[ad_1]
New School Foods says the muscle fiber and scaffolding technology to produce whole cut fish alternatives is now at a demonstration stage and a test facility could be built. The company’s first product is a fillet that tastes like wild salmon, cooks, tastes and tastes good.
The announcement comes after the Toronto-based plant-based seafood producer secured $12 million in seed funding. Participating investors include Lever VC, Hatch, Good Startup, Blue Horizon Ventures, Clear Current Capital, Alwyn Capital, Basecamp Ventures, Climate Capital, FoodHack/HackCapital, Joyance Partners and Joyful Ventures. New School Foods also has grants from Canadian government agencies, including Protein Industries Canada. The company has now raised a total of $13 million.
The three-year-old company has been swimming in crowded waters lately as startups from around the world enter a market that is poised to be worth $1.6 billion over the next 10 years.
Venture capital is also flowing into the space — with nearly $178 million in investments in the first half of 2022. One of its biggest venture capital investments in alternative seafood last year went into Wildtype, which raised $100 million in a Series B round. His crop of salmon production. Meanwhile, Plantsch, Blue Seafood and ISH Co. are working on salmon alternatives.
“Seafood right now is a new piece of the puzzle in terms of technology,” Christopher Bryson, CEO of New School Foods, told TechCrunch.
Access to technology
Bryson got into alternative seafood five years ago after selling his company, Unata, an e-commerce platform for major grocery stores, to Instacart. Looking for the next “big thing,” he learned about factory farming and animal husbandry, which he described as a “life-changing event.”
“Not enough people seemed to care about it,” he added.
Bryson explained that the startup ecosystem did not reward R&D, so there was no product for investors to taste, instead he took the approach of the angel investor – early technologies, especially proteins that have not yet been used for alternatives.
When looking for research to invest in, what he found wasn’t technology that fully addressed cut proteins, but very few focused on seafood. Bryson saw high-moisture extract being used many times, but found that the high heat used was pre-cooking the food, which didn’t provide the texture and muscle fiber he wanted.
“Therefore, we decided to create a new technology that does not depend on high humidity extraction and is better suited for full cutting,” he said.
New School Foods has introduced a proprietary muscle fiber and scaffolding platform that enables whole-cut meat alternatives to produce the same color, flavor, fat, texture and texture as traditional fish.
Instead of a high-temperature method, the technology relies on a series of cold-based processes to create a product that starts off “raw,” and when cooked, has a flaky texture similar to traditional salmon.
“All these cold steps in our process can use off-the-shelf equipment from nearby industries, but they are used for cooling but not for this purpose, and this is very important, because many things that try to be an alternative to extinction are pretty science fiction. . and there’s no widespread infrastructure,” Bresson said. “When we’re talking about feeding the world in a relatively short period of time, we can feed a lot of people very quickly and reliably using off-the-shelf, large-scale equipment. “
New School Foods Raw Plant Based Salmon Filet Image Credits: New school meals
Reproduction and production
Bryson intends to use the new funding to continue to focus on R&D. Expanding the company’s team to about a dozen people, especially in the area of food scientists, enhancing scaffolding technology; And build a research and production space.
New School Foods broke ground on a Toronto facility last month and said it will announce plans in a few months.
Meanwhile, the company plans to sell through restaurants and drum up demand as it prepares to launch a chef-only pilot program in North America and prepare to roll out the product later this year.
“This year, we’re building our own production facilities in parallel with building our salmon production and processing at restaurants,” Bresson said. “We also know that this technology has potential way beyond salmon, so we don’t intend to stop there.”
[ad_2]
Source link
