Israeli food tech company Yo Egg is launching its vegan sunny-side-ups and poached eggs in US retail, starting with stores in Los Angeles, before a nationwide move next year.
A year after making its foodservice debut in Los Angeles, Yo Egg is moving into retail with its vegan fried and poached eggs, starting with the west coast.
Headquartered in Los Angeles, the startup will introduce its plant-based eggs in the city through a distribution deal with Whitestone Natural Foods. This will mean its products – which are priced at $6.99 for a four-pack – will be available in the freezers of Hanks Organic, Besties Vegan Paradise, Rainbow Acres Natural Foods, Follow Your Heart Market and PlantX (XMarket Venice), among others.
The company then plans to expand into California, New York and eventually nationwide next year. “We’re starting small with individual operators in the better-for-you natural foods category,” Yo Egg CEO Eran Groner told AgFunderNews. “Then we’re targeting regional players such as Bristol Farms, before going after accounts such as Sprouts and Whole Foods.”
Pondering co-manufacturing to scale up vegan egg production
Courtesy: Yo Egg
Founded in 2021 by Groner and chef Yosefa Ben Cohen – who had developed the eggs with both restaurants and home cooks in mind – Yo Egg is the world’s first startup creating vegan fried and poached eggs, complete with runny yolks.
Unlike other plant-based egg companies, which either produce a powdered version or liquid eggs to make omelettes and scrambles, Yo Egg focuses on pre-prepped frozen sunny-side-up and poached eggs that can be boiled or fried. Made from a base of sunflower oil and chickpea and soy protein, the eggs leverage the startup’s patent-pending tech for whites and yolks (which are sealed using alginate, a seaweed extract).
The egg white system enables Yo Egg to produce the ideal structure for each format, and can be fried, poached or boiled. “It’s all about the phasing, timing and temperatures, not just the recipe, so it would be very hard to reverse-engineer it,” Groner explained.
Meanwhile, the company can make 50,000 yolks each day with a single piece of equipment. “In a room that’s 200 square feet, we can have four such machines, so that’s 200,000 yolks per day, which – if you do the math – is already a scaled egg farm in the United States if you have 200,000 birds laying eggs,” he noted.
Yo Egg currently has a pilot facility in North Hollywood, with which it can already compete with the prices of market leader Just Egg, whose scale is way higher (it recently announced the sale of the equivalent of 500 million eggs). But Groner, who said the company is hoping to bring retail prices down to $5.99 per pack, floated the idea of using a co-manufacturer too. “We would make the egg whites and the yolks and the co-manufacturer would form the egg, and we provide the plug-and-play equipment for that process. They form the egg and then they cook it, freeze it and package it,” he said.
“This way, we maintain the IP, the recipe and the protocol of mixing, and the yolk manufacturing using our specialised equipment,” he added, stating that after line testing with “a fairly big manufacturer”, the eggs came out better than what Yo Egg’s own equipment can deliver.
Yo Egg’s foodservice-first strategy
Courtesy: Yo Egg
Yo Egg, which has raised over $5M in funding, made its debut in US foodservice last February, targeting brunch spots in Los Angeles, including Real Food Daily, Flore Vegan, Swingers Diner, Coyote Grill, and Loma Linda’s Vegan District Asian Eatery.
This was followed by a nationwide launch in April, with Yo Egg appearing on the menu at restaurants like Coletta and Beyond Sushi, and even the offices of Google. Its poached and sunny-side-up offerings are also part of menu options at fast-casual chain Veggie Grill (now owned by Next Level Burger).
This foodservice-first approach is a tried-and-tested strategy in the plant-based sector. Oatly, for example, debuted in the US through specialty coffee shops, with word of mouth and barista approval stamps propelling it to widespread popularity before its retail launch. A similar route to market was taken by plant-based meat giant Impossible Foods, which has an outstanding foodservice record and was specified by Groner as a reference point for Yo Egg.
“There are definitely advantages in launching a brand in foodservice before you go into retail. It’s easier to iterate quickly in foodservice, get rapid feedback, and iterate again. It doesn’t work like that in retail,” he explained. “What people like is that we’re going after every format of eggs. We’re starting with fried and poached eggs and we’re planning to launch a patty next quarter, where we already have major accounts signed up. This will be followed by hard-boiled eggs later this year, and a liquid yolk product next year.”
Yo Egg will hope these innovations allow it to take a large slice of the vegan egg market, which is currently dominated by Just Egg (it represents 99% of all sales in the sector). Other retail players include Follow Your Heart, Hodo, Simply Eggless, WunderEggs and Neat Egg, alongside private-label offerings from Target and Kroger – but succeeding in this space is tough. Plant-based eggs make up just 0.5% of the total US egg market, as of 2022. In terms of units, while plant-based eggs grew by sevenfold between 2019-22 to reach 10 million sales, animal-based egg sales were around 2.3 billion.
Additionally, the number of American households buying plant-based eggs was just 2% in 2022 – but the sector has outpaced dollar sales growth for animal-derived eggs, growing by 348% versus 67% for the latter from 2019-22, albeit with a much smaller base. So there has definitely been progress, but there’s room for a lot of progress too, given the scale of the conventional egg industry.
“Consumers like the fact that animals are not involved and it’s better for the environment, but what really drives consumption is you have a third of the saturated fat, zero cholesterol, and less sodium [compared to chicken eggs],” explained Groner. “And foodservice operators love the fact that finally, they have a plant-based option on their menu that they can be proud of. It’s a surprising, innovative, versatile product.”
Disney+, the world’s third-largest streaming service, will next month release a new Korean thriller series based on cultivated meat, with a new poster confirming the novel protein’s central role in the story.
The Disney+ Original K-drama will feature Ju Ji-hoon (Lucifer, Kingdom) and Han Hyo-joo (Dong Yi, Moving) in the lead roles, with the storyline blending mystery, technology and ethical dilemmas. The teaser poster of the series showcases a piece of cultivated steak branded with the letters ‘BF’ (for Blood Free) under a 3D printer, with tubes attached to both sides of it.
On the Korean poster, the tagline reads: “Will you join us in this age of artificially cultured meat?” It’s accompanied with a caption stating: “Conspiracies, conflict and cultured meat. One brilliant woman and her protector face the dangers of a #BloodFree future.”
Cultivated meat forms the backdrop of K-drama Blood Free
Courtesy: Disney+
The 10-episode series, previously called Dominant Species, is a suspense thriller set in 2025. It revolves around Yoon Ja-yu (played by Han), who is the CEO of BF Group, a biotech company that has pioneered cultivated meat development. While the firm dominates the market share, Yoon is facing doubts and scrutiny both publicly and internally.
Ju, meanwhile, plays Woo Chae-woon, a former Naval Academy graduate and soldier and current bodyguard who is haunted by past failures. He is chasing the mastermind behind a terrorist attack, and after following several different leads, he approaches Yoon – also a survivor of the attack – to offer protection.
The cast includes Lee Hee-jun, who portrays prime minister Seon Woo-jae, who wants to take control of BF Group. Lee Moo-saeng plays the role of Onsan, Yoon’s friend of 20 years and a physiologist who developed the cell culture tech as a co-founder of BF Group. He developed the technology alongside bioengineer Kim Shin-gu (played by Kim Sang-ho).
They are joined by Park Ji-yeon, who portrays the role of a lawyer and head of planning at BF Group, and Jeon Seok-ho, who plays an IT expert at the firm. The series is written by Lee Soo-yeon, who was behind the acclaimed 2017 series Stranger (an adaptation of Forest of Secrets), and directed by Park Cheol-hwan, who worked alongside Lee on the 2022 series Grid.
Cultivated meat in pop culture, and the importance of accurate representation
It’s not the first time these proteins have been on screen – it was the subject of the 2020 documentary Meat the Future, a Jane Goodall-narrated film that chronicled the story of Californian cultivated chicken producer Upside Foods (which is one of only two companies currently allowed to all cultivated meat in the US).
Cultivated meat has been represented in onscreen fiction too. In 2009, the satirical workplace comedy Better Off Ted attempted to create “beef without cows” in a lab in the episode titled Heroes. However, it also highlighted the risks of misrepresenting cultivated meat to a wider public – the show’s food taster said the meat tasted like “despair”.
It perpetuated two common perceptions of cultivated meat that remain to this day, and to the industry’s detriment. First, the idea that cultivated meat tastes bad or – in Better Off Ted’s case – just plain sad could be off-putting to people who are already unsure about these novel foods. And second, it associated cultivated meat with the ‘lab-grown’ moniker, despite the sector’s attempts to move away from it.
This is because, at scale, cultivated meat is – like most foods – grown in bioreactors in a production facility, not labs. These cultivators are similar to the setup of a brewery. This makes ‘lab-grown’ a misleading term, and it’s one that carries the most uninviting tone to consumers. Research has constantly shown that consumers find ‘lab-grown’ to be the least favourable term (more so than even ‘artificial meat’), with 75% of Americans finding it unappealing.
Blood Free has similar connotations, with the English poster reading: “Out lab-grown future has arrived.” While the representation of cultivated meat in popular media is a significant way to increase awareness of the term, it’s important that the circumstances around it – the terrorist attacks and the doubts faced by the CEO of a cultivated meat company – don’t turn consumers away from these foods, which are vital for a climate-friendly future.
South Korea’s attitudes and support for cultivated meat
Courtesy: TissenBioFarm
The news of the release comes shortly after South Korea established a framework for the regulatory approval of cultivated meat, with the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety now accepting applications from cultivated meat producers. Several local startups are expected to file dossiers in the coming weeks, ushering in a new era for meat in the country.
The process takes up to 270 days and costs ₩45M ($34,000), with startups needing to file a comprehensive application to be considered safe for human consumption and allowed to sell their products.
Consumer surveys have displayed a willingness to give these products a shot. A 1,100-person poll by the APAC Society for Cellular Agriculture in October found that 90% of South Koreans are open to trying cultivated meat at least once (though only 5% indicated they’d eat it regularly). Moreover, 39% were supportive of cultivated meat being sold at supermarkets and restaurants (with 14- to 29-year-olds leading the way), and just 10% were opposed to its commercialisation.
In fact, 19% of Koreans said they would prefer cultivated meat over plant proteins. But price remains a significant barrier, with 65% citing it as the most important factor for eating these products, followed by taste and texture (62%). This is reflected in the fact that despite two-thirds of Korean households spending up to ₩50,000 ($23-38) each week on meat products, only 12% would be willing to pay ₩1,000-3,000 (75 cents to $2) more per 100g of cultivated meat.
Calisa Lim, project manager at APAC-SCA, told Green Queen at the time: “We need combined synergies and efforts through investors, contract manufacturers, established stakeholders, startups, and government bodies to facilitate a thriving ecosystem for cultivated meat and seafood in South Korea.”
Can Blood Free make Koreans – and the 150 million people who subscribe to Disney+ globally – hungry for cultivated meat?
Californian cultivated meat producer Eat Just has paused its Singapore operations, three months after Huber’s Bistro stopped selling its Good Meat chicken. The production facility set to open in Q3 last year has also been shut, as the company says it’s reevaluating its strategy in Asia.
2024 will mark the four-year anniversary of Eat Just’s historic regulatory approval for the sale of cultivated meat in Singapore. Since then, the Californian startup received clearance in the US too, and restaurants began selling its Good Meat chicken in both countries.
However, you can’t find Eat Just’s chicken – or any cultivated meat, for that matter – in restaurants anymore. In Singapore, its product is no longer available at Huber’s Bistro, which was the only restaurant offering the chicken last year.
And now, it has emerged that Eat Just has pressed pause on its operations in the island nation, with the company telling the Straits Times it’s reassessing its Asia strategy. “We’re evaluating various processing conditions, the unit economics, and a larger strategic approach to producing in Asia,” a spokesperson said.
The Singapore newspaper has revealed that Eat Just is no longer producing in Singapore, with the $61M Good Meat manufacturing plant in Bedok – which was slated for a Q3 2023 launch – seemingly not in operation anymore, while the $120M factory for Just Egg in the city’s Pioneer area also cancelled.
Manufacturing facilities shuttered, but products to return ‘very soon’
Courtesy: Eat Just
The Strait Times visited Bedok Food City, the site of Good Meat’s 30,000 sq ft facility – last week, but employees from other companies in the building said Eat Just’s two units on the ground floor were closed. They added that these had rarely opened for about six months. One of the closed units had boxes full of air-purifying equipment sitting outside, and the other had benches piled up.
The newspaper said a separate commercial plant that previously manufactured Good Meat’s chicken is not producing for the company anymore either. Eat Just said there was “no firm timeline” on when the Bedok facility would be operational, noting that the startup had “produced and paused and produced and paused” since it began selling the chicken.
However, they added: “We’re planning to produce at least twice as much in Singapore this year than any year before.”
Eat Just had announced that it had broken ground on a plant protein facility for its vegan Just Egg product in March 2022, stating that it would take about two years to complete. But when asked about progress on this, the spokesperson said: “We are not building a facility in Pioneer.”
Meanwhile, the company indicated that Good Meat will soon be back at Huber’s Bistro, which offered the chicken as part of skewers and salads. The spokesperson said the products will return to the eatery “very soon”, once the supply is ready.
The foodservice pause isn’t just in Singapore – Good Meat used to be available at the José Andrés-owned Washington, DC restaurant China Chilcano, but the eatery passed reservations for its tasting menu featuring the cultivated chicken back in September. “The most important activities for GOOD Meat are related to process development and lowering costs long-term. We are focusing our efforts and resources on those tasks at this time,” Eat Just’s global communications director, Carrie Kabat, told Green Queen last month.
Eat Just looks to overcome challenges for a profitable 2024
Courtesy: Eat Just
This is the latest in a growing list of challenges faced by Eat Just over the last year. As the company – which has raised over $850M to date – aims for profitability in 2024, it is in the middle of multiple legal battles with suppliers and manufacturers over non-payment.
Eat Just has been involved in at least seven lawsuits since 2019 – and while it has settled some of them, its case with bioreactor manufacturer ABEC is still ongoing. The latter sued the alternative protein startup for $100M, which included payments for changes to the scope of the work, alongside unpaid invoices. But last month, Eat Just filed a counterclaim alleging that it was ABEC that breached contractual terms.
The Californian startup also shut down production on the facility that was going to house the ABEC bioreactors, which was announced in May 2022. Speaking to Green Queen in September, Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick said: “In the past few years we have invested a lot of capital in the design and engineering for a large-scale cultivated meat facility, knowing we would have to raise additional capital to complete the rest of the facility.”
He added: “Because of market conditions, we found ourselves in a position where it became very challenging to raise that additional capital. At this point, we’re re-assessing how we think about a large-scale facility in a more realistic way – which will still be very challenging.”
But conversely, the company has made several strides to ensure it can break even this year. The news about its Singapore operations comes a week after Eat Just announced it had sold the equivalent of 500 million eggs since Just Egg’s launch in 2019. And in January, it relaunched its cult-favourite Just Mayo and Ranch lines.
“Challenges, doubts, and unforeseen hurdles have not stopped Eat Just from continuing to drive innovation in plant-based foods to give consumers better choices and more ways to change the food system for the better every time they sit down to a meal,” the brand told Green Queen during the launch.
Cultivated meat is still progressing in Singapore and elsewhere
Courtesy: Eat Just
It shows how it’s not all doom and gloom for cultivated meat. Kabat confirmed that Good Meat planned to resume tastings in the US this year, as did Upside Foods, the only other company to have the regulatory greenlight for cultivated meat in the US.
And as for Singapore, the country still remains a hotbed for alternative protein in Asia – it was the world’s first to approve these novel proteins for sale, and it’s now expected to grant the next clearance in the sector, with Dutch company Meatable anticipating the go-ahead by Q2. This would make it the first European startup – and first cultivated pork producer – to be allowed to sell cultivated meat anywhere in the world. France’s Vital Meat and Israel’s Aleph Farms (which is already approved in its home country) have also filed dossiers in Singapore for their products.
Additionally, last month, the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore ruled that cultivated meat can be halal under specific circumstances. It was followed by South Korea inviting applications for safety assessments of cultivated meat for regulatory approval. Meanwhile, Australia’s Vow Food has advanced into a public consultation process for its cultivated quail in Australia and New Zealand, before it will enter a 60-day review period for ministers.
“Transforming the global food system is a relay race, not a sprint,” said Mirte Gosker, managing director of alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute APAC. “With more than 150 companies operating in the cultivated meat sector worldwide, progress is bound to come in fits and starts, as has been the case in clean energy, electric vehicles, and other emerging technologies.
“What matters most is that cultivated meat as a category succeeds, because there is no path to limiting global warming to 1.5°C without reimagining the way meat gets to our plates.”
In what would be a major step towards the regulatory approval and commercialisation of cultivated meat, the UK is aiming to begin safety testing by this autumn, with the Food Standards Agency hoping to win government funding for the lab facilities.
It was in August that Israeli cultivated meat producer Aleph Farms announced the submission of its dossier for regulatory approval from the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA). Five months later, the company became just the third in the world to receive the all-clear to sell cultivated meat – but this was in its home country of Israel, not the UK.
However, Aleph Farms may be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel soon, with the FSA reportedly planning to start conducting safety tests for cultivated meat this autumn, according to the Grocer. The FSA is in talks with food companies and has issued a call for scientists to work alongside to pilot a ‘sandbox’ testing project, which will enable them to assess the novel proteins for human consumption.
The FSA is seeking government funding for the labs that would be used to conduct the tests, with a bid to win financing through a £5M scheme announced by UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt last autumn.
“Following the chancellor’s announcement late last year that new regulatory sandboxes would be created to help support transformative innovations in emerging sectors, the Food Standards Agency has signalled its interest in creating a sandbox environment for cultivated meat,” Linus Pardoe, UK policy manager at alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe – which has previously called on the chancellor to provide the FSA with a £30M injection – told Green Queen.
Slow post-Brexit regulation drives UK producers elsewhere
Courtesy: Hoxton Farms
The FSA still follows pre-Brexit rules set out by the European Food Safety Agency, which classes cultivated meat as a novel food that requires premarket authorisation. These are said to be the strictest regulations around food safety in the world, and so far, no alternative protein company has received the go-ahead to sell cultivated meat.
Publicly, Aleph Farms is the only one to have applied in Europe – though both filings were in countries outside the EU (Switzerland and the UK). Dutch company Meatable has announced it will soon apply in the Netherlands, after it cleared the route for public tastings of cell-cultured meat.
In the UK, there was talk of fast-tracking the approval of these foods through a bilateral deal with Israel, with government and FSA officials visiting the country to taste cultivated meat and see how it’s regulated in the Middle Eastern nation. But this was just before its conflict with Hamas began, which has likely derailed any such deals for the time being.
But now, even as many EU countries ban or attempt to restrict these proteins, cultivated meat regulation could be preparing for a shakeup in its former member nation. The FSA will next month present plans for an overhaul of novel foods (among other products) in its board meeting next month, in the face of criticism that it has been too slow to capitalise on post-Brexit freedom in this area.
Speaking to Green Queen in August, Pardoe warned that the UK could risk losing momentum in the regulation race if it didn’t ramp up investment in the sector – countries like the US and Singapore had already approved cultivated meat for sale by then, and the Netherlands and Israel were making good progress. The prophecy has come true, with British cultured pork fat company Hoxton Farms considering a move to the US in order to speed up the regulatory green light.
“We’re very confident we will get approval from the US FDA [Food and Drug Administration], so we’re considering building our first manufacturing facility outside the UK,” CEO Ed Steele told the Financial Times this week. “That’s not what we want to do, but we need to do what’s best for the company.”
The Grocer has previously reported that an FSA-commissioned report by Deloitte in 2023 found that speeding up of novel foods regulation could help the UK meet its carbon reduction plans (the country has earmarked 2050 as its net-zero target). A GFI report from last year found that cultivated meat can reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of meat production by 92%.
“We are actively engaging with CCP [cell-cultured product] companies to understand their novel technologies and understand how we can support innovation,” FSA deputy director of food policy Natasha Smith told the Grocer. “Engagement is ongoing, and we are continually speaking to industry about how to best manage applications and to set expectations about the approval process.”
Increased funding supports cultivated meat progress in the UK
Courtesy: Aleph Farms
“Should it receive funding, the FSA will be able to use the sandbox to further develop its understanding of the key food safety considerations and nutritional value of cultivated meat, helping it implement the UK’s robust regulatory framework and build consumer confidence in this food,” said Pardoe.
Regulatory sandboxes involve companies to test new concepts – in this case, cultivated meat – with real customers under the supervision of a regulator, as designed by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority.
“If funding is granted, we can create a team in the FSA that works with the cell-cultivated product industry to agree on what should be included within their applications, address complex regulatory questions, and provide pre-application support to CCP companies,” said the FSA’s Smith.
In August, GFI Europe urged the UK government to invest £390M in alternative proteins between 2025 and 2030, while a report by the Green Alliance suggested that, with the right combination of targeted investments and regulation, this industry could be worth £6.8B annually and create 25,000 British jobs by 2035.
In that vein, earlier this month, government body UK Research and Innovation made an investment through its Technical Missions fund for University of Oxford cultivated meat researcher Hua Ye. And fellow state agency Innovate UK awarded close to a £500,000 grant to turn the northeast into a cultivated meat production hub, with the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), MarraBio Ltd and Aelius Biotech working together to create cost-effective and low-emission cultured meat products.
“Ensuring the safety of any new and innovative food product, including cell-cultivated products, is paramount, and we must continue to balance fast-paced technological advances and industry demands with protecting public health,” said Smith.
One source told the Grocer that both the FSA and cultivated meat producers hoping to commercialise their products agree that proving the safety of these foods is crucial. “The sandbox is really zeroing in on cultivated meats specifically,” they said.
As mentioned above, there has been a lot of backlash from EU countries like Italy, France and Romania, who have either outlawed the production and sale of cultivated meat, or are hoping to do so. Among the main reasons cited are to protect culinary heritage, livestock farmers, and human health.
But the source argued that cultivated meat would be safer than conventional meat from a hygiene perspective. “You are talking about food being grown in what is essentially a sterile laboratory, in contrast to your average abattoir,” he noted. “It’s going to be a laboratory with scientists from the FSA looking all over it, I doubt it’s going to get any cleaner than that.”
Catalan plant-based meat company Heura has announced its year-on-year sales grew by 22% last year, thanks to increased distribution deals across Europe. The business now aims to be profitable by 2025.
Weeks after closing a €40M ($43M) Series B fundraiser, Heura has revealed that it posted €38.3M ($41.4M) in turnover last year, marking a 22% increase in annual sales. The positive figures were bolstered by both international growth, where its sales rose by 63% from the year before – particularly in France (88%) and the UK (81%).
The plant-based meat company also cemented its leadership in its home market, capturing what it says is a record 26% market share and boasting the highest repeat rates in the category (50% above the average). Meanwhile, Heura’s portfolio accounts for four of the top five most-sold products in this sector in Spain.
“In a pivotal year of transformation for the plant-based sector, we emerged as a category developer leader, enabling other companies to accelerate the protein transition by introducing a licensing B2B division aimed at extending its impact to a global scale via breakthrough technologies,” said CEO Marc Coloma, who co-founded Heura with Bernat Añaños in 2017.
Expanding distribution and new B2B model fuel Heura’s growth
Courtesy: Heura
The announcement caps off a year of successes for Heura, which makes plant-based alternatives to chicken, beef, pork and fish in multiple formats. The company ranked 10 on the UK’s Forward Fooding FoodTech 500 list (described as “the Fortune 500 of agrifood tech”), won the Pyme del Año 2023 (which recognises the contribution of Spanish SMEs to the UK economy), and secured the EU’s Marie Curie Grant.
