Welcome to the Spoon Weekly. The Spoon Weekly features some of our favorite food tech stories from the past week. Make sure to subscribe to get it delivered directly to your inbox.
Food tech startup BioBetter has developed a novel way to create growth factors for cell-cultivated meat utilizing tobacco plants.
Based in Kiryat Shemona, Israel, the company announced that it has developed a method to create growth factors via molecular farming techniques by essentially turning the tobacco plant into a bioreactor. BioBetter’s technology employs plant cells to produce growth factors instead of more traditional techniques which utilize yeast, bacteria, or CHO in a bioreactor to produce growth factors.
The company’s technology involves identifying the gene of the target protein, cloning it, and transferring it into the tobacco plant. They then select the highest-yielding plants, breed them to develop higher yields, and then ultimately grow and harvest the plants.
As the tobacco plants mature, their cells express the growth factors and store them until harvest. The company then uses a proprietary protein extraction and purification technology that enables it to exploit nearly the entire plant, producing a high purity product at lower overall costs.
To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.
As Meat Prices Rise, Could Plant-Based Meat Become a Value Option for Consumers?
Have you seen the price of meat lately?
It’s not pretty. The average price of a pound of ground beef in the United States has jumped over 20% in the past year and seems to just keep going up.
Meanwhile, the cost of a 12-ounce package of Impossible ground has continued to drop and is showing up at under $6 at some retail establishments, about the same price of a pound of extra lean ground beef.
Not quite price parity…yet. But as Impossible and other plant-based meat providers continue to ramp up volume, it’s worth asking: when meat alternatives reach price parity and, eventually, sell at a discount to animal meat, could customers start reaching for plant-based meat to save a buck?
You can read the full post at The Spoon.
Here Are Four Ways Starbucks Could Get Into The NFT Business
Starbucks is getting into the NFT business.
That’s according to company CEO Howard Schultz, who recently held a company town hall to discuss what the company’s plans are for the coming year. Schultz, who retook the reigns of the coffee giant this week, said the company would be in the NFT business before the end of the calendar year.
“If you look at the companies, the brands, the celebrities, the influencers that are trying to create a digital NFT platform and business, I can’t find one of them that has the treasure trove of assets that Starbucks has, from collectibles to the entire heritage of the company,” Schultz said.
While it can often be cringe-inducing when CEOs talk about new digital formats – something Schultz acknowledged by admitting he’s not a digital native – he’s right that the company has many assets that could be tokenized and create new ways to engage with its customers.
You can read the full post here.
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Smart Kitchen
Holy Smokes: FirstBuild’s Arden Indoor Smoker Hits Crowdfunding Target in Two Minutes
FirstBuild, GE Appliances’ innovation arm, has launched its latest crowdfunding campaign, and this one looks like a potential home run.
The same group that brought you the Opal ice machine and the Paragon induction cooktop are now bringing an indoor pellet smoker called Arden to market via a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. The Arden can smoke up to two racks of ribs at a time or a small brisket, all inside your home without setting your fire alarms off.
The Arden uses a smoke-elimination technology that requires no additional filters to clean or replace. According to FirstBuild, the technology was first developed for GE’s smart hearth oven and has now been incorporated into the Arden.
The unit uses the same pellets used with other smokers. Once the smoke is pulled out of the chamber and into the smoke eliminator, it eliminates all smoke and just CO2 and water are exhausted into the kitchen. This allows users to sit the Arden on a countertop and smoke a slab of meat without any special venting.
To read the full story, head here.
Lomi, Unboxed: A First Look at The Lomi Smart Food Waste Composter
I find food tech fascinating – especially the products and solutions that have a shot at fixing a real problem in our food system. Tackling issues like food waste, food insecurity, nutrition, and accessibility, technology can give us the tools to change habits and systems.
But, I admit I haven’t always adopted tech in my own home that has made a huge change in our own food habits outside of our beloved sous vide, and nothing that stuck when it came to food waste. With growing kids, our grocery bills keep increasing, but I throw out more food on busy weeks than I’d ever like to admit.
Composting at home has never been an easy or…neat endeavor; we’ve tried several times, using smaller receptacles to collect food scraps to bring out to a larger pile. But no matter what, we abandoned our efforts for lack of time and patience. One year, we even subscribed to a service that would drop off nutrient-dense compost soil for us to use in our vegetable garden. We paid someone for THEIR broken-down food scraps — and it turns out, nutrient-rich, locally harvested, hand-delivered compost is not cheap.
To read the full story, head here.
Smart Kitchen Platform Company Drop Changes Name to Fresco
Drop dropped Drop.
