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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

plant-based meat

GFI: U.S. Plant-Based Meat Sales in Food Service Hit All-Time High in ’22, Retail Sales Remain Flat

According to a new report from the Good Food Institute (GFI) examining plant-based meat sales in the U.S. food service sector, sales of meat derived from plants sold to restaurants and other food service institutions hit $730 million in 2022, up 7.8% and $53 million in total dollars compared to the previous year. GFI also says that total U.S. retail sales for plant-based meat – still the biggest overall category – remained flat at $1.4 billion last year.

The GFI report detailed total U.S. sales of plant-based meat, including food service, retail sales, and e-commerce. According to the report, total plant-based meat sales revenue grew slightly from $2.1 billion in 2021 to $2.2 billion in 2022, amounting to an increase of 2%. However, while total plant-based meat revenue was up year over year, GFI’s report says that total pounds of U.S. plant-based meat sold dipped slightly from 349 million to 336 million in 2022, a dip of 4%.

If you’re curious how total revenue went up while pounds shipped went down, that’s due to price increases for plant-based meat brought on by inflation. According to GFI, wholesale prices for plant-based meat in broadline distribution increased by 4% in 2022 over the previous year, half that of the 8% increase in prices for animal-based meat products. Animal meat product price increases were in line with the estimated increase in food service pricing, which was an estimated 8% in 2022. According to GFI, overall plant-based meat price per pound has decreased by 11% since 2019, which they attribute to increased scale and more favorable sourcing agreements with distributors.

GFI also broke down where plant-based meats were sold in the food service category. According to the report, 39% of alternative meat was sold through quick-service restaurants (i.e. fast food), while full-service restaurants accounted for 19%. Education came in a distant third, accounting for 16% of plant-based meat sales in the food service category for 2022.

You can read the full GFI report here.

Podcast: The Anti-Tech Grocery Store & Food Tech News of the Week

The Spoon Podcast is back after a summer hiatus with a food tech news wrap-up discussing some of the most interesting stories of the week!

In this episode, Spoon contributor Allen Weiner and I talk about:

You can listen to the full episode by clicking below or by finding The Spoon Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts! And while you’re at it, do us a favor and leave us a review!

As mentioned in the show, the Spoon is once again leading the charge for food tech at CES, the world’s biggest tech show. If you are interested in showcasing your future food or food tech innovation, head over to The Spoon’s CES page for more info.

Also, on October 25th, we’ll be bringing leaders at the intersection of food and AI together for a day of conversation. Please use the discount code PODCAST for 15% off tickets to the Food AI Summit.

Meala Raises $1.9M to Create Functional Proteins From ‘Home Kitchen’ Ingredients

Israel–based start-up Meala FoodTech announced today it has secured $1.9m in pre-seed funding from investors. The company, which is focused on developing functional proteins from what it says will be clean and recognizable ingredients, received funding from The Kitchen FoodTech Hub (part of the Strauss-Group), and DSM Venturing, the corporate venture arm of Royal DSM. The funding will be used to continue developing Meala’s functional protein platform and move it from lab to pilot scale.

The company’s focus is on developing functional proteins that can achieve the taste and mouthfeel of real meat but do so without a long and exotic-looking ingredient list. While the company doesn’t name names, it’s clearly contrasting the proteins developed with its cleaner-label ingredient platform with those used by companies such as Impossible and Beyond. But unlike those companies, Meala’s focus is B2B, where it will provide functional proteins for other CPG brands creating plant-based meats. In short, it’s hoping to be something akin to a clean-label version of Motif Foodworks.

“There is a significant need in the plant-based industry to effectively reduce undesirable ingredients and clean up labels,” said Hadar Razmovich, CEO and Meala co-founder. “This investment will help us get closer and faster to the market, better address the companies’ specific needs and provide affordable, smarter solutions.”

According to the company, its multi-functional proteins will improve the texture of meat alternatives and make them more realistic while also creating a “more full-bodied flavor” with what it describes as a short list of “home kitchen” ingredients. The company says its proteins will be designed to be used as “binding and gelling agents” with “superior water retention capabilities.” The start-up’s technology can be used to develop functional proteins for a variety of alternative meats, including burgers, sausages, nuggets with egg and fish.

The company plans to use the funding to further develop its platform technology and take it from lab to pilot scale and says it intends to have its products in the US and Europe by 2024.

The company’s positioning definitely feels of the moment, coming at a time when the plant-based industry is doing a bit of soul-searching regarding its approach of the last few years. That said, there’s not a whole lot of detail in the Meala announcement about what exactly its “home kitchen” ingredients will be, and without having tasted meats developed using its ingredients, it’s impossible to know just yet if they will achieve their intended goal. But if they can deliver on their promise to have the best of both worlds – a simple ingredient list and proteins that deliver realistic meat-like flavor – it’s not hard to imagine CPG brands lining up at their door.

The Spoon Food Tech Weekly: About That Bloomberg Article

This is the online version of The Spoon’s Food Tech Weekly newsletter. To get it in your inbox, just sign up here.

Someday, We’ll Look Back and Laugh

If you’re in the alternative protein industry, you’ve probably seen an article from Bloomberg titled, “Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods wanted to upend the world’s $1 trillion meat industry. But plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop.”

And if you haven’t read it, you’ve almost certainly read about it. That’s because, over the past week, there’s been no shortage of blog posts, newsletters, Linkedin think pieces, and full-page ads in the New York Times declaring why – depending on where you fall on the matter – Bloomberg had it right or wrong. 

Much of the reaction from those in the alt-protein industry centered on the article’s focus on two companies, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. Many argued (rightly) that the plant-based meat industry is much bigger than just these two companies, and any analysis of the space and its prospects that doesn’t include a fuller look of the new products on the horizon (like those based on fungi/mycelium) misses why so many are still so excited about the industry’s prospects. 

But as Rachel Konrad, former head of comms for Impossible Foods, said on this week’s Spoon podcast, the industry “doth protest too much.” 

After all, it’s just one article, right? Why was there so much pushback?

