Silicon Valley Trends 2015, Part 3: Using Technology to Reinvent Everything About Food

崔绮雯 · 2015-06-11 · English translation

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"Silicon Valley Trends 2015" is a special QDaily reporting series from Silicon Valley. Over the past few decades, hundreds of technology companies have started here, and their technology has touched almost every industry in the world. What are Silicon Valley's tech founders and investors watching and talking about today? This series of trend reports draws on what we saw and heard at dozens of in-person tech events in Silicon Valley this summer, and on our reading of industry figures such as investment and funding numbers.

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"We are going to reinvent food." That was how Douglas Hickey introduced the U.S. Pavilion, which he runs, at the Milan Expo.

In the United States, eating better and more healthily has become a top priority. With two-thirds of American adults overweight, even the federal government is eager to promote new, healthier ways of eating, in a country long known for fried food and fast food.

And as in almost every industry going through change today, when a problem appears, Silicon Valley's tech founders rush to the front. The artificial-meat company Beyond Meat lets people eat "meat" without killing animals. The meal-replacement company Soylent sells a nutritionally complete powder to replace three meals a day. And there are countless food-delivery services, such as Sprig, GrubHub and DoorDash, that are cutting delivery times from 40 minutes to 10 minutes or less.

A company that can solve the problem of eating, even one link in the chain, will benefit humanity and reap rich rewards at the same time. Perhaps that is why big-name tech investors stand behind these companies. Beyond Meat is backed by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Bill Gates; Modern Meadow, another artificial-meat company, is backed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. In fact, judged by the money they raised in their first three years, these fast food-delivery companies are growing faster than Uber did at the same stage.

In Silicon Valley, technology startups are shaking up every link in the chain of eating, from the form food takes and how it is cooked to how it is delivered. Even traditional restaurants are adopting new ways of doing business.

Rebuilding the Structure of Food

The artificial-meat company Beyond Meat has been a star of America's food movement in recent years because it is rebuilding the structure of food itself.

Beyond Meat makes beef and chicken products from plant protein. Public records say the company was founded in 2009, but it had in fact been researching plant-protein synthesis for 10 years. Its products are already on the shelves at Whole Foods, the American organic supermarket. In appearance, texture and even nutritional value, this "artificial meat" is no different from ordinary meat, but what you are eating is not meat at all: it is beans grown by Beyond Meat. Many people now think of Beyond Meat as "meat for vegetarians" (among them Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, one of its investors), but its founder, Ethan Brown, sees it differently. He wants Beyond Meat to become "the meat of humanity's future."

Ethan Brown grew up in Washington in a well-off family that also bought a farm outside the city. As a boy, he spent his weekends with the livestock. After graduating from Columbia Business School, he went to work for a clean-energy company, where he paid close attention to data about livestock. Today, greenhouse gases from livestock raised for food account for 51% of the world's total, and producing meat requires people to raise huge numbers of animals and use huge amounts of water. But for Ethan Brown, another reason matters more: "Farm animals are treated far worse than our pet dogs. Why is that acceptable?"

Beyond Meat's chicken strips

Ethan Brown wants Beyond Meat to replace the meat protein people eat, so that we no longer have to raise and slaughter so many animals for meat, and so that the planet's greenhouse gas emissions fall. He thinks persuading people to eat plant-protein meat for the environment's sake is much easier than the United Nations' campaign to get countries to cut emissions: "Getting countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25% is too hard, but getting people to eat 25% less meat protein is doable."

Modern Meadow's printed meat

Modern Meadow, which is in the artificial-meat business like Beyond Meat, is still testing its technology. The company, which took US$1.4 million in seed funding from Peter Thiel, makes meat by 3D bioprinting, which it believes can shield meat from the effects of the environment and animal feed. So far it has produced only printed meat to put in a hamburger, and founder Andras Forgacs admits that the technology is at an early stage and that the texture is not yet 100% like real meat.

Changing the Form of Food Entirely

The meal-replacement company Soylent has a different, even more radical idea of where the world's food is heading. Soylent is a synthetic nutrition powder: everything a person needs in a day, including protein, fat, sugar and vitamins, is turned into powder and packed into a single bag. In theory, if you drink one packet of Soylent mixed with water each day, you can free yourself from the time and effort of three meals.

This is a packet of Soylent. The text lists the nutrients and their percentages; one packet holds the nutrition a person needs for a day. Soylent also comes with a pitcher for mixing the powder, and the company suggests mixing a full batch at once and keeping it in the refrigerator as "meal prep."

Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart believes this powder is the "real" nutrition that most people will consume in the future, free of extra oil, fat and other impurities, and that eating at restaurants will become a luxury. And because the powder costs less to make than ordinary food, he also believes Soylent can solve the food shortages and hunger the world faces today.

Cooking Beyond Pan-Frying, Deep-Frying and Roasting

"This country is only 200 years old. Its food culture isn't as deeply rooted as China's, which goes back thousands of years, so the market still needs educating." That is how Lisa Fetterman explained to me why she started a "food startup" in the United States. We were having lunch in her office at the time: steak cooked in a low-temperature water bath, served with thin slices of zucchini and mushrooms in a savory sauce with minced garlic and lemon juice. Because it was cooked at a low temperature, the beef was done evenly all the way through, kept its juices and had just the right bite. It was cooked with Nomiku, the smart device made by Lisa's startup.

