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Wildtype

The Spoon Weekly: Home Delivery Lockers, Shopify For Food Robots

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Are Food Delivery Lockers the Next Must-Have Home Amenity?

Everywhere you look there are delivery lockers. Grocery stores, apartment buildings, office lobbies.

So why not at our home?

If you’re Jeremy High, the idea makes lots of sense. As a luxury home builder in the central California market of Monterey, High works closely with clients spec’ing out features customized around their lifestyles. A recurring ask he hears from his customers is they want a way to ensure that food delivered to their home is safe and kept at the right temperature.

The more he heard this, the more High wondered if a solution existed to help his customers. When he realized there wasn’t, he decided to build it himself.

High’s product, eventually called the Fresh Portal, is a food and package delivery locker built into the side of a home. It has temperature control zones for either hot or cold food and would be accessible both from the outside and inside. It would be managed by an app and integrated with third-party delivery service providers like UberEats or Amazon Fresh so they can access the outside of the locker and insert a delivery.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Read The Top Food Tech Stories of The Week!
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New Podcast!
This week we caught up with Stephen Klein, the CEO of Hyphen, who is trying to democratize restaurant robotics with his modular makeline. Listen at The Spoon or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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A Conversation With Wildtype’s Justin Kolbeck About Building a Cultivated Seafood Company

Wildtype, a San Francisco-based cell-cultivated seafood startup, today announced it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round. The round, the largest to date for a cultivated seafood startup, is being led by private equity firm L Catterton and includes a number of high profile investors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr. (through his Footprint Coalition and Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions) among others.

The new funding comes after the company’s June 2021 launch of its pilot production plant. With its new funding in pocket, Wildtype plans to expand the production capacity of its cultivated salmon and to begin work with culinary and restaurant partners.

I sat down with company CEO Justin Kolbeck to learn more about what he sees in Wildtype’s future. According to Kolbeck, expanding production would not have been possible had it not been able to build a pilot production plant with its $12.5 million Series A.

“The organizing thought there was let’s build a pilot plant on Series A money,” Kolbeck said. “And we built the world’s first operational cultivated seafood pilot plant. Was it intended to be our go-to-market plant? No, the idea was, how could we set something up quickly and modularly, that we could add capacity to, and start learning from as we scaled.”

And according to Kolbeck, they learned a lot.

“If we had waited till now to start building the thing, we wouldn’t have had the data, we wouldn’t have the know-how to inform something like what is a sensible floor plan? Because we wouldn’t have gone through the motions of growing cells, creating the scaffold, seeding the cells on the scaffold, and so on. And now we’ve done that, we’ve learned a heck of a lot.”

You can read and listen to our full conversation with Justin at The Spoon. 

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Food Robots

Hyphen Wants to Be The Shopify for Restaurant Robots

Imagine you’re a culinary student with dreams of owning your own restaurant.

In days past, that journey towards restauranteur would take 10 to 20 years as you cut your teeth, gained experience, and saved enough money.

But imagine if you could build a restaurant today or in the near future leveraging automation and software? There would be no big location remodel and a big loan to pay for it. Instead, you’d use a virtual restaurant model powered by fractional pay-as-you-go food robotics, food ordering apps, and third-party delivery, all allowing you to bring something to market in months instead of a decade?

That’s the kind of world that Stephen Klein wants to build. Klein’s company Hyphen announced this week that they’d raised a $24 million Series A funding round, and so I decided to catch up with him to hear about his vision for the company and the food robotics marketplace.

In short, what Stephen and his co-founder Daniel Fukuba believe they are building a Shopify for restaurant robots.

“Instead of enabling merchants to compete with the likes of Amazon, we’re enabling restaurants to compete with the likes of DoorDash,” said Klein.

According to Klein, the big delivery companies are sucking up data from smaller restaurants and using that to compete with them. He believes if the smaller and regional players – as well as new food entrepreneurs – were able to use Hyphen’s automation technology to scale up new offerings, they’d have a much better chance to compete with the big players.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Alt Protein

Kraft-Heinz and NotCo Form Joint Venture for AI-Powered Food Products

This week Kraft-Heinz and NotCo, the food tech company behind the NotCo brand of plant-based foods, announced they are forming a joint venture to develop a lineup of plant-based food products.

According to the announcement, the new company will leverage the strengths of both companies to develop and bring to market a new line of plant-based products. Called The Kraft Heinz Not Company, it will leverage NotCo’s patented AI platform to develop the food products, while Kraft-Heinz will offer up its production capabilities and formidable sales channels to help bring the products to market.

In joining forces with NotCo, Kraft-Heinz is partnering up with one of the hottest new brands in the fast-growing alt-milk category. The Chilean-based startup has secured distribution deals with a number of premium natural and organic food retailers such as Whole Foods, Sprouts and others since entering the US market in late 2020. The deal also gives the CPG stalwart access to the startup’s patented AI product development platform.

