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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Perfect Day

(UPDATE): Betterland Foods, Maker of Candy & Milk With Animal-Free Whey, Is Seeking a Sale

UPDATE: A spokesperson for Betterland reached out to The Spoon with the following statement:

“betterland foods™ is not closed down. It is currently being prepared for sale and is in talks with several CPG brands. After seeing a proof of concept with the success of both WOO and betterland milk, and after looking at the current market and retailer landscape, betterland foods decided to bundle the brands and sell to a larger CPG to capitalize on the success of the formulations and the potential for the brand to flourish with more resources. Given her experience selling think!® to Glanbia, she (founder Lizanne Falsetto) believes this is the best approach.“

It appears that Betterland Foods, a startup launched last year to create dairy and chocolate using Perfect Day’s precision fermented animal-free whey, has closed its doors.

Sources close to the company have told The Spoon that Betterland closed down earlier this year. The websites for Betterland Foods dairy and Woo Bars are no longer active.

The company debuted with significant fanfare in early 2022, touting the impressive background of its better-for-you industry veteran founder Lizanne Falsetto. Falsetto, who helped pioneer the nutrition bar category with the launch of thinkThin brands, came out of retirement to launch the new company, citing her concern for the toll traditional animal agriculture is taking on the planet.

“I am disturbed by the toll of food production on the planet, and I kept a close eye on climate-friendly protein innovation,” Falsetto wrote on Linkedin. “I fell in love with the health benefits and eco-friendly footprint of cow-free protein, but what’s more, I began to develop a vision.”

Betterland Foods and Woo were two of the first of a growing list of external go-to-market partners for Perfect Day for its animal-free dairy proteins. The maker of precision fermented dairy products diversified its strategy of launching internally developed brands through holding companies such as Brave Robot and began to work with external partners over the past couple of years. Betterland and Woo, which are still listed as brand partners on the company website, look to be the first of the company’s external partner brands to exit the market.

While Falsetto’s experience launching a better-for-you brand in thinkThin (which she sold to Glanbia in 2015) was a promising indicator Betterland could help create a new category utilizing animal-free protein, the results a year later show that even the strongest of resumes is no guarantee in noisy, saturated markets. Both dairy and candy are highly competitive categories in which consumers tend to be loyal to brands they know and love. With precision fermentation, this difficulty is compounded by the reality that messaging the uniqueness and benefits of animal-free-but-identical inputs is nuanced, something we’ve witnessed as Perfect Day itself has worked through different framing as it’s pushed its products into the market.

Speaking personally, it’s a bummer to see Woo and Betterland disappear. I tried the Woo chocolate bar and thought it tasted great, and while I never got a chance to try Betterland milk, I’ve had milk with Perfect Day’s animal-free protein and thought it was the best alternative milk I’ve ever sampled.

I’ve reached out for comment to both Perfect Day and Betterland and will update this story when we get a response.

Perfect Day is Building an AWS for Precision Fermentation

Back when Amazon was still just an e-commerce company, founder Jeff Bezos became so frustrated that every project took so long to get going that he asked his then-chief of staff, Andy Jassy, to investigate. What Jassy found is that everyone was spending all their time reinventing wheels:

“…(Jassy) found a running complaint. The executive team expected a project to take three months, but it was taking three months just to build the database, compute or storage component. Everyone was building their own resources for an individual project, with no thought to scale or reuse.

The internal teams at Amazon required a set of common infrastructure services everyone could access without reinventing the wheel every time, and that’s precisely what Amazon set out to build — and that’s when they began to realize they might have something bigger.

That something bigger eventually became AWS, which Jassy visualized as something he called the Internet OS, where the company would provide all the necessary ingredients for an Internet company to run a successful business.

While both Bezos and Jassy were visionaries to realize they could offer Amazon’s industry-leading Internet infrastructure as a platform to help Internet companies could build products, no one – not even Bezos or Jassy – could have predicted the company’s cloud services would eventually become a $46 billion annual business.

Since then, we’ve seen the infrastructure-as-a-service playbook applied to new verticals, from delivery to food service production. But when it comes to building the future of food, we’ve yet to see any companies create a full-stack production platform for alt protein.

Enter Perfect Day. The company, which has made a name for itself with its pioneering precision-fermentation derived animal-identical proteins, has begun to put together the pieces to help create essentially what is an AWS for alt-protein, particularly precision fermentation.

The latest move in the company’s evolution towards becoming a full-stack microbial fermentation services company is its acquisition of Sterling Biotech Limited (SBL), an India-based biomanufacturing services company that currently serves the pharmaceutical and food industries. According to the announcement, the acquisition will double the company’s production capability by adding four high-value assets. These manufacturing facilities include fermenters that provide precision fermentation capabilities, which Perfect Day will use to expand its precision fermentation capabilities while continuing to service existing SBL customers.

This news comes just a couple of months after Perfect Day announced the formalization of their enterprise services business, which the company is calling nth, under which it plans to offer expertise and technology services to partners developing food and other products that utilize precision fermentation-derived inputs. According to Perfect Day, the company worked for two years to develop the nth services business, building out its scale-up production, IP licensing, strain engineering services, and other precision fermentation solutions.

nth is the only enterprise biology company in the world that offers end-to-end expertise and services from the earliest stages of molecular development to commercial-scale manufacturing, and the many steps in between.

While Perfect Day has a lead in creating an alternative protein services platform, they aren’t the only ones trying to become an essential partner for others. For example, Gingko and its Motif subsidiary are working to build an ingredient platform business, and BioBrew is offering scaled manufacturing services to companies like Clara. Others, like Pow, provide scale-up services and infrastructure to companies in the early stages of product development. But none of these have the depth of services that Perfect Day has, at least now.

