Meat, fish and savory ingredients

Dissecting cultivated meat regulation part 2: What’s working in the US and Singapore, and what’s not?

16-Feb-2023 By Flora Southey

Both the US and Singapore have seen cultivated meat products pass through their regulatory processes, yet the two governments approach novel foods in different ways. Which challenges and opportunities exist within these regulatory frameworks, and what...

'These products will only take a significant portion of the global market when they can compete with conventional meat on taste, price, and convenience': alt protein sector looks for solutions amid mixed investment figures

16-Feb-2023 By Oliver Morrison

Alt protein advocates are calling for governments to ‘step up’ to build a ‘more sustainable food system’ after data showed that global investment in sustainable proteins decelerated last year and sales of meat alternatives dipped in some countries.

Egg prices continue to climb at slower pace alongside those for other food consumed at home, propping up food inflation, CPI reveals

14-Feb-2023 By Elizabeth Crawford

Overall US food prices accelerated in January over December after steadily slowing month-over-month between September and December, but the opposite is true for food consumed at home, which cooled in January – continuing a trend that began in December,...

Soup-To-Nuts Podcast: What does plant-based protein need to cross the trough of despair?

13-Feb-2023 By Elizabeth Crawford

Alongside falling sales, volume and units, plant-based meat has slid into the trough of despair, also known as valley of disillusionment or sorrow, and while it is unclear if the category has hit bottom yet, many stakeholders already are looking for a...

OTA’s Farm Bill wish list focuses on creating responsive organic standards, reinforcing organic supply chains and enhancing conservation

13-Feb-2023 By Elizabeth Crawford

The Organic Trade Association is calling for Congress in the next Farm Bill to further strengthen the supply chain and integrity of the organic program and support research and adoption of conservation and climate-smart programs, which it says will help...

Tofurky acquired by Morinaga Nutritional Foods in ‘an expected move’ for plant-based pioneer

11-Feb-2023 By Ryan Daily

Following in the footsteps of its competitors Field Roast and Lightlife, Tofurky announced its acquisition, along with its sister brand Moocho, by US-based tofu manufacturer Morinaga Nutritional Foods. This deal was “an expected move” for the third largest...

Tabasco spices up salads with TikTok-influenced, LTO hot sauce dressing

10-Feb-2023 By Ryan Daily

With a new product collaboration with TikTok influencer Tinx, Tabasco is looking to “normalize hot sauce as dressing,” as Lee Susen, chief sales and marketing officer at McIlhenny Company (Tabasco’s parent company), told FoodNavigator-USA.

Boldly casts its line in plant-based seafood market with konjac products

09-Feb-2023 By Ryan Daily

Plant-based seafood brand Boldly will launch in May a line of vegan products with the "incredibly versatile" Southeast Asian root vegetable konjac, including calamari, salmon and tuna sashimi, shrimp and crab sticks, Boldly Founder and Co-founder...

Dissecting cultivated meat regulation part 1: What’s working in Europe and Israel, and what’s not?

08-Feb-2023 By Flora Southey

Achieving pre-market authorisation to put cultivated meat on people’s plates is no easy feat. With different geographies handling the regulatory process in their own unique ways, we dissect how it works in the EU and Israel, and ask how these systems...

The researchers brewing lipids to transform waste into food

07-Feb-2023 By Oliver Morrison

Researchers say they are using ancient technology to turn agricultural waste into fats. They say the approach could help the sustainable protein industry recreate the flavours of meat and has the potential to replace palm oil or other tropical oils.

Tyson’s iconic chicken segment’s margins tighten in face of ‘unpredictable and sizeable’ market swings

07-Feb-2023 By Elizabeth Crawford

Tyson Foods remains optimistic about rebuilding the competitiveness of its chicken business, which includes its iconic eponymous brand, despite what the CEO called a “hit in the mouth” in the first quarter from weaker-than-expected demand for poultry...

Behind the 'world’s first 100% cultivated pork steak'

03-Feb-2023 By Oliver Morrison

UK scientists have made headlines after claiming to make the world’s first 100% cultivated pork steak.

