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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Motif FoodWorks

Motif Continues Finished Product Expansion With Launch of Portfolio at NRA Show

Motif Foodworks, a company that develops plant-based meat alternative ingredients, has continued its expansion into finished product formats with the debut of its food service portfolio later this month at the National Restaurant Association show.

The company says the portfolio, which includes alt pork (PorkWorks), beef (Plant-Based Ground and Motif BeefWorks, Plant-Based Burger Patties and Grounds) and chicken (ChickenWorks), will be available to food service providers later in 2023. The products are an evolution of their initial steps into the food product prototypes it started testing in 2022 under slightly different brand names and came just a month after the company dabbled in a direct-to-consumer trial.

The move comes despite the company’s recent insistence that they are still primarily a B2B player set on designing next-generation food ingredients for other brands. After the launch of its D2C trial last month, company CEO Mike Leonard told Food Navigator that the company is still a B2B company and they don’t intend to develop a consumer-facing brand of its own.

As appetites for late-round alternative protein investments cool, it looks like Motif continues to look for ways to accelerate its pathway toward revenue. The company, which laid off an unspecified number of employees last summer, has already raised $343 million and would likely have difficulty raising another significant round in the current environment. In addition to its continued expansion into finished products, the company expanded into bioprocessing services earlier this year and showed its openness to platform flexibility by expanding into molecular farming in a partnership with Ingredientwerks.

The expansion into a fully fleshed-out end product portfolio comes at an interesting time for Motif, as the company continues its fight with Impossible over patents which started last year when Impossible filed suit over patent infringement in March of 2022. Motif responded by challenging the validity of Impossible’s patents but endured a setback in October when the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board affirmed Impossible’s patent. The legal battle continues, with the trial set to begin in January 2025.

Are The Layoffs at Motif a Canary in the Coalmine For the Plant-Based Meat Industry?

According to an article out today from Food Navigator USA, plant-based meat ingredient startup Motif Foodworks has laid off an undisclosed number of employees.

The layoffs, which are the first for the company, are part of a broader restructuring that will “maximize ROI for our customers and investors.” According to company CEO Jonathan McIntyre, the slimmed-down company will prioritize those ingredients and finished products where the company is “experiencing strong demand.”

Motif, which has been developing ingredients such as a plant-based heme and technology to give plant-based cheese the same stretch and melting properties of animal-based cheese products, has raised $345 million in funding over the past few years, including a $226 million round 12 months ago. That funding, which came at a time when lots of alternative protein startups had access to lots of cheap capital, was spent on everything from an expansive new headquarters to new headcount as the company looked to become what is essentially an “Intel-inside” provider of future food building blocks for a new generation of alt-protein startups.

Now, however, Motif is facing increasing headwinds in the form of a legal battle and overall sluggishness in parts of the plant-based meat sector. These headwinds come at the same time venture capital’s easy-money era appears to be coming to an end, making it doubly-hard for a company with product development cycles as long as Motif’s. With fresh rounds of funding that would extend the company’s runway now drying up, Motif has no choice but to prioritize revenue-producing product lines such as its consumer-facing brands and ready-for-market ingredient products.

It’s probably too soon to tell if Motif’s problems are endemic to a company that spent relatively freely during a time of plentiful venture capital or if it’s a sign of things to come in a broader industry shakeout. Paleo, another company creating alt-meat building blocks similar to those at Motif, just announced its new product line and is raising a Series A to scale its product line. Other plant-based startups like Tender and Nowadays have been able to raise money in recent months, showing that there is still some appetite among investors for the sector.

Either way, we’ll be keeping a close eye on the company and some of its peers to see if this new era of venture capital austerity forces additional changes to business models to accelerate the road to profitability.

Food Fight! Motif Looks to Invalidate Impossible’s Patent as It Fights Back Against Lawsuit

The Impossible vs. Motif legal tussle is heating up.

Last month, Impossible Foods filed a lawsuit against Motif Foodworks, claiming the company’s HEMAMI protein derived from precision fermentation infringed on Impossible’s patent for making plant-based burgers containing 0.1% to 5% heme protein.

In response, Motif filed a petition with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”) to invalidate Impossible’s patent at the center of the lawsuit against them. The petition, known in legalese as an “inter partes review” (“IPR”), could allow Motif to ask a panel of judges from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) to review the Impossible Foods’ patent for to beef replicas.

