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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

plant-based meat

Impossible Foods Launches its Plant-Based Impossible Sausage at Retail

Impossible Foods announced today that its plant-based Impossible Sausage is now available at retailers across the country. The new sausage comes in two flavors, Savory and Spicy. The product costs $5.99 for a 14-ounce package,and is rolling out at Kroger, Ralphs, King Soopers, Fred Meyer, Safeway, Albertsons, Wegmens, Stop & Shop, Hannaford, Gian martins, Giant Food, Shoprite, Sprouts Farmers Market and Heinen’s.

This is Impossible’s first new product at retail since the company’s Impossible Burger. Impossible Sausage made its debut at CES in 2020 and went to restaurants such as Starbucks and Burger King last year in the form of sausage patties. The plant-based sausage Impossible is introducing today is a ground product and not pre-formed into a patty shape like Beyond Meat’s retail sausage.

During a video chat this week, Michael Bortinger, Senior Manager of Retail Marketing at Impossible Foods told me why. “We always want to bring more products in different forms,” he said. “There really isn’t a ground sausage form in the segment right now. It’s a white space for us.” Bortinger said that the ground form will give the product more versatility to be used in casseroles, sandwiches and more.

Just like the Impossible Burger, the new Impossible Sausage uses heme as one of its ingredients. Because heme is derived from genetically modified ingredients, it does not yet have approval to be sold in the European Union. As such, Impossible is currently focused on the U.S. with this launch. Bortinger said that by the end of the year Impossible Sausage will be available in 13,000 stores domestically.

Impossible said its sausage has 30 percent fewer calories, 47 percent less total fat and 43 percent less saturated fat when cooked and “compared to the leading pork ground sausage.” Impossible’s Savory Sausage has 380mg of sodium per serving, and the Spicy version has 370mg, representing 17 and 16 percent of the daily recommended allowance, respectively. A similar sized package of Jimmy Dean pork sausage contains 415mg of sodium. One serving size of Beyond Meat Classic Sausage Patties (two patties) has 270mg of sodium.

In advance of this post, Impossible sent me samples of the new sausage to try out and it is definitely versatile. We made standalone patties, breakfast sandwiches, breakfast burritos and even mixed it in with some mac n’ cheese. The sausage is indeed delicious, though a little watery in its texture. While there is versatility with the sausage, there is also extra work to cook it. A frozen Beyond Sausage Patty is easy to throw in the oven to heat up as you whip up a morning sandwich. The Impossible Sausage is “raw,” so it takes more work and preparation (forming patties, frying up) and is messier. But having said that, Impossible Sausage will definitely be on my shopping list as I try to reduce the amount of meat I buy.

Japan: Next Meats Announces New Alternative Protein Production Facility

Tokyo-based Next Meats Co. announced today their plan to start construction of their alternative protein “NEXT Factory” in Niigata, Japan. The new, large-scale facility will be dedicated to the development of alternative proteins, feature both and R&D lab as well as a production line, and is scheduled to be completed next summer.

Next Meats makes plant-based meat analogues such as its Yakiniku Short Rib and NEXT Gyudon vegan traditional Japanese beef bowl. More recently, the company announced a newly developed plant-based egg product dubbed NEXT EGG 1.0, which is initially being offered as a B2B ingredient.

In addition to developing its own products, the NEXT Factory will also co-produce a new product with Kameda Saika, a prominent snack manufacturer in Japan, and Next Meats has also signed a research and development agreement with Nagaoka University of Technology to look into epigenetic applications in creating new alternative meat products.

This announcement marks the latest production facility to open up from an alternative protein company, signaling a continued maturation of the space. Companies across the alt protein space have started work on or opened such production factories including cultured meat company Future Meat, mycoprotein company Better Meat, and protein-from-air company Air Protein.

Obviously, a key benefit of having mass production facilities is that they can produce more alternative protein products at scale, thereby reducing their costs and making them more available to consumers around the world.

Fittingly, in addition to producing plant-based meat, Next Meat’s new factory will also be eco-friendly using DX cooling systems, solar panels and locally-sourced building materials. And in a nice touch, the facility is being built in the hometown of Next Meats co-founder Ryo Shirai, who said he wanted to give back to his community.