Outside of accolades, individual products experienced commercial triumphs too. The latest iteration of its signature beef patty, the 3.0 Burger, is the best-selling vegan burger in southern Europe, and has triple the rotation of the second-best brand in Spain. Meanwhile, the York-style ham slices launched in October became the top-selling plant-based deli product in its home market within three months, accounting for 52% of the category’s growth in Q4.
Heura also inked several new distribution deals across Europe, including with Vueling, Hilton and Royal Caribbean in foodservice, and Intermarche (France), Auchan (Portugal), Pam (Italy), Colruyt (Belgium) and Waitrose (UK) in retail. Plus, it boosted its presence in Spanish schools via a collaboration with catering company Serunion.
The other major development in Heura’s 2023 was the launch of its B2B licensing division, powered by its patent-pending Good Rebel Tech system, which was unveiled in April. The proprietary process involves a novel thermomechanical processing technique, which relies upon mathematical models similar to AI.
“We are basing our approach and models on new scientific understanding of plant proteins that we generate in the tech lab,” Coloma told Green Queen in October. “We can improve [the] accuracy of our predictions, limit biases and, most importantly, develop breakthrough technological solutions which are based on new scientific knowledge; rather than optimising technologies that already exist based on published existing data.”
The tech can create additive-free, affordable plant-based foods with superior sensory and nutritional values and fewer ingredients, using only protein, water and oil to structure the product. This is how its 11-ingredient clean-label ham slices were created, and it opens up a new business model for Heura, allowing the manufacturers to leverage the tech in multiple food categories. Just earlier this month, it entered a partnership with plant-based CPG giant Upfield (which is an investor in the company) to license its tech.
The clean-label, nutrition-forward aspects will speak to a European population that is eating less meat, and primarily due to health, a reason cited by 47% of respondents in a 7,500-person survey last year. The poll further revealed that nutritional inadequacies of plant-based food were a concern for 24% of consumers. Globally, too, an Ingredion survey found that 78% would spend more money on products with ‘natural’ or ‘all-natural’ packaging claims.
Heura finds success in a year of challenges for the sector
Courtesy: Heura
It’s not all about health for Heura, of course. The climate is just as important, and an ISO-compliant life-cycle assessment has revealed that its products have a 70-98% lower environmental impact than their conventional counterparts. Last year’s sales represented water savings equivalent to 6,600 swimming pools, carbon savings of 36.5 million kg (which could power 4,600 homes for one year), and the sparing of 1.3 million animals.
Heura’s €40M Series B financing was the second-largest publicly announced funding round for a vegan company in 2023, and took total investment in the business to €88M ($95M). The plant-based meat player had said it would use the funding to “boost its impact in the food industry”, accelerate international expansion, introduce new products, and explore more collaborative models beyond its own meat alternatives.
Most notably, Heura said the investment would help drive the company towards profitability – and now, it has confirmed its aim to become profitable by 2025. To do so, the business has “transitioned from a hypergrowth approach to a sustainable growth strategy”, which has involved changes to “improve efficiency and focus on the milestones nearing profitability”.
The financial results come just a week after plant-based meat giant Beyond Meat published its own Q4 earnings, which revealed an 18% decrease in annual revenue (which reached $343M), but a 2.5% reduction in net losses ($338M) from 2022 too. Its performance in the last quarter was better than analysts predicted, signalling a shift in fortunes for the company as well as the sector as a whole.
While VC activity has largely slowed down and sales have been disappointing over the last year, some feel that the sector’s slump will turn around this year. Matthew Glover, co-founder of the Vegan Food Group, told Green Queen this week: “The signs are that the declines are reducing, and I think we’ll be cheering the news that the categories will be back in growth during this year.”
While he acknowledged that double-digit growth won’t be a reality just yet for most plant-based meat companies – Heura has turned out to be an exception here – he added: “The economic climate generally seems to be improving, and there are some powerful advocacy programmes, which should help reengage consumers to the category.
“Whilst it’s a tough trading environment, I do feel like we’re soon to be over the worst of it. The planet and the animals need us to be successful, and I’m confident we will be.”
Canadian whole-cut plant-based salmon producer New School Foods has kicked off its New School Culinary Council of industry advisors, starting with vegan chef Matthew Kenney, who will help the brand make its commercial debut later this year.
New School Foods, which produces whole-cut wild salmon from plants, has collaborated with Matthew Kenney to launch the New School Culinary Council (NSCC), an invite-only collective of international chefs and restaurateurs. The advisory hub will help guide the company through its upcoming launch in restaurants.
Members of the NSCC will work closely with the Toronto-based startup to guide product development, recommend recipes, and support the adoption of its whole-muscle salmon. It reflects the company’s positioning of its seafood analogue as chef-led, with the use of plant fibres able to replicate the texture of fish muscle fibres, and recreate the same flavour, appearance and functional attributes.
“From Day 0, we developed this product with chefs in mind,” said New School Foods CEO Chris Bryson. “As tastemakers, chefs and restaurateurs sit at the intersection between product and consumer – they represent a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to developing a product that consumers crave. If it won’t work for a chef, why would the consumer care?”
Kenney agreed, noting that “there is no more demanding audience” for plant-based meat than professional chefs: “If your product does not look, cook, and taste like the real thing, you are better off in the grocery store, because chefs will not compromise.”
Tapping into Matthew Kenney’s decades-long experience
Courtesy: New School Foods
The partnership will see Kenney develop new recipes with New School Foods’ salmon throughout the year, while highlighting menu flexibility and versatility of the whole-cut filet, which can be cooked in a host of different methods, including baking, roasting, sauteing, smoking and sous vide.
“He’s a true expert in plant-based foods and immediately understood our product – what it can do, and what it could do,” Bryson told Green Queen when about the decision to team up with Kenney. “The first time he got the product, he took a series of filets and cooked them each in a different way, managing to take our product to whole new heights. He’s been extremely helpful at providing feedback for further improving the product, both in terms of the customer sensory experience, as well as the chef cooking experience.”
In addition, Kenney will serve as an advocate and consultant for New School Foods, leveraging his experience and network to secure foodservice listings for the vegan salmon, especially in Los Angeles, where he currently lives. He will also provide ongoing feedback during regular sessions with the product development team ahead of its planned launch later this year.
Kenney has been working in professional kitchens for over 30 years, with his company with dozens of restaurants around the world, including Plant Food + Wine, Plant City and Double Zero. A raw food pioneer, he was the founding partner of the infamous Pure Food and Wine vegan eatery in New York City, which was the subject of controversy in the 2010s after failing to pay its staff (Kenney left the establishment in 2005).
However, since September 2022, at least 12 of his restaurants have shut, and investors, landlords and employees have accused Kenney of non-payments, with some paychecks allegedly bouncing even as influencers were given $10,000 worth of free food every year for promoting the establishments. The chef has acknowledged that some checks may have bounced, but denies that influencers would have been given more than $1,000 worth of food.
To his credit, Kenney answered all questions asked of him in a wide-ranging interview with the Los Angeles Times – but the lawsuits and financial controversies give New School Foods pause when opting to work with him? “Not at all,” said Bryson. “We worked closely with chef Kenney for months before partnering, and his passion for both the product and the mission is clear. We believe that passion will carry over to many other chefs who will want to join New School Foods.”
Better-tasting alt-seafood products will win over consumers
Courtesy: New School Foods
New School Foods, which first unveiled its salmon in February 2023, expects to add more chefs to its NSCC. “We have been working with a series of chefs over the last year,” revealed Bryson. “Matthew is our first official member given his deep experience with the plant-based space.”
Adhering to the chef-forward philosophy, the company has no plans to sell its salmon in retail, instead focusing solely on restaurants. As for the pricing, Bryson said it will “depend on the relationship we have with each restaurant”.
New School Foods has also been working with precision fermentation startup Liven Proteins and dehydration solutions provider NuWave Research on an $11.4M project partly funded by the Canadian government, which will combine its salmon production tech with Liven’s animal-free collagen and NuWave Research’s vacuum microwave technology to manufacturer whole-muscle plant-based salmon at scale. “[The collaboration is] to support our core product development and bring it to market,” said Bryson. “Liven is doing some great work that we hope to include in future product versions.”
Its own version is made from a unique scaffolding technology that uses directional freezing to create scaffolds that mimic muscle fibres and connective tissues found in meat and fish. These are then infused with different proteins and flavours that mimic the taste, texture, structure and cooking process of conventional meat and seafood.
The news comes just shortly after San Francisco-based New Wave Foods and German startup Ordinary Seafood were forced to cease trading, highlighting the challenges facing the alternative seafood industry. Despite vegan seafood outpacing the plant-based meat sector in sales from 2021-22, its retail sales only hit $14M, a minuscule 1% of the $1.2B made by the overall meat analogues category. Its contribution to the overall seafood sector is even smaller, representing just 0.2% of total sales.
There have been some success stories too. Fellow Canadian Yves Potvin’s Konscious Foods has its frozen vegan sushi and poke bowl SKUs in over 4,500 retail doors in North America; Nestlé – the world’s largest CPG brand – introduced three plant-based seafood products in Europe and Asia recently; and Sweden’s Hooked Foods expanded into Germany with a listing in 400 REWE West stores in November.
“While the market is going through an adjustment period, long-term, we expect this will be a very exciting sector,” said Bryson. “Customers are still looking for alternatives, and that shows based on the plant-based sector’s growth in Europe and US foodservice. But the products need to be better – in taste, texture, cooking experience, and clear nutritional benefit over meat/seafood. That will require better ingredients, and better processing technologies to more closely meet customer expectations.”
“I speak from first-hand experience when I say that the products New School Foods developed are nothing short of a plant-based miracle,” said Kenney. “I was stunned by how versatile the product was – how it was a product that I could prepare any way I wanted. It cooks and transforms just like the real thing, raw-to-cooked transition and all, while delivering an amazing taste and texture experience.”
Israel’s Oshi and Austria’s Revo Foods also make whole-cut salmon – the latter was recently involved in a court case against the City of Vienna, which accused it of misleading consumers with its ‘vegan’ label on product packaging. The court has dismissed the suit.
Misinformation is rampant in the food system, with attacks on alternative protein becoming louder and more frequent. Robbie Lockie, founder of the newly formed Freedom Food Alliance, talks about the organisation’s research into meat and dairy’s crusade in a global election year.
Over the last few months, a chunk of investigations have highlighted the link between animal agriculture lobby groups and their influence on policymaking around the world. One highlighted the livestock industry’s ties with EU members, which led to the bloc U-turning on its promised caged farming ban. Another found that the UN FAO watered down its reporting on meat and dairy’s climate impact after pressure from industry groups.
Yet another looked at social media, where powerful far-right figures fuel the culture wars around meat-eating, and highlighted their use of a misleading study into cultivated meat. This was then used by lawmakers in the EU who are trying to restrict cultivated meat, before it has even been approved by the bloc’s food safety regulator.
Now, a new report by consumer advocacy organisation the Freedom Food Alliance (FFA) sheds further light on misinformation and disinformation emanating from the meat and dairy industry, which receives 1,200 times more public funding in the EU than the alternative protein sector, and 800 times more in the US.
A wide-ranging study that covers various examples of misinformation, the research explains how these can lead to policy changes affecting the food system – particularly the alternative protein space – at a time when reducing emissions is paramount and in a year where climate change is a key agenda for elections around the world.
“Animal agriculture giants are waging a disinformation war, threatening public health and the planet,” said lead researcher Nicholas Carter. “Our report exposes their tactics of denial and delay and underscores the need for urgent action.”
But first, let’s distinguish between misinformation and disinformation. The former can often start without malice, and could be “a simple misunderstanding or an error”, according to FFA founder Robbie Lockie. “Disinformation is a beast of a different nature, meticulously crafted with the intent to mislead and manipulate,” he adds. “It’s a deliberate act to cloud public perception, and it’s crucial we distinguish between these two to fight back effectively.”
Big Beef’s viral disinformation campaigns to promote meat
The report is expansive and looks at numerous instances of the livestock industry’s successful attempts to disinform policymakers and the public alike about the alternative protein sector. One of these is the #Yes2Meat campaign, which was a coordinated backlash attempt against the 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission report. Backed by scientists from across the globe, the study recommended halving the consumption of red meat and limiting dairy for a healthier and more sustainable food system.
Courtesy: Freedom Food Alliance
But a week before the full report came out, a campaign coordinated by the UC David CLEAR Center – founded and funded by livestock feed organisation IFEEDER – initiated the #Yes2Meat hashtag to dominate online conversations and spark conspiracy theories against the EAT-Lancet research. The effort was successful: response to the report was 10 times more likely to be negative than positive or neutral, thanks to the cultivation of doubt, false narratives and deflection to other issues.
Lockie calls this the most “glaring” case study explored by the FFA report. “It wasn’t just an opposition to the Planetary Health Diet; it was a calculated attack against the very science that guides us towards healthier, more environmentally friendly dietary choices,” he explains. “This campaign sought to engrain the notion that meat is indispensable, blatantly ignoring the overwhelming evidence of its environmental and health ramifications.”
He adds: “The attempts to sever the established connection between livestock farming and climate change are among the most audacious disinformation campaigns we’ve encountered.” You only need to look as far as the national Beef Checkoff programme run by the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board. While it began as an optional tax in 1985, it now mandates cattle producers to pay $1 for each live cow sold, which goes into a marketing fund designed to increase the demand for beef.
Courtesy: Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board
The Beef Checkoff has spent $42M on its campaigns for this year alone, which are creeping into schools to influence children. The programme has used the money to promote beef – which is the food with the highest carbon footprint – with viral campaigns like ‘Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner’ promoting “regenerative grazing” and containing messaging like “meat substitutes are just that – substitutes”. It also got healthcare professionals to advocate for beef consumption.
Other campaigns have downplayed the effects of meat production on the climate – notably, the sector pushing to use a new metric to calculate greenhouse gas emissions, called GWP*, which is skewed in its favour and has won a lot of support from politicians in several countries. But experts have warned that this is all but a misleading attempt to greenwash consumers.
“These efforts deliberately twist scientific findings and amplify uncertainties, all to stall the essential policy changes needed for reducing meat consumption and moving towards a sustainable food system,” says Lockie. “It’s a stark reminder of the lengths some will go to protect vested interests over the well-being of our planet.”
Using media, social networks and AI for disinformation
News media and social networks can be highly effective disinformation tools out there, and Big Meat has been using them to its advantage. The report highlights the underreporting of animal agriculture in climate coverage – 93% of these stories never mention livestock farming – and how the media can reinforce industry narratives, oversimplify complex initiatives, and at times promote false information.
Big Meat’s influence shapes up in the form of sponsored posts and promotional content too – sometimes created by its own members, and in other instances produced by media outlets. And this obviously influences consumer opinion, with a review of 285 million social media posts revealing that people find alternative protein unhealthy and bad for the planet, with dietary shifts framed as an ‘elite’ agenda to promote the culture wars surrounding these themes.
Courtesy: Freedom Food Alliance
The FFA report outlines how industry-funded social media influencers and bots are creating the illusion of a balanced debate despite scientific evidence repeatedly imploring a dietary change towards more plants and fewer animals. Speaking of bots, the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing by the day.
AI bots can exploit social media algorithms to increase their visibility and mimic human behaviour to spread convincing, viral disinformation – a problem that has been exacerbated by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) and the subsequent staff cuts and removal of content moderation roles. There is one striking example here: since December 2022 (two months after Musk finalised the deal), #ClimateScam has outperformed both #ClimateCrisis and #ClimateEmergency every month on the platform, both in terms of retweets and likes.
Courtesy: Changing Markets Foundation
“The advancement of AI brings about a new frontier in the dissemination of disinformation,” says Lockie. “The capability of AI to produce content that is convincingly real, yet fundamentally false, is alarming.” The tech has also been accused of being speciesist, which highlights an “urgent need for ethical frameworks and transparency” in how it’s used, especially to thwart potential misuse in spreading harmful narratives within the food sector.
As for social media, Lockie believes there’s a “glimmer of hope” with governments and these platforms beginning to address the tide of disinformation. “The report calls for a firmer stance through enhanced regulations, robust fact-checking, and a united front among policymakers, NGOs, and the tech sector. It’s about laying down the groundwork to dismantle the mechanisms that allow disinformation to flourish,” he states.
The ultra-processed food debate
Another of the issues highlighted by the FFA is the misconceptions about plant-based meat and ultra-processed food. For years, the livestock industry has criticised meat alternatives’ long ingredient lists as shorthand for ‘unhealthy’. The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a meat industry interest group, has been running coordinated attack ads since 2019, taking aim at their processed nature.
One of its ads pit plant-based meat against dog food, with a side-by-side comparison of the ingredient lists asking consumers to guess which is which. Perhaps its biggest commercial came during the 2020 Super Bowl, where children in a Spelling Bee contest struggled with words like methylcellulose, a common emulsifier in meat alternatives. “If you can’t spell it or pronounce it,” concluded the ad, “maybe you shouldn’t be eating it.”
While the plant-based industry has hit back, the CCF’s misinformation efforts have been successful, clouding consumers’ perception of these meat analogues, who group them with other UPFs and classify them as unhealthy. But experts have noted that not all UPFs are bad. “[Such marketing] campaigns play into concerns some people have around foods that are new – often called ‘food neophobia‘… Some campaigns really hone in on this, by using words like ‘fake’ and ‘unnatural’ to describe plant-based meats (which are safe, nutritious foods),” Churchill Fellow Jenny Chapman told Green Queen earlier this month.
The meat industry also has clever ways to disregard the health benefits of plant-based meat. Take industry leader Beyond Meat, which last week announced a recipe overhaul for its beef and burger products, which – among other aspects – results in lower saturated fat and sodium content. But speaking to analysts in its Q4 earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Ethan Brown highlighted the deceptive misinformation tactics of Big Meat.
“A favourite target is sodium levels, and the sleight of hand employed is to compare the Beyond Burger, which is seasoned, to an unseasoned ground beef burger,” he said. “The current Beyond Burger contains 17% of the daily recommended value of sodium, which when appropriately compared to seasoned beef burgers, often means less, not more sodium.”
He added: “Nevertheless, Beyond IV achieves a 20% reduction in the amount of sodium, with the sodium content now registering at 14% of daily values. Quick math reveals that even if you were to have seven of the Beyond IV burgers in a single day, this consumption alone would not exceed the daily recommended value of sodium.”
How to combat meat and dairy misinformation
“Without decisive and collective action, we stand on precarious ground, especially as we navigate the controversies surrounding alternative proteins,” says Lockie. “Disinformation campaigns could seize on consumer fears, further muddying the waters.”
The FFA offers a range of solutions. Media literacy is key, with consumers’ ability to evaluate information critically a major step towards battling disinformation. The report argues that scientists and experts should actively engage with the public to share accurate and accessible information, while transparent communication about research processes can help prevent misconceptions.
There is a call for cross-sector collaboration to ensure a cohesive and consistent response against meat and dairy misinformation. Meanwhile, technology can be used for good too – think websites and tools that check for misinformation about the climate credentials of meat, algorithmic and automatic detection of fake news, and AI models to analyse aerial images of methane over dairy farms, for example.
Courtesy: Freedom Food Alliance
The recommendations further include lobbying, community outreach and educational campaigns on behalf of non-governmental organisations, while administrative bodies themselves could set legal accountability measures for downplaying climate impacts, regulate industry climate transition plans, incentivise herd reduction, and update school curricula to remove livestock promotion and include climate- and nutrition-based food education.
“Our report also sees a silver lining,” notes Lockie. “An informed public and stronger regulatory frameworks could significantly dampen the impact of these campaigns, fostering a more transparent dialogue around our food choices and their impact on the world.”
He doubles down on the importance of public education. “Our fight against disinformation is incomplete without empowering consumers with knowledge. The report advocates for making information about food choices transparent, accessible, and engaging,” he says.
“It’s about enlightening individuals with the science behind their diets and enhancing digital literacy to enable a more critical evaluation of information sources. Knowledge is power, and in this case, it’s the power to make informed choices about what we eat.”
Matthew Glover, co-founder of the Vegan Food Group, speaks to Green Queen about the decision behind acquiring its portfolio companies, the ambition to become a “vegan Unilever”, the challenging period for the sector, and the need for a plant-based checkoff programme.
“I know… it’s a bit of an ambiguous title,” admits Matthew Glover, chief mission officer of the Vegan Food Group (VFG), the new company that evolved from plant-based chicken startup VFC Foods.
Glover co-founded VFC with Adam Lyons in 2020, replete with wacky marketing, undercover chicken farm investigations, and – if sales are a barometer – a finger-lickin’ good product. The brand grew exponentially last year, with sales value up by nearly 200%, but things turned in a different direction halfway through.
Fellow plant-based meat maker Meatless Farm was on the brink of collapse – and VFC swooped in to purchase its UK operations and revive its market presence. Months later, it acquired pie company Clive’s Purely Plants. And in January came the grand reveal. VFC was now VFG, a holding company that has rapidly become a leader in the vegan sector. Just yesterday, VFG announced the acquisition of 35-year-old German tofu manufacturer Tofutown, an indicator of its wider European ambitions.
Courtesy: VFC
“I’d like to say this was always the masterplan,” Glover tells me. “But the reality is that circumstances came into play. VFC was making good progress, but like many startups, the progress wasn’t as fast as we’d hoped or expected.” The competition was fierce, the demand was levelling off, and the team sensed that businesses in this space would need to be proactive if they were to survive.
“When we heard that Meatless Farm might be going out of business, we saw synergies with what we were doing, and felt the brand was too good to fail,” he recalls. The rescue of Meatless Farm is when the idea of VFG began to take shape. When the rebrand materialised last month, Glover stepped into the more active role of chief mission officer.
“When Adam and I set up VFC, my motivation was removing animals from the supply chain, and Adam wanted the world to taste better. We were both very focused on the ethical imperative,” he says, explaining his new position. “The way I see it is: I’m here to keep the original values of the business front of mind as we grow and bring on more brands.”
Why the Vegan Food Group acquired the brands in its portfolio
So VFG made its first two acquisitions before officially being formed, and now is a company that houses four businesses with over 80 SKUs in more than 21,000 distribution points across the UK and the EU. Reflecting on the Meatless Farm deal, Glover says VFC was an admirer of the brand and product range: “There’d been so much invested over the years in marketing and product development that it seemed such a shame for the movement to lose such a big name.”
He credits the progress made by the team, led by founder Morten Toft Bech (who exited the company after the sale), in terms of listings in major retailers and foodservice. Crucially, consumers liked the products. Moreover, the product range of chilled beef and pork analogues was complementary to VFC’s frozen vegan chicken. “By not cannibalising our VFC range we knew we could make our proposition stronger,” says Glover.
Meatless Farm was also local to VFC, with both businesses hailing from Yorkshire, and the latter’s head of innovation previously worked at the former. “When the business instructed an administrator, we decided to take a look. The staff had all been laid off, and we knew that customers were being let down as the company had run out of cash,” notes Glover.
Courtesy: Meatless Farm
“We knew it was going to be a huge challenge to get the supply chain back up and running, but suppliers and customers were generally very receptive in those early days and we gradually managed to get things moving again,” he adds. Meatless Farm returned to UK retail in September, three months after the takeover. “I had little involvement in the rebuild, and the VFC team led by [CEO] Dave Sparrow put in all the hard work.”
The acquisition of Clive’s Purely Plants was a different state of affairs, however, given that it wasn’t in a distressed situation. Glover’s investment firm Veg Capital had bought 90% of the business in 2021, with Clive’s managing director Esther Pearson staying on at the helm. “She’d helped steer the company from a local supplier of organic pies in health food stores, to gaining national listings with Waitrose and Ocado, whilst moving to a larger manufacturing site in Dartmouth, Devon,” says Glover.
“As Veg Capital is also the major investor in VFG, we began to see how having Clive’s as part of the group would make sense for both parties. VFG would have direct access to manufacturing, and a veg-led brand as part of the portfolio, whilst Clive’s would have access to the support of the wider VFG team and resources, and benefit from the additional sales and marketing,” he explains.
