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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

vegan

Food Tech News Roundup: Recyclable Meal Kits, KFC Goes Vegan(ish), and a Dairy App

Time for this week’s food tech news roundup! This week on the Spoon we covered self-heating beverage cans, beer made from surplus bread, and indoor smart grow system Ava’s (one of the Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase finalists of 2017!) seed funding. We also launched a new podcast episode discussing how machine learning can help dairy farmers.

But enough about us — here are some of the food tech news stories that caught our eye this week:

Photo: Marley Spoon

Marley Spoon files IPO in Australia
Meal kit subscription service Marley Spoon filed for an initial public offering (IPO) this week in Australia, according to TechCrunch. The company is headquartered in Berlin, but decided to list on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) because Down Under is one of its biggest markets. Marley Spoon has tried to distinguish itself from competing services like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh through its paid partnership with Martha Stewart and its launch of budget-friendly line Dinnerly. The IPO is expected to give Marley Spoon a market capitalization of $152 million — but we’ll see if it can overcome challenges others like Blue Apron faced post-IPO, and whether Marley Spoon will make the move into retail stores like Hello Fresh, Plated and Home Chef.

Photo: Purple Carrot

Purple Carrot unveils 100% curbside recyclable packaging
Marley Spoon wasn’t the only meal kit company with an announcement this week. Purple Carrot, the plant-based meal kit service, sent out a press release to tell the world about their “new 100% curbside recyclable packaging.” Meal kits may cut down on food waste, but they’re notorious for their packaging waste; even if many elements are technically recyclable they often require a good deal of effort on the consumer’s part to break them down or drive them to a facility capable of processing them. Purple Carrot promises that its new packaging will be 100% fit for at-home recycling — which could be a huge step towards mitigating plastic packaging waste.

 

Photo: Stellapps

Gates Foundation invests $14M in dairy tech app
Last week Stellapps Technologies, the India-based IoT and data analysis stack for the dairy supply chain, raised a $14 million Series B round, as reported by AgFunder News. The round was led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and IndusAge Partners. Founded in 2011, Stellapps uses sensors, machine learning, and automation to optimize the entire dairy supply chain: from production to shipping to distribution. Technology has unlocked a new era of cow and dairy management, with startups like SomaDetect and Connecterra allowing farmers to make more data-driven decisions.

 

Pixabay

KFC to test vegetarian fried “chicken” in U.K.
KFC UK has made promises to cut their calorie content by 20 percent over the next 7 years, and one of the ways they’re working towards this goal is by developing a vegetarian version of their iconic fried chicken. Apparently, the new menu offering will still use the secret blend of 11 herbs and spices that made the Colonel famous, and will debut some time in 2019. This comes on the heels of the plant-based Impossible burger’s launch at White Castle.

 

Photo: Beyond Meat

Beyond Meat doubles production to meet increased demand
This week, plant-based protein company Beyond Meat announced that it would double their production to sate the growing hunger for their plant-based burgers. According to Plant Based News, Beyond burgers are outselling beef burgers in some stores in California, and Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown has said that the company is ahead of their sales targets. All of which means that the demand for meat-like vegan burgers is there, and is growing — the question now becomes if Beyond Meat can keep up with demand, especially as it rolls out in 50 countries this summer.

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U.K. Finally Gets a Beef-Like Vegan Burger

Picture a juicy seared burger, mac and cheese, short rib, and smoky barbecue sauce, sandwiched on a soft bun. But it’s all vegan. Dubbed the “Vegan Mac Daddy,” it’s the plant-based meat behemoth that restaurant Dirty Bones will premiere at its London and Oxford locations this June.

The base of this head-turner is the vegan B12 Burger by Moving Mountains. It’s made from coconut oil, wheat, soy, potatoes, mushrooms and beet juice, which makes the patty appear to “bleed” when you cut into it. According to Moving Mountains Founder Simeon Van der Molen, their product is “the UK’s first ever raw bleeding plant-based meat burger.”

The patty has 20 grams of protein, no cholesterol, and low saturated fat, but is on-par with beef in terms of protein. As its name suggests, the B12 burger is also fortified with B12, a vitamin that can be hard to get in a meat-free diet.