Redefine Meat Launches 5 “New Meat” Plant-Based Proteins in Israel

Plant-based meat company Redefine Meat announced five new products are now available at select Israeli restaurants and hotels. The “New-Meat” line consists of Redefine Burger, Redefine Ground Beef, Redefine Lamb Kabob, Redefine Sausage, and Redefine Cigar (a classic Middle East dish that wraps meat in pastry).

As we’ve covered before:

Redefine Meat uses 3D-printing technology along with ingredients it calls “Alt-Fat,” “Alt-Muscle,” and “Alt-Blood” to create whole cuts of plant-based meat that mimic animal-based meat. The company has also mapped out 70 sensorial parameters that let it control factors such as texture, juiciness, fat distribution and mouthfeel.

It should be noted that the products Redefine announced today are not whole cuts, but rather ground versions of meat. This is a pretty standard way for plant-based meat companies to enter the market because replicating the structure of animal meat with plants is way more difficult than creating a minced product.

And like Impossible Foods, Redefine Meat is first going to restaurants with its new plant-based meats. It’s “New-Meats” are available at: Hudson, Nam, Asif Center, Eddi’s Hideout, The Lounge, Sinta Bar, C2, Guesta, Joz & DanieBudega, and American Kitchen.

Redefine plans to expand New-Meat availability to Europe in Q4 of this year followed by U.S. and Asian expansion in 2022.

The entire plant-based meat space is getting more sophisticated and moving beyond burgers (pardon the pun). Juicy Marbles introduced its (expensive) plant-based filet mignon in March of this year. In January of this year NovaMeat, which also uses 3D printing technology to create meat analogues, received €250,000 (~ $307,500 USD at the time) from the Spanish government and announced a collaboration with Disfrutar, a two-Michelin star restaurant. Other players in the 3D-printed plant-based meat space include fellow Israeli companies MeaTech and SavorEats (both of which are publicly traded on the Israeli stock exchange).

At the beginning of this year, Redefine Meat announced a partnership with Israeli meat distributor Best Meister and followed that with a $29 million Series A round of funding. The company plans to debut its whole cuts of plant-based meat at the end of this year, following pilot tests.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIVEKINDLY Collective Acquires Seaweed Burger Maker, The Dutch Weed Burger

LIVEKINDLY Collective, a collection of alternative protein brands, announced this week that it is acquiring Amsterdam-based company The Dutch Weed Burger. The Dutch Weed Burger makes a range of meat analogs using seaweed as the hero ingredient. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

LIVEKINDLY Collective formed in March of 2020 when Foods United bought vegan-focused media company LIVEKINDLY. Brands in the LIVEKINDLY Collective portfolio include Oumph!, The Fry Family Food Co., LikeMeat, and No Meat, which the company acquired earlier this year. This past March, LIVEKINDLY Collective closed a $335 million round of funding that the company said would go towards new partnerships and acquisitions.

With the purchase of The Dutch Weed Burger, LIVEKINDLY Collectiveis expanding into seaweed products. Seaweed is a source of protein that can be cultivated using minimal fresh water and no agricultural land. It’s also pretty versatile. Other startups using seaweed include New Wave Foods, which is making seaweed-based shrimp, and Oceanium is using seaweed to make food ingredients including protein, fibre and nutraceuticals, as well as home-compostable packaging materials.

In its press announcement, LIVEKINDLY Collective said that the acquisition of The Dutch Weed Burger also will help the company scale internationally into the UK and the Nordics, as well as the U.S. and Canada.

LIVEKINDLY Collective is striking while the plant-based iron is hot. Here in the U.S., sales of plant based meat have experienced double-digit growth over the past two years. According to the Good Food Institute, the plant-based meat market is worth $1.4 billion here in the U.S., having increased by more than $430 million from 2019 to 2020. Additionally, the NPD Group reported this week that shipments of plant-based proteins to restaurants in the U.S. were up 60 percent year-over-year.

Between demand for plant-based foods increasing and its sizeable warchest, it’s a safe bet that this isn’t the last acquisition LIVEKINDLY Collective will be making this year.

