Food’s new world – Silicon Valley is about to change our world. Again.
A new revolution has been quietly gathering speed, as a wave of high-tech wunderkinds focuses on one of the most basic human questions: What’s for dinner?
Former software engineers and data experts are joining forces with bioscientists and world-class chefs to drive a paradigm shift that might prove as significant as our progression from a hunting-and-gathering species to an agrarian one.
It’s all about finding ways to deliver new foods that can provide optimal nutrition efficiently and economically, with the ultimate goal of eliminating food scarcity and restoring a healthy ecosystem.
That’s a tall order, but among the companies spearheading the move to fulfill it are Hampton Creek, Solazyme and Soylent. Here’s how each is working to change not just the way we eat, but our very idea of what food is.
The Role of Big Data
High-tech San Francisco company Hampton Creek is working to improve the foods we already eat.
So far, they have two new products on the market, both of which use high-protein yellow peas as an egg substitute. The company’s Just Cookies and Just Mayo sold out at a major supermarket chain in their first two weeks on the shelf.
Behind those products is a team that includes biochemists, molecular biologists, food scientists and data specialists, plus a culinary crew led by Chris Jones of TV’s Top Chef. And their work all takes place within a larger context.
That’s why, in July, the company hired Google Maps’ data mastermind, Dan Zigmond, to head up a project as ambitious as Google’s plan to scan every book ever written: building the world’s largest plant database.
“There are hundreds of thousands of plant species, and each of them encodes about 40,000 or 50,000 proteins,” said Lee Chae, their bioinformatics scientist. “What we want to do is survey these different species for their proteins and the way those proteins function in foods.”
To this end, Hampton Creek is combing the world for plants and bringing them back to the lab, where they’re analyzed for nutritional value, taste, texture and more. It’s a huge big data project that will eventually encompass nearly nine million plants and their subspecies.
The ultimate goal is to use this database to select plants that can provide high quality, nutritious, palate-pleasing food to people at all income levels, while minimizing our carbon footprint.
Nature’s First Food for the 21st Century
Solazyme, a South San Francisco-based company, specializes in developing sustainable oils and ingredients from microalgae.
Algae have been a source of oils, proteins and other vital nutrients for millennia – but here’s the game changer.
By marrying microalgae’s unique nutritional profile with fermentation technology, Solazyme can now produce highly nutritious foods independently of weather and land conditions, in any season, almost anywhere in the world, with incredible speed and minimal impact to the environment.
Their approach to food production reflects their Silicon Valley roots.
So far, the company has created two foods under the brand name AlgaVia™. Whole Algal Protein is a vegan source of protein that is free of known allergens, plus it delivers fiber and micronutrients to foods. Whole Algal Flour is a whole food ingredient that can replace dairy, eggs and oils as ingredients, while lowering saturated fats, calories, and providing a rich mouthfeel.
Mark Brooks, senior vice president of food ingredients, discusses how the AlgaVia™ line represents a quantum leap forward.
“These ingredients break the barriers to achieving healthy and nutritious food, without sacrificing the taste, texture or indulgence that people love,” he said. “We harness microalgae found in nature, feed them abundant plant sugars to produce an entirely new source of protein and healthy oils sustainably.”
And it’s all part of a much larger vision.
“As the population continues to expand – and it’s expected to reach upwards of 8 billion within the next decade,” Brooks said, “new innovations will be required to ensure a food-secure future for our people and planet.”
A Techie Designs the Ideal Meal
Soylent was founded by Rob Rhinehart, a former Silicon Valley engineer. The company began in the Bay Area, but San Francisco’s notoriously high rents drove them south to Los Angeles.
Rhinehart has designed a complete liquid food called Soylent – and he did it exactly the way he would have designed any other high-tech product.
“Many ideas from hardware manufacturing apply to food because it’s a physical product,” he said. “It needs to be designed so that it’s useful and efficient and cheap and safe.”
It was necessity that drove Rhinehart to create his own food. He’d been working intensely on an Internet startup and had little spare time or money. So he ate what a lot of busy people do – burgers, pizza, ramen – and his health was suffering.
“I thought, why can’t we optimize our food to be healthy and convenient and affordable? And I figured maybe we could do that by taking an engineering approach.”
The drink he created restored his health and became his next start-up.
He’s quick to point out that Soylent is not a supplement or a weight-loss product. It’s a complete substitute for food, with every daily requirement from protein and vitamins to enzymes and fiber, designed to keep you healthy even if you eat nothing else.
Sustainability and Food Security
If all of these new-paradigm food companies are turning to plants as the source for better food, it’s not because of vegan or vegetarian sensibilities. They’re concerned with how our current food production practices are affecting the earth and its resources.
Take, for instance, the quarter-pound hamburger. Producing one little patty requires several pounds of corn, more than 50 gallons of water and more than a thousand BTUs of fossil fuel. And while many populations still suffer from hunger, more and more of the world’s food is being fed to livestock instead of humans.
“This is one reason I really admire what Solazyme is doing,” said Rhinehart. “The algae production of food ingredients is leagues more sustainable than using traditional agriculture. I really think that’s the future. It needs to happen because our burden on the environment is unsustainable.”
And at Solazyme, Brooks, too, underscored the importance of sharing this common goal.
“It’s imperative that we all work together,” he said, “pushing innovation and new thinking, to develop nutritional, sustainable, lasting solutions that will benefit our communities and the world.”
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