The EVERY Company investor Anne Hathaway's star power raises consumer awareness, acceptance of ‘animal-free’ protein, precision-fermentation

02-Feb-2023 By Elizabeth Crawford

Actress Anne Hathaway’s investment in food-tech startup The Every Co., announced yesterday, brings more than capital – it also brings star power that the company’s CEO says he hopes will raise consumer awareness – and acceptance – of animal-free proteins...

Kerry’s 2023 Taste & Nutrition charts explore sriracha’s rise & guava, sesame, dulce de leche growth

01-Feb-2023 By Ryan Daily

After nearly two decades of first appearing in fast-food restaurants across the US and becoming a go-to favorite for spicy aficionados, sriracha today is not only an established flavor that many consumers love, but according to Kerry’s Taste & Nutrition...

Euromonitor cracks the lid on canned seafood TikTok craze

30-Jan-2023 By Ryan Daily

What’s old is new … or so the saying goes. And for canned seafood products, they might be the newest/oldest thing on the block, with sales increasing 9.7% to $2.7 billion in 2022, as Euromonitor International senior research analyst Miri Eliyahu recently...

Alt protein brand Meati Foods spreads its roots, opens ‘Mega Ranch’

26-Jan-2023 By Ryan Daily

With the opening of a new facility, dubbed the “Mega Ranch,” fungi-based startup Meati seeks to place its mushroom-root-based, sliced meat product in “tens of thousands of stores” in 2023, company co-founder and CEO, Tyler Huggins, told FoodNavigator-USA

FDA proposes lead limits in baby food – but do they go far enough and are they achievable?

25-Jan-2023 By Elizabeth Crawford

FDA’s long-awaited guidance for limiting lead concentrations in packaged food for babies and toddlers published yesterday estimates a reduced exposure risk upwards of 27%, but according to some stakeholders this isn’t high enough.

News In Brief

FDA asks experts to review seafood safety for children through health equity lens

23-Jan-2023 By Elizabeth Crawford

Recognizing the cultural significance of seafood varies among different groups of Americans, FDA has asked an expert panel to consider health equity and environmental justice issues in their review of children’s exposure to toxins from seafood.

Unilever drives market share up 10pp by pruning innovation pipeline, product portfolio to do more with less

13-Jan-2023 By Elizabeth Crawford

Unilever is steadily gaining market share, boosting sales in fast-growing categories, lowering the cost of experimentation and improving its consumer engagement by doing more with less, CEO Alan Jope touted during the company’s investor day last month....

Egg prices surge even as inflation slows across the board, including for groceries

13-Jan-2023 By Elizabeth Crawford

While economists and investors celebrate a slowdown in overall inflation in the US, including for food at home, the price of some grocery staples continues to rise – most notably that for eggs, which increased a staggering 11.1% in December over November,...

Meat alternative producer No Meat Factory raises $42m, gears up to open second production facility

12-Jan-2023 By Elaine Watson

Canadian meat alternative producer No Meat Factory has closed a $42m series B round as it gears up to open a second factory, and says it is seeing significant demand for high-quality capacity, despite the recent slowdown in sales at US retail.

Corn prices to stay elevated as global supplies ‘remain tight’

12-Jan-2023 By Teodora Lyubomirova

Procurement intelligence and analytics provider Beroe predicts that corn prices will remain high due to supply chain disruptions and increasing production costs.

Consumer perceptions: How does cell-based meat compare to plant-based, insects, and meat itself?

10-Jan-2023 By Flora Southey

What do Dutch consumers think about cultured meat compared to its conventional counterpart, fish, insects, and plant-based meat alternatives? Researchers investigate.

Impossible Foods hires new chief demand officer: 'One budget. One mission. One team... No fiefdoms. No territories. No silos'

09-Jan-2023 By Elaine Watson

Echoing a move he made while at Chobani when he took charge of a new ‘demand’ department, Impossible Foods president and CEO Peter McGuiness has hired CPG industry veteran Sherene Jagla as its first chief demand officer as part of a plan to integrate...

The 'college diet': Soup sales surge as shoppers seek affordable meals and comfort

21-Dec-2022 By Elizabeth Crawford

Soup season is in full swing as temperatures across the country drop and cold and flu cases rise. But staying warm and reinforcing their reserves when sick aren’t the only reasons sales of soup are up significantly this year over last, according to new...

