197. What’s in Your Cart? A Grocery Store Walkthrough of Next-Gen Food Innovation

Ali [00:00:00] food is medicine and the biotech and syn bio categories is important and needs need to come together and hold hands. erum: Hey, Carl. How's it going? karl: Great, Aram. How about you? erum: Oh, I'm so excited. Labor Day is here. I can't believe the summer went by so quickly. karl: It was a busy summer, and yeah, it went by way too fast. erum: Yes. And so here we are at the Grow Everything podcast, where we talk about how biology as technology is transforming every industry and the business that's going along with it. erum: And today we're gonna be doing a very unique episode. we've done some of this before, but it is a mashup, and our theme is going to be food tech. karl: It's super exciting because there's a lot of food tech news that's happening that most people aren't seeing. But we've interviewed a number of people that are in the food tech space, so we thought it would be good for our listeners to get up to speed in terms of, like, what these people are doing and what they're talking [00:01:00] about. karl: There's a lot of developments happening in the food space. erum: so here's how this episode is going to work. We are going to be walking through the grocery store, and We're gonna be looking at the sweetness that hooks you. How is sweeteners changing? erum: You know, we had a great interview with Ally Wang. And then we're gonna go, of course, we see a little bit of color, so those that haven't listened to our bio dye series, which we had a part one and part two, we will link to that in the show notes. We made some playlists on YouTube as well. and then we'll make a pit stop in the produce aisle. erum: So we're gonna see how biotech has influenced different colors of produce, which is gonna be super fun. And then, of course, the protein at the center of the plate. So lots of alternative proteins, but there are a couple companies that are doing it the most amazing way, and this is gonna be a shout out to Paul Shapiro and Eben Bayer. erum: and then, of course, we'll go upstream to where ingredients come from, and then how they land on the shelf itself and get [00:02:00] into your cart. karl: So listeners, what we'll suggest you pay attention to is the fact that a lot of this is being done through fermentation, and fermentation's a form of manufacturing. karl: And people say that the beginning of fermentation is the beginning of civilization. When man learned to make wine and beer and grow things, that was really when he started to be a much more sophisticated being on this planet. So fermentation is manufacturing, it's not farming. karl: And problems that exist in the world become feedstocks. and then at the end of it, you know, taste and performance are really what decides everything. erum: All right. So let's grow. first up, sweetness. Allie Wing started at Nike and spent her career at the intersection of healthy living and technology. erum: She now runs Oobli, a precision fermentation company making sweet proteins, proteins that evolved in berries in West Africa and Southeast Asia that were evolved to win over primate taste buds, which is super cool. I love

[00:03:00] this idea of how fruits and vegetables evolved to suit the needs of our ancestors from back in the day. erum: And the first product that Oobli had launched was a chocolate bar with 70% less sugar, and then sweet teas were next. So let's hear from Allie Wing of Oobli.

Ali sweet proteins were, found in fruits and berries. Largely considered by scientists as probably having evolved with humans. And what we know about them is they were plants and berries that were growing in precious ecosystems and they were dying because they weren't being attractive enough to the apes and gorillas that were necessary to come eat them and spread their seed. And so they biologically got busy figuring out their solution. And their solution was, it's too expensive for me to carry carbohydrates and be sweet and attractive but I figured out. i could Produce one tiny little protein and that actual protein tricks only apes gorillas in humans, um T1 and R one taste receptors, which is where we experience sweet in our [00:04:00] mouth. , But. Like any other protein, once you swallow it, , it unfolds and digests just like any other protein. karl: So we were lucky enough to try these Oobli candy bars, and I actually really loved them. I love the way they taste. And what I love about Allie's story is that she's swapping 15 cubes of sugar for a little bit of a sprinkle of a protein, and your eye's gonna decide whether you're gonna eat this thing before your tongue does. erum: And so of course, sweetness is an attraction, but you do eat with your eyes first. So next up is color, and we have highlighted two founders growing color in fungi. karl: so any of you who've listened to our color series know that red dye is being banned by the end of 2026, and every food brand needs color. karl: Ricky Cassini grew up in Argentina's corn fields. He became a professor of logistics, and now he runs Mychroma, and he's growing food colorants in fungal biofactory with fermentation giant CJ. [00:05:00] And from our bio series, Garrett Tolburg of Chromologic shows what these processes actually look like

Ricky 60% of the food D market, is natural. overall, right? The other 30 40% is synthetic, artificial, and the main reason is not because of the volume or tons, it's of the dollar value, natural dyes are really expensive and, the synthetic ones are really cheap and are widely used. What is good is that, fermentation becomes more like manufacturing, rather than farming. I believe it's the future of, ingredient production, especially high value ingredient production like colors, flavors, fragrances, and more.

