Instead of feeding peanut shells to livestock, we can upcycle them to make high-fibre meat analogues and growth components for cultivated meat, while cutting down on food waste.
Did you know that you can eat peanut shells? Better yet, were you aware that you can make planet-friendly meat from them?
That’s what scientists from the US are proposing, in a move they say can cut food waste, promote human health, boost food security and farm economies, reduce emissions, and thus meet several Sustainable Development Goals.
In a review published in the Frontiers journal, researchers outline how about 22% of the 46 million tonnes of peanuts produced annually is waste from the shells, resulting in a loss of over 6.5 million tonnes of dietary fibre and 595,000 tonnes of plant protein.
While peanut shells are most commonly upcycled into animal feed, a dry complete material for packaging and industrial fillers, and potentially biofuel, the study suggests that this is a “missed opportunity” since these hulls are edible to humans. It proposes methods to recapture nutrients (like protein and fibre) and process these hulls into functional ingredients for a variety of foods, including plant-based and cultivated meats.
The nutritional and food security potential of peanut shells
Courtesy: Frontiers
The scientists argue that the valorisation of peanut byproducts would significantly increase the amount of food available from current land, water and energy use, addressing hunger and benefitting farmers (who could sell the shells at a premium compared to low-cost animal feed).
Most of the greenhouse gas emissions from peanut production come from on-farm activities, and the hulls alone represent a quarter of the potential energy output. But overall, these groundnuts generate 97% fewer emissions per kg than beef, and use up 97% less land too – so using the shells to produce food for human consumption illustrates a highly sustainable way to increase food security.
Peanut shells have several nutritional advantages, according to the study. They’re a rich source of dietary fibre (making up over 60% of their dry weight) and protein (7%), alongside plant-sourced phytonutrients like polyphenols and flavonoids. This includes the anti-inflammatory flavonoid luteolin, which has been used as a source of bioactive in medicines and nutritional supplements.
The scientists cite research showing the potential of extracts derived from peanut hulls in cancer and hypertension treatments, pain management, displaying anti-diabetic properties, and reducing pathogen activity in food applications.
“The advances in the evidence about these compounds have led to widespread production of extracts from peanut hulls frequently used in pharmaceuticals in most global regions,” the study states.
However, peanut shell flour isn’t currently processed anywhere in the world, according to the researchers, and this presents an opportunity for health experts and food manufacturers. Once consumers accept it as an ingredient, adding it to foodstuffs can reduce production costs and food insecurity in at-risk regions, many of which overlap with peanut-growing areas.
Shells and husks of hazelnuts, almonds and walnuts are already being used as fibre- and protein-rich flours. But peanuts are grown in substantially larger volumes, and their shells have a much larger absolute amount of protein, fibre and nutrients than hazelnut or almond hulls. Still, no patents exist for processing peanut shells for human food uses, rendering it a market ripe for innovation.
Reimagining peanut shells as a future food
Courtesy: Patcharapon’s Images/Sissyartsy
Just as almond and hazelnut flours have been utilised in baking and snacking applications, peanut hull flour can also be used to make breads, cookies, crackers, and biscuits. Fibre-rich flours from these shells can enhance baking textures due to strong binding capacity and higher water absorption. Common foods like stews and gravies can also benefit from peanut shell flour.
One interesting use case comes from the hydrolysation of peanut hull flour, which is used to extract lignans (a group of polyphenols). What’s left over is cellulose, which can be processed into a substitute for methylcellulose. This is a commonly used emulsifier, thickener, and binding agent in plant-based meats.
The targeted activation of proteins could unlock properties associated with cellulose additives, better utilising peanut shells and improving the cost efficiency of upcycling them, while also providing greater culinary versatility and an enhanced nutritional profile with fewer overall processing demands.
Meanwhile, these shells also have a high concentration of branch-chain amino acids, some of which are associated with umami flavours, especially grilled and aged meats. Plus, they can be processed in a similar way to pea protein, whose large demand is set to outsize production capacities.
“Recapturing lost protein from an alternative legume source like PHs could provide an additional source to meet that demand while increasing the efficiency of existing production systems,” says the study. Due to the retained fibre and carbohydrate content, the final sale volumes could be 20% larger than pea protein, if aiming for similar concentrations.
These peanut shell protein concentrates can have multiple applications, from a mildly peanut-flavoured protein supplement for drinks and powder, to a protein base for plant-based meat and dairy products.
Notably, they can be used as a replacement for other plant proteins in serum-free growth media, bio-ink, and structural scaffolding components of cultivated meat, important at a time when the industry is working to reduce costs through culture media innovations.
Israeli molecular farming player PoLoPo will now supply patatin after its egg protein clients expressed demand for the native potato protein.
PoLoPo, the Israel-based startup turning potatoes into protein factories, is now supplying patatin to clients, in response to an unexpected demand for the native potato protein.
The company uses molecular farming to grow target amino acids within a potato’s tuber through its SuperAA platform. While its first product is ovalbumin, the most abundant protein found in chicken eggs, its metabolic engineering techniques can also increase the potato’s own protein content.
And according to PoLoPo, commercial customers that have been buying its egg protein have also been asking for the latter, since the startup can produce patatin at much lower costs than current the current standard.
“We are keeping our eyes on the prize, which is bringing molecular-farmed egg protein to market, but conversations with clients revealed an additional demand for patatin in large quantities at a fair price,” said Maya Sapir-Mir, CEO of PoLoPo, which is awaiting regulatory approval from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) before going to market.
Why PoLoPo’s patatin is unlike other potato proteins
Courtesy: PoLoPo
Sapir-Mir co-founded PoLoPo with CTO Raya Liberman-Aloni in 2022. The team decided to begin with potatoes due to their resilience in diverse climates, low growth costs, short maturation time, relatively large storage capacity (in the form of tubers), high yields, and compatibility with existing technologies.
The company says it’s an efficient and sustainable ingredient that offers attractive financial opportunities for established agrifood producers, which will allow PoLoPo scale up its SuperAA system in a cost-effective manner.
For its ovalbumin, it inserts a DNA sequence into the potato to teach it to produce a fully functional, nutritionally equivalent protein that is chemically identical to chicken eggs.
But it can also produce a powdered version of patatin. It does so by drying and extracting proteins harvested from the tubers. The final product doesn’t have any GMOs, despite the process using genetic engineering.
The problem is, most manufacturers destroy native protein when extracting potato starch, so most patatin on the market is non-functional, and this usually ends up going to animal feed, pet food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals.
PoLoPo’s patatin, though, has a high protein digestibility score of 0.99 (the scale maxes out at 1), which is similar to that of casein, beef and eggs. It also has all essential amino acids and boasts functional attributes like emulsification, gelling and texturisation.
“Patatin has high nutritional value, is not considered as an allergen, and has great functionalities. By that, it is a versatile protein option for many categories: plant-based meat and dairy, baked goods, products like bars and drinks that are popular for sports nutrition or even meal replacement,” Sapir-Mir tells Green Queen.
PoLoPo bets on cost efficiency amid impending US approval
Courtesy: PoLoPo
“We are scaling up our production to pilot scale in Israel for product and formulation development purposes,” reveals Sapir-Mir. “It’s important to remember that to scale, all we need is to plant another field.”
This is one of the key advantages of molecular farming: it doesn’t require expensive bioreactors to produce ingredients on a large scale. Here, the plants themselves act as the bioreactors. This also means lower prices – a key selling point for PoLoPo’s plunge into a $105M market for potato proteins.
Current prices of functional patatin can surpass $100 per kg, as extraction and drying with existing infrastructure is a resource-intensive process. But PoLoPo’s potato plants produce higher levels of patatin within potatoes, leading to better returns – both financially and in terms of yields. Combined with the protein’s functionality, this could help battle food insecurity in malnutrition-hit regions.
“Our SuperAA platform is significantly elevating the natural yield of patatin in potatoes, making potato processing for functional protein extraction more economical,” highlights Sapir-Mir. “This innovation unlocks pricing points that the industry has never seen before for functional patatin, offering more competitive pricing for high-quality protein.”
While she leaves the door open for fundraising (the company closed a $2.3M pre-seed investment round last year), PoLoPo is also now gearing up for launch in the US. It applied for USDA approval in May, and expects to get the nod by the end of the year.
“The submission to the USDA earlier this year is to cover growing our rich protein potatoes. We will file self-GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) for the patatin ingredient, and because it’s the natural protein growing in its natural environment, we expect a relatively smooth and quick approval,” Sapir-Mir explains.
PoLoPo is among a host of Israeli companies using molecular farming to grow future-friendly proteins. Finally Foods is also using potatoes, but to grow casein (the main protein in dairy) instead. NewMoo, meanwhile, is producing liquid casein from soybeans.
Alternative proteins are poised to present attractive benefits to Israel, with the industry expected to produce 10,000 additional jobs, have more than 200 companies and over a dozen manufacturing facilities, and contribute $2.5B to the country’s economy by 2030.
Canada’s New School Foods has attracted $6M in new capital and opened a commercial-scale manufacturing facility to bring its vegan salmon to market.
As it prepares for its commercial launch in the US and Canada, plant-based seafood maker New School Foods has received $6M in a seed extension round and opened a 28,000 sq ft production facility.
The latest investment included Inter IKEA – the holding company of the Swedish furniture giant – Good Startup, NewTree Capital and Hatch, building on existing state-led funding from Protein Industries Canada.
It brings the Toronto-based startup’s total raised to $18M, and will help it accelerate the launch of its whole-cut salmon analogue to foodservice customers.
Whether the vegan salmon appears on IKEA menus one day remains to be seen, but New School Foods founder and CEO Chris Bryson commended the furniture retailer’s “strong alignment to our mission of creating a more sustainable food system”. “We greatly admire the fact that IKEA has committed publicly to being at least 50% plant-based in their menus by 2025,” he told Green Queen.
Courtesy: New School Foods
How New School Foods makes its whole-cut salmon
New School Foods, which was established in 2021, employs directional freezing on a biopolymer gel to form thousands of microscopic ice crystals that travel away from the freezing source. The ice is then removed, leaving behind empty channels that act as a scaffold, which can be filled with proteins, fats, flavours, etc. to form meat-mimicking muscle fibres.
The “cold-based” process creates highly tunable fibres – their length, diameter and resistance can be altered to create the desirable textures. These pieces of muscle fibres are then assembled into larger structures, separated by layers of connective tissues.
“While conventional structuring processes like extrusion use heat to mimic muscle fibres, which pre-cooks the protein, we use a freezing-based technique to create muscle fibres that do not pre-cook the proteins,” explained Bryson.
“This ensures that the product looks raw, and then transforms upon cooking, providing a familiar cooking experience. And by not pre-cooking the proteins, it ensures that the texture does not end up being rubbery.”
Bryson said the method is “specifically designed to address the inherent product complexities and challenges of making whole cuts: “That’s everything from the way the product looks – both raw, and cooked, and how it actually cooks and transforms, to its texture and its taste.”
He added: “Salmon, for example, has a vibrant, shiny and translucent look, layered with parallel white lines. Those lines melt upon cooking, which enables the product to flake. And then those flakes break down into small muscle fibres. Recreating that entirety is key to driving a customer experience that will feel authentic, familiar, and worth enjoying time and again.”
Courtesy: New School Foods
Using machines identical to fishing industry
This process of making vegan salmon will now be applied on a large scale via New School Foods’ V1 commercial assembly line in the new facility in Toronto, which is designed to “host multiple stages of growth”.
Bryson described the V1 assembly line as “the very first commercial implementation of our scaffolding and directional freezing processes”. It will support the startup’s initial restaurant partners while aiming to showcase how it can produce high-quality seafood analogues.
“We’ve designed the facility to allow room for continued expansion of our production capabilities, since there will be a V2 line, and so on,” the CEO said, adding that contrary to many competitors, the company owns its production operation instead of using a co-manufacturer.
“This ensures that we have greater control over quality [and] unit costs, and can invest in continuous innovation for both our process and formulations so as to solve the most important issue at hand – creating plant-based alternatives that appeal to a wider customer audience,” he said.
“This is especially important for making whole-cut alternatives because they are significantly more complex products to create than a ground product – if you want to do it right.”
New School Foods’ technology uses adapted off-the-shelf, commercially available industrial equipment to ensure it can scale up. “Ironically, one of the pieces of equipment we use is a commercially flash-freezing machine identical to those used in the commercial fishing industry – we’re just using it for plant-based fish,” Bryce revealed.
Courtesy: New School Foods
Quality and price the ‘North Star’ of vegan seafood
The latest investment comes a few months after the company kicked off its New School Culinary Council, a collective of chefs and restauranteurs that will guide product development, recommend recipes, and support the market adoption of its vegan salmon.
The first chef it had collaborated with was Matthew Kenney of Plant Food + Wine fame. The vegan chef has endured a troublesome couple of years, with at least 12 of his restaurants closing since September 2022. Asked if Kenney is still working with the brand, Bryson indicated that the partnership had run its course for now. “As of late, we’ve mainly been working with local chefs in Toronto,” he said.
New School Foods has always targeted chefs as its point of entry in the market. “Our plan has always been to distribute via the chefs and tastemakers – 70% of the seafood purchased in the US is via restaurant orders rather than grocery/cook-at-home,” he explained.
“Since we are producing new versions of the product every week, if not multiple times per week, it’s been very important for us to get immediate market feedback to keep improving the product,” added Bryson. “This is something that we expect to continue doing; getting great feedback from experts is critical to building a great product.”
New School Foods founder and CEO Chris Bryson | Courtesy: New School Foods
While there’s no exact launch date yet, the startup has previously suggested that it would be sometime this year. Alternative seafood has faced significant headwinds of late, with sales only making up 1% of the entire plant-based market in the US. Its slice of the overall seafood industry is similar. Brands like Akua, Ordinary Seafood and New Wave Foods have shut down in recent months, illustrating the tough market landscape.
And as consumers continue to face cost-of-living pressures, finding the right price for its salmon will be key to making people bite. Bryon agreed, saying: “Product quality and price parity need to be your combined North Star, and that’s a major reason why we’ve developed our own manufacturing operation.”
He added: “We won’t start at parity since that requires significant volume, but we’re laying the right foundation to get there. When we do launch via our restaurant partners, we expect that the price of the filet will be of a comparable price to other entrees on the menu.”
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 Chile’s vegan ads with Joaquin Phoenix, Maison Landemaine’s La Vie sandwiches, and Helaina’s animal-free lactoferrin study.
New products and launches
A new vegan brand is on the market. Spain’s Beanstalk Foods has entered the European market with a range of meat analogues like hamburgers, meatballs, pastrami, breaded calamari, as well as ambient salami and chorizo snacks. It will start with Spain and the UK, and has a sister company in New York for a US launch.
Courtesy: Beanstalk Foods
South Korean vegan cheese brand Armored Fresh has expanded its distribution footprint with KeHe Distributors, with its products now available nationwide for retailers in the US.
Israeli vegan meal kit producer Anina Culinary Art, whose products feature upcycled vegetables in dehydrated discs, has now launched nationwide in the US with its new online store.
German chocolate giant Ritter Sport is adding a new Vegan Double Crunch flavour to its Travel Retail Edition Vegan Tower in January. The range will be showcased at the TFWA World Exhibition in Cannes (September 30 to October 3).
Courtesy: La Vie/Beanstalk Foods/Fundación Veg
Parisian bakery chain Maison Landemaine has introduced two sandwiches using La Vie‘s plant-based meats: a vegetarian croque monsieur with ham and a vegan club sandwich with bacon.
Speaking of bacon, the UK’s Squeaky Bean has introduced ready-to-eat Crispy Bacon Style Strips, described as a first-to-market vegan alternative.
In Chile, Fundación Veg has launched a new campaign in Santiago Metro to promote plant-based eating during the Fiestas Patrias (September 18-19), with an animal-welfare-centric painting of actor Joaquin Phoenix by local artist Fab Ciraolo.
Courtesy: Pythag Tech
New York-based Pythag Tech, a software provider focused on cultivated meat, has unveiled The Clean Meat Terminal, a market intelligence platform for investors, companies, consultants and researchers with news, regulatory information, a company database, and more.
In Hong Kong, The White Owl Group has opened a new joint location for its plant-forwardMaya Bakery and The Cakery at the IFC Mall in the city’s Central district.
KFC China partnered with famed Shanghai vegan eatery Spring Breeze Songyuelou to introduce plant-based steamed buns on its breakfast menu.
And in India, cricketer Virat Kohli and actress Anushka Sharma (who are married) have appeared in a new ad campaign for plant-based meat brand Blue Tribe.
Research and policy developments
The Good Food Institute has released a report on investment in the alternative protein space, advising companies on where to target fundraising efforts amid a global squeeze in food tech financing.
Courtesy: Helaina
New York-based precision fermentation player Helaina has released a pre-print, non-peer-reviewed study, which found that its animal-free lactoferrin had a lower immunogenic response than the bovine version.
In the UK’s Slough Borough Council, a trial to collect food waste using dedicated caddies from residents in five areas has saved the council more than £3,000.
Courtesy: Chinese Nutrition Society/Dao Foods
During China’s National Nutrition Week 2024, the Chinese Nutrition Society promoted soy and legume consumption, with one event focusing on soy milk’s nutrition and releasing a white paper around guidelines and recommended intakes.
Events and awards
The Good Food Institute has unveiled the latest cohort of its student-focused Alt Protein Project, with 21 new chapters part of its fifth year.
Manufacturers, startups, investors, suppliers and scientists will gather at ProVeg International‘s New Food Conference in Berlin on September 3, where they’ll examine the current state of plant-based foods and best supply chain practices, as consumers reach a “societal tipping point”.
Courtesy: Solar Foods
Finally, Finnish startup Solar Foods, which makes Solein protein from air, has won the international Phase 3 category in NASA‘s Deep Space Food Challenge.
Scientists have developed a way to produce vitamin B12 from spirulina, in a move that could advance the nutritional prowess of plant-based meat and dairy.
While spirulina has made its way into social consciousness over the last decade as a superfood, the algae also represents enormous potential as a sustainable ingredient.
In a new study led by Asaf Tzachor, founder and academic director of the Aviram Sustainability and Climate Program at Israel’s Reichman University, scientists have demonstrated the potential of spirulina to produce vitamin B12, an essential micronutrient mainly found in animal products.
Alongside researchers from Iceland, Denmark, Austria and the UK, Tzachor found that using biotechnology to cultivate photosynthetically controlled spirulina can produce a carbon-neutral and nutritious biomass with bioactive vitamin B12. And this is present in high concentrations (1.64 micrograms per 100g) comparable to beef (0.7-1.5 micrograms per 100g).
The innovation could be harnessed to produce fortified milk and meat analogues that address a key nutritional deficiency with a fraction of the environmental impact of livestock farming, explained Tzachor.
