Impossible foods
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Impossible Foods rolls out to nearly 1,000 new grocery stores and supermarkets
Starting tomorrow, 777 supermarkets in California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Nevada will begin stocking the Impossible Foods plant-based meat substitute.
Fueling the increased distribution and a push to expand its product suite and geographic footprint domestically and internationally is a $500 million round of funding the company closed in March.
Some of that money is supporting the company’s debut at stores like Albertsons, Jewel-Osco, Pavilions, Safeway and Vons.
In all, the company said it would be in nearly 1,000 grocery stores by tomorrow. That includes all Albertsons, Vons, Pavilions and Gelson’s Markets in Southern California; all Safeway stores in Northern California and Nevada; Jewel-Osco stores in Chicago, eastern Iowa and northwest Indiana; Wegmans stores on the East Coast and Fairway markets in and around New York.
Since its debut in September, the company said it was the number one item sold at the locations it was available on the East and West coasts.
The company’s 12-ounce packages are sold for somewhere between $8.99 and $9.99 and it plans to soon introduce the Impossible Burger at even more stores nationwide.
“We’ve always planned on a dramatic surge in retail for 2020 — but with more and more Americans’ eating at home, we’ve received requests from retailers and consumers alike,” said Impossible Foods’ president Dennis Woodside, in a statement. “Our existing retail partners have achieved record sales of Impossible Burger in recent weeks, and we are moving as quickly as possible to expand with retailers nationwide.”
Even as the company announced its expansion, it made moves to assuage any consumer concerns over the processes in place at its manufacturing facilities.
Impossible Foods said it had instituted mandatory work from home policies for all of its employees who can telecommute; restricted visitors to its facilities and those operated by co-manufacturers; banned all work-related travel; and implemented new sanitizing and disinfection procedures at its workplaces.
“Our No. 1 priority is the safety of our employees, customers and consumers,” Woodside said. “And we recognize our responsibility for the welfare of our community, including the entire San Francisco Bay Area, our global supplier and customer network, millions of customers, and billions of people who are relying on food manufacturers to produce supplies in times of need.”
The company said it was proceeding with its research and development initiatives; accelerating the ramp of its production facilities; and moving to broadly commercialize its Impossible Sausage and Impossible Pork products.
Impossible Foods has raised $1.3 billion from investors, including Mirae Asset Global Investments, Khosla Ventures, Horizons Ventures and Temasek.
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Alpha Foods raises $28 million for its vegetarian prepared foods
Alpha Foods, the vegetarian prepared food manufacturer, has raised $28 million in financing for its portfolio of vegetarian burritos, tamales, nuggets, pizzas, burgers, patties and sausages.
The Glendale, Calif.-based company was launched by Loren Wallis, the founder of the dairy substitute, Good Karma Foods, and Cole Orobetz, a former director with the agricultural debt lending firm Avrio Capital.
First launched in 2015, Alpha Foods previously raised $12 million in financing from investment firms like New Crop Capital and AccelFoods, whose other brands include Kite Hill, Good Catch, BRAMi and Evoke Healthy Foods.
As more Americans move to supplement their diets with plant-based products, companies like Alpha Foods have found willing investors for new food brands. The company’s new round was led by AccelFoods, with existing investors, including New Crop Capital, Green Monday Ventures and Blue Horizon, also participating.
Companies like Alpha compete with huge consumer packaged goods companies like Kellogg’s (through its Morningstar Farms line of vegetarian products) and Nestlé (through Sweet Earth Foods).
While the Morningstar Farms brand might seem a bit stale, the market has been reinvigorated through the marketing muscle and venture dollars supplied by companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, whose products have captured contracts from some of the world’s biggest fast food chains — including McDonald’s, KFC and Burger King.
Alpha Foods said it will use the latest money to launch new products, make new hires and expand its distribution channels nationally and internationally.
The company is already sold in well over 9,000 stores at chains including Wegmans, Walmart, Kroger and Publix.
“As more and more people actively seek out plant-based options, whether for their health or the environment, we are looking to expand our innovations within the category and bring easy to prepare products to a wider audience,” said Cole Orobetz, co-founder and president of Alpha Foods, in a statement.
The sale of pre-prepared plant-based meals reached $387 million in 2019, up 6% over the past year, according to data from the Good Food Institute.
“We are in the early days of plant-based consumption. As a portable, functional food business geared towards the newly emergent flexitarian consumer, the Alpha platform meets all of its customers’ snack and mealtime needs,” said AccelFoods Managing Partner Jordan Gaspar. “We couldn’t be prouder to lead this strong nexus of collaborative investors, who had the opportunity to organically build trust this past year allowing for an incredibly successful outcome in this financing.”