The strong reaction can be partly attributed to Bloomberg’s place in the media ecosystem. Not only is its journalism viewed on par with the Wall Street Journal from a business reporting perspective (though they don’t have as many journalists covering as many beats at the Journal), but unlike the Journal, it’s a weekly news magazine with cover stories. 

I mean, just look at that cover: 

Despite print media’s long and slow death spiral, a story like this still has an outsize impact, especially in publications like Bloomberg. They can become, in a sense, self-fulfilling prophecies.

Don’t believe it? Just ask Juicero’s founders. Those familiar with Juicero’s demise will remember the final nail in the coffin for the connected juicer startup was a Bloomberg piece. Within days after publication, the company and its high-priced juicer became a symbol of Silicon Valley excess and over-engineered solutions. It wasn’t long before the company’s venture backers backed out, and soon after, the company was toast.

But the plant-based meat industry is not Juicero. It’s an industry made up of literally hundreds of companies, backed by billions of dollars of venture funding, and it has achieved some measure of success in that many of these new products have become established on quick service menus and occupy space on grocery store and warehouse store meat aisles. 

I suspect the real reason, though, the article touched a nerve was it pointed out a truth that not enough executives in the plant-based industry and food retail are ready to admit: some of the earliest and loudest voices in the plant-based industry over-promised early on about how quickly consumers would embrace their products. 

Take these quotes from Pat Brown, founder of Impossible, made on stage in 2015 at a TED talk and later in an interview with the New Yorker: 

“I know it sounds insane to replace a deeply entrenched, trillion-dollar-a-year global industry,” he said, “but it has to be done.” Four years later, when the New Yorker profiled Impossible, Pat predicted his company would “take a double-digit portion of the beef market” by 2024 before sending it into a “death spiral.” Next he would target “the pork industry and the chicken industry and say, ‘You’re next!’ and they’ll go bankrupt even faster.”

Ethan Brown has spoken in similar terms about how he felt his company would transform people’s diets around the world. From the Bloomberg piece:

Just like technology had rendered the horse-drawn carriage obsolete, he told the crowd at the New York Times’ climate conference this past fall, so, too, would his system of breaking down plants transform the protein at the center of the plate. “This,” he said, “is something that I feel is inevitable.”

I don’t blame either founder for articulating what they see as the ultimate goal of plant-based meat. Both are visionary founders and are driven to change what they see as a cruel industry that is, according to them, steering the planet toward a calamity caused by the climate impact of industrial agriculture. The goal of the plant-based meat industry – to replace industrially-produced meat from animals with a more sustainable alternative – makes sense and should be the goal.

But the reality is that these visionaries overpromised early market acceptance because, in part, they underestimated how difficult it would be to convince consumers to change their diets. Part of this has to do with the product themselves; neither Beyond nor Impossible are what you could describe as healthy when compared to a pure, simple ingredient plant-based diet. Even more importantly, the products’ taste profiles aren’t nearly close enough to what they are replacing, residing still in what chef Ali Bouzari describes as the ‘Uncanny Valley of Food.’

As a result, the consumer dietary profile that Pat Brown has said many times he most wanted to target – the carnivore – doesn’t believe these products are suitable replacements for something they’ve been eating their whole lives. Arguments about animal welfare don’t resonate with the vast majority of consumers, and the health arguments – which have the potential to resonate with a wide swath of consumers – haven’t convinced the vast majority of people who have been told – rightly or wrongly – that these products are going to be better for them. 

The hard truth is consumers are creatures of habit. They eat what they know, and convincing them to change their behavior is difficult. When consumers do change their diets, it’s often due to exposure to a mix of influencer-fed trends and ideas passed on to them by friends or family. Plant-based meats just haven’t caught on, and in fact, you could point to an opposite trend, where a contingent of consumers argue (again rightly or wrongly) against these foods because they’ve come to believe they are too “processed” and this is somehow unhealthy. 

The purchase price also factors in. While consumers with plant-forward diets may be ok paying a premium for an alternative product that satiates a desire for meat, most consumers are not. They wonder why not just buy the real thing at a lower price? And sure, the price premium for plant-based meat has gotten smaller, but the products are still, on the whole, more expensive than those spit out by the fine-tuned, highly-scaled machinery of industrial animal agriculture. 

Now, the plant-based meat industry finds itself in a tricky spot in 2023. A majority of consumers not only don’t believe these products are any healthier than the real thing but they also aren’t convinced plant-based alternatives taste as good as meat yet. In other words, the average consumer sees plant-based meat – as represented by Beyond and Impossible – as expensive processed food, and no amount of New York Times full-page ads will change that.

But all hope is not lost. The plant-based meat industry is still in the early innings, with much of its promise ahead of it in a pipeline of new products that are either on the market or slated to arrive soon. Tasty meat analogs that use mycelium, jackfruit, or other ingredients are already here, and most consumers have yet to try them. Products using novel ingredients derived using new approaches that use some combination of artificial intelligence, precision fermentation, and genetic engineering are on their way. New formats, like plant-based whole-cut meat and fish, have yet to make their way onto the vast majority of consumer plates. And let’s not forget to mention those products made with real animal cells in the form of cultivated meat, which are now on the fast track toward consumer plates in 2023.

The alternative meat industry has a lot of work ahead of it, but the best way to move forward is to examine its challenges in the cold light of day. That’s what we’re doing now, and we’ll look back at the Bloomberg article in 5 or 10 years and laugh and wonder what we were all worried about. 

How will new tools like ChatGPT impact the world of food? We’ll be discussing just that during the Spoon’s mini-summit on February 15th. The event is free, so register here today before the session fills up. 

Bruce Friedrich, Isha Data, and Mark Post in a panel discussion at Tufts University’s Cellular Agriculture Innovation Day. (Paul Rutherford for Tufts University)

The Cell Ag Infrastructure Buildout

A little over a week ago, the leaders of the nascent cellular agriculture industry got together at Tufts and held a day-long state of the industry conference. The Tufts team did an excellent job getting the right people together, and the sessions spanned several topics that have been top of mind for me, including scaling and funding, two things that are integrally intertwined.

One of the points made during the day was the need for more government funding. Bruce Friedrich of GFI said he’s seeing progress on this front, as we’ve seen governments go from “almost zero to hundreds of millions of dollars” in funding in the span of a few years.