Moving Mountains launched their burger at vegetarian London chain Mildred’s earlier this year, but when they premier at Dirty Bones this June it will be the first time their patty will grace the menu of a restaurant that also serves meat dishes. The Vegan Mac Daddy will be £12 ($16), which is just £1 more expensive than its meaty alter-ego.

While I certainly wouldn’t mind taking a taste of this burger (and maybe I will when I head to the U.K. after Smart Kitchen Summit Europe!), the most interesting part about the B12 Burger isn’t the burger itself, but how long it took to get here. And by here, I mean the U.K.

After all, we in the U.S. have two options for plant-based burgers meant to mimic the look and feel of beef: Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. Moving Mountains’ burger is the first attempt in the U.K. to make a plant-based product that’s marketed not just at vegetarians, but also at meat-eaters and flexitarians.

The recent arrivalof a meaty vegan burger is pretty surprising considering London was named the most vegetarian-friendly city by PETA and has over 3.5 million vegans. A recent study from Kantar Worldpanel showed that 29% of evening meals in the U.K. don’t contain any meat.

While I lived there I came to expect a vegetarian option — in fact, a good vegetarian option — at every burger joint and cafe, no matter how meat-focused. Which is not always the case in the U.S.

The ingredients in Moving Mountains’ plant-based burger.

Perhaps it’s because of these omnipresent veg options (often built around halloumi, the most delicious substance on the planet Earth) that the U.K. has been slow to hop on the meat-like vegan burger train. Though the B12 Burger’s positive reception at Mildred’s shows that there’s certainly a market for it, though it’s still so new that it’s mostly a novelty.

Part of this delay is just timing. Founder Simeon Van Der Molen told the Spoon that the idea for Moving Mountains formed in 2016, after he “recognized a restriction on the impact we can have on the environment and animal agriculture,” and then decided to create an “innovative plant-based food product that could affect positive change for public health and the planet by reducing animal meat consumption.”

After he had the idea, it took Van Der Molen and his team two years in a lab working with a team of scientists, chefs and farmers to nail the formula — they went through 100 recipes before they settled on a final one. They wanted to get a burger that, in Van Der Molen’s words, “replicates animal meat in every way, from the sizzle and texture to the taste.”

It seems like Moving Mountains may have hit the market just in time. Beyond Meat announced that it was planning to start selling their burgers in the U.K. by the end of 2018. In fact, the Guardian reported that Beyond Meat was rumored to have a deal with British supermarket Tesco to bring their burgers across the pond by July of this year.

As of now Moving Mountains is only available at a handful of restaurants in London and Brighton. If Beyond Meat does indeed make it to the U.K., we’ll see if there’s enough room for two meat-like meatless burgers in the ever-growing British flexitarian market.

A Peek Inside JUST’s Clean Meat Lab

Last June, JUST, the company formerly known as Hampton Creek, announced out of nowhere that they would bring lab-grown meat to market by 2018. If they succeed, they would be the first to do so; Finless Foods hopes their cultured fish will gain price parity with bluefin tuna by 2019, and Memphis Meats is aiming to premiere their cultured meat in 2021.

But it’ll be an uphill battle to get there. Soon after their announcement about lab-grown meat nearly all of JUST’s board resigned, leaving only Josh Tetrick, their very charismatic (and polarizing) CEO. Their former cellular agriculture director also left the company in early 2018 to start his own cultured animal product venture. (The new CTO who oversees the cellular agriculture team has been there since November.) At the same time, though, JUST has raised a total $310M in funding over the years, which is light years away from other clean meat startups (Memphis Meats has currently raised $20.1M). Can a company such high-profile turnover and drama, along with 125 employees and some pretty hefty capital, achieve its very ambitious vision of being the first to bring cultured meat to market?

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I was able to get a peek behind the heavily guarded doors of JUST (well, there was only one guard, but still) and take a tour of this buzzy startup — including their clean meat lab. I came in feeling skeptical and left much the same … but also oddly inspired.

A few of the plants in JUST’s library.

JUST is the prototypical millennial-heavy food tech startup, complete with geometric logos, repurposed factory workspaces, and lots of robots.  First I was led through the discovery platform, the part of JUST where scientists use custom-built robots to test plants from across the globe, determining their potential in vegan food products. Next, those plants go to the product development area; a fancified, high-tech kitchen staffed by chefs, many with Michelin stars.