There’s been much conversation as of late around how companies in alternative protein will scale their products to make them more affordable and plentiful enough to make a dent in traditional animal agriculture. Perfect Day’s answer this to make their processes, technology, and production infrastructure available to others, so these early-stage companies don’t spin their wheels trying to recreate the wheel.

Spoon Weekly: JOKR Shuts Down, Moolec Going Public, Mars & Perfect Day

Another fast-grocery startup bites the dust.

JOKR, the speedy grocery delivery company that was part of a larger wave of startups that entered the US last year, is shutting down its US operations, according to an email sent to customers today. The company said the last day of delivery in New York City and Boston will be June 19th.

From the email:

While we were able to build an amazing customer base (thank you!!) and lay the groundwork for a sustainable business in the US, the company has made the tough decision to exit the market during this period of global economic uncertainty.

To read the full story, click here.

Who Are The Leaders of the Food Tech Revolution?

We may be a little biased here at The Spoon, but we think food tech is the most exciting industry going.

Think about it: Food is what many of us – heck, most of us – spend a huge chunk of our day thinking about, craving, searching for, and consuming. Food is something everyone is passionate about.

It’s also an industry where some of the biggest advances in AI, biology, agriculture, design, chemistry, and many more fields are now manifesting themselves to create some of the most interesting and exciting changes we’ve ever seen in what, where, how, and why we feed ourselves.

And perhaps most importantly, food systems and their future will undeniably play an outsized role in determining what life on earth looks like here in 10, 20, or 100 years.

All of which is why we love covering this industry, and the biggest joy in all of it is talking to the people leading the food tech revolution. The innovation, the collective progress we make, the futuristic advances we see nearly every week, all of it is a direct result of the many inspiring voices pioneering in this space and trying to create a better world.

To read the full post, head to The Spoon.

Molecular Farming Pioneer Moolec is Going Public Via SPAC

Moolec Science, a company that develops animal-identical proteins utilizing a technique called molecular farming, announced today it is going public via a special purpose acquisition company (“SPAC”). The company is doing so via a business combination agreement with LightJump Acquisition Corp, a company formed in 2020 as a SPAC vehicle. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2022.

Moolec, a spinout of Bioceres Crop Solutions, is one of the first companies to utilize molecular farming to create alternative proteins. The attraction of molecular farming is that it uses crops as a protein factory, compared to traditional microbial fermentation techniques that utilize more capital-intensive fermentation infrastructure.

With molecular farming, crops are genetically modified to produce a target molecule. The Moolec team matches the target molecule with a host plant, creating different plant-molecule combinations for different applications. The company has launched two products so far, including a plant-based dairy ingredient called chymosin and nutritional oil GLA, both of which use safflower as a carrier crop. According to Moolec, both products have been cleared by regulatory authorities and the company is currently ramping up seed inventories. 

You can read the full post at The Spoon. 

Kitchen Tech

Fellow, Maker of Specialty Coffee Gear, Raises $30 Million Series B

Fellow, a maker of specialty coffee gear, announced this week they had raised $30 million via a Series B funding round led by Nextworld Evergreen.

The San Francisco-based company, which has made a name for itself with its somewhat pricey design-forward coffee-making gear, was started by founder and CEO Jake Miller in his dorm room at Stanford where he began work on a coffee steeper that raised close to $200 thousand on Kickstarter.

Since those early days, Miller and his team have launched a family of coffee and tea gear, ranging from French presses to kettles to insulated coffee mugs. The company, which has gained a following among baristas and celebrities for its sleekly designed Stagg EKG kettles (and also influenced a dozen or more knockoffs), also sells coffee beans via its website and has opened a flagship retail store in San Francisco.

You can read the full interview with Jake Miller of Fellow at The Spoon. 

The Shrooly Lets Aspiring Mushroom Farmers Grow Fungi On Their Kitchen Countertop

While I’m not a mushroom eater – they’re slimy and weird-looking pieces of mold – I’m all for growing them at home because, well, mushrooms are slimy weird-looking pieces of mold.

And, from the looks of it, I (and the mycophiles among us) may soon have another option to become a small-scale mushroom farmer with a home mushroom fruiting chamber called the Shrooly. The new gadget is currently being offered up through a new Indiegogo campaign and is scheduled to start shipping to backers in December of this year.

The appliance, which is available starting at $299 on Indiegogo, is a countertop home growing chamber with light and humidity control. The appliance has on-device control knob and a small display screen that gives updates on the mushroom’s growth, temperature data, and how long until the mushroom is ready for harvest. The Shrooly will also have an app that allows the user to control humidity and monitor the growth of the mushroom.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Here Are Four Tech-Powered Lunchboxes That Might Help You Fight Lunchflation

Everything is getting more expensive lately, and food is near the top of the list.

For those of you who work outside of the home (and don’t have free and tasty food as a work perk), you’re probably trying to figure out how to fight the suddenly very real problem of lunchflation. The easiest and most obvious way is to pack your own lunch, but often times food tossed in a brown bag or a plain old lunchbox (Evil Knievel or otherwise) doesn’t stay warm or cold enough or whatever needs to be done to optimize freshness.

Luckily for you, we live in an era of feature-packed lunchboxes. Models with everything from temperature zones to hydro flasks to stackable compartments and more give everyone from school kids to lunch-toting nine-to-fivers an abundance of options for bringing a meal along for the day.

