on grocery shelves.

Good Catch Foods Reels In $8.7 Million for Plant-Based Seafood

Good Catch Foods, the Pennsylvania-based startup which makes seafood out of plants, closed an $8.7 million Series A funding round yesterday. This ups their Series A from the $5.5 million the company announced in April. The round was led by New Crop Capital with participation from Stray Dog Capital, the PHW Group, Blue Horizon, and others.

Founded in 2016, Good Catch Foods is developing plant-based alternatives to shredded tuna, crab cakes, and fish patties. They’re aiming to bring their fish-free tuna, which comes in three flavors and has roughly half the protein of “real” tuna, to market by 2019.

According to the U.N., around 90% of the world’s stocks are currently fully or overfished — and our demand for fresh seafood continues to grow. Some companies are tackling this by ensuring they only source sustainable fish and shellfish or raising farmed fish with low environmental impact. Despite these efforts, the fact remains that seafood is a finite resource. Which makes the work of companies like Good Catch Foods, who hope to sate our seafood craving using plants, all the more important.

The alterna-seafood market, which is developing more slowly than its meaty counterparts, has recently experienced some serious growth. Wild Type raised $3.5 million a few months ago for their lab-grown salmon, followed a few months later by an identical fundraise from Finless Foods, a startup developing cultured bluefin tuna. And just a few weeks ago, Terramino Foods raised $4.25 million for its “salmon” burger made out of fungi.

Terramino Foods’ “salmon” burger.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first investment in meat alternatives for the PHW Group, which is one of Europe’s largest poultry producers. They recently invested in cultured meat company Mosa Meats, and also partnered with SuperMeat, an Israeli company developing lab-grown chicken.

This is in line with the idea that Tom Mastrobuoni, the CFO of Tyson Ventures, put forth at the Smart Kitchen Summit Europe: for Big Food companies, the smart move is to invest in their own disruptors. Which explains why Tyson Foods, which produces one in five pounds of protein consumed in the U.S., has invested in both plant-based and cultured meat companies. (P.S. If you want to hear more about food tech investment trends, see Tom speak at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle this October.)

The Number of Vegetarians Today Is the Same as in 2012 — Is That About to Change?

With so many companies debuting new (and tasty) ways to eat meat made from plants, you’d think that the number of vegetarians and vegans would be on the rise, right?

Apparently, wrong. Recently, Mara Judkis wrote a Washington Post article which blew our preconceived notions about the number of non-meat-eaters out of the water. In the piece, she wrote that only 5% of Americans identified as vegetarian; a number which has remained unchanged since 2012 — and, in fact, is down from the number of vegetarians in 1999 and 2001. From the article:

What’s remarkable is how little has changed, even as our food culture and habits have evolved over the past 20 years. In 1999, there were no “Meatless Mondays,” no Pinterest, no “Food, Inc.,” no fast-casual salad places, no Goop. Information about a vegetarian diet — at least for middle- and upper-class people who have more dietary choices — has seemingly never been more abundant. But it’s not resulting in any noticeable increase in the rate at which people adopt the diet — a fact that may prove either galvanizing or discouraging for plant-based advocacy groups. 

This is especially surprising to us at the Spoon, as we’ve covered a bounty of companies developing new, better tasting meat alternatives. From Beyond Meat to Impossible Foods, companies are producing meaty simulacrums that not only taste like meat, but also cook like meat and even bleed like meat. With all these new options, it seems like more people would be skipping the meat altogether.

In fact, demand for plant-based products is on the rise. Mintel reported that the number of vegetarian products on the market doubled between 2009 and 2013, and a Nielson study with the Good Food Institute showed that the plant-based food industry topped $3.1 billion in sales in 2017. Beyond Burgers are flying off retail shelves faster than the company can make them, and even fast food joints like KFC and White Castle are investing in plant-based “meats” to meet burgeoning consumer demand.

Judkis points out that the study doesn’t take into account the rise in flexitarianism. While Americans may not be abstaining from meat altogether, more are cutting down; in fact, 60% of carnivores are working to reduce their meat consumption. At the same time, Americans are projected to eat more meat than ever before in 2018, according to the USDA. Basically, Americans’ demand for protein — animal or otherwise — is on the rise.

