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Motif

December 17, 2020

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.”

November 15, 2019

SKS 2019: The Key to Sustainable Protein Might be Fermentation, not Plants

When you hear the term alternative proteins, your thoughts likely jump to plant-based foods, or maybe even cultured meat.

But there’s actually a third way to create high-protein meat alternatives without plants by leveraging a relatively old technology, and that is fermentation. At SKS 2019, Dr. Lisa Dyson of Air Protein, Perumal Gandhi of Perfect Day, and Morgan Keim of Motif FoodWorks discussed how their companies are using genetically engineered microbes to ferment sustainable, highly customizable proteins.

If you’re intrigued by all the buzz around the alternative protein space, it’s worth watching the whole video below. (You get to learn how Air Protein makes protein from air, c’mon.) Here are a few takeaways from the conversation:

Fermented protein is super sustainable
Plant-based protein is certainly more environmentally friendly than animal protein, but fermented protein has the potential to be even more sustainable. Dr. Dyson noted that their protein is made using only energy (which can come from solar or wind) and elements of the air. Bonus: unlike farming, it can scale vertically, is independent of weather conditions, and makes protein incredibly quickly.

It’s more efficient, too
One of the perks of fermenting protein is you can get really granular about which molecules you want to create, eliminating waste. “If you just want one part of, say, a dairy molecule, why create the whole thing?” asked Keim onstage. “Why not just make the one part you actually need?” Having that sort of control over the protein leads to more efficient R&D processes for all sorts of animal alternative products.

Fermentation isn’t *that* out of this world
Dr. Dyson noted that growing protein from fermentation “may sound like science fiction,’ but it’s actually quite close to our current standard methods of growing many staple foods — including yogurt and beer.

Gandhi echoed this sentiment. Perfect Day, which dubbed their proteins “flora-based” after the microflora used to create them, noted that fermenting protein isn’t anything new. “We’ve been using it for 40 years now,” Gandhi said. “We’re just applying [the technology] in a new way.”

Watch the full video below to learn more about what Keim called “the next generation of what non-animal foods will be.” It’ll make you rethink the protein on your plate.

SKS 2019: Growing Protein: The Emerging Food Tech Ingredient Market

March 1, 2019

Editor Roundtable Podcast: Forget Delivery Bots, Amazon Wants You to Keep a Robot in Your Garage

Gotta give credit where credit is due: Amazon sure has lots of ideas about how to get more stuff to your house.

While everyone thought Amazon was all about about delivery drones, pickup lockers and IoT-connected order buttons (ok, maybe not), the tech giant’s also been brainstorming about putting a robot in your garage that could go and retrieve your latest package for you.

That’s just one of the topics we tackle in this week’s podcast with the Spoon editorial gang. Other topics include:

  • Motif’s massive $90 million funding round for its plan to democratize plant-based ingredients
  • How Gen Z is shaking up the food business with its eating habits
  • Do we need refrigeration in our countertop appliances?

You can listen to the podcast below, find it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or your favorite podcast app, or download it directly to your computer.

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