In vitro meat is coming online

Startups are making home cooking more automated, customized, and health-conscious than ever.

Smart Sous-Vide Machine from Mellow

From the invention of the microwave to the emergence of frozen foods, CPG and consumer product companies are always innovating in the kitchen.

But in many ways, the fundamentals of cooking haven’t changed in decades. Humans primarily use “regular” ingredients (largely harvested from livestock and plants), ovens, and stovetops to make their meals.

That may soon change, however, as tech begins to infiltrate the kitchen in more disruptive ways than ever before.

Next-generation ingredients, robotic appliances, novel cooking methods, and other technology have the potential to fundamentally change what we eat and how we cook it.

A new kind of home ‘chef’

Learning to cook takes time and effort … unless you’re a robot.

Moley Robotics has created a fully automated, intelligent cooking robot capable of precisely creating meals. The system – which takes the form of an end-to-end, capsule robotic kitchen – is trained via artificial intelligence to “know” recipes, and to execute them using the same movements as a master chef.

In its at-home consumer model, the Moley kitchen is operable either by smartphone or via a touch screen equipped to the system.

Once users select a recipe, the Moley’s robotic arms work with a plate of ingredients to prepare a meal – slicing, dicing, and stirring ingredients from behind an enclosed inside glass screen (which slides across the capsule kitchen for safety when the robot is in use).

When not in use, the robotic arms retract into the hood of the unit, away from view.

Of course, robotic kitchens have already infiltrated the restaurant space – with companies like Momentum Machines, CafeX, and Eatsa using robots to automate the food-service environment.

But the systems from those three companies (and others) automate food cooking in an industrial, assembly-line manner. Moley’s system, on the other hand, mimics human cooking: The machine’s robotic arms perform cooking activities on a regular countertop, and the tactile sensors equipped to the robot’s hands behave just like fingers – even switching the stove top controls on or off.

Moley is one of the first robotics companies to bring a humanoid cooking bot to market for at-home use; the consumer version of the Moley is expected to launch in 2018.

With a reported $100,000 price tag, however, the Moley isn’t likely to see mass adoption any time soon. But a more limited approach to robotic cooking may become feasible at a consumer-friendly price point with smaller countertop devices.

The following machines are still in prototype, but would likely retail for several thousand USD:

Gammachef is developing an all-in-one system for creating one-pot meals, including pastas, risottos, or stews. Users load bar-coded plastic containers filled with precut food into the machine and select their desired digital recipes (and meal times) via app. At the right time, the machine heats a pan and adds ingredients in the orders or portions dictated by the recipe, with a robotic arm doing the necessary stirring and mixing.

Nymble is also testing an automated, one-pot cooking device, but one with the potential to become “a robotic personal chef.” Nymble users will select from a predetermined set of recipes, “feed” the ingredients to the machine, and customize spice quantities, times/temperatures, and sauce consistencies to their liking.

Over time, Nymble intends to deploy that user preference data into an artificial intelligence system and use it to train the device to cook food tailored to a person’s individual tastes.

You can see some of Nymble’s R&D efforts in the video below.

Notably, each of the robotic innovations above are marketed by their makers as tools for simplifying home cooking to make it faster and easier – not as “disrupting” or eliminating it.

Gammachef, for one, positions its product as a celebration of tasty and healthy homemade food and says it “prepares food just like real people do.”

But as Gammachef’s copy implies, other kitchen inventions are pushing beyond automating chopping or soup-stirring. They are reimagining what the meal is made of.

Novel (and eco-conscious) ingredients

Startups and established companies have been tinkering with ingredients and developing alternative foods for years, whether they’re creating synthetic sweeteners and flavorings or “replacement foods” like Soylent.

New ingredients are gaining traction on grocery store shelves – many with an emphasis on plant-based ingredients or “trending” spices and flavors.

Among food startups that raised funding in the last 2 years, for example, we have seen a focus on flavors like Moringa, Maca, and Monkfruit (all stemming from South America and Southeast Asia).

Beyond using more niche flavors and unique spices in products, some startups are aiming to replace the protein most of us get from livestock with protein from a less expected source: Insects.

Insect-based proteins are touted as a healthier and more sustainable alternative to animal proteins, since insects can be grown in more humane, energy-efficient conditions than livestock.

You can already buy cricket-based snacks from startups like Six Foods and Chapul at health food stores.

In addition, these startups are working to make insect-based versions of common ingredients:

Entomo Farms is a wholesale supplier of cricket flour, which people can use in place of real flour in many recipes. Since cricket flour packs 7 grams of protein per ¼ cup compared to just 4 grams in all-purpose flour, using cricket flour in baked goods can be more nutricious than typical flour.

Flying SpArk is an edible-insect company selling the benefits of fruit fly larvae as an animal-protein replacement. The company sells dried larvae, as well as two larvae-based protein powders and a cooking oil.

There’s even a company helping you breed and harvest your own protein source on your countertop. The Hive ($579), from startup Livin Farms, is an all-in one solution for growing “healthy, delicious and sustainable mealworms in your home.”

But it’s not just insects that offer an alternative protein source. Researchers and tech companies are also working to develop engineered ingredients that can replace animal protein sources entirely.

Hinoman, based in Israel, is developing and cultivating Mankai, a proprietary, protein-rich, whole-leaf vegetable grown using sustainable hydroponics. (Mankai contains 45% complete whole vegetable protein as well as many vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, and other nutrients found in so-called superfoods like kale and spirulina). Mankai has already captured the attention of “big food”: In March 2017, Japanese frozen food-to-seasonings giant Ajinomoto invested $1M in Hinoman and acquired exclusive sales rights for Mankai in Japan.

Engineered food

Researchers in the growing field of cellular agriculture are going even further by producing agricultural products from cell cultures.

New Harvest, a leading 501c(3) research institute in the space, is funding university researchers who are creating things like milk, eggs, and meat using organic protein and fat molecules, rather than relying on any living or (once-living) cells.

To do so, researchers are replicatinng organic biological processes.

Take milk, for example:

Milk is usually made by keeping female cows in a lactating state, but it can also be “brewed” at the molecular level using genetically altered yeast: By inserting the DNA blueprints for casein, a milk protein, into the yeast microbe, the yeast can produce casein that’s identical to the casein that cows make.

Similar processes extend into the production of “cultured meat.” Cultured meat is produced in the lab using cell cultures: Scientists can extract a small number of normal cells from a chicken (or other farm animal) and allow them to naturally multiply in vitro, in petri dishes, while soaked in nutrients.

After the cells multiply, scientists can expose them to additional nutrients and manipulate properties like their size and protein content. The resulting cells can then be harvested, seasoned, cooked, and consumed just like any other boneless, processed meat.

And as the video below explains, “farming” cultured meat is simpler and less resource intensive than traditional livestock farming.