In the end, Judkis doesn’t make a prediction of whether or not the number of vegetarians and vegans will continue to stay static. I think we’re at the calm before the storm. There are a plethora of companies that are either releasing plant-based protein products, or are just about to: Good Catch Foods’ vegan tuna will be available by the end of 2018, and JUST’s mung bean-based “egg scramble” is popping up in grocery stores around the country. And of course we’re a few years away from cultured meat, which, depending on how you look at it, could be the key to eliminating traditional meat and turning everyone “vegetarian.”

Judkis’ article focused on America, but a lot of plant-based innovation is happening in other countries. Denmark’s PlantJammer is an app working to help people cook vegetarian meals from whatever’s in their fridge, Vivera just debuted its plant-based steak in Belgian supermarkets, and Omnipork is developing a vegetarian pork product to meet China’s rising meat demands.

As in the U.S., many of these company’s products are either still in development, or else reach only a niche audience. Likely, the amount of vegetarians and vegans will rise as meat alternatives become more affordable, available, and indistinguishable from meat — and as traditional meat starts to rise in price thanks to environmental constraints.

The Weekly Spoon: Laboring over Labels and Go Go Robo Restaurants!

This is a the post version of our weekly (twice-weekly, actually) newsletter. If you’d like to get the weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here. 

By now we are all inured to the “fake news” label casually thrown about on a daily basis. But now the discussion over what is real and what isn’t is seeping into the labels we give our meat and milk. Science has brought about a wave of innovation in those fields, and traditional makers of those products are none too happy.

Groups representing cattlemen and ranchers sent a letter to President Trump asking his administration to bring regulation of lab-grown, or cultured, meat under the USDA. This follows a different letter from farm bureaus and agricultural groups sent to the FDA asking them to crack down on what types of drinks can actually be called milk. (The hullabaloo over milk even earned a mocking segment on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show.)

These moves reveal that we are on the cusp of a societal leap in how we eat, and incumbents are digging in. While cultured meat hasn’t hit store shelves yet, it’s a hot sector for investment and the technology keeps improving and coming down in price. Meanwhile sales of plant-based milks have soared over the past five years while the dairy industry grapples with surpluses and falling prices.

To be fair, having a discussion over what we officially label the food we put into our bodies is a worthy one to make sure we know what we are consuming. Case in point: this week the FDA gave the green light to Impossible Foods saying its heme-burgers are safe to eat, and Beyond Meat can officially slap a “non-GMO” label on its pea protein burgers.

But if we spend all our time and energy (and money) dithering over details over what we call something, before you know it, the robots will have taken over and they will decide for us.

Don’t believe me? We broke the news this week of the launch of robot food startup, Ono Food Company, which is headed up by the former VP of Operations at Cafe X. Details on Ono are slim, but it’s backed by Lemnos, Compound and Pathbreaker. It joins other restaurant robots coming online like those in Spyce Kitchen, Ekim, and Bear Robotics’ Penny.

Robots and automation are expanding into more of our everyday routines. Long John Silvers announced plans to make its drive-thrus fully automated, Pizzametry is working to put pizza vending machines in high-traffic areas like airports and dorms, and Flippy just got a new job making chicken tenders at Dodgers stadium.

Finally, there were some unexpected moves in the meal kit market this week. True Food Innovations is breathing new life into Chef’d, which abruptly shut down earlier this month. Chef’d 2.0 actually involves a number of ex-Chef’d execs, who plan to forego e-commerce and focus on retail. And Chick-Fil-A, of all places, announced an experiment to offer meal kits at a limited number of its stores in Atlanta. While I applaud the effort, I’m not sure it will work.

Whew. It was a big week! And that was just the news. We’re also hard at work assembling an awesome Smart Kitchen Summit: North America. The lineup of speakers is fantastic, the schedule is thoughtful and forward looking for food tech and tickets are on sale now!

As always, we’d love to hear from you! If you’ve got news, send us a tip, or join our Slack channel.

