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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Prime Roots

Prime Roots Raises $30M Series B for Deli Meat Made With Koji Mycelium

The average supermarket deli is a sad carnival of sulfites, nitrates, and preservatives that go bump in your belly. There have been a handful of upstarts in the plant-based food space attempting to create a healthy alternative to sliced cotto salami or chunks of smoked roast beef. One Berkeley-based company believes it has a healthy, tasty solution.

Prime Roots, producer of deli-style meat made from koji mycelium, announced $30 million in Series B funding this month from True Ventures, Pangaea Ventures, Prosus Ventures, Top Tier Capital, Diamond Edge Ventures, bringing their total funding to $50 million. The fresh funding will enable Prime Roots to scale and expand to deli counters and restaurants. The company’s alternative deli product currently is available primarily in the San Francisco Bay area.

Growing up with family in the food industry, Prime Roots founder and CEO Kimberlie Le knew that the focus had to be a multi-barreled approach: taste was a must; nutrition was also a consideration, and sustainability also was vital.

“Because I come from a food background, I really wanted to emphasize taste,” Le told The Spoon in a recent interview. “We wanted to make sure the products taste good first and foremost. When we started six years ago, we were also thinking about really the nutrition and the cleanliness of the products. At the time, legacy brands had long ingredient lists and a lot of unpronounceable ingredients. I really wanted to fix that because it wasn’t anything that my mom, who’s a chef, would want to serve in her restaurants or at home. And so really took it upon myself to find a solution that really met the consumer where they are and really solved a personal problem for conscience eaters.”

Prime Roots approaches the deli case with the identical microscopic texture of meat, along with its umami taste made from plants. Experienced chefs helped develop the most popular deli products-including cracked pepper turkey, black forest ham, hickory bacon, salami, and pepperoni to emulate the savory, meaty taste, and texture that consumers demand for meat substitutes. According to the company, Prime Roots’ turkey and ham have no nitrates, preservatives, cholesterol, soy, wheat and are lower in sodium than the leading brands.

Koji is a strain of a fungus used for various culinary purposes, including the production of alcoholic beverages like sake or invaluable condiments like miso and mirin. In the case of creating deli meats, koji ignites the fermentation process when added to other base ingredients. Other companies such as Meati and Aqua Culture Foods use koji in their production of alternative proteins.

Le said that as part of her due diligence, she toured a number of delis across the country including New York, the center for all things corned beef and pastrami. The goal was to see how receptive these landmark eateries would be to a new product.

“When we were working on the concept, the deli concept,” Le recalled, “The first thing we did when we had initial prototypes was go to New York, which is really deli mecca and had prototypes which we would take into some of the most iconic delis and say, ‘Hey, try this’ to see how open and receptive these deli folks were and how the deli culture would be receptive to a plant-based product.”

 “Surprisingly, we didn’t get kicked out of a single place, and everyone was super excited to put the meats on their slicer. They were wowed by the texture, the slicing capabilities, and were just very open and excited.”

Finally! Prime Roots’ New Koji Bacon is a Really Good Vegan Bacon

Whenever conversation arises around my decision to follow a plant-based diet, it is inevitable that someone will say, “I could never do that because of bacon.” The salty, crispy, aromatic cuts of meat have people hooked. I get it – bacon is a classic breakfast side, it appears on top of donuts and wrapped around dates, and provides the crunch in a BLT. It makes me wonder if a really good vegan bacon existed, would this be enough for more people to transition to a plant-based diet?

This week, I was lucky enough to try exactly that – really good vegan bacon from the company Prime Roots. To celebrate Earth Day, Prime Roots launched four new flavors of its plant-based bacon, black pepper, sriracha, maple, and hickory. Prior to today’s launch, Prime Roots has been selling its original bacon on its website and according to the founder, Kimberlie Le, the product frequently sells out.

The plant-based bacon alternative looked, smelled, and cooked just like its meat counterpart. Depending on your preference, the bacon can be made chewy or crispy depending on how long you cook it. I opted for crispy and fried the bacon in a cast iron pan for a little over 10 minutes. The bacon was umami-rich with the familiar hickory smoke flavor, and definitely delicious.

The star ingredient in all of Prime Root’s bacon and alternative protein products is koji, a filamentous fungus. Koji is important in Japanese cuisine because it is used in products like miso, sake, and soy sauce. The fungus is great for plant-based meat alternatives in that it grows rapidly, has a neutral flavor, and it can be easily molded into any shape.

Besides bacon, Prime Roots produces a myriad of other meat and seafood alternatives from koji. A few other products include plant-based lobster mac & cheese, sausage ravioli, and prepared meals like kung pao chicken. Le said that Prime Roots’ goal is to become the Nestle of plant-based foods.

Another start-up called AtLast also uses mycelium to craft its plant-based bacon product, and the company recently raised $40 million in funding. Meati uses mycelium to create plant-based steak, chicken, and jerky, and is planning for a rollout of its products this upcoming summer.

Like most of Prime Roots products, the four new bacon flavors will only be available for a limited amount of time. Until the products sell out, an 8 oz. package of bacon costs $9.99, plus $15 shipping on Prime Roots’ website.