NPD: Shipments of Plant-Based Proteins to Restaurants Up 60 Percent Year Over Year

Shipments of plant-based proteins from foodservice distributors to commercial restaurants were up 60 percent year-over-year in April of 2021, according to new data released by NPD Group today. The stat is another data point illustrating the staying power and appeal of plant-based proteins.

NPD writes that plant-based beef nabbed the largest share of those protein shipments, with the number of pounds shipped increasing by 45 percent year-over-year in April. Plant-based chicken grew by 82 percent year-over-year in April, and plant-based fish is up 72 percent year-over-year. Plant-based chicken and fish are more nascent categories compared with plant-based beef, which would explain their relative dramatic jumps.      

“There has been a lot of public discussion about plant-based beef and meat substitutes, and whether or not plant-based is a fad or a trend,” says Tim Fires, president of NPD’s SupplyTrack said in a press announcement. “But the fact of the matter is, chefs and operators see the plant-based protein category as a flexible option for developing recipes and menu offerings that taste good, and their guests enjoy. Plant-based is now a staple in their repertoire.

Though NPD didn’t specify reasons for the increase in shipments, the two big drivers for this growth in plant-based protein are availability and price. Both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, the two biggest players in the beef analog space, have dramatically ramped up production in the past couple of years, which has helped bring prices down and closer to parity with animal meat.

But this increase in shipments of plant-based protein to restaurants is just part of an overall increase in interest and sales of plant-based meat. The Good Food Institute’s latest U.S. market research shows that the plant-based meat category grew by more than $430 million in sales from 2019 to 2020 and the category is now worth $1.4 billion.

Better Meat Co. Completes Its Production Facility for Fermented Mycoprotein Ingredients

Plant-based ingredient maker Better Meat Co.’s new fermentation plant, which will produce the company’s mycoprotein ingredient Rhiza, is up and running as of today in Sacramento, California, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Rhiza is a fungi-based protein analogue with a naturally meaty texture and neutral taste. Because it is a whole food, it requires less processing than, say, pea protein, to get a meat alternative customers would actually want to eat. Better Meat Co. says the product can be used either on its own, as a complete replacement for meat, or as a “meat enhancer” that gets blended with traditional protein. 

To get Rhiza, the company uses a fermentation process where fungi feeds on a basic crop such as a potato to create a biomass that can be harvested with minimal processing. The process is similar to those of Quorn or Enough, companies that also use fermentation-based mycoprotein production. 

Since Better Meat Co. is a business-to-business company, it will sell Rhiza to food companies that can use it in their own products. Adding an ingredient like Rhiza to an existing meat product can improve the latter’s overall nutritional profile. For example, it could reduce the amount of cholesterol typically found in a traditional burger patty. The company also claims its product has more iron than traditional beef, more protein than eggs, and more fiber than oats.

The new facility in Sacramento will include both lab and office space. It will primarily serve as a R&D facility in addition to producing “thousands of pounds of finished product per month,” according to today’s news release. 

Plant Power Fast Food Chain Raises $7.5M Series A

San Diego, California-based fast food restaurant chain Plant Power announced today that it has completed a $7.5 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Helia Capital USA, Eat Beyond Global Holdings and Batta Foods, with participation from Aileen Getty and other individual investors.

As its name spells out, Plant Power is a fast food chain that offers an entirely plant-based menu. According to the press announcement sent to The Spoon, Plant Power has seven locations up and running in Southern California, with eight more stores opening in locations including Sacramento, Hollywood, and Las Vegas. The company said it reported year-over-year enterprise-wide retail net sales growth of more than 50 percent from 2019 to 2020.

While those growth stats are vague, the general numbers line up with the recent trajectory of plant-based foods. According to the Good Food Institute, U.S. sales of plant-based foods grew 2 times faster than overall food sales in 2020. Additionally, sales of plant-based foods in the U.S jumped 27 percent in the past year, and 43 percent in the past two years to hit $7 billion. The plant-based meat category (including burgers) saw its category sales increase by more than $430 million from 2019 to 2020 and the plant-based meat market is now worth $1.4 billion.