Have a great weekend!

Be kind. Always.

Chris

In the 07/27/2018 edition:

Traditional Meat Producers Lobby Trump Over Cultured Meat
Agricultural professional groups including the American Sheep Industry Association, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, National Chicken Council, National Pork Producers Council and the National Turkey Federation fired off a letter to President Trump today, asking for parity when it comes to the regulation of cultured meat.

Got Milk? Are You Sure? Labeling Debate Moves on to Plant-Based Drinks
It looks like the debate over what we label cultured/lab grown/clean “meat” will not be isolated to the deli case. If the comments made by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb today are any indication, there will be another drawn out battle over what we label as “milk.”

Stephen Colbert Mocks FDA’s Crackdown on Plant-Based Milks
On The Late Show host Stephen Colbert turned his biting wit towards a subject that’s been generating a lot of media buzz lately: the question of what to call dairy alternatives. He was referencing last week’s Politico Pro Summit, in which FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced that his agency would start cracking down on the use of the term “milk” for non-dairy products.

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

Lemnos Backs Robot Restaurant Startup Ono
Restaurant robots are kinda hot. The latest evidence of this? Yet another robot restaurant startup called Ono Food Company just got funded, this time from Lemnos, Compound and Pathbreaker ventures. The amount of the funding round was undisclosed.

Now That Delivery Is All the Rage, What Happens to the Drive-Thru?
Long John Silver’s, that bastion of quick-service seafood, made a bold claim today by announcing their intent to “install the most technologically advanced digital drive-thru platforms in the restaurant industry.”

Will You Try Pizzametry’s Pizza Vending Machine?
The Pizzametry is the size of a beefy vending machine. For around $5 – $6 (prices will vary depending on location), you can order either an eight-inch cheese (no sauce), or cheese (with sauce) or pepperoni pizza. The machine is pre-loaded with canisters of frozen dough which are then thawed, cut, pressed, topped and cooked at 700 degrees to make a pizza in three and a half minutes (that time actually goes down to 90 seconds on subsequent pizzas if you order more than one).

Chef’d Assets Acquired by True Food Innovations, to Focus on Retail
True Food Innovations, a food technology, CPG and manufacturing company, today announced that it has acquired the assets of meal kit maker, Chef’d, which abruptly shuttered operations earlier this month. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Chick-fil-A is Paving the Way for Fast Food Meal Kits
Each Chick-fil-A box will contain fresh, pre-measured ingredients to make one of five meals, from chicken enchiladas to chicken flatbread to pan-roasted chicken. (Sense a theme here?) The kits will cost $15.89, feed two people, and can be prepared in 30 minutes or less.

Chick-Fil-A’s Uncanny Valley Problem with Meal Kits
When popular fast food chain, Chick-Fil-A announced it would be experimenting with meal kits next month, I agreed with my colleague, Catherine Lamb, that this could pave the way for a new meal kit sales channel. But in the days since the announcement I’ve soured on the notion. Now, I think consumers will have certain expectations of what a Chick-Fil-A meal kit should taste like, but will instead experience the uncanny valley.

Traditional Meat Producers Lobby Trump Over Cultured Meat

About a decade ago, “disruption” was the big buzzword. Though it was (way) overused, there were some examples of startups that truly disrupted the status quo and changed entire industries. Think: Uber and taxis, or AirBnB and hotels. And now, from what it looks like, traditional meat producers in the U.S. are seeing the writing on the wall when it comes to lab-grown meat — and are taking steps to stave off their own disruption.

Agricultural professional groups including the American Sheep Industry Association, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, National Chicken Council, National Pork Producers Council and the National Turkey Federation fired off a letter to President Trump today, asking for parity when it comes to the regulation of cultured meat. From that letter:

“At a recent public meeting held by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which excluded USDA and at which FDA indicated it plans to assert itself as the primary regulator of cell-cultured products, a representative of a cell-cultured protein company stated, ‘Our beef is beef, our chicken is chicken.’ If that is so, then cell-cultured protein products that purport to be meat or poultry should be subject to the same comprehensive inspection system that governs other amenable meat and poultry products to ensure they are wholesome and safe for consumption, and to ensure they are labeled and marketed in a manner that provides a level playing field in the marketplace.”