“The findings demonstrate that photosynthetically controlled Spirulina can produce desirable levels of active vitamin B12, offering a sustainable alternative to traditional animal-source foods,” he added.
The importance – and problematic supply – of vitamin B12
Courtesy: Madeleine Steinbach
Also called cobalamin, vitamin B12 helps our bodies form red blood cells and DNA, and supports nerve function. A lack of this essential micronutrient can cause both minor and major symptoms like fatigue, memory loss, nerve damage, and anaemia.
But our body can’t produce B12 on its own, and it’s a major reason why many people suffer from B12 deficiency. Research has shown that 6% of adults under 60 in the UK and the US are deficient, as are 50% of children and adults in Latin America, 70% of schoolchildren in Kenya, and 80% of pre-schoolgoers in India.
The main dietary sources of B12 are animal-based foods like red meat, fish, shellfish, poultry, eggs, milk, and cheese. This, however, presents a major problem: these products are harmful to the planet. Livestock production accounts for up to 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and 57% of the food system’s emissions (twice as much as plant-based foods).
Many plant-based meats, milks and cereals come fortified with synthetic B12, alongside natural sources like nutritional yeast. Still, vegans are usually at a higher risk of developing B12 deficiencies.
This is where spirulina, a blue-green algae with the scientific name Arthrospira platensis, comes in. The authors of the study, published in the Discover Food journal, cited research that has positioned spirulina as a healthier and sustainable alternative to meat and dairy, thanks to the presence of desirable macro- and micronutrients like calcium, essential amino acids, potassium, magnesium and iron.
But, they argue, most of the vitamin B12 found in spirulina is in a non-active pseudo-form unavailable to humans. And this hinders the algae’s potential to address B12 deficiencies and fully replace beef and other meats in our diets.
Leveraging light to produce B12-rich spirulina
Courtesy: Discover Food
To overcome this hurdle, the researchers looked at light, specifically whether it can enhance the active production of vitamin B12 within spirulina. They evaluated a system of artificially illuminated, scalable photobioreactors developed by nutrition tech company Vaxa Technologies and located in the Hengill area of Iceland.
They focused on the engineering components, inputs (like energy), and outputs, including biomass composition. The photobioreactor system used modified light conditions to improve active B12 production in the algae, as well as other bioactive compounds with antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and immune-bosting properties.
For decades, studies have shown that spirulina can be cultured in a range of conditions, including photobioreactors where controlling the light collected by the algae could enhance photosynthesis. If this is done on renewable energy sources, algae production like the one in the Hengill factory could be carbon-neutral, according to the scientists.
The study also looked into scenarios to scale up production, and how they can impact global nutrition. If electricity from large-scale, heavy industry purposes is reallocated to spirulina production, Icland could produce. nearly 280,000 tonnes of biomass annually. This translates to 4,550g of active vitamin B12, meeting the recommended dietary allowance for nearly 14 million children aged one to three.
The authors highlight the need for further research, acknowledging that consuming 100g of the photosynthetically controlled spirulina is associated with challenges around palatability, nutrition, and practicality – the taste and texture of the algae may not be as easily adaptable to a wide variety of dishes as beef.
Achieving the daily recommended allowance for B12 by fortifying foods with spirulina is possible, but would present complex challenges and require careful formulation. That said, the researchers said the use of this spirulina as a “potent vitamin and mineral source could support the transition from animal-based to well-balanced plant-based diets”.
Swedish mycoprotein startup Mycorena has been acquired by Naplasol, a fellow biomass fermentation player, just over a month after it filed for bankruptcy.
Naplasol, a biomass fermentation subsidiary of Belgian animal protein producer Veos Group, has acquired Swedish mycoprotein counterpart Mycorena.
The deal comes six weeks after Mycorena appointed law firm Advokatfirman Lindahl KB as trustee to administer its bankruptcy process, following unsuccessful attempts to raise capital for a Series B round and the decision to halt plans for a commercial-scale factory.
The takeover will see Naplasol produce Mycorena’s Promyc ingredient at its industrial plant in Bree, Belgium, diversifying its mycoprotein product portfolio for the food, pet and feed sectors.
“Our vision is to become a global leader in the sustainable production of essential proteins through fermentation technology, and the acquisition of Mycorena is perfectly aligned with this goal,” Naplasol commercial director Lowie Vanholme told Green Queen.
Mycorena and Naplasol to benefit from ‘complementary knowledge’
Courtesy: Naplasol
Veos Group, founded in 1974, makes animal protein products like collagen, plasma, globins and functional meat ingredients for the human and pet food sectors, as well as the feed industry. Naplasol targets the same industries, but with a range of mycoprotein ingredients (called SNF) to enhance meat analogues.
Mycorena, meanwhile, sells its fungi-derived proteins and fats to food manufacturers. Promyc, its flagship ingredient, is said to be neutral in flavour with a strong fibrous texture, and has a lower environmental footprint than both animal and plant proteins.
Wim Slee, co-CEO of Veos Group, noted how both companies “are active in the same field and have complementary knowledge and products [from] which we can benefit in the future”.
“We [are] now focused on our clear and ambitious goal: bringing Promyc to the market on an industrial scale,” said Vanholme. “Naplasol is proud to operate a state-of-the-art facility in Bree, Belgium where we look forward producing Promyc. This site is also continuing the manufacturing of our existing SNF mycoproteins.”
Having raised €35M in equity funding, including a then-record Series A round for a Nordic alternative protein startup, Mycorena had made considerable progress, selling consumer products in six EU nations via collaborations with the likes of Rebl Eats, Meeat Food Tech Oy, Revo Foods, and RIP Foods.
But the unforgiving food tech funding environment of the last couple of years meant new capital was hard to come by. “However, the investor appetite for large-scale capital-expenditure-driven projects within [the] alternative protein space has significantly diminished over the past few years,” Mycorena founder Ramkumar Nair told Green Queen last month.
He labelled the situation a “big catch-22”, explaining: “Investors would like to see strong binding offtake agreements before they sign up on a large capital expenditure project, whereas the partner companies that we were working with are reluctant to sign offtake contracts without seeing strong production capabilities.”
This, coupled with its B2B partners decelerating their growth plans, pushed Mycorena to cancel its scale-up project and refocus on its demo facility, as well as turn to B2B2C operations. “Despite this pivot, the accumulated challenges of the past two years have left us with limited options,” Nair said, outlining why the company filed for bankruptcy.
Latest in a string of alt-protein brand revivals
Courtesy: Mycorena
For Mycorena, the move was always intended as a step towards reviving the business. “Although it was emotionally a difficult decision to make for all of us, filing for bankruptcy was the most viable path forward for the company, allowing it to make a clean restart,” Nair explained at the time.
He said that some of the company’s former shareholders and certain new investors were building a consortium to buy back the bankruptcy estate and reinstate the company’s operations.
In the end, it has been acquired by Naplasol, joining Meatless Farm, VBites, Tattooed Chef and Plant & Bean as the latest alternative protein startup to come back from the brink in the last 18 months.
“We are proud that we can continue the story of Mycorena, as we strongly believe in the future of mycoproteins,” said Slee. “Mycoproteins are clearly a sustainable protein alternative, with a lower CO2, land and water footprint compared to other plant-based proteins.”
Addressing the implications for its employees, Nair said last month: “We possess substantial intellectual assets and know-how within our company, and we consider our team to be a cornerstone of our value. As we are now making efforts to restart, our goal is to retain the founders and all employees and continue Mycorena’s envisioned journey under new ownership.”
Vanholme declined to share details about how the acquisition would affect Mycorena’s employees and executive team, suggesting that this has “not yet been fully determined”.
Following the takeover, Nair remarked: “Mycorena has been on an exciting journey towards becoming a leading player in the mycoprotein industry. The acquisition and merger with Naplasol offer a unique opportunity to build on the foundation we have established.”
Leading future food industry investor Blue Horizon is pivoting from fund management to manufacturing, starting with a Giga Protein Factory in the Arabian desert. Here’s why.
Just over a year ago, alternative protein fund leader Blue Horizon pulled the plug on its growth fund amidst changes in the venture capital landscape and an internal dispute that had led to complications.
Fast-forward to June 2024: agrifood VC platform AgFunder announced in a social media post that it was taking over the management of Blue Horizon’s growth fund effective immediately. The update stated that Blue Horizon had “exited the investment advisory sector”.
According to the announcement, the fund’s limited partners (LPs) would “gain access to AgFunder’s global network, with offices in Silicon Valley, London, and Singapore” and “benefit from the resources provided by AgFunderNews, comprehensive research, and GAIA, AgFunder’s proprietary database and AI platform, which includes over 60,000 agtech and foodtech startups.”
Blue Horizon, meanwhile, said it was pivoting away from asset management to focus on core operations and manufacturing via large-scale ‘Giga Protein Factories’ under a new entity, dubbed NUOS (NUtrition Operating System), in a bid to “accelerate the global transition to a sustainable food system”.
It represents a significant shift in the alternative protein and future food investor space. Since its founding by Swiss businessman Roger Lienhard in 2016, Zurich-based Blue Horizon has been a seminal fund in the sector.
But the seed for change came when Blue Horizon began raising the growth fund – the firm realised that the category wasn’t mature enough to warrant growth equity capital.
According to Blue Horizon’s founders, the future food industry was entering the Gartner hype cycle, and concern around pricing, taste and health came to the fore, which led the conventional meat and dairy industry to mobilise and launch anti-plant-based meat campaigns. Subsequently, mainstream investors became nervous and the alternative protein sector fell into what the firm calls a “capital chasm”, a bottleneck that impeded the industry’s progress.
Blue Horizon told Green Queen they couldn’t break the cycle, ending up with only a $100 million raise after three years of efforts for their first growth fund (reports suggest the firm was targeting multiples of this sum).
Behind the scenes, there were other complications. The firm’s fund management business had faced hurdles despite raising capital, and a dispute with one key executive of the venture fund rattled LPs’ confidence, resulting in its liquidation.
“Yes, there have been tensions,” says Hector Freitas, partner and head of business development at Blue Horizon. “But that’s history.”
After much soul searching, Blue Horizon made the decision to scale back its fund management business – the firm transferred the growth fund to AgFunder – and recalibrate its employee base with an eye toward the future.
AgFunder takes on growth fund
Founded in 2013 by Michael Dean and Rob Leclerc, AgFunder is a leading global early-stage investor in food and agriculture with a portfolio of nearly 100 agrifood tech companies across six continents.
Last month, AgFunder closed its fourth early-stage fund on $102M, surpassing its target. It has already deployed a third of this fund, supporting startups like jitter-free coffee brand Rarebird and ketone-rich energy drink maker Key.
The takeover of Blue Horizon’s fund brings its total managed assets to $300M and adds a growth-stage portfolio to the firm.
“We’ve always intended to have [a growth fund], but the market needed to mature and there have been limited viable opportunities for growth stage investing until fairly recently,” Dean told Green Queen.
AgFunder partners Michael Dean and Manuel Gonzalez with head of media and research at AgFunderNews, Louisa Burwood-Taylor | Courtesy: AgFunderNews
“With our network and AI-driven discovery platform, we have been particularly strong with early-stage investing, which also offers the best opportunity for high multiple returns – but with a maturing portfolio, we’ve always intended to have a growth strategy, and this deal with Blue Horizon gave us the opportunity to dive in sooner than later,” he added.
Discussions about Blue Horizon’s fund management began because the two funds share a limited partner. “The anchor investor in Blue Horizon is also an anchor investor in our fund,” he shared. “They approached me to see if AgFunder would be interested in taking over the Blue Horizon growth fund, and facilitated the introduction last September. So it took around seven to eight months to close.”
Would AgFunder use the funds to invest in its existing early-stage portfolio companies? “We have a good number of portfolio companies maturing nicely who will be going out for their Series B+ soon, and we’ll certainly take the best of those opportunities to our LPAC [Limited Partner Advisory Committee] for consideration [under the growth fund],” Dean said, after confirming that roughly 50% of the fund is left to disburse.
Freitas says he is confident that AgFunder will do right by the fund. “The [growth] fund is now under control of the LPs.[It’s] super important to make sure that the LPs are being looked after in the right way,” he says in an interview with Green Queen. “I’m sure they [AgFunder] will do something really good with the fund going forward.”
Blue Horizon taps into its true DNA
A rendering of Nuos’ Giga Protein Factory | Courtesy: Nuos
The focus is now on NUOS, which is described on its website as “the world’s leading contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) facility for producing alternative proteins at scale”. It’s an extension of Blue Horizon’s goal to transition the world to a sustainable food system.
Freitas, alongside Lienhard and CEO Björn Witte, is part of Blue Horizon’s management team, and says the development of NUOS is one of his key responsibilities.
He frames the latest activity at Blue Horizon as the result of a long-term master plan with three main verticals, with the first revolving around innovation: “One of our master plans is our innovation vertical – Blue Horizon has always stood for accelerating the transition into a sustainable food system.”
Blue Horizon’s smart protein journey started with backing alternative protein innovation, which involved seeding the early-stage funders – “meet the founders, help them with capital, and support them to grow”, as Freitas puts it. “Since the inception of Blue Horizon, we have done close to 100 investments in the alternative protein space.”
Further, he points out that the firm has had a handful of successful exits to its name, something that’s “quite unusual in the current market environment”. The latest example is New Roots, the Swiss vegan cheese company (as per Blue Horizon’s own website).
Courtesy: New Roots
Blue Horizon began by making investments off its balance sheet, Freitas tells Green Queen, about the firm’s origins. “[First}, we started with balance sheet investments, which was followed by the inception of the funds. We started the venture capital fund, and we started the growth fund,” he says, suggesting that operational excellence has been one of the firm’s strengths.
The firm was one of the most supportive fund partners in the alternative protein space, he adds, going above and beyond a typical venture capital role. He points to a dedicated content and social media team based in Los Angeles whose sole job was to assist Blue Horizon startups as an example. “That’s how we supported our portfolio.”
Green Queen spoke to at least three founders whose companies were seed-funded by Blue Horizon who characterised the fund’s team as “very supportive of founders,” with both noting how important the team was to the broader alternative protein ecosystem.
Freitas says that Blue Horizon will continue to invest in innovation, though not at the same pace. “The adjustment of strategy is that we have decided to exit the investment advisory side of the business given the market development in our industry over the last two years,” says Freitas. “It just does not seem to work well for us.”
Covering the whole spectrum from early seed to fund advisory was “not our DNA. Our DNA is being entrepreneurial,” he explains. “That’s where we see the biggest impact,” he says when asked why Blue Horizon is pivoting to driving operational businesses. “That’s where we see the biggest need.”
Phase two: consolidation
The second vertical involved the execution of a consolidation strategy. Freitas says that while plant-based meat companies such as Like Meat, Planted or Daring tend to become very successful in their home markets quite quickly, it’s when the startups start expanding geographically that things get complicated.
“It’s still food,” he says. “It’s not an app that goes from one phone to the other,” noting the challenges of regulations and logistics for tangible goods like plant-based meat, challenges alien to software startups and their investors.
For Lienhard and his team, the “early sparks were failing to create the fire” – products were costly, they weren’t getting tastier fast enough, and the startups were too small for the impact needed. To set the stage for large-scale transition, Blue Horizon set up a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to fundraise and bring together “some of the most promising players out there”.
Blue Horizon tells Green Queen that the firm saw an opportunity to break the fragmentation cycle and consolidate some of the sector’s leading players into one holding company, which would benefit from tailwinds in the market, world-class products, consolidated operations and a credible leadership team.
That formed the basis of Livekindly Collective, which launched in 2020 with $135M in funding (later raising a $200M Series A and a $200M Series B). Claimed to be the world’s third-largest alternative protein company, it’s essentially a roll-up of plant-based portfolio brands including Like Meat, Fry’s, Oumph!, No Meat, Dutch Weedburger, and later Alpha Foods, which allowed for economies of scale on R&D, production, distribution and marketing.
Giga protein factories and the Tesla model
The third vertical of the master plan is all about managing costs and expectations. “Up until 2022, there was ‘an early hype’; and hope in our market of gaining fast traction,” says Freitas. “Several funding rounds and funds came into the picture, Beyond Meat went public, and everyone was talking about the plant-based sector growing rapidly.”
But when the hype cools down, people look to make changes. “If you’re tight on money, you tend to go for the cheapest protein you can find in the supermarket, and the cheapest protein is still meat,” he says.
Plant-based meat still comes at a premium – in the US, it is 77% more expensive on average than conventional meat. To bridge this gap, Blue Horizon is taking inspiration from Elon Musk’s Tesla Gigafactory EV playbook in Nevada: build on a large scale in the desert, with optimum costs for energy, land, labour and logistics; involve people who care about sustainability; and focus on food security.
“We did very detailed calculations over the last 18 months… [and] realised that we will be able to undercut the lowest price of chicken breast of JBS meat from Brazil or Thailand,” says Freitas.
A rendering of Nuos’ Giga Protein Factory | Courtesy: Nuos
Just like EVs are going from highly prized (and priced) luxuries to gradual mass-market adoption, for alternative proteins to truly reach the mainstream and meet demand, the unit economics needs to compete with meat.
The first of these giga protein factories will be in the Middle East, which would be able to produce a million tonnes of product each year. “We want to be the home for alternative protein production going forward. And establishing in the Middle East has a lot of benefits,” Freitas states. “Capital, of course, but also a willingness [from local governments] to be in this space.”
When the news was announced, Witte – who is the chairman of NUOS – said the company was looking for “the right partner who shares the vision, mission and has the ecosystem to drive a global transition”, and the Abu Dhabi government turned out to be the ideal fit.
“Amongst all of the nations’ proposals NUOS received, it was clear from the outset that Abu Dhabi would be the natural partner. Through a combination of their vision, commitment, local infrastructure and long-term partnership appetite we felt that we could… create the gold standard for the food industry globally,” Witte added.
An ‘Innovation Academy’ to reach price parity
Plant-based meat at price parity with animal meat | Courtesy: Lidl
Some supermarkets have already made major strides towards price parity via their private-label ranges, with Lidl in Germany and other EU markets being the most notable example. Why can’t the sector have more such wins?
“The Lidl campaign was amazing… putting alternative proteins next to meat at the same price on the shelves. It looked super cool to start with. But in the end, products were not good or tasty enough yet to attract repeat buyers,” he says. [Editor’s note: Lidl said the campaign helped increase sales by 30% over six months.]
“There are some products out there that are really amazing. Look at Burger King: they’re selling plant-based chicken nuggets at the same price as meat. They get closer to their sustainability targets – being one key driver, but they’re probably not making enough margin yet.”
Getting taste and texture right is crucial, as is cleaning up ingredient labels. He alludes to the constant headlines criticising Beyond Meat’s supposed long ingredient lists, adding that nobody talks about what goes into the minced meat found in supermarkets. “It’s often an unfair comparison. But that’s how it works,” says Freitas. “Constant development needs to be done because our minds are so conditioned to meat.”