Friedrich pointed to how the government helped get the EV industry off the ground by allocating tens of billions of dollars over the past decade and thinks governments could be convinced to eventually do the same for cellular agriculture. 

So the question becomes what this type of funding would look like and how it would be spent. Are tax breaks for large-scale biomanufacturing similar to what we saw for the chip industry with the CHIPS act the right approch? Or what about direct investment in infrastructure, like we’re seeing with the EV charging network buildout spending allocated from the infrastructure bill? The devil is definitely in the details, but one that is sure is that private capital alone won’t get us there alone. 

Who knows, maybe someday we’ll see a biomanufacturing infrastructure plan akin to the CHIP act. For that to take place, the Biden administration or one that follows will need to be convinced that cellular agriculture is not only a growth industry that will provide millions of new jobs (which I think it could), but it’s also strategically important for the US to become a leader in biomanufacturing, something other countries – China and Singapore to name a couple – already have recognized. 

Food robots are popping up everywhere, from fast food to stadiums to even some homes. So what’s the food robot industry look like in 2023? Join us for the Food Robotics Outlook 2023 on March 1st to find out! 

You can register for this free event here. Better hurry before the tickets are gone!  

Sigh. I Guess The Gas Stove is Now Part of the Culture War

Over the past couple of years, food-related matters have become an ever-bigger part of the political culture wars, and the latest one to enter the fray is gas stoves. The recent fuss resulted from some poorly worded remarks from Consumer Product Safety Commission Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr, who told Bloomberg that “any option” was on the table regarding gas stoves: “Products that can’t be made safe can be banned,” he said. 

Some on the right, ever eager for a new political cudgel with which to hit the Biden administration over the head, seized on the words. Trumka later clarified his remarks and said no ban was being considered, but by then, it didn’t matter; gas stoves were fodder in a new culture war.

While there is little chance we’ll ever see an outright ban on gas stoves at the federal level, we are already seeing some restrictions being put in place at the state and city level. Berkeley started it all in 2019, followed by San Francisco and LA, and the state of California is looking to ban gas hookups to new builds by 2030. More recently, states like Washington have passed legislation banning gas in commercial buildings set to kick in this year.

Somewhat lost in the frenzied debate is the momentum we’ve seen for induction cooking over the past couple of years. The technology, which a number of chefs have started to see as superior to that of gas, has become more mainstream in the US in the past couple of years, and forecasts have it continuing to outpace the growth of gas or coiled-electric cooktops. 

The biggest hurdle for induction cooking today is price. On average, a new induction stove still costs more than a gas or coiled electric stove and costs even more if a consumer has to swap out their cookware for induction-compatible pots and pans. The good news is many pans sold today come induction compatible, so many consumers may already be equipped to start cooking with induction. 

For now, organizations like the Decarbonization Coalition are busy making the rounds, doing the hard work of trying to convince more of the benefits of electrification. We wish them luck and hope they don’t get caught in the crossfire!

That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend and we’ll talk to you next week.

Michael Wolf

P.S. The CES food tech report will be out on Monday. There was so much to cover we wanted to make sure to get all of it!

New Alt Protein and Bioinnovation Hubs Are Popping Up From NYC to Israel

This week was a big one when it came to incubating the next generation of future food.

Not only did GFI Israel and Technion announce a new Sustainable Protein Research Center (SPRC), but the city of New York also announced it would build a “bioinnovation hub” with $20 million in new funding earmarked from NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ administration.

The SPRC, which Technion and GFI Israel claim is the first of its kind in the world, “will coordinate the collaborative activities of dozens of researchers from more than ten different academic departments at the Technion and with additional universities and companies to address the world’s most pressing challenges of sustainability and human health.”

The new facility will have a 5-year budget of $20 million and will facilitate the recruitment of new faculty members in the field and support “the construction of a building for the Carasso FoodTech Innovation Center.” The new center will purchase and maintain capital equipment and recruit professional technicians and ” fund collaborative seed research and train graduate students and post-docs in related fields.”

You can read the full story here on The Spoon.

Meati Opens Up ‘Mega Ranch’ Production Facility, Plans to Produce “Tens of Millions of Pounds” of Fungi-Based Meat

Meati Foods, a producer of plant-based whole-food protein made from mycelium, announced the opening of its largest-yet production facility in Thornton, Colorado. The 100 thousand foot facility, dubbed the “Mega Ranch,” is expected to hit a production rate that could produce tens of millions of pounds of the startup’s fungi-derived meat product by late 2023.

The funding for the new facility comes in the form of a $150 million Series C raised last year and a recent $22 million extension round. The company’s total funding to date is more than $250 million.

Meati claims the Mega Ranch will be able to match and even exceed the scale of the United States’ largest individual animal-based ranches. The company says the Ranch is vertically integrated, which means it will allow for the growing, harvesting, processing, and packaging of Meati products under one roof.

Read the full story at The Spoon.

Food Retail

GreenSwapp Wants to Make Figuring Out the Climate Impact of a Bag of Chips as Easy as Snapping a Pic

While the climate impact of our food has finally made the main stage as a topic at the world’s most high-profile summit, the average joe has no idea how good or bad that bag of chips or can of soda is for the environment.

A Dutch startup called GreenSwapp wants to change that by making information about the climate impact of practically any CPG product instantly available to anyone using its technology.

The Amsterdam-based company started as an online grocery app for climate-friendly products, but more recently has focused on building a climate impact data platform for both consumers and companies. To that end, the company debuted a new scanning tool at CES which gives instant scoring (low, medium, or high impact) of practically any packaged food product when the product’s barcode is scanned with a smartphone.

You can read the full story at The Spoon. 

Food Robotics

SJW Robotics Raises $2M as It Eyes Launch of Autonomous Robotic Restaurants This Spring

SJW Robotics, a maker of autonomous robotic restaurants, has raised a $2 million seed funding round, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The Canadian startup’s newest round includes investments from Alley Robotic Ventures and celebrity chef Tom Colicchio.

