Changes Are Needed to Bring New FoodTech Products to Market in North America

At last week's The Spoon FoodTech event at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel focused on "A Peek into the Future of Food" with three CEOs in the FoodTech space - Paul Shapiro of The Better Meat Co., Eric Schulze of Good Humans Design Agency, a former regulator and VP of Global Regulatory and Public Policy at Upside Foods, and Hirotaka Tanaka, of UnlocX in Tokyo.

We talked about the necessity of a bolder vision for the FoodTech sector in the U.S., a greater focus on sustainability overall, and the need for new models for collaboration, in order to get the foods of the future on to the market and on to consumer plates.

In the discussion, we got to the heart of the emerging FoodTech innovations that stand to shape not only companies and industries, but the entire global food system. These include alternative proteins, like those derived from biomass or precision fermentation, foods developed with CRISPR technology, and cultivated meat. 

Much of the discussion focused on how modern-day FoodTech is just the continuation of an ancient practice to re-imagine or improve the foods that we eat.

"To me, food technology is an ancient practice that we continue to get better and better and more precise at, whether its fermentation, whether its hybridization of wheat that led to billions of people not starving to death, or whether its creating meat without animals," said The Better Meat Co.'s Shapiro.

The panel cited early industry and consumer opposition to other FoodTech innovations -- "manufactured" ice and umami seasonings like MSG -- that are now broadly used globally. Shapiro added "[if] there's a new food technology, then how do you introduce it to people? If it tastes good, and it is determined to be safe, and people can afford it, there's a lot of people who will eat it." 

Often, startups and legacy food producers, and even entire industries, are cast in opposition to each other. We have seen this in the U.S. with plant-based dairy, with GMO foods, and most recently cultivated meat, where there has been state-level legislation in Florida and Alabama to ban the manufacture, sale, or distribution of cultivated meat. How do you establish "rules of the road" for crafting policy, deploying resources, and driving commercialization?

"Come to the table in good faith, have solutions at the ready, and be ready to compromise," said Schulze, referencing his time at Upside Foods. "Compromise should be painful," he added. Regarding cultivated meat, he pointed out that there are too few options in the U.S. market to make a judgment call on acceptance.

Tanaka spoke about how the ecosystem in Japan has taken an integrated approach, bringing government, industry, and other stakeholders together to invest in, develop, and commercialize new FoodTech foods -- in fact, Japan was the first nation to have not one, but two gene edited food products in the market -- a high GABA tomato and a sea bream. 

"In Japan, we have a lot of cutting edge technologies, techniques, and culture that can be used globally," said Tanaka. "We created an ecosystem, a community approach [...] to create an environment for new foodtech adoption." He shared that Japan has taken this multi-faceted approach in the areas of future proteins, cross-sector manufacturing capacity building, and the creation of a digital food platform to share learning and resources.

Here in the U.S., the panel cited both EV policy and the Biden Administration's investment in the bioeconomy, as strong examples of how government can support and incent organizations to develop innovative technologies and products.

"Being a former Fed myself, the government has to have skin in the game. Subsidies have to be issued to cultivated [meat] companies, or in this case, removed from conventional, which is very unlikely politically," said Schulze.

From my perspective, new models for collaboration are needed here in North America to nurture startups and university researchers through the expensive and time-consuming R&D phase, so that consumers and customers alike can benefit from the innovation. One organization leading the way in this is MISTA. The Spoon's "A Peek into the Future of Food" Panel brought forward both a vision and tested approaches for driving progress in the FoodTech sector.