As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos funnels $60 million into support for alternative meats, Rebellyous Foods founder Christie Lagally has some suggestions, one entrepreneur to another.
“We have the recipes for a lot of products that are of very high quality,” Lagally said of the sector in general. “We need to find tools that take it to a scale that is outside of the scope of the kitchen.”
The Bezos Earth Fund recently shared that over the next five years it will create university centers to research ways to improve environmentally friendly alternatives to the protein that comes from cows, pigs, chickens and other animals. That work will include efforts to reduce manufacturing costs for food production, according to Bloomberg.
The money will pay for the Bezos Centers for Sustainable Protein. The effort is part of the fund’s Future of Food program, which is led by Andy Jarvis. The $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund, aimed at addressing climate change, launched in 2020.
Rebellyous Foods has developed a line of plant-based faux chicken products that includes nuggets, patties and tenders. The Seattle-based company launched seven years ago and has grown to serve 241 major school districts across the U.S. It also sells it products in retail locations on the West Coast.
There are many companies in the space, including Impossible Foods, Beyond Beef, Gardein, Tofurky, Quorn and others.
But for alternative meats to really make an impact, there needs to be R&D into better manufacturing and production technology, Lagally said. That includes new tech for plant-based products like hers, as well as cultivated meat, which is made from animal cells grown in the lab.
In order to dramatically boost production of the alternative meats, one can either use more equipment or make the equipment bigger to handle larger batches of the food.
However, the physics and biology can change as the scale increases, Lagally said. A bigger mixer, for example, generates more friction and can warm ingredients to a point it changes their properties. Growing larger volumes of cells for cultivated meat alters their oxygen and nutrient needs in potentially challenging ways.
But scale is essential.
“The survivability of our industry,” Lagally said, “is heavily dependent on designing our solutions for competing at the scale of the meat industry.”
There’s a history of academic research supporting food production, Lagally said, pointing to the role played by land grant universities over the decades in advancing technology used by the meat industry. The only alternative protein program at a university that she’s currently aware of is in The Netherlands.
“We’re investing in alternative proteins because they need to be successful.”
– Andy Jarvis, director of the Bezos Earth Fund’s Future of Food program
The quest for non-animal proteins is important to helping slow global warming. In the U.S., agriculture is responsible for 10% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, with a significant fraction coming from livestock. Ruminants such as cattle produce and release methane, a particularly potent climate gas, when digesting food.
“Alternative proteins are an imperative if we are to stay within planetary boundaries, if we are to feed 10 billion people within those boundaries,” Jarvis told Bloomberg. “We’re investing in alternative proteins because they need to be successful.”
The struggle has been coming up with products that are good tasting, affordable and healthy — and then getting consumers on board.
The Bezos funding for research centers comes at a time when the alternative meat sector has hit a lull after years of hype and investment.
In 2018, companies developing meat and dairy alternatives landed $1.1 billion in venture capital. By 2021, that sum rose to $6.8 billion, according to PitchBook. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is among the investors in the sector, backing Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat and Upside Foods, a cultivated meat startup.
But many of the products haven’t sold as well as expected, either in grocery stores, restaurants or fast food chains. The amount of capital invested in the sector dropped to $2.3 billion last year.
Rebellyous was able to raise $9.5 million last year, bringing its total funding to approximately $30 million.
Lagally applauded the Earth Fund’s support for her industry.
“A $60 million infusion into R&D for [alternative] meat comes at a critical time,” she said, “and will make an impact to help mature the sector — both in cultivated meat and plant-based meat.”