“The integration is still ongoing, but the signs are good that Clive’s will play a leading role as part of VFG’s future development.” (Pearson remains a shareholder in Clive’s.)
The cross-Europe move for Tofutown
In the works for a while, Tofutown takeover was a major move, giving VFC access to its two manufacturing sites sprawling a combined 55,000 sq m, and a gateway into further European expansion. “There’s a number of reasons why we saw Tofutown as an attractive addition to the Vegan Food Group,” says Glover. “The fact that Germany is the biggest market for plant-based food in Europe was top of the list, providing so many opportunities to expand.”
He adds: “The business also has an existing senior management team in place with an enthusiasm to grow and learn as part of a wider group structure. We’re very excited about how we can merge the start-up culture of VFC and Meatless Farm, with the established nature of a food company where manufacturing and delivering high-quality food is second nature.”
While VFG is unable to disclose the acquisition sums, Glover did highlight the value of employees of the acquired brands. “It is indeed our priority to retain the workforce whenever possible. We believe that the success of our acquisitions is significantly enhanced by the contributions of these individuals, and we are keen on integrating them into our team, fostering a culture of growth, innovation, and mutual respect,” he states.
Courtesy: Vegan Food Group
With a diverse portfolio of brands, could we see a blend of the different offerings in new product launches? “We’ll be looking at a variety of ways to enhance the brands, and co-branding opportunities could be a possibility. We’re particularly excited about expanding the Meatless Farm and VFC brands into Germany, and then using our base there to expand into other EU countries,” confirms Glover. (Tofutown products will soon be available in the UK as part of the deal too.)
“As Tofutown is known for natural, organic, clean-label product ranges, then we’ll be looking at ways to leverage this expertise and create new SKUs, which could be private label, branded as VFC, Meatless Farm, Clive’s, or we may even bring new brands to market,” he adds. “The beauty of having significant manufacturing capacity and expertise is we can listen to our customers and create the products that consumers are buying.”
Turning VFG into ‘a vegan Unilever’
VFG made a significant statement upon launch, setting its sights on becoming “a vegan Unilever”. “Our strategy is to establish VFG as a leader within the plant-based food sector, where customers, suppliers and industry leaders look to us for what’s coming next,” explains Glover.
“We’ll be offering a much wider range of options to customers, so they don’t need to deal with so many smaller suppliers,” he says. “Operationally, there are efficiencies and better buying power we can leverage, whilst providing our teams with a more diversified portfolio of brands to manage. There’s likely to be flexibility with some brands managed in-house (like VFC and Meatless Farm), with other brands being stand-alone subsidiaries.”
VFG aims to become profitable this year, with a goal of collecting €100M in revenue. Unilever, meanwhile, turned over nearly €60B last year, with its nutrition and ice cream divisions alone bringing in €21M. Becoming a vegan Unilever is a lofty ambition – does Glover fear it could almost become an albatross?
“Only if we fail, but we’ve no intention of failing,” he says. “We believe we have a very good strategy and a team that can develop our model into a large plant-based CPG company. We’ve got strong financial backing from mission-aligned investors who are keen to support us on this journey. The early signs are good, but I’ll reflect on your question in a couple of years and let you know!”
Courtesy: VFC
When laying out this goal initially, Glover had said: “Imagine a ‘vegan Unilever’, but with the majority of future profits being donated to effective animal charities and diet change initiatives – that’s what we’re creating at the Vegan Food Group.” This is where his role as chief mission officer comes in. “As we grow the team both organically and through M&A, we’re bringing on staff who don’t necessarily have the activism background or know about all the impacts of animal agriculture. I see my role as making sure we don’t lose sight of why we’re doing this as a company,” he explains.
VFG is majority-owned by Veg Capital, which is committed to donating 100% of its profits from its stake to effective animal charities. “We see our work as a virtuous circle, working on both the supply and demand side of the equation,” notes Glover.
“We expect to be profitable in 2024 if all goes to plan, with consistent profits feeding through over the coming years. As the group will be focused on fast-track growth (either organically or through acquisition), then we’ll likely be reinvesting profits back into the organisation for the next few years,” he adds. “The most likely time that we’ll be able to fulfil our charitable ambition is after an exit event, but there’s a lot of work to do before we get there.”
Glover will additionally assume the role of group chair at VFG, which will see him support Sparrow and the leadership team to navigate the M&A opportunities and advise on the organic growth of its existing brands.
A vegan checkoff programme to support plant-based meat
Alternative protein as a whole suffered from dwindling sales and waning consumer interest globally last year. In the UK, meat-free products were among the worst-performing grocery categories last year, with sales declining by £38.4m, and volumes down by 4.2%.
“We can’t hide away from the fact that plant-based meat categories have been in decline over the past year, or two,” says Glover, before pointing out that the British downturn isn’t as severe as it has been in the US. “There’s a multitude of factors at play, including the cost-of-living crisis, meat industry misinformation campaigns successfully turning consumers away, as well as products not meeting expectations. Retailers reducing shelf space hasn’t helped.”
Courtesy: VFC
There has been a disconnect with consumers too, many of whom perceive plant-based meat to be unhealthy because they’re ultra-processed foods (UPFs), despite experts suggesting that not all UPFs – which are a mark of processing, not nutrition – are bad for you. “The meat industry has been adept at sowing seeds of doubt about the processed nature of meat alternatives and the healthfulness of plant-based diets, contributing to consumer scepticism,” says Glover. And government support for these systems doesn’t help.
In the US and the UK, meat and dairy industries collect government-backed funds from livestock producers to help fund promotional campaigns that encourage the consumption of these foods. These schemes, called levies in the UK and checkoff programmes in the US, enable the animal agriculture industry to “develop large multi-million-pound category campaigns” transmitted nationwide. With plant-based companies facing tough times, promoting the category to the public “with all its benefits is one way to get businesses moving again”.
In line with that notion, Glover is working with Indy Kaur, founder of vegan consultancy firm Plant Futures, on the plant-based industry’s own checkoff programme. “We are looking to level up with this, consolidate funding and create a campaign which can fairly compete and give consumers a reason to choose to eat plants and not animals,” he outlines.
The project will take “best practices from the meat and dairy industry”. Glover – who is also the co-founder of Veganuary – cites the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board’s anti-Veganuary drive last month, as well as the US Milk Processor Education Program’s ultra-successful Got Milk? campaign as “proven models driving demand” for meat and dairy. “We’ll be doing the same, with plants,” he says.
For the majority of its funding, the vegan checkoff project aims to raise at least £3M from donors and investors, which would be supplemented with businesses’ marketing spend, though Glover acknowledges that these budgets are tight. “We are starting with a UK pilot, a test-and-learn methodology and potentially starting in the north where we know meat consumption is disproportionally higher than the south. Backed with a fast follow, [we’ll go] nationwide around Q3 with US rollout soon after,” he says.
Courtesy: VFC
“We’re going big because we have to. We’re aiming for all plant-based protein businesses in the UK and US to sign up, whether they can financially contribute or not. We are speaking to a lot of businesses and expect to have spoken to most in the plant-based protein space by the end of Q1/start of Q2,” adds Glover.
He notes that this will also help “take the burden off the shoulders of young businesses who need support” in the current climate. “There’s no holding Indy back, and she’s working with the smartest minds and a global network of advisors – it’s impressive,” he says. “We all know the future market potential for plant-based remains huge and this checkoff is designed to unlock this. We’re in it together, and that’s exactly how we are designing [the] checkoff from day one.”
Giving consumers what they want
Going back to VFG, which has teased more acquisitions in the near future, I ask Glover about the profile of the businesses it wants to take over. “There’s no target number of brands to acquire. Instead, we’ll look at every opportunity on merit and decide whether the brand or manufacturing site adds value, whilst not cannibalising our current range,” he explains. “We’ll focus primarily on frozen and chilled meal occasions where we already have expertise and relationships with buyers and suppliers.
“Ideally, we’re looking at companies which are already established, have gained decent distribution and have a run rate in excess of €3M,” he says, adding: “And the products have got to be good.”
That last point is crucial. A 1,000-person survey last year found that 66% of Brits are unhappy with the taste of plant-based meat, and 62% find them too expensive. For 51%, taste and texture are the main reasons for reducing their alt-meat consumption, but on the flip side, 39% are eating these products because of their flavour and texture. Attitudes around health were also mixed.
Does Glover know what people really want? “Oh gosh, I wish I had the definitive answer, as it’d make it far easier to scale VFG if we knew exactly how to appeal to the broadest range of consumers,” he responds. “Unfortunately, we’re navigating a nuanced interplay of factors.
Courtesy: VFC
“Taste and texture often stand at the forefront; people choose plant-based options that don’t compromise on the sensory experience traditionally associated with animal products. However, achieving this without the additional price tag remains a challenge for the sector,” he explains. This is significant, as the price gap will always deter the budget-conscious.
“Health considerations are also a driving force, with many turning to vegan options for a diet seen as cleaner and more beneficial. But there’s been a meat industry-sponsored backlash in the media, which has discouraged some consumers,” he says, referring to the aforementioned misinformation campaigns.
“Beyond these immediate concerns, broader issues play into consumer decisions. Environmental sustainability and ethical considerations are increasingly influencing purchasing behaviours,” suggests Glover. “Convenience, too, cannot be overlooked, with the demand for easy, quick-preparation vegan options rising.”
Additionally, there are some cultural and informational challenges as well. Over half of Brits want more information about plant-based meat, with occasional and former frequent eaters most likely to want more details. “Our societies have been centred around meat consumption for thousands of years, supported by over a century of targeted advertising by the meat industry. This deep-rooted history creates a significant barrier to changing dietary habits overnight,” he says.
Courtesy: VFC
This is why winning back consumer trust and shifting dietary dynamics are complex tasks that “will undoubtedly take time”. It would mean improving products’ functionality and prices, as well as involve transparent communication to combat misinformation. “As we move forward, understanding and addressing these multifaceted consumer needs and concerns will be crucial for the growth and acceptance of vegan food in the broader market,” says Glover.
He believes it will still be a tough year for plant-based companies. “I can’t see growth being back to the double-digit figures we had previously, and a lot of companies are running on empty financially,” he explains. However, the VFG co-founder says the economic climate generally seems to be improving”, and signals that the “declines are reducing”, with advocacy campaigns like the checkoff programme aimed at reengaging consumers. “I think we’ll be cheering the news that the categories will be back in growth during this year.”
Plant-based giant Beyond Meat witnessed an 18% decrease in annual net revenue in 2023. Despite posting losses in Q4 too, its sales were better than expected, sending the company’s shares soaring and signalling a turnaround in fortunes for 2024.
Fresh from a product revamp with new recipes for its beef and burger analogues, Beyond Meat’s stock jumped by 78% yesterday after it posted higher-than-expected numbers in the last quarter of 2023. Quarterly revenue dropped by only 2% – compared to a 26% decline from Q2 to Q3 – to $73.7M, better than the $66.7M predicted by analysts. For the full year, the Californian company’s revenue fell by 18% to $343M.
“In 2023, Beyond Meat undertook extensive initiatives to reset the business toward sustainable operations and, ultimately, profitable growth. Much of this reset is now coming into view,” said CEO Ethan Brown. He added that the company’s plans for this year include reducing operating expenses, changing pricing structures, and right-sizing its production footprint, and rolling out the Beyond IV line of products.
“We believe these sweeping changes, together with measures we plan to pursue this year to bolster our balance sheet, will strengthen our near-term operations as we pursue our vision of being the global protein company of the future,” Brown said.
Beyond Meat discontinues jerky and forecasts improved margins
Courtesy: Beyond Meat
Beyond Meat’s Q4 net losses doubled from the previous quarter, reaching $155M. These were heavily impacted by the one-off charges of $85M from its global operations review last year, which was launched last November to reassess elements of the business that don’t line up with profitability plans (this also involved a potential restructuring of its China operations). The company finished the year with $10.6M in capital expenditure, 85% less than 2022.
It further managed to bring down its operating expenses by 19% to $259M, following a year where it laid off 19% of its global non-production workforce (about 65 employees), consolidated its operations from 13 co-manufacturing locations in North America to just one, and discontinued its slow-selling beef jerky line (which it launched in 2022 through a partnership with PepsiCo).
“These refinements allow focus and resources to be put against our latest product platform renovation, Beyond IV, and other SKUs,” Brown said in an earnings call to analysts and investors, outlining why the company decided to discontinue the jerky, despite its position as the top-selling vegan jerky. He added that the reformulated beef products and its other analogues have a higher growth potential in the US, and that the changes reflect the business’s increased focus on Europe.
Moreover, the alt-meat giant’s yearly losses shrunk by 2.5% at $338M, and the significant restructuring and cost-cutting activities last year mean it is able to forecast improved margins for 2024 (these were in the negative in 2023).
Beyond Meat has an outstanding debt of $1.1B – owing to convertible notes (a type of investment that begins as a loan and turns into equity) that are due to be paid back in 2027. “We’re doing everything that we need to do to fix the fundamentals of the business so that we are a lower cash consumption business with a longer-term goal, obviously, of getting to sustained free cash flow positive,” said CFO Lubi Kutua.
US sales falter but McDonald’s deal boosts European performance
Courtesy: McDonald’s
Beyond Meat witnessed a 32% fall in year-over-year sales in its home market in 2023. Despite pricing its products lower in grocery stores, retail revenue dropped by 27%, while foodservice figures were also down by 26%. It reflects the larger decline in US retail sales of plant-based meat, which dipped by 11% to just over $1B in the year ending January 28, 2024.
Brown ascribed this to the polarisation and politicisation of plant-based meat in the US, noting that the biggest consumption barrier for Americans is the health attributes of these products. While half of US consumers found meat alternatives healthy in 2020, that number fell to 38% in 2022. And this loss in faith has since continued, with a Mintel survey from last year showing that nutrition is the second-biggest reason (35%) for Americans’ reticence to try plant-based meat. “It’s not just the animal protein players and their lobbyists, it’s actually members of the pharmaceutical industry, which I find to be kind of disturbing, actually,” said Brown.
Beyond Meat has made health the focal point of its marketing efforts, with its latest marketing drive honing in on the Beyond Steak, which was certified as ‘heart-healthy’ by the American Heart Association (AHA). It has continued to do that with its new Beyond Burger and Beef, which has undergone a recipe change that now includes avocado oil, fava beans and red lentils, and has 60% less saturated fat, 20% less sodium, 20% more calcium, and 12% higher potassium content.
“The current climate of misinformation and efforts by incumbents – including, sadly, pharmaceutical interests – to poison the plant-based meat well push us to accelerate gains in the health profile of our product platforms,” noted Brown, adding: “We had to right the message. We can do that by yelling from the rooftops about the benefits of our existing products, or we can just try to make them even more healthy and unassailable.”
The company’s performance internationally, however, has improved by 18% from 2022-23, with both retail and foodservice sales up. This is thanks in large part to its European deal with McDonald’s, which uses the Beyond Beef patty for the vegan McPlant burger. Brown highlighted that the business had witnessed “continued traction at McDonald’s across countries such as Austria, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, UK, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, and Switzerland”.
Beyond Meat to increase prices in the US this year
When Beyond Beyond Meat announced its product reformulation last week, Green Queen reported that the new burger and mince would be more expensive, given the use of premium ingredients like avocado oil. Now, it has emerged that this will coincide with a larger overhaul of the company’s pricing structure, which will see some of its products in the US become more expensive. Brown insisted that this “does not reflect an abandonment of our long-sought price parity goal, which we in fact achieved in certain very specific offerings”.
“Pricing just wasn’t as effective a tool,” he revealed. “We probably ended up selling a lot of our products to the same consumer at a reduced price. So we learned that and moved away from it.” Outlining the reasons for the higher markups, he said restoring margins was important, while the pricing programmes the company previously implemented failed to convert early adopters into the mainstream.
“In certain areas, there will be more of a delta between animal protein and ourselves, but in others, there will not be. And so, this is not a kind of crude application of a price increase. We have some very important partnerships and relationships where getting on the product line, there won’t be much change,” explained Brown.
“In retrospect, the noise and swirl surrounding the category reached decibels that were perhaps sufficient to ground out pricing and other messages,” he noted, adding that the new cost structure would take on a tiered approach across its product lines. “I do think there’s a real opportunity to continue to offer outstanding innovation year after year that does have a more premium price on it, while you continue to offer some of the rest of your portfolio at lower pricing.”
This is something Beyond Meat’s chief communication officer, Shira Zackai, highlighted last week. “Based on the significant nutritional benefits and elevated taste profile of these new products, we feel confident in the value we will be providing to consumers relative to their cost,” he told Green Queen.
The price hikes will be implemented in the US this year, but in markets like Europe, Brown admitted that the company had to adjust retail prices, which were “just too high”. Kutua highlighted that a big reason for this is the higher level of private-label penetration in Europe compared to the US. He explained that the company narrowed the price gap with its competition two years ago in Europe, but it still carries a premium in certain categories, and over time, the goal would be to further bridge that gap – though it’s not an immediate concern.
One thing the company will look to do in 2024 is expand its presence in German retail, which would be a shrewd move considering it is Europe’s largest plant-based market. Beyond Meat forecasts its 2024 revenues to be level with last year’s, between $315-345M, with Q1 sales for this year also expected to remain in the $70-75M range.
“We’re cautious in our optimism,” said Brown. “We’ve obviously had some tough years, but by making these changes and creating the sustainable baseline for which we can grow, we’re going to create some room for ourselves to execute and get back on track for growth.”
In our weekly column, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers Oato’s oat milk launch in retail, Maple Leaf Foods’ consolidation, and a spate of alternative seafood developments.
New products and launches
A week after announcing its financial results for 2023 and promising product expansion, Oatly has launched a new line of oat milk creamers in four flavours for the US market: sweet and creamy, mocha, vanilla and caramel.
Courtesy: Oato
UK startup Oato has secured a listing for its fresh oat milks at Scottish supermarket Booths. The barista whole oat milk comes in 1l bottles shaped like cow’s milk.
London-based oat milk chocolate brand HiP (Happiness in Plants) has upgraded its vegan Easter eggs, which are now 50% bigger and contain chocolate buttons inside. They’re available in Salted Caramel and Cookies No Cream flavours.
In the US, plant-based milk maker Mooala has introduced single-serve versions of its banana milk in Sprouts stores nationwide. The range is available in chocolate, vanilla and strawberry flavours, and priced at $1.49 per 8oz bottle.
Chicago-based dairy company Truly Grass Fed has launched a premium gluten-free oat milk line in original and extra creamy variants, which are available at select The Fresh Market locations, and at Lowes Foods and Natural Grocers soon.
Meanwhile, US food tech startup microTERRA has unveiled a duckweed-based ingredient aimed at sugar reduction. The innovation amplifies sweetness perception to help cut back on sugar in food and beverages without compromising on any functional attributes.
New York-based company InnovoPro has developed a plant-based barista product with chickpea protein, which can remove the need for buffers and emulsifiers in high-protein beverages and fruit shakes.
Courtesy: Ichiran
Japanese ramen chain Ichiran is introducing a vegan tonkotsu ramen kit in the US, which is the result of six years of R&D. Comprising a liquid broth concentrate, tamen oil, togarashi seasoning and Hakata-style noodles, it will be available from tomorrow.
Californian plant-based meat player Beleaf has inked a new distribution partnership with Dot Foods to expand the presence of its meat, shrimp and egg analogues nationwide in the US.
US fast-casual chain Pokeworks has expanded its partnership with vegan seafood producer Impact Food, which will see the eatery serve the latte’s vegan tuna in its Bay Area locations.
It’s a big week for seafood news. Dutch plant-based brand Vegan Zeastar will open a pop-up restaurant Zèta, a vegan eatery at Grote Markt in The Hague. Running from March 5-10, it will showcase dishes using its vegan crab, shrimp and sashimi.
Fellow Dutch vegan producer The Vegetarian Butcher is launching its first fish SKU, called Krosse Flosse. The breaded product is now available in Germany.
Courtesy: The Vegetarian Butcher
And Brazilian plant-based meat startup Future Farm is reformulating its entire product range to elevate the taste and texture attributes of its vegan chicken, beef and seafood analogues.
Finance and closures
British vegan sweets startup Tasty Mates has bagged a £60,000 Dragons’ Den investment for a 15% stake from Peter Jones, though negations are still ongoing over a lower share.
UK vegan burger chain The Vurger Co has shut its doors over a year after it was rescued from administration, citing post-pandemic challenges and insufficient government support.
Courtesy: The Vurger Co
Across the Atlantic, Brooklyn-based specialty mushroom company Smallhold, which specialised in vertical farming, has filed for bankruptcy, after it emerged that the business was in worse financial shape than previously disclosed.
Portland, Oregon’s fermentation-focused vegan deli and restaurant Fermenter is also closing. But it’s a positive sign, as the team is revamping the concept for a launch in April. The brand, meanwhile, will live on through products and classes.
Policy and corporate moves
Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf Foods is merging its meat and plant protein businesses – includafing Lightlife and Field Roast – into a single unit to simplify its operations and drive growth across all categories.
Dutch cultivated pork producer Meatable has appointed industry executives Lorne Abony and Patricia Malarkey to its board of directors as it awaits the regulatory greenlight in Singapore ahead of its planned launch later this year.
Courtesy: Meatable
France has officially banned the use of meat-related terms on the product labelling of plant-based alternatives, which includes 21 terms – although ‘burger’ is not on the prohibited list.
And in the UK, the Green Party mayor of Worcester, Louis Stephen, has taken meat off the menu for the council’s receptions to serve an exclusively plant-based menu to highlight food’s impact on climate change.
Following its rebrand from VFC Foods last month, the newly formed Vegan Food Group is set to acquire German tofu manufacturer Tofutown for an undisclosed sum. With four businesses under its portfolio, the company aims to bolster revenue beyond €100M and become profitable this year.
The Vegan Food Group (VFG) will soon complete its third plant-based M&A deal in less than 10 months, taking over 35-year-old German brand Tofutown. The deal will allow VFG to scale up total revenues to over €100M and set it on a path to profitability this year.
It’s part of the company’s mission to become “a vegan Unilever”, as co-founder and chief mission officer Matthew Glover noted during the rebrand from VFC Foods last month. The move to become a holding company – which now comprises VFC, Meatless Farm, Clive’s Purely Plants, and Tofutown – allows VFG to become “one of Europe’s largest plant-based manufacturers”, and the latest acquisition delivers on CEO Dave Sparrow’s promise that there would be more takeovers to come.
“VFG will now be a major player in plant-based food, with a significant manufacturing scale across three sites, employing over 300 staff, and with a strong network of strategic manufacturing and supply chain partners,” said Sparrow. “This acquisition allows VFG to fast-track our growth across the UK and the EU in chilled, frozen, and ambient products, in both branded and own-label retail, as well as foodservice.”
“There’s a number of reasons why we saw Tofutown as an attractive addition to the Vegan Food Group,” Glover told Green Queen. “The fact that Germany is the biggest market for plant-based food in Europe was top of the list, providing so many opportunities to expand.”
Why the Vegan Food Group decided to buy Tofutown
Courtesy: Vegan Food Group
“The business already has significant scale with circa €60m revenue, 300 staff and manufacturing capacity, producing a wide range of 100% natural, organic tofu, spreads, and meat alternatives,” Glover said of Tofutown. “[Founder] Bernd [Drosihn] and the team have invested heavily over 40 years developing a business with distribution into major retailers and foodservice across Germany, which we can continue to develop.”
Headquartered in Wiesbaum, Tofutown supplies major retailers including Aldi, Lidl, DM and Edeka. It has two manufacturing sites sprawling a combined 55,000 sq m, with the Lüneburg, Lower Saxony facility one of Europe’s largest plant-based factories, “with the capacity to produce a wide range of new plant-based lines”.