And things are about to get even better. A new generation of tech-powered lunchboxes is on its way to help make eating homemade lunches outside the home an even better experience. In this post, I take a look at four of these new options coming to market for those looking to pack up their lunch for work or school.

To read about the four tech-powered lunchboxes, head over to The Spoon.

Future Food

SuperMeat Believes An Open Source Approach to Cultivated Meat Will Benefit All

Lab-grown or cultured meat is a sexy topic that fulfills the dream of healthy eating while saving the planet’s precious resources. Most of the headlines focus on the companies in the four corners of the world waiting for regulators to wave the checkered flag. The more interesting story—at least for those who enjoy looking under the hood—is in the processes, supply chain, and partnerships vital to this promising industry.

To understand the drill-down of what it takes to go from harvesting animal cells to creating consumer-facing products, it’s valuable to speak with visionaries such as Ido Savir, CEO of Israel’s SuperMeat. In addition to his knowledge of cultivated meat, Savir’s background in IT provides him with a panoramic view of the infrastructure needed to build a successful B2B company.

While it might not qualify as an awe-inspiring announcement, SuperMeat recently received a grant from the Israeli Innovation Authority to establish an open-source high-throughput screening system for optimizing cultivated meat feed ingredients. As an analogy, think of it as a system that ensures cows or chickens receive only the best quality feed to produce larger quantities of high-grade meat or chicken. But there is a significant difference.

Read the full post at The Spoon.

Mars Teams Up With Perfect Day to Launch Animal-Free Chocolate Bar

Today Mars announced the launch of a new animal-free chocolate under the brand CO2COA. Developed in partnership with precision fermentation specialist Perfect Day, the chocolate is available today via the product’s new website.

While Mars already offers a range of vegan chocolate bars, this is the first bar from a major candy brand that replaces animal dairy with identical proteins produced through precision fermentation. A German startup by the name of QOA announced last year they are using precision fermentation to develop new chocolate, but their focus is on replacing cocoa rather than animal inputs. The Mars deal follows an announcement made by Perfect Day and Betterland Foods in March of an animal-free chocolate bar.

Read the story at The Spoon.

Food Robots

Picnic’s Pizza-Making Robot Heading To Five College Campuses This Fall

Seattle-based Picnic Works announced today that its Pizza Station robot will be heading to college this fall as part of an expanded pilot program with college food service company Chartwells Higher Education. The pilot will include five colleges: Texas A&M, the University of Chicago, Missouri State University, Carroll University, and Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis.

The rollout of the pizza robot follows a successful eight-week pilot of Picnic’s Pizza Station at Texas A&M. According to Picnic, during the initial pilot, the robot at Texas A&M made over 4,500 pizzas and enabled the kitchen staff to reallocate 8 hours of kitchen worker time per day to other tasks.

The origin story of Picnic’s enrollment at Texas A&M goes back to COVID when Chartwell’s district executive chef Marc Cruz couldn’t find enough workers to staff the pizza makeline and often found himself in the kitchen making pizza by himself. After someone at food service supplier Rich’s suggested that Cruz and his team check out Picnic, it wasn’t too long before the startup installed its robot in College Station, Texas.

To read the full story, click here!

Mars Teams Up With Perfect Day to Launch Animal-Free Chocolate Bar

Today Mars announced the launch of a new animal-free chocolate under the brand CO2COA. Developed in partnership with precision fermentation specialist Perfect Day, the chocolate is available today via the product’s new website.

While Mars already offers a range of vegan chocolate bars, this is the first bar from a major candy brand that replaces animal dairy with identical proteins produced through precision fermentation. A German startup by the name of QOA announced last year they are using precision fermentation to develop new chocolate, but their focus is on replacing cocoa rather than animal inputs. The Mars deal follows an announcement made by Perfect Day and Betterland Foods in March of an animal-free chocolate bar.

The new candy is available only via a new website and “while supplies last,” which tells me Mars is trialing the concept before committing to a longer-term product launch (and rollout at retail). It’s reminiscent of the toe-in-the-water that Starbucks took with its testing of Perfect Day’s animal-free dairy. My guess is the company will keep a close on customer response and, possibly, eye a wider rollout in time if the response is positive.

For Perfect Day, the Mars deal is yet another in a growing list of partnerships the company has inked with consumer-facing brands to utilize their animal-free dairy in products such as gelato, chocolate milk, and protein powders. The company also continues to periodically add new products under their own consumer brand subsidiary, Urgent Company, adding protein powders late last year and acquiring another ice cream brand, Coolhaus, to add to their ice cream lineup alongside Brave Robot.

Betterland Foods Launches Better-For-You Chocolate Using Perfect Day’s Animal-Free Whey Protein

Move over Hershey and Mars, WOO is coming, and it’s fixing to make a sweet, healthy impact on the candy category.

betterland foods, a Napa-based company that recently introduced its cow-free milk, is taking the alternative whey protein it created to take on the alternative dairy market and now aiming at making noise in the candy space with WOO. This better-for-you candy bar competes with the big names on taste but without guilt.

“Candy has not been disrupted since 1934,” company CEO Lizanne Falsetto said in an interview with The Spoon. “Keep in mind that Hershey and Mars can buy up the shelf space, but they still can’t get to the core of what we believe people want today. They want to have a decadent treat that’s better for them and better for the planet.”

WOO (as in Moo or Whoo) is now available direct to consumers before being launched in retail. WOO’s layered chocolate bar, built using Perfect Day’s whey protein, contains organic chocolate, caramel, peanuts, and cow-free nougat. Falsetto quickly points out the dramatic difference between WOO and its entrenched competitors.