Company CEO and cofounder Nipun Sharma told The Spoon the new investment would be used to fund the rollout of the company’s robotic kitchen system with partner Compass Canada. The two announced their partnership last summer, with Compass disclosing that they had plans to pilot three RJW robotic restaurant kitchens in select markets. According to Sharma, the first Compass autonomous kitchen pilot will launch at a hospital in the Toronto market under Compass’s Bok Choy brand this spring.

To read the full story, click here!

The Secret to Scaling a Plant-Based Meat Startup With Nowadays’ Max Elder

In his previous life, Max Elder worked as a futurist, where he helped food brands develop strategies for the future.

One of his primary motivations in this work was the belief he could help steer these brands away from animal agriculture and toward a future centered around more humane and sustainable foods. Over time, however, Elder realized that to have a meaningful impact, he’d have to create his own product.

“I always thought that I could sneak into the boardroom and try to shift the Titanic,” Elder said. “That was meaningful work, but it’s quite hard to do. Structural sort of incentives aren’t aligned in these kinds of companies. And Titanics sink. That’s the story, right?”

So in late 2020, Elder left his job as a futurist and created a plant-based meat company. With Nowadays, Elder envisions a future where he can have a bigger impact by scaling meat utilizing production techniques perfected for traditional animal agriculture.

“To truly scale these products efficiently so that the category can realize its potential, we have to think more creatively about our manufacturing process, our finishing process, and partnering with existing players across the meat value chain,” Elder said.

He sees many plant-based meat startups trying to create entirely new ways to make their products when, in truth, many existing processes built for the world of animal agriculture work and are already highly scalable.

“A lot of work is being done to recreate wheels,” Elder said. “And the (existing) wheels are cheap, ubiquitous, and super efficient. They’re just pumping out conventional protein that isn’t as good for people or the planet.”

So while Titantics may sink, Elder thinks he has created a way to leverage much of the existing know-how from the old world to lift the tide of alternative proteins by making them more efficient and affordable.

“As a founder, Nowadays is my version of a speedboat. Hopefully, one that we can grow to have impact.”

Elder was this week’s guest on The Spoon podcast, where we talked about his transition from strategist to entreprenuer, and Elder put his futurist hat back on to look at where things are going in the world of alternative protein.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below or get it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Asia Pacific Leads in Plant-Based Meat IP According to Report

While many think innovation in plant-based meat is a fairly recent phenomenon, companies, researchers and entrepreneurs have looking for ways to leverage plants as an alternative to animal agriculture since the sixties.

However, there’s no doubt the pace of innovation has accelerated in recent decades amidst a worsening climate crisis and a rising global population, and one way to quantify the innovation is through an analysis of the growth in intellectual property. And now, thanks to a new report published by researcher Roots Analysis, we can do just that.

Source: Roots Analysis

According to the Roots report, the number of cumulative IP publications for plant-based meat has grown by nearly 3x over the past decade, going from 2,388 in 2012 to 7,126 by 2022. In addition, the growth in patent filings, granted patents, and amended patents (the three of which make up the bulk of IP-related publications) has grown nearly every year over the past decade, with the annual growth of publications going from just over one hundred per year for the decade prior to 2012, to around 900 per year in both 2020 (915 new IP documents) and 2021 (891 new documents).

Source: Roots Analysis

According to the report, most IP documents in the plant-based meat space are patent applications (77.4%) and granted patents (18.7%). When breaking the documents down by region, Asia Pacific is responsible for over half of all IP (3,717), compared to about 18% for North America (1,277 documents) and Europe (1,310 documents).

While Asia Pac dominates in terms of the total number of patent filings and granted patents, the report points out that some of the most valuable intellectual property in the early market is owned by larger North American and European food companies. The report points to Impossible Foods, Cargill, Mars, and Solae as some of the leading IP stakeholders in plant-based meats.

The report also broke down the key phrases used within the intellectual property documents to give an idea of the focus of the innovation. The top categories of keywords within the filings are production methods, proteins, preparations, and products. The report also analyzed the various types of plant-based meats in which researchers and companies create intellectual property. Some of the different plant-based meat categories include plant-based seafood, structured/textured meat analogs, plant-based meat for pet food, processed meat analogs, amorphous meat analogs, and dehydrated meat analogs.

You can find out more about the report here.

Rebellyous Develops Patent-Pending Production System That Puts Plant-Based Meat at Price Parity With Animal Meat

Seattle-based plant-based meat startup Rebellyous Foods has announced they have developed a new patent-pending production system prototype that can produce plant-based meat at price parity with traditional meat.

The company claims the new system, which it calls the Mock 1S, will eventually reduce the cost of plant-based meat manufacturing by 95% through a combination of workforce reduction through automation, reduced energy consumption, and a 90% reduction in waste, and other improvements.

What makes the new Mock 1S system more efficient than traditional plant-based meat manufacturing? According to Rebellyous CEO Christie Lagally, the system is custom-designed for making plant-based meat, whereas traditionally, plant-based meat manufacturers utilize conventional food processing infrastructure that isn’t designed for the job.

“If you walk into a typical plant-based meat production facility, it would be exactly the same equipment as you would see in a typical meat processing facility,” said Lagally.

According to Lagally, plant-based meat production plants today utilize bowl choppers, tumblers, and conveyor belts that combine to texturize dry protein, emulsify the oils, water, and starch, and eventually mix it all together. With the Mock 1S, she says the system performs “just-in-time hydration” and emulsifies and mixes the dough at the right temperature in one automated process flow, all without using conveyor belts or wasted steps.

Lagally, who is a former Boeing engineer, had the vision for re-inventing plant-based meat manufacturing ever since she founded the company as Seattle Food Tech back in 2017. With this week’s announcement, she believes they’ve reached a significant milestone that will help her company to scale production of the company’s plant-based chicken and offer it at prices that are the same as you’d find from the likes of Tyson or other big-meat producers. Longer-term, she believes the system they have developed will allow them to produce their much cheaper than traditional factory-farmed animal meat products.

When I asked her if she planned to eventually offer her system to others to help them scale production, she said they might eventually go down that path, but for now, they’re happy to use it for their product.