A rendering of Nuos’ Giga Protein Factory | Courtesy: Nuos
It’s why Blue Horizon is creating an Innovation Academy next to the gigafactory, which would allow it to invest in R&D for companies and drive prices down. While price is important to the end consumer, Freitas believes it’s probably even more crucial for B2B customers.
“If you can give a retailer or a QSR more margin against an equivalent product on a plant-based basis… they will be able to sell it,” he says. “They will place it correctly, and then consumers will take it on.”
Freitas adds: “Our strength is being close to the founders, being close to operations, being close to building infrastructure, and creating ideas [about] what the next step can be so our industry is growing… When you are on the operational side, you constantly have to be in a fight so you have a better chance [when] sitting in the driver’s seat, and steering food chains in the right direction.”
NUOS breaks ground in 2025, aiming to solve what it describes as the “great bottleneck” with the “great unlock” for plant-based meats, by enabling the upsurge in the S curve and the leap into mass adoption.
As Lienhard puts it: “The unlock for the industry is building something that can help startups accelerate and scale.”
This article was updated to add new information.
Disclaimer: NUOS is a content partner for Green Queen’s newsletter Green Queen Gulf.
Fat is key to flavour, texture and functionality, but health and climate problems are pushing the need for sustainable alternatives. However, this industry faces its own challenges.
For better or worse, fats are everywhere. They’re key to making food taste and feel good, and are crucial nutrients, but they can also be bad for our health and the climate.
With many traditional fats – from canola to coconut – under scrutiny for high saturated content or significant deforestation, many companies are innovating to come up with more viable alternatives that work just as well but are better for human and planetary health.
This includes fats made from microbes, plants, the air, and even some combination of these – driving a market set to be worth $6.4B by 2031. But this burgeoning industry comes with many of its own challenges, says a new report by British chef and writer Anthony Warner for New Food Innovation.
“Fat is one of the most important nutrients in our food system, yet one that is commonly demonised and misunderstood,” Warner writes. “There is often a focus on protein when we talk about food system health and sustainability, but fat is equally important.”
The report looks at several novel ways to produce fats, the hurdles they need to overcome, and how innovation can help them do so.
“The consumption of tropical oils, often the only alternative to animal fats in certain food applications, is a significant sustainability and biodiversity issue. The consumption of animal fats also comes with environmental, ethical and health concerns,” the report explains.
“If we want to build a better food system, we need alternatives that are healthy, functional and sustainable. Where those alternatives are going to come from is one of the great food challenges of the next few years.”
Using fermentation to create fats
Courtesy: Melt&Marble
Starting with fermented fats, Waners explains that there are two main approaches to producing fats this way. The first involves selecting microorganisms – like yeasts and fungi – that naturally produce fat and tailoring a process to optimise production. Precision fermentation startups like Nourish Ingredients, Yali Bio, C16 Biosciences, Melt&Marble, and Clean Food Group all fall in this category.
The second approach centres on genetic modification to produce animal-derived fats from microbes, as cultivated fat players such as Hoxton Farms, Mission Barns and Steakholder Foods are doing. But these require expensive and time-consuming novel food applications and “can be considered to be a long way from market”, the report states.
There are other issues here. All these startups are working to replace animal fats and palm oil, both cheap commodities that are favoured by food manufacturers. Fermented fat startups, on the other hand, need time, energy, feedstocks and expensive infrastructure, and are “unlikely to ever produce high yields”.
“The fat will then require extraction, de-flavouring and removal from the aqueous fermentate if it is going to be used in food applications. It is always going to be difficult to compete on price with some of the food industry’s cheapest commodities,” reads the report.
Volume is another major challenge. If a company can produce 20g of a yeast-based palm oil alternative per litre of fermentation capacity, replacing 1% of global palm production would require around 30 million litres of fermentation capacity. But currently, the world’s entire food-grade fermentation capacity is 16 million litres. As the report notes, this is just palm – replacing dairy is an even greater challenge.
While startups are looking to make meat, dairy and fish proteins, as well as ingredients like rennet or mycoprotein, these are far more valuable than commodity fats. “The cleverest fermentation startups are currently looking to target high-value ingredients, understanding that industrial fermentation capacity is [not] going to exceed demand for a very long time to come,” the report states.
Speaking to Green Queen, Warner says the capacity bottleneck is the biggest issue. “If we are serious about producing commodity fats by fermentation, global capacity will need to expand massively, which will be expensive and time-consuming,” he explains.
“Any plan to produce fats by fermentation needs to be explicit about how the capacity issue is going to be addressed. The alternative is to focus on high-value, lower-volume fat fractions for specialist use.”
The power of algae
Courtesy: Algae Cooking Club
There is another kind of fermented fat: algal oil. Algae Cooking Club has made waves over the last year through its partnership with Eleven Madison Park’s Daniel Humm, but these fats have been around for a while. Corbion, the largest algae oil producer, has been making its fat by feeding microbes on waste sugarcane since 2014 for fish feed, personal care and food manufacturers.
“Despite being a fermented oil produced from a monoculture feedstock, sustainability metrics for algal oils appear to be favourable when compared to other oil crops for measures such as carbon emissions, land and water use,” the report outlines.
Corbion’s large-scale reproduction also proves that these technologies can be commercially viable, but it further shows the importance of inexpensive feedstocks and the need to find a high-value niche.
“Algae-derived fats have been successful in high-value niche products, such as cosmetics and culinary oils, but when it comes to competing with commodity fats like palm or soy, there are significant economic and capacity barriers to overcome,” says Warner.
“Again, it’s going to be about addressing capacity and cost of manufacture. Algal fat products have been proven to work in application, but they need to make sense economically.”
Fats from genetically modified plants
Courtesy: Rothamsted Research
We’ve talked about genetically engineering microbes, but what about doing so with plants? Modifying plants via genetic manipulation or selective breeding could help produce fats, the biggest win being a plant that could grow a palm oil equivalent in a temperate climate (although this would have its own issues of fat solidification on cold days).
A well-known project using this approach is being spearheaded by Professor Johnathan Napier, whose 20-year project at Rothamsted Research aims to create fish oils in a Camelina plant. This involves inserting genes from algae responsible for the biosynthesis of long-chain omega-3 oils.
The report notes how “a few thousand hectares” of these genetically modified plants can meet the entire global demand for fish oils, proving to be a high-value crop for farmers, which can be grown in temperate climates.
Plants provide the most significant environmental benefit of all ongoing GM food projects, and this project is close to commercialisation following trials and seed production being held in the US last year. The Camelina-grown fat can have uses for human food supplements and fortification.
This effort demonstrates how strategic projects can have high commercial and environmental value, and that the path to market is long – as the report explains, “anyone promising quick-to-market GM solutions to large environmental issues [is] probably overlooking the practical realities”. The Camelina project also shows that resistance to genetic modification will likely impact farmers in counties where such technologies are opposed.
Plants are highly efficient at capturing solar energy to create food, and modifying them to produce high-value ingredients is “a more efficient method of production than fermentation tanks”, since there are few limits on their production capacity, and there’s enough infrastructure for oil extraction and processing.
The major obstacle is that “crop science is hard, time-consuming and expensive”. While fermenters with short timelines are tempting for researchers and investors, most of what we eat “will always be derived from crops grown in fields”, the report notes. Until technology can break that link, this will always be the case.
“GM technologies have obvious issues regarding consumer and legislator acceptance. Important work can be done using GM crop technologies, especially when it comes to health, but there needs to be a realism about how time consuming and difficult this sort of work is, potentially taking decades to reach market,” explains Warner. “Then there is approval, which might never be possible in some parts of the world, particularly the EU.”
The paradoxical potential of air-based fats
Courtesy: Savor
Fatty acids largely comprise carbon and hydrogen, so in theory, they can be produced without plants. Savor, the Californian startup backed by Bill Gates, recently made headlines for a butter created with carbon dioxide.
While it’s an energy-intensive process, if Savor can use renewable power sources, it would represent a major win for the climate – we could have a fat created with next to no land, and one that captures carbon from the atmosphere.
But the technology to capture atmospheric CO2 has been explored in hydrocarbon fuel production too. “The fact that it is not yet commercially viable to produce diesel in this way perhaps suggests that large-scale production of bakery shortening might be an economic challenge,” the report says.
Another thing to consider is that this tech has only been used to make saturated fats, which aren’t ideal from both health and function perspectives – these fats can crystallise easily and become too hard at room temperature for many uses.
“Blends with plant-derived unsaturated oils can be made with useful properties, including using interesterification, but this presents an interesting dilemma,” notes the report says, since producing fully saturated fats from canola or soybean oil, for example, is possible through hydrogenation.
“In reality, we will be swapping one technology that consumers no longer accept for a different technology that consumers may one day reject, all to produce fats that might not be ideal from a health perspective,” it explains.
Expanding on this, Warner says: “Air-based fats are fascinating because there is the potential to create food without any land, but currently there is no way of stopping the formation of trans fats using these methods, unless completely saturated fats are produced. This will always be an issue regarding health and functionality, requiring blends with paint oils to be made, so limiting usefulness.
“If we can somehow solve the trans fat issue then this technology is potentially an interesting part of the future, but companies can not skirt around the problems. At the moment, air-derived fats face exactly the same issue as hydrogenated fats, which is a technology that has largely been rejected.”
Could emulsions and microgels be the solution?
Courtesy: Time Traveling Milkman
Warner looks at a range of other innovative solutions, from emulsions and oleogels to microgels and oleosomes. Edinburgh’s Palm-Alt is emulsifying non-tropical oils with proteins and water to give them more ‘saturated’ properties, having unveiled a palm oil substitute for bakery products.
The Fat 2.0 created by UK plant-based meat brand THIS, meanwhile, has come up with an olive-oil-base emulsion to promote the health benefits and reduce the level of saturated fat in its chicken, beef and pork analogues.
Another UK startup, MicroLub, has developed microgels of plant proteins, a technology that involves the formation of protein and water gels that are broken into microparticles using a homogeniser. These microgels release water when chewed to create the creamy mouthfeel associated with fats.
Dutch company Time Traveling Milkman, meanwhile, is producing a fat that preserves the naturally occurring oleosomes – micro-droplets for oil storage that are surrounded with a layer of phospholipids to keep the oil stable during emulsions – in sunflower seeds. Instead of disrupting oleosomes to produce liquid oil, the startup is keeping these oil bodies intact during extraction, which has been linked to lower processing levels and digestion resistance.
Then there are oleogels, which involve combining oil with gelators to farm hard structures, giving unsaturated oils some of the functional attributes of harder saturated fats. But this is yet to reach commercialisation, thanks to a lack of availability of food-grade gelators, and regulatory restrictions around their use.
“All these methods rely on different approaches to the processing of existing ingredients, meaning that they are not subject to novel food regulations and have a chance of reaching the market reasonably quickly,” says Warner. “Even combined, they are not the solution to all the problems surrounding fat, but they do offer a suite of different approaches to food innovators looking to improve their products.”
What does the future of alt-fats look like?
Courtesy: Lypid
So where does that leave us? The report warns that it’s “incredibly unlikely” that a single breakthrough technology will transform fat production in the next two decades. Despite some European markets seeing the growth of trans-free hydrogenated oil blends, consumer resistance will likely persist in many parts of the world.
Warner also notes that fat isn’t the main driver of crop consumption in many cases of food production. For example, palm is used extensively in animal feed and biofuels, which doesn’t make a lot of sense considering we’re destroying tropical forests to produce more ‘sustainable’ fuels.
The report suggests that several food science approaches can reimagine the use of problematic fats, including cleaver emulsions, functional starches, gels, and fat-like flavourings. Sensory and oral processing can help discover ways to make foods tasty with low levels of fat, while advancements in crop science can make oil production more planet-friendly.
“It is possible that legislative and consumer resistance to technologies such as gene editing will fall as significant environmental and health benefits are realised,” the report adds.
Warner suggests that incremental improvements to the health and climate impacts of fat are probably the best path to a better food system, although they’re unlikely to garner heavy investment.
“The future is likely to involve a combination of approaches. The best way forward will be about understanding exactly what the issues are, and ignoring the bluster and hyperbole of some well-intentioned technology companies,” he says.
“There is unlikely to be a universal solution across all formats. Bakery shortening solutions will be different to plant-based dairy solutions, and these will be different to solutions for plant-based meats or cosmetics. We need to be honest about the current capacity and cost limitations regarding fermentation, and look towards realistic approaches to address them,” adds Warner.
“In my opinion, we need to accept that most food will always be derived from farmers growing stuff in fields, and find ways of doing that in healthier and more sustainable ways.”
Mars Petcare and Big Idea Ventures are spearheading a new programme for startups developing novel proteins and fats to develop sustainable pet food innovations.
As the planetary impacts of pet food become apparent to more and more consumers, a new programme is hoping to advance innovations that deliver more sustainable food for our furry friends.
Industry giant Mars Petcare and food tech investor Big Idea Ventures have partnered with food and feed technology specialist Bühler and plant-based fat producer AAK to launch the Next Generation Pet Food Program.
The initiative is on the hunt for human food startups that can help greenify the pet food sector through sustainable solutions like novel ingredients and upcycling. The idea is to use alternative proteins and fats to reduce the carbon emissions of the pet food sector.
“This initiative aims to highlight the exciting opportunity for developing sustainable pet food products,” said Andrew D Ive, founder and managing general partner of Big Idea Ventures. “It represents a significant step forward in fostering innovative, eco-friendly solutions within the pet food industry.”
Scheme looks for novel food startups to transform pet food sector
Courtesy: Olga Kholiavina/Getty Images
Pet ownership is on the rise, as is the carbon footprint attached to it. While the true emissions of pet food are a subject of debate between experts, research has shown that 20% of all meat in the UK and 25-30% in the US is used for pet food.
Meat is the most carbon-intensive food, making up 57% of the global dietary emissions together with dairy (twice as high as plant-based foods). Livestock agriculture is also an efficient form of farming, taking up 80% of the world’s farmland while supplying only 18% of its calories and 37% of its protein.
While. there are a number of companies working specifically on making pet food more planet-friendly, whether through plant-based proteins or cultivated meat, the Next Generation Pet Food Program wants to apply the tech advancements in human food to this industry.
The organisers are looking for companies innovating with alternative proteins and fats, nutritionally rich and sustainable novel ingredients, and eco-friendly processing technologies like food waste upcycling and innovative extraction techniques.
Startups will be chosen based on how unique their solution is, their ability to be scaled up, their potential to reduce emissions (with quantifiable metrics), and their willingness to openly collaborate with partners using your IP. Companies based in Asia-Pacific are preferred as the showcase event, will be held in Singapore, but other geographies will be considered if they have a highly relevant tech solution.
Mars has already been working on replacing chicken and pork fat with sustainable alternatives, so partnering with AAK – which makes plant-based oils and fats for a variety of applications – makes sense. Bühler, meanwhile, will provide technological expertise, with selected startups invited to tour its Protein Innovation Center and participate in an extrusion demo in Singapore.
“Ensuring a sustainable source of pet nutrition requires new ideas, technologies, and innovative practices,” said Bühler CTO Ian Roberts. “Collaborative innovation between industry leaders like Mars Petcare and Big Idea Ventures attracts startups from both within and beyond the pet care sector, supporting them in scaling their solutions to enhance the sustainability of pet nutrition.”
Startups to showcase product concepts in Singapore
Courtesy: ThamKC/Getty Images
The deadline for applications is September 10, and in the end, five to six startups will be chosen for the programme. Once selected, they’ll participate in online sessions during October and November, gaining expert insights from leading pet food experts and understanding the key factors in product formulation for pet food.
The startups will work with CPG, ingredient and tech experts from Mars Petcare, AAK and Bühler to develop innovative pet food concepts that directly address problem statements.
Then, during the Singapore International Agri-Food Week (November 18-22), the organisers will host a meet-and-greet event alongside the tour of Bühler’s facility. The startups will present a pitch for their innovations to Big Idea Ventures, which will help polish the presentation in preparation for a showcase event. Here, they’ll be presenting their solutions to a “high-profile audience”, which will offer them a host of networking opportunities.
“At Mars Petcare, our purpose is: A Better World for Pets,” said Elise Malandain, VP of R&D at Mars Petcare. “This programme aligns perfectly with our commitment to sustainability and innovation, and we are excited to collaborate with startups that share our vision.”
The announcement of the Next Generation Pet Food Program comes amid a flurry of activity in the alternative pet food space. Just this week, for example, Wild Earth entered the vegan cat food category with a “nutritionally complete” Unicorn Pate.
Last month, UK manufacturer Pets Choice agreed to acquire vegan dog food maker Hownd, while London-based Meatly became the world’s first cultivated pet food company to be approved for sale.
Meanwhile, in the US, Friends & Family Pet Food Co. announced it was partnering with Singapore’s Umami Bioworks to produce cultivated seafood treats for cats, while Cult Food Science began preparing for FDA feeding trials in pursuit of regulatory approval for its Noochies! cultivated dog treats.
And in a major win for the sector, the British Veterinary Association revised its position on the health credentials of vegan pet food, recognising that it’s possible to feed plant-based diets to dogs, so long as they’re nutritionally complete.
California’s Mission Barns has developed a novel bioreactor that is easy to scale and can lower the cost of cultivated meat, with regulatory approval imminent ahead of its planned market launch.
Moving away from the conventional single-cell suspension reactors of the biopharma sector, Mission Barns is hoping to solve cultivated meat’s scalability and cost problems with a novel solution.
The Californian startup is working on a cultivated pork fat called Mission Fat, which is meant to be mixed with plant-based proteins and ingredients to make hybrid meat products like bacon, pepperoni and chorizo.
Founded in 2018 by Eat Just alum Eitan Fischer, Mission Barns plans to launch these products in both foodservice and retail channels once it receives regulatory approval, for which it has filed dossiers in several countries. But to meet the market demand for cultivated meat, the company (and the industry) needs to solve two major bottlenecks: production capacity and price.
To get there, the startup has eschewed conventional bioreactors to develop a novel machine that’s more efficient, easier to scale, and ends up with a cheaper final product.
“We have different sizes of our proprietary bioreactors, ranging from R&D-scale units for experiments and optimisation, to our largest scale which is currently at pilot scale,” explains Bianca Lê, technical affairs and growth principal at Mission Barns.
The problem with using pharmaceutical bioreactors for cultivated meat
Courtesy: Mission Barns/LinkedIn
For Mission Barns, the need for a better bioreactor solution stemmed from the fact that a lot of the biotechnology used to make biopharmaceuticals isn’t purpose-built for cultivated meat.
There are inherent differences between the two: the per-tonne demand for cultivated meat is seven times higher than for biopharma drugs produced from mammalian cell cultures; the accepted ideal costs for the former is around $5-10 per kg, versus $500,000-1M for the latter; and people have more concerns about GMOs in food than in medicines.