Falsetto explains that most candy bars on the market have 28 grams of sugar, while WOO had nine. The betterland’s bar has six grams of fiber compared to one in most others and eight grams of protein versus four.

Falsetto and her partner, company president Bill Pikar come to the “healthy” food space with a significant win under their belts. Falsetto is the founder and former CEO of Think! A pioneering protein bar that she developed in her kitchen. The company was sold in late 2015, after which Falsetto began working with women leaders in her Holistic Success Network.

Always keeping an eye on the alternative protein space, Falsetto and Pikar were ready to jump at the chance at another chance to (as she puts it) “blow up a category.” The Perfect Day folks reached out to the former nutrition bar creator and suggested a new type of bar using cow-free whey. Not one to focus on their “been-there, done-that” space, the betterland’s team suggested they produce a “better for you” candy bar.

“We decided the candy category would need a disruptive product, and that’s why candy was the choice.” Falsetto commented. She also jokes that betterland’s newest product has a deja-vu experience. “Interestingly enough, we were making nutrition bars on candy equipment in 1995, and now, in reverse, we are now making candy on nutrition bar equipment.”

Having gone through retail product placement with THINK!, Falsetto has developed a clear marketing strategy. Initially, protein bars, she says, didn’t have a set home in a retail store, and she sees the same route for WOO. A “dual placement” strategy, where the vegan-friendly candy bar sits with its category competitors and at the cash wrap for impulse purchases.

WOO’s initial direct-to-consumer campaign aims to create consumer familiarity and tap into social media awareness. When betterland approaches Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods of the world, the company will be in a better position for retail acceptance.

Falsetto’s take on marketing speaks to her success at finding and fulfilling a market need: I would say when it comes to a market campaign., all we want to put the food into people’s mouths, and we want them to eat it alongside a Snickers bar—like the Pepsi Challenge.”

Without going into detail, likely, we’ve not heard the last of betterland’s relationship with Perfect Day and its alternative whey. “Lizanne’s experience as a protein innovator and retail disruptor made her our first choice to launch candy made kinder and greener with Perfect Day’s whey protein,” said Ryan Pandya, co-founder, and CEO of Perfect Day. “Lizanne has already proven what she can do with betterland milk, and we are thrilled to now bring animal-free layered chocolate candy to consumers who have been excitedly awaiting more products made with Perfect Day protein.”

WOO candy bars will retail for $2.69 and are available at woobars.com

Betterland Foods Debuts Cow-Free Milk Powered by Perfect Day’s Animal-Identical Protein

Today Perfect Day and betterland foods announced the debut of betterland milk, a new cow-free milk using Perfect Day’s animal-identical whey protein produced via precision fermentation. According to the announcement, the new alt-milk will deliver “the same cooking, whipping, steaming, frothing, and baking functionality” as animal milk.

The partnership with betterland foods follows a familiar playbook for Perfect Day, which has previously gone to market with consumer brands incubated within The Urgent Company (TUC). Like Brave Robot ice cream and Modern Kitchen cream cheese brands, betterland milk will use Perfect Day’s genetically engineered whey (beta-lactoglobulin). However, unlike TUC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Perfect Day, it appears betterland foods is a young startup formed independently of Perfect Day.

That’s not to say that betterland founder Lizanne Falsetto, an experience consumer products founder who previously cofounded thinkThin (a maker of nutrition bars), didn’t create the company with Perfect Day’s cow-free proteins in mind. From the announcement:

“When I saw what Perfect Day founders Ryan and Perumal were doing to cultivate nutritious, more sustainable milk proteins, I felt the pull to not only get back into the industry, but to help build a portfolio of products that taste great, while being better for the planet,” said Falsetto. “That’s when betterland foods was born.”

While this is the first consumer-packaged retail alt-milk product featuring Perfect Day’s protein, Spoon readers might remember that the company has been experimenting with milk alternatives for the past year. Last fall word got out the company trialing a special 2% “barista-blend” version of its alt-milk for Starbucks. I ventured to the east side of Seattle to try it out and found it to be exactly like cow’s milk.

While we’ve seen plant-based milk become a major category in the past few years, most brands have centered around a key ingredient like oat or almond. With the arrival of Perfect Day’s animal-identical whey on the milk aisle, I am curious to see how they – and betterland – message this to stand out from the crowd. When I tried the Starbucks Perfect Day blend, it was clear the coffee giant was still workshopping descriptions and taking surveys to figure it out.

My guess is betterland and Perfect Day will get there, in part they have a CPG veteran who has helped launch a new better-for-you category in gluten free nutrition bars leading the charge.

Betterland foods will offer two varieties of in whole and extra creamy. They will debut the product as the large natural food trade show Expo West next month and will head to retail in the spring.

Spoon Weekly: Starbucks Animal-Free Milk Review, Bitcoin Restaurants, Alt-Meat Sales Drop

It may be almost holiday time, but the food tech news keeps on coming. Plant-based meat slowdown, Starbucks animal-free milk trials, Bitcoin restaurants. Read all about it.

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Will Jack Dorsey’s Block Usher In The Bitcoin Restaurant Era?

Here’s what we know: On Monday, Jack Dorsey announced he’s stepping down immediately from the top job at Twitter. On Wednesday, his payments company Square said it would change its name to Block and would, among other things, double down on cryptocurrency, blockchain, and building a decentralized payment system. I haven’t checked the news today, but I’m guessing he may have announced he’s creating a robot society or has plans for a teleportation system.

What does it all mean (besides the robots and teleportation)? For one, Jack Dorsey has had a busy week. But it also means the same guy who helped usher in real-time social media and democratize digital payments for small businesses may now be the one who helps make it easier for average Joe to buy everyday things with cryptocurrency.