The startup that started with a connected scale eight years ago announced it has a new brand identity. The company is now called Fresco, a name which “(reflects) the company’s priority to connect dots in the kitchen between appliances, home cooks and recipes to make cooking effortless,” said the announcement.
Fresco CEO Ben Harris said that the company needed a new brand given its evolution beyond its hardware roots.
“Drop was a great name for a physical product, but we pivoted to become a smart kitchen platform, providing end-to-end solutions to make appliances connected, from firmware development to IoT expertise and an app that pulls all the appliances together,” Harris said. “As a result, we needed a brand that better represented this.”
Drop is part of a cohort of smart kitchen startups that offer software and connectivity solutions to power kitchen appliances and help consumers cook and plan meals. While some of its peers have increasingly focused on shoppable recipes and looked to help power online grocery integrations, Drop has doubled down on expanding its solutions and increasing its partner roster in the connected kitchen and guided cooking space.
To read the full story, head here.
Future Food
Plant-Based Eggs Starting to Crack Open The European Market
Here in the US, a version of a plant-based egg from Eat Just, Inc. has been on the market since 2013, starting with an earlier version from when the company was Hampton Creek. The company’s current product, which uses its flagship mung bean formulation, began selling in the US market in 2019.
But if you wanted to try JUST Egg in Europe, you were out of luck.
That’s about to change. That’s because the company just got approval for its mung bean protein from the European Commission. The approval, which follows an earlier greenlight last fall by the European Food Safety Authority, paves the way for the introduction of JUST Egg to the European market by the fourth quarter of 2022.
That’s not the only good news if you are looking for an egg alternative in Europe. Berlin-based Perfeggt has been working on an egg alternative that derives its protein punch from fava beans, and is starting to ship in Germany.
Read the full post here.
Israel’s Vanilla Vida Wants to Expand and Improve the World’s Favorite Flavor
Here’s a fun fact: Did you know that vanilla is the world’s most popular flavor? In addition, how about the idea that 95% of all vanilla sold is synthetic, generally made from an oil or lab-developed chemical compound. Sounds like a supply and demand issue for a real deal vanilla pod.
Vanilla Vida has done its homework and sees an opportunity to tickle the universal taste buds by using technology and data to produce large quantities of top-quality vanilla anywhere in the world. Madagascar and Indonesia are the top crop producers but face issues with uncertain weather, quality control issues, and a long drying process. With proof of concept completed, Vanilla Vida CEO Oren Zilberman is ready to expand beyond Israel and launch climate-controlled farms worldwide.
Zilberman’s experience as a VC is instrumental in the success of his new company. “When you are building a startup, you are always looking about what is the chance it can do a major impact and some change in the world and at the same time, have a really good business,” the company’s CEO said in a recent interview with The Spoon. He also explained that his experience led him not to want to develop something new or go into an unproven segment. By expanding the opportunity for a wildly popular product, such as vanilla, Vanilla Vida can hit the ground running instead of requiring a great deal of marketing to drive customer awareness.
Read the full post here
Food Robots
Chili’s is Trialing a Sidewalk Delivery Robot From Serve Robotics
Hankering for some Chili’s but don’t want to jump in your car? It might not be long before that grilled chicken and bowl of chili arrive at your front door via sidewalk robot.
That’s because Chili’s parent company Brinker has been secretly piloting a trial with sidewalk delivery startup Serve Robotics and is evaluating the possibility of a wider rollout.
The first hint of the Brinker-Serve pilot came via a small mention last week in an article in a Dallas publication about the company’s drone delivery trials with Flytrex. Both Brinker and Serve have since confirmed to The Spoon that they are running an early stage sidewalk delivery pilot but were not ready to discuss further details of a wider rollout.
“We can confirm Serve is working with Brinker International to roll out robotic delivery for Chili’s customers,” a Serve spokesperson told the Spoon. “We will have more to share once service is launched.”
To read the full story, click here!
Watch This Video of RoboBurger, a Robot Burger Vending Machine, Cooking Up Burgers
Over the past couple of years, there’s been no shortage of robotic vending machines cooking up everything from salads to bowl food to ramen to pizza. But, what we haven’t seen – until earlier this week – is a machine that makes the cornerstone meal of the American fast food marketplace, the hamburger.
The RoboBurger, a robotic burger vending machine, arrived at its first location in a New Jersey shopping mall. The machine, a fully autonomous machine that makes a complete burger in minutes, showed up at the Newport Centre mall in Jersey City, New Jersey. The box measures 12 square feet, plugs into a 220-volt wall socket, has a built-in refrigerator and an automated griddle and cleaning system. The self-contained machine holds up to 50 frozen burger patties and cooks each burger one at a time.
You can read full post here.
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