“Bioreactors are vessels designed to grow cells. They’ve historically been designed to produce products for the biopharmaceutical industry,” Lê tells Green Queen. “We’ve invented a novel bioreactor that allows us to scale the production of cultivated meat, whether it’s pork, beef, or chicken, or fat or muscle.”
Most cultivated meat producers use bioreactors that support single-cell suspension, as these are readily available at larger scales. But to produce cell cultures this way, companies need to genetically modify anchorage-dependant cells (those that need something to attach to) so they can grow in suspension liquids.
“Meat is made up of muscle and fat cells embedded within a protein scaffold that provides structure and texture,” explains Lê. “These anchorage-dependent cells are called ‘adherent cells’ because they need to attach (or adhere) to this scaffold in order to grow. This is in contrast to cells that are able to freely float and grow whilst suspended in liquid (called ‘suspension cells’).”
Mission Barnes argues that existing suspension culture bioreactors aren’t effective in making non-GM cultivated muscle or fat, while commercially available adherent culture bioreactors only exist at small to medium scales due to a lack of market demand.
“Rather than changing the meat cells to suit a suspension culture bioreactor, our bioreactor recreates the same adherent growth conditions inside an animal’s body,” says Lê.
The mission behind the novel bioreactors
Courtesy: Mission Barns
For the new bioreactors, Mission Barns wanted to meet four key design specifications that outperform current options (whether suspension or adherent), with the aim of achieving high production capacities at low costs.
First, the company wanted to “efficiently grow and harvest meat cells (which are anchorage-dependent) from any species, using less space than existing harvestable adherent bioreactors”, outlines Lê. Then, it aimed to bypass the lengthy development process required for new cell lines to adapt to existing bioreactor environments.
The new machine also needed to be able to easily “mature muscle and fat cells, taking into account changes in geometry, density, and buoyancy”. And finally, the startup wanted the bioreactors to “produce whole-cut tissue products within a single vessel, eliminating the need for separate tissue production equipment”.
“We have successfully developed a bioreactor that meets these specifications, allowing us to cultivate both muscle and fat cells, or tissue, from any species,” says Lê.
“Our innovative adherent approach enables us to focus on engineering a single system – the bioreactor – instead of having to modify and adapt different cell types to work with existing bioreactors like suspension bioreactors. This makes the process more efficient and straightforward.”
Mission Barnes has additionally developed fully chemically defined and animal-free culture media, non-GM pork cell lines that can differentiate fat and proliferate quickly, and food-grade, cheap process reagents and substrates for coating, washing, and harvesting.
With partners lined up, Mission Barns expects US approval soon
Courtesy: Mission Barns
“At this pre-market stage, our primary focus is on bioprocess optimisation,” says Lê. The startup’s bioreactor is already in its third iteration, which is over 500 times larger than the initial prototypes.
Now, it is planning a larger-scale manufacturing facility. “Our current plan involves having bioreactors with working volumes in the tens of thousands of litres at commercial scale, when we’ll be outputting tens of millions of pounds of final product per year,” she adds.
Mission Barns, which has so far raised $60M, conducted a techno-economic analysis of this future facility, finding that with continued tech advancements – such as efficient media use, innovative scale-up, and an optimised supply chain for raw materials – it could reduce costs to reach price parity with conventional pork.
Asked about the regulatory progress, Lê reveals that Mission Barns is “actively working with regulators around the world” to bring its products to market “in a way that can assure consumers of its safety and high quality standards”.
“We’ve already completed a comprehensive safety assessment of our cultivated pork, and expect the agencies to publicly agree with our assessment soon, including the US,” she says.
The current pilot plant facility “can produce enough product to supply a handful of restaurants and retailers”. This would help with the initial market launch, as Lê points out: “We have a number of exciting partnerships confirmed with major US grocery stores, restaurants and food distributors who we have partnered with to sell our products.”
US plant-based milk brand Milkadamia has introduced 2D-printed Flat Pack sheets that cut packaging waste by 94%, and it’s starting with oat milk.
Known for its macadamia milks, Milkadamia is diversifying its lineup with a new product format and milk base to tackle the sector’s waste and carbon footprint through ‘precycling’.
The Illinois-based startup has launched Flat Pack, a range of 2D-printed plant-based milk sheets that are shelf-stable and can be blended with water at home. The debut product is an oat milk, which will be showcased at the Newtopia Now trade event in Denver (August 25-28).
Milkadamia began with oat milk “simply because the oat product was formulated first and oat milk is driving growth in the plant milk category”, CEO Jim Richards tells Green Queen, adding that the sheets will be available online and in stores in January.
While almond still represents the highest share, oat milk is the fastest-growing milk analogue in the US, with shelf-stable sales up by 14.2% in the 52 weeks ending July 14, according to SPINS data reported by AgFunderNews. Oat is also the number one base in new alt-milk launches in the country.
“We are using organic oats, which fit with the Milkadamia ethos,” says Richards, before revealing that other Flat Pack variants are imminent. “Almond, macadamia, and other variants will follow in rapid succession.”
An inclusive product for people with and without blenders
Courtesy: Milkadamia/ Boltenkoff/Getty Images | Composite by Green Queen
Milkadamia was among the earliest macadamia milk brands, originating in Australia and launching stateside in 2016. Its core lineup includes sweetened and unsweetened barista and vanilla-flavoured milks, with an Artisan range with multi-ingredient organic bases introduced earlier this year.
Now, it has joined the burgeoning sector of new-format plant milks, which look to further curb the planetary impact of this sector through clever technology and packaging solutions.
Milkadamia starts with an oat milk paste that is printed into sheets via a proprietary 2D-printing process, which are then covered in compact and lightweight packaging, reducing packaging waste by 94% and weight by 85%, as well as cutting down emissions from transportation.
Every Flat Pack contains five sheets, which can each make 8oz of oat milk. They’re made from fermented whole-grain oats, water, rapeseed oil, oat fibre, locust bean gum, sea salt, and bourbon vanilla, and can be used in a plethora of applications, including in frothy cappuccinos.
There are two ways to consumers can make the oat milk. The first is by blending a sheet with a cup of water for 30 seconds to a minute, until the sheet is fully dissolved. But not everyone has a blender, whether that’s due to affordability, a lack of counter space, or something else. The second method is for these folks, who can soak the sheet in water overnight in the fridge, and shake it up in the morning.
“Our aspiration is to invite everyone to the precycling journey with Flat Pack, and minimise barriers to make this innovation accessible,” says Richards. This approach, the company explains, helps shift the focus from “post-consumer waste management to proactive reduction, allowing consumers to make a direct positive impact on the planet”.
“By varying the ratio of water to sheet, consistencies from skim-milk-like through to ultra-creamy are easily attained. The milk is made fresh and to suit personal preference,” he adds.
Balancing convenience with sustainability
Courtesy: Milkadamia
Milkadamia isn’t the only one innovating with the format of plant-based milk. Germany’s Veganz has been selling its own 2D-printed oat milk sheets under the Mililk brand. But apart from sheets, brands are also making powders, nut milk pastes, and frozen concentrates.
While these products offer something new in the way of customisation, utility and efficiency, there’s something to be said about the convenience factor – are consumers willing to go the extra mile and make their own milk on a regular basis, as opposed to simply pouring it from a Tetra Pak or bottle?
“The simple act of preparing food from scratch generates a sense of fulfilment that all the conveniences of modern life cannot match,” argues Richards. “Incorporating the preparation of Flat Pack milk into a daily ritual is a little do-good and feel-good therapy.”
He adds: “Flat Pack Oat Milk is for anyone, but will not be for everyone – no product ever is. However, we believe this is a major disruptor in plant milk and hopefully far beyond. The users of Milkadamia’s Flat Pack line are specifically attracted by the trade-off with convenience.”
Lowering the environmental and economic impacts (this is a cheaper product) is a benefit that makes inconvenience “trivial compared to the cost of drifting along with the status quo”.
“Consumers have long bemoaned the volume of packaging they are forced to toss. It is a long-standing, unaddressed irritant. Stronger disaffection has been growing under the surface for years. The current state of packaging is ripe for the trade-off we’re bringing,” says Richards.
He continues: “Industry ignores the packaging disposal problem it creates and is content to shift the – largely futile – burden of recycling onto the consumer, who has few options other than to have it added to overflowing landfills or end up in our plastic- and pollution-choked oceans. Those who recognise it is unsustainable and unacceptable, who seek a better way and are willing to put in a little effort for the Earth, are Milkadamia Flat Pack customers.
“Some small conveniences are not worth their upstream and downstream impact on the environment or the consumers’ wallet. Every business should be pre-cycling to reduce packaging and other waste-creating activities.”
A breakthrough study explores how continuous manufacturing can solve the scalability challenges of cultivated chicken and bring prices down to $6 per lb.
If you speak to anybody from the cultivated meat sector – be it a startup founder, an investor, or a think tank expert – most of them will likely tell you that scalability and costs are the two biggest bottlenecks of the industry’s progress.
As it stands, there’s simply not enough infrastructure to make cultivated meat in batches that will drive costs closer to conventional meat. According to McKinsey, startups in this space would need over 17 times the fermentation capacity that currently exists in the global pharmaceutical industry to meet the growth demands of the industry.
The consulting giant further states that it’ll take until at least 2030 for these proteins to reach price parity, and this is despite companies having brought down costs by 99% in less than a decade. One investor told Reuters that these products need to reach manufacturing costs of $2.92 per pound to be price-competitive with conventional meat.
Now, a new study by Israel’s Believer Meats and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) demonstrates how cultivated meat can be produced in a manner that is cost-effective, describing it as a potential “breakthrough” for the industry.
Published in the Nature Food journal, the research is based on a technology called tangential flow filtration (TFF) – an efficient way to separate and purify biomolecules – for the continuous manufacturing of cultivated meat. It can potentially bring down the cost of producing cultivated chicken to $6.20 per pound, in line with the retail price of conventional organic chicken.
For context, the only cultivated meat currently found in supermarkets, Good Meat’s chicken, has a retail price equivalent to over $20 per pound – and cultivated cells only make up 3% of the product.
Empirical study paves the way for accessible cultivated meat
Courtesy: Nahmias Lab
Believer Meats founder Yaakov Nahmias and researchers from HUJI took inspiration from how Ford’s automated assembly line transformed the auto industry in the early 20th century.
They leveraged a new bioreactor assembly method (enabled by the TFF technique) to allow biomass expansion of 130 billion cells per litre, with a yield of 43% weight per volume. This process of cultivated the chicken cells was carried out continuously for over 20 days, leading to daily harvests of the biomass.
The study also introduced an animal-free culture medium that cost only $0.63 per litre, supporting the long-term, high-density culture of chicken cells. Culture media represent the bulk of the costs of cultivated meat production, and can cost hundreds of dollars.
Using this empirical data, the researchers conducted a techno-economic analysis of a hypothetical 50,000-litre production facility, which resulted in the aforementioned $6.20 per lb figure for cultivated chicken.
“Empirical data is the bedrock for any cost model of scaled cultivated meat production, and this study is the first to provide real-world empirical evidence for key factors that influence the cost of production, such as media cost, metabolic efficiency, and achievable yields in a scalable bioprocess design,” said Elliot Swartz, principal cultivated meat scientist at alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute.
“Our findings show that continuous manufacturing enables cultivated meat production at a fraction of current costs, without resorting to genetic modification or mega-factories,” said Nahmias. “This technology brings us closer to making cultivated meat a viable and sustainable alternative to traditional animal farming.”
Cost-cutting efforts are front of mind for cultivated meat producers
Courtesy: Believer Meats
The study’s authors acknowledged that various other factors would affect the final price of cultivated meat, but added that their research underscored the potential of continuous manufacturing to slash production costs and make these proteins more accessible to consumers.
The research has also presented solutions like a novel filter stack perfusion that can reduce factory costs, aside from the animal-free medium that can lower raw material costs and the continuous manufacturing that increases factory capacity. The analysis of the 50,000-litre facility resulted in a projected annual production of 2.14 million kg of cultivated chicken at price parity with USDA Organic chicken.
Many companies have been making efforts to decrease the cost of culture media, including pet food producers Meatly and BioCraft Pet Nutrition. The former has created a protein-free medium to get costs to just £1 ($1.30), while the latter has developed a plant-based medium that could bring market prices down to $2-2.50 per lb.
“This important study provides numerous data points that demonstrate the economic feasibility of cultivated meat. The study confirms early theoretical calculations that serum-free media can be produced at costs well below $1/L without forfeiting productivity, which is a key factor for cultivated meat achieving cost-competitiveness.”
Fellow Israeli company Ever After Foods has also developed a bioreactor platform that offers a 90% reduction in cultivated meat prices for its B2B clients. And researchers in Finland have posited stem cell metabolism as a way to produce these proteins without expensive growth factors.
Believer Meats, meanwhile, is currently building what it claims would be the world’s largest cultivated meat facility. Located in North Carolina, the 200,000 sq ft plant would be able to churn out at least 10,000 tonnes of product a year, and will help apply this continuous manufacturing research in practice on a large scale.
Finnish gas protein startup Solar Foods is planning to go public with a technical listing on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market in Helsinki.
Solar Foods, which makes Solein protein by feeding microbes on gases, has announced its intention to list the business on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market in September.
The First North marketplace is a division of Nasdaq Nordic and an alternative stock exchange for smaller companies in Europe. It is currently home to over 550 companies.
Helsinki-based Solar Foods will be applying for a technical (or direct) listing – unlike an IPO, this doesn’t involve the issuance of any new shares, but instead allows businesses to sell their existing stocks without raising new capital.
The Solein protein producer outlined two reasons for going public. The first is to implement a global growth strategy, which involves scaling up production, introducing new products, and making strategic acquisitions to speed up tech development.
Additionally, Solar Foods aims to enhance its profile and credibility among stakeholders, customers, financiers, as well as current and future personnel.
Tech licencing could open up new revenue stream
Courtesy: Solar Foods
Solar Foods produces Solein through the fermentation of microbes, using carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen as feedstocks (instead of sugar). The resulting protein can be used in an assortment of products, from meat, dairy and egg analogues to beverages and noodles.
Having already been approved for sale in Singapore, it debuted as part of a vegan chocolate gelato at Italian eatery Fico, and was the base of a Taste the Future chocolate snack bar released by Fazer – a majority shareholder of Solar Foods – earlier this year. And just this month, Japanese food conglomerate Ajinomoto unveiled mooncakes and ice cream sandwiches where Solein replaced the dairy.
The deep-yellow, flavourless powder boasts 65-70% protein, 5-8% fat, and up to 15% dietary fibre, while also containing iron and vitamin B. But apart from nutrition, Solein’s USP lies in the sustainability credentials – the main raw materials for production are carbon dioxide and renewable energy, resulting in emissions equal to just 1% of those generated by conventional meat, and 20% of plant proteins.
This has also allowed it to become the first private company in Finland to gain a Nasdaq Green Equity Designation, which recognises businesses that generate more than half of their turnover from green activities, and less than 5% from fossil fuels.
In its announcement, Solar Foods explained that its business model is “to produce new food raw materials for the global market using both existing and new microbial strains under development”.
“This requires investments in R&D, sales and marketing, as well as in the production capacity of Solein,” it said. “As the company has already scaled its production technology to demonstration scale, it also has the potential to licence both hydrogen fermentation technology and production organisms for the food industry.”
In doing so, its net sales would be based on a licence fee based on clients’ production, and the startup said this model wouldn’t tie up capital and would help improve its profitability.
Solar Foods working on new products as it plans for Factory 02
Courtesy: Solar Foods
To date, Solar Foods has attracted over €43M in equity funding, including an €8M Series B round last November, as well as €30M in debt financing. It also received €34M in grants from Business Finland to build its commercial-scale Factory 01, which opened in April with the capacity to produce as much protein per day as a dairy farm with 300 cows.
Business Finland has set aside a further €76M to support the construction of its next plant, Factory 02, if it’s built on European soil. This facility is expected to have a profitable production scale.
Solar Foods has highlighted several “megatrends” that underscore its growth. Climate change, biodiversity loss, shrinking farmland, a swelling population, increasing consumer consciousness around sustainability, and geopolitics (three countries make up 80% of global soy production) are all major challenges for food companies.
“Solein has the lowest carbon footprint compared to all other known protein sources if fossil-free energy is used in production,” Solar Foods said. “The production of Solein does not require arable land, and it can be produced anywhere where renewable energy is available, such as in the desert or in space. In large-scale production, the company estimates that Solein’s cost will be competitive with any other protein.”
The startup is now focusing on international expansion, with regulatory approval expected in the US this year, allowing it to begin sales in the second half of 2024. This is set to provide “significant benefits” in authorisation processes in the other markets it has filed dossiers in, such as the EU and the UK. Solar Foods anticipates the UK greenlight in 2026, and is also considering filing applications for new products developed alongside Solein.
The two manufacturing plants form the basis of Solar Foods’ growth over the next two years. Factory 01 can produce 160 tonnes of Solein annually, and this would be sold to customers for test marketing campaigns and new product pilots – these are prerequisites for earning sales contracts for Factory 02.
The latter’s capacity is set to be 50 to 100 times higher than Factory 01 and generate net sales of €80-200M. It could see a total investment of €150-420M, and based on current estimates, each kg of Solein will cost €4.3-5.2 to produce (excluding certain financing costs). That price is set to fall even further with tech advancements.
At the end of 2023, Solar Foods had a net debt of €12M (25% down from the previous year), with an operating loss of nearly €7M and net sales of €5,000 – the latter will likely increase significantly with the new partnerships this year, including the Fazer and Ajinomoto products.
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 Lurpak’s plant-based butter, Cheetos’ limited-edition vegan release, and Oatly and Kolkata Chai Co.’s ice cream block party.
New products and launches
Arla‘s market-leading butter brand Lurpak has finally entered the plant-based world with a non-dairy spreadable version made from rapeseed, coconut and shea oils, oats and cultures. It debuts in the UK today, and in Denmark on August 26.
Courtesy: Lurpak/Meawnamcat via Getty Images
Another dairy-free win comes from Premier Foods, whose canned custard brand Ambrosia has introduced a plant-based edition in the UK. The non-HFSS 390g tin is currently available at Morrisons for £1.95 (on par with the £2, 400g dairy and egg version), and will roll out at other retailers next month.
Irish vegan influencer duo David and Stephen Flynn – known as The Happy Pear – is bringing its range of dips, soups, ready meals, granolas and drinks to UK supermarkets following a successful €2.5M crowdfunding round in June.
Courtesy: The Happy Pear
Swedish vegan meat analogue startup Hooked Foods has brought out four new products – chicken bites, chicken filets, tuna bites, and salmon bites – with a refreshed packaging design. They will be available at ICA Gruppen and Coop Sverige from October.
German pet food startup VegDog has permanently introduced a potato-based vegan popcorn snack for dogs.