SPECIAL REPORT: Plant-based dairy and meat by numbers; declining trends continue, but pockets of growth remain

16-Dec-2022 By Elaine Watson

New data from IRI and SPINS shows continued steep declines in sales of refrigerated meat alternatives but pockets of growth in frozen products and some plant-based milk, cheese, and yogurt subcategories, which do not all behave in the same way (spoiler...

What is the environmental impact of cultivated meat? LCA sheds new light, says SCiFi Foods

15-Dec-2022 By Elaine Watson

Does cultivated meat have a lower environmental impact than conventional meat? Given that no one is yet operating a commercial scale facility, definitive data is not yet available. However, a life cycle assessment (LCA) conducted by Ohio State University...

STARTUP NATION PART THREE: Israeli food startups to watch, from animal-free dairy to designer sweet proteins

14-Dec-2022 By Elaine Watson

In part three of our gallery of highlights from FoodNavigator-USA's recent trip to Israel, we profile startups exploring everything from high-tech indoor vanilla cultivation to the manufacture of no-sugar-added snack bars using compression and ultrasonic...

BELIEVER Meats breaks ground on ‘largest cultivated meat production center in the world’ in North Carolina

08-Dec-2022 By Elaine Watson

Israeli startup BELIEVER Meats (formerly Future Meat Technologies) has broken ground on a 200,000-square-foot facility in Wilson, North Carolina, that it claims will be the largest cultivated meat production facility in the world with the capacity to...

Orbillion Bio teams up with Solar Biotech to scale up cultivated meat platform in the US

07-Dec-2022 By Elaine Watson

Berkeley-based Orbillion Bio – which is carving a distinct path in the nascent cultivated meat industry by concentrating on premium ‘heritage’ breeds from Wagyu to elk – has teamed up with bioprocessing specialist Solar Biotech to scale up production...

WATCH: SuperMeat CEO on cultivated meat metrics: ‘We have a trajectory to cost parity, and I'm not just talking about beef, I'm talking about chicken…’

01-Dec-2022 By Elaine Watson

What’s the most efficient way to make meat, outside of an animal, at scale? Startups in the nascent cultivated meat space are deploying multiple approaches from hybrid strategies combining cell biomass and plant-based protein, to tissue engineering and...

What does FDA’s greenlight of cultivated meat mean for Europe? ‘There are worldwide implications’

30-Nov-2022 By Flora Southey

In the US, a cultivated meat product has successfully completed the FDA’s pre-market safety review, moving it one step closer to commercialisation. What implications does this regulatory greenlight have for Europe’s cell-based meat sector?

Can a rail strike – and by extension food shortages on shelves – be avoided?

29-Nov-2022 By Elizabeth Crawford

Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle promise to push forward this week legislation to divert a looming national freight rail strike that threatens significant job and financial losses and which could snarl still fragile supply chains, including...

Holiday grocery shopping: Consumers swap name brands for private label

28-Nov-2022 By Mary Ellen Shoup

As inflation continues to bite, private label is increasingly becoming a go-to option for shoppers, finds Daymon.

Consumers turn to mass, club as they seek lower grocery prices amid rising inflation

21-Nov-2022 By Elizabeth Crawford

Consumers feeling pinched by rising inflation are shifting where they shop for food, what they buy and how many items they place in their carts – prompting retailers to rethink and often reduce their product mix, reveals IRI sales data crunched by 210...

Target deals with an increasingly price sensitive shopper: 'We see our guests holding out for and expecting promotions more than ever,' says EVP

21-Nov-2022 By Mary Ellen Shoup

Caught between providing value for its increasingly price sensitive shopper and generating healthy profit margins, Target is identifying new ways to optimize and simplify its business to drive positive long-term growth.

Vow founder: First wave of cultivated meat should delight and intrigue consumers, so why launch with chicken nuggets?

18-Nov-2022 By Elaine Watson

If you’re making cultivated meat in a bioreactor instead of a living, breathing animal, and you want to introduce it to consumers for the first time, what’s the best launch vehicle? A chicken nugget or fillet, a thin beef steak, a high-value item such...

Many US adults misjudge the quality of their diets, study finds

17-Nov-2022 By Mary Ellen Shoup

While most adults are aware of the importance of fruits and vegetables in their diets, many individuals overestimate the quality of their daily diets, new research from the American Heart Association has found.