“Joining the Vegan Food Group is an exciting opportunity for Tofutown to successfully continue Bernd’s vision over the coming decades,” said Touftown CEO Markus Kerres. “With Germany and the UK being the two biggest markets for plant-based foods, we’re well-positioned to thrive over the next decade.”
The tofu maker joins VFG’s growing family of vegan brands, a portfolio the company says will continue to expand with more M&As on the way. “We’ll be looking at opportunities to expand our brands into Europe through the distribution already in place, whilst expanding the current Tofutown product ranges into the UK market,” said Glover.
“The business also has an existing senior management team in place with an enthusiasm to grow and learn as part of a wider group structure. We’re very excited about how we can merge the startup culture of VFC and Meatless Farm, with the established nature of a food company where manufacturing and delivering high-quality food is second nature.”
Consolidation deals ‘vital’ for rapid plant-based growth
Courtesy: Vegan Food Group
VFG was launched in 2020 as a vegan fried chicken brand by Glover and Adam Lyons, and after witnessing strong growth, has evolved from a challenger brand into a sector leader. Last year, the group rescued plant-based meat company Meatless Farm from the brink of bankruptcy, purchasing the latter in a £12M deal for its UK operations (VFC paid just a small portion of the sum, keeping the brand assets intact).
This was followed by the acquisition of Clive’s Purely Plants in October, which positioned VFC as “a formidable player” in the market, according to Sparrow. “What excites us the most is the diverse range of products we can offer consumers, from enticing meat alternatives to wholesome and delicious vegetable-based options, making us one of the most diversified players in the category,” he said at the time.
Moreover, 2023 saw VFG’s sales value grow exponentially by 199.3%, according to NielsenIQ data for the Grocer’s Top Products survey. However, it still represented a small chunk of the overall UK meat-free sector, which experienced major headwinds in a consumer landscape hit by the cost-of-living crisis. Vegan meat analogues were among the worst-performing grocery categories in the country, with sales declining by £38.4m, and volumes down by 4.2%.
With manufacturers like Plant & Bean and LoveSeitan ceasing operations – and VBites being bailed out of administration – and Nestlé and Heck pulling products from their plant-based meat ranges, it’s been a challenging year, and that’s before you take note of the lack of investment in the space.
“In the context of flat or declining category demand, consolidation, and M&As are vital for rapid growth in the plant-based sector. These strategies allow companies to scale, innovate, and navigate through resilience challenges more effectively,” explained Glover, who is also the co-founder of Veganuary. “Combining resources and expertise through M&As enables businesses to expand their market presence and improve supply chains efficiently, which is crucial when organic growth is hard to achieve.”
He added that in a tough fundraising environment, acquisitions allow brands to circumvent the risk of running out of operational cash, save valuable product lines, and emerge stronger from the current market slump. “Ultimately, consolidation and M&As are not just about growth; they’re about sustaining the innovation and competitiveness of the plant-based sector in a rapidly changing market,” he noted.
VFG’s purchase deal with Tofutown, which will see the former acquire all shares, is pending final authorisation, but is expected to close soon. It is the latest in a rapidly growing line of M&A deals in the vegan sector, including Australia’s v2foods’ buyout of ready meal brands Soulara and Macros, Indian company Nourish You’s purchase of alt-dairy startup One Good, and Next Level Burger’s acquisition of Veggie Grill (and its Más Veggies taco chain) in the US – all of which have come in the last couple of months.
With 2024 a year of major elections around the world, Caitlin Smith, senior campaigner at corporate watchdog Changing Markets Foundation, highlights the non-profit’s research into alternative protein misinformation on social media, and why it’s more important than ever for our leaders to take a stand for human and planetary health.
Despite high levels of red and processed meats being linked to negative health outcomes like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, alternative proteins continue to struggle to break through the public narrative and have also increasingly become the target of numerous social media attacks. Our recent investigation, Truth, Lies, and Culture Wars offers some insights into why and our new explainer video provides a snapshot of social media posts that our investigation (together with Ripple Research) discovered.
Over a 14-month period (June 2022 to July 2023), we found over one million examples of misinformation surrounding meat and dairy mostly on X (formerly Twitter), with spikes in misinformation around key political and media moments. 78% of misinformation focused on ‘disparaging’ meat and dairy alternatives, pushing forward cultural polarisation and attacking alternative proteins and diets as unhealthy or bad for the environment.
Conversely, 22% of misinformation ‘enhanced’ meat and dairy, exaggerating their health benefits, such as praising ‘the carnivore diet’ and claiming vegan diets would make you unhealthy. To a smaller extent, this misinformation also focused on the environmental benefits of meat and dairy.
This is a big claim, considering methane is around 80 times more warming than C02 over a 20-year time period, with animal agriculture being the single largest source of man-made methane emissions globally.This potent gas is already estimated to be responsible for 0.5°C of warming since industrialisation, and addressing methane emissions urgently is essential to ensure we don’t pass climate tipping points. One of the readily available ways to do this and to improve people’s health, is to reduce meat and dairy consumption in favour of a more plant-based diet – not something that Big Meat and Dairy want to hear.
We were able to trace misinformation back to people who have established financial links with the meat and dairy industry. For example, professor of animal science Frank Mitloehner, who leads the industry-funded CLEAR Centre at UC Davis, has pushed misinformation aimed at undermining alternative proteins, by sharing quizzes comparing Beyond and Impossible burgers to dog food.
Courtesy: Twitter/X
A similar narrative has been successfully pushed by Rick Berman, a lobbyist and the founder of the Centre for Consumer Freedom – an outlet funded by the meat industry and restaurant chains, which placed ‘Fake Meat or Dog Food?’ adverts in prominent newspapers, as well as placing an ad questioning the ingredients in “fake meat” during the 2020 Super Bowl. The CCF not only attacks these products, but also links proposals for shifting diets to an ‘elite conspiracy’, claiming that these are narratives put forward by people like Bill Gates to get you to eat bugs and shift away from meat consumption for their own profit-making.
Other examples include adverts funded by milk processors, and fronted by celebrity Aubrey Plaza, disparaging plant-based milk alternatives, calling them ‘Wood Milk’. A campaign advert, which has had a complaint made against it with the US Department of Agriculture, suggesting the advert could be illegal.
Another tactic that was prominently featured in our research was to undermine scientific research on the impact of animal agriculture and promote other types of research to discredit alternative proteins. A pre-peer-reviewed study by UC Davis on cultivated meat, claimed that this was 25% worse for the environment than beef. The study’s media journey started, when it was published in an article by the New Scientist magazine on 9 May 2023, which lead to many other media stories.
Though it has since been criticised by a number of academics for its methodology and misleading comparisons, the study and related media coverage caused a huge spike in social media conversations and was seized upon by right-wing media and political figures, which linked it with the various conspiracy theories.
Since our report was launched, the findings of the discredited UC Davies study, which still hasn’t been peer-reviewed, even made its way into the official discussion documents submitted by Austria, France and Italy to the Council of the European Union, claiming that investment into cultivated meat should be stopped, because it could be more damaging for the environment than producing conventional meat.
Online misinformation has hurt the alternative protein sector
Misinformation surrounding meat and dairy has not only appeared during policymaking discussions, but it has also impacted the profits of plant-based meat companies. Pricing challenges with many meat burgers, still much cheaper than plant-based alternatives, have been compounded by the lack of clarity on the health benefits of some alternative proteins. When households are under increasing pressure with the ongoing cost of living crisis, the move to switch to plant-based alternatives to processed meat, appears to have been swayed by this lack of clarity on the health implications for the consumer.
Courtesy: Beyond Meat
Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown was quoted in the Guardian last year stating: “This change in perception is not without encouragement from interest groups who have succeeded in seeding doubt and fear around the ingredients and process used to create our and other plant-based meats.” Granted, this is the opinion of the opposing side, but it is still a strong indication of the impact that misinformation is having. Investment to influence the public narrative is high, even going as far as developing an MBA, Masters of Beef Advocacy, to educate individuals to push industry favourable information online.
Our research found that a mere 50 accounts captured 50% of engagement with misinformation online, and nearly a quarter of all the misinformation we found focused on pushing the negative health impacts of alternative proteins, across meat and dairy alternatives. This included focusing on the ingredients and production processes – highlighting large factories and labs, nutrition, claims that cultivated meat causes cancer, negative health outcomes from consuming alternative proteins, and capitalising on trends like ‘frankenfood’.
As elections across the world loom this year, including in the EU, the fight for the dominant narrative is heating up. Misinformation spikes at key political moments and a good example of this, highlighted in our research, was the attempt to reduce livestock numbers in the Netherlands in 2022, after a High Court ruling that nitrogen pollution needed to be urgently reduced. In response to the ruling, the Government offered financial buyouts to farmers, budgeting 25 billion EUR to support this process. However, opposition to the policy was significant, and at the same time, misinformation online was high, with much of the narrative linked to conspiracy theories.
In this instance, misinformation focused on conspiracies about land-grabbing from the Government, feeding into the far-right agenda of populist politicians like Geert Wilders, advocating against environmental policies. Ironically, the majority of voices on this topic which were feeding Wilder’s narratives, were coming from outside of the Netherlands – something which might ordinarily be against Wilder’s usual position on ‘foreign influence’.
Courtesy: Twitter/X
Far-right commentators like Eva Vlaardingerbroek were also prominent voices during this time. Vlaardingerbroek is an ex-member of far-right political party Forum for Democracy (FVD) and has been invited to the Tucker Carlson Show and on Fox News to comment on the struggles of Dutch farmers. She is firmly behind misinformation narratives, such as that livestock does not have any impact on climate change and that this is all part of an elite agenda to control people’s lives and to make people weak.
Alt-protein has a big hill to climb, but politicians need to stand up
Online misinformation on meat and dairy is benefitting big industries and there are many overlaps in the narrative between misinfluencers, and the meat and dairy industry interests. In the EU alone, the climate and environmental policy U-turns that have taken place have been stark. By the Commission’s own accounting, many of the flagship ‘Farm to Fork’ initiatives have been dropped, and as the Commission comes to the end of its term, the far right in Europe has hailed this as a win for farmers.
When EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced the pesticide reduction policy was scrapped, Bayer saw an immediate increase in the value of its shares. Topics like cultivated meat have been utilised as an easy scapegoat to distract from the bigger issues of the devastating climate and environmental impact of industrial farming and the significant health impact of overconsumption of red and processed meat. In the EU, meat and dairy production is responsible for 53% of the bloc’s total methane emissions – yet they remain a policy blind spot.
With such powerful opponents, the alternative protein industry has a big hill to climb to reach the same level of influence across its marketing, lobbying, and online presence. Although there has been some pushback by companies like Beyond Meat, it is difficult for this nascent industry to fight the influence big farm lobbies and big meat and dairy companies have on media outlets, and social media platforms to counter misinformation online.
The public and politicians must have the accurate information they need to make decisions about our health and the environment. Watch our explainer to find out more about the kinds of misinformation to look out for and whose interests it’s putting forward – it’s probably not yours.
With even the cheapest plant-based meat products usually more expensive than conventional protein, cost remains a key consumption barrier for vegan alternatives – a new report shows how these can reach price parity.
Plant-based meat has had a challenging year, with the higher cost of living, attitudes around ultra-processed food, and misinformation about these products contributing to dwindling sales globally.
Many studies have identified the major factors that hold consumers back from eating these products. While taste and texture are regularly cited as the main barriers, alongside health/nutrition, price is key too. Despite a spate of launches over the last few years, and advancements made in the flavour and mouthfeel department, plant-based meats still cost on average than their conventional counterparts.
Courtesy: Hannah Ritchie
Alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute has revealed that in 2022, plant-based meat was 67% more expensive than animal meat. Likewise, research by data scientist Hannah Ritchie last year showed that even the cheapest plant-based meat alternatives are higher in price than animal-derived meat, suggesting that the former don’t just need to be at parity with the latter, but rather much cheaper.
So how do we get there? A new report by British chef and writer Anthony Warner for New Food Innovation delves into solutions to make meat alternatives cheaper than they currently are. The whitepaper outlines how textured vegetable protein (TVP) is usually much cheaper than meat, as the former is combined with a bunch of other ingredients to enhance the end product, things get a little trickier.
On average, hydrated TVP only makes up 20% of a plant-based burger’s ingredient cost. Fats and oils account for another 20%, emulsifiers and gelling agents 15%, and crumbs, seasonings, etc. 5%. But the real expense is in the flavourings to recreate the taste of beef and mask any native flavours in the plant protein, contributing to 40% of a vegan burger’s cost.
Courtesy: New Food Innovation
This is all before you consider the costs of processing – hydration, specialist equipment, time-consuming processes, specialist handling, efficient mixing and wastage are part of the manufacturing cycle, which can comprise up to thrice as many steps as conventional meat production.
Here’s how the plant-based meat industry can step over these hurdles and provide cheaper products to reach price parity with meat.
1) Tweak your flavour focus
A 1,000-person survey last year found that taste is the biggest deterrent for plant-based meat consumption for Brits (66%), followed closely by price (62%). Taste and texture are also the most common reasons for reducing consumption of meat analogues (40%) in the UK. Clearly, it’s a key factor to unlocking cheaper alt-meat. But as noted above, it’s the costliest too.
A typical burger formulation will have a savoury base element, a top-note meat flavour, a grill flavour, and a masking flavour. Masking is important as many plant proteins can have an unappetising taste, but using more specific masking agents can help reduce costs. Flavour companies can molecularly analyse the tasting notes in specific proteins to identify the best masking options – this targeted approach can bring savings compared to previous trial-and-error methods.
The flavour industry is dominated by a few companies, which means sometimes, food manufacturers end up overpaying. A push to improve plant-based flavourings has meant higher research and marketing costs, which are often passed on to the producers, but market consolidation and sourcing flavours from a single supplier can help these meat alternatives get closer to price parity.
Another solution could be to use non-natural flavouring agents, which are cheaper and can offer a wider gamut of taste notes, especially with grilling and smoking. This comes without any “obvious penalty on labelling”, given that they can be described as ‘flavouring’ instead of ‘natural flavouring’.
2) Leverage enzymes and in-built emulsification and gelling properties
Courtesy: Impossible Foods
Gels and emulsifiers like methylcellulose are omnipresent in plant-based meat and have key functional attributes, but these can make up between 10-15% of the total cost. While some companies are developing alternatives to methylcellulose, these are still expensive. The report recommends enzymatic solutions – especially those based on transglutaminase – which, while needing time and heat, require low levels of dosing and achieve “considerable cost savings”.
Emulsifiers are easier to remove, but they’re rarely used in high enough proportions to significantly impact the price of the final product. However, eliminating them will obviously cut some costs, and a greater understanding of existing ingredients’ functionality can help manufacturers make use of the natural emulsification, foaming and gelling properties of plant proteins.
3) Switch the processing and prolong the shelf life
Short shelf life for chilled plant-based meats prevents long production runs and adds to wastage. The industry can learn from the bakery sector when it comes to shelf-life extension, including the use of buffered vinegars, fermented acids and natural sorbate sources.
But it’s the micro issues that are most important to tackle. Using air-classified protein concentrates – which are cheaper and much more energy-efficient – over isolates is one solution, although they can be harder to work with and would need some refinement. Many high-quality TVPs are now being made entirely from plant protein concentrates, rendering cheaper and more climate-friendly ingredients.
4) Diversify the protein type
Courtesy: Heura
It’s easier to create plant-based analogues of lower-value, processed meats, but more premium cuts are harder and costlier to achieve – vegan bacon being a prime example. New extrusion processes can help overcome this obstacle, with a better understanding of their impact on finished products and the development of novel processes to improve meat-like structures enabling the creation of next-gen extruded plant proteins.
Many of these processes can help produce high-quality meat structures from plant concentrates, and their focus is less on burgers and sausages, and more on chicken, beef, lamb or pork chunks, strips and pieces to be used directly in dishes like pies, ready meals and stir-fries. These cuts of meat analogues only require small modifications to existing extrusion processes, meaning they’re similar to existing TVPs in terms of price and labelling. Plus, they don’t require any gelling, emulsification or tropical fats to deliver acceptable products.
5) Valorise the sidestream to cut food waste
When a protein is concentrated, something is always left over – for example, producing a protein-rich fraction from legume flour will leave a carbohydrate- and fibre-rich fraction, and utilising this is key to making cheaper meat alternatives. This already happens in the meat and dairy industry: think whey from cheese production and rendered animal fats.
Sidestream valorisation is essential for driving down costs and competing with animal agriculture. Some carb-rich streams can be used in food production as a source of starch to thicken soups or make extruded snacks, but they can also be used as feedstock for the fermentation sector to possibly increase protein yields.
“There are several projects currently in the research stage that will help increase the utilisation of plant-based side streams, and if the market is to grow as predicted, this work is going to have to increase in urgency,” the report notes.
6) Look local to find cheaper plant protein sources
Courtesy: Meeluinie
Current plant proteins are dominated by soy, pea and wheat, which often travel vast distances as part of a complex supply chain. While these still usually have environmental benefits over meat, this isn’t an ideal scenario. The research points to provenance and local sourcing as a major opportunity for plant-based meat.
For example, in the UK, fava beans are an important crop, but are mostly exported or used for animal feed. While these aren’t as easy to transform into TVP as soy or yellow pea, and come with flavour challenges, extrusion and masking tech has helped bridge this gap, with the first TVP made entirely from fava bean concentrate soon to be available to manufacturers in the country. (Beyond Meat’s reformulated beef is a case in point, adding fava beans in its new recipe.)
“There is much work to do. Some short-term solutions can produce significant results. Other approaches are likely to take more time, particularly those that require us to shift consumer understanding,” the report concludes. “But it is definitely possible that, if companies can maintain focus, a lot of plant-based products can be shifted towards price parity over the next couple of years. And if a few medium-term projects and research streams are implemented, we may even move beyond that point.”
The Precision Fermentation Alliance (PFA) and Food Fermentation Europe (FFE) have together announced a refined definition of precision fermentation to provide clarity and distinction from other food technologies, in the face of rapid advancements in the sector.
While it has been in use for over 30 years – in insulin, rennet for cheese, and vitamin supplements – most people only first heard of precision fermentation in recent years for its use in alternative protein applications.
But more and more technologies are flooding the future food industry, while the precision fermentation sector itself has witnessed a chunk of advancements lately. This is why it has become so important to better understand what the technology is all about.
That’s the basis of the work done by industry bodies the Precision Fermentation Alliance (PFA) and Food Fermentation Europe (FFE). Both organisations were founded early last year, with the aim of serving as an industry voice to advance regulatory compliance, unlock public and private investments and partnerships, and educate consumers about the tech.
To help clarify what it entails and clearly differentiate it from its alternative protein counterparts, the two bodies have now announced a refined and expanded definition of the technology: “Precision fermentation combines the process of traditional fermentation with the latest advances in biotechnology to efficiently produce a compound of interest, such as a protein, flavour molecule, vitamin, pigment, or fat.”
“As more companies are commercialising new food production technologies and ingredients, we found that there was a need to further refine the definition of precision fermentation to help educate the food ecosystem about the differences between similar technologies and resulting products,” Irina Gerry, vice-chair of the board of directors at PFA and chief marketing officer of precision fermentation company Change Foods, tells Green Queen.
How precision fermentation is different from other food technologies
Courtesy: New Culture
The PFA and FFE clarify that precision fermentation stands apart from traditional or wild fermentation and natural breeding techniques by leveraging the latest bioengineering techniques. “We wanted to draw a distinction between natural or traditional fermentation that we use to make beer, yoghurt or kombucha, and precision fermentation, which is leveraging the latest advances in biotechnology,” explains Gerry. “By using biotechnology, we are able to programme microorganisms to produce specific molecules that they would not make otherwise.”
During precision fermentation, a specific molecular sequence – derived from digitalised databases instead of animals or plants – is inserted into a microorganism to give it instructions to produce the desired molecule when fermented. At the end of the fermentation process, the resulting compounds are isolated and filtered out from the fermentation broth, separating them from the microorganisms that produced them. This is in contrast to biomass fermentation, where the entire biomass (including the cells) is the product.
“Since the first DNA sequence was performed in the 1970s, scientists have sequenced many plant and animal species. These sequences are now catalogued in digitised databases globally, and many are accessible online,” says Gerry. “For example, one can copy the DNA sequence of whey protein, such as beta-lactoglobulin or lactoferrin, transfer it into a microorganism, using bioengineering techniques, and create a unique milk-protein-producing strain.
“These microorganisms will produce the desired whey protein during fermentation, which can be later filtered out, creating a whey protein isolate that is equivalent to whey protein that comes from cow’s milk, but without any direct involvement of the animals. This technique is a defining feature of precision fermentation.”
This is also a key aspect that separates precision fermentation from cell cultivation. Sourcing molecular sequences from digitalised databases eschews the need for animal involvement in any stage of the process, which is different from cultivated meat, where a small sample of cells is taken from a live animal. And unlike cell cultivation, precision fermentation focuses on using microorganisms to produce specific compounds of interest, rather than growing an entire cell or biomass.
This is evidenced by what leading precision fermentation companies are doing – using microbes like fungi, algae and bacteria to produce specific proteins, fats, vitamins, and flavouring and colouring agents, which can be combined with other ingredients to make. Cultivated meat companies are, instead, creating the end product, such as chicken and beef.
“Ingredients made via precision fermentation would be required to go through the standard regulatory approval process,” confirms Gerry.
Progress for precision fermentation outlines need for education and scale-up
Courtesy: The EVERY Company
“While some applications of precision fermentation may be new, the technology itself has been safely used in food and medicine like producing insulin for over 30 years,” notes FFE president Jevan Nagarajah. “We are excited to contribute to the understanding of precision fermentation and its role in advancing food innovation.”
Nagarajah is the founder and CEO of Better Dairy, a member of FFE, alongside Formo, Imagindairy, Onego Bio, Those Vegan Cowboys, Bon Vivant, and Standing Ovation. The PFA, meanwhile, counts Change Foods, Perfect Day, The EVERY Co, Helaina, Imagindairy, Remilk, Motif FoodWorks, New Culture and Onego Bio as its members.
Many of them have made strides in recent weeks. Just last week, Perfect Day announced its partnership with Unilever, with its precision-fermented whey protein forming the base for a new lactose-free chocolate ice cream by Breyers. This came two weeks after fellow CPG giant Nestlé launched the Better Whey protein powder under the Orgain brand, made from precision fermentation as well.
This year has proven to be a significant one for regulation too. New Culture became the first company to attain self-affirmed GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status for animal-free casein earlier this month, a week before Vivici obtained the certification for its whey protein. That came a month after Imagindairy received a ‘no further questions’ letter for its precision-fermented whey from the FDA. In 2023, Remilk (also producing whey) joined Perfect Day on that FDA GRAS list, alongside The EVERY Co, which earned its third GRAS notification late in the year for egg proteins.
Aside from these launches and regulatory breakthroughs, investors have had an eye on this space too. Perfect Day itself is closing a $90M Series A funding round (announced last month), but other companies have secured smaller capital injections recently too, including casein producer Standing Ovation (€3M) and bioactive protein maker Triplebar ($20M). And this May, the EU will open applications for investments totalling €50M in precision fermentation and algae-based food startups as part of its Horizon Europe scheme.
Moreover, there have been some manufacturing and scale-up milestones. Imagindairy unveiled an industrial-scale facility with a 10,000-litre fermentation capacity, Daisy Lab ramped up production for its beta-lactoglobulin whey powder and diversified into lactoferrin protein, Yali Bio created what it claimed was the world’s first yeast-derived breast milk fat from precision fermentation, and Bond Pet Foods reached a scaling milestone alongside Hill’s Pet Nutrition to develop pet food products – all in the space of a month.