Gerit So we're using a filamentous fungi and we're putting that in a bioreactor and then we're fermenting this fungi. And we're just making a red color. So you have to picture a bucket with water, you put it in the fungi, you stir, and then the water turns to wine from a color perspective. So you have this really nice red wine looking liquid. Then we have some different [00:06:00] filtration steps where the fungus, goes off, some impurities we filter away, and in the end we dry the liquid, and then we have a very nice red, almost black powder that we then, can ship to our potential customers so they can put it in their end product, like their cake mix or their sausage mix karl: Iram, you lived this problem. You baked a rainbow birthday cake that came out of the oven with no color in it, and Riki solved that problem. erum: Yeah, exactly. Now, my chroma grows its color in a tank, which is amazing, and our next guest grows color in a tomato, and he does not apologize for it. erum: Nate Pumplun is CEO of Norfolk Healthy Produce, that was spun out of the UK's John Innes Centre by plant scientists Cathie Martin and Jonathan Jones. So they created this to have a high antioxidant purple tomato, so we know, like, the reds and the purples have that property, and [00:07:00] it's actually the same equivalent nutrients as blueberries and acai, and they did this by just switching on a gene from an edible flower. erum: And what was really interesting and exciting for Nathan and his team is that they just completed their FDA review, and this is all on the heels of a USDA green light, so they have full clearance to commercialize. From the archive, Nate Pumplun and the purple tomato

Nathan So conventionally bred purple tomatoes, this is done through wild introgressions. It means that doesn't bring in good qualities for eating but it does bring in the purple. That purple needs to be activated by light. When you get a purple skin tomato at the store, the top is purple, but the bottom is red. And then when you cut it in half, it's red. So in our purple tomato plants, when the fruit first starts to form on the vine, it comes out, it's green. And, when you grow tomatoes, typically they're green and then they start to turn orange and then they turn red. Our tomatoes are programmed genetically through development to turn purple instead. Consumers are [00:08:00] very open to products like ours. They're very open to technologies as long as they understand how they're made, why they're made, what problems they solve. erum: I had tried that salsa at SynBioBeta. You did, too. It was so beautiful, right? We talked about eating with our eyes, that deep royal purple, but the flavor was also amazing. karl: one of my favorite salsas ever, which says a lot because I consider myself to be a salsa connoisseur. But now let's move our story to the center of the plate. karl: Two founders, two kinds of fungi, same rules, but taste very different. Let's talk about those. Paul Shapiro founded Compassion Over Killing in high school. He spent 13 years as a lobbyist. He wrote a book called "Clean Meat." He's a big fan of the podcast, and one of the things he concluded is that technology, not sentiment, is what will end animal agriculture. karl: So he ended up co-founding The Better Meat Co., growing mycoprotein in bioreactors in Sacramento. Just weeks before we aired this replay, [00:09:00] Better Meat Co. raised $31 million in a Series A. Let's let Paul take it away

Paul what if you could achieve a meat like texture without fractionation, isolation, extrusion, and all these other expensive processes, and instead achieve it merely through fermentation? We take tiny microscopic fungi, we subject them to a special kind of biotech fermentation that within less than one single day. From the time we inoculate our reactor to the time that we harvest it less than one single day, it produces a myprotein. A myprotein has more protein than eggs. More iron than beef, more zinc than beef, more potassium than bananas, and it naturally contains vitamin B12, you get this superfood erum: So Paul grows his protein in a bioreactor. Eben Bayer grows his on a mushroom farm, 80,000 pounds of wood chips at a time. So Eben Bayer founded Ecovative, and his MycoForest Food brand makes MyBacon from oyster [00:10:00] mushroom mycelium. And when this was recorded, they just raised $11 million. And erum: and they were growing five farms across the US, Canada, and the erum: Netherlands at this time, and I also saw a news story that they are now distributing MyBacon in very large supermarkets, so congratulations to Eben and his team. Let's hear from him on the story of MyBacon and MycoForest Foods