Frito-Lay‘s cult-favourite cheese puff brand Cheetos has at last gone plant-based with a new Vegan Vegetalien White Cheddar Blanc launched exclusively in Canada for a limited time.
Courtesy: @accidentally_vegan_canada via Instagram/Yazgi Bayram via Getty Images
Ingredients giant Ingredion has released a functional native cornstarch called Novation Indulge 2940, which holds distinct gelling properties for use in vegan cheese, among other applications.
UK vegan meat maker Shicken has rolled out its Tikka Kebab in Costco stores in the US, making it the only British plant-based meat brand currently available on its shelves.
Also in the US, Oatly has partnered with Kolkata Chai Co. to promote their Oat Milk Chai Soft Serve at a block party at the latter’s East Village location in New York City this Friday (August 22), which is National Soft Serve Day. It comes a week after Oatly’s soft-serve began appearing at Impossible Foods‘ Chicago pop-up.
Courtesy: Oatly/Kolkata Chai Co.
Texas-based Kibo Foods has launched a new line of Veggie Crunch chips made from green peas. They come in three plant-based flavours: sour cream and onion, hot chipotle, and sea salt. They’re available on its e-store and on Amazon for $21.99 per 12-pack.
In Singapore, upcycled food startup The Moonbeam Co. has collaborated with coffee company Bettr to introduce the Resavour Mocha Siew Dai Cookies, made using spent coffee grounds.
Japanese restaurant operator Fujiya has announced a sorghum-based meat analogue brand called Nikugoe. The lineup, which includes Hamburg Steak, Meat Super Cheese Hamburger, and Meat Super Gyoza, is set to launch in the country in autumn, with future plans to take it to the US.
Courtesy: Tous les Jours
South Korean bakery chain Tous les Jours has added vegan cakes to its menu. The Plantastic raspberry-chocolate and blueberry-chocolate offerings are available nationwide.
And in Dubai, vegan café Seva is set to reopen on September 1 after undergoing renovations in the summer.
Research and company developments
Research by plant-based meat brand Meatless Farm has found that two-thirds of meat-eaters would swap beef burgers for a vegan option after learning that its meat-free burger has 85% lower emissions.
Courtesy: Meatless Farm
At the University of Lisbon‘s Técnico Lisboa, researchers have developed cultivated seabass via 3D bioprinting, a result of a five-year effort.
Inn Pakistan, the Institute of Agronomy at Bahauddin Zakariya University has launched an MSc (Hons) degree in Climate Change and Food Security.
Company and personnel updates
Sandhya Sriram, founder of cultivated seafood startup Shiok Meats (now acquired by Umami Bioworks), has been appointed as CEO of New Zealand-based food tech investor and accelerator Sprout Agritech.
In Canada, Danone’s plant-based milk brand Silk‘s coconut and almond milk ranges, and Walmart‘s private-label Great Value almond milks, have been recalled due to concerns of a Listeria outbreak.
Courtesy: Beacon Press
Mercy for Animals president and CEO Leah Garcés is releasing her second book, Transfarmation: The Movement to Free Us from Factory Farming, on September 17. Currently available for pre-order, it is described as an “insightful and pointed exploration of the injustices perpetrated by factory farming”, and will be promoted via a six-city book tour in the fall.
Finally, Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport has joined the growing list of retailers and caterers to commit to making 60% of all protein sales plant-based by 2030, with the aim of halving emissions by this time. The international airport will also introduce Fairtrade standards for food and coffee, with all products being deforestation-free by 2025 (echoing the incoming EU regulations).
A host of startups are overhauling one of the world’s favourite ingredients, turning sugar into fibre, reducing sweetness, and innovating with better-for-you substitutes.
While sugar may not technically be an addictive food, it’s as close to this distinction as any foodstuff gets. The ingredient is omnipresent around the world – separate studies in Canada and Australia have shown that two-thirds of packaged foods contain added sugar.
So it’s no surprise that we consume way more of the sweet stuff than we should. In the US, 58% of consumers exceed the intake recommended by the national dietary guidelines. Children in the UK, meanwhile, surpass the maximum recommended intake for an 18-year-old by the time they’re 10.
Too much of anything is a bad thing, but overconsumption of added sugar (not the natural sugars found in whole foods) is especially detrimental to health, increasing the risk of conditions like type 2 diabetes, obesity and heart disease.
This is why national governments are imploring citizens to eat less sugar. India, the world’s largest sugar consumer, recently updated its dietary guidelines and now recommends limiting sugar to 5% of daily calories, and advises against giving any of it to children under two.
But shaking up this sector is tough – the global sugar market was valued at $66B in 2023, while the same research firm placed the sugar substitute sector at $7B. It’s a nascent industry with many question marks (see aspartame), but one with tons of innovation.
Startups looking to change the conversation on sugar are coming up with different ways to make sweet foods. Some are creating ‘sweet proteins’, a new class of sweeteners derived from natural proteins and made via fermentation, others are converting sugar into dietary fibre for enhanced health effects, and yet others are using technology to reduce the sugar content of beverages without impacting the sweetness.
Headquarters: Davis, California Founders/parent company: Jason Ryder and Alan Perlstein Total funding: $31.9M
Courtesy: Oobli
A leader in the sweet protein space, Oobli (formerly Joywell Foods) is named after the West African fruit Oubli, which contains a natural sweet protein called brazzein (said to be between 500 to 2,000 times sweeter than sucrose). The startup recently received a ‘no questions’ letter from the FDA, allowing the company to sell its precision-fermented Oubli Fruit Sweet Protein – which has no impact on the glycemic index – to US food and drink manufacturers, and its own iced teas, lemonades and chocolates.
Zya
Headquarters: London, UK Founders/parent company: Joshua Sauer and Niels Wicke Total funding: $5.2M
Courtesy: Zya
Formerly called Inulox, Zya has developed an enzyme that can convert sugar into fibre inside the digestive system, by acting on sugar before the body breaks it down and absorbs it. The enzyme can convert up to 30% of the sugar into fibre, while retaining the taste. It aims to launch the product (called Convero) in the US in 2026, but will need to work with regulators for clearance and labelling guidance. Europe and the UK are also on the list.
Amai Proteins
Headquarters: Rehovot, Israel Founders/parent company: Ilan Samish Total funding: $114M (reportedly)
Another sweet protein startup, Amai Proteins uses its Pro3 Platform to develop a line of Designer Sweet Proteins to reduce the amount of added sugar in food and beverage products, from dairy alternatives and fruit juices to peanut butter and ketchup. Its first product, Sweelin, is a calorie-free ingredient made from precision fermentation that’s 3,000 times sweeter than sugar and can replace 40-70% of added sugar content. Plus, it has a 98% lower climate footprint.
BlueTree Technologies
Headquarters: Kiryat Shmona, Israel Founders/parent company: Didier Toubia and Yuval Klein Total funding: $2.26M
Courtesy: BlueTree Technologies
Fellow Israeli player BlueTree Technologies also focuses on sugar reduction, using ultra-filtration technology to remove disaccharides like sucrose and lactose from juices, beer and milk without affecting the taste (since the remaining monosaccharides such as fructose and glucose are much sweeter). The company recently received self-determined Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status in the US, and is awaiting approval in Israel to launch a 30% reduced-sugar orange juice with Israeli manufacturer Priniv.
Better Juice
Headquarters: Rehovot, Israel Founders/parent company: Gali Yarom and Eran Blachinsky Total funding: $8M
Courtesy: Better Juice
Also in Israel, Better Juice is using microbial enzymes to convert fruit sugars into dietary fibre and non-digestible sugars in juice concentrates, purées, cereals, sorbets, jams, yoghurts and gummies. It does so by passing the product through immobilised microbes in fermenters, reducing the sugar content by 30-80% and calories in juices by up to 60%. Its commercial-scale facility can process 250 million litres of fruit juice annually, and the startup obtained self-affirmed GRAS status in the US earlier this year.
IncreBio
Headquarters: Bangkok Founders/parent company: Chonchayong (Sean) Trairatkeyoon Total funding: $530,000
Courtesy: IncreBio
Formerly JuiceInnov8, Increbio is all about sugar reduction in juices, leveraging its INCRNatural and a natural yeast isolated from fruits. It uses precision fermentation to control the pathway of sugar-reducing microbes in bioreactors, which break down and eat the sugar within the juices. The microbes are then filtered out to obtain the end product, called Incredible Juice, which has a 70% lower natural sugar content.
Naturannova
Headquarters: Santiago, Chile Founders/parent company: Antonella Lazzari, Juan Duarte and Fabian Gonzalez Total funding: Undisclosed
Courtesy: Naturannova
Also leveraging precision fermentation is Chile’s Naturannova, which uses its computational platform to discover hidden edible peptides in plants and develop functional ingredients with them. Its first product is Sweet Protein+, which does not spike glucose levels. Currently available in samples for manufacturers, it is 10 times sweeter than sweeteners like Stevia, has no aftertaste, and is being used in dairy and flavoured water applications. Naturannova has reportedly applied for approval in the US and Europe.
MycoTechnology
Headquarters: Aurora, Colorado, US Founders/parent company: Alan Hahn, Jim Langan, Brooks Kelly and Peter Luba Total funding: $207.6M
Courtesy: MycoTechnology
US fungi startup MycoTechnology’s precision-fermented sweet protein originates from honey truffles, which are native to Eastern Europe. It is 1,500-2,500 times sweeter than sugar, has negligible calories and no aftertaste. It is currently scaling up production and aims to enter the North American market in 2025/26, followed by Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
Sweegen
Headquarters: Orange County, California, US Founders/parent company: Steven Chen Total funding: Undisclosed
Courtesy: Sweegen
Sweegen is an amalgamation of all the tenets of sugar innovation. The Californian brand has leveraged sweet proteins like brazzein and thaumatin (found in yet another West African fruit, katemfe), as well as sweeteners such as Bestevia. These have powered innovations like Sweetensify, a collection of taste modulation flavours that can smoothen alcohol burn bring out creamy chocolate notes, and replace calories in soft drinks. It has Innovation Studios in Southern California, Mexico City and London, and has achieved regulatory approval for products in a number of countries globally.
And this week, industry members got a taste of three new dishes using a new kind of ingredient for hybrid meats (a combination of cultivated animal cells and plant-based ingredients).
Local startup Ants Innovate showcased Cell Essence, a cultivated pork oil for hybrid meats, as part of three dishes at a private tasting. It is part of the company’s line of functional ingredients for the alternative protein industry, and was mixed with products from its plant-based meat brand NouMi.
The cultivated porcine oil was part of IKEA-style meatballs, Shanghai-style soup dumplings (xiaolongbao), and teriyaki grilled skewers. The latter featured another of Ants Innovate’s functional ingredients, a lean meat cut using its Scalable Micro-Imprinted Lapis Expansion (or SMILE) tech.
A few drops are all that’s needed
Courtesy: GFI APAC/LInkedIn
Ants Innovate is an alumnus of the state-owned Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR), and was founded by Hanry Yu and Ong Shuian in 2020. The startup calls itself an “industry enabler and a translator of technology to products”, and aims to supply functional ingredients for cultivated and plant-based protein manufacturers to make premium whole-cut meats.
The company is working on a range of fictional hybrid meat ingredients to hit the taste, texture and affordability touchpoints, which includes a scaleable micro-imprinting and stacking technology for planet-friendly meat cuts, as explained by the Good Food Institute APAC, whose director Mirte Gosker was at the tasting event.
Cell Essence is described as an ingredient that “emulates the rich, savoury essence of pork”, and has a major impact on the sensory aspects of hybrid meats even in small concentrations. The technology extracts these attributes from animal cells and helps the startup “control the meaty aroma, fibrous base or natural meaty colouring” of the products.
“This is a hybrid cultivated porcine oil that emulates the rich, savoury essence of pork,” explained Calisa Lim, senior project manager at trade body APAC-SCA, who was also at the event. Writing on LinkedIn, she said she was particularly “blown away by the smell and taste” of the meat skewers.
“The small percentage of cells (<3%) was enough to deliver on the sweet, salty and umami flavour that conventional pork has,” wrote Lim.
The commercial potential of hybrid meat
Courtesy: Ants Innovate
Ants Innovate is among several startups working on cultivated meat ingredients. Silicon Valley startup Mission Barns is making cultivated pork fat, Dutch player Upstream Foods is working on cultivated salmon fat, and fellow Singaporean company ImpacFat is developing cultivated fish fat. South Korea’s Simple Planet, meanwhile, has created a cultivated meat powder.
Ants Innovate – whose name takes inspiration from the Ants and Lions story – has an automaton instrument that uses process and design engineering to seamlessly transform ingredients like Cell Essence into end products. It has established various cell lines and opened a lab and pilot plant at Bedok Food City.
It launched NouMi in 2022, offering plant-based meat products in the form of baos, spring rolls, curry puffs and dumplings. It has also been working with strategic partners in supply chain and distribution to commercialise its functional ingredients.
Most cultivated meats that have been sold so far are hybrid meats, as the industry continues to scale and lower costs. “The chances of being able to economically produce 100% cultivated products that can compete on price with commoditised meat are slim to none in the next 10+ years,” Heather Courtney, general partner at Alwyn Capital, told Green Queen in December.
“in the short term, it’s likely the only way to make cultivated commercially feasible,” she added. “Hybrid products will allow the cultivated market the chance to build and become normalised with consumers, while also – importantly – generating the revenues and business necessary to keep dollars flowing into the space, so scale can be further achieved.”
Ants Innovate addresses the cost question on its website, saying: “We have low cost as a key design goal and have simplified the manufacturing process and ingredient list, as well as the cell and food production strategies. We use cells for their meaty flavours so our premium quality products will be priced competitively with conventional meat.”
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 Chloe Coscarelli’s comeback to the restaurant world, vegan hits at UK airports, and Canada’s plant-based egg labelling guidelines.
New products and launches
Vegan chef Chloe Coscarelli has opened eponymous restaurant Chloe on New York City’s Bleecker Street (to rave reviews), eight years after she was ousted from her first restaurant chain, By Chloe.
Courtesy: Chloe
On the other coast, vegan seafood company Impact Food served its sushi-grade tuna in nachos and a rice bowl by the Da Poke Man food truck at the Outside Lands music festival last weekend.
If you’re a fan of the adult party game Cards Against Humanity, vegan gaming company This Is Not A Game has released a vegan-focused version called Plants Against Veganity. There’s apparently a Monopoly-style game in the works too.
Courtesy: This Is Not A Game
Israeli alt-seafood player Oshi has partnered with Lewis Hamilton-backed vegan chain Neat, which has added three dishes using the former’s vegan salmon. It comes shortly after the startup relocated production to California, spotting a bigger market for its vegan fish in the US.
US airline JetBlue has launched Lakeland Dairies‘ Milk in a Stick Oat Milk, a plant-based creamer for the in-flight Dunkin’ coffee and tea offerings.
Alt-dairy giant Califia Farms has announced its fall and winter lineups: the former features pumpkin spice barista oat milk, caramel apple crumble oat creamer, and maple waffle almond creamer; and the latter has a holiday blend black iced coffee, holiday nog, and peppermint mocha almond latte. These and other flavours are rolling out across grocery stores now.
Courtesy: Califia Farms
Blue Zones Kitchen – the company based on the world’s blue zones highlighted in Netflix’s Live to 100 – has rolled out its debut breakfast product line. The vegan, gluten-free, steel-cut oatmeal SKUs come in blueberry-walnut and peach-pecan flavours, and can be found at Whole Foods stores nationwide.
Fast-casual chain Veggie Grill has debuted its largest menu update since being acquired by Next Level Burger in January. New items include quinoa-mushroom burgers, crispy chicken sandwiches, and an avocado Cobb salad with tempeh bacon.
Courtesy: Veggie Grill
In the UK, VBites owner Heather Mills is sponsoring The Big Green Clash, an eco-focused rugby match between Richmond Rugby Club and the all-vegan Green Gazelles Rugby Club at London’s Richmond Athletic Ground on September 8.
Meanwhile, bottled oat milk maker Oato has launched a Caffè Latte variant exclusively for British milk round Modern Milkman, with notes of caramel and vanilla, 7g of sugar per 100ml, and a price tag of £1.50 per pint.
Courtesy: Oato
And restaurant chain Wagamama, which aims to make half its menu plant-based by 2025, has introduced a vegan brunch menu at 22 locations across the UK. A national rollout will follow soon.
Financial updates
Australian precision fermentation startup Cauldron has been awarded an A$4.3M ($2.8M) grant by the Department of Industry, Science and Resources Industry Growth Program to scale up its manufacturing platform for high-value ingredients.
Brazilian mycoprotein producerTypcal has received R$250,000 ($45,000) in grant funding from the government’s Paraná Anjo Inovador programme.
Courtesy: Typcal
In South Korea, meat-producer-turned-vegan-startup Sujis Link has secured a ₩3B ($2.5M) investment from Samyang Foods, as part of a collaboration to advance the country’s plant-based sector.
Since last summer, sales of vegan breakfasts and brunches have hiked by over 20% at Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands airports in the UK.
Policy and research developments
In Chile, the agricultural committee has passed a bill that would see plant-based meat, dairy and egg products as “simulated food”. The proposed legislation is now being debated in the Chamber of Deputies.
Canada is developing guidance on the labelling of plant-based egg products, in what it says is an effort to help companies avoid being ‘misleading’ and comply with regulations. The proposed guidance is predictable.
Courtesy: Veronika Dvorakova
Speaking of Canada, cellular agriculture platform Cult Food Science‘s subsidiary Further Foods has submitted a design protocol for feeding trials of its cultivated pet food, which it aims to launch under its Noochies! brand. As we reported last month, the goal is to receive US regulatory approval and sell cultivated chicken in early 2025.
University of Georgia startup CytoNest has introduced an edible 3D fibre scaffold for cultivated meat and seafood, which is made from Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) materials.
Courtesy: Lauren Corcino
Finally, in the UK, West Yorkshire’s Calderdale Council is the latest to go vegan, having approved the proposal to only serve plant-based food at future meetings and catered events.
Solar Foods’s Solein protein from air stars in mooncakes and ice cream sandwiches launched in Singapore under Japanese food giant Ajinomoto’s new Atlr.72 brand.
Finnish startup Solar Foods has introduced the first results of its partnership with Ajinomoto, the Japanese food and drink conglomerate that made MSG famous.
The two companies have come out with Traditional Flowering Mooncakes and Ice Cream Sandwiches made from Solein, which Solar Foods describes as the “world’s most sustainable protein”. It is produced via the fermentation of microbes, which are fed on carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen (instead of sugar) to turn into protein.
Solein will replace dairy in the limited-edition desserts, which are the first products to be launched under Ajinomoto’s Altr.72 brand (pronounced Atelier Seven Two), which is focused on using plant-based, cell-based and microbial ingredients to advance the company’s green business – one of its four growth areas.