Because right now, it isn’t easy. Crypto isn’t nearly as liquid as other conventional payment methods such as cash or credit. Sure, you can trade crypto without any problem – anyone with a Coinbase or Robinhood account knows that – but good luck paying for a bottle of mouthwash or buying a Big Mac with that wad of Dogecoin burning a hole in your crypto wallet.

So what can Dorsey do about it? Simple: with Square Block, he has all the different parts to make a payment value chain for crypto that will take it from what is mainly a highly volatile investment vehicle today to a street-spendable retail currency of tomorrow.

Click here to read the full post about Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin bets.

The Spoon & CES Bring Food Tech To The World’s Biggest Tech Show

Did you know food tech will be a featured theme for the first time ever at the world’s biggest tech show in January and The Spoon is CES’s exclusive partner to help make it happen? 

There’s still time to grab a booth! If you want to sponsor the event, let us know. See you in Vegas!

Starbucks is Trialing Animal-Free Milk. I Decided to Try it Out to See If It Tastes & Foams Like Regular Milk

In case you haven’t heard, Starbucks is trialing animal-free milk in the Seattle market. No, we’re not talking Oatly or another plant-based milk, but a milk with cow milk-identical proteins made in a lab.

The alt-milk is from Perfect Day, a company that uses precision fermentation to create its proprietary β-lactoglobulin animal-identical milk protein. The company’s protein, which received GRAS approval from the FDA last year, has primarily been sold to consumers in the form of ice cream (and soon cream cheese), but not in the form of a milk product. However, this move could signify that one could be on the way.

The company created a special 2% “barista-blend” version of its alt-milk especially for the Starbucks trial. Starbucks is currently trialing the milk at two locations in the Seattle market, Bellevue (a city east of Seattle) and Renton (south of Seattle).

Since I live in Seattle, I decided to head on over to Bellevue and see how precision-fermented milk tasted in a cup of Starbucks coffee.

Click here to see how Perfect Day’s animal-free milk foamed and tasted.

Zippin Checks In at JFK With Autonomous Checkout Technology

In a hurry but still hoping to grab a snack before you jump on your flight? If you’re at JFK in New York City, you might be in luck, at least if you’re passing Gate B 42. Because that’s where the airport just teamed up with Zippin, a maker of AI-powered cashierless checkout technology, and SSP America, an airport foodservice operator, to launch a new grab-and-go convenience concept called Camden Food Express.

According to the release sent to The Spoon, here’s how it works: Customers enter the store through a turnstile tapping their credit card as they enter and begin shopping by picking items off shelves. As they do, Zippin’s AI system automatically identifies the items and builds the customer’s virtual cart with the corresponding monetary value. When the customer leaves the store, the total amount spent is automatically charged to the card the customer used to check-in at the store entrance.

For Zippin, its partnership with JFK and SSP is a nice feather in the cap for a company with a portfolio of deployments, including hotels, stadiums, and grocery stores. Zippin’s move into airports follows other cashierless tech platforms like Amazon’s Just Walk Out, which showed up in Dallas airport earlier this year.

Click here to read the full story about Zippin’s deployment at JFK.

What The Heck is Causing The Plant-Based Meat Slowdown?

No two ways about it: Plant-based meat has hit a sales slump.

According to recent data from market watcher SPINS, sales in the overall plant-based meat market dropped 1.8% year over year for the four-week period ending October 3rd. This follows an even bigger drop in the category earlier in 2021 starting around April, when the plant-based category dropped over 15% year over year.

The drop in overall plant-based meat sales jibes with what some industry bellwethers are seeing. According to Michael McCain, the CEO of Maple Leaf Foods, his plant-based meat sales dropped in every channel the company sells into in the third quarter of this year. McCain was perplexed as to the reason and said the company is reevaluating their “investment thesis”.

Maple Leaf wasn’t the only one. Beyond, where company CEO Ethan Brown came out and said the plant-based meat company had seen its sales drop 13.9% year over year and forecast a potentially bumpy road ahead.

So what’s going on here? Fast-growing nascent markets are supposed to go up, not down and down some more.

While there’s no way to know for certain without more data. it’s worth taking a stab at potential causes for the drop in plant-based meat. 

You can read why plant-based meat sales are suddenly sluggish here.

The Media Was Fascinated with a TikTok Video of a Robot at Denny’s. Here’s What it Means.

Maybe it was a slow news week. Perhaps it was the sight of pancakes hitching a ride on a robot at America’s late-night diner. Whatever the reason, it seemed like every news organization wrote the same story about a TikTok video of server-robot showing up to dish out breakfast at a Denny’s.

They all had a variant of the same headline: “Viral Video of Robot at Denny’s Sparks Debate.” From there, the authors sifted through comments made by TikTok viewers, some cheering the idea of faster service and lower tips, others angry about a robot stealing a job.

While the sudden interest in a social media post about a server robot may say as much about the modern media landscape as it does about the use of robotics at restaurants, the reality is Denny’s deploying robots is kind of a big deal. After all, as America’s most famous 24-hour diner, Denny’s holds a special place in our collective consciousness, a place where almost anyone can get a cheap meal as well as apply for – and often get – a job.

And it’s these two things that Denny’s represents – a place with affordable food and an employer of everyday Americans – that seemed to be in tension with one another when looking at both the comments on the video on TikTok as well as the framing by the media.

To read the full story about Denny’s server robot, click here.