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Novameat has a platform for 3D-printing steaks and has new money to take it to market
Novameat, a Spanish startup looking to accelerate the development of alternative proteins across the meat aisle, has gotten a boost in the form of new investment capital from the leading foodtech investment firm, New Crop Capital.
Founded by biomedical engineering expert Giuseppe Scionti, Novameat builds on Scionti’s decade of research as an assistant professor in bioengineering at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, the University College of London, Chalmers University and Polytechnic University of Milan.
The company first came to fame with the production of the world’s first 3D-printed plant-based beefsteak in 2018 and will use the new funds from New Crop Capital to further develop its platform for accelerating the development of meats like steak, chicken breasts and other fibrous textured meat replacements.
The company has developed a new scaffolding technology that mimics the texture, appearance, nutritional and sensorial properties of fibrous meats like beefsteaks, chicken breasts and fish filets.
Scionti sees the technology as the next step in the development of plant-based and lab-cultured alternatives to traditional proteins. While many clean meat and plant-based food companies have managed to take ground meat replacements to market with similar taste and textural qualities to the real thing, steaks and cuts of muscle meat have proven harder to replicate.
Novameat potentially solves that problem.
“While I was researching on regenerating animal tissues through bioprinting technologies for biomedical and veterinary applications, I discovered a way to bio-hack the structure of the native 3D matrix of a variety of plant-based proteins to achieve a meaty texture,” said Scionti, in a statement.
The core of Novameat’s technology is a customized printer that enables companies to create the kinds of fibrous tissues needed to make a steak. “We are providing the equipment, the machinery, under a licensing agreement to these companies,” says Scionti. “Plant-based meat manufacturers have access to something that creates the texture and taste of a steak.”
Traditional extrusion technologies are not capable of using the ingredients from Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods to print a steak, but Novameat’s founder argues that his technology can.
The technology was promising enough to attract the attention of New Crop Capital, arguably one of the most seasoned investors in the expanding market of meat replacement. The venture firm’s portfolio includes Memphis Meat, Beyond Meat, Kite Hill, Geltor, Good Dot, Aleph Farms, Supermeat, Mosa Meat, New Wave and Zero Egg.
“We think the global food supply chain is broken and we are focused on fixing one of those challenges, which is animal protein,” says New Crop Capital’s Dan Altschuler Malek. “We see that there is an opportunity to shift consumer behavior to reduce their consumption of animal protein products to products that are at the price point that people will pay.”
Novameat can help reduce costs, Malek thinks, because it speeds up the time to create meat substitutes.
Scionti says the company’s micro-extrusion technology enables companies to get a three-dimensional structure without having to go through an incubation period that can take a significant amount of time and increase costs.
“Novameat’s bioprinting-based technology provides a flexible and tunable method of producing plant-based meat, with the utility to create different textures from a wide variety of ingredients, all within a single piece of meat,” he said. “Low and high-moisture extruders are the primary method currently used to restructure plant proteins to create the texture of meat. While extrusion works well for some applications, this method may not be ideal for mimicking all types of animal meat. Alternative technologies like Novameat’s give plant-based meat manufacturers a wider array of tools to mimic all types of meat and seafood,” said Good Food Institute Director of Science and Technology David Welch, in a statement.
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Patrick Brown, the chief executive of Impossible Foods, is coming to Disrupt
Impossible Foods is having quite the year.
In the past seven months, the company has signed a nationwide deal with Burger King, weathered a demand surge that saw supplies dwindle and stocks of its signature Impossible burger sell out across the country, and raised fears among players in the $98 billion meat market that they could lose their grip on the American diet.
In October, the principal architect of this impossibly bold assault on the meat market will take the stage at Disrupt SF to talk about it all.
Patrick Brown has been on a wild ride since launching Impossible Foods in 2011. The idea for the company came to Brown, already a famous geneticist, while on sabbatical from his position as a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine.
In his earlier research Brown had already helped define the mechanism by which HIV and other retroviruses incorporate their genes into the cells they infect. At Stanford, Brown and his colleagues developed a new technology that lets researchers monitor the activity of all the genes in a genome and analyze, identify and interpret gene expression.
It was that work with genetics that led Brown to identify Impossible Foods’ key innovation, the development of synthetic heme — a molecule that makes meat… well… meaty.
Driven by the desire to address the environmental impact of animal farming, Brown and Impossible Foods have ambitious plans to develop plant-based alternatives to fish, poultry and beef around the world.
Along the way, Impossible has riled the beef industry, faced down supply chain snafus and made an unlikely ally in Burger King — one of the largest purveyors of beef patties in the U.S.