“It’s not off the table. But I’ll tell you, that’s not our first goal. Our first goal is to deploy. We just deployed this new system, so we’ll start using it to make cost-competitive plant-based chicken we’ll scale it up.”

Lagally told me that with this milestone in the books, the company is now in fund-raising mode to help invest in scale-up of their production capability. The company plans on implementing the next-generation Mock system (the Mock 2) in their current production facility and begin to look for a new location in 2023 where they can ramp up production to meet the growing demand for their product.

And just how big is that demand currently?

“We are now in almost 600 retail locations. We will be announcing some new retail locations and about a month. We are serving 46 school districts ranging from northern Washington to the southern tip of California.”

While Lagally says they aren’t ready to show the Mock 1 off publicly – they currently have 5 patents pending for the system – you can see a walkthrough tour The Spoon took of the Rebellyous plant last year here to get a peak of their early thinking about how to reinvent plant-based meat manufacturing.

The Spoon Weekly: Tobacco Plant Bioreactors, Roboburgers & Starbucks NFTs

Welcome to the Spoon Weekly. The Spoon Weekly features some of our favorite food tech stories from the past week. Make sure to subscribe to get it delivered directly to your inbox.

BioBetter is Turning Tobacco Plants into Bioreactors to Drive Down the Cost of Cultivated Meat Growth Media

Food tech startup BioBetter has developed a novel way to create growth factors for cell-cultivated meat utilizing tobacco plants.

Based in Kiryat Shemona, Israel, the company announced that it has developed a method to create growth factors via molecular farming techniques by essentially turning the tobacco plant into a bioreactor. BioBetter’s technology employs plant cells to produce growth factors instead of more traditional techniques which utilize yeast, bacteria, or CHO in a bioreactor to produce growth factors.

The company’s technology involves identifying the gene of the target protein, cloning it, and transferring it into the tobacco plant. They then select the highest-yielding plants, breed them to develop higher yields, and then ultimately grow and harvest the plants.

As the tobacco plants mature, their cells express the growth factors and store them until harvest. The company then uses a proprietary protein extraction and purification technology that enables it to exploit nearly the entire plant, producing a high purity product at lower overall costs.

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

As Meat Prices Rise, Could Plant-Based Meat Become a Value Option for Consumers?

Have you seen the price of meat lately?

It’s not pretty. The average price of a pound of ground beef in the United States has jumped over 20% in the past year and seems to just keep going up.

Meanwhile, the cost of a 12-ounce package of Impossible ground has continued to drop and is showing up at under $6 at some retail establishments, about the same price of a pound of extra lean ground beef.

Not quite price parity…yet. But as Impossible and other plant-based meat providers continue to ramp up volume, it’s worth asking: when meat alternatives reach price parity and, eventually, sell at a discount to animal meat, could customers start reaching for plant-based meat to save a buck?

You can read the full post at The Spoon.

Here Are Four Ways Starbucks Could Get Into The NFT Business

Starbucks is getting into the NFT business.

That’s according to company CEO Howard Schultz, who recently held a company town hall to discuss what the company’s plans are for the coming year. Schultz, who retook the reigns of the coffee giant this week, said the company would be in the NFT business before the end of the calendar year.

“If you look at the companies, the brands, the celebrities, the influencers that are trying to create a digital NFT platform and business, I can’t find one of them that has the treasure trove of assets that Starbucks has, from collectibles to the entire heritage of the company,” Schultz said.

While it can often be cringe-inducing when CEOs talk about new digital formats – something Schultz acknowledged by admitting he’s not a digital native – he’s right that the company has many assets that could be tokenized and create new ways to engage with its customers.

You can read the full post here. 

The Spoon is Hiring!

Do you love food tech? Are you a dynamic sales leader who can close? We want to talk! The Spoon is looking for a sales lead to help generate new sales, expand existing relationships and help build our business! Check this and other positions out at the Spoon Job Board!

Smart Kitchen

Holy Smokes: FirstBuild’s Arden Indoor Smoker Hits Crowdfunding Target in Two Minutes

FirstBuild, GE Appliances’ innovation arm, has launched its latest crowdfunding campaign, and this one looks like a potential home run.

The same group that brought you the Opal ice machine and the Paragon induction cooktop are now bringing an indoor pellet smoker called Arden to market via a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. The Arden can smoke up to two racks of ribs at a time or a small brisket, all inside your home without setting your fire alarms off.

The Arden uses a smoke-elimination technology that requires no additional filters to clean or replace. According to FirstBuild, the technology was first developed for GE’s smart hearth oven and has now been incorporated into the Arden.

The unit uses the same pellets used with other smokers. Once the smoke is pulled out of the chamber and into the smoke eliminator, it eliminates all smoke and just CO2 and water are exhausted into the kitchen. This allows users to sit the Arden on a countertop and smoke a slab of meat without any special venting.

To read the full story, head here.

Lomi, Unboxed: A First Look at The Lomi Smart Food Waste Composter

I find food tech fascinating – especially the products and solutions that have a shot at fixing a real problem in our food system. Tackling issues like food waste, food insecurity, nutrition, and accessibility, technology can give us the tools to change habits and systems.

But, I admit I haven’t always adopted tech in my own home that has made a huge change in our own food habits outside of our beloved sous vide, and nothing that stuck when it came to food waste. With growing kids, our grocery bills keep increasing, but I throw out more food on busy weeks than I’d ever like to admit.

Composting at home has never been an easy or…neat endeavor; we’ve tried several times, using smaller receptacles to collect food scraps to bring out to a larger pile. But no matter what, we abandoned our efforts for lack of time and patience. One year, we even subscribed to a service that would drop off nutrient-dense compost soil for us to use in our vegetable garden. We paid someone for THEIR broken-down food scraps — and it turns out, nutrient-rich, locally harvested, hand-delivered compost is not cheap.

To read the full story, head here.

Smart Kitchen Platform Company Drop Changes Name to Fresco

Drop dropped Drop.

The startup that started with a connected scale eight years ago announced it has a new brand identity. The company is now called Fresco, a name which “(reflects) the company’s priority to connect dots in the kitchen between appliances, home cooks and recipes to make cooking effortless,” said the announcement.