During my tour I got to try a few flavors of JUST’s signature eggless mayo (really darn good) and their vegan cookies (tasted like normal cookies, though I suppose that was the point). But the coolest thing I sampled was their eggless scramble. Made of mung beans, the pale yellow liquid perfectly acted just like eggs, forming curds in the hot pan that were virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. The only giveaway was the beany flavor, though their VP of Product Development Ben Roche told me they’re working currently working on a new version that tastes more egg-like.

All the usual players, but vegan.

The fact that it cooks so much like regular scrambled eggs would make it an easy swap for foodservice — even easier than the real thing, since they don’t have to blend up the eggs first. Roche told me that they’re also working on pre-cooked eggless patties. I could see them putting those on the breakfast menu of a fast-food chain, following in the footsteps of partnerships like Impossible Foods and White Castle. For now, though, Just Scramble is only available in only a few restaurants in San Francisco and Hong Kong, though they’re hoping to expand it soon. 

No eggs, just mung beans!

The area of JUST I had the highest expectations for was their clean meat lab. It’s also the area where I learned the least — though I suppose I wasn’t really expecting JUST to give away all their secrets so easily. (Sorry, no photos allowed in here.)

For a company that claims they’ll produce enough cultured meat to bring to market by the end of this year, the lab was surprisingly small. The room was filled with incubators growing cells cultures, bioreactors, and a small area behind a plastic curtain where a scientist was pipetting something into wells. (I was not allowed behind the curtain.)

In the corner of the room was a machine filled with shaking bottles. Vitor Espirito Santo, the Senior Scientist of Cellular Agriculture at JUST, explained to me that the bottles contained proliferating muscle cells; in order to scale up their meat production to a marketable scale, they have to grow them in suspension. Espirito Santo told me that the plan was to transfer the cells into larger and larger bioreactors (the vessels where cultured meat is grown) as their technology improved. The largest one they had in the lab was 2 liters — which is pretty small, though JUST says they want to scale up to pilot plant facilities in the near future.

What JUST’s lab-grown burger will look like.

Despite my skepticism, Espirito Santo was adamant that JUST’s lab-grown meat would be available by the end of 2018 as promised. When I pressed him for details but all I got was “It will be something avian.” The technology required to grow meat with the texture of a chicken breast isn’t evolved enough for mass production, so I’m predicting that their first product will be some sort of ground turkey or chicken. JUST’s press office also clarified with me that they were aiming to make the first commercial sale of clean meat by the end of 2018, subject to regulatory considerations — which, as we’ve written about before, could slow things down considerably. 

Though they’re planning to be the first to bring clean meat to market, JUST’s chief focus seemed to be developing plant-based media. If they’re successful it would be a huge boon for the cultured meat industry. Many clean meat labs use fetal bovine serum (FBS) as the media in which to grow their muscle cells. FBS, however, is very expensive and also (duh) not vegan. If JUST can succeed in developing a plant-based media as effective and versatile as FBS, they have a real shot at making clean meat affordable, scalable, and 100% animal-free.

They’re not the first company to work on developing an alternative to animal-based media. In fact, Shojinmeat, a resource for people growing cultured meat at home, has found a way to do away with FBS altogether, using yeast extract as their media. Yeast extract isn’t a perfect solution — it only works with certain types of cells and doesn’t catalyze as much growth as FBS — but it is an exciting step towards inexpensive, plant-based media.

To me, the most provocative part of the clean meat lab wasn’t what Espirito Santo and his team were doing (or not doing), but what they hoped to do someday. Two drawings on the wall of the clean meat lab laid out their vision for the future of meat: a utopian architectural plan of a vertically integrated cultured meat production facility.

On one end of the property is a farm where they grow the plants for their cell media. On the other are the giant vats where the meat is grown, which lead to a factory where the meat is “assembled” on conveyor belts with 3D printing technology. The only humans involved in the process were walking between the belts doing quality control. The factory has glass walls, so the whole affair is transparent – literally and metaphorically. Consumers could come to the facility, watch their meat being printed out, and select cuts for their dinner. Sort of like a visit to one of those places you can watch cheese being made before buying a wheel, but with cultured meat. 

Espirito Santo said they want that setup to be the same size as the largest slaughterhouse in the U.S. If he and his team can make plant-based media, and if 3D printing technology improves to allow for those production speeds, their goal could actually be attainable. 