Impossible’s lawsuit claims that Motif has been able to gain an understanding of Impossible’s process through information in the public domain, which then helped it in developing its HEMAMI protein. The lawsuit also calls out claims by Motif and parent company Ginkgo that its novel protein can essentially act as a replacement for Impossible’s proprietary heme.

Speaking about the petition, a Motif spokesperson said that the “ingredients that Impossible claims to have “discovered” have been sold in everyday food products for decades and continue to be sold today. Impossible did not invent heme – it exists in animal muscle tissues and plants that people eat every day. And meat substitutes have been around for centuries, there is nothing new about them.”

The move to invalidate the patent could pose a serious threat to Impossible, which has hung its hat for much of the success of its beef analog around the realistic taste profile created by its proprietary heme technology.

The Motif vs. Impossible legal battle isn’t the only fight over intellectual property in the plant-based meat market. Last year, Meati accused Better Meat Co. of IP theft, a claim which Better says is an attempt to bully a less-funded rival. The emergence of these types of legal skirmishes over IP signifies the market is entering a more competitive phase as companies pursue similar and related innovations designed to engineer better-tasting meat analogs.

You can see the petition filed by Motif below.

2022.04.20_IPR Petition_10,863,761Download

Motif Foodworks’ New HEMAMI Receives GRAS Status From FDA

Motif Foodworks is on a mission to improve the taste and texture of plant-based foods, and in June 2021, the company raised $226 million USD to do exactly that. This week, the food-tech company made its most recent product called HEMAMI commercially available for large-scale distribution to its customers.

HEMAMI appears to be the combination of the words “umami” and “heme”. This novel ingredient is a heme protein derived from yeast, created via precision fermentation. Heme is a molecule that contains iron, and it is found in high concentrations in the blood of animals and humans. According to the company, HEMAMI can be used to improve the aroma and flavor of plant-based meat analogs likes burgers, sausages, chicken, and more.

Plant-based heme (made from a base of soy) is what gives Impossible Burger the realistic meat flavor and its “bleeding” texture. A Chicago-based start-up called Back of the Yards Algae Sciences developed spirulina-derived heme that can be sprayed onto plant-based burgers and other analogs to provide a meatier flavor.

Motif Foodworks’ HEMAMI also received the FDA’s GRAS (generally recognized as safe) letter. In the letter, the yeast-based heme was approved as a flavor and aroma additive for plant-based meat. Motif also submitted a Color Additive Petition for its new ingredient to be used as a color additive, and this is still pending approval.

Many consumers have swapped out meat for plant-based alternatives due to health, environmental, and ethical reasons, but flavor and texture may still be holding them back from doing so. According to the report, “Climate Change and the American Diet”, two out of three Americans would eat more plant-based alternatives if they tasted better. Ingredients like HEMAMI may be the key to unlocking better plant-based meats. Motif has also created an ingredient called APPETEX that mimics the texture of animal tissue using plants, spearheading the common complaint of alternative products having an unrealistic texture.

Interested in trying HEMAMI? Motif Foodworks will be offering samples of plant-based burgers made with HEMAMI at the Plant-Based World Expo in New York on December 9th and 10th.

Motif FoodWorks Raises $226M to Improve the Taste of Plant-Based Proteins

Plant-based food tech company Motif FoodWorks has raised a whopping $226 million in Series B funding, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The round was co-led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, through its Teachers’ Innovation Platform, and BlackRock. Rethink Food and existing investors also participated in the round. To date, Motif has raised $345 million.

The company says its new funds will go towards three areas: research and development; scaling and commercializing its food tech; and expanding its number of people and facilities.

Through all of these areas, Motif’s underlying goal is to improve plant-based foods by developing novel food ingredients that lead to better texture, mouthfeel, and taste in products. The company does this via a mix of microbial engineering and precision fermentation.

Motif, which was spun out of bioengineering platform Ginkgo Bioworks, moved into its own facility in the Boston Seaport area last year, where it is focusing on R&D efforts. Meanwhile, just last month, the company announced it had acquired extrudable fat technology from private research firm Coasun to use in mimicking fat textures in plant-based meats. Additionally, Gingko is licensing prolamin technology from the University of Guelph. The prolamin tech will improve the texture of plant-based cheese so that it can melt, bubble, and stretch as easily as its traditional counterpart. 