And its this AI platform, which goes by the name Guiseppe, which NotCo cites for its fast success in the US market. Guiseppe works by sifting through huge datasets from the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Library and other sources to find ingredient and processing combinations that would best mimic the elements (flavor, texture, etc.) of real meat or dairy in plant-based analogues. The goal is to find the types of combinations that can create a product that completely mimics traditional meat and dairy — a feat few if any plant-based protein-makers have yet to achieve.

You can read the full story at The Spoon

Betterland Foods Debuts Cow-Free Milk Powered by Perfect Day’s Animal-Identical Protein

This week Perfect Day and betterland foods announced the debut of betterland milk, a new cow-free milk using Perfect Day’s animal-identical whey protein produced via precision fermentation. According to the announcement, the new alt-milk will deliver “the same cooking, whipping, steaming, frothing, and baking functionality” as animal milk.

The partnership with betterland foods follows a familiar playbook for Perfect Day, which has previously gone to market with consumer brands incubated within The Urgent Company (TUC). Like Brave Robot ice cream and Modern Kitchen cream cheese brands, betterland milk will use Perfect Day’s genetically engineered whey (beta-lactoglobulin). However, unlike TUC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Perfect Day, it appears betterland foods is a young startup formed independently of Perfect Day.

That’s not to say that betterland founder Lizanne Falsetto, an experience consumer products founder who previously cofounded thinkThin (a maker of nutrition bars), didn’t create the company with Perfect Day’s cow-free proteins in mind. From the announcement:

“When I saw what Perfect Day founders Ryan and Perumal were doing to cultivate nutritious, more sustainable milk proteins, I felt the pull to not only get back into the industry, but to help build a portfolio of products that taste great, while being better for the planet,” said Falsetto. “That’s when betterland foods was born.”

You can read the full story at The Spoon.

Food & Web3

GourmetNFT Want to Help Culinary Creators Monetize Recipes & Food Experiences Using NFTs

The tried-and-true cookbook is dead. Long live the fractional cookbook.

The movement toward secure, one-of-a-kind recipes and food experiences are fueled by advances and acceptance of the technology surrounding Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). It could be a way to move beyond one-dimensional food presentations and feed the growing number of foodies who want more bells and whistles in their gourmet interactions. And then, there are chefs, who, faced with shrinking margins and the impact of COVID-19 on their businesses, are always on the hunt for new revenue streams.

“It has always baffled me as to why chefs and culinary creators, who are essentially IP creators and artists don’t get royalties unless they get into the whole hassle of writing and publish a cookbook,” Ruth McCartney, part of the team behind GourmetNFT, said in an interview with The Spoon. “When NFTs came along, my mind went to individual recipes and for foodies to be able to curate and compile all of their favorite recipes and cook from their iPads.”

To read the full story, click here!

Smart Kitchen

Haier Patents a Fridge That Cooks Eggs

If you’re like me, you think the refrigerator can use a rethink. Outside of adding a few smart features like Wi-Fi, internal cameras, and touchscreens, the biggest and most expensive appliance in our kitchen hasn’t changed a whole lot in recent decades.

Which is why I was intrigued to see this patent by Haier for a fridge with an internal egg boiler.

The patent, which was issued earlier this month to GE Appliance’s parent company, describes an appliance with an internal system for boiling eggs.

It works like this: The egg boiler is built into the refrigerator door. Once the system controller determines the boiler has eggs loaded into it, it orders hot water into the boiler to cook the eggs. After the eggs are cooked, the cooking chamber is flushed with cooler water to cool the eggs off. An alert is then sent to the user which would open the egg boiler and remove their finished eggs.

To read full story, click on The Spoon. 

Wildtype Raises $100 Million in Series B Funding, Largest Ever for Cell Cultivated Seafood Company

Wildtype, a San Francisco-based cell-cultivated seafood startup, today announced it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round. The round, the largest to date for a cultivated seafood startup, is being led by private equity firm L Catterton and includes a number of high profile investors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr. (through his Footprint Coalition and Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions) among others.

The new funding comes after the company’s June 2021 launch of its pilot production plant. With its new funding in pocket, Wildtype plans to expand the production capacity of its cultivated salmon and to begin work with culinary and restaurant partners.

I sat down with company CEO Justin Kolbeck to learn more about what he sees in Wildtype’s future. According to Kolbeck, expanding production would not have been possible had it not been able to build a pilot production plant with its $12.5 million Series A.

“The organizing thought there was let’s build a pilot plant on Series A money,” Kolbeck said. “And we built the world’s first operational cultivated seafood pilot plant. Was it intended to be our go-to-market plant? No, the idea was, how could we set something up quickly and modularly, that we could add capacity to, and start learning from as we scaled.”

And according to Kolbeck, they learned a lot.