There’s a lot of plant-based momentum in QSRs right now. Copper Branch is a chain in Canada is all plant-based, and even Starbucks is testing a full plant-based menu at one of its Seattle locations. Growing consumer sentiment for plant-based options has even spurred traditional QSRs like Burger King to launch the Impossible Whopper, and both McDonald’s and Yum Brands have partnered with Beyond Meat to create more plant-based meat options for their menus.

Plant Power said it will use its new funding to continue its expansion plans and focus on new corporate unit development.

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

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

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

As described in the press release, the technologies include:

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

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

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

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

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

OmniFoods Plans to Launch Its Plant-Based OmniPork Products in the U.S. This Year

OmniPork, the plant-based meat line from Green Monday subsidiary OmniFoods, will launch in the U.S. later this year, according to an article from Food Navigator. 

OmniFoods launched its OmniPork line in 2018 in Hong Kong, where the company is also headquartered. As its name suggests, the line features various plant-based replacements for pork, which is the most widely consumed meat in the world. As of now, the OmniPork line includes grounds, lunch meats, and strips as well as OmniPork buns and dumplings. 

Products are made from a proprietary blend of pea and soy protein along with shiitake mushroom and rice. 

The OmniPork line debuted on mainland China in 2019. For its U.S. expansion, OmniFoods will maintain its Asian-inspired focus for its products, rather than creating meat analogues of American staples (e.g., bacon). That said, OmniPork products are, in the company’s own words, “a relatively bland flavor,” which ensures a certain amount of versatility in the products.

Speaking to Food Navigator, OmniFoods founder David Yeung, said its ready meals (dumplings, stir fry, dim sum) are also “extremely well received,” and that down the line, the company may work with U.S.-based food manufacturers to develop meals in addition to the protein products. 

OmniFood debuted products in the U.S. at eight different restaurants across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Honolulu. The company used this same strategy — launching in restaurants before expanding across retail outlets — with its U.K. launch earlier this year. 

The U.S. retail launch doesn’t yet have a specific date applied to it, but will happen at some point later in 2021.

Beyond Meat to Launch Newest Version of its Burgers in U.S. Stores Next Week

Beyond Meat announced today the newest iteration of its plant-based burger, which will hit store shelves starting next week. The company said this latest version is its “meatiest, juiciest” burger to date.

While Beyond didn’t go into too many specifics around what changes it made to its burger, a Beyond rep emailed us to say that the newest iteration “removed mung bean protein and added vitamins and minerals to deliver a micronutrient profile comparable to beef.” According to the press announcement, in addition to a new taste and texture, the nutrition profile of the new Beyond Burger includes:

  • 35% less total fat than 80/20 ground beef
  • 35% less saturated fat than 80/20 ground beef
  • Fewer calories and no cholesterol compared to 80/20 ground beef
  • B vitamins and minerals comparable to the micronutrient profile of beef

The press release didn’t mention anything about the sodium count in Beyond Meat. The current version has 350 mg of sodium, or 15 percent of your daily value.

As we’ve written before, by re-creating traditional meat with plant-based ingredients, companies like Beyond Meat and its rival, Impossible Foods, can make burgers more like software. Each company has released successive iterations of its products, tweaking the ingredients to achieve different nutritonal, flavor and textural outcomes.

If the new Beyond burger proves to be an improvement on its predecessors, it’s arriving at the right time. The Good Food Institute’s (GFI) most recent survey data show that 56.8 percent of U.S. consumers purchased plant-based foods in 2020. In particular, sales of plant-based meats doubled over the course of 2020 to reach $1.4 billion.

We’re just four months into 2021, and it has already been a busy year for Beyond Meat. The company announced global distribution deals with both McDonald’s and Yum Brands, opened its first manufacturing facility outside the U.S., in China, and bolstered its European retail presence.

For those who can’t wait until May 3, Beyond Meat is hosting a number of pop-ups across the country on May 1 and 2 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., where people can try the new burger for free.