All this underlines the progress made by the precision fermentation space, as well as the need for further education. “One of the reasons we created PFA is to help educate consumers about precision fermentation, its benefits and the types of ingredients that can be made. Precision fermentation has a long and safe history of use in food. It is the same technology that is used to make insulin, vitamins and natural flavours today,” says Gerry.
“Scaling [up] manufacturing and reducing costs of production is critical for these ingredients to be able to effectively compete with animal-derived ingredients,” she adds. “The industry is addressing it in multiple ways. We see new types of private and public funding, university training programmes, industry partnerships, and contract manufacturing companies getting established to support these efforts. It won’t happen overnight, but the process is underway.”
As France restricts plant-based meat labels, pushes to ban cultivated meat, and encourages factory farming, nutrition experts and climate activists are urging the national dietary guidelines to recommend a reduction in meat consumption.
In November, a large European survey – which included 750 French citizens – revealed that 57% of people in France have reduced their meat consumption. For 38%, health was the biggest reason, while 29% picked the environment as the greatest motivation.
However, a new 3,000-person poll has found that French consumers are eating more meat (over 700g per week) than what’s recommended by the national dietary guidelines (600g weekly). Benoît Granier, food manager at the Climate Action Network (RAC) and co-author of the study, illustrated the conundrum: “There is a significant portion of the French who feel they eat less meat, or who want to eat less. But meat consumption itself is not decreasing.”
His organisation collaborated with the French Nutrition Society (SFN), which includes a host of public and private sector nutrition experts, for the new report, which is calling on the national guidelines to suggest cutting meat consumption by at least 25% each week – a total of 450g – in the upcoming update. “Today, we can no longer just think in terms of human health alone,” said public health expert and SFN member Nicole Darmon. “We’re also thinking in terms of the planet’s health.”
Dietary guidelines should consider meat’s climate and health effects
Courtesy: Gourmey
Currently, the French National Nutrition and Health Program (PNNS) recommends eating a maximum of 500g of red meat and 150g of processed meat – taking into account both categories’ links to cancer, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes – while favouring poultry consumption, for which there no limit has been set.
But the researchers argue that these guidelines don’t account for the growing number of studies shedding light on the animal agriculture industry’s environmental impact. Research suggests that veganism can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, land use and water pollution by 75% compared to diets rich in meat, which accounts for 60% of the food system’s emissions.
One study revealed that just replacing 50% of our meat and dairy consumption with plant-based analogues can bring down agricultural emissions by 31%, halt deforestation and reduce biodiversity loss. And this latest French survey revealed that diets contribute to 22% of the country’s emissions.
“With half as much meat, if we eat more fruits and vegetables, legumes, fruits and whole grains, we can check all the boxes in terms of nutrition,” said Granier. The RAC and SFN’s recommended meat intake would mean capping consumption to four meat-based meals a week, which can be done without any compromises by making some adjustments.
A health research review has previously revealed that swapping 50g of processed meat with 28-50g of nuts daily can lower the risk of death by 21% from any cause, while the risk of cardiovascular disease – the second-most common cause of death in France – can be decreased by 25% if 50g of processed meat is replaced by nuts or legumes per day.
Serge Hercberg, former president of the PNNS, welcomed the call from the SFN and RAC. “It is really essential to take into consideration this environmental dimension,” he said. “Today, many countries say it needs to be done, but very few have done it.” One of those is Denmark, which became the world’s first country to prioritise a plant-based transition in its national action plan last October. That same month, South Korea also prioritised vegan food production and alternative protein consumption in its national strategy.
France wages war on alternative protein amid push for factory farming
Courtesy: Umiami
The big problem, Granier outlined, is that “everything around us encourages us to eat a lot of meat”. He explained: “Even the current recommendations are not widely followed. Everything is mobilised for us to consume things that are contrary to the PNNS.”
It’s a nod to the French government’s policies, which heavily favour the traditional meat industry. In September, the country announced its intention to ban 21 terms – including ‘steak’, ‘beef’, ‘ham’ and ‘grilled’ – from plant-based meat product labels, which attracted backlash from vegetarian groups. “This new draft decree reflects our desire to put an end to misleading claims… by using names relating to meat products for foodstuffs that do not contain them,” said agriculture minister Marc Fesneau. “It’s an issue of transparency and loyalty which meets a legitimate expectation of consumers and producers.”
Two weeks later, the nation U-turned on its factory farming stance, with Fesneau calling on farmers to produce more and cheaper meat to “take back the market from imports”. But, as the SFN and RAC study points out, while over 30% of meat eaten in France was imported (and 50% of chicken), a reduction in meat consumption wouldn’t hinder farmers. “The challenge is to prioritise meats that are French, from more sustainable farming, with public policies to support breeders in this transition,” he explained.
Food in France has seen an 11% inflation, forcing many to seek the cheaper meat Fesneau is promoting. “30% of French people now have the means to pay more for quality,” Pascale Hébel, a consumption analyst for data consultants C-Ways, told the Guardian. (In contrast, 50% could afford higher-quality meat in 2017.)
But the recommendations of the study – limiting red, processed and poultry meat consumption to a maximum of 450g per week – would actually make for a 10% cheaper diet on average, with the authors imploring that social and economic inequalities be taken into consideration in the national nutritional recommendations.
France is now also hoping to ban cultivated meat, as part of a collective effort including a dozen other states pushing back against these novel proteins. The proposed bill would forbid producing, processing or marketing cultured meat in the country “in the interests of human health, animal health and the environment”.
However, Hercberg argued that consumers should make their own minds up about meat consumption. France’s Climate and Resilience Act mentions eco labelling on product packaging as one of its key goals, accompanying the Nutri-Score labels already adopted by the country. A 2020 analysis of three global YouGov polls totalling 10,540 participants found that 80% of French citizens find carbon labelling a good idea.
While France is set to introduce its eco-labelling scheme this year, will the government take into account the impact of meat for its dietary guidelines?
Despite its hard-line stance on alternative protein in the last few months, Italy is reconsidering its ban on using meat-like terms on plant-based product labels, with Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida indicating that he doesn’t want to have any conflict with local manufacturers.
It’s been an eventful few months for Italy and its adventures with alternative protein. In November, it became the first country to ban cultivated meat, citing health reasons, a risk to the country’s tradition, and a need to safeguard the livestock industry.
However, this wasn’t the only ban introduced by Italy, with another legislation going slightly under the radar. As part of the cultivated meat legislation, the country also prohibited the use of meat-related terms like ‘steak’ and ‘salami’ on the product packaging of plant-based meat, which alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe says is consumed by half of Italy’s population.
Labelling is a hot topic of debate in countries across the world, but perhaps it carries even greater weight considering Italy’s position as the third-largest vegan market in the EU, with a 21% sales hike from 2020-22. Agriculture Minister Lollobrigida appears to be changing tact, with the government reconsidering the move after backlash from food industry groups.
Food industry group argues that consumers aren’t confused
Courtesy: VegFather
The decision comes after Unione Italiana Food, which describes itself as Italy’s leading association for direct representation of food product categories, hit back at the government’s labelling ban by appealing to the EU Commission and requesting the removal of the article about plant-based food.
Outlining its intention to introduce the legislation, Italy’s government submitted a Technical Regulations Information System (TRIS) notification to the EU, which meant the country needed approval from the bloc if it wanted to ban cultivated meat and plant-based meat labels, with other EU members getting the chance to weigh in on the decision as well.
In response to this notification, Unione Italiana Food had outlined its stance. As a group with over 550 companies and €51B in turnover, which offered a broad range of plant-based products, it noted that these have “nothing to do with food consisting of, isolated from or produced from cell cultures or tissues derived from vertebrate animals”.
Unione Italiana Food argues that the protection of consumer information and the correct regulatory framework was already in place and that at the national and EU level, food labels are regulated by EU parliament rules. The bloc passed a landmark ruling in 2020 that rejected calls to ban the use of meat-related terms on plant-based product packaging.
“It does not appear that consumers are confused by plant-based products’ denomination – on the contrary, they are generally consumers who read labels and who are very clear about the nature of what they are purchasing,” the association wrote. The European Consumer Organisation BEUC conducted a survey in 2020, which found that over 85% of Italians did not have any concerns with plant-based products using meat-like terms, as long as they were clearly labelled as vegetarian. “These names… do not give rise to risks of misunderstanding, also because they are always followed by the specification ‘vegetable’,” wrote Unione Italiana Food in its comment.
“It’s not possible to change the names of products that have been around for 30 years,” the group told local newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. “This way, 20 million Italians who consume them knowingly will be confused. Our labels allow consumers to easily find and choose the products they intend to bring to the table without the risk of confusion on the shelves. Instead, the prohibition will end up generating confusion and disorientation.”
GFI Europe’s public affairs consultant, Francesca Gallelli, had said at the time: “Eliminating the possibility of using familiar terms to facilitate product recognition undermines transparency, generating confusion for consumers where none currently exists, as demonstrated by surveys.”
Supply chain discussions are needed as plant-based sales grow
Courtesy: Atlante/Vivera
Italy soon withdrew this notification, as it knew that the proposal would be rejected by the EU. This was followed by the formal ban, which many stakeholders felt would not hold, as it likely violated EU law. “We are the first nation to ban [cultivated meat], with all due respect to the multinationals who hope to make monstrous profits by putting citizens’ jobs and health at risk,” Lollobrigida said after the ban.
While the noise was louder for cultivated meat, it’s plant-based meat products that were more affected, given that they’re the ones currently in the market. But now, it seems the Agriculture Minister is going back on his own words.
“The last thing I want is to create conflict with Italian companies, so we have decided to start a process with Unione Italiana Food to develop a shared plan for the use of meat terms on plant-based products,” he told local reporters. “Our objective is to combine the needs of the industry with the protection of the consumer, who must not be misled.”
While the deadline for the process was set to be February 16, Lollobrigida has said that it wasn’t an “imperative” date and that more discussions with supply chain players were required. He noted that the request “does not affect the entire law” of cultivated meat, but only the individual article about plant-based products, which is why he is happy to discuss it.
“If it were a problem from this point of view, we could make an evaluation,” he said. “Through a gradual process, for example, we could decide not to change the names of the flagship products of some companies and instead modify those that are less well-known.”
With plant-based sales in Italian retail and foodservice growing by 2.8% last year – in a global landscape where sales have regressed for these products – Unione Italiana Food will hope the conclusion is a positive one.
From pollution and destruction to disease, the societal costs of livestock meat production are an incredible burden.
In 2020, the average American ate almost 280 pounds of meat, a figure which is very likely higher today. Many European and Latin American countries, not to mention Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Hong Kong also eat a large amount of animal meat. In most industrialized nations, animal proteins are at the center of the average person’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner plate. But what of the costs to our collective health and environment? This past December, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released a paper showing that our food systems, which we know to be based on animal proteins, externalizes $12.7 trillion in costs to society. That is an estimated 10% of global GDP.
Why does meat cost society so much?
There is no shortage of research linking excess meat consumption to chronic disease. Both the Journal of American Medicine (JAMA) and The National Library of Medicine show that regularly eating processed meats (bacon, sausage, deli slices, hot dogs) can cause heart disease. The World Health Organization qualifies processed meats as carcinogenic. Further, meat consumption is associated with rising levels of diabetes and obesity, as per the National Library of Medicine. All this illness costs the average taxpayer dearly: from debilitating personal illness to skyrocketing healthcare costs, not to mention severe environmental damage and considerable economic loss.
For example, a 2018 Milken Institute report suggested that the $1.1 trillion in U.S. healthcare costs for chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity, as determined by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) is closer to $3.7 trillion when lost economic productivity is included. “This is equivalent to nearly 20 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP),” according to the report authors.
The FAO paper, published during the UN climate conference COP28 where sustainable and healthy food systems advancements were part of the main programming for the first time, noted that 73% of the $12.7 trillion cost to society was due to dietary pattern-induced productivity losses. In laypeople’s terms, we pay for our addiction to meat and other processed foods in more ways than at the grocery store.
Another societal cost of our meat-dependent food systems, perhaps not reflected in the $12.7 trillion, is our growing antibiotic resistance. Livestock animals are raised in cramped conditions where disease is rampant, and as such, require enormous amounts of antibiotics (over 70% of all antibiotics produced globally are used by the livestock industry). By consuming meat, we ingest those pharmaceuticals and develop a resistance to them.
Then, there are the environmental costs of our current food system, which the FAO report says “have an expected value corresponding to about 20 percent of total quantified hidden costs [$2.6T] caused by agrifood systems. Of these, more than half pertained to nitrogen emissions (mostly from runoff to surface waters and ammonia emissions to air). These were followed by the contributions of greenhouse gas emissions to climate change (30 percent), land-use change costs (14 percent), and water use (4 percent).”
Big Meat’s media tricks and the taxpayer burden
Through sophisticated media campaigns that follow the PR playbook of other polluting industries such as fossil fuels and tobacco, the livestock industry has convinced the average consumer that meat is healthy, a non-negotiable part of their cultural identity, and that they can’t live without it. Made aware of the significant costs and tax burden of livestock meat production detailed above, would most people choose differently?
Alas, the duping of society by the Big Meat lobby is quite seductive. Take, for example, a Big Mac. What appears to be one of the cheapest meals/foods available to a US consumer, is actually quite costly upon further review, in large part because of external costs (see above) and substantial meat production subsidies. According to a paper by the American Institute for Economic Research titled ‘The True Cost of a Hamburger’, “the United States federal government spends $38 billion every year subsidizing the meat and dairy industries. Research from 2015 shows this subsidization reduces the price of Big Macs from $13 to $5 and the price of a pound of hamburger meat from $30 to the $5 we see today.” Guess who pays for those subsidies in the end? That’s right! It’s us, the taxpayers. Not only are we incentivized to eat foods that make us sick and damage our environment, we are made to pay for it through taxes. Not only is this infuriating, it’s fiscally irresponsible. Not to mention it’s all in the service of a very below-average hamburger.
Food system innovation is the silver lining
There is a silver lining: investing in food system innovation. Per the U.N.E.P., despite livestock farming accounting for up to 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions, agrifood tech funding accounts for only 4% of global climate investments.
Public markets haven’t yet priced in the true negative costs of livestock meat production and the full positive potential of future food innovations. Now is the time to invest in what some might call a golden opportunity.
Where there is inefficiency, there is disruption through innovation. Markets thrive on this, and eventually, the great solutions rise to the top and there is mass adoption across society. Think of how the horse and buggy gave way to the automobile, the film developing industry gave way to digital imaging and the landline gave way to the cell phone. Today’s smart protein industry is alight with innovation that makes animal factories look like the dark-age torture relics they are.
Indeed, innovation for efficient protein diversification through plant-based foods, precision fermented proteins and cultivated meat is growing, and the benefits are many. With alternatives, society can meet the rising demand for protein from a growing, economically-mobile and urbanizing global population for a fraction of the health and environmental costs, as noted by the COP28 host nation the UAE’s Minister of the Environment Her Excellency Mariam Almheiri during the conference.
We can see the path to food systems change is already taking shape with pioneering startups hitting key milestones. Israel’s Aleph Farms, for example, has just received approval from the Israeli government for the public sale of cultivated beef. Their peers at Upside Foods and GOOD Meat received US regulatory approval for cultivated chicken in June of last year. In the past few weeks, several precision fermentation dairy companies have earned FDA self-affirmed GRAS status for their animal-free dairy proteins. Meanwhile, the plant-based industry continues to iterate and work to improve taste, ingredient quality and health credentials.
It’s never been a better time to invest in the future of food, and it’s never been more important. Soon, Governments across the world are waking up to this reality. In the meantime, you and your financial portfolio could potentially benefit from the market’s assymetry.
South Korea has opened up the regulatory approval process for cultivated meat, after the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety established the framework for these applications.
During the launch of the APAC Regulatory Coordination Forum in October, Mirte Gosker, director of founding organisation the Good Food Institute (GFI) APAC, predicted that South Korea would be among the APAC countries next in line to develop regulatory frameworks for cultivated meat, with both countries “proactively seeking input from industry groups to craft clear and efficient safety review processes”.
Four months on, that prophecy has come true, with South Korea now accepting applications for the regulatory approval of cultivated meat. Today, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) officially published the Standards for Recognition of Temporary Standards and Specifications for Food, etc. to “revitalise the food industry”.
It has revised the framework and clarified the procedure for recognising food ingredients made from “cell and microbial culture” technology. This means that cultivated meat startups, which could previously only use these ingredients for R&D purposes, can now file dossiers to be allowed to sell these products in the country. So far, only Singapore, the US and Israel have approved the sale of cultivated meat.
The latter came just last month, when Israeli’s health ministry granted clearance to local startup Aleph Farms, whose regulatory affairs chef Yifat Gavriel said: “2024 stands to be a landmark year for the advancement of regulatory pathways and commercialisation of cultivated meat.” It certainly is proving to be the case, if South Korea’s announcement is anything to go by.
“Today’s announcement of a tangible path to market for cultivated meat companies is a welcome recognition of the important role that future foods will play as South Korea seeks to build a more secure and sustainable protein supply,” Sam Lawrence, vice president of policy for Asia at GFI, told Green Queen. “So far, the government has released an interim framework, which we expect to continue to develop and evolve over time.
What companies need to do and pay for regulatory approval in South Korea
Courtesy: Space F
While no producer has applied for approval, the expectation is that several local startups are likely to do so within the next few weeks. The entire process is set to take up to 270 working days, meaning even if companies apply soon, it’s unlikely that any clearance will be given this year.
Dossiers submitted to the MFDS must include safety verification data, including the name of the raw material, the origin of the cell, the manufacturing process, and international recognition and usage history. If the cells are derived from livestock, the application needs to provide information about the donor, such as country of origin, gender, age, and slaughter inspection certificate. For marine sources, data confirming the source of the donor must be submitted.
Moreover, the filing requires companies to divulge information about the human safety impact of the raw material, which entails digestibility, any negative health reactions, allergy and toxin data, and a confirmation of the genetic stability between the raw material and final ingredient.
The approval process will cost companies a cool ₩45M ($34,000). That is a hefty markup, especially given that not all countries charge a fee for the assessment of such novel food applications. Singapore and Israel, for example, have no fees attached to the process, for example.
Australia and New Zealand’s joint regulator also doesn’t charge a fee by default, unless companies want the procedure to be fast-tracked or prioritised. Currently, Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) is considering an application from Vow Foods for its cultured quail. The startup filed its application in February 2023, and is now awaiting a second round of public consultation, which will be followed by a 60-day period for ministers to comment on the regulatory body’s decisions
“Considering that the only risk assessment to be completed by FSANZ was done via fee and still took quite a while – who is going to go the free route?” one policy expert familiar with the application process in several countries told Green Queen, with the fees amounting to around AU$195,000 ($128,000). “In my mind, it is a de facto fee structure.”
As for the US, UK and EU, neither country charges a direct fee for the application. However, there are other expenses involved. “There are peripheral costs,” explained the source. “We have to use third-party accredited labs for the analytics on the five non-consecutive batches required for the UK and EU. Those lab fees can add up to be several hundred thousand euros.”
Lawrence added: “Regulatory agencies often operate on a cost-recovery basis and fee reductions are a point of discussion in many jurisdictions. It’s a known cost of doing business for companies operating in the future-foods space, but when GFI is asked for input by regulators, we consistently urge them to make their costs as low as possible, as higher costs can act as a barrier to innovation, particularly for startups.”
Consumer survey shows importance of price parity for cultivated meat
Courtesy: CellMEAT
The development will be welcome news for South Korea’s cultivated meat companies, including TissenBioFarm, Simple Planet, Space F, SeaWith, CellMEAT, and Cellqua, among others. It will also interest Korean noodle giant Nongshim, which has invested $7.4M in food tech VC funding with a focus on cultivated meat, and CJ CheilJedang, which has teamed up with KCell Biosciences to build a cell culture facility in Busan. And last week, scientists at the Yonsei University showcased a hybrid rice variety with cultivated beef and cow fat cells as a proof of concept for more affordable beef with a smaller carbon footprint.
It concludes a process that began in 2022, when the MFDS included official guidance for alternative protein in the country’s National Plan, covering the safety, manufacturing processes and regulatory approval of cultivated meat. A year ago, 28 industry stakeholders signed an MoU to advance the country’s cultivated meat industry, while a month later, the North Gyeongsang province opened a 2,309 sq m Cellular Agriculture Industry Support Center.
The APAC Society for Cellular Agriculture, which co-founded the APAC Regulatory Coordination Forum with GFI APAC, conducted a 1,110-person survey in October, revealing that 90% of respondents were willing to try cultivated meat at least once (though only 5% indicated they’d eat it regularly). Moreover, 39% were supportive of cultivated meat being sold at supermarkets and restaurants (with 14- to 29-year-olds leading the way), and just 10% were opposed to its commercialisation.
In fact, 19% of Koreans said they would prefer cultivated meat over plant proteins. But price remains a key purchase driver, important for 65% of citizens, followed by taste and texture (62%). While two-thirds of respondents spend up to ₩50,000 ($23-38) per week on meat products for the whole household, only 12% would part with ₩1,000-3,000 (75 cents to $2) more per 100g of cultivated meat. And just 6% would be willing to pay even more.
Despite that, 57% and 25% said they’d eat cultivated pork and beef, respectively, if they’re cheaper than their conventional counterparts. This indicates that scaling up production to reach price parity with farmed meat is among the biggest hurdles for South Korea’s cultivated meat sector.
“Hybrid products and scaling up production are key factors to achieve price parity – and it is at the forefront on many of the companies’ agenda either today or in the near future,” Calisa Lim, project manager at APAC-SCA, told Green Queen at the time. “We need combined synergies and efforts through investors, contract manufacturers, established stakeholders, startups, and government bodies to facilitate a thriving ecosystem for cultivated meat and seafood in South Korea.”
“GFI’s scientists and policy experts have offered our input to regulators during the consultation processes, and will continue to provide feedback to ensure the framework is effective and incorporates global best practices,” added Lawrence. “The agency is inviting companies to submit applications during this interim period, which we take as a positive sign that regulators are keen to get the local sector moving.”
Singapore-based 70/30 Food Tech has closed a $700,000 seed extension round, which has helped it launch a research lab to develop mycelium-based protein products, starting with shredded chicken.
70/30 Food Tech’s latest fundraiser saw participation from existing seed investors as well as Better Bite Ventures. The round has facilitated the opening of a Mycelium Research Lab to advance the startup’s R&D into fungi-based proteins.
“We believe that mycelium-based sustainable protein products can be a gateway to broader consumer adoption in Asia, especially given the familiarity and positive perception of fungi in the region,” said Better Bite Ventures founding partner Michal Klar. “We liked 70/30 Food Tech’s product pipeline and unique go-to-market strategy.”
Founded in 2020 by Eve Samyuktha and Mike Huang, F&B consultants working in China’s plant-based sector, the company makes vegan ready meals using its biomass-fermented mycelium chicken. In 2021 alone, as part of its test launch, it shifted 25,000 of these meals.
Now, to scale up and expand further, 70/30 Food Tech has launched its new research lab in Bangalore, a city known as India’s tech hub. “We chose Bangalore not only for the R&D, but also are aiming India as one of our markets for future products,” Samyuktha told Green Queen. “The per capita consumption of meat in India is significantly low compared to [the] rest of Asia. However, there is a rising demand for poultry and we want to be on the brink of it and offer exciting solutions.”
She added: “Having the lab in Bangalore is super cost-effective compared to Singapore, so the iterations and runs are larger in number.”
Using mycelium to offer Asians cost-effective alternative proteins
Courtesy: 70/30 Food Tech
The company began its initial pilot-scale experiments in biomass fermentation in 2021 at the Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences, with the primary aim of developing affordable alternative protein solutions. Having surveyed several B2B consumers – for whom it makes mushroom- and soy-based proteins, including the Chinese restaurant chain Guaka – the startup concluded that price is a key aspect of protein diversification.