I couldn’t help but wonder if it might be more productive, from a price and efficiency point of view, for JUST to simply put their resources into developing plant-based meats that taste the same as the “real” thing. For example, Seattle Food Tech is developing vegan chicken nuggets — and manufacturing technology to make them scalable — which seems like a much more feasible way to take a bite out of the meat industry. Omnipork and Beyond Meat are developing plant-based pork and beef burgers, respectively. Which begs the question: If people can’t taste the difference, will they really care if their pork chop is made of muscle cells grown in a bioreactor, or plants made to have the same taste and texture as meat? This question seems especially relevant since, outside of the clean meat lab, all of JUST’s resources are focused on making plant-based versions of animal products, such as their eggless scramble.

While I think that JUST’s claim that they’ll bring lab-grown meat to market by 2018 is definitely a stretch, you have to respect their self-assuredness. The word “disrupt” gets thrown around a lot in the field of food innovation, but JUST really is trying to radically shake up the way we eat. They want to replace some of our most beloved foods — scrambled eggs, mayonnaise, and hamburgers — with vegan taste-alikes, and so far they’ve been pretty successful. We’ll have to see if their vision for cultured meat comes to pass, or if it’s just a drawing on the wall. 

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This article has been updated to reflect that JUST plans to be the first to make a commercial sale of cultured meat, not bring it to mass market, barring regulatory considerations. We also clarified that the CTO overseeing the cellular agriculture program has been at JUST since November. 

Pig, Out: Omnipork Hopes to Replace China’s Most Consumed Meat

Dumplings, char siu, lo mein, sweet and sour stir fries — a lot of China’s most-loved dishes feature one meat above all: pork. In fact, mainland China is the world’s largest consumer of pork; they’re projected to consume about 56 million tons of it this year alone.

David Yeung is trying to curb Chinese pork consumption by replacing it with a plant-based option called Omnipork. Made from soy, pea, mushroom and rice proteins, Yeung hopes it will exactly mimic the taste and texture of pork. It contains about a third of the calories and saturated fat of traditional pork, as well as more fiber, calcium, or iron. And, since it’s not made from an animal, it doesn’t have any antibiotics or hormones, and carries less of a risk of foodborne illness.

This isn’t Yeung’s first foray into meat alternatives. He is an investor in Beyond Meat and brought the meatless burgers over to Hong Kong to sell in Green Common, a vegetarian grocery store and casual dining chain that he founded. Green Common is one of the few places in the world to serve Just Scramble, a mung bean-based egg substitute.

Omnipork will launch in Hong Kong in June, at Michelin-starred restaurant Cantonese Ming Court. Yeung’s company Right Treat is working to get their product approved by Chinese regulators. If they succeed, Yeung hopes to start selling it in mainland China by the end of 2018. 

According to a taste test with CNNMoney, however, Omnipork isn’t fooling anyone yet. Part of the issue might be because there’s so little precedent; Right Treat is one of the first to focus on making a plant-based pork product. Sure Beyond Meat has a (still relatively new) Beyond Sausage and there are a few companies turning jackfruit into pseudo pulled pork. But compared to beef — especially burgers, “bleeding” and otherwise — there are very few examples of plant-based pig products. Add to that the fact that they’re trying to make an all-in-one pork replacement — one that steams, fries, and patties like pork — and they’re going where no meat alternative company has gone before.

Which is also why Omnipork has such great potential. Since there are so few vegan “pork” products, if Yeung can successfully develop one that has the same taste and texture as the real thing, it could be massively successful. After all, pork is the most consumed meat in the world, according to the World Watch Institute — and much of it is consumed in China. 60% of all hogs are bred in China, 95% of which are slaughtered and eaten before they leave the country.

Yeung realized that if he was going to tempt China away from pork, his product would have to be tailored to Chinese culinary tastes. While the majority of plant-based meat alternative companies are developed for Western palates, he worked to create a specifically ‘Chinese’ plant-based pork product. (He did, however, team up with U.S. scientists to develop it.) Because if a pork alternative is going to make a serious dent in the meat industry, it has to make a serious dent in the Chinese pork market.

