Peanut butter, chocolate and coffee samples from Voyage Foods.
Grape seeds are one of the millions of tons of waste discarded by wineries around the world each year. But for alternative food startup Voyage Foods, these grape seeds are essential to making chocolate.
Adam Maxwell, CEO of Voyage Foods, told Insider that as agriculture is impacted by climate change, the company’s team of chemists and food scientists are working to process grape seeds. He said he developed a recipe that produces the same deep flavor as raw cocoa.
Voyage Foods is also developing alternative foods for cocoa and coffee. As the Inter-American Development Bank predicts that global warming will reduce the amount of land available for coffee cultivation, fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases will continue to be used. This threatens cocoa and coffee production.
“These are crops that are likely to be devastated by climate change,” says Maxwell. “So we ran into the question, ‘How can we keep these foods alive in the future?'”
“Molecular Engineering”
Startups like Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and Oatly have become known for their plant-based alternatives to animal meat and milk. These companies market their products as a way to be greener and a way out of ethically questionable supply chains.
In a similar vein, startups that have turned their attention to common household foods like coffee, peanut butter, and chocolate are now working to develop alternative foods.
Voyage Foods announced on April 28, 2022 that it had raised $36 million (approximately ¥4.7 billion, converted to ¥130 to the dollar) in its latest Series A funding round.
The company is preparing to launch direct-to-consumer alternative food sales in the coming months, starting with a peanut butter-like flavored spread with other seeds and grains in June 2022. says Maxwell. He said grape seed chocolate will follow in the summer of 2022, followed by coffee by the end of the year.
Coffee and chocolate are already technically “plant-based” foods, but Maxwell says there are many problems with the companies and systems that produce them.
In addition to the threat of climate change, both cocoa and coffee are water-intensive crops that rely on labor from developing countries.
For example, leading chocolate makers Hershey, Nestlé and Mondelez have come under fire for not doing enough to combat forced labor, including child labor, on their cocoa farms in West Africa. It is
Maxwell said Voyage Foods’ goal is to find alternatives that closely resemble the taste and texture of traditional foods, adding:
“We are basically looking for ingredients that have some degree of similarity and molecular structure to the food we are trying to replicate.”
An alternative food company taking a similar approach is Chile-based NotCo. The company uses ingredients such as cabbage and pineapple to recreate the taste of lactose contained in milk. So does AtomoCoffee, which makes coffee from grape skins, dates, chicory roots, and more.
Voyage Foods’ food processing equipment is similar to that used to make traditional chocolate, Maxwell says.
“We use pretty much the same equipment and production process that is used for traditional food products.The only difference is how we bring out the aroma of the cocoa.”
“I call it ‘molecular engineering,'” says James Stewart, a founding partner at Level One Fund, which invested in the company’s Series A.
Stewart said he was impressed by two aspects of this molecular engineering technique. “Molecular engineering can make food at a much lower cost than conventional food,” he said, “and it’s greener, faster, and can be deployed on a larger scale.”
Competing not only on price but also on climate change
Sylvain Charlebois, a professor of food policy and distribution at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, said that startups, whether Voyage Foods or Atmo Coffee, are looking to sell products like chocolate and coffee. He says that it is not easy to challenge a new genre.
Price could be a big bottleneck, he said. Even if the cost of raw materials and manufacturing is kept low, the costs of building the brand, such as advertising and distribution at retail stores, which are necessary to compete with established companies, are expected to weigh heavily at first.
Even Beyond Meat and Impossible, which have been on the market for years, are still struggling to bring their products closer to the price range of real beef.
For consumers to flock to alternatives like Voyage Foods chocolate, they must be able to afford them and like the alternatives, Charlevoix said. talk. “Although there are some foods developed for the wealthy, I think we really need food innovation that allows for more general product development.”
Maxwell said Voyage Foods is looking to roll out to retail stores in the months to come.
But the long-term goal is to get global food companies to use Voyage Foods’ products as ingredients. Maxwell says he’s already working with a “multi-billion dollar confectionery company” to launch a co-branded chocolate bar in the third quarter of this year.
“Working with these multinationals is the best way we can make a difference, because they are already doing large-scale deployments that would take us a lot longer to do. hey”
*This article first appeared on May 13, 2022.
[original text]
(Edited by Sayuri Daimon)
Source: BusinessInsider
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