This letter follows a petition from the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association in February of this year asking the USDA: To Exclude Product Not Derived Directly from Animals Raised and Slaughtered from the Definition of “Beef” and “Meat.” Basically, the argument is that the only thing you can call “beef” (and other specific meat types) is that which was born, raised and killed.

There’s a lot to unpack here. First, there is the issue of which regulatory body should oversee and set up rules around cultured meat. Traditional meat producers want it to be the USDA. But the USDA typically provides oversight of meat at the point of slaughter, and the point of lab-grown meat is to bypass animal slaughter altogether.

As Quartz points out, falling under USDA regulation would put cultured meat companies at a political disadvantage next to traditional meat producers, who have built up more clout with the agency.

For its part, The Good Food Institute (GFI), a non-profit that supports plant-based meat and dairy alternatives, responded publicly today advocating for FDA involvement, writing:

“The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has demonstrated the expertise necessary to provide adequate oversight of clean meat. Additionally, it is clear that FDA will have authority over most or all varieties of clean meat fish. Given that the methods of production will be the same, splitting oversight of the same process between two agencies would be duplicative and costly. So it makes sense that FDA would regulate clean beef, chicken, and pork as well.”

Ultimately, however, GFI said it would work with whichever agency was chosen.

In the press release announcing its letter to the president, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association used very Trump-ian language, calling lab-grown meat “fake meat,” and referring to the FDA’s recent moves as a “power grab.”

But all the sturm and drang from traditional meat producers feels a bit like an argument with a significant other over how they load the dishwasher. At some point, it’s not about how you place the bowls in the upper rack, it’s about something else — something deeper that’s been brewing inside.

Today’s letter to Trump comes at a time when the United States is sitting on 2.5 billion pounds of excess meat chilling in cold storage as a result of retaliatory tariffs from other U.S. meat importing countries, and at a time when the government is preparing to give $12 billion in aid to farmers impacted by the administration’s trade war.

Traditional meat producers have to deal with all of this today, and they have to worry about what can be grown in a petri dish tomorrow. That’s a tough spot to be in, but I can’t tell how many of these protestations are genuine and how many are just out of self-preserving fear. We should have a discussion about how we label the food we ingest! But if a startup can grow a steak in a lab without having to spend time, money and natural resources on raising an animal, we shouldn’t stymie that progress over picayune details.

Some traditional meat companies are investing these disruptive startups. Tyson Ventures, of the Tyson chicken company invested in Future Meat and Memphis Meats. Memphis Meats is also funded by agriculture giant, Cargill.

So is the smarter play to be a friend or foe to this meat disruption? Hopefully we won’t have to wait a decade to find out.

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.

Highlights From our Future of Meat Food Tech Meetup

Last night we hosted our second food tech meetup. Folks passionate about the future of meat mingled over some excellent grub from lunch subscription service MealPal. One lucky attendee even won a Joule from our sponsor, ChefSteps!

Panelists Isaac Emery (Good Food Institute), Christie Lagally (Seattle Food Tech), and Ethan Lowry (Crowd Cow) had a really thought-provoking discussion about our relationship with meat, why industrial farming is so unsustainable, and the alternatives we can turn towards. If you missed it, here are a few topics and points that stood out to us.

P.S. Our next meetup is on June 27th and will focus on food waste solutions — mark your calendars and register to get your free tickets!

Meat labeling is frustrating.

“I hate labeling,” said Lowry. Factory-farmed meat companies can use clever labeling loopholes to make their products seem more ethical or high-quality. For example, beef can be called “grass-fed” even if it’s just fed pellets of grass in a small pen, and U.S. meat doesn’t have to disclose where it was farmed on the package. Which can be frustrating when companies like Crowd Cow try to show that their beef is truly grass-fed and local.

Of course, we also had to touch on the issue of labeling with regards to lab-grown meat. This topic has been popping up in the news as of late; from provisions in the proposed farm bill to Missouri’s declaration of what is and isn’t meat. People (and Big Beef) are wondering: will clean meat actually be considered meat?

