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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

plant-based milk

Danone North America to Launch “Dairy-Like” Segment

One common complaint amongst those trying to make the switch to non-dairy milk is that some alternatives have a “plant-y” flavor; meaning, it doesn’t quite taste like cow’s milk. Some alternative milks might taste distinctively like soy, almonds, or coconut. That being said, companies like Oatly and NotCo have produced some pretty great milk alternatives that give conventional milk a run for its money.

Danone North America is the latest company to attempt to create a “dairy-like” segment of plant-based products in hopes of providing alternative milk that dairy-drinkers can enjoy. Through its two brands, Silk and So Delicious Dairy Free, it will launch Silk nextmilk™ and So Delicious Wondermilk™ in January 2022.

According to an email sent to The Spoon, the company’s scientists deconstructed the attributes of real dairy and the sensory experience, like the mouthfeel, of drinking milk. These characteristics were then recreated by blending different plant-based ingredients, including soy, coconut, and oats.

Both brands will offer a whole fat and reduced-fat version of plant-based milk. Silk Nextmilk will contain six key nutrients found in dairy (Calcium, Vitamin D, Vitamin A, B12, Riboflavin, and Phosphorus), with each serving offering 4 grams of protein.

Little information was disclosed in regards to the So Delicious Wondermilk. However, the Wondermilk line will also include frozen dessert (a vegan way to say ice cream) pints and cones.

Alternative milk, already a $2.5 billion market, is the most established category in the plant-based food space. Another company that aims to be a direct replacement for dairy is NotCo, which uses AI to develop its whole fat and 2 percent alternative milk. Other big players in the space that Danone’s brand will face competition from include Oatly, Ripple, Good Karma, and possibly Beyond Meat in the future.

When launched in grocery stores early next year, both Nextmilk and Wondermilk will retail for $4.99 per carton.

Trademark Filing Indicates Beyond Meat Could Add Milk to its Lineup

Plant-based meat giant Beyond Meat has filed for a trademark on the name Beyond Milk, indicating that the company could be prepping for a move into alternative milk category. Food Dive was first to report the news, writing that Beyond’s application with the US Patent and Trademark Office would cover “making milk shakes; coffee or tea beverages with milk or milk substitutes.”

That Beyond would add a plant-based milk to its lineup is not that much of a surprise. According to the most recent data from the Good Food Institute, the plant-based milk category is worth $2.5 billion and accounts for 35 percent of the total plant-based food market. So there is money to be made milking plants.

Of course, where there is money to be made, there is also competition. The alternative milk space is already crowded with a number of incumbent and up-and-coming players. Big companies like Danone, which owns the Silk soy milk brand, already line supermarket coolers. Oatly recently went public, bulking up its warchest to solidify and expand its market share. But potentially the most interesting competitor is Ripple, which makes a pea-based milk. While we don’t know anything about how Beyond would make a plant-based milk at this point, pea protein is one of the main ingredients in its popular burger. So Beyond leveraging what it knows about pea protein to formulate a new type of milk makes some sense.

Another competitor on the horizon could be Beyond’s plant-based burger rival, Impossible Foods, which revealed last October that it was developing its own plant-based milk. The two companies have to this point been lock step in announcing similar plant-based products including burgers, sausage and chicken. It looks like in the not-too-distant future we’ll be able to wash those foods down with a glass of Impossible or Beyond milk.

I Tried NotCo’s A.I.-Generated Milk Alternative

NotCo, a Chile-based company, is sometimes referred to as the Impossible Foods/Beyond Meat of Latin America. The company produces various alternative products including plant-based mayo, burgers, ice cream, and milk. When they reached out to me recently offering to send samples of their products, I happily accepted.

NotCo uses its patented A.I. platform to determine what plant-based ingredients would best replicate properties found in animal-based ingredients. For example, in its alt-milk products, the two main ingredients are simply water and pea protein. However, there is a small amount of pineapple juice, cabbage juice, sunflower oil, and chicory root, among other natural flavors, added to the milk alternative to bolster its flavor and texture.

The Bezos-backed company sent me a half-gallon of its whole milk and 2 percent milk alternatives. I first poured a small glass of the whole milk and drank it straight up. At first sip, I was surprised by the sweetness of it. Surprisingly, there are only three grams of sugar in a single serving. It had a vanilla flavor with a light aftertaste of coconut. The two percent milk had the same flavor, but tasted a tad bit more watery than the whole milk.

Photo of the alternative whole and two percent milk that was sent to me

I heated some of the whole milk in a pot on the stove and attempted to produce foam with my handheld frother. I had no luck, and the milk was completely flat after frothing for about two minutes. In defense of NotCo, they do not make any claims about their milk’s ability to froth, and I do not have barista-grade equipment. It makes me wonder if the company has plans to develop a “barista version” of its milk that is meant to produce a thick froth for lattes, like many alternative milk companies have done.