Hazel Technologies Announces New California Hub To Expand Produce Conserving Technology

Starting in the mid-twentieth century, the advent of new fertilizer production technologies allowed the world to grow crops at a new scale. While that so-called Green Revolution helped producers to feed more people than ever, it also created a focus on crop production rather than systems efficiency. And that imbalanced focus has led to a worldwide agricultural system that wastes about a third of the food it produces, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

During a stint as a chemistry fellow at the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern University, Dr. Aidan Mouat wondered what could happen if we used chemistry to create a new revolution — one that targeted the food supply chain. That idea led to the 2015 launch of Hazel Technologies, a Chicago-based company that manufactures high-tech produce packaging and storage solutions to extend shelf life.

Read the full story about Hazel’s new hub, head over to The Spoon.  

Starbucks is Trialing Animal-Free Milk. I Decided to Try it Out to See If It Tastes & Foams Like Regular Milk

In case you haven’t heard, Starbucks is trialing animal-free milk in the Seattle market. No, we’re not talking Oatly or another plant-based milk, but a milk with cow milk-identical proteins made in a lab.

The alt-milk is from Perfect Day, a company that uses precision fermentation to create its proprietary β-lactoglobulin animal-identical milk protein. The company’s protein, which received GRAS approval from the FDA last year, has primarily been sold to consumers in the form of ice cream (and soon cream cheese), but not in the form of a milk product. However, this move could signify that one could be on the way.

The company created a special 2% “barista-blend” version of its alt-milk especially for the Starbucks trial. Starbucks is currently trialing the milk at two locations in the Seattle market, Bellevue (a city east of Seattle) and Renton (south of Seattle).

Since I live in Seattle, I decided to head on over to Bellevue and see how precision-fermented milk tasted in a cup of Starbucks coffee.

When I walked into the coffee shop, one of the first things I saw at the counter was a sign that said: “Try Your Favorite Beverage With Animal-Free Milk.” The sign said this animal-free milk is lactose-free (but does contain milk allergens). The sign also had a QR code which, when scanned, brought up a survey page on my phone titled “Perfect Day Milk Customer Questionnaire.” The page gave a brief description of this new milk and asked questions like “What questions do you have about “animal-free” milk? and “Should Starbucks offer animal-free milk at all of our stores?”.

Interestingly, the questionnaire didn’t ask how the milk tasted compared to cow or plant-based milk. To figure that out, I ordered two drinks: a tall caramel macchiato with animal-free milk and a tall caramel macchiato with regular 2% milk.

When the drinks arrived, they were essentially identical, except that the Perfect Day milk drink had a “DF” on the label (which, the barista explained, stood for “Dairy-Free”).

The reason I ordered a macchiato was, outside of it being a pretty tasty beverage, I wanted to see how precision fermented milk foamed when steamed compared to cow milk. When I took the lid off the drinks, it was clear it foamed up just fine, as you can see from the picture below (DF milk drink is on the left, cow milk drink on the right):

The real test, however, would be how it tasted. And after tasting both drinks side by side, I can say that this version of precision fermented milk tasted exactly like cow’s milk. The foam was just as, well, foamy, and the actual milk taste in the dairy-free version was not discernably different than that of cow’s milk. In fact, from a taste and experience perspective, the two drinks were identical.

Which, of course, is the goal.

If Starbucks and Perfect Day are using this trial to determine if they should make this milk more widely available, I expect a wider rollout may soon be on its way. Outside of the environmental benefits of precision fermented milk, it’s easy to see how offering a milk without lactose and absent potential other health concerns of factory-farmed dairy could be a big winner.

That said, I imagine the biggest challenge for Perfect Day and Starbucks will be figuring out a way to message it to customers. When I asked the cashier what “animal-free milk” is, she did a decent job describing it: “It’s supposed to mimic 2%, but it’s made in a lab, so it’s like very eco-friendly,” she told me. “But it still has milk protein in it, which makes it not dairy-free, but lactose-free.”

Again, decent, but my feeling is that some consumers might bristle at the term “made in a lab.” I know Perfect Day has been working on messaging their product, and while they’ve made progress, I would suggest dropping “lab-grown” as a descriptor. Maybe something like “brewed” or other terms borrowed from beer or other fermentation-driven beverages since, after all, companies like AB InBev are already putting their brewing skills to work in making animal-identical proteins.

If you live in the Seattle market, I would suggest you head on over to Bellevue or Renton and order an animal-free coffee drink yourself and let us know what you think.

MOOLESS: The First Animal-Free Whey Protein Powder Created By Perfect Day & Natreve

Perfect Day, a company that makes animal-identical proteins using precision fermentation, and Natreve, a wellness and nutrition company, have partnered to produce MOOLESS, a protein powder made with animal-free whey protein.

In 2020, the FDA approved Perfect Day’s animal-free whey protein made from β-lactoglobulin (the company’s proprietary protein) for human consumption. This GRAS letter allowed the start-up to sell its alternative dairy protein to CPG companies to create novel products – and that’s exactly what Perfect Day has been doing as of recently. Last month Perfect Day launched a cake mix with animal-free whey through its Urgent Company.

MOOLESS is the most recent product to make use of Perfect Day’s animal-free whey protein, which is molecularly identical to conventional whey protein. According to the companies, this will be the first animal-free whey protein powder on the market that also provides the same nutritional benefits of whey, while also offering a lower environmental footprint. A single serving of the alternative protein powder will provide 20 grams of protein

Whey protein is commonly found in meal replacement shakes, protein powders, and protein bars. Dairy-free and vegan products often use pea, soy, rice, and hemp to boost their protein content, but the protein content can sometimes fall short of what whey protein is able to provide. MOOLESS is a vegan product because it is not animal-based, but it is not suitable for those with dairy allergy.