Yeung’s timing just might pay off. There are around 50 million vegetarians in China, and, thanks to growing concern for health, food safety scares, and millennial dining habits, the number is projected to rise. Pair this with the fact that the Chinese government announced two years ago that they’re aiming to cut national meat consumption by 50% and a growth in the Chinese vegetarian protein market seems inevitable. If demand for meat alternatives increases in China, as it did in the U.S., then Omnipork could soon be flying off the shelves — as long as the flavor gets a little closer to pork.

How Now, No Cow: Animal-Free Dairy Startup PerfectDay Raises $24.7M

Someone’s moo-ving up in the world.

PerfectDay, a food startup developing technology to make animal-free milk, just raised $24.7 million in series A funding. This brings their total funding to $26.8 million. The round was led by Temasek, a Singapore state-owned investment company, with participation from Horizon Ventures, Iconiq Capital, and Lion Ventures, among others. Berkeley-based Perfect Day is on a roll: earlier this month, they received a patent to use their animal-free dairy technology in food applications.

Though it’s been attracting a good bit of attention as of late, PerfectDay has been around for a while. The company launched in 2014 under the name Muufri, but rebranded to PerfectDay in 2016. (Fun fact: The new name comes from a study which found that cows produced more milk when listening to soothing music like the eponymous Lou Reed tune.) They plan to use their new funding to expand their staff (currently 32 people strong) and accelerate commercial marketing of their product with dairy & food companies.

Unlike other milk alternatives, which are made of plants like soy, almond, or peas, PerfectDay uses fermentation to create the exact same elements found in cow’s milk. Scientists give genetically altered yeast a “blueprint” so that, when fed with certain nutrients, they produce two key proteins in milk: casein and whey.

The resulting proteins can be used to make lactose-free, gluten-free, soy-free, and nut-free milk. They can also be used to make a myriad of dairy products such as cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. While there are plenty of vegan dairy products already on shelves, no cashew cheese or coconut-based gelato will ever taste exactly the same as the dairy original. Products made with PerfectDay’s milk proteins, however, taste just like the “real thing”—after all, the proteins are genetically identical.

When they first launched, PerfectDay was trying to do two things: create a supply chain for animal-free dairy components and put a single brand of cow-free milk on supermarket shelves. In November of 2017 co-founder Perumal Gandhi announced on LinkedIn that they would shift course to focus on a B2B model, creating a supply chain for animal-free dairy products and partnering with food and drink companies to bring their technology to market.

And this, in my opinion, is where things start to get really interesting. “Nobody else was working on the supply chain side,” Gandhi told The Spoon. “We started this company to have the largest possible impact on the effects of animal agriculture on our planet, and now we can do that by working with grocery stores across multiple channels. We can be national from Day One.”

 

Animal-free milk has significantly lower environmental impact than cow’s milk.

By joining forces with existing food manufacturers, especially large dairy companies, PerfectDay hopes to alter the system from the inside. With the recent trends for vegan products and milk alternatives, this disruption could prove to be pretty profitable—both for PerfectDay and the planet. And given their investors’ connections with large-scale food and beverage brands, PerfectDay will likely be able to commercialize their “milk” protein technology relatively quickly.

Gandhi said that, while they’re also partnering with smaller, family-owned businesses, they need to team up with big companies to truly change the food industry. He hopes that their lab-grown casein and whey will eventually be like pea protein is today: an ingredient that used to be rare, but is now fairly commonplace in animal-free products.

The path ahead is not without obstacles. PerfectDay will have to convince consumers that cow-free dairy products can taste and function indistinguishably from traditional dairy, and can be produced at a competitive price. They will also have to figure out what their new products will be called.

In fact, the PerfectDay team is currently in talks with the FDA to determine what sort of labeling use for their cow-free dairy. Unlike lab-grown meat, which is fighting Big Beef to be able to use “meat” on their labels, Gandhi said that they want to call their product something other than “milk.” “We’re trying to come up with a nomenclature to show the consumer that this is produced in a new way, without animals,” he said. “If we call it milk then we’re not being transparent.” This makes sense, especially if their products are more expensive; people want to know why they’re paying a premium.

Challenges aside, their technology as a service model has the potential to be hugely successful. By choosing to use a B2B model, PerfectDay will no doubt be able to scale more quickly than with a B2C model. It will be interesting to follow their progress and see how they compare in, say, 5 years with other food tech startups who chose to market directly to consumers.

If the current trend towards animal protein alternatives continues, PerfectDay will no doubt take home some serious (cow-free) cheddar.