NotCo’s whole milk after being heated and frothed

I haven’t had milk for about eight years, but for what it’s worth, NotCo’s NotMilk reminded me of real dairy milk. The sweetness of NotMilk was reminiscent of the sweetness that lactose provides in dairy milk. However, there was something about the NotMilk that still suggested it wasn’t actually dairy. While I couldn’t quite pinpoint the reason, it could very well be the slight aftertaste/mouthfeel of pea protein. Overall, though I would say that NotMilk is a pretty good milk alternative product.

Pea protein, meanwhile, is a popular ingredient in the plant-based space due to its neutral flavor, versatility, and high protein content. It is the second ingredient in NotMilk, and both the whole and 2 percent milk contain four grams of protein in a single serving (one cup). U.S.-based Ripple and Swedish-based Sproud are two other companies that both also produce alternative milk made from pea protein.

NotCo launched its milk in the U.S. last year, and it seems like Oatly will be one of its biggest competitors in the alternative dairy space. Oatly has steadily gained a cult-like following in the U.S. since launching in independent coffee shops in 2016. The Swedish-based company went public this March, and raised $1.4 billion USD through this.

In the U.S., NotCo’s milks are available in stores like Whole Foods, Sprouts, and some independent grocers and retailers. A half-gallon of the alternative whole or two percent milk normally retails for $4.99.

Chile’s NotCo Nabs Investment From Danny Meyer-Affiliated Growth Equity Fund

Alternative protein company NotCo announced this week it has received an investment from from Enlightened Hospitality Investments (EHI), a growth equity fund affiliated with Union Square Hospitality’s Danny Meyer. Financial terms of the investment have not been disclosed at this time, though the company says it has raised “more than $130 million to date” and intends to get to a $1 billion valuation by the end of 2021.  

Chile-based NoCo says the investment will help it further expand in the U.S. and launch new products in the Latin America market. Currently, NotCo sells its pea protein-based milk alternative to U.S. consumers at Whole Foods stores and through online retailers Veji and Imperfect Foods. In Chile, Brazil, and Argentina, the company also has burger, mayonnaise, and ice cream alternatives. 

NotCo puts special emphasis on Giuseppe, the AI platform powering the company’s products. Giuseppe sifts through huge datasets (for example, from the USDA’s National Agricultural Library), to find ingredient and processing combinations that would best mimic the elements (flavor, texture, etc.) of real meat or dairy in plant-based alternatives. The goal is to eventually find flavor and ingredient combinations that can exactly mimic a burger, slice of cheese, or glass of milk.

A handful of other companies also use AI-based methods to create meat and dairy alternatives, from Climax’s cheese to Spoonshot’s platform that identifies novel flavor combinations.   

The EHI involvement will, says NotCo, expand into the U.S. foodservice market. In Latin America, the company already has existing partnerships with Papa John’s and Burger King.

Numilk’s Home Plant-Based Milk Machine Blows Past Kickstarter Goal

I love my oat milk in the morning, but I don’t love the big plastic jugs it comes in. It just feels wasteful, especially since so little plastic actually gets recycled. With that in mind, could the Numilk Home be the key to more conscientious plant-based milk consumption? Given how quickly the company has blown past its Kickstarter goal, a lot of other people seem to think so.

The Numilk Home is a countertop version of the Numilk kiosk, which is a large plant-based milk dispenser installed at grocery stores across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. For the kiosk installations, users place an empty Numilk glass bottle under a dispenser and choose from a selection of plant-based milks.

For the Numilk Home, the main concept remains the same, only on a smaller scale. The countertop devices uses a combination of ingredient pouches and special bottles. The ingredient pouches contain a variety of different plain and flavored milks (almond, soy, oat, chocolate, etc.). The Numilk bottles have a special emulsifier at the bottom.

To make milk, users place the ingredient pouch in the top and push a button. The ingredients are dispensed with water into the special bottle. Special technology built into the base of the machine emulsifies the milk. We reached out for more details about how this emulsifying technology works (e.g., Are bottles single use?) and will update when we hear back.

Numilk founders actually pitched their device and company on a March episode of Shark Tank, accepting an investment offer of up to $2 million from Mark Cuban. Now Numilk is reaching out through Kickstarter to crowdfund the rest, and is off to a strong start. As of today, Numilk has pulled in nearly $210,000 in pledge funding, more than doubling its initial goal of $100,000. The campaign still has 27 days to go.