  • Atlanta (Piedmont Park (Greystone), 400 Park Dr NE, Atlanta, GA 30309)
  • Chicago (Pioneer Court, 401 Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60611)
  • Dallas (Klyde Warren Park, 2012 Woodall Rodgers Fwy, Dallas, TX 75201)
  • Los Angeles (The Brig, 1525 Abbot Kinney Blvd, Venice, CA 90291)
  • Miami (LAB Miami, 400 NW 26th St, Miami, FL 33127)
  • New York City (Barclay’s Center, 620 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217)

For the rest of us, the new Beyond Burger will be sold in grocery stores nationwide beginning May 3 as a two-pack, as well as a new four-pack (MSRP: $9.99) and a 1lb Beyond Beef ground pack will become available later in May. The new burger will be available on Beyond’s direct to consumer site “soon.” Foodservice operators will get access to the new Beyond Burger in June, and the company says it will introduce a second Beyond Burger patty option with half the saturated fat of 80/20 beef later this year.

Exploring Consumer Acceptance of Alt-Meat with Red to Green

There are lots of factors that play into the success of a food product: Price, taste, cultural norms and acceptance.

Sometimes it helps when a chef embraces a type of food and popularizes it through media or a new restaurant concept. Other times, a new type of food takes decades to become an overnight success.

With plant-based proteins, I’d say it’s a mixture of both. More and more chefs are exploring new ways to move meat off the center of the plate, and many non-vegan consumers are trying plant-based alternatives for the first time.

Looking to the future, it’s hard to say how consumers will react to the next big tectonic shift in alt-proteins — cultivated meat. Since most companies in the space are focused on scaling their early prototypes for wider scale production, there’s been very little work done in these early days to educate the consumer about what this cultured meat is and why they should eat it.

That better change soon since, with cell-cultured meat, the battle for the minds is as big a hurdle as the science. Not that some aren’t trying. Companies like Eat Just are beginning to experiment with ways to raise awareness of this very early product, while others like Blue Nalu are working with young research chefs to have them think about the future of sustainable food like cultured seafood.

Still, there’s a lot more work to do to help educate the consumer about what this food is and why they should eat it. That’s why I’m excited for a new podcast season from the folks behind Red to Green, a Berlin-based media and consultancy firm that is headed up by Marina Schmidt. When Marine told me about how the latest season of her podcast would focus on how these companies will win consumer acceptance of their products, I was excited because it’s an area we think a lot about here at the Spoon and one that needs more discussion.

Then when she asked if we would like to cross-publish her podcast, I jumped at the chance. Each week for the next few months we’ll be publishing each episode of the Red to Green season three here on The Spoon complete with transcripts.

Below you can see the first episode of season 3, which includes yours truly. Marina and I decided it would be fun to first have us both on the show to go behind the scenes and talk about the topics she’ll be discussing this season. You can also see the transcript of the conversation below.

The next episode of Red to Green, which we’ll publish tomorrow, will feature Isha Datar, the executive director of New Harvest, talking about building community, safety and brands in cultured meat.

For now, you can check out the first episode below or subscribe to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

Promoting Alternative Proteins - PODCAST│S3E1 Introduction & Red to Green behind the scenes

Transcript:

Michael Wolf

We’re having this conversation because we are excited to have you as a content partner. You’re putting together this interesting season where you’re having conversations with leaders in the cellular agriculture and alternative protein space. And the third season, we’re going to actually be putting up on the spoon, kind of as a partnership with you guys. So you guys also have it on your own outlets as well, but yeah, let’s, let’s talk a little bit about what you’re building. So tell people about,  Marina Schmidt and Red to Green.

Marina Schmidt

Well, I think to start right now with the status quo Red to green is doing deep-dive research. So I started out with Red to Green because I found two types of content in the food tech and sustainability space. On the one hand, you have this diverse array, like one episode on vertical farming, one on food waste, and another one on the latest quinoa chocolate chip goji berries chocolate bar.

And then there’s the other type of content, which is really, really extremely in-depth. for example, I found a podcast with 245 episodes just on precision farming. So we started Red to Green to get the middle ground to choose one topic at a time, specifically in food tech and sustainability, and cover it really in-depth.

So that means we approach each podcast season like a book. We think about what would people need to know to get a very well-rounded diverse perspective on the topic? As an example, we started out last year in May with a season on cultivated meat, or actually more broader cellular agriculture. 