The products will be available at Ajinomoto’s pop-up stores at Takashimaya Singapore (August 12) and One Holland Village (August 30), ahead of September’s Mid-Autumn Festival, a harvest festival where mooncakes are gifted to each other.
Solein to advance Ajinomoto’s sustainability aims
Courtesy: Solar Foods
Solar Foods and Ajinomoto announced a strategic collaboration in May 2023, focused on product development with Solein and testing market feasibility in Singapore.
Having received regulatory approval in Singapore in October 2022, products made from Solein had already appeared on the market in the city-state. Italian eatery Fico debuted the flavourless gas protein in a vegan chocolate gelato, and Fazer – a majority shareholder of Solar Food – released a Taste the Future chocolate snack bar earlier this year.
The new mooncakes and ice cream sandwiches are the latest products to feature Solein, kicking off the Atlr.72 brand. It’s an extension of Ajinomoto’s green focus, which looks to create planet-friendly food ingredients “in the face of food shortages due to climate change and population growth”.
“With the new brand, Ajinomoto proposes a new food lifestyle that fosters a respect for nature in today’s consumers. Solar Foods is proud to be supporting this ambition, and we share the vision for what the future of food will be,” said Solar Foods co-founder and CEO Pasi Vainikka.
Styled as cookie sandwiches, the Flowering Mooncakes are made with guimuave, a French marshmallow-style sweet made from fruit purée, and come in Japanese yuzu, Kyoto Uji matcha, raspberry, and blackcurrant flavours.
The guimuave is made from agar instead of gelatin, beet sugar, and Okinawan sea salt. Solein, meanwhile, is used as a partial butter substitute in the recipe, supervised by a “well-known Japanese pâtissier”.
The ice cream sandwiches, meanwhile, contain vanilla ice cream made with Solein (which is said to add to its rich consistency) and mochi stuffed between cookies, which are decorated in colourful Peranakan patterns.
Solar Foods and Ajinomoto eye global expansion
Courtesy: Solar Foods
Once the limited sale period ends, Ajinomoto plans to expand Atlr.72 from sweet products to everyday foods, and take the brand to other countries.
Solar Foods, which plans to be a billion-euro company, expects to enter the US market this year, once it receives Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) certification through the Food and Drug Administration. In addition, it is also awaiting novel food approval in the EU, with a launch earmarked for 2025-26, and has applied in the UK too.
The startup has raised over $47M in equity funding to date, including an €8M ($8.8M) Series B round last November, as well as $32M in debt financing. And in April, it opened a large-scale production facility called Factory 01, allowing it to produce the same amount of protein as a dairy farm with 300 cows per day.
Plans for Factory 02 are underway too. “Factory 01 is already a bona fide factory, the kind you could see in an industrial park. But to realise Solein’s full potential, we think bigger,” Vainikka has previously said. “That’s why Factory 02 will eventually scale up the bioprocess as well as the production process: it would not be located in an industrial park, it would more likely fill an industrial park.”
Speaking about the latest partnership, he said: “Ajinomoto’s launch marks an important milestone on our journey to renew existing food categories and reduce the environmental impact of food production.”
A life-cycle analysis conducted has found that Solein’s GHG emissions are just 1% of those generated by conventional meat, and 20% of plant-based proteins. The company has also earned a Nasdaq Green Equity Designation, which recognises businesses that generate more than half of their turnover from green activities.
“It’s a major step for the commercial use of Solein as our new factory is now ramping up its production, paving the way for the introduction of Solein to people’s plates,” Vainikka added.
The Indian government has introduced over 100 high-yielding, climate-resilient varieties of crops for farmers, a group among the country’s most vulnerable to global warming.
India has unveiled 109 future-facing varieties of crops for an agricultural sector ravaged by climate change and extreme weather events.
The new biofortified varieties – spanning a total of 61 field and horticultural crops – are said to be high in yield and resilient to the effects of climate change. They were introduced at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (commonly known as the Pusa Institute) in New Delhi, delivering on a promise made in the finance ministry’s 2024-25 budget last month.
Prime minister Narendra Modi – who has long had a tetchy relationship with India’s farmers – released seeds and planting material at three sites in the demonstration fields of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), which funds the Pusa Institute.
In an address to scientists, the recently reelected head of state said experts from the ICAR, agricultural universities and Krishi Vigyan Kendras (local farm science centres) should “proactively interact with farmers and inform them about new varieties and technology every month”.
Climate-resilient crops now need to be produced on larger scale
Courtesy: Narendra Modi/X
India, the world’s most populous nation, is responsible for 10% of the global agricultural output. The sector contributes to 15% of its GDP, and employs between 43% and 65% of its population. It is the world’s leading producer of pulses, and second-largest producer of wheat, rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnuts, vegetables, fruits and cotton.
The new seeds are variants of 34 field crops and 27 horticultural crops. The former includes various cereals like millets, forage crops, oilseeds, pulses, sugarcane, cotton and fibre, while the latter involves fruits, vegetables, plantation crops, tuber crops, spices, flowers and medicinal crops.
Modi met with a group of farmers and told them that the new varieties would benefit them immensely, since they would cut expenditures, add crop value and diversity, have a positive impact on the environment, and withstand the impacts of climate change.
The ICAR scientists who developed the varieties said their brief was to bring underutilised crops to the mainstream. Among the new innovations were rice that can withstand submergence or flooding, climate-resilient guava, a green gram variety customised for the National Capital Region surrounding Delhi, heat-tolerant durum wheat, high-calcium finger millet, and a superior mango variety, according to local media.
Modi outlined the need for higher-nutrition foods in India, and suggested that people have begun demanding and consuming more organic foods – the country expanded its organic farmland by 145% between 2012 and 2022.
Agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan highlighted the central government’s “lab to land” approach in a way that “science reaches the farmer directly”. He added that the seeds of the new varieties will now need to be produced on a large scale, and will reach farmers in three years.
Why India’s agriculture needs more action on climate change
Courtesy: Narendra Modi/X
Climate change has dealt devastating blows to India’s agriculture sector. The country is the largest consumer of groundwater, since farmers depend on a heavily stressed water supply for irrigation. And 65% of its farmland depends on rainwater, but inconsistent rainfall and increasing temperatures are decimating crops.
While it is the second-largest wheat producer, every 1°C increase in temperature brings about a decline in wheat production by four to five million tonnes, according to ICAR. Temperatures have steadily grown in India over the last few decades, with extreme heatwaves sweeping through different parts in recent years. This year has already seen an area in New Delhi record the country’s hottest temperature ever, reaching 52.3°C, while some of its deadliest floods have occurred in the last decade or so.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the nation has lost nearly 70 million hectares of crops due to excessive rainfall or drought. Agriculture is the sector most vulnerable to the climate crisis in India, and was among several industries that suffered a combined $159B in economic losses in 2021 due to lost working hours from extreme weather events.
The Modi government’s rollout of the climate-resilient crop varieties would be welcomed by farmers, and would represent a rare win for the prime minister among this group. During Covid-19, hundreds of thousands of farmers protested against Modi’s move to open up more private investment in agriculture, which they believed would make them vulnerable to low prices.
Farmers were already facing crippling debt – since Modi first took office in 2014, estimates suggest over 100,000 farmers have taken their lives. The sector’s contribution to the GDP has fallen from 35% in 1990-91 to less than a sixth now, and 82% of it is made up of small or marginal farmers.
With climate change exacerbating the financial strains on Indian farmers, the mood has continued to sour. It was touted as an important factor in the surprising national election results this year, where Modi’s party had to rely on a coalition to form a government, following two terms built upon landslide victories.
That said, more needs to be done. Agriculture accounts for 15% of India’s emissions, but two-thirds of this comes from livestock farming. Given it is the leading producer of milk globally, a shift towards plant-based analogues would drastically reduce the country’s climate footprint – if the milk lobby allows, that is.
Building on its impressive foodservice record, Impossible Foods will open its first pop-up restaurant in Chicago, showcasing its plant-based meat products across a range of dishes.
Impossible Foods is opening a new pop-up restaurant in Chicago’s XMarket Food Hall tomorrow, a first for the plant-based meat maker.
Titled Impossible Quality Meats, the foodservice concept will spotlight the company’s vegan beef, chicken and pork products in a variety of dishes. The idea is to call attention to its expansive foodservice footprint (it is available in over 45,000 locations in the US alone) and showcase the versatility of its plant-based meat range, which has now been on the market for eight years.
“Impossible began as a foodservice brand, launching our flagship beef product in 2016 with some of the best restaurants in America,” said Impossible Foods CEO Peter McGuinness. “It’s been a natural evolution for us to create our own branded dining experience to showcase our delicious food.”
What’s on the many at the Impossible Quality Meats pop-up?
Courtesy: Impossible Foods
Impossible Quality Meats will be open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 8pm, and run throughout fall 2024. It has been leased through PlantX Life Inc., whose parent company Veg House is managing the pop-up.
“With Impossible Quality Meats, we wanted to offer diners a fun way to experience our food. From breakfast to lunch to dinner, we leaned into classic craveable dishes people love,” said McGuinness. “Choosing meat from plants shouldn’t feel like a compromise. It’s great-tasting food, plain and simple.”
The menu contains small plates like Asian-style meatballs in hoisin-lime sauce, Italian meatball sliders, nachos with Impossible Beef or Chicken and a Cheez Whiz-style vegan alternative, beef chilli, as well as chilli cheese fries.
Visitors can also choose grilled chicken Caesar (with vegan parmesan), crispy southwest chicken or Asian-style chicken as part of a salad or wrap.
And on the bun menu, there’s a choice of a breakfast sandwich (with sausage and a vegan egg), a classic Impossible Burger, a smash burger, a bratwurst, an Impossible Hot Dog, and a chilli dog. In addition, the pop-up restaurant will also have rotating burger and hot dog specials.
The Impossible Nuggets are served with fries (which can be subbed for onion rings if you pay extra) and a choice from nine sauces.
And while the company may have stopped working on Impossible Milk, that doesn’t mean Chicago residents wouldn’t get dessert at the pop-up. The brand has partnered with Oatly, the world’s largest oat milk player, whose ice creams will be available in vanilla, chocolate and swirl options.
Impossible Foods is hosting a launch party on Saturday, August 17 at the XMarket Food Hall, when locals would be able to sample Impossible Hot Dogs, Burgers and Oatly Soft Serve for free.
Impossible Foods highlights record amid faltering industry sales
Courtesy: Impossible Foods
The development is a marker of Impossible Foods’s reputation as a foodservice mainstay. The company claims to be the leading plant-based brand in this channel in the US, and has long-standing partnerships with American chef David Chang and his Momofuku restaurant group (going back eight years), Bareburger (seven years), White Castle (six years), Starbucks (five years), and Disneyland (four years). And just last week, it completed five years of the Impossible Whopper at Burger King.
In addition to the Impossible Quality Meats pop-up, visitors of Xmarket Food Hall can also buy retail products like its plant-based beef, hot dogs, and chicken nuggets at the PlantX Bodega. It follows the brand’s entry into Whole Foods Market nationwide, which is a sign of its strong retail performance – Impossible Beef is the top-selling plant-based beef in the US across both retail and foodservice, while the vegan meatballs and nuggets are the bestsellers in their respective categories too.
In the US, Impossible Foods is the leader in refrigerated meat analogue sales, making up 9% of the market, according to Bloomberg. However, this segment witnessed a 21% drop in volume 19% decline in dollar sales in the 52 weeks ending May 19, 2024, data by Circana shows. Analysts ascribe this to high prices, unsatisfactory taste and texture, and concerns about ingredients.
Impossible Foods has already been leaning on its taste-first messaging since the identity and packaging refresh in March (with a heavier focus on health too), while it claims to have cut prices by 20% since early 2023.
At the pop-up, prices for dishes with Impossible Foods range from $7.99 for the hot dog to $12.99 for the nachos, chilli-cheese fries, meatball sliders, salads and wraps. Meanwhile, a single-patty Impossible Burger – topped with lettuce, onion, tomato, pickles, and special sauce – will set you back $9.99.
Nutritionist slams ‘unhealthy’ claims about plant-based meat
“The idea that all plant-based meats are categorically unhealthier than animal-based meats is scientifically unfounded. In fact, many plant-based options, like those from Impossible Foods, outperform animal meat in terms of key nutrients like cholesterol, trans fat, and saturated fat,” Kaytee Hadley, a registered dietitian and health and nutrition ambassador of Impossible Foods, told Green Queen.
“Most Americans do not consume enough plants or fibre, and Impossible products contain high-quality plant-based ingredients that contain important nutrients including fibre, iron and potassium,” she added. “Any one food in and of itself will not meet a human’s nutritional needs on its own because people need to eat a diversity of foods and nutrients, but in the context of a balanced diet, plant-based meats, like Impossible, can be a great addition.”
Hadley suggested that basing a food’s nutritional value on the number of ingredients is an “outdated and highly simplistic approach” view of nutrition. “Many foods are enriched with vitamins and minerals (for example, baby food, cereal, and white rice). Does this addition make a food less nutritious? The obvious answer is no.
“When you look more closely at the actual ingredients, processing methods, and nutritional profile of plant-based meats, it’s easy to see that these products are not all necessarily ‘less healthy than animal proteins’.”
Californian startup Plonts has emerged from stealth with a $12M funding round, launching its fermented soy milk cheese at restaurants in New York City and San Francisco.
Cheese is not a dairy product; it is a microbial product – and Plonts wants you to know that.
Formerly known as Tezza Foods, the Oakland-based startup uses microbial fermentation to turn soy milk into “stinky” vegan cheese. Armed with a $12M seed investment round, it is introducing its first product – an aged Cheddar – at select bicoastal restaurants in the US.
The financing was led by Lowercarbon Capital, with participation from Litani Ventures, Accelr8, Pillar, Ponderosa Ventures, and several angel investors. It was accompanied by the opening of a pilot plant in Oakland.
The company was founded in 2019 by co-CEOs Nathaniel Chu, who has a PhD in the gut microbiome, and Josh Moser, whose background lies in venture capital. Chu tapped into his microbial expertise to create fermented foods from plants, and began experimenting with vegan cheese in the corner of a pizza restaurant.
Now, the Plonts Cheddar – currently sold in loafs to restaurants – is coming to the menus of Court Street Grocers and S&P Lunch in New York City, Shuggie’s and Moongate Lounge in San Francisco, and Lovely’s in Oakland, appearing in grilled cheeses, pizza puffs and burgers.
All about efficiency
Courtesy: Erin Ng
Plonts’ ‘microbes, not dairy’ mantra for cheese is rooted in the fact that it uses traditional cheesemaking processes, but eschewing cow’s milk with soybeans, one of the most efficient protein sources with a digestibility score equal to animal proteins.
It is far from the only company using centuries-old processes in a novel way to make climate-friendly cheese – Miyoko’s Creamery is a pioneer in this space (it uses cashews), Daiya recently began doing the same with oats, and Climax Foods is an up-and-comer championing pumpkin and hemp seeds and lima beans.
But Plonts is betting on soybeans. Soy, along with corn, is a commodity crops, and is a major driver of deforestation in the Amazon. However, globally, 77% of all soy is grown to feed cattle being raised for meat and dairy.
“It can take eight pounds of corn and soy to make one gallon of milk, and… 10 pounds of corn and soy blend to make one pound of beef,” Mark Shepard, founder and farmer at New Forest Farm, said in the 2024 documentary Feeding Tomorrow. “And so that’s really stupid. Because we could grow 90% less corn and beans if we didn’t feed it to animals.”
Plonts echoes this sentiment, explaining on its website: “The big problem with corn and soy is that they aren’t that tasty. So we use cows to convert that corn and soy into something we actually want to eat: beef and cheese.”
Courtesy: Erin Ng
The startup is also banking on soy’s sustainability aspects when compared to animal proteins. “The entire world’s protein needs could be met by a soybean farm the size of 1% of global habitable land, or less than eight times the size of Iowa,” it states. “Satisfying this need with cheese would require 120% of global habitable land, or a farm covering the entire continents of Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Europe.”
Plonts adds: “To do this with beef alone, we’d need 955% of habitable land or nine more planets. What’s more, soy and many other plants don’t emit methane and require less water, machinery, fertilisers and pesticides. It’s vastly more efficient to grow a pound of soybeans than to grow 10 pounds of soybeans, feed them to a cow, and get a pound of beef or cheese.”
A Cheddar that takes less Chedda’
Just like fermentation originally transformed “cheap but not particularly tasty ingredients like milk and wheat into delicacies like cheese and beer”, the startup is making use of “the most sustainable, inexpensive plants available” and introducing them to microbes that make them more delicious.
“Our searches may result in familiar foods from unfamiliar ingredients (e.g., cheese made from cheap plants) or entirely new categories of fermented products. In this way, we’re not trying to imitate beef and dairy. We are discovering the delicious potential of what plants and microbes can be,” says Plonts.
Cheese, one of the most famous fermented foods, is known for its funky, sharp flavours, which the startup ascribes to the metabolism of microbes, instead of milk. Some companies – like Perfect Day, Formo and New Culture, to name a few – are using precision fermentation to recreate bioidentical dairy proteins for more realistic animal-free cheese.
But this is expensive, and scaling up is a major challenge. Soy, on the other hand, is cheap and easy to scale, and Plonts looks to take advantage of that by “biochemically and physically manipulating” the ingredient to replicate the stretch and melt so important to many cheeses.
Courtesy: Erin Ng
However, Plonts is entering a crowded category with multifaceted challenges. Between 2021 and 2023, only four plant-based segments witnessed sales declines in the US – vegan cheese was one of them, dipping by 5.4%. Plant-based cheese has only penetrated 7% of American homes, with less than half (49%) buying it more than once.
How does Plonts – whose name has already spawned some detractors – aim to differentiate itself from the growing number of brands selling vegan cheese? By harnessing microbes, the company claims it can lower costs to less than half of dairy cheese “something that cannot be said for cheese made with nuts or engineered proteins”.
It may seem like a bit of a stretch, but that’s the idea.
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 Mr. Charlie’s new vegan cheeseburger, Califia Farms’ acquisition of Uproot, and a raft of EU investments into alternative proteins.
New products and launches
Vegan fast food chain Mr. Charlie’s – dubbed the plant-based McDonald’s – has introduced the Mr. Royale with Cheese, a burger featuring the non-dairy Cultured Cheddar slices by Stockeld Dreamery. The menu item is available at its Los Angeles and San Francisco locations.
Courtesy: Mr. Charlie’s
AI-powered protein discovery startup Shiru has collaborated with Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition to develop and commercialise sweet proteins for use in beverages and specialty products.
Pinky Cole has opened the second location of Bar Vegan – the sister establishment of Slutty Vegan – at 706 Grayson Highway in Lawrenceville, Georgia.