In some ways, the Numilk feels kinda like the Juicero, the infamously expensive juicing machine that flamed out a few years back. You’re not just buying a machine, you’re buying into the Numilk ecosystem, and will be reliant on their pouches. And, as with any hardware crowdfunding campaign, there is the chance that Numilk won’t be able to move from prototype to scaled production, a very real problem on the platform.

But if you want to back the project, a Numilk Home machine will set you back $199. Numilk ingredient pouches will cost between $3 and $5 and will be available through the Numilk website. The company says it will ship the devices in August of 2022.

Oat Milk Pioneer Oatly Raises $200 Million on $2 Billion Valuation

Oatly, the Swedish company that pioneered the oat milk category back in the 90s and reinvented itself as a global plant-based food brand in 2013, announced today it has received $200 million in funding on a $2 billion valuation led by the Blackstone Group.

The deal is further validation that venture investments in plant-based alternatives is red-hot despite the pandemic. Alt-dairy is especially hot, as Oatly’s funding comes after a $225 series D in Califia Farms, a maker of a variety of alt-milks, back in January.

The company plans to invest the funding in expanding its production capacity and personnel in North America, Europe and Asia. From the release:

The injection of capital will fund the company’s overall growth plans, which include expansion in current markets and new production plants and related jobs in Europe, the United States and Asia. By bringing facilities closer to consumers, the company will make the Oatly product range more readily available to the growing community of health and environmentally conscious consumers worldwide.

Investment in additional production capacity comes on the heels of the launch of the company’s first production plant last year in Millville, New Jersey. That plant, which cost $15 million to build, produces roughly 750 thousand gallons of oat milk base per month which is, apparently, not enough.

The rapid growth in demand for Oatly shouldn’t be surprising. Prior to the addition of the production plant last year, you could find speculators trying to sell 12 packs of Oatly barista edition online in the US for $200. Add in oat milk’s eye-popping growth in 2019 and you can see why investors have put such a high valuation on a company with an almost cult-like following.

In addition to the Blackstone Group, other investors on the round include high profile individual investors like Oprah Winfrey, Natalie Portman, and Howard Schultz as well as Orkila Capital and Rabo Corporate Investments (the investment arm of Rabobank).

The Blackstone Group investment in Oatly is led by Blackstone Growth, an investment vehicle within the private equity group. Blackstone itself is one of the largest private equity firms in the world, owning a diverse array of companies ranging from dating app company Bumble to hotel chains (they own both the Bellagio Resort and Motel 6 budget motel chain) to drug companies like Ferring.

Blackstone’s investment in a sustainable brand like Oatly is a new turn for a company that saw some controversy in 2019 after one of the firm’s investment holdings, a Brazilian logistics operator named Hidrovias do Brasil, was accused of deforesting the Amazon to help make way for a highway into the jungle to access one of the company’s terminals.

The Food Tech Show: Delivery Bots Head to College

This week the Spoon gang got together to talk about some of the most interesting food tech stories of the week.

On this week’s Food Tech Show we talk about:

As always, you can listen to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also download direct to your phone or just click play below.

Enjoy the podcast!

The Weekly Spoon: Laboring over Labels and Go Go Robo Restaurants!

This is a the post version of our weekly (twice-weekly, actually) newsletter. If you’d like to get the weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here. 

By now we are all inured to the “fake news” label casually thrown about on a daily basis. But now the discussion over what is real and what isn’t is seeping into the labels we give our meat and milk. Science has brought about a wave of innovation in those fields, and traditional makers of those products are none too happy.

Groups representing cattlemen and ranchers sent a letter to President Trump asking his administration to bring regulation of lab-grown, or cultured, meat under the USDA. This follows a different letter from farm bureaus and agricultural groups sent to the FDA asking them to crack down on what types of drinks can actually be called milk. (The hullabaloo over milk even earned a mocking segment on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show.)

These moves reveal that we are on the cusp of a societal leap in how we eat, and incumbents are digging in. While cultured meat hasn’t hit store shelves yet, it’s a hot sector for investment and the technology keeps improving and coming down in price. Meanwhile sales of plant-based milks have soared over the past five years while the dairy industry grapples with surpluses and falling prices.

To be fair, having a discussion over what we officially label the food we put into our bodies is a worthy one to make sure we know what we are consuming. Case in point: this week the FDA gave the green light to Impossible Foods saying its heme-burgers are safe to eat, and Beyond Meat can officially slap a “non-GMO” label on its pea protein burgers.

But if we spend all our time and energy (and money) dithering over details over what we call something, before you know it, the robots will have taken over and they will decide for us.