On our stage in San Francisco, Brown will talk about it all. It’s sure to be a fascinating conversation that will leave our audience with a lot of meaty issues to chew on.
Disrupt SF runs October 2 – October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available here.
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Is your event strategy paying off? How to calculate your event ROI
Sarah Shewey is the Founder & CEO of Happily, a platform that rapidly assembles experiences for the fastest growing brands in the world with the largest network of freelance event producers. She is also the co-founder of TEDActive, the founder of EXP, a co-founder of The Margin, and the board president of dublab.
Events have increasingly become an important channel in the marketing mix, despite how notoriously “impossible” it is to measure the ROI, or return on investment. When people show up to your event, they are willingly giving you their attention for hours on end – not trying to avoid attention-grabbing ads.
A well produced experience provides a great way to reach outside of your existing networks, build a pipeline of new customers, transform existing customers into superfans, and position your brand as a thought leader. In 2017, only 7% of marketers said that events were their most important marketing channel. Last year, that number rose to 41% according to a survey done by Bizzabo.
As the founder of Happily, the largest network of event producers in the United States, I’ve had backstage access to thousands of events – some wildly successful like TED and others that didn’t ever get traction in building an engaged community.
What has defined the successful ones?
The experiential marketing industry has long struggled to measure success in a meaningful way. They propose all the same KPIs (key performance indicators), but rarely do those KPIs provide a benchmark to determine if an event is successful or give marketers the ability to tell what worked and what didn’t. They especially fall down when customers aren’t won until months after an event.
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Singapore’s Grain, a profitable food delivery startup, pulls in $10M for expansion
Cloud kitchens are the big thing in food delivery, with ex-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s new business one contender in that space, with Asia, and particularly Southeast Asia, a major focus. Despite the newcomers, a more established startup from Singapore has raised a large bowl of cash to go after regional expansion.
Founded in 2014, Grain specializes in clean food while it takes a different approach to Kalanick’s CloudKitchens or food delivery services like Deliveroo, FoodPanda or GrabFood.
It adopted a cloud kitchen model — utilizing unwanted real estate as kitchens, with delivery services for output — but used it for its own operations. So while CloudKitchens and others rent their space to F&B companies as a cheaper way to make food for their on-demand delivery customers, Grain works with its own chefs, menu and delivery team. A so-called “full stack” model, if you can stand the cliched tech phrase.
Finally, Grain is also profitable. The new round has it shooting for growth — more on that below — but the startup was profitable last year, CEO and co-founder Yi Sung Yong told TechCrunch.
Now it is reaping the rewards of a model that keeps it in control of its product, unlike others that are complicated by a chain that includes the restaurant and a delivery person.
We previously wrote about Grain when it raised a $1.7 million Series A back in 2016, and today it announced a $10 million Series B, which is led by Thailand’s Singha Ventures, the VC arm of the beer brand. A bevy of other investors took part, including Genesis Alternative Ventures, Sass Corp, K2 Global — run by serial investor Ozi Amanat who has backed Impossible Foods, Spotify and Uber among others — FoodXervices and Majuven. Existing investors Openspace Ventures, Raging Bull — from Thai Express founder Ivan Lee — and Cento Ventures participated.
The round includes venture debt, as well as equity, and it is worth noting that the family office of the owners of The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf — Sassoon Investment Corporation — was involved.
Grain covers individual food as well as buffets in Singapore
Three years is a long gap between the two deals — Openspace and Cento have even rebranded during the intervening period — and the ride has been an eventful one. During those years, Sung said the business had come close to running out of capital before it doubled down on the fundamentals before the precarious runway capital ran out.
In fact, he said, the company — which now has more than 100 staff — was fully prepared to self-sustain.
“We didn’t think of raising a Series B,” he explained in an interview. “Instead, we focused on the business and getting profitable… we thought that we can’t depend entirely on investors.”
And, ladies and gentleman, the irony of that is that VCs very much like a business that can self-sustain — it shows a model is proven — and investing in a startup that doesn’t need capital can be attractive.
Ultimately, though, profitability is seen as sexy today — particularly in the meal space, where countless U.S. startups have shuttered, including Munchery and Sprig — but the focus meant that Grain had to shelve its expansion plans. It then went through soul-searching times in 2017 when a spoilt curry saw 20 customers get food poisoning.
Sung declined to comment directly on that incident, but he said that company today has developed the “infrastructure” to scale its business across the board, and that very much includes quality control.
Grain co-founder and CEO Yi Sung Yong [Image via LinkedIn]
Grain currently delivers “thousands” of meals per day in Singapore, its sole market, with eight-figures in sales per year, he said. Last year, growth was 200 percent, Sung continued, and now is the time to look overseas. With Singha, the Grain CEO said the company has “everything we need to launch in Bangkok.”