And it starts with an introduction. What is it?  What is the concept behind it? How is it produced? Then we covered all the different important topics.  We covered beef, dairy, cheese, eggs, gelatin, seafood, fish, and then had also the NGO perspective and the investor’s perspective. And by choosing the interview guests very well with a diverse set of backgrounds and companies that they work for, we create this well-balanced overview of what’s going on.

Michael Wolf

So you ultimately decided to create Red to Green as kind of a new focus for your career. And part of that journey, interestingly enough, and not that’s something that I think a lot of people always consider when they make a new move is a spreadsheet was at the center of this, this kind of switch.

Tell us a little bit about that story.

Marina Schmidt

Oh, my, my friends actually have a lot of insider jokes about the amount of spreadsheets that I have and the things that I manage in spreadsheets, which can be quite crazy.  Well, pretty much originally I built a company in career consulting and job consulting.  It’s a German company, we are partnering with job fairs all over the place. Twenty-five plus of the largest German job fairs. And through that, I would see hundreds, if not thousands of CVs and there would be this pattern of people going for the career and then the middle of their career, they would want to drastically change the industry, what they’re specifically doing, et cetera. And usually, it was because they would find that what they’re currently doing is not actually aligned with their values, and maybe they haven’t been looking at their values for quite a while. So I saw that as a sign and I was like, well, maybe I don’t have to go down that path. And I decided to sit down and really think about it.

And this process led me to gradually work on, on topics that got me closer to that calling of food tech and sustainability. I worked in company building and worked in digital health with some of the largest medical publishers.  I was also working with the World Economic Forum representatives to increase health and climate innovation in Europe. And it was getting warmer and warmer, but I was still tiptoeing around the actual topics. So there was a yoga retreat that really helped. Seven days, lots of meditation, lots of yoga can very much recommend that for some clarity. There I realized, okay I have to be in sustainability, but sustainability is still super broad. Very very wide. 

So that’s where a spreadsheet helped. Actually a friend of mine, he’s the founder of the regenerative agriculture company, Klim. He originally had started the spreadsheet where he has listed various, like so many different areas of impact and he created a spreadsheet detailing what is the field about what is the core problem? And what are some startups trying to address this problem and solve it. I looked at it and I filled it out. I ranked these areas on a scale of one to 10, 10 being “this is fricking amazing. I would put everything down and stop my life move to another country to work on this” and nine and down being exciting or less exciting.

 As I filled it out, I was quite surprised that all of my nines were in food tech. My nines were vertical farming, plastic alternatives, which you can sort of say as part of food regenerative agriculture, food waste, and my only 10 was alternative proteins and specifically cellular agriculture.

You have this saying in German, but not sure if it’s also applicable in English, it was like, tomatoes fell off my eyes. I love the saying. It’s very visual. That’s how it felt. Tomatoes fell off my eyes right there as I was staring at the spreadsheet and I realized, Oh wow, I have to, I have to work in this field. Otherwise, I’m going to regret it. And especially with cellular agriculture, it feels like you have to work in it right now because it’s, it’s a special time to contribute to it.

So,  I’ve been talking to a lot of people who want to get into the field or who are thinking about their purpose and their values. And I have decided to make the spreadsheet available for free to anybody who wants to just look at it, maybe broaden their scope of  on the ways of how you can have an impact. Or just maybe re-check career choices. So we can link to it and people can fill it out. Please, if you find anything where there’s startups to add, where there is a broken link, please just comment on it because we will work on updating it and making it more and more useful to more and more people.

Michael Wolf

Well, great. Well, that’s a great use of a spreadsheet. Definitely different than most people use spreadsheets. That’s a great story.

Yeah. I mean, I, and I think that podcasting allows you the storytelling arc throughout a season, and I love that approach. And  I find it’s when I go through and do podcasts, I find I’m learning every episode and I get better for the next episode. So I’m kind of curious how maybe your approach to the season changed.

Were they fairly close to what you had thought about when you set out to kind of plan this 12 episode arc or did, as you learned more and, and discovered more and talk to these experts on the way, did it change at all?

Marina Schmidt

So I think it’s very dependent on the topic. With the cultured meat topic, I had a relatively clear idea of what I’m going to cover, and that turned out to be pretty on point in the end. But with the plastics alternative season, which is the second season we had, it was like stepping in the dark.