“Achieving cost-efficiency is crucial and food businesses in China and other parts of Asia will likely be interested in products that can offer competitive pricing compared to animal-based products and this, in turn, can attract a larger market share and drive adoption,” said Doris Lee, CEO of GFIC, GFIC, the independent partner organisation of the Good Food Institute APAC.
A report by alternative protein think tank Food Frontier last year found China to be the most favourable market for plant-based food, although India was on the other end of the list. But across Southeast Asia, high price was a key barrier for these foods. Analysis by Asymmetrics Research also found that in China, many middle-income consumers are cutting back their impulse spending and looking for better-value products. Pork and beef prices have fallen, toughening the challenge for plant-based brands trying to sell to foodservice, which is a cost-sensitive approach.
Moreover, a recent study has shown that mycelium production can be done on a large scale and with lower costs, developing a protein that can grow in a relatively short period – days instead of the months or years it takes to grow animal-derived or even plant-based food. With greater investment in resources and infrastructure to cut production costs and educate consumers on mycelium as a potential dietary staple, the authors argue that the fungi ingredient could be a solution for global hunger and food insecurity.
While manufacturing costs are currently under wraps, 70/30 Food Tech will likely be looking to reach price parity with conventional chicken – already one of the cheapest meat products you can buy – sooner rather than later.
70/30 Food Tech to replace existing offering with mycelium chicken
Courtesy: 70/30 Food Tech
The mycelium study above also extolled the fungi root’s nutritional and environmental benefits. This is important for 70/30 Food Tech too, with Samyuktha noting that the startup is working to get its mycelium certified as a carbon-neutral food – a process that requires extensive data collection.
“Our feedstock is byproducts of other food manufacturers that would be generally regarded as waste, but safe for food reuse,” she explained. “Data required will involve the entire supply chain of the mycelium production, including cost of transportation, how we isolate and extract the parent strains to the downstream processing, storage and packing.”
The study, which was authored by employees of US mycelium meat leader Meati, revealed that mycelium can take on different desired tasting notes through biochemistry and flavour chemistry, while being high in protein with all essential amino acids and micronutrients. It has been shown to lower LDL cholesterol too, with the potential to reduce food waste by valorising the sidestream and be produced in a cost-effective manner.
“Nutritionally, I am excited to say that not only the amino acid profiles are similar to meat, but certain amino acids are significantly higher compared to chicken,” said Samyuktha. Additionally, biomass fermentation allows companies to eschew the extrusion process commonly used for soy protein, while the use of specially mutated fungi strains and bioreactor process designs allows 70/30 Food Tech to follow a close-to-market commercialisation approach.
“The first pilot run successfully gave us the texture of shredded chicken,” the founder said, before adding: “The key challenge is the downstream processing and ‘odour’ removal, which has been very time consuming.” But it’s not just chicken – or meat, for that matter – that’s in the works. “We are dabbling with a possible fatty substitute for traditional cow-milk butter.”
With retail a capital-intensive channel, the focus remains on B2B solutions, where 70/30 Food Tech wants to replace its current offering with its mycelium-based mushroom-soy blend, pending regulatory approval.
The startup was Asia’s first mycelium protein company, while last year, Shanghai-based CellX expanded into the sector too. It’s an industry that has seen a flurry of innovations and developments in the last year. This includes Meati’s launch of a D2C marketplace, chicken nuggets and mycelium jerky SKUs, Esencia Foods‘ whole-cut seafood analogues, Better Nature‘s soybean mycelium chicken, Libre Foods‘ whole-cut chicken breast, and Bolder Foods‘ cheese alternatives.
Plus, investors have shown heightened interest in the sector, with MyForest Foods bagging a $15M Series A extension in June and Infinite Roots securing $58M in Series B funding last month.
Californian plant-based giant Beyond Meat has unveiled its first product reformulation in three years, with the Beyond IV burger and beef now featuring avocado oil, fava beans and lentils. It’s a more nutritious product, but it’s also more expensive.
Beyond Meat is reformulating its mince and burger SKUs to match consumer demands for better-tasting and healthier plant-based meats, which will roll out in the US this spring.
Fuelled by the fourth generation of its core beef platform, the new Beyond Burger and Beef will replace the existing iterations on retail shelves, and their launch is headlined by improved nutritional credentials. There’s less saturated fat, less sodium, more calcium, more potassium, and slightly more protein.
The El Segundo-based company has now bid adieu to canola and coconut oils, replacing them with avocado oil. Plus, it has added fava beans and red lentils to its ingredient list, marginally shortening the ingredient list from 18 to 17. All this plays into key consumer concerns and demands: research has shown that people want better-tasting vegan burgers that are also better for their health.
Beyond Meat’s revamp comes with the backdrop of heightened criticism around the additives, ‘unnatural’ ingredients and ultra-processing used in meat alternatives. To ensure that its claims live up to scrutiny, the company worked with medical and nutrition experts in a multi-year research effort to improve its offerings and meet guidelines set by national health bodies and experts.
“We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished with Beyond IV as it marks our most significant renovation and step forward to date,” Shira Zackai, the company’s chief communication officer, told Green Queen. “As part of Beyond Meat’s rapid and relentless approach to innovation, we’re always working to advance the taste and nutrition of our products.”
Beyond Meat IV means more nutritious plant-based beef
Courtesy: Beyond Meat | Graphic by Green Queen
In the last year, brand strategies for plant-based meat have shifted drastically. There’s a bigger focus on health than ever before, in direct response to consumer attitudes and concerns about vegan alternatives. In August, with its first marketing campaign in years, Beyond Meat opted to subtly push back against targeted attacks from meat industry lobby groups, shining a light on the farmers who grow its ingredients.
However, it quickly changed tact two months later, with a new marketing drive honing in on its steak product, which was certified as ‘heart-healthy’ by the American Heart Association (AHA). It has continued that rhetoric, as has its biggest rival, Impossible Foods.
“There is a considerable gap between the strong health credentials of our products and a broader counternarrative that is now afoot, and this gap appears to have widened,” Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown said in its Q2 earnings call. “This change in perception is not without encouragement from interest groups, who have succeeded in seeding doubt and fear around the ingredients and processes we use to create our and other plant-based meats.”
In retrospect, this served as a precursor to today’s announcement. Behind the scenes, Beyond Meat has been intent on answering critics of plant-based meat, and the belief is that its newest products are its strongest response yet. The Beyond Burger IV is an upgrade on the existing one on multiple counts: there’s 60% less saturated fat (2g per serving), 30% less sodium (310mg), 20% more calcium (120mg), and 12% higher potassium content (370mg).
Plus, the new Beyond Beef has 21g of protein, a gram more than its predecessor. This, by the way, is higher than most 80/20 beef products on the market. The company claims the saturated fat content is 75% lower than standard 80/20 beef too.
“The development of the new products occurred within an ecosystem of leading medical and nutrition experts, and were designed to meet the standards of national health organisations to create a product that delivers the taste, satisfaction, and utility of 80/20 beef – yet is demonstrably healthier,” said Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown.
The company has been able to do so by rejigging its ingredient list. Gone are the canola and coconut oils – the former is a seed oil that has high amounts of linoleic acid, which has been linked to inflammation and related diseases, while the latter is a fat infamous for its high saturated fat content. With avocado oil, there’s less saturated fat, less linoleic acid, and more monounsaturated fat (also known as one of the healthier fats). The new products have 8g of the latter, versus 6g in the 3.0 versions.
Half of Americans found plant-based meats to be healthy in 2020, but that dipped to 38% in 2022. The loss in faith has since continued, with a Mintel survey from last year showing that nutrition is the second-biggest reason (35%) for Americans’ reticence to try meat alternatives. Yet another poll revealed that health is the major factor behind Americans eating meatless diets, with six in 10 choosing it.
Beyond Meat’s beef is now recognised by the American Diabetes Association’s evidence-based nutritional guidelines for its Better Choices for Life programme, and now features Good Housekeeping’s Nutritionist Approved Emblem. Unlike its steak, the ground beef and burger aren’t yet certified by the AHA, but they have been included in a catalogue of ‘heart-healthy’ recipes by its Heart-Check initiative.
All this will no doubt appeal to a country where one citizen dies from cardiovascular disease every 33 seconds, over a third are clinically obese, and over 11% suffer from type 2 diabetes.
Courtesy: Beyond Meat
Beyond Meat leans into the whole-food trend, but there’s a snag
The other major additions to Beyond Meat’s mince and burger are fava beans and red lentils. The company joins a raft of others incorporating whole foods into their plant-based offerings, playing into a trend connected to the increased consciousness around health and ultra-processed foods.
Among different protein sources, those originating from whole plants experienced the sharpest rise in consumption among Americans between 2022 and 2023, with 28% eating them ‘somewhat’ or ‘much more’. These foods also had the second-lowest drop (11%) in intake, behind plant-based meat and seafood analogues (10%).
There is a lot of misconception about ultra-processing and plant-based meats, with consumers linking the former with healthfulness to explain their dismay about the latter. This outlook chimes with “concerns some people have around foods that are new – often called food neophobia“, Churchill Fellow Jenny Chapman told Green Queen earlier this month. “Some [marketing] campaigns really hone in on this, by using words like ‘fake’ and ‘unnatural’ to describe plant-based meats (which are safe, nutritious foods).”
With fava bean, pea protein and avocado oil, Beyond Meat is aiming to appeal to people looking for clean-label foods. Research by ingredients supplier Ingredion has found that 78% of consumers would spend more money on products with ‘natural’ or ‘all-natural’ packaging claims.
It’s important to note that there’s no agreed definition for what constitutes a ‘clean-label’ food, though the common understanding is that it means there are fewer ingredients and fewer ultra-processed elements. The 17-ingredient Beyond Beef and Burger IV don’t suggest they meet the former criterion, but the removal of ‘expeller-pressed canola oil’ and ‘refined coconut oil’ indicates they could fit the latter.
Backing up this claim is a Clean Label Project certification, the first such accreditation for plant-based meat – although the initiative is more focused on screening products for environmental toxins and ingredient quality.
However, there is one drawback with the inclusion of fava beans: it makes Beyond Meat products more susceptible to allergies. Estimates suggest that around 4% of the world’s population have favism, a genetic disorder characterised by allergy-like reactions to these beans. The company did not respond to Green Queen’s query about whether the inclusion of fava beans raised any internal concerns about allergies.
Courtesy: Beyond Meat | Graphic by Green Queen
Avocado oil pits flavour against cost
Using avocado oil doesn’t just come with health gains – it opens up more culinary attributes too. This is important: flavour is by far the biggest deterrent and attraction for alt-meat consumption. This is illustrated by an international survey from 2022, which suggested that plant-based meat’s taste and texture are as important as their conventional counterparts for over 75% of consumers. And remember that Mintel poll from above? Nutrition was second on the list to flavour, which drives 48% of consumers away from these products.
But by using this fat, Beyond Meat is hitting the taste vertical, with the neutral flavour and smoother mouthfeel allowing it to “unlock an even meatier, beefy flavour” for the new products. Plus, given avocado oil has a higher smoke point of any fat (270°C/521°F, versus 230°C/446°F for canola oil, on average), the new Beyond Beef is designed to sizzle and barbecue better.
If you’re worried about the change in ingredients meaning a change in your beloved Beyond Burger’s flavour, fret not. A 93-person taste test last September indicated that consumers preferred the meatier taste and texture of the new vegan beef. And at last month’s FoodFluence conference in Edinburgh, 29 out of 31 registered dietitians said they enjoyed the taste of the new Beyond Burger, found it healthful, and would recommend it.
“We are excited to be adding more nutrient-dense plant-based ingredients including red lentil and faba bean protein in the Beyond IV platform,” Zackai told Green Queen. “The interplay of the proteins with the avocado oil allowed us to deliver our meatiest product yet while significantly advancing the nutritional benefits.”
Moreover, according to its latest life-cycle assessment, the Beyond Burger 3.0 generates 90% fewer GHG emissions, requires 37% non-renewable energy, uses 97% less land and consumes 97% less water than a conventional 80/20 quarter-pound beef patty produced in the US. But the reformulation doesn’t necessarily signal a shift in Beyond Beef’s environmental credentials. “While more research is still needed, we don’t expect there to be a significant change,” he said.
We’re in an era of increased cost of living, and people are looking for wallet-friendly food. In the UK, inflation has bitten plant-based meats already. While Beyond Meat’s yearly accounts are due next week, the company’s previous financials have shown that it struggled last year, with a 26.5% sales fall in Q3 (over already declining sales in the previous quarter) forcing it to abandon its target of becoming cashflow-positive, lay off more staff, and cut back its full-year forecast.
There was always going to be one major issue with avocado oil – for all its benefits, it’s significantly more expensive. So, Beyond Meat had to make a decision: absorb the added costs, or pass them on to the consumer. “As avocado oil is a more premium ingredient, the new platform will be priced to reflect that,” revealed Zackai. “However, based on the significant nutritional benefits and elevated taste profile of these new products, we feel confident in the value we will be providing to consumers relative to their cost.”
So, it’ll be interesting to see whether consumers really are willing to pay more for healthier, tastier meat alternatives. The new products are initially exclusive to retail, and their foodservice path remains unclear. “It will be available at all retailers where the Beyond Burger and Beyond Beef are currently sold, replacing the previous version in grocery stores,” confirmed Zackai. “We are excited to get these products into the market and clearly communicate these benefits to consumers, so they can make a choice that not only tastes great, but is substantially better for them and the planet.”
Could platform IV be a catalyst for the year 2024 for Beyond Meat?
US mycelium meat maker Meati has appointed a new CEO and cut 13% of its workforce in a right-sizing move aimed at reaching profitability.
Meati has switched up its C-suite by making Phil Graves its new CEO. The former Patagonia executive, who joined the alternative meat startup just two weeks ago as CFO, takes over from Meati co-founder Tyler Huggins, who will move into the role of chief innovation officer. It follows ex-COO and president Scott Tassani’s exit earlier this month.
Amid restructuring in the wider food industry, the Colorado-based company has also let go of 13% of its workforce, marking the business’s third round of job cuts in nine months. The decision to right-size has been made with an eye towards accelerating the company’s path to profitability. The details of any severance packages are unclear, but Meati said it doesn’t expect any supply chain disruptions due to the layoffs.
Graves argued that although such changes are challenging, they’re essential for aligning resources with profitability objectives. “These changes allow us to better serve our customers and pave the way for long-term, sustainable growth,” said the new Meati CEO.
Meati layoffs come after a challenging year for plant-based meat
Courtesy: Charlie McKenna/Meati
In June last year, Meati laid off 17 employees (about 5% of its workforce), followed by another round of cutbacks in September that saw 30 staffers (10% of the total at the time) lose their jobs. This was accompanied by a reshuffle that meant the elimination of 60 positions, as well as the shuttering of its pilot plant.
Striking a similar tone to Graves now, a Meati representative told Green Queen at the time: “These job cuts, while incredibly difficult, are a necessary part of ensuring we achieve a sustainable business model. Despite creating incredible products and an excellent commercial start in the market, we must be nimble and focus on near-term profitability.”
They added: “Meati is a young, disruptive company navigating uncharted territory – bringing a novel food to the forefront of a highly competitive industry in a challenging economic climate. Each of these factors requires us to regularly evaluate every aspect of our operations.”
Meati is not the only plant-based meat company to have cut its workforce over the last year, which has been incredibly challenging for the industry in terms of both funding and sales. Beyond Meat, one of the sector’s leading companies, laid off 19% of its global non-production workforce (about 65 employees) last year in an effort to reduce operating expenses and improve its cost structure, after reducing its annual sales forecast. A few months prior, rival company Impossible Foods let go of 20% of its staff.
Circana data crunched by 210 Analytics reveals that retail sales of meat analogues dipped by 11.1% to $1.05B in the 52 weeks ending January 28, 2024, while volume was down by 16.5%. In comparison, sales of fresh meat declined only by 0.5%, with volumes decreasing by 1.5% in the same period.
Investment has also slowed down in the plant-based protein space, as part of a wider funding hurdle for food tech. In the first half of 2023, plant-based companies attracted just $124M in investment – while data for the second half is yet to be updated, it still represents an alarming drop from the $1.2B injected in the sector for the full year of 2022.
Meati – which has raised over $275M in total investment – said its latest cutbacks follow precedents set by other leading companies “navigating transformative market shifts”. Last month, over 6,650 layoffs were publicly announced in the food sector, which is the highest number of monthly cutbacks in the sector since November 2012 (which were a result of factory closures), according to data from Challenger, Grey & Christmas Inc.
Meati continues to grow, targeting 10,000 retailers by year-end
Courtesy: Meati
Graves’ move from CFO to CEO leaves the company without a dedicated chief financial or commercial executive, but a spokesperson for Meati told AFN that the departure of Tassani, who joined TreeHouse Foods after two years at Meati, wasn’t sudden: “He took another role that was offered to him that he couldn’t pass up. Scott left before Phil was brought in as CFO, and that hiring process had been ongoing.”
The reshuffle sees Huggins, who founded Meati alongside CSO Justin Whiteley in 2017, move to a product-focused position. He will oversee the launch of a new foodservice Chef Cut product and drive the business’s sustainability initiatives. “I am incredibly proud of what we have achieved to date, and I am confident that in Phil we have found the right individual to lead the company to our next exciting chapter,” said Huggins.
Despite the layoffs last September, though, Meati added nearly 100 positions to amp up production capacity for its mycelium-based chicken and beef alternatives, which have been produced in a ‘mega ranch’ facility in Thornton, Colorado since January 2023. This will ultimately be capable of manufacturing 40 million lbs of meat analogues annually to rival the output of animal farms, which will help the company achieve its goal of $1B sales, which was previously earmarked for 2025, but may now be pushed back.
“Our future is bright. This category-defining product is already in 3,600 stores nationwide after just one year of production, showcasing its boundless potential,” revealed Graves. Its products are available in Whole Foods Market, Meijer, Cub Foods and Sprouts Farmers Markets, among other retailers, while it launched a D2C marketplace in September alongside a subscription service for new product trials. By the end of this year, it aims to enter 10,000 retail doors.
The company added chicken nuggets, jerky SKUs, and more flavours to its roster ahead of Christmas, all powered by its patented MushroomRoot ingredient, its commercial name for the Neurospora crassa strain of mycelium. An AI-led study has shown that this ingredient, whose whole-food nutritional density could address “prevalent nutritional deficiencies” and enhance “cardiovascular health”, also boasts certain “exceedingly rare/non-existent” compounds in food that present “pointed” health benefits.
It’s a leading company in the red-hot mycelium protein space, which has seen a bunch of innovations and developments in the last year, including Esencia Foods‘ whole-cut seafood analogues, Better Nature‘s soybean mycelium chicken, Libre Foods‘ whole-cut chicken breast, and Bolder Foods‘ cheese alternatives. Plus, investors have shown heightened interest in the sector, with MyForest Foods bagging a $15M Series A extension in June and Infinite Roots securing $58M in Series B funding last month.
It speaks to the potential of mycelium, with a study authored by Meati employees revealing that the fungi can take on different desired tasting notes through biochemistry and flavour chemistry, while being high in protein with all essential amino acids and micronutrients. It has been shown to lower LDL cholesterol too, with the potential to reduce food waste by valorising the sidestream and be produced in a cost-effective manner.
The study argued that mycelium could resolve global hunger and food insecurity if scaled effectively with enough investment and consumer education: “Once achieved, mycelium will certainly be appealing as an environmentally friendly, nutrient-dense protein source that can aid in the reduction of global hunger.”
Israeli cultivated meat leader Aleph Farms is advancing its Southeast Asia strategy with an “asset-light” approach through a deal that will involve the first production facility dedicated to cultured meat in Thailand.
Aleph Farms has partnered with biomanufacturer BBGI and synbio research and manufacturing company Fermbox Bio to increase its production capabilities in Southeast Asia. The collaboration will initiate Thailand’s first plant for cultivated meat production.
The deal complements Aleph Farms’ growth strategy in the region, with the company implementing a capital-efficient approach for manufacturing to drive down costs and accelerate scalability. The Israeli startup explains that the production of cultured meat is “conducive to value chains that are decentralised, compact, predictable, and conveniently located near end consumers”. This helps mitigate supply chain vulnerabilities, bolster food security and fuel economic prosperity for local communities.
“A prudent, capital-efficient scale-up lets us navigate infrastructure investments thoughtfully, enabling sustainable penetration into key regions,” said Aleph Farms co-founder and CEO Didier Toubia.
Cost and scale-up the cornerstones of Aleph Farms’ deal
Aleph Farms opened a 65,000 square ft facility at the Stratasys building in Rehovot, Israel in 2022 | Courtesy: Amit Goren
With a total of $118M in funding, Aleph Farms is one of the most well-financed cultivated meat companies. But it has chosen an asset-light approach towards manufacturing, which is centered around a hub-and-spoke model based in key markets. It acquired a production facility in Modi’in, Israel last year and penned a deal with ESCO Aster in Singapore (the world’s only approved industrial manufacturer for cultured meat) based on this approach, and has now added Thailand to its list of hubs.
“This strategy aligns with our commitment to scaling up responsibly, avoiding abrupt, extensive CAPEX investments in the process,” explained Toubia. “Ultimately, this progression aligns with our overarching goal: ensuring food security through an equitable and inclusive transition to sustainable, resilient food systems.”
Explaining this strategy, he told AFN last year: “We believe that in the next five to 10 years, companies will focus either on operations and production or on product development and branding. It will be difficult for companies to do both efficiently – especially in the current funding environment – so at Aleph Farms, we decided to focus on product development and branding and rely on external partners for production.”
This is why it decided to team up with BBGI, which focuses on cooking-oil-based biofuels and high-value bio-based products, and Fermbox Bio, which leverages microbial fermentation and synthetic biology to help businesses mitigate supply chain risks. Aleph Farms stated that collaboration with value chain partners is a pivotal element of its asset-light strategy, and the partnership will focus specifically on production enhancement, including cost optimisation and operational scale-up.
Figuring out ways to bring down prices is a key next step for cultivated meat, which needs to reach production costs of $2.92 per pound to be cost-competitive with conventional meat. While companies have managed to cut manufacturing costs by 99% in less than a decade, McKinsey analysis estimates that it will still take until 2030 for these proteins to reach parity.
“Of common animal proteins, beef delivers the highest value in global markets, so by focusing on cultivated beef, we are able to shorten the timeline to price parity,” Yoav Reisler, senior marketing and communications manager at Aleph Farms, told Green Queen last month.
“This agreement aims to support the sustainable development of Thailand and the region in every aspect, focusing on the new S-Curve, with expected governmental support,” noted BBGI CEO Kittiphong Limsuwannarot, referring to the 10 industries (including food processing) that form a pillar of Thailand’s Eastern Economic Corridor. “Drawing upon our extensive experience in designing and operating large-scale biomanufacturing facilities, we are well-positioned to operationalise the shared objectives of this collaboration,” added Fermbox Bio founder Subramani Ramachandrappa.
A milestone for Thailand’s alternative protein industry
Courtesy: Aleph Farms
“I think that four or five companies in this space, including Aleph Farms, have already developed scalable processes, have done a lot of work on cost reduction, and have already built facilities where they can make cultivated meet at the commercial level and comply with all the regulatory requirements,” Toubia told Green Queen founding editor Sonalie Figueiras on the Green Queen in Conversation: Cultivated Meat Pioneers podcast in September.
Aleph Farms made history last month after becoming the first company in the world to receive regulatory approval for cultivated beef, and only the third in the cultured meat sector (after California’s UPSIDE Foods and Eat JUST). It means that the startup can sell its Black Angus Petit Steak to consumers in Israel, whose production will be supported by the 65,000 sq ft plant it moved to in Rehovot, Israel, which can produce between 10 to 20 tonnes of product annually.