Photo: A Saku Block of Wildtype Cell-Cultivated Salmon

“If we had waited till now to start building the thing, we wouldn’t have had the data, we wouldn’t have the know-how to inform something like what is a sensible floor plan? Because we wouldn’t have gone through the motions of growing cells, creating the scaffold, seeding the cells on the scaffold, and so on. And now we’ve done that, we’ve learned a heck of a lot.”

According to Kolbeck, the company will use the new funding to move to a new facility in the San Francisco market and look to open a new production plant in the Pacific Northwest. But he cautioned that even with its expanded production capacity, the company’s overall output will be extremely limited over the next couple of years as they refine their technology and processes.

“In the early days, we will be a very supply-constrained business,” said Kolbeck. “The seafood market is 350 billion pounds a year, a staggering amount of volume. And, to be on the menu at five or six restaurants is just a drop in the bucket. And I think that’s what we’re talking about for the first year or so as more production comes online.”

Like other cellular agriculture startups, Wildtype’s product rollout requires approval from the US government. In their case, this means the FDA, which oversees the regulatory approval process for cell-cultured seafood. According to Kolbeck, that process has been smooth, and they are hopeful the FDA will soon give them (and others) the green light to begin selling their product to consumers.

As for a specific date for when that will happen, Kolbeck said they don’t have one, and there’s a reason for that.

“I think part of it’s because is it’s entirely bespoke. I think if you were to kind of get under a nondisclosure agreement and look at each (cell-cultivated seafood) company, all of our technologies are pretty significantly different from one to the next. And so I think FDA has to kind of look at them individually.”

If you want to hear my full conversation with Justin Kolbeck, you can hear it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Food Tech News: Lab Grown Chocolate, Lupin Bean Eggs, Cultured Sushi Tasting Room

The summer days are going by fast, but it feels like the rate at which news is breaking in the food tech space is even faster. In this week’s Food Tech News roundup, we have pieces on chocolate being grown in a lab, a tasting room opening in San Franciso for cultured sushi, a new Canadian egg alternative, and a Russian plant-based company’s recent funding round.

Lab-grown chocolate in Switzerland

We live in a chocolate-crazed world, but unfortunately growing cacao for the production of chocolate can cause deforestation and make use of child labor. Some chocolate companies choose to source their cocoa beans from farmers and suppliers that use ethical practices, but this is not always the case. Scientists at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland may have found another option: growing chocolate in a lab. One of the food scientists had the idea to extract cell cultures from cocoa beans to attempt to produce a compound found in chocolate called polyphenols (important for the sensory effects in chocolate). Cocoa beans are cut into quarters and then incubated in a culture medium. After about three weeks a callus grows over the surface of the bean, which can be continuously be replicated. The new material is added to shaking flasks and mixed with suspension culture, and then multiplied in a bioreactor. The cultured cells can then be used to make chocolate.

The scientist said that there is currently no plan for commercial production of lab-grown chocolate. The process is considerably more expensive than conventional chocolate, and they will be continuing to study and compare the production processes of conventional and lab-grown chocolate.

Photo from Wildtype’s Instagram page

Wildtype set to open a cultured sushi tasting room

Wildtype, a cell-ag company focused on seafood, shared that it will be opening a tasting room for cultured sushi in San Francisco. The tasting room will serve as an opportunity to educate consumers on the benefits of cell-based agriculture and provide transparency on this process. Wildtype is focused on creating cultured sushi-grade salmon, and it sources living cells from Pacific salmon. Its pilot plant will soon be capable of producing 50,000 pounds of seafood per year, with a maximum capacity of 200,000 pounds. The tasting room is expected to open in fall 2021.

Nabati launches a plant-based egg product made from lupin beans

Nabati is a Canadian-based plant-based brand, and this week it announced it is filing patents for its plant-based egg product currently being developed. The new egg product will be in liquid form, like Just Egg, and this is the first Canadian-made egg alternative product. Nabati is filing patents for the product in Canada, the United States, and Australia, with the intention to also eventually file in Europe, and China. The egg, called Nabati Plant Eggz, contains no cholesterol, 90 calories per serving, and six grams of protein. Lupin beans and pea protein are the main ingredients used, and the product is both soy and gluten-free. The new egg alternative is expected to be available for purchase sometime later this year.

Russian plant-based brand raises $1.5 million in Series A round

Welldone is a plant-based meat alternative company in Moscow, Russia, and this week it raised $1.5 million in its Series A round. The round was led by Phystech Ventures and Lever VC, and this new capital will be used to increase production and distribution, as well as bring Welldone’s products to new markets. Welldone currently produces alternative cutlets, burger patties, and minced meat made from a base of soy, coconut oil, and cellulose. Plant-based alternatives in Russia can be pricey, and Welldone has set the goal of reaching price parity with meat.