Because the tricky thing is to create such a season we need to understand the whole field and that can be harder in some cases than in other cases. With the topic of plastic alternatives and sustainable food packaging, it was more an investigative season. We were looking for an answer. What does it mean to have sustainable food packaging?

What is bad packaging? And as these issues are very big and very cloudy and complex we were going step-by-step interview by interview, learning bits of the puzzle and finding our way. With the second season, I found that we had to have trusted people in the industry who would fact-check. The guests that we would have on and who would fact check the topics that we would be addressing and promoting. Because there’s so much greenwashing and it’s very hard to differentiate fact from fiction in this space. So it was a completely different experience in cultivated meat or cellular agriculture versus in plastics.

And here again, with the next season, we are doing on convincing consumers. We again, don’t have a clear playbook. It’s not like we are just making an overview of an existing field. We are researching for the industry. What would make consumers switch to alternative dairy, to insect protein, to cultured meat. And we’re actually looking for people who you wouldn’t think of as being interesting interview guests, like people from outside the industry who maybe don’t even know much about cultured meat in general, but who can offer a novel perspective on it. So this again is more an investigative season.

And how have you seen the messaging change? So if you look at the plant-based companies, but also the cell-based companies, how has their marketing and the way that they communicate about the  products changed?

Michael Wolf

Well, what’s interesting is just this past week Impossible launched really their first big widespread consumer advertising campaign with the message that “we are meat”. And I think what they’re saying is, you know if you’re a meat-eater if you’re a carnivore this is meat. It may be meat made from plants, but it’s really no different.

So I think it’s in a sense also pushing back against the incumbents countering the message saying this isn’t meat. This is some weird ingredient. So I think I think there’s a messaging war going on and we’re, we’re in this middle of this, this big evolutionary consumer acceptance path where you’re going to see, and going to try to understand if mainstream meat-eaters are going to accept these alternative proteins. 

I think with cellular agriculture and the cultured stuff, the time horizons a little bit longer. And I think that’s going to be a much, even more, tricky messaging campaign because it’s really advanced science and then we’re not even talking about things like precision fermentation, right?

Marina Schmidt

The more I look into the topic, the more multilayered complicated it becomes as actually with many of the themes that we have covered in Red to Green. So I’m really happy to now have a team of, we’re now 12 people, who are looking into this, who are doing industry research, who are looking for interview guests. Because that’s absolutely necessary to be able to cover these topics.

Michael Wolf

And what I love about podcasting is it’s a form, I’ve always viewed it as a form of open-source journalism. In a way that,  you know, if you’re a good journalist, if you’re a, ultimately a good podcaster, you’re having these conversations. And you know, you go back 20 years before there’s podcasting, you wouldn’t hear these conversations, you would hear like what essentially you’d read, like a 300, 400-word article.

But what I always found was interesting is the conversations that take place to get there. And so I love that you’re doing these deep conversations that people get to hear these, these conversations and take this journey with you. what’s what I’ve always loved about the medium of audio and audio journalism.

Marina Schmidt

Yeah, definitely. We do go now into video, also releasing the video to the podcast, and also making write-ups. So for the work that we’re doing from this season onwards, but also for any upcoming seasons, we will create summaries and reports. Because I would say that the audience that we have is clearly the food tech nerds.

Most of our listeners from 70 plus countries are actually food tech professionals or are about to get into the field. And you do have to be quite a bit nerdy to listen to eight hours of deep-dive cellular agriculture content or nine hours on plastic alternatives. And that’s why it’s more like an audiobook.

And I recently started looking at it as audiobooks that have this beginning, middle, and end attached to them.

Michael Wolf

And I love the idea of the story arc and I’m sure people will be able to, to enjoy it and listen to both the first and second season and, and listen on for the third season on your outlets as well as on the spoon. So yeah, I’m looking forward to working with you on this and looking forward to this conversation.

Marina Schmidt

Yeah, lovely. thank you, Mike. And looking forward to also see how the content will be received by the spoon, readers, and listeners.

Michael Wolf

I can tell you already, they’re going to love it. So, all right. Thanks, Marina.

Marina Schmidt

Thank you, Mike.