While research on cultivated pork is ongoing at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University and Mahidol University, there are no companies or manufacturers working with cultivated meat within Thailand, meaning Aleph Farms’ partnership marks a milestone for the country’s alternative protein sector. But it’s not the first time there has been a link between Thai businesses and overseas cultivated meat startups – Bangkok’s Charoen Pokphand Foods is developing hybrid proteins with Israel’s Future Meat, while seafood giant Thai Union is an investor in Aleph Farms.
A 2021 survey conducted by the latter two companies revealed that 97% of Thai consumers are willing to try cultivated meat. Meanwhile, in December last year, a 1,500-person survey revealed that only 24% of the population was aware of cultured meat. However, while 76% of them eat meat, 67% want to reduce their intake within the next two years, primarily for health reasons.
“Thailand has food technology, and we are a top player in the world, especially when compared to our population and country size,” said Jacques-Chai Chomthongdi, Southeast Asia director at Madre Brava. “Therefore, if you want to develop further in any area, the existing potential should be considered, along with changes and needs at the international level as well.”
In our weekly column, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers South Korea’s vegan tourism drive, a new hybrid cultivated beef rice, and plant-based meat brand THIS’s financing plans.
New products and launches
Nordic dairy giant Arla has relaunched its JÖRĐ brand of plant-based dairy products in Sweden, comprising oat milks and flavoured oat yoghurts.
Courtesy: Arla
In the US, Califia Farms has introduced a new Complete plant-based milk to its portfolio, a blend of chickpea, fava bean and pea protein boasting all nine essential amino acids and vitamin B12, alongside half the sugar content.
British producer MYCO is working on a line of burgers with Hooba, a protein mince made from oyster mushrooms. It comes after a funding round of £1.5M, with a launch date set for the end of March.
In the Netherlands, The Vegetarian Butcher has launched three new SKUs: vegan alternatives to cordon bleu, bratwurst and battered fish fillet.
Swedish mouldable plant-based meat producer Havredal has entered the US market through an agreement with Virginia-based distributor Performance Food Group. Its fava-bean-based beef and chicken burgers and mince will soon be available in East Coast states including Virginia, New York and Massachusetts.
Courtesy: Havredal
Also in the US, Delaware-based Superbrewed Food has partnered withDöhler for commercial-scale fermentation capacity to produce its Postbiotic Protein, which will be part of products launched by multiple CPG companies this year.
Vegan gelato maker NuTTi, which makes clean-label ice creams from cashews and maple syrup, has landed on the shelves of over 80 retail stores in the US, and is now in talks with Whole Foods and another leading national distributor.
And UK vegan dog food brand HOWND has expanded its Plant Powered Superfood range with a high-protein, low-fat dry food lineup in pumpkin, quinoa and moringa flavours, which contain Phytodroitin an algae-based alternative to chondroitin, to support joint health.
Finance and markets
New York-based VC firm Big Idea Ventures has changed the name of its new fund from New Protein Fund II to Global Food Innovation Fund II to emphasise that its thesis area covers proteins, fat, ingredients, sweeteners, and more.
In its bid for profitability, UK plant-based meat player THIS is set to begin its final crowdfunding campaign later this month, ahead of a larger eight-figure financing round later this year.
Indian plant-based milk startup The Alt Coappeared on the ongoing season of Shark Tank India, but couldn’t manage to get a deal with the investors.
Speaking of, the plant-based milk market was estimated to be worth $20B in 2022, and will expand annually by 10% to reach $51.9B in 2032, according to a new estimate.
Cultivated meat news
Cultivated meat pioneer Upside Foods has paused construction of its commercial-scale facility and has conducted a few layoffs as it doubles investment in its existing EPIC plant in California.
After a rough year for alternative protein and food tech as a whole, preliminary data by AgFunder has revealed that investment in cultivated meat startups dropped by 88% Deon 2021 to 2023, with producers in the space raising $177M.
In more positive news, Brazilian cultivated meat ingredient company Cellva has raised R$6.5M ($1.3M) in funding to support R&D and scale-up for its cultured pork fat.
Australia’s Vow Food, which is in the advanced stages of regulatory approval for cultivated meat in its home country, hosted a tasting of its cultured Japanese quail in collaboration with Iceland’s ORF Genetics in Reykjavik.
Courtesy: Yonsei University
In a new front for cellular agriculture, scientists at the Yonsei University in South Korea have created a hybrid rice variety with cultivated beef and cow fat cells.
Policy, manufacturing and awards
If you feel like becoming a millionaire, all you have to do is come up with the next concept for the Whopper at Burger King – and you can participate by using Impossible Foods‘ beef too.
Courtesy: Impossible Foods
Finnish brand Oddlygood’s vanilla-flavoured barista oat milk has been chosen as the Best Plant-Based Milk by 8,000 Brits in the 2024 Product of the Year awards.
Researchers at Finland’s Lund University are hoping to make better plant-based meat by replicating muscle fibres through the extrusion of a combination of ingredients – they found a combination of hemp protein and gluten to be the most suitable.
Singapore’s Float Foods, which makes vegan eggs under the OnlyEg line, has received a food safety certification for its Halal-certified facility, allowing it to offer its tech to other food producers looking to eliminate eggs from their lineup.
Spanish plant-based meat maker Heura has partnered with food industry giant Upfield on a tech agreement to to accelerate innovation in the vegan sector.
In Austria, Revo Foods landed a legal victory after a judge dismissed a case against the 3D-printed seafood maker filed by the City of Vienna, which accused the startup of misleading consumers with its ‘vegan’/’plant-based’ product label for its whole-cut salmon.
Courtesy: Green Earth Travel
Looking for a nice holiday? Green Earth Travel is organising an eight-day vegan food tour across multiple cities in South Korea on behalf of the Korea Tourism Organisation to explore what the country has to offer in terms of plant-based cuisine. The $4,120 package includes accommodation and 15 meals.
Israeli startup Day 8, which produces upcycled plant-based proteins from Rubisco, has secured a pre-seed investment of $750,000 from food tech incubator and investor The Kitchen Hub.
Day 8 has closed a $750,000 pre-seed financing round and formed a partnership with The Kitchen Hub, a food tech incubator and investor from Israel, which will help the startup produce plant proteins from agricultural waste.
Day 8’s USP is Rubisco, which is found in green crops like duckweed and said to be the most abundant protein on the planet. Unlike most plant proteins that are extracted from the seeds, Rubisco is derived from the leaves. The company is taking it a step further by making use of discarded crop leaves as the raw material, which resolves “economic efficiency”.
“Within the food industry, Rubisco is the most craved plant-based protein due to its superior qualities and abundance, and it has been a focus of The Kitchen for a while,” said Amir Zaidman, chief business officer at The Kitchen Hub. “When we met Day 8, we felt that this is the right team with the right technology to materialise the enormous business potential of Rubisco protein and create a more sustainable global food system.”
The funds will enable the startup to scale up to pilot production and carry out proof-of-concept work with what co-founder and CEO Daniel Rejzner described as “a long list of food manufacturers that have signed up to try the product”.
The multi-pronged benefits of Rubisco
Courtesy: Day 8
Founded in July 2023, Day 8 is the brainchild of Rejzner and Dana Marom. Marom, who is the company’s chief technology officer, is a food manufacturing veteran with previous experience in soy protein production and the medical cannabis sector. Rejzner comes from the CPG space, and previously founded Zollo, an app helping consumers compare grocery prices.
The name comes from the Biblical belief that the world was created in seven days. On day eight, it becomes humans’ “responsibility to protect and nurture it”. This underlines the startup’s goal to create more scalable, sustainable and functional plant-based products for the mass market.
This is where Rubisco, possibly the most abundant enzyme on the planet, comes in. You’ll find this in all green plants: alfalfa, broccoli, spinach, kale, you name it. Nutritionally, it is a complete protein, with high amounts of essential amino acids, resulting in an amino acid profile similar to beef, egg whites, and dairy proteins like whey and casein. It’s also rich in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and micronutrients, and easily digestible, a major plus point in the gut wellness era.
It boasts multiple culinary benefits too, with foaming, gelling and emulsification properties that can be key to many foods, including plant-based meat and dairy products, as well as baking and functional foods. Moreover, the enzyme is responsible for carbon fixation and has been targeted in studies looking to increase crop yields, which represents its positive potential to produce climate-friendly foods that preserve food security.
Its omnipresence means this is a naturally available source of plant protein everywhere in the world. All of us have eaten a lot of Rubisco without even knowing it, especially since it has very low allergenicity.
Overcoming the challenges of Rubisco protein production
Courtesy: Day 8
It’s not like the plant-based industry hasn’t tried to work with Rubisco before. One of the world’s leading alternative meat makers, Impossible Foods, experimented with alfalfa-derived rubisco in its early years. Speaking to the New Yorker in 2019, founder and then-CEO Pat Brown explained: “For a year, our prototype burgers used RuBisCo, and it worked functionally better than any other protein, making a juicy burger.”
In fact, the company filed a patent in 2015 describing the use of Rubisco as a binding agent, as well as an example of Rubisco isolation and purification. Brown predicted that the ingredient could help meet the world’s protein requirements using just 3% of the world’s land. The company eventually went to market with soy protein, of course, but mainly because no one was producing Rubisco at scale.
And that is because it’s hard to do so. The enzyme needs to be isolated from indigestible cellulose, but isn’t easy to extract in the first place, given it is enclosed in tough cell walls of leaves. It also needs a large amount of biomass to be extracted as a protein source for food, which is where crops like alfalfa, moringa, sugar beets and duckweed come in. But even then, these leaves tend to rot in storage. This is before you tackle the removal of chlorophyll and other molecules to produce a colourless compound without any bitter or vegetal notes.
Day 8 says its extraction technology can make the “most taste-neutral protein available today”. And to make things more affordable, it eliminates the cost of growing raw materials – green plants, in this case – by upcycling discarded leaves from existing crops. While Rejzner remained tight-lipped when asked what plants the startup is using, he offered: “Our process is cropagnostic, so we are able to work on multiple crops.”
In the long term, it claims products made from its Rubisco protein will be so cheap that they could replace soy protein entirely. “We estimate that approximately 2.7 trillion tons of discarded leaves can be upcycled annually,” he explained. “This vast resource has the potential to produce protein equivalent to 11 times the entire global soy protein consumption without requiring any incremental land, much less water, or energy.”
Expanding on this, Rejzner told Green Queen: “Initially, as our production scale is small and production costs are higher, the product will be similar to other functional ingredients. As our production scale gets larger, the cost will be at par with bulk soy protein powder.”
He added that Day 8’s protein has a wide range of applications. “Most promising are protein-enhanced products, whether these are bars, dairy products, plant based dairy, etc.”
With the plant-based world still reeling from post-pandemic headwinds, and cultivated meat weathering its own legislative storm, could Rubisco prove to be a viable solution for companies, consumers and investors alike? Day 8 will hope so, armed with the backing of The Kitchen Hub, which has 26 companies under its portfolio and has helped them raise over $345M to date.
It’s a trend identified by other companies too, not least California’s Plantible Foods, which has made significant strides with its duckweed-derived Rubisco. In 2021, it raised $21.5M in Series A funding to build a commercial-scale production facility and launch its nutrient-dense Rubi Protein. Currently, the startup is focusing on replacing eggs in applications like baking and pasta-making with Rubi Whisk, and providing a cleaner-label binder to plant-based meat with Rubi Prime.
Dutch startup Rubisco Foods is also tapping duckweed for its protein, while New Zealand’s Leaft Foods (which has secured $15M in investment) uses alfalfa as a base.
Black-owned plant-based meat company Meat the Mushroom secured investment from two Sharks in the ongoing season on Shark Tank – here’s the inside story on how it all went down.
“In Shark Tank, we have so many plant-based products – they all taste like crap. This actually tastes good.”
As far as stamps of approval go, this one from Kevin O’Leary – known on the internet as Chef Wonderful – took the cake for Meat the Mushroom, the Baltimore-based startup that appeared on Shark Tank’s ongoing season. Owned by husband-and-wife duo Marvin and Aleah Rae Montague, the three-year-old brand’s flagship product is Shroomacon, a vegan bacon with only five ingredients: king oyster mushrooms, olive oil, natural smoke flavour, salt and black pepper.
The clean-label aspect drives the company’s nutrition-focused marketing strategy, with Aleah highlighting bacon’s association with high blood pressure and heart disease, its high saturated fat and cholesterol content, and the presence of nitrates and preservatives. With heart disease being the leading cause of death in the US – one American dies from cardiovascular disease every 33 seconds, and African Americans are 30% more likely to do so than non-Hispanic white people – the health focus on food is higher than ever.
A 1,022-person survey by the International Food Information Council (IFIC) last year found that health is the major factor behind Americans eating vegan or vegetarian diets, with six in 10 choosing it. And in terms of plant-based meat, ‘healthy’ is the most appealing description on product labels.
When it comes to protein intake, whole-plant sources saw the sharpest rise among Americans between 2022 and 2023, with 28% eating them ‘somewhat’ or ‘much more’ now. There’s also greater sensitivity around ultra-processed foods and their impact on health, a link that is extended to meat alternatives. All this has brought whole-food plant-based proteins into sharp focus recently.
For Marvin himself, going vegan was a health thing. Within a year of transitioning to a plant-based diet in 2014, he managed to overcome his lifelong battle with asthma and reverse a diagnosis of early heart disease. Giving up bacon was the hardest part, though, which led to him creating a mushroom-based version in preparation for a future restaurant. That has now evolved into Meat the Mushroom.
Two Sharks for the price of one
Courtesy: Christopher Willard/ABC
The Montagues’ appearance on Shark Tank – which has platformed many vegan brands, including Wild Earth, Everything Legendary, Project Pollo, Mrs Goldfarb’s Unreal Deli and The Cinnamon Kitchen – was two years in the making. “We applied two years in a row and got the call in the spring of 2023 that we were moving forward to the next round in the process,” Aleah tells Green Queen. “And it is a process.”
They received a call to find out they’re moving forward past the application stage, a moment she describes as “surreal”. “This entire experience is a real ‘pinch-me’ moment,” she notes. The nerves gave way to adrenaline as she and her husband walked down the famous Shark Tank hallway. “All of our practice really kicked in… and we made it all happen.”
Pitching to Mark Cuban (a known vegetarian and alternative protein investor), Lori Greiner, Daymond John, Daniel Lubetzky and O’Leary, Marvin and Aleah were seeking $150,000 for a 7.5% stake in their vegan bacon company.
But although the Sharks were impressed by the bacon, they didn’t have the same feeling about the $2M valuation. O’Leary offered the full $150,000, but for a 33.3% stake, valuing the company at $450,000 instead. “I have zero flexibility,” he warned. Were the Shroomacon makers surprised by that? “No, they are Sharks for a reason,” says Marvin. “Everything is negotiable, and just having an offer meant we had a chance to walk out of there with one on our team.”
Quickly, however, Cuban and John pulled out – for the former, it was a conflict of interest, given he’s an investor in Unreal Deli, while John believed it would be too hard to maximise profits. O’Leary followed up with a ‘mushroomed’ offer of 33.67%, and then 34%. Lubetzky then took himself out of the running too, encouraging the Montagues to take O’Leary’s offer.
Meat the Mushroom experiences the ‘Shark Tank effect’
Courtesy: Meat the Mushroom
You could sense the hesitation on the entrepreneurs’ minds, who knew they’d need to raise more money down the line, which is proving to already be an uphill task in the food tech sector. Things took a turn soon, though, when Greiner came in matching O’Leary’s original offer for a 33.3% stake.
Aleah explained that a third of the company is a lot more than they were willing to give. After O’Leary outlined the challenging financial landscape, Greiner sweetened the deal by offering to join his 33.3% offer. As the saying goes, two Sharks are better than one.
The Montagues countered with 25%, but the investors stood their ground. Their next counters – $200,000 for 33.33% and 34% – was unsuccessful too, before Cuban chimed in and warned that they were overnegotiating. While still looking a little uncertain, the Meat the Mushroom founders agreed to O’Leary and Greiner’s joint deal.
“We could see the value that having two Sharks could really bring,” explains Marvin. “Our goal has always been to make Shroomacon more accessible and to make it easier for people to really transform their lives by changing their eating habits. We felt two Sharks can get us there, and it felt worth the equity.”
While many deals end up gaining investment from the Sharks, roughly half of them never close after due diligence. But things look to be going positively for Meat the Mushroom. “We are in the process of finalising the details and are excited about what this partnership will bring forth,” reveals Aliah.
The startup was also subject to what’s become known as the ‘Shark Tank effect’, when businesses who appear on the show receive a huge uptick in sales and website visits after the segment’s airing. “In the 12 hours after our episode aired, we did over $60,000 worth of online sales. That’s more sales than we did in any month in the history of our business,” notes Marvin. For context, at the time of their pitch the startup’s all-time sales were $360,000. “Our minds were blown.”
Vegan bacon isn’t an easy game – in a $1.3B market crowded by innovators like THIS, La Vie, MyForest Foods, Prime Roots, the Vegetarian Butcher and Lightlife, to name a few, Meat the Mushroom would need to double down on the clean-label aspect for its Shroomacon to really stand out. Having a couple of Sharks on board will go a long way in doing so.
Since the pitch, the business has progressed nicely. “We’ve gone from about 25 stores to over 100 and closed 2023 with over a half million in sales,” Marvin says. “Our team has grown too – we now have over 12 people on our team, and we are very proud to be creating jobs in our city of Baltimore.” The city became the first in the US to officially proclaim January as the month of Veganuary earlier this year.
“We are working hard to get our product into grocery stores and restaurants nationwide,” adds Aleah. Currently, Shroomacon is available in Central Market, Green Life Market, MOM’s Organic Market and Jungle Jim’s stores. “But more than that, we want to continue to be a resource to anyone looking to live longer and healthier by making eating choices that are better for their body.”
New Zealand food tech startup Miruku has raised $5M in a pre-Series A financing round to expand its molecular farming platform for dairy proteins and fats, and conduct field trials in Australia.
The $5M pre-Series A fundraiser was led by Motion Capital and included returning investor Movac and new investor NZVC. It brings Miruku’s total raised to $7.4M, following a $2.4M pre-seed round in March 2022.
Lachlan Nixon, Managing Partner of Motion Capital told Green Queen via email: “We are delighted to be supporting Miruku to re-write the rules of dairy production. Miruku’s molecular farming technology enables the production of bio-similar dairy proteins and fats at a significantly cheaper cost, as well as with significantly less environmental impact, than traditional animal agriculture.”
Michal Klar, Founding Partner at Better Bite Ventures, which invested in Miruku’s pre-seed round, added: “From the start, we were impressed with the combination of technical and business experience in Miruku’s founding team.”
“Great to see new investors on board – this round will give the team the funding necessary to bring their unique molecular farming platform closer to the market, and cut the climate impact of dairy production,” he continued.
The molecular farming company will use the capital to advance its dairy seed system, co-develop products with industry partners, and strike a collaboration with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, the Australian government body responsible for science research. This will entail Miruku testing its modified safflower varieties in field trials in Australia to support regulatory approval.
“Miruku is committed to innovating at the intersection of agriculture and biotechnology,” CEO Amos Palfreyman said in a statement. “Our technology offers a scalable solution to meet the growing demand for sustainable dairy alternatives, supporting the global transition towards a more sustainable food system.”
Using plants as bioreactors to reinvent dairy molecules
Courtesy: Miruku
Founded in 2020, Miruku blends the lines of biotech and agriculture for future food, with the aim of disrupting New Zealand’s giant dairy industry, which is responsible for one in every four export dollars earned by the country (totalling $25.7B). The startup wants to work with farmers to help pivot to more planet-friendly farming processes.
It is Asia-Pacific’s only molecular farming company and among just a handful around the world. The tech involves modifying plant cells into mini-factories that can replicate animal-derived proteins, fats, sugars and other molecules, which can then be harvested from leaves or other plant tissues. It’s akin to the process of microorganisms infecting plants and transferring some of their genes.
Molecular farming has several advantages over animal cell cultivation and precision fermentation, especially in terms of cost and scalability, given that it eschews bioreactors for plants themselves. For its dairy elements, Miruku is reengineering safflower due to its climate resilience (the crop is resistant to droughts and can be grown in residual moisture in semi-arid conditions).
Like precision fermentation, molecular farming does entail genetic engineering. But speaking to Green Queen in 2020, Palfreyman noted that this tech has made “huge progress over the last decade”. “While the plants we grow have been genetically transformed, the proteins that our plants produce are the same as normal dairy molecules. That’s the point,” he said. “They are safe, clean, friendlier to the planet and as nutritious and delicious as the same dairy molecules from a cow.”
Klar gives additional context on how molecular farming could “reinvent how dairy is made”, highlighting its benefits: “Because it is using plants as a production vehicle, it can do it at scale and ultimately at price parity – or even price advantage – to animal-derived dairy. And most importantly, in a much more sustainable way.”
Other companies working on molecular farming include Nobell Foods and Mozza, both of whom are developing dairy molecules, while Moolec, Tiamat Sciences, Bright Biotech and ORF Genetics are using the tech for other applications.
Palfreyman told TechCrunch that Miruku differs from the rest in a few ways: it has a B2B model, focuses on both proteins and fats within the same plant, and uses safflower crops. He previously revealed to Green Queen that Miruku aimed to eventually make a broad range of dairy alternatives, including yoghurt and cheese.
Taking on New Zealand’s massive legacy dairy sector
Courtesy: Miruku
Since its pre-seed financing, the company has advanced its tech, which previously programmed plants to produce proteins that could be extracted from seeds, but now can make use of interactions between recombinant dairy casein protein and native plant proteins, with or without improved fatty acid profiles. Casein, which makes up 80% of the protein content found in dairy, is key from a textural perspective, giving cheeses their signature melting and stretching properties.
“This breakthrough allows us to utilise a larger portion of the seed, transforming it into a range of versatile ingredients tailored for the food and beverage industry,” said Palfreyman. “We’ve now reached several key proof-of-concept milestones demonstrating the viability and potential of the dairy seed system.”
Moreover, the startup has tripled its team, cultivated relationships with food manufacturers for co-development opportunities, and expanded its footprint to Israel and Australia, the latter being its initial launch market. “Miruku has not only aimed to navigate the challenges presented by the shifting climate impacting traditional dairy production but has also broadened our focus to address critical issues of food security and nutrition,” Palfreyman explained.
New Zealand is the world’s largest exporter of dairy proteins, and per capita: milk consumption reaches 400 million litres a year, with 190 two-litre bottles of milk sold every minute in supermarkets, according to Fonterra, the leading dairy producer globally and New Zealand’s biggest company. But there is a huge environmental trade-off, with half of the nation’s emissions coming from agriculture, three-quarters of which are a direct result of methane from livestock.
This is something locals recognise, with 51% of respondents in a 2022 survey agreeing that plant-based alternatives are better for the environment than dairy. However, 66% of consumers find dairy to be higher in nutritional value, with 78% calling it better value for money and 70% labelling it to be better for the national economy.
According to Scott Day, co-founder of Free Flow Manufacturing Grocery – which opened New Zealand’s first dedicated alt-milk facility last year – plant-based milk sales increased by 44% from 2019 to the end of 2022, rising from NZ$61M ($37.4M) to NZ$88M ($54M). But this is still a fraction of the country’s conventional dairy sector.
It’s what makes technologies like Miruku’s so important. One thing the company will have to figure out is regulatory approval from the bi-national Food Safety Australia and New Zealand, which has previously approved Impossible Foods’s modified heme ingredient for commercial sale. “Navigating the regulatory processes for the introduction of all new crops and the marketing of all foods with new ingredients is super important,” Palfreyman told this publication in 2022. “Fortunately, the regulatory environments for both growing, formulating and selling to consumers have opened up in major continents and are widening every year.”
“Our priority is to advance our technology and progress towards market readiness,” Palfreyman told TechCrunch. “This includes expanding our footprint in Australia and looking at establishing a presence in the United States.”