German ingredients company Loryma has developed three wheat-based solutions for specific fat applications to bolster the processing, textural and nutritional benefits of meat analogues.
Also in Germany, poultry giant PHW Group – known for its Wiesenhof brand – is entering the traditional and precision fermentation space with a new subsidiary this year, which will develop ingredients for alternative protein and blended products.
Courtesy: Redefine Meat
Israel’s Redefine Meat is continuing to expand its retail presence in Europe, gaining listings for its 3D-printed meat analogues with Coop in Switzerland, Jumbo in the Netherlands, Velivery in Germany, and Monoprix in France.
As part of the state-funded Singapore Agri-food Innovation Lab, the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) has partnered with global food giant Bunge. The latter will supply soybean, canola and sunflower fats, plus oilseed meal and cake for NTU to produce alternative protein flavours using fermentation.
Courtesy: Nanyang Technological University
And in Vietnam, Hanoi-based FPT Software has signed an MoU with the Green Tuesday Initiative to reduce its food-related carbon footprint via sustainable food policies.
Finance and business updates
In Poland, the science and education ministry’s National Center for Research and Development has invested $2.29M in Warsaw-based cultivated chicken startup LabFarm. It will use the funding to expand production, develop proprietary growth media, create products, and expand its team.
Meanwhile, Sweden’s Millow – maker of minimally processed oat- and mycelium-based meat analogues – has received a €2.4M ($2.6M) grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator and up to €15M ($16.3M) in equity funding from the EIC Fund. The startup, which has already developed multiple products with large manufacturers, will use the capital to scale up production.
On similar lines, Dutch palm oil alternative producer NoPalm Ingredients has secured €2.5M ($2.7M) in funding, along with potential equity investment, from the EIC Accelerator. It follows a €5M ($5.4M) seed investment round in July.
Courtesy: NoPalm Ingredients
Canadian cellular agriculture platform Cult Food Science‘s portfolio company Jellatech, which is making bioidentical collagen, has joined the Bezos Earth Fund‘s $30M Center for Sustainable Protein at North Carolina State University.
Cult Food Science is also about to close a $3.3M fundraise to commercialise its Noochies! cultivated pet treats. The company will soon begin feeding trials to receive regulatory approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Courtesy: Uproot
US plant-based milk leader Califia Farms has acquired New York startup Uproot, which makes alt-milk dispensers. The latter’s team will join Califia Farms, which aims to expand its foodservice offerings.
AI-powered vegan travel app Vegius has initiated a crowdfunding campaign on Wefunder with a target of $120,000 to fuel its global expansion. It currently lists accommodations in 30+ countries and donates half its revenue to the 125 animal sanctuaries it has partnered with.
Research and awards
A new psychology study on US and German consumers tests the Moral Foundations Theory on cultivated meat, revealing that people who say living a natural life is morally important to them are more likely to reject these proteins, while the idea of harm doesn’t have any consistent correlations.
In the UK, a new study by The Vegan Society has found that 41% of men are interested in veganism, but health concerns and unsupportive friends are the major barriers to the lifestyle.
Courtesy: THIS/Green Queen
The Vegan Society has also supported a legal case by two students from the National Major University of San Marcos in Peru, who are asking the university to recognise veganism as a protected belief and offer suitable plant-based meal options.
UK plant-based meat startup THIS has received 10 stars from the Great Taste Awards across five of its products, with its lamb kebabs earning the maximum three stars.
Another recopient of the Great Taste Awards is vegan cheesemaker Julienne Bruno, whose ricotta-style Crematta has received two stars and burrata alternative Burrella has gained one.
Courtesy: Dr Foods
Finally, Japanese startups Next Meats and its subsidiary Dr Foods were finalists in the cultivated meat category of this year’s FoodNiche Summit at Cornell Tech University, where they presented vegan foie gras, caviar and truffle butter with the aim to find local distribution in New York.
Germany’s Veganz Group has secured €10M ($10.9M) in financing to scale up production of Mililk, its 2D-printed oat milk, and its plant-based meat analogue Peas on Earth.
Veganz Group, a plant-based pioneer from Germany, has brought in €10M ($10.9M) in equity funding to expand production capacities for its plant-based milk and meat products.
The investment round, which brings its total raised to over $24M, came courtesy of a Securities Purchase Agreement with New York-based investor Global Corporate Finance LLC (GCF).
The contract enables a flexible and staggered use of the capital over a 30-month period, against the issuance of new shares at a valuation determined through the share price at the time of retrieval.
Veganz will utilise the capital to optimise and automate its production processes, increasing the manufacturing capacity of its Mililk sheets by fivefold. While the current version of the non-dairy milk is based on oats, the company indicated that it’s working on almond milk too. Additionally, Veganz will look to expand Peas on Earth, a new pea-protein-based meat analogue.
Tackling food, water and packaging waste
Courtesy: Veganz
Veganz first licensed the 2D-printed milk technology from New York startup Vitiprints in 2022, and began working on making them scaleable. It has been selling the Mililk Oat Barista sheets since October 2023, featuring fermented and gluten-free oats, water, rapeseed oil, oat fibre, locust bean gum, sea salt, and bourbon vanilla.
The premise couldn’t be simpler. You pop a sheet in the blender, add water, blitz for 30 seconds, and voila! The benefits aren’t just in the shelf-stable nature or the ease of use (unless you don’t have a blender, of course), but also the sustainability aspect.
The company prints the oat mas directly after fermentation via a screen printing process on an industrial printer. By drying out the oat base into compact discs, Veganz requires 90% fewer materials for Mililk’s packaging (compared to the standard Tetra Paks used for standard oat milks), which in turn is 82% lighter in weight, helping save on transportation costs and emissions.
There’s also a customisation element at play: you can add as much or as little water as you like, resulting in a range of thicknesses from oat pastes to creams to milk. The barista-friendly oat milk sheets also help cut down on food waste (60% of which comes from households on a global level) and water usage, since you can make exactly the amount you need at a given time. Each sheet can make 250ml of oat milk.
The product plays into Germans’ demand for sustainable eating, with 68% wanting to eat in a way that’s kind to the planet. One survey shows that 27% of Germans want to consume more plant-based dairy in the next two years, which is no surprise given the country represents the largest market for vegan food in Europe.
And earlier this year, the German Nutrition Society updated its dietary guidelines to recommend limiting meat and dairy intake and eating more plant-based foods, with the latter making up at least 75% of domestic diets. It noted that plant-based milks are suitable as long as they’re fortified with sufficient amounts of calcium, vitamin B2 and iodine.
Veganz ramps up Mililk production to meet demand
Courtesy: Veganz
While Mililk was originally only available via the D2C channel, it has since expanded into foodservice in Germany and Austria. And in April, it began supplying the oat milk sheets to German retail giant Rewe for its own-label brands Food For Future and Rewe Bio, which are now available nationwide in 3,700 Rewe stores and 2,000 Penny stores.
The latest equity investment comes two months after Veganz secured funding from the state of Brandenburg to expand production. And a month later, it announced plans to use around 1,000 sq m of its site in Ludwigsfeld to ramp up manufacturing of its Mililk products, enabling it to make 50,000 litres every day.
Veganz, which saw sales decline by 31% last year but cut its losses nearly in half, said the new funding round did not affect the capital increase subscribed by VeGreat LLC last September. The latter acquired shares in the German plant-based startup after the two announced a vertical farming partnership for protein crops in the UAE.
Mililk is among a burgeoning category of plant-based milks breaking away from the conventional liquid format to offer a product more sustainable, convenient, clean-label, or a combination of these. Mighty, Overherd and Blue Farm are all making powdered oat milks, JOI and Nooj produce nut pastes to be blended with water, while Goodmylk makes frozen concentrates.
Tomorrow Farms has launched its Bored Cow animal-free milks, made from Perfect Day‘s precision-fermented dairy protein, into select Target stores nationwide.
Animal-free milk is coming to Target shelves across America, as New York startup Tomorrow Farms builds on its nationwide expansion.
Bored Cow, its cow-free dairy brand that uses whey protein from Californian precision fermentation pioneer Perfect Day, is now available at Target stores in the form of a 32oz carton for its Original flavour, and four-packs of 11oz chocolate and strawberry variants.
It makes Target – which recorded over $105.84B in sales last year – the largest retailer to carry Bored Cow products. To mark the milestone, the brand is debuting a new limited-edition Pumpkin Spice flavour of its milk exclusively at the supermarket.
Courtesy: Bored Cow
A year of expansion for Bored Cow
Bored Cow was born out of a partnership between Tomorrow Farms and Perfect Day in 2022, starting with flavoured milks (chocolate, strawberry and vanilla) first, before bringing out the original version as well.
They’re a combination of Perfect Day’s bioidentical whey protein – made by feeding microflora on plant sugar in fermentation tanks, in a process akin to beer brewing – sunflower oil, cane sugar, citrus fibre, salt and natural flavours, gellan gum, and acacia, and are fortified with a variety of vitamins and minerals.
The original flavour contains 8g of protein and 3g of sugar per cup, as well as vitamins D and B12, iron calcium and potassium. Plus, none of the milks has any cholesterol or animal hormones.
The success of the Bored Cow range allowed Tomorrow Farms to introduce a drinkable yoghurt line, which debuted at Natural Products Expo West in California in March. The brand introduced the products to stores in New York City in vanilla, passionfruit-mango and strawberry flavours, priced at $2.99 to $3.99 per 7oz bottle.
And in May, Bored Cow announced that its milks were now available in all 50 US states, courtesy of a major expansion into 2,000 new locations of retailers including Albertsons, Safeway, Sprouts, Fresh Thyme, Central Market, and Shaws, among others.
At the same time, Tomorrow Farms became B Corp-certified. “We can only succeed in our mission if we hold ourselves to the highest social and environmental standards,” said founder and CEO Ben Berman. An ISO-certified independent life-cycle assessment has shown that producing Bored Cow requires up to 96% less land and 67% less water, and emits up to 44% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than conventional and organic dairy milk.
Courtesy: Bored Cow
Precision fermentation gains ground
Bored Cow’s expansion into Target is the latest win in what is proving to be a big year for precision fermentation, both in terms of regulation and market entry. For starters, its own products are now available in 3,400 stores across the US.
Perfect Day – which was hit with a $134M lawsuit from a manufacturing partner earlier this year – partnered with Unilever to feature its whey protein in a new lactose-free ice cream under the Breyers brand, while Nestlé released a limited-edition animal-free whey protein powder under its Orgain brand, called Better Whey. While one Perfect Day employee seemed to confirm that Nestlé was using its whey, a spokesperson for the startup declined to confirm this on the record.
Meanwhile, San Francisco’s New Culture earned self-affirmed Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status for its precision-fermented casein protein in the US. It followed this up with a manufacturing partnership with South Korean giant CJ CheilJedang.
Dutch startup Vivici also obtained this certification for its whey protein, following Israel’s Imagindairy receiving a ‘no further questions’ letter for its precision-fermented whey from the FDA. Elsewhere, Singapore’s TurtleTree teamed up with Cadence Performance Coffee for a line of cold brew espresso shots infused with its animal-free lactoferrin powder, LF+. The ingredient – along with Perfect Day’s whey – will also be part of an immunity beverage and protein powder by Strive Nutrition.
Another partnership in this space saw Leprino Foods – the world’s largest mozzarella manufacturer – sign an exclusive licensing agreement to commercialise the precision-fermented casein produced by Dutch startup Fooditive Group.
And California’s The Every Company is working with another Dutch startup, The Vegetarian Butcher, which will use the former’s animal-free egg proteins to enhance its meat analogues. The Every Company has additionally co-launched Fermy, a line of ready-to-mix protein powders for coffee and matcha drinks, with vegan wellness company Landish Foods.
Israeli startup ReaGenics has developed a cell-based potato with 31% protein content, which could rise even higher.
ReaGenics, an Israeli biotech startup leveraging cellular tissue culturing to grow plant molecules in bioreactors, has created high-protein potatoes that have significant advantages over soy or pea.
While potatoes typically contain just 2% of native protein and aren’t what comes to mind when you think of a protein crop, ReaGenics has used cellular agriculture to develop spuds with 31% protein content. This could potentially rise to 40% and open up new markets for the company.
“Not all potato varieties can be made into tissue culture,” co-founder and chairman Michael Kagan told AgFunderNews. “But we managed to do it with a select few, and when we optimised conditions for the cells to grow, we discovered that the concentration of the proteins in the cells is far higher.”
He added: “And then by applying different stress conditions (temperature, media etc) you can get it even higher, and this is all non-GMO, with the full spectrum of amino acids that you would find in a [regular] potato.”
Courtesy: Michael Kagan/LinkedIn
A functionally efficient, high-protein spud
While it has been around for decades, plant cell culture is still a burgeoning segment of the smart protein space, and is among a number of technologies “key to tackling the problem of recreating dairy proteins and other ingredients on a mass scale”, according to Albrecht Wolfmeyer, director of ProVeg Incubator.
These startups don’t use regular agricultural inputs like water or soil, instead growing plant cells in bioreactors, which are fed sugar, vitamins, minerals, etc. It allows companies to eschew the huge amount of resources needed to grow plants, and ensure a consistent supply resilient to climate change and other industry issues.
Kagan said cell-based potatoes enable a significant increase in protein production. “At the moment, the main market is for animal feed, although the protein is very close to animal proteins such as egg and casein when it comes to nutrition and functionality,” he explained.
“It is highly soluble and has gelling, foaming, emulsification, binding, texturising and stabilising properties, plus it is non-allergenic, which makes it very attractive to food formulators if the availability is there and the price is right. It has a PDCAAS [protein digestibility] score of 0.99,” he said. The maximum score on the PDCAAS spectrum is 1.0.
Kagan added: “It is also white-coloured with no unpleasant smell or aftertaste you need to cover up, which is not the case with most plant proteins, plus it has a very small environmental footprint.”
Meat and potatoes (sort of)
Courtesy: Dapa Images
ReaGenics is among several startups revolutionising the potato protein market, which is set to grow annually by 7%. Avebe, Tereos, Roquette and Branston are all working in this space. Fellow Israeli company PoLoPo, meanwhile, is using molecular farming to increase the native protein content in potatoes (much like ReaGenics), as well as produce the main protein found in chicken eggs. South Korea’s E Green Global is similarly producing egg proteins in potatoes via plant cell culture.
ReaGenics is currently not building “massive production facilities” for its potato protein in-house, having tested its continuous production process in its own bioreactor platforms, with a capacity between 4,000 and 10,000 litres.
“We are in contact with a number of companies who are interested in creating factories that can produce potato biomass at scale under license,” said Kagan. “In parallel, we’re working on increasing the protein concentration. We think we can get to 40% without GMO, but nature has its limits.”
He said a number of big manufacturers had approached ReaGenics, interested in applications ranging from vegan meat analogues and plant-based milk to high-protein fries and potato chips. Some would want purified potato protein, and others would be interested in the whole biomass, which means cost will vary on the end product.
“At the moment, the main proteins for these products are peanuts and whey, which are both major allergens. The other thing is that we could supply carbs as well as protein, as the potato biomass contains both,” he explained, suggesting that the potato protein could provide a solution to acute malnutrition, a condition that affects over 45 million children under the age of five globally.
Before any of that, though, it would need to pass regulatory hurdles. In the US, this would be in the form of Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status, but Kagan believes it would not be a big challenge given potato protein is a known quantity and his company isn’t using genetic engineering. In Europe, it would mean going through its novel foods framework, which entails a long and complex process.
ReaGenics is also working on other ingredients developed via plant cell culture, such as cannabinoids, resveratrol (a natural polyphenol found in grapes), anthocyanins from purple maize, and coffee. Parisian startup Stem is also using the same tech to make the latter, as is Israeli’s Pluri.
US whole-cut meat analogues maker Chunk Foods has debuted The Prince, an iteration of its new Slab steaks, in partnership with New York City deli Pastrami Queen.
The site of Anthony Bourdain’s favourite pastrami sandwich now has a plant-based offering.
Chunk Foods, the startup making vegan whole-cut steaks, has collaborated with celebrated New York City deli Pastrami Queen to unveil its latest product, The Prince.
Made from cultured soy and wheat, it’s a $20 plant-based pastrami sandwich cut from the Chunk Slab, one of two new vegan steak offerings the brand has brought to foodservice this year. Touted to be the largest plant-based whole-cut meat to hit the restaurant market (weighing over 3 lbs), this marks the Slab’s debut in the US.
“‘The Prince powered by Chunk’ bridges the gap between the past and the future of food with the intersection of traditional Jewish deli cuisine with modern plant-based options, contributing to the dynamic and diverse food scene in NYC and local food culture,” said Chunk Foods CEO Amos Golan, who founded the startup in 2020. “The unique qualities of Chunk’s plant-based pastrami offer a taste and texture comparable to traditional meat.”
Pastrami Queen collaboration will help with texture concerns
Courtesy: Chunk Foods
Pastrami Queen has been feeding New Yorkers since 1956, starting with its original site on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Over the 70-odd years, it has carved a reputation as one of the city’s best delis, praised for its dedication to preserving the flavours and traditions of Jewish deli cuisine. It led the late Bourdain to proclaim the establishment as the “real deal”.
This is why it’s a big deal for Chunk Foods, a four-year-old startup, to team up with Pastrami Queen. The new vegan pastrami sandwich is available at the latter’s Moynihan Food Hall store. It is comprised of the Chunk Slab, New York deli mustard, rye bread, and a pickle.
The fermentation-derived slab steak was first introduced at Chicago’s National Restaurant Association Show in May, where it received a Food and Beverage (FABI) Award. Apart from the base of soy and wheat, the product contains coconut oil, water, beet juice, iron, salt and vitamin B12, a clean-label list catering to an increasingly conscious consumer.
Whole-cut plant-based meats are known for their fibrous texture and mouthfeel, since they replicate animal muscle fibres. Texture is among the main consumption barriers of plant-based meat. A 1,500-person survey this year found that 42% of Americans are deterred from choosing a meat analogue dish at a restaurant because they don’t think they’ll like the texture. However, 91% of those who have tried plant-based protein like its taste and texture and are satisfied with it, highlighting a major perception gap.
Debuting its product at a popular and acclaimed deli like Pastrami Queen will only help Chunk Foods assuage these concerns. “At Pastrami Queen, we pride ourselves on offering the best of traditional Jewish deli cuisine,” said manager Eric Newman.
“Partnering with Chunk Foods allows us to expand our menu with a delicious plant-based option that maintains the high standards our customers expect. ‘The Prince powered by Chunk’ is a great addition to our menu, providing a taste and texture that our patrons are looking for.”
Chunk Foods targets restaurants as whole-cut meat race heats up
Courtesy: Chunk Foods
This isn’t Chunk Foods’ first rodeo into meat-based foodservice. In 2023, it launched into Charley’s Steak House in Orlando, the first time a steakhouse in the US put a vegan analogue on the menu. This evolved into a wider partnership with the restaurant’s parent company, Talk of the Town.