This Startup Just Figured Out How to Create the Perfect Vegan Gummy Bear

For hundreds of years, humans have used gelatin to create consumer goods: as a cooking agent, in medicines and cosmetics, and as an essential element of candies like marshmallow and gummy bears.

Trouble is, making gelatin basically involves dropping the skin, bone, and connective tissue of animals into acid or alkaline baths—a process that doesn’t exactly line up with today’s rising standards for cleaner eating.

But don’t give up on those Haribo frog candies yet. Geltor is currently at work engineering a solution for those with a sweet tooth who prefer not to eat acid-dipped horse bones. The company programs microbes so they produce produce collagen—from which gelatin is made—via a fermentation process, leaving out the animal parts altogether.

Geltor grows the microbes in large fermentation tanks in its San Leandro, Calif. facility. The microbes, which naturally produce protein, are given instructions in the form of DNA sequences to create the collagen.

“Recombinant proteins are critical to the post-animal economy,” Geltor CEO and founder Alex Lorestani said in an interview last year. “They are also difficult and expensive to manufacture.” Lorestani believes his company’s platform can help build the necessary proteins for animal-free gelatin at a lower cost than was previously possible. Food manufacturers might then be able to seriously consider gelatin alternatives in their foods that can mimic the form and consistency of the real thing without having to include animal parts in the process.

The gelatin market is right now close to $3 billion. At the same time, however, there’s rising demand for alternative forms of gelatin that don’t rely on animal proteins to produce. It’s not just vegans causing this demand. Those with religious restrictions around food have to steer clear of some gelatins (namely, pork-derived gelatin, which is neither halal nor kosher). And there are concerns about animal diseases making their way into gelatin-based candies (BSE, for example).

While there are some substitutes already available on the market—pectin, agar, guar gum—anyone who’s ever tasted a “vegan gummy bear” knows it’s notoriously difficult to replicate the real deal.

Geltor’s platform addresses this very issue. The big question is whether it can do so at scale.

Lorestani and Co. say they are about five years from producing their gelatin in commercial-sized quantities for food industry buyers, though they reportedly already have a long wait list of potential buyers. The company also has to consider regulatory issues—namely, proving their product is a safe alternative.

Right now there’s not much in the way of competition. That will undoubtedly change over the next five years, since it’s more than just the candy makers need gelatin to make their products. Once the pharmaceutical and personal care companies get onboard, expect to hear lots of noise coming from this corner of the biotech world.

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Plant-Based Food Was Red Hot In 2016

I live in Brooklyn, which means I come across vegan food trucks pretty often. They almost always have something called “faux gras” on the menu: a vegan version of foie gras. Why any vegan wants to pretend she’s eating fatty duck liver is beyond me, but it seems to be a staple of their diet.

It turns out this trend is pretty widespread, and not just among dreadlocked hipsters in Bushwick. Eating sustainably is top of many people’s minds these days, and tech companies are jumping on the opportunity.

Take Impossible Foods, the Silicon Valley sweetheart that has raised more than $150 million to make its veggie burgers that “bleed.” Biochemist and founder Patrick Brown spent around five years and $80 million to develop textured wheat protein, coconut oil, and other plant-based ingredients into the meat patty, and the result is a patty that uses 74 percent water and 95 percent less land, and emits 87 percent less greenhouse gas than its beefy counterpart. In July 2016 celebrity chef and New York City sweetheart David Chang started offering the veggie burger on his menu at Momofuku Nishi, on a first come, first serve basis, of course.

NotCo’s plant-based Mayo, gif via GIPHY

Now there’s news that another company is coming onto the scene. Chilean startup NotCo uses artificial intelligence to help it recreate the flavors and textures of animal-based foods with plants. Its Not Mayo (made with potatoes, peas, basil, and canola oil rather than vegetable oil and eggs) is already available at a major supermarket in Chile, and the company is working on plant-based cheese, yogurt, milk, and (you guessed it) pate. NotCo has also spoken with Coca-Cola, Hershey, and Mars about recreating both soda and milk chocolate with solely plant-based ingredients.

Just think: In a few years you may be able to grab a “bleeding veggie” burger to go, then eat it at home with a plant-based “chocolate milkshake,” illuminated by a lamp made out of mushrooms.