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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

R&D

Nestlé is the Latest CPG Company to Launch a Food & Beverage Accelerator

Nestlé is the latest mega food company to get in on the food & beverage accelerator movement.

Today the Swiss company announced that it was launching an R&D accelerator program in Lausanne, Switzerland. This is the first internal accelerator for Nestlé, who previously partnered with Rabobank and Rocketspace to create the Terra Food + Agtech Accelerator program in 2017.

In the press release, Nestlé was pretty vague on the details. We don’t know what type of startups or individuals they’re targeting, how many have been accepted, or how often the cohorts will cycle through. The release lists “Nestlé scientists, students, and start-ups,” so presumably it will be a pretty diverse mixture of participants.

However, we do know a few key things about the program. Accepted individuals and groups will get access to Nestlé’s R&D labs, kitchens, equipment, and expertise, as well as some office space. The accelerator will kick off before the end of 2019.

Nestlé joins an ever-growing group of big CPG companies who are launching accelerators to sniff out new, trendy brands. Chobani, General Mills, Kraft-Heinz, and Pepsi-Co are just a few that have done so over the past year. It’s a smart move: accelerators are a relatively low-touch way to give corporations access to agile, innovative companies, which they can either acquire or partner with for image, product and marketing purposes.

My colleague, Jenn Marston, predicted we’d see even more of these programs from Big Food in 2019. It seems like she was right.

Singapore to Invest $535 million in R&D, including Cultured Meat and Robots

Cell-based meat is about to get another big shot in the arm.

Yesterday the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Singapore announced the RIE2020 plan, which will allocate S$724 million ($535 million) to boost the city-state’s economy and to bolster R&D efforts in cell therapy manufacturing, digital technology (like AI and robotics), and sustainable urban food production.

Up to S$144 million (~$106 million) of the funds in RIE2020 will be allocated to the new Singapore Food Story R&D program, which will focus on urban agriculture, cultured meat, and microbial protein production. This isn’t super surprising, since we recently made the prediction that cell-based meat will debut in Asia first, thanks to more flexible government regulation and high consumer interest.

In fact, there’s already at least one cultured meat company (that we know of) operating out of Singapore. Shiok Meats is developing cell-based crustaceans and just became the first clean meat company to be accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator program. Hopefully this influx of funds from the government will help cell-based meat companies scale up and become more affordable more quickly.

Singapore recently announced a goal to produce 30 percent of its own food by 2030. Growing meat in labs is a good place to start. Scientists are apparently also working on breeding fast-growing, disease-resistant tilapia that can survive in Singapore’s brackish water, and figuring out ways to use microbes to grow protein.

There were far fewer details on what type of robotics and automation Singapore will be using its new funds to develop, but hopefully some of it will be related to the food industry. Maybe food delivery robots? Articulating arms to cook burgers or make lattes? Self-driving food running bots? There’s a lot of potential.

If you’re curious about the future of food robotics, join us for ArticulATE on April 16th! We’ll have executives from Google Brain, Sony, CafeX, Albertson’s, and lots more discussing how automation will shape the way we discover, cook, and consume food. It’ll be a really fun and engaging summit — tickets are on sale here.

Motif Ingredients Launches, Raises $90M to Democratize Plant-Based Ingredients

Making a burger (or chicken nugget, or egg) out of plants that tastes like the real thing is no easy feat. It takes years of R&D, teams of scientists, and large amounts of funding, and for many small startups, the development process is a slow struggle.

A new company is working to make it easier for plant-based protein companies to develop better products. Today Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based biotech company (and unicorn), unveiled Motif Ingredients, a spinoff company developing ingredients to replace animal protein. The company’s off to a running start: today it also announced it has raised a 90 million Series A funding round from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Fonterra and food processing giant Louis Dreyfus Co., among others.

Motif will use engineered microbes (like yeast) to “brew” food proteins that can mimic the same ones that give animal products their unique taste and texture. The resulting ingredients can be used to make everything from regular ol’ cow milk and chicken meat to more unique offerings, like sturgeon eggs and camel milk.

Established players like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and JUST have their own dedicated R&D labs, filled with robots sussing out plant properties and teams of scientists with extensive backgrounds in biotechnology and food science. Big Food — along with its extensive resources — is also entering the plant-based protein space. In fact, Tyson recently announced plans to develop its own meatless products internally.

But for smaller startups, developing their own plant-based ingredients can be a prohibitively expensive and time-consuming process. By partnering with Motif, however, these companies could outsource the costly R&D process and accelerate their product development.

If successful — and with $90 million in funding and a unicorn parent company, I don’t see why they wouldn’t be — Motif’s services could help usher in a flood of new plant-based protein companies. Plant-based camel milk, here we come.