Five Food Startups We Can’t Shut Up About

Contemporary food trends can often feel profoundly silly. Does the joy of culinary pop ups really outweigh having a great restaurant round the corner? Are Buddha bowls adding to your inner peace or just making you crave a plate? Is paying hundreds of dollars for some steak worth getting a snap of Salt Bae in action? Thankfully, many of the futuristic food startups around at the moment act as a tonic to this, treating food with the gravity and ambition that can sometimes be missing in a sphere dominated by how potentially Instagrammable a meal is. Let’s explore.

Nuritas

Turning food into medical discoveries

This Irish startup could go down in the history books if the reality remotely matches up to the hype. This company claims to unlock “the hidden potential of everyday food.” Translation? They use big data to identify peptides in food which could be useful in treating a specific disease. And they argue that they’re far better equipped to develop new medicines than the average scientists. Founder and 2015 TOA speaker Nora Khaldi told attendees at an event in Dublin in 2017, “If you ask a colleague ‘Could you find me a treasure chest in the ocean?’, they might say yes but it could take them a lifetime looking for it. We know there are treasure chests in the ocean for sure but how can we find them without a map. What Nuritas is doing through AI though is pinpointing the location and tell you there’s an 80 percent chance of you finding the treasure chest here. We are providing a map through those trillions and trillions of molecules.” As of February, they’ve teamed up with Nestle to identify bioactive peptides in our food, which should mean they have the funding to keep those medical discoveries coming thick and fast.

Apeel Sciences

Natural technology magically extending your food’s shelf life

This California-based startup solves the problem you didn’t know was a problem — fruit and vegetables rot so quickly! Mould is a profitable issue: the startup already has 40 million dollars in the bank, thanks to funding from prestigious venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz as well as multiple other investors.

According to his interview with Inhabitat , CEO and founder James Rogers was inspired to create the edible coating to help solve the problem of world hunger after listening to a podcast on the topic. He discovered that the answer wasn’t producing enough food, but stopping food from going off. Edipeel solves the issue by fortifying “the surfaces of fresh fruit and vegetables, forming an ultra thin barrier that…shields produce from both biotic and abiotic stressors.” Plus, according to the Inhabit interview, this means fruit and vegetables “can last two, three, four times longer.” This has radical implications — according to foodnavigator-usa.com’s interview with the founder, once shelf life is extended by four times, there’s no need for refrigeration. As such, you’re not just cutting down on food waste but energy use. Forbes reports that Apeel has developed the coating for three dozen crops, “including avocados, asparagus, peaches, lemons, pears and nectarines.”

Flippy

Mechanical arm flipping the perfect burger

Is it weird to find a robot cute? Especially when it’s essentially just a mechanical arm? Whatever, there’s something strangely endearing about Miso Robotics’ burger-grilling robot, Flippy. But Flippy isn’t just a pretty face arm. According to Miso Robotics CEO and co-founder David Zito, AI and automation is essential “to solve the high pain points in restaurants and food prep. That’s the dull, dirty and dangerous work around the grill, the fryer, and other prep work like chopping onions. The idea is to help restaurants improve food quality and safety without requiring a major kitchen redesign.” According to Miso Robotics, Flippy is capable of cooking 150–300 hamburger patties an hour (“depending on kitchen staff,” whatever that means) and delivers the perfect burger every time. But if you’re consumed by the darker side of the narrative — thinking that this robotic arm could take jobs from minimum-wage workers — you might be right. A senior figure at the Cali Group (who own the Caliburger Restaurants) told the BBC “There will be changes in the way workers are hired and the types of jobs available,” clarifying that it’s “very possible” that restaurants in the future will have less human employees. Um.

Solace might be found in the fact that it’s still an incredibly expensive replacement for human labour. According to a Techcrunch article from 2017, investing in your own personal robotic kitchen assistant will set you back a cool $60,000, “a price that will likely increase over time as Miso continues to add new functionality to the robot.” while the BBC claims the robotic arm will cost a further $12,000 a year to run on top of that initial sum.

Ava Wines

Grape-free wine straight from the future

“Wines before vines,” says the company’s homepage, which might make you want to commit an act of violence (please don’t bastardise the perfect “fries before guys”). Equally questionable is the fact that the company believes that wine can be improved by removing grapes from the equation. But once you delve into the science behind it, their idea is undeniably cool. After a visit to the Napa Valley, Mardonn Chua and Alec Lee were inspired by how unaffordable the best wines were. “I could never afford a bottle like this, I could never enjoy it,” Chua told New Scientist. “That got me thinking.” The result? An artificially-created wine that mimics the taste of the finest wines by recreating your favourite booze “molecule for molecule.” and focusing on and then reproducing the compounds that give wine its flavour.

PeelPioneers

Achieving the near-impossible: finding a use for your old orange peel

While carrying out a research project for his masters in chemistry in Amsterdam, Sytze van Stempvoort stumbled across something inspiring: a Brazilian refinery for citrus waste. According to the Dutch startup, 250 million kilos of orange peel are discarded in the Netherlands each year. And while some people might look at orange peel and see trash, van Stempvoort could only see treasure. Now PeelPioneers “extracts the components from the peels (like essential oils and citrus pulp), so that they can then be used as raw materials for making new products,” like the natural food flavouring the oil can become or the supplementary cattle feed the pulp goes on to become. And they’ve got big, if incredibly niche, ambitions: they want to be the foremost processor of citrus peelings in Northwest Europe by 2022. Now that’s…an ap-peel-ing vision.

Written by Sophie Atkinson/images by Rosalba Porpora

This month’s theme is FEAST. Think culinary delights, futuristic farming and food straight from The Jetsons.