South Korean cultivated meat startup Simple Planet has raised ₩8B ($6M) in a pre-Series A funding round to optimise its technology for its powdered ingredient, secure regulatory approval, and expand internationally.
Simple Planet’s ₩8M ($6M) pre-Series A funding round saw participation from POSCO Technology Investment, DCP Private Equity, Hyundai Technology Investment, Prologue Ventures, Pathfinder H, and Samho Green Investment, among others.
The latest capital injection brought the South Korean startup’s total financing to ₩10B ($7.5M), after a previous ₩2B ($1.5M) round led by tofu giant Pulmuone. It will help accelerate its R&D efforts to produce ingredients like powders and fats for cultivated meat, facilitating the optimisation of its manufacturing processes, its path to regulatory approvals, and overseas expansion.
“Despite the challenging investment climate, our pre-Series funding round was overbooked,” said Simple Planet co-founder and CEO Il Doo Jeong. “We are in the process of establishing a GMP [good manufacturing practices] facility for the mass production of cell-cultured food ingredients.”
Serum-free medium drives down costs for Simple Planet’s ingredients
Courtesy: Simple Planet
Founded in 2021, Simple Planet takes the approach of making cultivated meat ingredients like proteins and unsaturated fats in powdered or paste forms, instead of creating finished products. These ingredients are said to be highly versatile, helping absorb and improve the flavour and nutritional structure of conventional proteins. They can also be used as part of functional ingredients for seniors and infants.
The company has established 13 different floating cell lines so far – including cows, chickens, pigs, ducks and fish – and developed a probiotics-based serum-free edible culture medium. Apart from being controversial for its sourcing, fetal bovine serum (FBS) makes up over 80% of costs in cultivated food manufacturing, according to Simple Planet. Its technology has lowered the price of its serum-free culture by 1/60th, which – alongside controlling nutrient release and density – enables it to bring down the costs of its commercial ingredients too.
In October, the APAC Society for Cellular Agriculture (APAC-SCA) released a 1,110-person survey of South Koreans, finding that 84% of consumers preferred a plant-based growth culture for cultivated meat, although 35% wouldn’t mind seeing FBS being used, and 21% called the latter their most preferred option. “However, we see that FBS ranks lower in the preferred cultivation medium overall, suggesting that negative perception of FBS still remains among the surveyed South Korean population,” says Calisa Lim, project manager at APAC-SCA.
“We expect to accelerate the development of serum-free edible culture media, which we are also researching,” said Simple Planet’s Jeong. “Moreover, we have been collaborating with global food companies since last year to utilise cultured meat prototypes. We aim to create significant outcomes through new business planning and international expansion by building cooperative relationships with global companies.”
The startup aims to launch its high-protein cultivated meat powder both domestically and internationally, and has previously stated plans to set up branches in the US and Canada to enable faster entry. Last September, it unveiled B2C convenience food brand Balboa Kitchen, with the aim of directly incorporating its cultivated food ingredients into consumer products. Now, it is looking to aggressively expand its distribution network.
In January, it entered strategic partnerships with accelerator and investment firm Plug and Play and South Korea’s S&S Lab, which operates private-led shared laboratory IRIS lab. And last year, it linked up with Pulmuone to co-produce hybrid meat products, with a targeted 2025 launch.
Simple Planet has won plenty of recognition for its tech, including being named in the UK’s Forward Fooding FoodTech 500 list (described as “the Fortune 500 of agrifood tech”), being selected in the Sustainable Food Challenge 2023 by MassChallenge in Switzerland, and winning first place in the food tech category of US startup pitch competition WKBC and sustainability category at Singapore’s X-Pitch.
Cultivated meat on the rise in South Korea
Courtesy: Cellmeat
Simple Planet is among a host of startups elevating South Korea’s burgeoning cultivated meat space. In February 2023, industry stakeholders signed an MoU to advance the country’s cultivated meat sector, and a month later, the North Gyeongsang province opened the North Gyeongsang Cellular Agriculture Industry Support Center. The 2,309 sq m facility was built over six years with a total investment of ₩9B ($7M) to develop biomaterials and support cultivated meat companies.
These developments came after the nation’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety included official guidance for alt-protein in its National Plan 2022, covering the safety, manufacturing processes and regulatory approval of cultivated meat.
In October, South Korea’s Society for Food Sustainatech signed on to the APAC Regulatory Coordination Forum, which aims to facilitate cross-border dialogue between stakeholders for cultivated foods. On the regulatory front, the South Korean government is expected to be the next (alongside Japan) to develop a framework for companies. “Both nations are proactively seeking input from industry groups to craft clear and efficient safety review processes,” said Mirte Gosker, managing director of the Good Food Institute APAC, which co-established APAC-SCA.
The APAC-SCA poll also that 90% of respondents were willing to try cultivated meat at least once (though only 5% said they’d definitely eat it regularly). Plus, 39% were supportive of cell-based meat being sold at supermarkets and restaurants (with 14- to 29-year-olds leading the way), and just 10% were opposed to its commercialisation.
In terms of purchase drivers, price tops the list – cited by 65% of Koreans – followed by taste and texture (62%) and health/nutrition (48%). This ties into Simple Planet’s focus on cost reductions as well as flavour and nutrition (0.3g of its cultivated meat powder contains the same essential amino acids as 1kg of beef).
Apart from Simple Planet, at least eight more startups are working with cultivated meat in the country, including CellMEAT – which has created prototypes of cultured Dokdo shrimp and caviar – TissenBioFarm, CellQua, Space F, and SeaWith. Meanwhile, Korean noodle giant Nongshim invested $7.4M in food tech VC funding with a focus on cultivated meat, and CJ CheilJedang has teamed up with KCell Biosciences to build a cell culture facility in Busan.
San Francisco-based New Wave Foods and Germany’s Ordinary Seafood have become the latest casualties in the alternative protein sector, spotlighting the troubles experienced by the vegan seafood category in recent times.
In a short space of time, New Wave Foods and Ordinary Seafood have been forced to cease operations. In what is already a tiny space in the alternative protein world, plant-based seafood has faced major headwinds lately.
New Wave Foods said it was unable to pay its debts in full, and is now set to liquidate its assets, while Ordinary Seafood fell victim to the increasingly volatile funding landscape for food tech. It has left the alternative seafood sector reeling, but industry members are hoping to mobilise efforts to continue its growth in the face of climate change.
New Wave Foods and Ordinary Seafood cease operations
Courtesy: Ordinary Seafood
In November, New Wave Foods entered into a voluntary assignment for the benefit of the creditors (ABC), an alternative to formal bankruptcy proceedings that involves transferring assets from a debtor to a trust to liquidate them and distribute the proceeds. In effect, the company was “indebted to various creditors” and “unable to pay its debts in full”.
Creditors have a mid-May deadline to submit claims against the business, which rolled out its vegan shrimp in US foodservice through a partnership with Dot Foods in 2021, months after closing an $18M Series A fundraiser. “Although we were gaining momentum in 2023 and had secured a major customer for 2024 sales, we couldn’t outrun industry headwinds,” New Wave Foods co-founder and CEO Michelle Wolf told AFN.
“Our focus had been on healthy business fundamentals since I became CEO in late 2021 and I’m proud of what we achieved. I believe New Wave has been one of the stepping stones toward more sustainable eating, whether by delighting diners, inspiring competitors, or advancing plant-based innovation,” she added. “I continue to have faith in the industry’s long-term success, but the environment we’re in will continue to push companies to prioritise like we did and explore innovation horizons.”
Similarly, earlier this month, German player Ordinary Seafood’s operations came to a head, with founder and CEO Anton Pluschke announcing the development on LinkedIn. The two-year-old brand had just introduced its vegan tuna and smoked salmon at METRO outlets across the country in November, but a bleak, “dramatically changed” funding landscape led to its demise. “We have had to make the incredibly difficult decision to wind down operations and let go of our outstanding team,” wrote Pluschke.
In a email to Green Queen, Pluschke underlined the importance of industry collaboration and cautioned that major food system change will take time: “While we have seen tremendous recent improvements in conventional animal-based food analogues, we should not pretend that transforming global food systems will happen overnight. While entrepreneurs focus on developing new ingredients, engineering novel processing technologies, build new brands and sales channels, the successful transformation of the food industry requires collaboration and involvement from all stakeholders including government and policymakers, producers and farmers, food industry companies, consumers, research institutions, supply chain partners and investors and financial institutions. Getting this right will require a unified voice, a true collaborative effort for improved planetary health. We do not have time for dangerous hype cycles, we need a deeper understanding with real commitment and true partnership.”
In a statement sent to Green Queen, Marissa Bronfman, founder of alternative seafood association Future Ocean Foods, which counts over 30 members, said: “We at Future Ocean Foods are all saddened that Ordinary Seafood is ceasing operations, an event precipitated by an extremely difficult fundraising environment for plant-based food and not reflective of the company’s fantastic alt-seafood products and passionate team.”
She added: “I applaud Anton for his exemplary leadership and know that we will continue to see incredible innovation from this visionary founder.”
The vegan seafood sector is dwarfed by plant-based meat and conventional seafood
Courtesy: The Good Food Institute
It marks the end of two brands that were helping disrupt the $8.5B global seafood market. Despite vegan seafood outpacing the plant-based meat sector to deliver growth in both unit and dollar sales from 2021-22, its retail sales only hit $14M, a minuscule 1% of the $1.2B made by the overall meat analogues category. Its contribution to the overall seafood sector is even smaller, representing just 0.2% of total sales.
Courtesy: The Good Food Institute
There have been some success stories recently, of course. Yves Potvin’s Konscious Foods has its frozen vegan sushi and poke bowl SKUs in over 4,500 retail doors in North America; Nestlé – the world’s largest CPG brand – introduced three plant-based seafood products in Europe and Asia recently; and Sweden’s Hooked Foods expanded into Germany with a listing in 400 REWE West stores in November.
But New Wave Foods and Ordinary Seafood’s fate underlines the seafood sector’s unique adoption problem. While many consumers are looking for plant-based alternatives to red and processed meat due to their associated health risks, for others, seafood is the solution. Research by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council in 2022 – covering over 12,000 consumers in 12 countries – revealed that health is the primary driver for buying seafood, with over 80% agreeing that including fish in their daily shopping is important for health.
This highlights a lack of awareness from consumers about the ills of the seafood industry. Microplastic pollution, toxic chemical runoff, antibiotic and pesticide use, sea lice and mercury all affect the seafood we consume, which inevitably enter our bodies too. This is before you consider the environmental impact of overfishing, which exacerbates biodiversity loss and could lead to a collapse of global fisheries by 2048, as well as the human rights abuse rampant in the industry.
Last month, a new study by agrifood campaigner Feedback International and a coalition of West African and Norwegian organisations accused Norway’s seafood salmon industry of ‘food colonialism’. A significant portion of fish oil for feed comes from Northwest Africa, a region suffering from acute food insecurity. But if these fish hadn’t been turned into oil, they could have provided four million people in the area with a year’s supply of fish.
And in the US, the Supreme Court is considering overturning the Chevron deference, after hearing two cases from fishing vessel operators appealing against a lower court ruling that mandates commercial fishing companies to pay for a government-run programme to monitor for overfishing. If the doctrine is overturned, it would allow unchecked overfishing and remove accountability from the sector, leaving global waters open to exploitation.
Courtesy: Konscious Foods
Turning crisis into opportunity
We need alternative seafood more than ever as global appetites for fish are stymied by environmental and ethical concerns. With at least 120 companies working with alternative seafood (as of 2021), consolidation may be key. This is exactly the path Wicked Kitchen has taken, first taking over Good Catch in 2022, followed by its Current Foods acquisition last year.
“Despite challenging times for the category, there is no denying that we are in a climate emergency and that our oceans are in peril,” said Bronfman. “We must ensure that the international venture community continues to fund alternative seafood across plant-based, fermentation and cultivated, if we are to protect our oceans and feed 10 billion people by 2050.”
Maarten Geraets, a food industry executive veteran and former managing director of alternative protein at Thai Union, compared the seafood sector’s issues with that of plant-based meat last year, which saw companies shut down, lay off staff, lose money, and consolidate. “It’s not so surprising,” he said.
“Alternative seafood companies should focus on resizing to lengthen runways/match sales forecasts, engage existing investors with renewed plans, seek support to handle the dip, prepare for eventual growth (which will come), and explore collaborations/partnerships with like-minded players, making an opportunity out of the crisis.”
Cargill has added to Scottish-Dutch food tech startup ENOUGH’s Series C funding round with an undisclosed sum to expand their existing partnership, which will see the meat giant co-create and market products with the latter’s ABUNDA mycoprotein.
Cargill, which is one of the Big Four meat producers in the US, has topped up the Series C funding pot for ENOUGH to earn a single-digit stake in the mycoprotein startup and extend its alternative protein portfolio. The investment adds to ENOUGH’s €40M/$43M financing round last August, and sees Cargill sign a commercial agreement to co-create and market plant-based meat products with the startup’s ABUNDA mycoprotein.
ENOUGH’s 160,000 sq ft Dutch manufacturing facility in Sas van Gent is co-located with a Cargill starch plant, which provides glucose syrup from sustainably sourced grains as feedstock for the former’s fungal biomass. The mycoprotein is centrifuged to remove most of the sugary wastewater, which is supplied to Cargill’s neighbouring bioethanol plant in a zero-waste process.
The collaboration is part of the EU-funded PLENITUDE consortium, with Cargill leveraging ENOUGH’s plant-based proteins, texturisers and fats, and its formulations and applications capabilities, and ENOUGH benefitting from the meat giant’s global footprint and feedstock technology expertise, enabling it to scale up faster.
“Expanding our partnership with Cargill is an exciting step to accelerate the great strides we’ve already made through the co-location of our Sas van Gent facility,” said ENOUGH CEO Jim Laird. “The alternative protein market is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity, and efficiency will come from collaboration with partners such as Cargill to leverage existing demand and supply chain to gain scale.”
A climate-friendly protein looking to overcome sector challenges
Courtesy: ENOUGH
ENOUGH was founded in 2015 and makes its ABUNDA mycoprotein using the same fungi strain as Quorn’s via biomass fermentation. This is said to be high in protein and fibre, contain all nine essential amino acids, and comprise a neutral flavour and meat-like texture to create plant-based meat and fish, as well as dairy alternatives.
Plus, the startup claims ABUNDA is 15 times more efficient than beef thanks to its zero-waste, circular production process, which uses 93% less water, 97% less feed and has 97% fewer carbon emissions than beef. This drives down costs to produce the mycoprotein.
ENOUGH’s facility, which began production last year, was initially producing 10,000 metric tonnes of ABUNDA a year, with plans to scale up to 60,000 tonnes annually by 2027 – the equivalent of one cow’s worth of protein every two minutes. By 2033, the producer aims to amp up yearly production to one million metric tonnes, which it says equates to replacing five million cows or over a billion chickens.
With a total of €95M/$102M raised to date, ENOUGH has been in conversations with multiple manufacturers for its protein, with over 30 sampling the ingredient. Among its customers are European poultry processor Plukon Food Group, which is making chicken and meat analogues using ABUNDA; Unilever, which will test the mycoprotein for The Vegetarian Butcher products; and manufacturers supplying to UK supermarket M&S.
ENOUGH’s partnership with Cargill comes at a challenging time for the plant-based meat sector, which has been rocked by closures, layoffs and bleak sales. In the US, meat alternatives saw a 7.8% decline in year-on-year sales by the end of 2023, according to NielsenIQ data. But speaking to AFN, Laird, an industry veteran, noted that “for every horror story in this market, there are also success stories out there”, adding that while there was “a bit of a hype cycle”, the underlying trends driving alternative protein still exist.
“I’m not your average 25-year-old startup CEO,” he said. “We’ve been developing this technology for eight years. There are capex costs, but what we’re doing is very scalable. We take a 200,000-liter tank full of water, sugar and micronutrients, we inoculate it with fungus and it doubles in size every four to six hours. In a couple of days, we get up to [critical mass] and then we start to harvest on a continuous basis.”
Cargill’s alt-protein footprint, and controversies
Courtesy: Cargill
Cargill is the largest privately held company in the US, in terms of revenue, which reached $177B last year. The food processing behemoth supplies around 22% of the domestic meat market in the US, and has committed to reducing apply chain emissions by 30% per ton of product sold by 2030.
It has made numerous investments in the alternative protein industry, including cultivated meat pioneers UPSIDE Foods, Aleph Farms and Wildtype, pea protein producer Puris (which supplies to Beyond Meat), 3D-printed meat startup Cocuus, and plant-based meat company Bflike. The company has also partnered with Cubiq Foods to co-develop and commercialise plant-based fat technologies, and teamed up with KFC to launch vegan chicken nuggets in China in 2020.
In 2019, it created an in-house alternative protein division, and has been offering its plant proteins to foodservice and retail customers since 2020. Plus, it has a vegan range called PlantEver for the Chinese market. However, it is not a company free from controversies, with Mighty Earth chair and former US Congressman Henry Waxman calling Cargill “the worst company in the world” in 2019, driving problems like deforestation, pollution, climate change and exploitation “at a scale that dwarfs their closest competitors.”
The multinational has been embroiled in multiple scandals over the years. It was among a group of companies facing boycotts from major food corporations (including McDonald’s) against the supply of soybeans grown from newly deforested land in the 2000s. It has been accused of buying cocoa grown illegally in national parks and protected forests in the Ivory Coast, endangering the habitats of wildlife species including chimpanzees and elephants. Plus, Cargill sells massive volumes of palm oil, which is linked to widespread tropical deforestation.
In 2020, one of its meat processing plants in Canada was linked to over 358 cases of Covid-19, with reports alleging that the company denied personal protective equipment to employees. And while it has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions in its North American beef supply chain by 30% by 2030, it could prove to be a tall order considering its climate footprint was once found to be greater than the entire country of the Netherlands.
Focusing on alternative protein investments and partnerships is just one step towards its climate goals, but nevertheless significant. “Cargill is strengthening its partnership with ENOUGH because the world needs more protein that is grown more sustainably to keep pace with global population growth,” said Belgin Köse, managing director of meat and dairy alternatives at Cargill.
Over four in 10 Japanese consumers are willing to give cultivated meat and seafood a taste as long as it’s safe, but 58% have never heard of it, highlighting the challenge for the country’s alternative protein sector.
In April, the regulatory framework for cultivated meat in Japan will become more complicated. While continuing to oversee food safety, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare will transfer its food hygiene standards division to the Consumer Affairs Agency. This means companies must liaise with two agencies on regulatory conversations, but makes prime minister Fumio Kishida the ultimate authority on these matters.
But if a new survey by the APAC Society for Cellular Agriculture (APAC-SCA) is anything to go by, stronger regulations to determine the safety of these foods are a must for Japan’s population. The 1,000-person poll revealed that as long as they’re safe, 42% of consumers are willing to try cultivated meat and seafood products.
However, 64% of respondents don’t know if cultivated proteins are safer than their conventional counterparts (though 19% found no difference in safety). For 44%, the presence of Japanese government regulations is the most important element in determining the safety of cultivated meat and seafood, with women in their 20s, 40s and 60s chiming most with this sentiment.
Courtesy: APAC-SCA
If international organisations or academia can assure safety, that would satisfy 38% and 24% of consumers, respectively. However, safety assurances from the industry and the sale of these products in other countries would have little effect in swaying these consumers, with only 19% being satisfied with these options. Conversely, 34% would not find these foods safe, whatever the case.
Health and price important, and youth attitudes encouraging
APAC-SCA’s survey highlights that 91% of Japan’s consumers eat meat, mirroring the figure from a Food Frontier report from December. Interestingly, there are more vegans (1%) than flexitarians (0.4%) or pescetarians (0.3%). But there is a gap in consumer awareness about cultivated meat, with 58% of people in Japan having never heard of it. And while 39% are familiar with it, only a further 3% understand the concept in detail.
Apart from the food safety aspect, health and price are key for these consumers when it comes to trying cultivated meat, cited by 25% and 23%, respectively. But an even greater number (30%) say they will not try these products. Safety (44%) and health (33%) are similarly the top concerns for respondents, followed by taste (27%).
Taste represents the leading expectation from these foods too, followed by a diversification of food options, and appearance – although 37% chose the ‘none applies’ option, further highlighting their unfamiliarity with the concept. of cultivated proteins and lack of experience in consuming such products.
Courtesy: APAC-SCA
A fifth (21%) of consumers are willing to buy cultivated meat products if they’re priced the same as their conventional versions, but only 6% would be willing to pay for them if they cost double or more. Understandably, 40% would purchase them if they’re cheaper, though 33% wouldn’t buy them at all. Research by McKinsey has shown that it will take until 2030 for cultivated meat to reach price parity, outlining the importance of scaling up production and increased funding for the sector.
There was a notable shift in acceptance with age, as younger Japanese consumers exhibited a more welcoming attitude towards cultivated meat and seafood. In terms of concerns about these foods, 35% did not select any options from the list – higher than the overall average. Men in their 20s also expressed the greatest interest in buying these products, with 18% willing to do so even if they cost double.
Courtesy: APAC-SCA
“This survey reveals interesting characteristics about the next generation of Japanese consumers. More than half of men in their 20s have heard of ‘cell-based foods’, nearly 30% are interested in trying them, and a whopping 62% answered that they would eat these products if they were cooked,” said Akira Igata, director of APAC-SCA partner the Japan Association for Cellular Agriculture and the survey’s analyst. “Understanding the proclivities of the next generation of Japanese consumers would be critical for companies interested in breaking into the Japanese market.”
What about feeding cultivated meat to children? Half of the respondents are unsure if they’ll do so, while 33% definitely wouldn’t. “For the industry, this signifies the importance of capturing the interest of consumers who are neutral but not opposed to the concept of cultivated meat and seafood,” the report stated.
Collaboration and direct communication key to establishing food safety
Prime minister Kishida already endorsed cellular agriculture last year, with plans to boost the sector to reduce the country’s climate footprint. And between 2020 and 2023, private investment in Japan’s alternative protein sector was dominated by cultivated meat, which made up 76% ($54M) of the total, according to the Good Food Institute APAC. A host of food giants are getting involved in cellular agriculture, including Nipponham and Nissin.
In December, the Japanese government invested ¥1.87B ($13.1M) in local cellular agriculture company IntegriCulture, which claims to have grown cultivated chicken and duck via a tech platform that can bring down costs to under $3 per kg of meat by 2025, and under $1 soon after.
But although the price aspect is important, safety is still crucial for consumers in Japan, which is why APAC-SCA recommends establishing a direct line of communication with regulators to convey information that can exhibit the safety potential of cultivated meat and seafood, which can be in the form of pre-market consultation services or a regulatory sandbox framework.
“Communicating the safety of cultivated meat and seafood products has always been the key focus for the industry,” said APAC-SCA programme director Peter Yu. “The 2023 report released by the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Health Organisation concluded that many of the hazards identified in cultivated foods already exist in conventionally produced foods and livestock agriculture. Cultivated meat and seafood are safe for consumption if produced and handled well.”
Courtesy: Wildtype
The report also suggests regulators and industry players can find common consensus on topics to support consistent approaches to safety assessments by participating in activities like the APAC Regulatory Coordination Forum. Likewise, regional collaboration between government agencies, academia and companies can help accelerate R&D efforts via resource and knowledge sharing.
Developing “message maps” for awareness of the benefits of cultivated meat and seafood can help raise consumer confidence and trust too, and socialising international reports can increase public awareness and assure the safety of these products.
“There is a great opportunity and incentive for close collaboration between the government and industry to engage consumers in the food safety dialogue for cultivated meat and seafood,” added Yu. “This will increase consumer confidence and drive widespread acceptance in the long run. Ensuring that cultivated meat and seafood is available as a complementary food option in Japan is vitally important for food security without environmental and ethical concerns associated with conventional meat production.”
