Turning slop into gold
After telephones, cameras and taxis, Silicon Valley is trying to fundamentally change another pillar of Western habits: fast food. But not only that, startups want to revolutionize the entire food industry and for this they are raising hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capitalists.
Many startuppers are motivated by the desire to wean humanity from meat and other foods that have a large environmental and social impact in terms of methane emissions, land use and the well-being of people and animals themselves.
"The traditional food system is broken in every way," says Seth Bannon, founding partner of Fifty Years, a San Francisco-based venture capital fund that has invested in food technology companies. "It's terrible for the environment, it's economically unfavorable and it's not good for people's health."
The best-known disrupter of the traditional food industry, and also the most radical in its approach, is called Soylent, a startup founded in 2013 by a group of Silicon Valley engineers who sought to reduce the time and money needed to buy and prepare food. The company has expanded from the production of a ready-to-eat beverage/meal (Saturate) to a nutritional snack bar called the “Food bar”. Both the drink and the bar can replace a traditional meal and are lactose-free, gluten-free and completely vegan. The Saturo drink can be purchased on Amazon (also from Italy), is a third of a liter and contains 300 calories per meal.
The startup derives its name from a 1966 science fiction novel by Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!, which explores the impact of excessive population growth on the world's resources. In the book, a nutrient made from soybeans and lentils called Soylent is used to feed the world's population. In a 1973 film version, Soylent Green (en. The survivors, with Charlton Heston), the theme is further developed in the depiction of a humanity destroyed by consumerism with the government encouraging assisted suicide. The only source of nourishment is Soylent Green, colorful nutrient bars produced by the Soylent company.
Today, the Los Angeles-based Soylent Company says its intelligent food design offers complete nutrition within everyone's reach. A tasteless portion of his slop costs just $2.
Crap for everyone
"It's hardly surprising that Soylent has become the darling of Silicon Valley and software developers," says Amy Bentley, a professor of food studies at New York University. First, she says, «it eliminates the social interaction that food often entails, and technologists are notorious for being less likely to interact. With Soylent you don't have to talk to your neighbor, you just have to eat or suck». In fact, by equipping yourself with a straw, you can consume a sufficient meal without taking your hands off the keyboard and your eyes from the video. It's kind of an ideal condition for them.
There are risks to pioneering food like Soylent's, however. Two months after the sale, Soylent discontinued the bars after some customers reported having episodes of violent vomiting. Two months later, for the same reason, he also withdrew the nutritional drink Saturo.
Soylent said lab tests came back "negative for foodborne pathogens, toxins or external contamination," but an ingredient derived from seaweed caused the intolerance. A new formula has been devised from which that component is absent. Bentley commented on this incident:
We are starting to know what our body needs. When we try to design new foods, it happens that at first it works quite well. Problems can come later.
Meanwhile, Soylent's competitors have also arrived, including Ambronite, a 100% food nutritional drink whose manufacturer, Space Nutrients Station, has urged customers to "stop cooking and eat like astronauts".
"The idea is that Ambronite can be any meal - says its co-founder Simo Suoheimo -, without claiming to take the place of any meal".
Vegetable meat
Ambronite received $600 from investors including YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim and Lifeline Ventures, while Soylent raised more than $20 million. But other food tech companies have more ambitious plans. Among these is Impossible Foods. In fact, investors have put more than 180 million dollars into Impossible Foods, a startup that seeks to produce a vegetable substitute for meat, a sort of hamburger substitute that tastes and smells similar but is of vegetable origin.
To achieve this, potatoes and coconuts are combined with the “magic ingredient”, heme, a fermented plant-derived protein whose culinary properties are similar to meat.
"You can't get people to stop eating meat," says Pat Brown, founder and CEO of Impossible Foods. “We manage to transform plants into meat more efficiently and sustainably than animals,” he says.
However, cloning nature proved to be a tougher undertaking than Brown could have imagined. Impossible Foods' research has already completed seven years and is only now starting to offer hamburgers to select and upscale restaurants.
We still have to wait to have a commercial scale production. Meanwhile, a pilot facility produces five quintals of synthetic meat a week. In recent years, Impossible Foods has redefined burger ingredients and reduced production costs. Brown specifies:
The cow is a very mature technology. But one huge advantage we have over the cow when it comes to producing meat is our ability to improve its properties and quality in every respect.
Meat from animal cells
Another startup, trying to turn nature upside down, is Memphis Meats. The Bay Area company is taking a different approach: growing meat in the lab from real animal cells. Uma Valeti, co-founder and CEO explains the Memphis approach this way:
We identify animal cells that have the ability to renew and reproduce faster. We breed in vitro those cells that are most effective in growth, just like a breeder would with animals.
In any event, there is the ultimate intention to remove animals from this trial entirely. Previous attempts to make the meat this way have resulted in incredibly expensive hamburgers, in the thousands of dollars. Memphis Meats hopes to reduce the price of its meatballs from $30 a gram to pennies by the end of the decade.
Bannon, of Fifty Years, which has invested in Memphis Meats, calls this approach "second domestication":
Traditionally we raise animals to harvest their cells to make food or drink. We are now starting to tame the cells themselves.