Our lunch: a medium-rare steak cooked with Nomiku

"See, this is different. This dish has more 'flavor' than ordinary American food," Lisa said as she ate. An American raised in a Chinese-American family, Lisa worked in restaurant management after college. Because she knows how real Chinese food is made and how it should taste, she wants to change the way Americans cook, so that it is no longer just frying, roasting and pan-frying, and no longer just salt, pepper and ketchup. The cooking method behind the Nomiku heating wand is called sous vide. You clip the Nomiku to the side of a pot, fill the pot with water, put in the vacuum-sealed meat, set the temperature, and wait to eat.

The kitchen in Nomiku's office. The green and white devices are Nomikus

Expensive Western restaurants have used sous vide for years, but it costs a lot. Put simply, sous vide means sealing meat in a plastic bag and cooking it slowly in water held at a steady 55-60 degrees Celsius. The process can take a dozen hours or more, takes a lot of labor, and needs equipment costing several thousand dollars. A Nomiku costs just US$200.

A photo of the Cinder oven from the company's website; the product is not yet in mass production

Cinder, another San Francisco company making sous vide kitchen appliances, takes a blunter approach. Its oven-like device cooks meat sous vide according to its thickness and type, and you don't even need water or the bother of vacuum-sealing: just put the meat in and set the temperature with a phone app. Cinder employees told QDaily that the company is swamped, because it has promised to bring the product to market in 2016.

"What we're doing is holding the cooking temperature precisely steady, while making it easy and convenient," Cinder founder Eric Norman has said.

Changing Delivery, and Even How Restaurants Work

"If you follow food startups in San Francisco, you have to try Sprig," Heather Scott, founder of the juice company PurplePlantBlends, told me at a San Francisco meetup for food startups.

Sprig, the company Heather was recommending, is a healthy-food delivery service that started in Silicon Valley. It has its own kitchen and a different menu every day, but the theme never changes: healthy food. Just look at the dishes. One is a tequila-grilled shrimp salad with chopped organic red and green lettuce, sliced radish, potato and avocado; another is medium-rare pan-seared salmon with steamed broccoli and pasta in a ginger-lime sauce. Sprig's dishes are reportedly made by chefs who used to cook in Google's kitchens, and its pitch is "healthy food that isn't expensive." Each of the two dishes above costs US$13, about what one dish costs at an ordinary American restaurant.

Munchery's kitchen

Munchery runs on a similar model to Sprig. It too has its own kitchen and handles the whole process, from organic ingredients to cooking to delivery. But fast delivery and online ordering are only the surface of these two companies. The secret that lets a company like Munchery feed more people than a restaurant can lies in the kitchen we never see: networked equipment at scale, very large smart ovens, inventory managed by database, and ingredients measured to the gram. According to Sherpa Ventures, which invested in Munchery and was an early investor in Uber, Munchery's model cuts out a restaurant's biggest costs, rent and waiters. And because it can model daily order volumes with data, the startup can buy ingredients in bulk and in advance. Munchery has become the largest buyer of ingredients in San Francisco, which earns it the biggest discounts and lowers what it pays for food.

Other delivery services compete not on healthy cooking but on speed. In Palo Alto, a city near San Francisco, the delivery company DoorDash can deliver food in under 10 minutes, four to five times faster than Ele.me, the service we use at home. Only a year old, the company already has eight-figure revenue in Palo Alto, where it is based, and quite a few restaurants get US$500,000 a year in orders from DoorDash alone. Delivery companies like DoorDash have their fans among investors too. Shervin Pishevar is one: he has invested in a string of food-delivery services, including DoorDash, Munchery, SpoonRocket and Order Ahead.

The Startups That Feed Tech Companies

You may not know the names of San Francisco's 19th-century gold miners, but Levi's, which sold them hard-wearing jeans, is still around. San Francisco has grown rich on tech companies, and the food companies that sell to them have taken off too. The one you see most often in San Francisco is PurplePlantBlends, a juice company founded in 2011 with fewer than 20 employees, which supplies healthy food and drinks to Silicon Valley companies.

The name may be new to you, but you will know its customers: Airbnb, Square, Twitter, Skype. Founder Heather Scott told QDaily that the company has drawn attention not only because its products are good, but also because showing up at tech companies' events has done a great deal to grow its business. One of its big customers, Twitter, came from such an event: PurplePlantBlends supplied juice for a Twitter event and was then signed on as a long-term partner.

In fact, we met Heather Scott at a meetup for food startups, where she was a guest speaker talking about her experience as a founder. "We want to serve companies that haven't set up their own juice bars," she said. PurplePlantBlends has a farm and a lab not far from downtown San Francisco. Every day it picks seasonal fruit and vegetables from the farm, makes juice, and delivers it the same day to its customers' offices downtown.

Catch2.me is another food startup that serves only tech companies; it even runs Uber's kitchen. It designs staff-meal programs for startups. To get employees to work more and not waste time going out for lunch or dinner, many tech startups set up several eateries in the office where staff can eat and take whatever they like. Catch2.me founder Zach Yungst sees the company's mission as helping companies build a food culture: good food, a relaxed setting and more choice. Catch2.me has already served 650 companies.

Even traditional food and drink businesses are changing how they operate, pushed by tech companies, the investment climate and shifting tastes. When QDaily attended an in-person event on food entrepreneurship, we found people from traditional restaurants asking the same question: I have a new food or drink brand, so should I raise money first, or go it alone?

They all want to be the next Blue Bottle or Philz Coffee. Blue Bottle, Silicon Valley's hottest coffee chain, closed a new US$70 million funding round just two days ago, bringing its total to more than US$110 million, though it has only 19 shops. Its backer is Google Ventures, the investment arm of Google. And Philz, the café that bills itself as a "slow brand," recently raised US$15 million from tech executives, including Facebook's CTO, to grow its coffee business.