Hacking protein
What I talk about when I talk about protein from thin air, cultivated meats first launch in Hong Kong and a baby carrot recall.
In June, I attended a boujee dinner in San Francisco for Vow, a cultivated-meat startup. You can read about it on Substack. (Vow held a similar dinner this past month at Masa in New York City, which you can read about in Wired.) The Australian company launched this week in Hong Kong at The Aubrey in the Mandarin Oriental. Vow is the first to launch in this Chinese territory. Hong Kong Business publication called Vow a “sustainable food startup.” Should they be called a gourmet food startup instead?
Unlike virtually all other cultivated meat startups that hope to figure out say chicken for mass impact, Vow says its going after the premium market. An interesting choice. Most founders want to find a way to lower the impact of traditional meat. Gourmet ingredients that aren’t center of plate won’t get us there.
So why am I writing about this again?
Yesterday, I attended an event at Mista Foods, an incubator of sorts that offers entrepreneurial support to young companies — production, scaling, development, packaging, etc. The event was a way to bring a bunch of startups together to see how they could collaborate and what kind of rapid prototyping they could do in just under a week. There was a fast and furious pitch competition followed by a tasting of what the 14 startups developed.
Many ask what’s most exciting about food-tech. It’s this. Seeing the ecosystem work together to pull ahead and create products we may need one day with a goal of delivering on price and taste. I don’t need foie gras, but you know that. (No matter how tasty, fatty and delicious.) A trend or theme yesterday was protein out of “thin air,” which seems like a misnomer. Air isn’t full of nothing. It’s primarily nitrogen and oxygen with a few other trace ingredients. Anyways. You can’t create something out of nothing, but you can, I am learning, make protein out of gases in our air.
In no special order, here are a few fun items from last night:
I’m just here for the tidbits:
If you’re traveling to San Francisco, or just love hotel bars like I do, you can sample the latest plant-based, whole-cut salmon at MKT Restaurant and Bar in the Four Seasons Hotel. The vegan salmon – made from soy, algae and mycoprotein – is created by Oshi, an Israel-based startup. Two years ago, when I tasted it at Future Food Tech, I was impressed with its appearance. The flavor and texture needed a lot of work. Now that it’s launching at a legit restaurant we can perhaps safely assume it’s worthy of a chef at a four-star hotel? I’ll be excited to try it. Check out the locations outside of SF, too.
Farmers in Florida are wondering what to plant in place of citrus trees, which are under threat from greening, a bacterial disease that weakens the tree to a host of other problems. Many of our favorite staples have issues. Cavendish bananas, the single most purchased fruit in the US, are crippled by Panama disease. Cacao and almond trees have seen their crop pricing explode up and down in volatility. But back to citrus. In this great article by Ambrook, citrus growers in Florida are exploring the pongamia tree, which grows nuts that can be turned into oil. Terviva is the only startup I know of making oil but it’s not something you can find easily. For farmers to grow untested crops, which take time to become commercially viable, our government is going to have to create the markets or support farmers financially in their transitions. (And a reminder, let’s not repeat the mono-cropping of our current staples.)
Another crop having a bad week? Carrots, which are my fridge hero. I’m sure you’ve seen bags of baby carrots from Grimmway Farms. Grimmway is the single largest producer of carrots worldwide – to the tune of over $4 billion in revenue. The company had a massive recall of their carrots due to E. coli contamination. Because they’re such a big producer there are also tangential products made with the carrots that are being recalled. This is like Boar’s Head big but for veggies, which we all need to eat more of. (Not deli meats, which we know are kinda bad for us.) So here’s a plug for organic carrots from your local farmers market.
File under what took so long: Kraft Mac & Cheese launched an everything-bagel flavor. They say it’s for a limited time, but that’s a marketing gimmick. However, for now it’s available only on walmart.com. Someone get it and report back please.
Or this: how about a menu made of only GMO or CRISPR-engineered foods? Read about Farma, a fictional pop-up in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset.
Where you can find me:
Next week is Thanksgiving. What will be on your table? My fam is having our first ever “hotel-room picnic” and I’m bringing a winter salad. What would your Thanksgiving menu look like if you didn’t have a stove, microwave or toaster oven and only a mini fridge to store your supplies?
Alternative meat is so interesting considering that meat and the meats we find as tasty/acceptable often depend on what we eat growing up.
I have been thinking a lot lately about cultures that grow up with Goat and Horse as normal vs those who try it later in life and often struggle with the difference in taste..
What if a new ‘meat’ will take an entire generation to take hold of as normal and acceptable?..
Lisa, a fun and interesting blog as usual! Everything bagel Mac n Cheese? That sounds like something one would get on the Space Shuttle. I can't even start to imagine the ingredient label. If I didn't have any way to cook or refrigerate, I would put together something like a seed, nut, fresh vegetable kind of dish. Also some kind of dip! If that were possible. Happy Thanksgiving!