Hey, let's buy some steak to cook in 2022
Prime Future 027: The weekly newsletter highlighting tech trends throughout the animal protein value chain.
I usually group meat & poultry innovations in the following categories:
Production - everything that happens on farm to raise livestock & poultry
Processing - everything that happens in plant(s) to disassemble carcasses and transform into final product
Customer experience - how product is marketed, sold, and distributed
But there’s an important sub-category that can get overlooked, largely because there aren’t that many companies innovating around it:
Preservation
Through a Cargill partnership with TechStars, the 2020 Farm to Fork Accelerator’s cohort of startups is about to wrap up their program. IXON, one of the cohort companies, “specializes in advanced sous-vide aseptic packaging (ASAP) that allows protein to remain stable at room temperature for up to two years."
This is especially interesting since sous vide for foodservice is a high growth sub-category within meat. (Or at least it was pre-pandemic, I don't know how this has changed with 2020’s drastic foodservice slowdown but lets assume it’s temporary and will pop back up to pre-pandemic levels.)
From IXON’s newly launched Kickstarter campaign page:
“Our gentle process keeps meat juicy, removing the bacteria and sealing it for easy storage at room temperature for up to 2 years.
Today, the meat industry is facing a crisis as disruptions in the supply chain are causing food spoilage, wastage and safety problems. The situation is further exacerbated by the shortage of butchers and laborers. Our ASAP technology might be the only hope in restoring the health and productivity of the meat industry, as well as ensuring the survival of humans as a species.”
While the founders, um, might be overstating the importance of their technology, still….two years with zero refrigeration necessary? Very interesting.
Given the extreme sensitivity of US retail shoppers when it comes to packaging and the presentation of meat, I’m skeptical about how the visuals of this would be received in the retail meat case but that still leaves a lot of potential use cases, particularly in foodservice or export supply chains.
The only other semi-recent innovation with an extend-shelf-life-objective is Suspended Fresh, a proprietary cold storage process to keep fresh meat fresh for longer. The ultimate value proposition of Suspended Fresh is to allow its boxed meat customers to flex in forward buying or selling meat to avoid/seek seasonal highs/lows in the market that are driven by seasonal demand and the traditional fresh shelf life. A compelling solution that adds market flexibility by improving cold chain storage.
One sign of a dynamic & flourishing meat industry with staying power is a meat industry that tailors to the preferences (whether taste, cost, transaction, etc) of sub-segments of customers & end consumers. Companies like IXON or Suspended Fresh make for interesting pieces to that puzzle in the idea we’ve talked before of the Impossible Foods play that the meat industry should run, of innovating the product itself.
Speaking of, this week Impossible Foods announced it was using some of the $700 million raised this year ($1.4B total) to double its R&D team. With no apparent end in sight to the capital flowing into Impossible Foods & their mission to innovate plant based meat to win on taste and cost (sound familiar?), innovations that increase the fundamental value proposition of meat & poultry are timely.
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ICYMI this week Plug & Play Topeka hosted a first round of startup pitches for admission to the inaugural Animal Health accelerator program. With a focus on animal health, and Cargill as an early partner, this could be an interesting add to the animal agtech ecosystem.
