Thursday Food News — Edition #2
Welcome to our second Thursday Food News!
Every Thursday we share articles about what’s new in the food industry, from the new shiny delivery startups to what we could eat 50 years from now.
Meet Impossible Foods’ lab-grown veggie burger. It bleeds
Slap an Impossible Foods’ burger on a grill, and it pops, sizzles and smokes like a typical hamburger. But there’s nothing typical about it. Instead of cow meat, it’s made of plant products. Oh, and it was wholly engineered in a Silicon Valley lab.
“We look for each of those elements that make meat, meat,” said Celeste Holz-Schietinger, a principal scientist for Impossible Foods, during a tour of the company’s Redwood City, California, lab last week. “That little bit of fat leak-out. Those meaty, those roasty, those caramelized notes.”
Why the foods of the future are a tasty prospect for business
What did you eat for breakfast today? For the time-poor worker it can be hard to grab a bite before heading out the door, even if your fridge is well stocked.
We know that somewhere between a quarter and a third of all the food produced globally never gets eaten, worth somewhere in the region of US$750 billion.
Clearly this is an issue that goes far beyond getting ready a little quicker in the morning.
Why We Need An Internet Of Food
In preparation for the Inaugural IC-FOODS conference, which will take place November 7–9 at UC Davis, The Mixing Bowl’s Rob Trice and Krista Holobar talked with Matthew Lange, the Principal Investigator of IC3-FOODS, about the Internet of Food and why we need it.
Dr. Lange, who teaches at both UC Davis’s Health System and its Department of Food Science & Technology, is leading efforts to build the semantic and ontological underpinnings for the emerging semantic web and Internet of Food (IoF).
Ever wondered if you can melt a potato? Meet chato, the cheese-like food of the future made from potato
If you’re looking for the next future food, look no further than the humble potato.
Melbourne inventor Andrew Dyhin has worked out how to melt the popular root vegetable, creating what he considers the “food base for future food”.
“It’s probably the biggest thing to happen to the potato industry since the frozen french fry.”
The product, called chato, “acts like cheese, looks like cheese, melts like cheese,” Dyhin said.
The real Soylent sickness
The source of the Soylent Bar sickness is still unknown, and, while foodborne illness is nothing new to packaged foods, the incident highlights a deeper problem with Silicon Valley’s mission to radically alter the way we eat.
Over the past few years, as money from the tech industry has found its way into all sorts of disruptive startups, the can-do engineering culture has set its sights on our daily bread.
The trouble with Soylent, and with the food-tech industry as a whole, goes beyond a product recall.
How This Startup Is Making Food Delivery Easier In Chicago
Bootler is a Chicago-based startup that has built a food delivery search engine.
It helps you get your food delivery quickly and for a lower price. It works similar to the way you would search for flights and hotels using websites like Expedia and Kayak.
Users can view menus and compare prices across a wide range of restaurants.
Tovala raises $1.6M for a smart oven that’s taking on microwaves
Tovala, the Chicago-based startup that makes a smart, cloud-connected countertop oven, has raised $1.6 million in seed funding, the company announced Tuesday.
CEO David Rabie wants to see the Tovala oven, which can broil, bake and steam food, replace microwaves and toaster ovens.
Origin Ventures — the Chicago venture fund that was an early investor in GrubHub — led the round, which Tovala raised in June after going through Bay Area startup accelerator Y Combinator.
Why we might all be eating insects in the future
This week, London’s first pop-up insect bar, aptly titled ‘Eat Grub’, opened to the public at London Food Tech Week. The specialist food bar offers mealworm canapes, bug ice-cream and chocolate brownies made out of cricket flour, among other insect-based recipes.
The organisers say they created the insect eatery in a bid to persuade consumers and retailers to overcome any squeamishness around entomology — the act of eating bugs — and demonstrate that they can be a sustainable source of protein in a healthy diet.
Not convinced? Here’s why you should reconsider your stance…