Fresco CEO Ben Harris said that the company needed a new brand given its evolution beyond its hardware roots.

“Drop was a great name for a physical product, but we pivoted to become a smart kitchen platform, providing end-to-end solutions to make appliances connected, from firmware development to IoT expertise and an app that pulls all the appliances together,” Harris said. “As a result, we needed a brand that better represented this.”

Drop is part of a cohort of smart kitchen startups that offer software and connectivity solutions to power kitchen appliances and help consumers cook and plan meals. While some of its peers have increasingly focused on shoppable recipes and looked to help power online grocery integrations, Drop has doubled down on expanding its solutions and increasing its partner roster in the connected kitchen and guided cooking space.

To read the full story, head here.

Future Food

Plant-Based Eggs Starting to Crack Open The European Market
 

Here in the US, a version of a plant-based egg from Eat Just, Inc. has been on the market since 2013, starting with an earlier version from when the company was Hampton Creek. The company’s current product, which uses its flagship mung bean formulation, began selling in the US market in 2019.

But if you wanted to try JUST Egg in Europe, you were out of luck.

That’s about to change. That’s because the company just got approval for its mung bean protein from the European Commission. The approval, which follows an earlier greenlight last fall by the European Food Safety Authority, paves the way for the introduction of JUST Egg to the European market by the fourth quarter of 2022.

That’s not the only good news if you are looking for an egg alternative in Europe. Berlin-based Perfeggt has been working on an egg alternative that derives its protein punch from fava beans, and is starting to ship in Germany.

Read the full post here.

Israel’s Vanilla Vida Wants to Expand and Improve the World’s Favorite Flavor

Here’s a fun fact: Did you know that vanilla is the world’s most popular flavor? In addition, how about the idea that 95% of all vanilla sold is synthetic, generally made from an oil or lab-developed chemical compound. Sounds like a supply and demand issue for a real deal vanilla pod.

Vanilla Vida has done its homework and sees an opportunity to tickle the universal taste buds by using technology and data to produce large quantities of top-quality vanilla anywhere in the world. Madagascar and Indonesia are the top crop producers but face issues with uncertain weather, quality control issues, and a long drying process. With proof of concept completed, Vanilla Vida CEO Oren Zilberman is ready to expand beyond Israel and launch climate-controlled farms worldwide.

Zilberman’s experience as a VC is instrumental in the success of his new company. “When you are building a startup, you are always looking about what is the chance it can do a major impact and some change in the world and at the same time, have a really good business,” the company’s CEO said in a recent interview with The Spoon. He also explained that his experience led him not to want to develop something new or go into an unproven segment. By expanding the opportunity for a wildly popular product, such as vanilla, Vanilla Vida can hit the ground running instead of requiring a great deal of marketing to drive customer awareness.

Read the full post here

Food Robots

Chili’s is Trialing a Sidewalk Delivery Robot From Serve Robotics

Hankering for some Chili’s but don’t want to jump in your car? It might not be long before that grilled chicken and bowl of chili arrive at your front door via sidewalk robot.

That’s because Chili’s parent company Brinker has been secretly piloting a trial with sidewalk delivery startup Serve Robotics and is evaluating the possibility of a wider rollout.

The first hint of the Brinker-Serve pilot came via a small mention last week in an article in a Dallas publication about the company’s drone delivery trials with Flytrex. Both Brinker and Serve have since confirmed to The Spoon that they are running an early stage sidewalk delivery pilot but were not ready to discuss further details of a wider rollout.

“We can confirm Serve is working with Brinker International to roll out robotic delivery for Chili’s customers,” a Serve spokesperson told the Spoon. “We will have more to share once service is launched.”

To read the full story, click here!

Watch This Video of RoboBurger, a Robot Burger Vending Machine, Cooking Up Burgers

Over the past couple of years, there’s been no shortage of robotic vending machines cooking up everything from salads to bowl food to ramen to pizza. But, what we haven’t seen – until earlier this week – is a machine that makes the cornerstone meal of the American fast food marketplace, the hamburger.

The RoboBurger, a robotic burger vending machine, arrived at its first location in a New Jersey shopping mall. The machine, a fully autonomous machine that makes a complete burger in minutes, showed up at the Newport Centre mall in Jersey City, New Jersey. The box measures 12 square feet, plugs into a 220-volt wall socket, has a built-in refrigerator and an automated griddle and cleaning system. The self-contained machine holds up to 50 frozen burger patties and cooks each burger one at a time.

You can read full post here.

Five Plant-Based Meat Predictions for 2022

Food tech prediction week continues here at the Spoon, and today we’re looking into our crystal ball to predict what 2022 holds for plant-based meat.

After you’re done reading this, make sure to check out my predictions for restaurant tech and food robotics!

Let’s do this.

The Year of the Whole Cut

After years of countless plant-based burgers and other minced alt-meat product introductions, the plant-based meat industry will see lots more whole cut analogs make it to market in 2022 and beyond.

We first got a hint at CES 2019 that Impossible was interested in whole cuts when The Spoon broke the story the company was working on a steak, but since that time we’ve seen a bunch of companies announce they are working on building whole cut alternatives.

Juicy Marbles, Novameat and Redefine Mean are also working on whole cut steak analogs. Others like Atlast are offering mycelium-based whole cut bacon. Then there are those making whole-cut seafood analogs like that from Plantish.

Many of these companies are looking to deliver their products in 2022, and you can expect a wave of new plant-based whole cut concepts introduced throughout the year.

Fungi-Powered Meat Alternatives

As we enter 2022, a whole crop alt-meat startups are rolling out a variety of meat analogs powered by fungi. One is Meati, which has developed prototypes of steak and chicken using mycelium grown using a submerged fermentation technique. Then there’s Nature’s Fynd, which debuted its breakfast patties which use its novel mycelium last fall. And in early January, MycoTechnologies debuted its meatless crumble brand Goodside Foods at CES.

The rise of myco-powered meat products shouldn’t be all that surprising since fungi, after all, is a lot closer in its molecular makeup to mammals than plants. For this and other reasons, fungi-based meat products don’t need as much high-tech trickery and processing to create a realistic meat analog. I predict this is only the beginning and we’ll see more fungi-based meat products debut throughout 2022.