This massive Series B fundraise comes at a time when retail sales of plant-based foods surpassed $7 billion. Even so, there’s room for improvement. Research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and Earth Day Network found that 44 percent of consumers surveyed “don’t like the taste of plant-based foods.” However, two out of three said in the same research that they would be “willing to eat more plant-based foods instead of meat if plant-based foods tasted better than they do today.”

Fermentation technology, sometimes called “the third pillar” of alt protein, is a way to bridge the taste gap between traditional and plant-based meats. Ingredients made with biomass and/or precision fermentation can be combined with plant-based ingredients to achieve the kind of meat and dairy analogues that taste and feel as close to the real thing as possible.

Other companies, including Perfect Day, Change Foods, and Clara Foods are all working towards this goal, too.

Motif Adds New Tech to Bring That Elusive Stretch to Plant-Based Cheese

Motif Foodworks, the food technology spinout of synthetic biology unicorn Gingko Bioworks, announced today that it has added a couple more tools to its plant-based food technology toolbox that will help enhance plant-based meat and cheese products and make them more like the real thing.

According to the press announcement, Motif has gained exclusive commercial rights to these technologies as a result of a collaboration announced last June with researchers at the University of Guelph and private research company Coasun.

As described in the press release, the technologies include:

  • Extrudable fat technology: Unique oleogel technology that replicates animal fat, allowing for more authentic fat textures, such as marbling, in plant-based meats—acquired from Coasun.
  • Prolamin technology: Uses plant-based ingredients to improve the texture of plant-based cheese, allowing it to melt, bubble, and stretch like animal-derived dairy—licensed from the University of Guelph.

Both these technologies address two of the most important shortcomings of plant-based products when it comes to creating realistic analogs. On the fat side, while plant-based minced meat replicas of ground beef or chicken nuggets are pretty realistic nowadays, there’s still some work to create realistic whole cut analogs. By acquiring the technology rights to the work of Dr. Alejandro Marangonia, Motif aims to help its plant-based product partners create more realistic marbling in that new plant-based ribeye steak.

For pizza lovers, the prolamin technology is exciting because it addresses one of the biggest challenges when it comes to creating realistic plant-based cheese: achieving the melty cheese “stretch” effect.

You can see the technology in action in the video from Motif below:

Personally, I’ve found some of the new generation plant-based cheeses from companies like Grounded Foods and Miyoko’s Creamery are pretty darn close to the real thing, but I’m still waiting for a good melty plant-based cheese product. With this news from Motif, hopefully plant-based cheese with that realistic stretch is just around the corner.

Motif Foodworks Moves Into New Home To Accelerate R&D Pipeline of Plant-Based Food Ingredients

Motif FoodWorks has a new home.

The company announced today that they have moved into a new 10,600 square foot facility in the Boston Seaport area, sharing a building with the company it spun out of last year, bioengineering platform company Ginkgo Bioworks. The new building includes labs, testing kitchens, and a new office space for its leadership team.

According to Motif CEO Jonathan McIntyre, the move is critically important to the company as it finally gives them their own in-house facilities for the first time, which will accelerate R&D and expand their in-house capabilities to better understand the properties of new plant-based food ingredients.

Up until now, Motif “didn’t have anything, we were a virtual company,” McIntyre told The Spoon. The new building’s “labs are designed for us to analyze food so we understand the kinds of ingredients and processes we need to make it taste better. It helps us discover new ingredients and characterize those new ingredients. And because we have kitchens here, put those into full food forms, and be able to design those foods with the new ingredients, test them, and bring them to consumer.”

Before the move, the company had to rent space at commercial research and university labs to get the work done. Now Motif has their own labs, fermentation tanks, and testing kitchens to help them build ingredient building blocks using the engineered microbes from Ginkgo.

Speaking of Ginkgo, I asked McIntyre why they couldn’t leverage the infrastructure of the company they were born out of and he made it clear that while they do take advantage of Ginkgo’s capabilities when necessary, the type of work the two companies do is fundamentally different.

“Their labs don’t really fit what we do,” said McIntyre. Ginkgo labs “are foundries of DNA synthesis and a bunch of other things. There is a transition between them generating a microbe that is been designed to produce a very specific product that gets transferred to us. In our labs, we have fermenters that grow microbes, allow microbes to produce the products, and then we are able to separate those from the bacteria and start working on those as food ingredients”

McIntyre also made it clear that while the new facilities will help them move towards scaling the production of their ingredients, the new building did not come with in-house pilot production plants. However, he doesn’t rule that out in the future.

