Fungi and Food Tech Webinar Recap
Food Tech Entrepreneurs and Investors Discuss Fungi’s Role in the Future of Food
If you missed our latest webinar, Fungi and Food Tech, you can watch the recording on the Prime Movers Lab YouTube Channel.
Despite rising grocery prices, the Green Revolution and the industrial agriculture system’s success means that many of us spend less on food than at any other point in history. But affordable groceries have come at a cost to our climate, animal welfare, and water supplies. In April, I wrote about how fungi are an ancient type of life that are just beginning to be applied to our food system. Entrepreneurs like our guests Paul Shapiro, CEO at Better Meat Co, and Isabella Iglesias-Musachio, CEO & Founder at Bosque Foods are working to make mycelium a staple of our diets that gives us the experience of eating meat without the drawbacks and at comparable prices. Our third panelist, Maya Schushan Orgad is CTO and Principal at Peakbridge, a venture capital firm that invests in technology and processes that will shape the future of food. They are inventing and capitalizing the future of our food industry.
If you need a primer on fungi and mycelium, Maya gave a great foundation in a blog post she wrote earlier this year.
What’s wrong with our current animal agriculture system?
Perhaps counterintuitively, animals are not particularly efficient producers of meat. It takes approximately 25 grams of feed to produce one gram of beef. Chickens and pigs do better but still require between 5 and 9 grams of feed per gram of meat. Isabella noted that, “we can actually cultivate different types of microorganisms that can be much more efficient producers…instead of taking a year or two years to raise a cow you can grow certain types of fungi in a matter of days or hours.”
Paul pointed out that, “the number one cause of wildlife extinction is raising animals for food. The number one cause of deforestation is raising animals for food. The United Nations published a report and said the number one risk for the next pandemic is increasing demand for animal protein.”
How big is the market?
Maya addressed this question and laid out what future protein sales could look like. Thirty years from now, we may not have enough protein to feed everyone. As the population eats more protein as a larger part of our diet by 2050, the supply needs to be 70% higher. In the long term, we need more sources of protein. The alternative meat market today is only 1% of the total meat market, about $14B. By 2030 the expectation is that this will grow to 8%, 10%, or 15%.
Why now? What technological advances make this the right time for fungi companies?
Fermentation has been around for hundreds or thousands of years. Foods like tofu or tempeh are fermented and so are wine and beer.
Liquid fermentation is when you produce mycelium in a liquid medium. Quorn pioneered this approach years ago and produced the first mycoprotein on the market. There are several other types of fermentation. Bosque Foods is using a solid-state fermentation process. Different fermentation methods offer different benefits and tradeoffs. Liquid fermentation tends to be faster, which equates to lower costs and prices. Solid-state fermentation is a process particularly well suited to creating “whole cut” products (e.g. a chicken breast is a whole cut, a chicken nugget is not). Remember, food is a trillion-dollar market so there will be many winners here.
In addition to fermentation methods, there are also different strains of fungi. We are only beginning to explore the different types and the ways we can optimize them to grow faster or produce better characteristics. As more tools are developed and high throughput screening becomes commonplace, expect to see companies developing novel products based on previously untapped fungi strains.
What trends should we look for?
Maya pointed out that companies are only just beginning to explore what they can do with fungi. Most companies today use naturally occurring strains. Companies will begin to develop screening tools to increase the speed that we can research the characteristics that different strains have. Once companies choose their strain there are many ways they can optimize it.
Consumers can also expect to see new products come to market that don’t look like meat but taste like meat. In an industry where just about everyone is a potential customer, some companies will make products that closely mimic traditional meat, in the way that Impossible Foods and Beyond have made hamburgers that are as close as possible to beef. Other companies will produce entirely different products that are “meaty” but are entirely new creations.
What makes fungi different from plant-based meat substitutes?
Plant-based meat products are highly processed. In order to transform wheat, pea, or soy protein into meat analogues, companies use fillers, binders, flavors, masking agents, and other chemicals to replicate the sensory experience of eating meat.
Mycelium is naturally fibrous and relatively flavorless. That means companies don’t need to work very hard to get a “meaty” product.
Our panelists have different opinions on how important ingredient lists are in consumer purchasing decisions. With hundreds of millions of Americans eating meat every day there will be companies that cater to every preference. Bosque Foods is developing a minimally processed “center of plate” product that does not directly imitate any particular meat. Better Meat Co, on the other hand, aims to be the “Cargill of Mycelium” and offer food manufacturers a selection of products that they can use in their own products.
Bottom Line
Demand is increasing for animal protein across the world and continuing to raise animals the way we have for the last 70 years isn’t the best approach to meet that demand. Technologies and products are being developed today that will give us the sensations many people love about meat without many of the drawbacks of our industrialized system. Fungi are an especially promising area of current research, and we are only beginning to understand what these microbes can do. An entirely new food category may be coming to grocery store shelves sooner than you think!
Panelists:
Maya Schushan Orgad, CTO and Principal at PeakBridge
Paul Shapiro, CEO at Better Meat Co
Isabella Iglesias-Musachio, CEO & Founder at Bosque Foods
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.
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