Thailand — which Malaysia-based rival Dahamakan picked for its first expansion — is the only new launch on the table, but Sung said that could change.
“If things move faster, we’ll expand to more cities, maybe one per year,” he said. “But we need to get our brand, our food and our service right first.”
One part of that may be securing better deals for raw ingredients and food from suppliers. Grain is expanding its “hub” kitchens — outposts placed strategically around town to serve customers faster — and growing its fleet of trucks, which are retrofitted with warmers and chillers for deliveries to customers.
Grain’s journey is proof that startups in the region will go through trials and tribulations, but being able to bolt down the fundamentals and reduce burn rate is crucial in the event that things go awry. Just look to grocery startup Honestbee, also based in Singapore, for evidence of what happens when costs are allowed to pile up.
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Tyson Foods investment arm backs another lab-grown meat manufacturer
The venture investment arm of massive meat manufacturer Tyson Foods is continuing its push into potential alternative methods of poultry production with a new investment in the Israeli startup Future Meat Technologies.
The backer of companies like the plant-based protein-maker Beyond Meat, and cultured-meat company Memphis Meats, Tyson Ventures’ latest investment is also tackling technology development to create mass-produced meat in a lab — instead of on the farm.
Future Meat Technologies is working to commercialize a manufacturing technology for fat and muscle cells that was first developed in the laboratories of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“It is difficult to imagine cultured meat becoming a reality with a current production price of about $10,000 per kilogram,” said Yaakov Nahmias, the company’s founder and chief scientist, in a statement. “We redesigned the manufacturing process until we brought it down to $800 per kilogram today, with a clear roadmap to $5-10 per kg by 2020.”
The deal marks Tyson’s first investment in an Israeli startup and gives the company another potential horse in the race to develop substitutes for the factory slaughterhouses that provide most of America’s meat.
“This is definitely in the Memphis Meats… in the lab-based meat world,” says Justin Whitmore, executive vice president of corporate strategy and chief sustainability officer of Tyson Foods.
Whitmore takes pains to emphasize that Tyson is continuing to invest in its traditional business lines, but acknowledges that the company believes “in exploring additional opportunities for growth that give consumers more choices,” according to a statement.
While startups like Impossible Foods are focused on developing plant-based alternatives to the proteins that give meat its flavor, Future Meat Technologies and Memphis Meats are trying to use animal cells themselves to grow meat, rather than basically harvesting it from dead animals.
Chef Uri Navon mixing ingredients with FMT’s cultured meat
According to Nahmias, animal fat produces the flavors and aromas that stimulate taste buds, and he says that his company can produce the fat without harvesting animals and without genetic modification.
For Whitmore, what separates Future Meat Technologies and Memphis Meats is the scale of the bioreactors that the companies are using to make their meat. Both companies — indeed all companies on the hunt for a meat replacement — are looking for a way around relying on fetal bovine serum, which is now a crucial component for any lab-cultured meats.
“I want my children to eat meat that is delicious, sustainable and safe,” said Nahmias, in a statement, “this is our commitment to future generations.”
The breadth of backgrounds among the investors that have come together to finance the $2.2 million seed round for Future Meat Technologies speak to the market opportunity that exists for getting a meat manufacturing replacement right.
“Global demand for protein and meat is growing at a rapid pace, with an estimated worldwide market of more than a trillion dollars, including explosive growth in China. We believe that making a healthy, non-GMO product that can meet this demand is an essential part of our mission,” said Rom Kshuk, the chief executive of Future Meat Technologies, in a statement.
One of the company’s first pilot products is lab-grown chicken meat that chefs have already used in some recipes.
FMT’s first cultured chicken kebab on grilled eggplant with tahini sauce
In addition to Tyson Ventures, investors in the Future Meat Technologies seed round included the Neto Group, an Israeli food conglomerate; Seed2Growth Ventures, a Chicago-based fund backed by Walmart wealth; BitsXBites, a Chinese food technology fund; and Agrinnovation, an Israeli investment fund founded by Yissum, the Technology Transfer Company of The Hebrew University,
“Hebrew University, home to Israel’s only Faculty of Agriculture, specializes in incubating applied research in such fields as animal-free meat sources. Future Meat Technologies’ innovations are revolutionizing the sector and leading the way in creating sustainable alternative protein sources,” said Dr. Yaron Daniely, president and CEO of Yissum.
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Does Gillette know your name?
How do you get excited about a new snack food or laundry detergent when virtual reality, artificial intelligence and autonomous cars dominate the news? It’s easy: Because consumer goods impact every facet of our lives, from our personal health and comfort to how we socialize with each other and care for our environment. Read More
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