Thanksgiving shoppers hunting for savings create opportunity for plant-based protein, discount retailers to capture market share now and long-term

17-Nov-2022 By Elizabeth Crawford

As Americans prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving in a week, many are worried they won’t be able to afford a traditional meal – prompting some to look for alternatives, including plant-based options, and triggering massive promotions by retailers eager for...

‘A watershed moment in the history of food…’ Cultivated meat edges closer to commercialization in the US as UPSIDE Foods gets FDA green light

17-Nov-2022 By Elaine Watson

Cultivated meat – made from animal cells grown in bioreactors instead of living breathing animals – has edged one step closer to commercialization in the US after the FDA sent Berkeley-based UPSIDE Foods a ‘no questions’ letter affirming the safety of...

WATCH: Beyond Meat CEO: ‘Let's not judge the category until we get to price parity...’

16-Nov-2022 By Elaine Watson

“It's very frustrating to hear people talk all the time about transportation and power [in conversations about climate change] when right in front of you three times a day, there is a solution that's more impactful,” observed Beyond Meat founder...

Tyson CEO defends questioned expertise of new leadership, including recently arrested CFO

15-Nov-2022 By Elizabeth Crawford

The CEO of Tyson Foods defended the meat-packing company’s recent leadership shakeup, which included appointments that one investment analyst suggested were not as experienced as their predecessors, including that of a 32-year-old member of the Tyson...

WATCH: Future Meat rebrands as Believer Meats: ‘A cow needs about two acres of land to grow. This [pilot plant] is the size of your living room and it can make a cow a day’

14-Nov-2022 By Elaine Watson

Growing meat from cells in bioreactors instead of living breathing animals should logically be more efficient, as resources are spent on growing only the cells that make up the meat product rather than keeping an animal alive. But it’s never been done...

Soup-to-Nuts Podcast: How are US eating patterns evolving and what opportunities are emerging?

14-Nov-2022 By Elizabeth Crawford

Between Americans’ hectic on-the-go lifestyles pre-COVID, the pandemic prompting everyone to hit pause followed by hybrid work schedules, inflation rates at 40-year highs, and increased expectations that food not only nourish the body but also the soul,...

Beyond Meat to slash operating expenses following 'disappointing' Q3 results, pivots focus to frozen

10-Nov-2022 By Mary Ellen Shoup

Beyond Meat posted a year-over-year net loss of $101.7m on net sales of $82.5m in Q3 2022 as the company executes a "full force pivot" to its operating model, which includes slashing operating expenses to fortify the business and focusing on...

'Unbelievably convenient' Proper Good lands $3.5m in seed funding to fuel retail expansion of shelf-stable meals

08-Nov-2022 By Mary Ellen Shoup

Proper Good, a shelf-stable meal solutions company, has raised $3.5m in seed funding to fuel its retail expansion and new product innovation.

New marketing chief for steadily-growing Impossible Foods to ‘carry the torch’ for otherwise slowing plant-based protein industry

08-Nov-2022 By Elizabeth Crawford

While the high-single to double-digit drop in plant-based meat sales over the past year has prompted significant handwringing among investors, retailers and other stakeholders, category front-runner Impossible Foods is neither surprised about the segment’s...

What happened to drinkable soup? 'It wasn’t the category, it was the product-market fit'

01-Nov-2022 By Mary Ellen Shoup

Chilled drinkable soup had a moment five to six years ago with a flurry of brands entering the niche segment attracting excited investors who backed brands positioning themselves as a fresh meal on the go that consumers could drink like a juice. But what’s...

BlueNalu launches scientific advisory board to accelerate commercialization plans of cell-cultured seafood

28-Oct-2022 By Mary Ellen Shoup

San Diego-based cell-cultured seafood company BlueNalu has set up a scientific advisory board bringing together experts in consumer research, sensory science, product development, bio-engineering, and systems biology to accelerate its commercialization...

Don Lee Farms vs Beyond Meat protein claims case dismissed, three related suits from different plaintiffs still moving through courts

27-Oct-2022 By Elaine Watson

Six days after settling their lengthy legal dispute over the early termination of a supply contact, Don Lee Farms and Beyond Meat have resolved their differences over a separate lawsuit* in which Don Lee accused Beyond Meat of over-stating the protein...