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☆ Consumers spend billions on frozen food. Freezer technology needs to get a lot better
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-09 | by ( Lori Ann Larocco | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

One of the changes in consumer behavior during the pandemic that is sticking is frozen food purchasing. According to the American Frozen Food Institute, the supermarket frozen food department was one of the biggest generators of sales growth in 2022, with a whopping $72.2 billion spent. All of that food — frozen seafood, processed meat, snacks, and ice cream are just some of the items — has to maintain proper temperature throughout a long cold-chain storage pipeline before reaching the home. But this refrigeration technology, critical to the food supply, is often outdated, especially in an era of advanced semiconducting applications across electronics. The company leases these reusable totes to grocery stores and retailers, which can use them to bifurcate a payload into three independent temperature zones.

☆ Gourmet fish bladder races chicken, beef to profitability in Singapore's lab meat push
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-06 | by ( Chen Lin | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +5 min

Two years after Singapore greenlighted lab-grown meat for human consumption, mass production has yet to start. The technological, regulatory and scale barriers to entry for cultivated meat are very high compared to plant-based meat, said Didier Toubia, chief executive of Israel's Aleph Farms, which makes cultivated beef steak. "It's too high and it's embarrassing ... We lose money every time someone enjoys our cultivated chicken," Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick said. Hong Kong-based Avant Meats is more bullish than Eat Just, with ambitions to make a premium food, cultivated fish maw. Fish maw is the swim bladder of a fish, a delicacy prized in China that could fetch up to thousands of dollars per kilogram, depending on its grade.

☆ You can call almond milk 'milk,' but there's a catch, the FDA says
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-23 | by ( Alex Bitter | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Almond milk and other plant-based drinks can be labeled "milk," the Food and Drug Administration said. But if they do, they should explain the nutritional differences between their plant-based milk and cow's milk, the FDA said. It also recommends that plant-based milk makers include a statement on their label clarifying the differences between their product and cow's milk. "We applaud FDA's recognition that consumers understand the difference between plant-based milk and cow's milk and that shoppers choose to purchase plant-based milk specifically because it is not cow's milk," Madeline Cohen, senior regulatory attorney at the Good Food Institute, which advocates for plant-based brands, said in a statement. The National Milk Producers Federation, which represents the US animal milk industry, said the proposed guidance would allow plant-based companies "to continue inappropriately using dairy terminology."

☆ Americans are quitting plant-based meat due to high prices, worse taste, and questionable health benefits
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-15 | by ( Jacob Zinkula | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

In 2020, retail sales of plant-based meat grew 45%, surpassing the $1 billion mark for the first time. Questionable taste and health benefits are scaring off consumersFirst, it's unclear whether the plant-based meat industry has a growing customer base. On the all-important issue of taste, many Americans say plant-based meat disappoints, and some experts think the industry's efforts to compare plant-based meat to the real thing is a losing battle. Additionally, while plant-based meat has environmental benefits, growing research suggests it may not be much — if at all — healthier than traditional meat, something consumers are beginning to suspect. It's also possible that cultivated meat — meat grown from animal cells in a lab — will prove to be the answer, though this innovation could face some obstacles as well.

But to reach its ultimate destination - supermarket shelves - cultivated meat faces big obstacles, five executives told Reuters. California-based cultivated meat company GOOD Meat already has an application pending with the FDA, which has not been previously reported. Regulatory approval is just the first hurdle for making cultivated meat accessible to a broad swath of consumers, executives at UPSIDE, Mosa Meat, Believer Meats, and GOOD Meat told Reuters. But it will take hundreds of millions of dollars for GOOD Meat, for example, to build bioreactors of the size needed to make its meat at scale, Tetrick said. But cultivated meat companies have the advantage that they can claim their product is real meat, Tetrick said.

But persistent inflation and skimpier incomes, coupled with high input costs, will make it a tough year for conscious consumers and the companies that serve them. Take plant-based meat substitutes. They produce 30%-90% fewer emissions than their animal-derived counterparts, but a pound of the stuff costs shoppers twice as much, according to the Good Food Institute, a think tank. The price of U.S. pea protein isolate – a key ingredient in many meat substitutes – rose 10% between April 2021 and November 2022, according to Mintec Benchmark Prices. That would edge meat substitutes closer to their goal of one day costing the same, or less, than their animal-based equivalents.

☆ Lab-grown meat could be served up for dinner soon. What does it taste like?
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-19 | by ( Julia Horowitz | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +11 min

It has a capacity of 600 liters, or 159 gallons, allowing the company to produce 6,000 pounds of cultivated meat per year. Right now, Singapore is alone in allowing the sale of cultivated meat to consumers, having issued a green light in late 2020. Yet delivering on the promise of lab-grown meat won’t just come down to regulators. CNN“The promise of cultivated meat [is] to bring forth a taste and texture component, and to deliver sustainability,” said Gautam Godhwani, managing partner at Good Startup, a Singapore-based venture capital firm that has invested in eight cultivated meat startups. “I think the whole of the cultivated meat industry will go hybrid first,” Ivy Farm’s Dillon said.

☆ Legumes can help fight climate change, but 'bean hesitancy' might stand in the way
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-10 | by ( Morgan Mcfall-Johnsen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Lentils, beans, and peas are low-carbon protein sources that can help prevent fertilizer pollution. People have told her they don't like beans, don't know how to cook them, or don't want to deal with the gas they get from eating them. We don't need to research what they do for the human body — there's mountains of research proving that. We don't need to research how many ways there are to cook it, because there's mountains of cookbooks also proving that. But we do need to understand what is this hesitancy among Americans to eat beans," Ichikawa told Insider.

☆ Juicy Marbles: Can a meat-free filet mignon convert carnivores?
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-12 | by ( Tom Page | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

With its plant-based prime cut steak, Juicy Marbles thinks it’s mastered the art. The company has raised $4.6 million and its filet mignon was launched online in Europe and the United States earlier this year. It plans to begin selling in shops in the European Union, United States and United Kingdom in 2023. A cross section of a cooked Juicy Marbles filet mignon. Just 7% of the world’s soy — the main ingredient of Juicy Marbles’ product — is directly consumed by humans.

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