Perfect Day has proven that precision fermentation is a viable technology for creating alternative protein products that are identical to their conventional counterparts. Other companies, like Formo, Imagindairy, and Change Foods, are also using precision fermentation to produce, but have yet to bring any products to market.

MOOLESS will come in four flavors: Vanilla Bean Cupcake, Cookies and Cream, Strawberry Shortcake, and Chocolate Fudge Brownie. The alternative protein powder is set to launch in early 2022 with a major U.S. retailer as well as on Natreve’s website.

Perfect Day has been on a hot streak as of late. Not only did the company launch their new cake mix last month, but their partnership with Natreve comes just weeks after the news that Starbucks would trial the company’s precision fermented milk at two Starbucks locations in the Seattle market.

The Week in Food Tech Funding: Perfect Day’s Big Raise & Gorillas Quits Monkeying Around

The week’s big news is a $350 million Series D raise by precision fermentation unicorn Perfect Day. There’s a whole lot packed into this announcement, so let’s get right to it:

First, the funding raises Perfect Day’s total to $750 million and sets the company on track for a possible IPO. The timing couldn’t be better, as tech startups continue to see rising valuations and the market is hungry for more food tech (see Oatly). And while Ginkgo Bioworks was the first company with significant precision fermentation (PF) capabilities to IPO, Perfect Day will be the first true future food PF pure-play to go public.

As part of the news, the company announced an expansion of its consumer products company, the Urgent Company (TUC). TUC, Perfect Day’s wholly-owned CPG company behind the Brave Robot ice cream brand, will add new “household staples” to its portfolio with Modern Kitchen, the second consumer brand under the TUC umbrella. Modern Kitchen’s first product will be dairy-free cream cheese, which the company will make with its animal-identical whey. As part of the announcement, TUC revealed Brave Robot is now in 5 thousand stores and that they’ve moved a million pints of ice cream.

Speaking of Brave Robot, it always struck me as a risky choice for a product name. Sure it stands out, but Brave Robot also doesn’t exactly make one think of tasty ice cream, which I think is the biggest challenge for a product that also wants to somehow communicate to the consumer it is made differently from traditional ice cream. With Modern Kitchen, I have to wonder if Perfect Day went purposefully conservative, choosing a brand this time around that doesn’t create extra work for itself.

Perfect Day also announced their third line of business (the other two being ingredient innovation and consumer products) in enterprise biology scale-up services. This move is a formalization of its enterprise biology efforts that started with the company’s 2020 acquisition of bioprocess scale-up facility SBF. With its new business line, Perfect Day hopes to help other food companies with technology transfer and scale-up consulting services.

“We first got into the ingredient business because food companies, big and small, were eager to work with the ingredients we had successfully scaled,” said Perumal Gandhi, Perfect Day co-founder, in the news release. “Today, something analogous is happening on the technology side. There are innovators all over the world with ideas and ambitions similar to our animal-free milk protein, but need help getting there. We’re standing up business models to be able to share our demonstrated capabilities in a way that maximizes upsides for all, yet ensures that Perfect Day remains at the forefront of our new industry.”

What struck me about the series of announcements is they illustrate how Perfect Day has matured in both its business and how it talks about itself. The addition of business services not only adds a new revenue line to the company, but it is a strategically savvy move that will set Perfect Day up with a pipeline of long-term IP licensing and ingredient supplier opportunities.

On the company messaging front, it wasn’t all that long ago that Perfect Day struggled to describe its technology and the animal-free dairy products that resulted from it. That’s changed, however, as this announcement brims with confidence. The company has clearly figured out how to communicate the benefits of its product while also giving just the right touch of details around the technology behind it all.

And now, the rest of this week’s funding news:

Cultured Meat

New Age Meats – $25 Million: California-based New Age Meats has raised a $25 million series A to help fund product development and ramp up production of its pork sausage products. Founded in 2018, the company hopes to bring its products to market next year as it uses the funds to double its workforce and build a first pilot production plant.

Ghost Kitchens/Virtual Restaurants

All Day Kitchens – $65 Million: Ghost kitchen startup All Day Kitchens announced this last week they’ve raised a $65 million series D to expand its distributed network of satellite kitchens. The company, which launched in 2018, focuses on helping small independent restaurants expand their reach via a unique model; Unlike traditional ghost kitchens with often treat restaurants like a landlord, All Day Kitchens helps to launch its new restaurant partners across its entire network of kitchens in a given metro area.

Plant-Based

Ripple – $60 Million: Pea-protein alt-dairy specialist Ripple has raised a $60 million Series E. Ripple, which basically is to pea milk what Oatly is to oat dairy products, has continued to grow its products ever since its 2015 debut and plans to use the funding to expand into even more new products and markets. While not all pea-protein products from Ripple have succeeded – see our review of the pretty-bad and now discontinued Ripple yogurt here – I’m intrigued to see what new products they bring to market (well, of course, except maybe yogurt).

Food Delivery

Avo – $45 Million: Israel-based food delivery startup has raised a $45 million Series B. Avo, which offers white-label food and consumer products delivery to landlords and employers, says it plans to use the funding to expand into 10 new metro markets over the next year. From the release: Avo’s mission is to deliver everything from groceries and alcohol to electronics and personal care items to millions of people daily. The company’s customizable amenity platform enables residential and commercial customers to obtain everyday items, the same day, without any minimum order size or incurring any delivery fees of any kind. The platform also excludes a tipping fee, as Avo has a full-time salaried team. Stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, Avo is currently adding a new major market every month – a dramatic increase in growth that has helped drive revenue 1000% over the past two years.