Eben We've consistently done that in our home market we also sell across nationwide in 1300 stores now at three times the rate of the market leader in plant-based bacon, about 50% higher price. So whether you're comparing us to pork, bacon, or folks have had a chance to really appreciate the product we really perform well. And the customers like the product. it's the same simple ingredients. It's salt, it's sugar, it's oyster mushroom, mycelium some smoked flavor. And then, organic coconut oil, karl: So carbs in, protein out. karl: I'm a huge fan of Eben in My Forest Foods. The bacon is delicious. And as you mentioned, wood chips in, bacon out off of these 100-foot [00:11:00] beds. The feedstock makes the business, and our next guest found a feedstock that's better than cheap. It's an environmental problem that oceans hand out by the millions of tons. erum: we're gonna hear from Mari Granström, an industrial chemist from Finland and a scuba diver who watched algae blooms take over her favorite dive sites and asked the chemist's question: What's in that biomass? She calls herself the chief executive activist of Origin by Ocean, which turns invasive sargassum into white powder ingredients for cosmetics, nutraceuticals, and more. erum: Let's hear from Mari.

Mari So we have between 40 to 60 million tons of sargassum blooming every single year. The Caribbean. Gulf of Mexico. And in the US. I remember reading the UN report like 12 to 15 years ago. They were writing about sargassum that this might become the next huge [00:12:00] environmental problem, of this world. And so it happened. So it's a great opportunity to tap in we take it as it is, it's dried material, we have to wet it, and then we start processing it. And out comes white powders. Our products, they don't look like seaweed, they don't taste like seaweed.

Mari And they don't smell like seaweed. And that's the beauty of it. the white powders then go to our customers and they are making cosmetics or hygiene products, textile printing processes and nutraceutical. karl: One thing I love about Mari is that she basically checks herself when it comes to hype. She says, "This has its place." And Mari says change happens through business, which is something that I tend to definitely agree with. So let's talk about the business end. karl: What actually gets a food product on the shelf? Daniel Scharff did global pricing for Mars Chocolate. Then he joined Just Egg in the early food tech days. Then he ran a beverage company as a CEO. Finally, he built Startup CPG into the world's biggest company for [00:13:00] emerging brands. karl: Free to join, sponsor-funded, and built on radically open help. Let's let Daniel take it away.

Daniel The things that are gonna make a product successful are gonna be in this order. Number one, great branding and packaging and number two, taste. And you know, if you nail those two things, I really think you could be competitive anywhere as long as you know how to then communicate those things to people. The people that I see be the most successful are very. Scrappy founders who are giving it all, and they're resourceful and they know how to build their network and use that network. You cannot stop them from pounding the pavement, including going and pitching individual stores and then demoing in those stores, and then using that to then get into a distributor and then Really knowing how to play that one lily pad to the next game with just ferocious intensity. erum: All right. There we had it. Six stops, one grocery store. We [00:14:00] talked about the sweetness that hooks you, the color you see, the tomato that wears its biotech proudly in the shade of purple, proteins at the center of the plate, ingredients from the sea, and the shelf where it has to land. karl: And so the through line, as we mentioned at the beginning, is fermentation is manufacturing, not farming. Problems, environmental problems become feed stocks, petroleum dyes, beet fields, wood chips, invasive sargassum, and nobody wins on sustainability alone. It only takes .03 milligrams of sweet protein to sweeten a tea or chocolate bar. karl: With, Ricky's, dye, you get 58 times coloring power compared to petroleum dyes. Taste and price, branding and taste, bio always wins by being better. erum: Yeah, and then kind of the big takeaway is the aisles won't look very different. Everything about how it got there will be, though. erum: So follow us on Substack. Come find us at World Bio Markets in Omaha this September. [00:15:00] Use the code GROW EVERYTHING for 25% off. karl: All right. Let's grow. erum: Let's grow