We didn’t solve that problem in our 40-minute panel, sadly. But the panelists did agree that labeling really needed to be more accurate and transparent — for meat and meat alternatives.

Education is critical — sometimes. 

People don’t always know very much about the meat they eat. In fact, they often don’t want to. “Nobody wants to see how the sausage is made — literally,” said Emery. Which is why education is such an important part of his, and Good Food Institute’s, mission. In order to promote meat alternatives, Emery and GFI work not only to inform consumers about the negative environmental effects of animal agriculture but also about new options, such as lab-grown meat.

Education is key to Crowd Cow as well. By giving their customers information about the farm where the meat was raised, they set themselves apart from the veiled sourcing of industrial meat — and justify their higher prices.

Interestingly, education — at least on the part of the consumer — is not all that important to Lagally’s mission at Seattle Food Tech. She’s marketing her plant-based chicken nuggets to institutions, such as schools and hospitals, as a healthy, easy-to-prepare option that costs the same as the meat alternative. So when kids go through the lunch line and get her plant-based nuggets instead of ones made of chicken, the point isn’t that they necessarily care that they’re eating something vegan. In fact, the point is that they don’t care — all they’ll notice is that it tastes good.

 

So, what’s the future of meat?

Lowry summed it up best when he said that the future of meat would be “complex.” If we learned anything at this meetup, it’s that there are a myriad of new ways to create and purchase meat (and meat alternatives), all of which are relatively new. (And, in the case of lab-grown meat, yet to be on the market.)

So as unsatisfying an answer as it is, the truth is that we don’t know what the future of meat will look like. But what we do know is that there will be a lot more options than there are now: more (and better, and cheaper) plant-based meat products, higher-quality meat with transparent supply chains, and, hopefully, clean meat as well.

    That’s a pretty rosy view of the future. But if we can make these alternatives convenient, affordable, and good-tasting, people will hopefully turn towards them and the amount of factory farmed meat will fall. “If we build it, they will come,” concluded Lagally. And that’s exactly what they’re working to do.

Thanks to everyone who came out for the meetup! See you on June 27th. 

Crowd Cow Beefs Up with $8M, Adds Ashton Kutcher as Investor

Crowd Cow, the online service that allows consumers to buy craft meat direct from independent farms, announced today that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Madrona Venture Group and had participation from Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures as well as existing investors Joe Montana (yes, that Joe Montana) of Liquid 2 Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by Crowd Cow to $10 million.

According to a press announcement, the new funding will help the company add ranches and farms to its platform, improve its supply chain and go “all-in on the search for new and unique flavors in categories like Craft Beef, Pastured Chicken, Heritage Pork, and beyond.”

Crowd Cow works by having “steakholders” purchase various cuts of a specific cow. Once the entire cow is purchased, the cow is “tipped” and then goes on to be processed, and its meat is packaged, frozen, and shipped directly to buyers.

I spoke with Crowd Cow founders Joe Heitzeberg and Ethan Lowry who said that they are creating this new type of communication loop. Crowd Cow is telling consumers exactly where their meat is coming from, and in turn, customer are providing feedback about the product directly back to the ranchers. Something the ranchers have never experienced before.

It’s transparency like this that consumers are looking for in their meat purchases. According to The Power of Meat report, conventional meat sales were flat in 2017, while meat with special production (natural, organic, etc.) and claims about ethical animal treatment saw “dollar gains of 4.8 percent and volume growth of 5.1 percent.” Millennials in particular like this type of special production, ensuring a market for Crowd Cow in years to come.

In addition to sourcing, Crowd Cow is doing work on the technology side with the supply chain, creating a logistics network that is able to process the meat near where the cow is raised, yet deliver it around the country. They even monitor weather at their customers’ various locations so that their algorithms can determine the proper amount of ice needed to keep the meat from spoiling on any doorstep.

Crowd Cow’s combination of small connection with farms and large scale distribution is partly what attracted investors. Heitzeberg and Lowry actually got a cold investment inquiry email from Kutcher, who grew up in Iowa and had worked as a butcher at one point. Interestingly, this also isn’t the only food-related investment for Kutcher, who is also an investor in the June Oven.