HUNGRY – $21 Million: Chef-powered catering delivery company HUNGRY has raised a $21 million Series C from a mix of athletes, reality TV talent show singers, and the usual mix of corporate venture capital funds. The company, which lets companies cater food from chefs, works with a variety of high-profile chefs such as Tom Colicchi and has claimed it allows chefs to earn up to half a million per year on the HUNGRY platform.

Swiggy – Half a $Bil?: Indian food delivery startup Swiggy is reportedly in talks to raise a $500-$600 million funding round that would value the company at one Oatly ($10 billion). Invesco will likely lead, while others like Softbank will also throw in capital.

10 Minutes Grocery Delivery

Gorillas – $950 Million: Gorillas, the fast-growing, fast-grocery delivery business has raised an eye-popping $950 billion in funding. The news comes even as the company has reportedly decided to stop monkeying around with a US expansion, at least for the time being. According to Business Insider Germany, Gorillas has decided to scale back its US expansion plans outside of New York City and is laying off employees beyond the Big Apple. This funding comes in large part from Delivery Hero as Gorillas continues expansion in as Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, and France.

Plant-Based Fish

Hooked – €3.8 Million: Sweden’s Hooked has raised €3.8 Million for its plant-based fish products. Like many new alt-protein funding rounds nowadays, Hooked’s with news of a celebrity backer, Swedish music star Danny Saucedo. The company launched its plant-based tuna brand Toonish into retail last month in the Swedish market.

Food Robots

Piestro – $4.7 Million: Piestro, a maker of robotic pizza-making kiosks, has raised just under $4.7 million via equity crowdfunding. The campaign, which the Wavemaker Labs portfolio company ran using StartEngine, will be used to fund the second-generation Piestro, which will be the first pizza robot from the company to be deployed in consumer-facing locations and take payments. The company hopes to have its new prototype deployed by December of this year. Wavemaker Labs, which describes itself as a “robotics and automation corporate innovation studio”, has shown a preference for using platforms such as StartEngine and SeedInvest to raise funds with its portfolio companies like Piestro, Miso Robotics, Future Acres and Bobacino.

You Can Now Buy Brave Robot’s Ice Cream with Crypto

Brave Robot is entering into the brave new world of cryptocurrencies. The company announced today that consumers can now by its ice cream made from fermented flora with Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, DAI, Ethereum, Litecoin, or USD Coin. Crypto payment is available on Brave Robot’s direct-to-consumer website and was made possible through a partnership with Coinbase Commerce.

Brave Robot’s ice cream is made using Perfect Day’s technology, which ferments micro-flora organisms to recreate dairy proteins. The result is animal-free milk, ice cream and other dairy products that closely mimic “the real thing.”

In its press announcement, Brave Robot explained the crypto move by writing:

With millennials and Gen Z adopting decentralized currencies and blockchain technology becoming one of the most significant technological innovations, Brave Robot is thrilled to integrate cryptocurrency payment options for consumers to facilitate secure online transactions through Coinbase Commerce. 

Cryptocurrencies have made headlines throughout the year because of a combination of sky-high values (one bitcoin was worth as much as almost $65,000 in April of this year) and its volatility (bitcoin fell to $29,000 per coin in July before rebounding back up to $46,000 as of this writing). This creates a bit of a dicey proposition for Brave Robot. The crypto people use to pay for ice cream today could be worth a lot more or a lot less in the coming weeks depending on the markets (excluding USD Coin, which stays at $1).

But raging volatility aside, cryptocurrencies represent a totally new way of thinking about money, just as Brave Robot/Perfect Day represent new ways of thinking about dairy. And at the very least, this stunt could help establish crypto as a legitimate payment method. So the marriage of the two actually makes sense.

Try Brave Robot’s Animal-Free Ice Cream During Its Live Tour This Summer

Nothing hits the spot quite like cold ice cream on a hot summer day. And if you want to throw in a little food tech futurism with your frozen treats, you can get free taste of Brave Robot as its ice cream truck continues its live taste tour on both coasts this weekend.

Brave Robot’s ice cream is animal free, as it uses Perfect Day’s technology that re-creates dairy proteins from microflora. The result is real dairy ice cream (so those with dairy sensitivities should take heed!) with no animal inputs.

We (and our families) tasted Brave Robot ice cream last year and enjoyed it. At the time, I found it to be just ever-so-slightly chalkier than animal-based ice cream, but that certainly didn’t stop me from polishing off the variety pack I bought.

Though Brave Robot ice cream is available at select retail outlets nationwide right now, the company has hit the road with ice cream truck to hand out free samples and merch this summer.

But most of all, who doesn’t want free ice cream — especially when it’s so futuristic? Here’s where Brave Robot’s tour will be this weekend, check out the website to see where they will head to next.

Cape Cod, MA:
7/9 Boston’s Vanderbilt Hall, 11a-2:30p
7/9 Stop & Shop Quincy, 4:30p – 7p
7/10 Falmouth Heights Beach, 10a-2p
7/10 Horseneck Beach, 3p-7p
7/11 Reggae On The Beach, New Bedford MA, 3p-7p

LA & Orange County:
7/9 Ralphs Tustin, 13321 Jamboree Rd, 11a – 4p
7/10 Gelson’s Laguna, 30922 South Coast Hwy, 11a-3p
7/10 Emerald Bay Community, Laguna Beach, 5p-9p
7/11 Gelson’s Newport Beach, 1660 San Miguel Dr, 11a-2p
7/11 Gelson’s Rancho Mission Viejo, 30731 Gateway Pl, 3p-7p