“Eventually we’ll be doing more engineering process research, like how do we scale up the production of these things. That will require us to get pilot facilities. We’ll be renting them for a while, and then eventually, probably building our own.”

For now however, McIntyre and the company are just happy to have their own facility, even if it might be a while before everyone can be together.

With COVID, “we’re being extra extra careful about who can come in and how they get come in,” said McIntyre. “We limit the number of non-R&D people here, and even the R&D people only come in when they’re doing experiments in the lab.”

Geltor Raises $91 Million To Accelerate Time to Market for Biomanufactured Products

Geltor, which helps CPG brands in a variety of verticals such as cosmetics and food, is looking to scale up its biodesign capability to help these companies find more sustainable, animal-free alternatives for food and cosmetic items while also accelerating their time to market.

“We do two things,” CEO Alex Lorestani told the Spoon. “Building a portfolio of ingredients that can help brands right now, for products they’re building in the next six to 12 months. And then partner with folks that are thinking about solutions that they’d be bringing out in the next, you know, two, three years.”

Most biomanufactured products usually take a really long time to design and bring to market. Vaccines are a good example of this, where half a decade is considered fast to develop a highly scaled product with millions of units.

“Historically biotechnology has been really good at delivering on the timescale of pharmaceutical products, like many years, and that just doesn’t work for consumer product companies,” said Lorestani. “Their development cycles are fundamentally different.”

According to Lorestani, Geltor will invest the money largely in new people. “The number one thing that we invest in are the folks that develop technologies that can help us serve more and more customers with more sustainable ingredients,” he said. “We want to be able to do that faster and for more customers. That’s what we’re using the capital for.”

Geltor is part of a nascent group of companies such as Gingko Bioworks (and its spinout Motif Foodworks) that are raising significant amounts of funding to build the capability to rapidly develop engineered microbial ingredients and scale the biomanufacturing of products built around these ingredients. The transition from an industrial-centered food manufacturing to one which utilizes fermentation and other biomanufacturing processes will take time, but investors seem bullish as they start to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into these companies.

I asked Lorestani where he thought biomanufacturing was in its development and he pointed to the early days of another science discipline which is a foundation for much of today’s industrial-based food manufacturing.

“It’s like 1900 in chemistry,” he said. “I think that we’re at the very early stages. It’s going to be 100 year cycle for biology to really become and lead as the way that supply chains and lots of other things, get get built and delivered.”

Spoon Plus subscribers can see my full interview with Alex Lorestani in the video below. 

Motif FoodWorks and University of Illinois Are on a Quest to Find the Perfect Texture for Plant-based Meat

Food ingredient innovator Motif FoodWorks announced today it has struck partnerships with two universities to further research the properties of plant-based foods and develop technologies to improve elements like texture. For the research, Motif will work with the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana.

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of Motif forming a partnership with the the University of Guelph to research plant-based fats in order to make them more like the real thing.

Fat is a key part of what makes meat taste good. And so is texture and mouthfeel. Achieving better versions of those latter two elements in plant-based meat is the driving motivation behind Motif’s partnerships with the University of Illinois. As we’ve written many, many times before, texture is one of the keys to making plant-based meat more appealing to mainstream consumers. 

In its press release today, Motif’s lead for food science, Stefan Baier, said that in order to get textures more precisely like those of actual meat, “we need to continue to evolve the way we approach food design” rather than relying on decades-old tools and technologies that might work for meat-meat but not so much for alt-meat.

Baier will lead the two-year-long project with UIC and UICU, working with the schools’ experts on advanced rheological techniques from the fields of mechanical and chemical engineering.

This isn’t the first time Motif has partnered with higher education to solve the texture riddle. In 2019, the company said it was working with the University of Queensland in Australia on improving texture of plant-based meats.

Motif’s quest to make plant-based meats replicate the properties of animal meat comes at a time when demand for plant-based meat is steadily on the rise. Many companies in the space are expanding in response. Impossible launched its direct-to-consumer site recently, and its chief rival Beyond has plans to launch a similar e-commerce store. And other companies are tackling the texture issue, too, from Redefine Meat‘s 3D-printed steaks to Ecovative’s mycelium scaffolding to Emergy’s fermented fungi steaks.