Food Tech News: New Mushroom Oat Milk, Eco Bricks and Koji Ravioli

Califia Farms adds “mushroom milk” to product portfolio

Califia Farms makes non-dairy milk, creamer, yogurt drinks, cold brew coffee, and the company announced a new milk product this week. The new product is a barista-style oat milk that is blended with Cordyceps and Lion’s Mane mushroom powders. Apparently, the mushrooms do not affect the naturally sweet flavor of oat milk, but just add the supposed health benefits of these mushrooms. One 32 oz carton retails for $5.99, and can be found on the company’s website and Whole Foods.

Photo form Mondelez Philippines’ website

Mondelez and Plastic Flamingo are creating eco-bricks from plastic packaging

Multinational food and beverage company Mondelez has partnered with Plastic Flamingo, a group that aims to keep plastic out of the ocean, in the Philippines to turn plastic packaging waste into functional bricks. Mondelez Philippines invested an undisclosed amount into this project, and plans to upcycle at least 40 metric tons of plastic packaging waste. The bricks will be used to create temporary housing in cases of natural disasters.

Prime Roots launches new koji-based ravioli products

Prime Roots produces a variety of plant-based meat alternatives and meals made from koji, a type of fungi. The company announced this week that is due to launch new ravioli products that are filled with a variety of plant-based meat and seafood alternatives. The ravioli will come in five varieties, including plant-based lobster, chicken and black truffle, bacon and butternut squash, chicken pesto and sun-dried tomato, and Italian sausage. The new products will launch on March 20th, which is National Ravioli Day, and will be available for purchase on the company’s website.

Prime Roots Makes Super Protein Building Blocks (and Bacon) from Mushroom Roots

If you’re biting into any sort of plant-based meat these days, odds are its main ingredient is soy, peas, or wheat. But that might not be the case for long if Prime Roots has its way.

The company’s cofounder and CEO, Kimberlie Le, got the inspiration for the company back in 2017, when she began questioning why alternative meats were made from the same few plants. “I wondered — why aren’t people looking at not plants?” she told me in a recent phone interview. So she began experimenting in the Berkeley Alternative Meat Lab with co-founder Joshua Nixon, looking for a plant-free protein building block to upend the meatless status quo.

Eventually, they found it in mushrooms. Or more specifically, mycelium: mushroom roots. (No, mushrooms are not technically plants — they’re fungi.) These roots, which are produced in a process akin to beer brewing, can be used to make any manner of meat substitutes, from shrimp to bacon to crab cakes.

Mycelium have a few advantages over other plant proteins. According to Le, the fungi they use are tasteless, so they don’t have to mask any off plant flavors (like the tongue-coating bitterness that comes with pea protein.) Mycelium require minimal resources to grow and are a more efficient source of protein than plants, which often require solvents to fully extract all the protein. Prime Roots can also tweak the fungi’s nutritional content, adjusting its levels of protein and fat. “We can make our product have 50 percent more protein than meat,” Le said.

Most importantly, though, mycelium have an extremely versatile flavor and texture, meaning they can be used to make any manner of meat or seafood substitutes. While still operating under their former name of Terramino Foods, they were focusing on fish-free salmon burgers. Now they’ve taken a step back to re-evaluate.

To narrow down the choices, they’ve posted a voting page on their website with 12 meaty and protein-heavy options — from chicken tenders to protein bars — all of which Prime Roots has already tested internally. Anyone who casts their vote will have early access to the products at a discounted price.

When they do launch, which Le anticipates will be around 2020, Prime Roots will be sold exclusively online. Le said they’re waiting to start selling their products until they’re priced competitively with meat. Which they’re actually not too far from — as of now — Prime Roots can make their mycelium for only a few dollars a pound.

Prime Roots currently has a team of 10. Last year they participated in the prestigious IndieBio accelerator program and raised $4.25 million.

By choosing to use mycelium as a meat substitute, Prime Roots is going up against one of the highest-grossing meat alternative companies in the world: Quorn. The company uses fermented mycoprotein, a type of fungi, as the base of their meat-free products. Per Le, Prime Roots’ advantage comes down to the unique properties and simplicity of their mycelium. “The fungi that [Quorn] uses has only been in the diet the last 50 or so years,” she said. “We looked at what protein people have been using a lot longer.”

Prime Roots is also hoping that their emphasis on community — putting the product choice in the hand of the consumers — will help them stand out as the alt-protein space gets more crowded. That way Prime Roots can sniff out gaps in the market and develop new products accordingly using their mushroomy building blocks.

It’s a clever idea. But Prime Roots will need more than just catchy marketing strategies to go up against a behemoth like Quorn, which has a sizeable range of products, global name recognition and a widespread retail footprint. To stand out, Prime Roots will have to not only make a product that tastes excellent, but also one that consumers don’t already see in the grocery aisle.

I just cast my own vote — bacon all the way. If Prime Roots can nail the taste of a product as popular (and, in the meat alternative space, as underrepresented) as that, they’ll have more than just a shot at carving out their own space in the alt-protein market.