Clean Label Enters Alt Protein

One criticism of some early plant-based meats is the long list of ingredients. While these alt-meats are no doubt miracles of modern food science, the unfamiliar ingredient list has scared away some customers concerned about eating exotic or genetically modified ingredients.

Enter the clean label. We started to see some startups begin to offer new plant-based meat analogs with simpler (and shorter) ingredient lists in 2021 and I expect to see more of this this year. Nowadays offered up their new pea-protein-based chicken nugget with seven ingredients, and Daring launched their soy-based nuggs that have a fairly straightforward recipe label. And then there’s No Evil Foods, which is leaning heavily into the whole plant-based clean label with a lineup of alt-meats ranging from chorizo to jerky. Expect to see these companies and other new ‘clean-label’ alt-meat startups push their simple (and understandable) recipes as a primary point of differentiation between themselves and those built with more (and more processed) ingredient lists

The Rise of the Plant-Based Meat Building Block

While many early-stage alt-meat companies have built much if not most of their end product in-house, nowadays there’s a growing cohort of new companies providing plant-based meat building blocks to enable others to get to market faster.

Take Motif. Last month, the Ginkgo Bioworks spinout announced the commercial launch of their yeast-derived heme protein HEMAMI, an umami-flavor and texture building block for alt-meat makers trying to produce a realistic alternative. This is good news if you’re a maker of alt-meat products who wants to replicate Impossible’s proprietary plant-based heme, because now instead of spending tens of millions trying to build it yourself, now you can buy a similar technology from Motif.

There are others making building blocks to get to market faster, whether that’s Jellatech and Geltor with their animal-free collagen, Hoxton, Melt & Marble and Nourish with their alt-fats, Umiami making a plant-based fibrous muscle alternatives, or Kingdom Supercultures creating the next great novel ingredient.

Forget Burgers, Let’s Eat Some Fish

While companies like Good Catch and Ocean Hugger have been at the plant-based seafood game for a while, others are diving in with new offerings: Asia plant-based giant Omnifood launched their line of plant-based seafood last summer, Plantish came out of stealth with their whole cut salmon last week, and Madrid-based Mimic recently launched its tomato-based alt-tuna. If 2021 was a big year for alt-fish, expect 2022 to be even bigger.

Bonus Prediction: Plant-Based Meat Consolidation

How many plant-based burger and chicken nugget brands can we expect to make it?

As with any market moving beyond adolesence, don’t be surprised to see some consolidation in plant-based meats. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, there are simply too many offerings in many of the same categories to survive. In 2022, I expect we’ll see some market consolidation as bigger players scoop up smaller players either to kickstart their plant-based lines or to shore up holes. And, sadly, some companies simply may not survive.

That’s it for today. Tune in tomorrow when I make predictions about the future of consumer kitchen tech!

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.

If you haven’t already subscribed to our newsletter, do so here to get the Spoon Weekly delivered to your inbox.

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.  

Tofurky and the Plant Based Foods Association Are Challenging an Oklahoma Plant-Based Labeling Law

The Animal Legal Defense Fund filed a complaint this month against an Oklahoma plant-based labeling law on behalf of Tofurky and the Plant Based Foods Association.

It’s not the first time Tofurky and the Fund have teamed up to challenge plant-based labeling legislation: In the last couple of years, they’ve also filed suits in Louisiana and Arkansas. But there’s something different about the Oklahoma law—and that difference could make it trickier for plant-based producers to challenge.

Starting in 2018, a handful of U.S. states passed laws that restrict plant-based producers from using certain terms on their product labels. Missouri, the first state to pass such a law, attached fines and potential jail sentences to the use of the word “meat” on non-conventional product labels.

Laws like this have a chilling effect on the plant-based industry, Tofurky’s president and CEO Jaime Athos told The Spoon in a recent Zoom interview. “The specters of potential lawsuits and litigation—especially when you look at what the damages could amount to—can really influence people’s decision-making,” he said.

The laws only apply in individual states, and the inconsistencies in labeling requirements from one state to the next can make interstate commerce for plant-based products unfeasible. It would be prohibitively expensive for many smaller companies to change their labels nationwide, and impossible or impractical to develop separate labels for separate states.

On paper, the rationale behind the laws has to do with something called consumer confusion: The idea that if plant-based producers are allowed to use terms like “meat” and burger,” unwitting consumers will be tricked into buying their products.

But Athos pointed out that plant-based meat products like Tofurky’s have been around for decades. People today are familiar with the use of terms like “veggie burger” to describe plant-based products, he said—and those terms can actually help consumers to understand how to use a new product.

As one of the older players in the plant-based space, Tofurky has stepped up to pursue multiple challenges against different states’ labeling laws. “I think a lot of the confidence to take the fight on comes from being in the business for a long time,” Athos said. “We can see the absurdity of being told that we have to change the names of our products, which people have eaten millions and millions of iterations of without any confusion or complaint for decades now. I think it does put us in a different frame of mind than a newer company would have.”

Tofurky and other groups have challenged speech bans under the First Amendment, arguing that they unfairly prohibit truthful commercial speech. And because the U.S. places a strong value on free speech, it takes a lot to defend a speech restriction, according to Amanda Howell, who is a senior staff attorney at the Animal Legal Defense Fund.

“If the law is a complete ban on speech, the defendants have to show that that law is serving a substantial government interest,” Howell said—and that there’s no alternative to banning speech that could also serve that government interest.

Tofurky and the Animal Legal Defense Fund have had some success in challenging labeling laws under the First Amendment. Last year, a federal court granted an injunction to Tofurky in an Arkansas case, halting the enforcement of that state’s labeling law. “The court said we were likely to win with a First Amendment challenge, because the law is unconstitutionally restrictive,” Howell said.

Oklahoma’s Meat Consumer Protection Act was passed last year to fanfare from the state’s cattlemen’s association, which described the law as one of its “lead priorities” in a press release. It’s safe to say that industry interests influenced the law: One of the legislators who introduced it has won the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association’s highest award.

