- FoodTech Weekly
- Posts
- FoodTech Weekly #125 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #125 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
December 02, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #125
Hi there,
I recently had the chance to eat cultivated meat for the very first time. It was a bit of landmark event for me and I'm still pinching myself. More on that below.
European vertical farming behemoth Infarm just announced they will lay off over half its workforce (around 500 people). But we've known for some time that the sector was heading for the 'trough of disillusionment.'
FoodHack has published a very helpful list of 200+ impact angels investing in FoodTech startups. I was included on the list, meaning my LinkedIn inbox blew up. RIP, dear inbox. Anyways, here's the actual list.
Oh, and if you haven't figured out your holiday gifts for me (or someone you truly care about), Juicy Marbles just launched its loin in Europe. Just saying.
This week's rundown:
U.K. startup BigSis landed funding for sterile insect technique that cuts the need for pesticides
Italian researchers developed food-grade, edible sensor that can detect whether a frozen product has been thawed and refrozen
The French baguette made the UNESCO heritage list
Let's go!
Conversations
I first met Ido Savir, founder of SuperMeat, in early 2018. Back then, his startup was one of relatively few companies in the world working on developing and bringing to market cultivated meat. Eating cultivated meat has been on my bucket list for several years, but I never had the opportunity — until last month. During my recent trip to Israel, I wanted to catch up with Ido. He invited me to the SuperMeat HQ in Ness Ziona south of Tel Aviv — and they had prepared a tasting for me of some of their products. The company has an in-house test kitchen / restaurant called The Chicken (some cool videos here), which looks like a regular bar / restaurant; one of the sides has glass walls towards the pilot production facility, allowing visitors to see where their food comes from.
Ido in the The Chicken restaurant
I was offered to try a sausage, and a chicken burger. The sausage consisted of 20% cultivated meat cells, and 80% plant-proteins — ‘about 4-5 ingredients in total’, Ido said. The chicken burger had a 30% / 70% split between cultivated and plant-based proteins. Ido explained that they’ve tried different inclusion rates for the cultivated meat, and discovered that different applications work best with different inclusion rates as well as proportions between fat to muscle.
My verdict? The sausage tasted just like a regular meat sausage. It was delicious. The chicken burger was a little dry, but according to SuperMeat they’ve adapted the taste according to Israeli consumer preferences and expectations. For me, eating cultivated meat was a major moment — a moon landing event of sorts. Decoupling meat consumption from the slaughter of animals is a big thing. Keep in mind that when Dr. Mark Post presented the first cultivated burger back in 2012, a single burger patty cost over $300,000 — and today the production cost has dropped to the level where an average guy like me is able to eat it. That’s exciting.
Tasting at SuperMeat
So how is the product made? SuperMeat sources non-GMO stem cells that are fed a proprietary feed (the main cost driver in the entire process) and can then be matured into e.g. fat, muscle, connective tissue, liver — anything really. The company does the manufacturing, and the production is free from antibiotics and FBS (fetal bovine serum). The entire process is transparent and enables full traceability from cell to finished product.
SuperMeat expects to be able to start selling in 2024, provided they first receive the necessary regulatory approvals. The goal is to be B2B; to sell the cultivated meat ingredient to e.g. plant-based and other brands that want to improve the taste and nutrition profiles of their own products. ‘We’re starting to diversify the different types of products we can produce’, Ido explained. In terms of price point, Ido expects the first products to hit the shelves with the SuperMeat ingredient to be priced about the same as products from (plant-based brands) Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.
While technological, regulatory, and consumer acceptance obstacles remain, I really think cultivated meat is happening. That’s game-changing, and that’s exciting. And it’s thanks to entrepreneurs and innovators such as Ido Savir and his team at SuperMeat.
Ido Savir
Noteworthy
U.K. AgTech startup BigSis scored £4.5M in fresh funding (in a round led by Regenerative Ventures), for its solution to combat insects in fields. The company grows sterile insects and releases them in farmers' fields. When the sterile males mate with wild female insects, they produce no offspring, and pest populations collapse. This helps reduce the need for chemical pesticides (h/t DigitalFoodLab). In related news, check out this fascinating WIRED article on hacking insect mating signals via pheromones.
Italian startup Babaco Market plucked €6.3M in Series A funding, in a round led by United Ventures of Milan. Babaco runs a grocery market and delivery service for ugly produce that would otherwise go to waste.
Very Dairy, the brand launched by U.S. precision fermentation dairy company Perfect Day, is launching its animal-free milk brand in Singapore supermarkets. The company also announced that it has acquired India's Sterling Biotech Ltd, the sixth largest manufacturer of gelatin in the world, for $78.1M at a bankruptcy auction. With the Sterling Biotech acquisition, Perfect Day doubles its production capacity.
Israeli nutraceutical startup Novella has developed a platform that can produce botanical ingredients -- in bioreactors -- without the need to grow the entire plant. The final product is a powder made of whole-cell plant tissues with an increased concentration of active ingredients.
Wildtype of the U.S., which produces salmon cultivated from cells, has received a $7M investment from South Korean SK Group, bringing its total funding north of $120M.
Image: Wildtype
Cultimate Foods of Berlin has taken in €700K in a pre-seed round from e.g. Big Idea Ventures; the company grows animal fat, which can help make e.g. plant-based meat products more realistic.
Italian researchers at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia have developed a food-grade, edible sensor that can detect whether a frozen product has been thawed and refrozen. The researchers hope the new sensor will help contribute to higher food safety levels.
Nestlé plans to stop marketing e.g. candy, icecream, and sugar-sweetened to kids under age 16.
A 26-storey pig skyscraper in China has been finalized; at full capacity, it will host and slaughter over 1M pigs per year.
MeliBio, which makes honey without bees, has secured $2.2M in additional investment, and is partnering with Narayan Foods to launch its products in 75K European stores under the Better Foodie brand, starting in 2023.
MeliBio
AgFunder has published its 'India 2022 AgriFood Startup Investment Report'. It shows that Indian agrifood startup investments increased 119% year-over-year to $4.6B in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2022. FarmTech deals were 60% of the total.
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
LRF Ventures (Sweden) is hiring an Investment Manager... GFI Europe is looking for a Science and Tech Research Support Manager... Believer Meats (Israel) is recruiting a FP&A Business Partner... BIOMILQ (U.S.) wants to bring on a Director of Business Operations... Chunk Foods (Israel / U.S.) has a number of open roles.
Shoutout to Azeem Azhar, who just published the 400th edition of his Sunday newsletter. To stay on top of tech trends and what they mean for the world, subscribe to his newsletter the Exponential View here.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
The French baguette was just added to the UNESCO heritage list, which was announced a few days ago. The French delegation to UNESCO cheered by holding up the loafs in the air.
More ooh-la-la: A man in France who was fired in 2015 for not being fun, sued the company and just won in the country's highest-ranking court (h/t Marie Dollé).
Researchers at the University of Connecticut have released a new report on food marketing targeted to Black and Hispanic consumers, which found that e.g. just 19 companies are responsi for some 75% of all food and bev TV ads, and 82% of the marketing is targeted to Black consumers. The proportion of junk food ads targeting Black and Hispanic consumers is also increasing.
I've shared this before, but it's worth reposting: There's a New England Journal of Medicine article showing that there's a close, linear correlation between chocolate consumption per capita and the number of Nobel laureates per 10M persons in a total of 23 countries.
I love you.
Daniel
- - -
This issue was produced while listening to Ho Hey by The Lumineers. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter. And here's the Appetizer which I co-host. Did your brilliant friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.