One thing Motif will need to consider in its research is just how closely consumers actually want their plant-based staples to replicate the real thing. Catherine Lamb, the Spoon’s former expert on all things plant-based meat, often said plant-based meat was too meaty. This nine-year-old concurs. But Catherine is a longtime vegetarian and the nine-year-old is, well, nine. Which is to say, adults who’ve been eating real meat for decades may prefer a more exact replication. At the moment there isn’t too much data out there on this subject, but it’s one Motif and others will most definitely need to tackle on the quest to make the perfect plant-based meat.

Motif FoodWorks Partners with University of Queensland to Revamp Texture of Plant-based Foods

For plant-based meat companies, successfully imitating the texture of real meat is one of their greatest challenges. Yesterday, Motif FoodWorks, a B2B animal-free ingredient development company, announced it will partner with The University of Queensland in Australia to help companies create better-textured meat alternatives.

Motif FoodWorks develops ingredients for plant-based foods using fermentation technology. It seems that now the company, a spinoff of Ginkgo Bioworks, is focusing on more than just the ingredients themselves, but how they’ll work together to create a realistic faux-burger, steak, etc. The initiative will last for three years.

According to a press release, the company will create new textures through a technique called in vitro processing, which is based on in-lab testing in test tubes, petri dishes, etc. Mike Leonard, CTO at Motif FoodWorks told me that they will explore “a range of relevant technologies and ingredients,” including microbial fermentation, to better “develop an understanding of the fundamental drivers of perception of plant-based meat analogs.” Basically, they’re trying to determine exactly how people experience the texture of meat and how to replicate that experience using non-animal ingredients.

Plenty of other alternative protein companies out there are trying to solve the texture problem. Redefine Meat and Novameat leverage 3D printing to emulate muscle fibers, while companies like Atlast Foods and Prime Roots use mycelium (mushroom roots). Leonard said that Motif would be experimenting with a wide range of technologies to replicate meat’s texture, including some based around their core fermentation technology, though he didn’t say whether it would include 3D printing or mushrooms.

As I’ve covered in my Future Food newsletter (you subscribe, right?), replicating textures is one of the biggest hurdles for companies developing alternative meats. With this partnership, Leonard said that Motif is hoping to “close the critical delta between the sensory experience of texture in meat products and their plant-based analogs.” If they’re serious about helping alternative protein companies on their R&D journey, they’re smart to start factoring texture into the equation in a serious way.

SKS 2019: 3 Things We Need to Create New and Better Forms of Animal-Free Protein

The future of alternative proteins is about way more than plants. That was the main takeaway from a talk my colleague Catherine Lamb hosted this morning at The Spoon’s SKS conference in Seattle.

Joining Lamb onstage were Dr. Lisa Dyson, cofounder and CEO of Air Protein; Morgan Keim, the Corporate & Business Development Manager of Motif FoodWorks; and Perumal Gandhi, cofounder of Perfect Day. All three are experts on the white-hot alternative protein space. All three run companies that are creating new forms of protein, using not animals or plants, but microorganisms, technology, and — in one case — the air itself.

Onstage, the three of them and Lamb discussed some elements we need more of to make alternative proteins more widely available to the average consumer and care for the planet at the same time.

1. Better Production Methods
As Dr. Dyson outlined in her talk, traditional protein, whether derived from animal or plant, requires land. As the recent burning of the Amazon forest illustrates, this way of farming is not sustainable for either the planet or the 10 billion people expected to be on it by 2025.

Air Protein’s solution is to remove land from the equation. Using a technology originally developed by NASA, Dr. Dyson’s company created a closed-loop system to feed microorganisms carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and nitrogen to create a carbon fermentation process that makes proteins.

You can read an in-depth profile of how the technology works here. Onstage, Dr. Dyson focused more on the possibilities a company like Air Protein could introduce into the food system, like saving land and preserving natural habitats. For example, a traditional soy farm would have to be the size of Texas to produce as much protein as an Air Protein farm the size of Disney World can make.

2. More Ingredients
Motif FoodWorks also uses a fermentation process to, as Morgan Keim explained onstage, create better versions of animal-based foods we know and love and, in many cases, are loathe to part with, doomed planet or no (ahem, cheese).

At SKS, Keim noted that one of the keys to making alternative protein more widespread is finding and including the kinds of ingredients that will help it function just as real meat (or egg or dairy) does. For example, is there something that can be added to alt protein that will help it maintain the right color once it’s in the form of a burger patty and cooking on the grill? What ingredients could make alternative proteins as digestible as their animal counterparts?