This type of conscientious meat capitalism is catching on. Just north of Seattle-based Crowd Cow is Vancouver, Canada’s Meatme, which also connects meat buyers with local ranchers.

Crowd Cow has also been expanding beyond beef in recent months, adding chicken, pork and seafood (though the seafood page appears to be down as of this writing). And on Memorial Day, the company is offering Wagyu beef from Japan in a special event.

Speaking of events, Lowry will be at The Spoon’s Future of Meat event tonight in Seattle. Look for a wrap up of what he and all our panelists have to say in a post here later this week.

Come Explore The Future of Meat at our May Food Tech Meetup

It’s time for the next event in our monthly food tech meetup series! We’ll be exploring a subject that’s been making a lot of headlines recently: the future of meat. Join us on Thursday, May 24th at Galvanize Seattle for drinks, snacks, and some rousing discussion. (Bonus: it’s free to attend, thanks to our sponsor ChefSteps!)

The Future of Meat

We’re at a crossroads: meat consumption is on the rise, but demand for meat alternatives has never been higher. And technology is changing the way we create, market, and eat animal products. From plant-based chicken nuggets to lab-grown burgers to transparent distribution channels for high-quality steak and pork, our panelists will discuss how technology is disrupting the meat industry — and what they think meat will look like in 5, 10, and 50 year’s time.

The panel will include:

–Christie Lagally, Seattle Food Tech

–Dr. Isaac Emery, the Good Food Institute

–Ethan Lowry, Crowd Cow

-Catherine Lamb, The Spoon

There will be drinks and snacks, so come hungry and ready to meet the Seattle food tech community — and bring a few business cards while you’re at it. Register here to reserve your spot!

Scoop: Seattle Food Tech Raises $1M to Jumpstart Plant-Based Meat Manufacturing

You’ve heard of Impossible Foods, you’ve heard of Beyond Meat — but there’s a new plant-based meat company on the scene. Seattle Food Tech launched in 2017 and recently raised a $1 million seed round, led by Fifty Years and Blue Horizon.

The nascent company hopes to produce plant-based meat at a scale and price comparable to traditional meat. In February, they finished developing their first product: a “chicken” nugget made of textured wheat, oil, chicken flavoring, cornstarch, and corn breading. What sets the product above its humble ingredients and makes it so good, according to founder and CEO Christie Lagally, is how it’s processed.

“It’s really all about the processing,” she told The Spoon. In order to make plant-based meat at scale and at a price competitive with meat, plant-based food companies have to develop intensive manufacturing technology specialized to their product.

This is the big way that Seattle Food Tech is disrupting the meat — heck, even the plant-based meat — industry. Along with several partners and equipment suppliers, Lagally is working on developing specialized machines for plant-based meat production. Essentially, she wants to industrialize the meat alternative industry.

At the moment, the “nuggets” are made through a contract manufacturer. However, the end goal of Seattle Food Tech is to start a facility specifically designed to manufacture plant-based products on a large scale. If they succeed, Lagally believes that it would be the first and only company to do so.

Seattle Food Tech also distinguishes itself from other plant-based meat companies in its go to market strategy. While Impossible Foods goes after restaurants and Beyond Meat sells on supermarket shelves, the Seattle-based company plans to market their product wholesale to institutional dining halls, such as school and hospital cafeterias.

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.

They hope to have their nuggets in schools and hospital dining halls by fall of 2018. Next up, they want to tackle “chicken” strips, which, along with nuggets, are two of the most eaten low-cost chicken products. This is a tougher mechanical lift than the nuggets, since replacing the strip will require extrusion to mimic the texture.

Lagally said that Seattle Food Tech will use their funding to hire staff and continue developing specialized manufacturing equipment.

“Fundamentally we can’t replace meat if it’s not convenient, good tasting, priced well, and widely available,” said Lagally. To do that, Seattle Food Tech will need some very innovative manufacturing technology — and some very good-tasting nuggets.