Don’t believe me? We broke the news this week of the launch of robot food startup, Ono Food Company, which is headed up by the former VP of Operations at Cafe X. Details on Ono are slim, but it’s backed by Lemnos, Compound and Pathbreaker. It joins other restaurant robots coming online like those in Spyce Kitchen, Ekim, and Bear Robotics’ Penny.

Robots and automation are expanding into more of our everyday routines. Long John Silvers announced plans to make its drive-thrus fully automated, Pizzametry is working to put pizza vending machines in high-traffic areas like airports and dorms, and Flippy just got a new job making chicken tenders at Dodgers stadium.

Finally, there were some unexpected moves in the meal kit market this week. True Food Innovations is breathing new life into Chef’d, which abruptly shut down earlier this month. Chef’d 2.0 actually involves a number of ex-Chef’d execs, who plan to forego e-commerce and focus on retail. And Chick-Fil-A, of all places, announced an experiment to offer meal kits at a limited number of its stores in Atlanta. While I applaud the effort, I’m not sure it will work.

Whew. It was a big week! And that was just the news. We’re also hard at work assembling an awesome Smart Kitchen Summit: North America. The lineup of speakers is fantastic, the schedule is thoughtful and forward looking for food tech and tickets are on sale now!

As always, we’d love to hear from you! If you’ve got news, send us a tip, or join our Slack channel.

Have a great weekend!

Be kind. Always.

Chris

In the 07/27/2018 edition:

Traditional Meat Producers Lobby Trump Over Cultured Meat
Agricultural professional groups including the American Sheep Industry Association, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, National Chicken Council, National Pork Producers Council and the National Turkey Federation fired off a letter to President Trump today, asking for parity when it comes to the regulation of cultured meat.

Got Milk? Are You Sure? Labeling Debate Moves on to Plant-Based Drinks
It looks like the debate over what we label cultured/lab grown/clean “meat” will not be isolated to the deli case. If the comments made by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb today are any indication, there will be another drawn out battle over what we label as “milk.”

Stephen Colbert Mocks FDA’s Crackdown on Plant-Based Milks
On The Late Show host Stephen Colbert turned his biting wit towards a subject that’s been generating a lot of media buzz lately: the question of what to call dairy alternatives. He was referencing last week’s Politico Pro Summit, in which FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced that his agency would start cracking down on the use of the term “milk” for non-dairy products.

Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Get Label Wins, Score Big for Plant-based Meat
Plant-based burger startup Impossible Foods officially got the green light from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that their patties are safe to eat. Impossible voluntarily submitted their burger to the FDA for testing last year and was surprised when the regulatory body came back to them with a big red flag concerning the burger’s not-so-secret star ingredient: heme.

Lemnos Backs Robot Restaurant Startup Ono
Restaurant robots are kinda hot. The latest evidence of this? Yet another robot restaurant startup called Ono Food Company just got funded, this time from Lemnos, Compound and Pathbreaker ventures. The amount of the funding round was undisclosed.

Now That Delivery Is All the Rage, What Happens to the Drive-Thru?
Long John Silver’s, that bastion of quick-service seafood, made a bold claim today by announcing their intent to “install the most technologically advanced digital drive-thru platforms in the restaurant industry.”

Will You Try Pizzametry’s Pizza Vending Machine?
The Pizzametry is the size of a beefy vending machine. For around $5 – $6 (prices will vary depending on location), you can order either an eight-inch cheese (no sauce), or cheese (with sauce) or pepperoni pizza. The machine is pre-loaded with canisters of frozen dough which are then thawed, cut, pressed, topped and cooked at 700 degrees to make a pizza in three and a half minutes (that time actually goes down to 90 seconds on subsequent pizzas if you order more than one).

Chef’d Assets Acquired by True Food Innovations, to Focus on Retail
True Food Innovations, a food technology, CPG and manufacturing company, today announced that it has acquired the assets of meal kit maker, Chef’d, which abruptly shuttered operations earlier this month. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Chick-fil-A is Paving the Way for Fast Food Meal Kits
Each Chick-fil-A box will contain fresh, pre-measured ingredients to make one of five meals, from chicken enchiladas to chicken flatbread to pan-roasted chicken. (Sense a theme here?) The kits will cost $15.89, feed two people, and can be prepared in 30 minutes or less.

Chick-Fil-A’s Uncanny Valley Problem with Meal Kits
When popular fast food chain, Chick-Fil-A announced it would be experimenting with meal kits next month, I agreed with my colleague, Catherine Lamb, that this could pave the way for a new meal kit sales channel. But in the days since the announcement I’ve soured on the notion. Now, I think consumers will have certain expectations of what a Chick-Fil-A meal kit should taste like, but will instead experience the uncanny valley.