The plant-based meat startup, which has raised $24M in funding (including a $7.5M injection earlier this year), has appeared on other restaurant menus in New York City as well, including Coletta, Anixi, The Butcher’s Daughter and Leonardo DiCaprio-backed chain Neat. And last month, it announced a partnership with popular fast-food chain Slutty Vegan and its sister establishment Bar Vegan.
Chunk Foods is also working on pork, lamb and poultry alternatives, and last year completed the construction of what it claims is one of the world’s largest factories of its kind. It has also gone international this year, linking up with plant protein company Better Balance to create new whole-cut meat analogues for the Mexican market.
That said, plant-based pastrami is a largely untapped market. The Corn’d Beef by Shark Tank alum Unreal Deli (formerly Mrs Goldfarb’s) and the Pastrami Style Slices by Squeaky Bean in the UK are among the few on the market.
Project Eaden is also developing a version made from wheat protein, which is slated for launch in 2025. The startup leverages fibre-spinning technology and is creating its own flavours.
“This has really changed the game, and has created deeper, more complex meatiness and more realistic roasting aroma,” its co-founder Jan Wilmking told Green Queen last month. “The combination of a blank flavour canvas with hardly any off-taste – and truly meaty taste notes on top – makes the products extremely tasty, without being too extreme or intense.”
Dutch startup NoPalm Ingredients has raised €5M ($5.4M) in a seed funding round to accelerate production of its sustainable palm oil alternative.
The investment round was led by Rubio Impact Ventures, and co-led by Oost NL, Fairtree Elevant Ventures, and Willow Capital Investments. There was participation from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) and other private investors as well.
It takes the total raised by NoPalm Ingredients – which makes a fermented yeast-derived alternative to palm oil – to €6M ($6.5M), following a pre-seed round in 2022. The capital will help the startup scale its technology up to industrial levels of 50 cubic metres and beyond, and prepare for its demo factory.
“NoPalm Ingredients is a leading pioneer from the Foodvalley ecosystem that is shaping the Dutch and European alternative oils and fats landscape, to create a more sustainable food system,” said Maureen Haverkamp, investment analyst at Oost NL.
“Their business model is innovative and appealing to both suppliers and customers and has a clear positive impact on the environment. We’re proud to invest in the innovative team of NoPalm Ingredients.”
Using potato peels to make eco-friendly oil
Courtesy: NoPalm Ingredients
NoPalm Ingredients, which was founded in 2021 by Lars Langhout and Jeroen Hugenholtz, employs a proprietary fermentation process using non-GMO yeasts and low-capex technology, which can convert local agricultural waste – like potato peels and whey permeate – into yeast oils.
The oils are said to be a “drop-in” replacement for palm oil, a fat that is present in 60% of all supermarket products, across every category. The yeast-based oils don’t require manufacturers to reformulate recipes, and cost the same as palm oil, thanks to the use of sidestream ingredients and its asset-light, highly scalable technology.
The company has developed an in-house pilot line producing several kgs of oil per batch, and completed pilot projects with CPG giants like Colgate-Palmolive, Unilever, and Zeelandia. It’s now gearing up for industrial-scale trials, which would help it deliver hundreds of kgs of oil for customer testing.
“This funding is pivotal for us to demonstrate large-scale production and reach our next milestone of producing 1.5 million kgs of sustainable oil annually, solidifying our role as a trusted partner in the food and personal care industries,” said Langhout. “We are on track for industrialisation and commercialisation in 2025.”
“NoPalm Ingredients has demonstrated the ability to make a cost-effective drop-in replacement for palm oil and other lipids that we believe will revolutionise the industry, address the massive environmental challenge of palm oil production and harvesting as well as solve myriad supply chain pain points for customers,” said David Evans, managing director at Fairtree Elevant Ventures.
“Further, NoPalm Ingredients’ innovation allows them to upcycle industrial food waste streams which recovers carbon and creates value from waste, creating tremendous benefit,” he added, noting that the company has “demonstrated both the technical capabilities as well as the commercial partnerships to rapidly scale their technology and make an incredible impact across a wide swathe of industry”.
Why we need substitutes for palm oil
Courtesy: NoPalm Ingredients
Palm oil accounts for 40% of all global oil production, and is desired for its neutral flavour, smell and colour, ability to withstand high temperatures, and function as a natural preservative. “Palm oil is cheap, incredibly versatile and widely used in almost every fast-moving consumer good, from your toothpaste to my newborn’s infant formula,” said Langhout.
The problem, however, is that this oil is a major driver of tropical deforestation, which is responsible for nearly 20% of global emissions. Indonesia and Malaysia alone are home to 90% of oil palm trees – the former’s forests have been subject to wildfires emanating directly from palm plantations in 2019.
Palm oil production has increased tenfold since 1980, and expanding demand means more forests will be burnt down, a form of mass deforestation that emits greenhouse gases, while removing trees that would help absorb these very emissions. “Global demand for palm oil grows by 4% annually, and there’s no strategy to meet the additional 22 million tons needed by 2030 without clearing rainforests 1.5 times the size of Ireland,” explained Langhout.
Additionally, it is a threat to wildlife, and as an industry, it’s associated with numerous human rights abuses. Indigenous communities have lost their lands and villages, and workers have been exploited with poor working conditions and pay.
Innovations like NoPalm Ingredients’ yeast oil – which generates 90% fewer emissions and requires 99% less land than conventional palm oil – are therefore crucial. “With new regulations banning deforestation-related products, European companies can only source sustainably certified palm oil, which excludes 83% of current supplies,” said Langhout.
“This will drive price increases that will affect every family in Europe. Often, the answer isn’t to prohibit a product but to step back and create a superior alternative that naturally compels a switch.”
Dutch startup NoPalm Ingredients has raised €5M ($5.4M) in a seed funding round to accelerate production of its sustainable palm oil alternative.
The investment round was led by Rubio Impact Ventures, and co-led by Oost NL, Fairtree Elevant Ventures, and Willow Capital Investments. There was participation from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) and other private investors as well.
It takes the total raised by NoPalm Ingredients – which makes a fermented yeast-derived alternative to palm oil – to €6M ($6.5M), following a pre-seed round in 2022. The capital will help the startup scale its technology up to industrial levels of 50 cubic metres and beyond, and prepare for its demo factory.
“NoPalm Ingredients is a leading pioneer from the Foodvalley ecosystem that is shaping the Dutch and European alternative oils and fats landscape, to create a more sustainable food system,” said Maureen Haverkamp, investment analyst at Oost NL.
“Their business model is innovative and appealing to both suppliers and customers and has a clear positive impact on the environment. We’re proud to invest in the innovative team of NoPalm Ingredients.”
Using potato peels to make eco-friendly oil
Courtesy: NoPalm Ingredients
NoPalm Ingredients, which was founded in 2021 by Lars Langhout and Jeroen Hugenholtz, employs a proprietary fermentation process using non-GMO yeasts and low-capex technology, which can convert local agricultural waste – like potato peels and whey permeate – into yeast oils.
The oils are said to be a “drop-in” replacement for palm oil, a fat that is present in 60% of all supermarket products, across every category. The yeast-based oils don’t require manufacturers to reformulate recipes, and cost the same as palm oil, thanks to the use of sidestream ingredients and its asset-light, highly scalable technology.
The company has developed an in-house pilot line producing several kgs of oil per batch, and completed pilot projects with CPG giants like Colgate-Palmolive, Unilever, and Zeelandia. It’s now gearing up for industrial-scale trials, which would help it deliver hundreds of kgs of oil for customer testing.
“This funding is pivotal for us to demonstrate large-scale production and reach our next milestone of producing 1.5 million kgs of sustainable oil annually, solidifying our role as a trusted partner in the food and personal care industries,” said Langhout. “We are on track for industrialisation and commercialisation in 2025.”
“NoPalm Ingredients has demonstrated the ability to make a cost-effective drop-in replacement for palm oil and other lipids that we believe will revolutionise the industry, address the massive environmental challenge of palm oil production and harvesting as well as solve myriad supply chain pain points for customers,” said David Evans, managing director at Fairtree Elevant Ventures.
“Further, NoPalm Ingredients’ innovation allows them to upcycle industrial food waste streams which recovers carbon and creates value from waste, creating tremendous benefit,” he added, noting that the company has “demonstrated both the technical capabilities as well as the commercial partnerships to rapidly scale their technology and make an incredible impact across a wide swathe of industry”.
Why we need substitutes for palm oil
Courtesy: NoPalm Ingredients
Palm oil accounts for 40% of all global oil production, and is desired for its neutral flavour, smell and colour, ability to withstand high temperatures, and function as a natural preservative. “Palm oil is cheap, incredibly versatile and widely used in almost every fast-moving consumer good, from your toothpaste to my newborn’s infant formula,” said Langhout.
The problem, however, is that this oil is a major driver of tropical deforestation, which is responsible for nearly 20% of global emissions. Indonesia and Malaysia alone are home to 90% of oil palm trees – the former’s forests have been subject to wildfires emanating directly from palm plantations in 2019.
Palm oil production has increased tenfold since 1980, and expanding demand means more forests will be burnt down, a form of mass deforestation that emits greenhouse gases, while removing trees that would help absorb these very emissions. “Global demand for palm oil grows by 4% annually, and there’s no strategy to meet the additional 22 million tons needed by 2030 without clearing rainforests 1.5 times the size of Ireland,” explained Langhout.
Additionally, it is a threat to wildlife, and as an industry, it’s associated with numerous human rights abuses. Indigenous communities have lost their lands and villages, and workers have been exploited with poor working conditions and pay.
Innovations like NoPalm Ingredients’ yeast oil – which generates 90% fewer emissions and requires 99% less land than conventional palm oil – are therefore crucial. “With new regulations banning deforestation-related products, European companies can only source sustainably certified palm oil, which excludes 83% of current supplies,” said Langhout.
“This will drive price increases that will affect every family in Europe. Often, the answer isn’t to prohibit a product but to step back and create a superior alternative that naturally compels a switch.”
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 VFC’s ad in response to KFC’s new campaign, a new oat milk company, and an alternative protein week.
New products and launches
Slovenian whole-cut plant-based meat producer Juicy Marbles has introduced its newest product, Baby Ribs, made with a cleaner-label recipe. The 350g pack will roll out tomorrow, and newsletter subscribers who pre-ordered the product could receive prototypes of its lamb rack or bacon.
Courtesy: Juicy Marbles
Shane Stanbridge and C-Y Chia, owners of Oakland’s now-closed Lion Dance Cafe, are working on a cookbook inspired by the vegan restaurant, and have put out an open call to ask customers which dishes they should include in the recipe list.
Catering giant Compass Group‘s Eurest division has linked up with Irish company The Plant-It Food Co to serve the latter’s vegan chicken across non-commercial operations in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. A national rollout will follow soon.
UK plant-based brand Framptons has unveiled the Wessex Oat Company, a range of discount oat milk in original, unsweetened, oat latte, caramel latte, and chocolate flavours for £1.49-1.99. It will also introduce a single cream alternative later this year.
Courtesy: Framptons
German vegan startup Planteneers has developed a fully plant-based Italian buffet. It showcased the menu with Marriott International, preparing vegan tiramisu, white fish and mortadella sandwiches for 1,450 attendees at the Future Food-Tech trade show in San Francisco.
Meanwhile, German producer Greenforce has linked up with UAE agrifood tech company Silal to bring its dehydrated plant-based meat mixes to foodservice locations in the Middle East and Africa region.
Also in Germany, discount supermarket Kaufland has expanded its own-label vegan, K-Take It Veggie, by around 20%, crossing 100 SKUs. It comes a year after it reduced the prices of its private-label plant-based products to match animal proteins.
In Australia, vegan food maker Plantein has rolled out an affordable line of ready-to-cook meals at Woolworths stores, featuring burgers, mince and meatballs for A$2.95 ($1.97).
Courtesy: Fascin8foods
And fellow Australian company Fascin8foods has expanded its Froom range of whole-food plant-based burgers, mine and meatballs to retailers in New South Wales and Queensland.
Company and event updates
Ingredients giant AAK has received a ‘no further questions’ letter from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the use of shea stearin, a plant-based fat that can replace cocoa butter and coconut oil, among others.
The Plant Based Foods Association has partnered with jobs platform Tälist, enabling its members to post open positions on a specially curated version of the AltProtein.jobs board.
Courtesy: Livekindly Collective
New York-based firm Livekindly Collective – the parent company of Like Meat, No Meat, Oumph! and Alpha Foods – has named David Suarez as CEO. Suarez moves up from his previous role as chief supply chain officer.
The Cultured Meat Symposium and UC Davis’ Integrative Center for Alternative Meat and Protein (iCAMP) have collaborated to host the Alternative Protein Week (September 9-13), which will convene over 300 researchers, policymakers, investors and stakeholders to discuss novel protein production.
Two months after opening its first European plant-based production line in Germany, Dutch drinks company Refresco has acquired Spanish white-label plant-based milk maker Frías Nutrición for an undisclosed sum.
Courtesy: VFC
UK vegan chicken maker VFC has launched a new campaign taking a shot at KFC‘s Believe in Chicken campaign, calling on people to ‘Believe in Chickens’ instead. The plurality aims to highlight the fast-food giant’s “hypocrisy”.
Research, policy and awards
What really drives people away from cultivated meat? One new study suggests it could be people’s morals, with Germans and Americans who care about the purity and naturalness of life are less inclined to eat these proteins. It highlights another pain point around consumer education for the sector.
Minnesota governor Tim Walz has announced a $200M Climate Pollution Reduction Grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the state’s food system
US mycelium meat producer Meati has received the Sustainable Plant of the Year award by Food Engineering magazine for its 100,000 sq ft Mega Ranch in Thornton, Colorado.
Courtesy: Meati
A campus-wide meat-free trial at the University of Bonn in Germany found that up to eight weeks after the trial ended, sales of meat were lower by 7-12% than before the veggie month, with 80% of students saying they want to see more meatless meals in the canteen.
Finally, in the UK, polling by Bosh! has revealed that nearly half (49%) of the country’s vegan population is male, subverting trends seen in previous research, which has suggested that veganism is much more common among women.
New Zealand dairy cooperative Fonterra has teamed up with Australia’s Nourish Ingredients to develop dairy and non-dairy products with the latter’s precision-fermented Creamilux fat.
In a new trans-Tasman partnership, Fonterra will leverage a precision-fermented fat developed by Nourish Ingredients to enhance the functionality of both dairy and non-dairy products.
Nourish Ingredients’ dairy-like Creamilux ingredient – which was showcased in alt-dairy and confectionery applications at April’s Future Food-Tech event in San Francisco – allows manufacturers to enhance the mouthfeel, flavour and emulsification of a variety of foods.
“Creamilux is an innovation platform that combines old technology with new ways of modulating the fat molecules, driving flavour, mouthfeel, and texture all in one potent molecule,” a company spokesperson told Green Queen.
The collaboration was born out of Fonterra’s first tasting of Creamilux in January, which impressed the dairy giant’s team. “Nourish Ingredients is taking a unique approach that aligns perfectly with Fonterra’s focus on leadership in dairy innovation science and being at the forefront of such innovative new food ingredients,” said Jeremy Hill, chief science and technology officer at Fonterra.
Creamilux to be used in both dairy and non-dairy products
Fonterra chief science and technology officer Jeremy Hill and Nourish Ingredients CTO Anna El Tahchy | Courtesy: Nourish Ingredients
“By partnering together, we can explore new ways to help meet the growing global demand for great-tasting, texturally appealing products that deliver… exceptional experiences to customers,” Hill explained.
Nourish Ingredients described Creamilux as a “highly potent, low-inclusion lipid” that offers a “genuine creamy texture and excellent emulsification properties to replicate the mouth-coating sensation of full cream”.
The first part of the collaboration will involve the development of conventional dairy products like cream, cheese, butter and more. The two companies will leverage Creamilux as a key ingredient to “unlock functionality” and preserve the flavour of dairy.
Additionally, Fonterra and Nourish Ingredients will also explore areas where the specialty fat can enhance non-dairy foods that typically rely on dairy lipids, such as bakery items. The aim is to enter new product segments beyond Fonterra’s core dairy activities.
“We are overcoming specific animal ingredient bottlenecks to optimise current animal-based food production capacity without losing quality. This allows us to enable our partners to meet demand with our potent lipids without sacrificing taste and experience,” said Nourish Ingredients CEO James Petrie, who called Fonterra “a great partner” that will help it commercialise “as quickly as possible”.
Nourish Ingredients did not respond to Green Queen’s questions about how this will impact the cost of both dairy and free-from products, and the planned channels and timeline for market launch.
However, at Future Food Tech, the startup – which has raised $39.6M in total funding – debuted the animal-free designer fat as part of a vegan chocolate, which only contained 1% of Creamilux but left a lingering mouthfeel on many attendees’ tastebuds. The low inclusion rate means the ingredient is unlikely to impact budgets, nutrition or production capacity too heavily, and could also help deliver cleaner labels by eschewing additives and emulsifiers.
Fonterra’s emissions under the spotlight
Courtesy: Fonterra
Fonterra is New Zealand’s largest company, and is responsible for 30% of the world’s dairy exports. This plays a key role in making the country the global leader in the export of dairy proteins. Domestically, per capita consumption reaches 400 million litres a year, with 380 litres of milk sold every minute in supermarkets.
But this comes with a major environmental impact – agriculture is to blame for half of New Zealand’s total emissions, and three-quarters of the food system’s footprint is a direct result of methane from livestock. Meanwhile, Fonterra is the country’s worst polluter, emitting over 26.8M tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2023.
The cooperative has committed to slashing its emissions footprint from dairy by 30% by the end of the decade. But it was recently the subject of a misinformation report by the Changing Markets Foundation, where it faced accusations of greenwashing after it was revealed that the company spends over five times their R&D budget on marketing and PR, which often portrays New Zealand dairy as climate-friendly.
Fonterra is also the lead named entity in an ongoing climate change trial as part of a case brought by a Māori leader against a group of dairy and fossil fuel operators. But the announcement of Fonterra’s new precision fermentation partnership did not have any sustainability-related messaging.
Nourish Ingredients – which is awaiting regulatory approval in Singapore for Tastilux, an animal-like fat for meat analogues – did not comment on Green Queen’s query about the environmental impact of Creamilux in light of Fonterra’s emissions.
This isn’t Fonterra’s first foray into precision fermentation. In 2022, it partnered with DSM-Firmenich Venturing to form a joint venture called Vivici, which earned self-determined Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status for its animal-free beta-lactoglobulin (a whey protein) in the US in February.
“Dairy will always be at the core of our business, now and in the future,” said Hill. “At the same time, ingredients produced through emerging technologies can work seamlessly in and alongside our dairy products, expanding the range of products and choices we can offer to customers and consumers.”