None of the Oklahoma state legislators who sponsored the law responded to The Spoon’s requests for comment.

The Meat Consumer Protection Act doesn’t ban the use of certain words outright. Instead, it requires plant-based meat and dairy companies to disclose the vegan or vegetarian nature of their products on their product labels. It also mandates that those disclosure statements be as large and prominent as the names of the products.

To challenge this kind of law under the First Amendment, it would be up to the plaintiff to prove that the legislation isn’t serving a reasonable government interest. Plant-based producer Upton’s Naturals and the Plant Based Foods Association have already tried to challenge the law on First Amendment grounds, but were denied an injunction last year.

Now Tofurky and the Animal Legal Defense Fund have taken over the suit. They’re taking a different approach, arguing that the law is unconstitutional for three key reasons: First, there are already federal laws concerning food product labels, which should take precedence over the state law. Second, the language of the law is vague, which could mean that it gets enforced in an arbitrary, discriminatory way. And third, the law puts a burden on interstate commerce by creating a patchwork of different state laws.

Though Howell was confident about the Fund’s arguments in the case, she expressed concern that the Oklahoma law might set a new precedent for other states. “Legislators may see that these bans on speech are uphill battles, and stop pursuing them because of the burden to show a government interest,” she said. And if that happens, “the next wave of these laws might be disclosure laws like Oklahoma’s, which would create a patchwork.”

While Tofurky and the Plant Based Foods Association pursue the legal challenge, the Association is also working on mounting collective action to discourage legislators from supporting labeling laws in the first place.

The Oklahoma case will likely serve as a signal to other state legislatures. We may see more states pick up disclosure requirements like Oklahoma’s, hoping to discourage challenges. But success for Tofurky could send a message that it just isn’t worth it for states to spend money defending plant-based labeling laws.

Black Sheep Foods Launches Plant-Based Lamb in San Francisco Restaurants

This week, alternative protein startup Black Sheep Foods’ plant-based lamb made its debut in San Francisco restaurants. The launch is a big step for the Black Sheep team, which wants to offer more variety to plant-based meat eaters.

“Our first product is lamb because it’s both alien and familiar in America,” company co-founder Sunny Kumar told The Spoon this week over Zoom. “Everyone knows about lamb, but no one really eats it at a high cadence.”

Kumar points out a few reasons for relatively low lamb consumption in the U.S. For one thing, lamb and mutton popularity plummeted when World War II GIs returned home, having lost their taste for the gamy, canned meat they had had to eat abroad. Then there was the influence of Lamb Chop, the adorable host of a 1990s PBS program for preschoolers. (“As these kids grew up, they would be like, ‘I don’t want to eat lamb, this was one of my favorite characters on TV,’” says Kumar.) And of course, there’s the general guilt factor of eating a baby animal.

Black Sheep wants to decouple the taste of lamb from some of the negative cultural connotations in the U.S. market—both by taking the actual lamb out of the picture, and by making a great-tasting product. To do that, the team had to figure out how to reproduce the meat’s flavor using plant-based ingredients.

Unlocking the taste of game

Kumar says that he and co-founder Ismael Montanez had an “aha” moment while working together at Finless Foods. “We realized that the taste of an animal really comes from what it’s eating, and how that food is processed by the animal itself,” he says.

The team ultimately came up with what Kumar calls the company’s secret sauce: A class of compounds called branched chain fatty acids, which account for the gamy flavor of lamb. After that, there were the hurdles of building a reliable supply chain and getting FDA approval for the ingredient.

“You can’t go for regulatory approval until you know the levels of the compounds you want to use, and the levels of the compounds are directly dictated by the texturing,” says Kumar. “And so you have to understand what you’re putting in, and as you add a little bit more fat or a little bit more water, you have to understand how those changes affect each other.”

Though the regulatory process was long and complicated, Kumar expects the team to enjoy a certain amount of competitive insulation as a result, making the investment in research and FDA approval worthwhile.

By unlocking the flavor of lamb, Black Sheep has been able to create a product that stands out among other plant-based meat options. Moving forward, Kumar says that flavor is one of the key elements that Black Sheep wants to focus on developing and producing in-house. The company currently works with a manufacturing partner to produce the branched chain fatty acids that create that gamy flavor—but, according to Kumar, they plan to take on more of the ingredient production internally over time.

The lamb launch strategy

Black Sheep has tested its formula in consumer panels, and judging by the results, Kumar expects the restaurant launch to be a success. “So far, the reviews are highly positive,” he says. “Some people have told us, ‘I don’t eat a lot of lamb, because I don’t like some of the notes in it.’ But the cool part about building it from the ground up is that we don’t have to add those negative notes—we only add the positive, gamy elements.”

With Mediterranean restaurant chains like Cava growing in popularity, Kumar sees plenty of room for more restaurant partnerships in the future. The team is tentatively planning to introduce products in grocery stores by the end of 2022. But first, they’re focused on ironing out the flavor and texture of their consumer products.

“We bought a small extruder and we’re going to get some learnings on it,” says Kumar, “but we’re going to be limited by the output of that machine. Hopefully with the next round of funding, we’ll be able to unlock a little bit more capacity.”

When The Spoon interviewed Black Sheep in 2019, the company was planning to launch its products in Asia. Kumar says that the team shifted its strategy due to the relative ease of co-packing and sourcing supplies domestically. After expanding in the U.S., they’re eyeing Europe and the U.K., where North African cultural influences have boosted the popularity of lamb.

Plant-based possibilities

Down the line, Kumar says that the team’s dream is to create plant-based, formed foods like burgers, nuggets, and sausages—“but with flavors that are insane.”

Ethics and environmental impacts are on the team’s mind. But beyond reacting to those concerns by replacing common frozen aisle products with similar-enough alternatives, Black Sheep wants to delight consumers with unique tastes. They hope to win over flexitarians by offering the chance to enjoy flavors they wouldn’t otherwise try.

With the plant-based space becoming increasingly competitive and crowded with similar products, the strategy makes sense. As Kumar says: “Why eat chicken nuggets when you could have duck nuggets with hoisin barbeque sauce?”

Photo credit: Nicola Parisi