Motif is currently using custom microbes to try and answer some of these questions. As Keim noted during the panel, the possibilities are practically limitless with the right mindset.

3. Transparency
But all those custom microbes and genetic modification processes have to be disclosed to consumers, something Perfect Day’s Gandhi discussed onstage.

Perfect Day, for example, makes a point of calling out that its products are “flora-based” — that is, they’re made from genetically modified microflora (a.k.a. bacteria). But as Gandhi explained onstage, even when discussing GMOs, people are actually more receptive to the product when you don’t try to hide information like that. If companies can effectively explain to the average consumer (read: not vegetarians or vegans) why and how a product like flora-based ice cream is better for them, people will generally be more open to the product.

That’s the hope, at least, and so far over the last few years, consumers have shown an increasing appetite for alternative forms of proteins, even those with genetically modified elements. We’ll be digging more into this movement towards over the next day and a half, so stay tuned for more on new forms of proteins and the role they’ll play in our future food system.

Michele Fite Wants to Defy Your Idea of What Animal-Free Alternatives Can Be

Burbling bread starters and pots of kimchi or kraut are common in today’s fermentation-forward, health-conscious kitchens. But what happens when you merge the ancient craft that brought us fine wine, soy sauce, and chocolate with cutting-edge science and technology ? You get protein, which is exactly what new(ish) spinoff company Motif Foodworks is all about: making animal-free protein solutions to help feed the alt-meat revolution.

We talked to Michele Fite, Chief Commercial Officer of Motif FoodWorks, to find out more. She will be at the Smart Food Summit (SKS) on October 7th speaking about Next-Gen Food Building Blocks next month. Tickets are almost gone, so register now!

This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity.

Tell us more about how Motif FoodWorks works.
We are an ingredient innovation company dedicated to reshaping the landscape of food through science and technology. We will do that by partnering with food innovators, from chefs to startups to major enterprise brands, and creating animal-free ingredients that will enable new and better food experiences. Ultimately, our goal is to defy expectations of what animal-free alternatives can be.

To achieve breakthroughs in ingredient innovation, we employ an exhaustive process to understand and unlock new food properties. We start with a thorough analysis of the sensory experience that allows us to identify the underlying components. We then decode the genetic makeup of those ingredients, translating them into animal-free counterparts. Powered by fermentation, we harness biology and select microbes designed to produce our target ingredients — ones we have traditionally gotten from animals — through a process that is akin to brewing beer.

Motif FoodWorks just raised $27.5 million dollars. What do you plan to use your new capital to achieve?
With the new funding, we plan to add to and accelerate our product pipeline; expand academic collaborations across a broad set of molecular food science disciplines; scale our science and regulatory staff; and deepen our research and development efforts.

This year alone we have been able to expand our leadership team with the additions of Janet Collins, Head of Regulatory, Government and Industry Affairs, Julie Post-Smith, Director of Business Development, and Morgan Keim, Business Development Manager, who will help Motif unlock the secrets of food and meet consumer demand for delicious, responsibly produced foods.

Why do you think the alternative protein space is so white-hot right now? What is motivating its rise in popularity?
The alternative protein space is rising in popularity because of shifting consumer attitudes, emerging technologies, and the “cool factor” of brands like Beyond and Impossible drawing more attention to the industry as a whole.

People want to eat a little better, both for their own health and the health of the environment, and Motif sees a unique opportunity to move plant-based and animal-free foods beyond a fad and solidify them into a movement by making sure consumers don’t have to compromise between taste, nutrition and values.

You previously worked in big CPG companies such as Nestlé, Dupont and Kerry. How has your experience informed your role at Motif Bioworks?
I am fortunate to bring a depth of experience in the food industry to my work at Motif – from working in consumer packaged goods experience as a marketer and brand manager to serving as a B2B executive in highly technical and specialized businesses such as infant formula, weight management, sports nutrition, medical foods, and dietary supplements. I will apply my abilities to understand consumer insights and trends in the food space and connect them back to technology to my role at Motif, as we work to reshape the food landscape and bring more nutritious, accessible and sustainable food experiences to consumers.

Come hear Michele, Perumal Gandhi of Perfect Day and Lisa Dyson of Air Protein speak at SKS next month! Tickets are going fast.