Generation Next thinking

sophistication of this amazing workforce, along with maturing of technology and infrastructure, is driving a lot of innovation,” she says, adding “and then there are the huge societal problems people want to solve.”

Not every new food technology will make it to the table (consumer response to pulverized crickets was, well, crickets). But several developments are worth watching. Here’s a look at a few food technologies poised to shape dinner plates in the future.

LAB-GROWN MEAT

A decade ago, the world’s first lab-grown beef burger grabbed headlines, not least for its US$330,000 price tag. The patty, developed by Dutch scientist Mark Post, was made by growing more than 20,000 small strips of muscle from bovine stem cells. The burger was cooked and eaten at a news conference in London, England, with mixed reviews. But the point was this: meat can be made without slaughtering animals.

Lab-grown meat (also called cell-based, cultivated or cultured meat) has come a long way since then. For starters, companies have been able to reduce production costs by 99%, according to a McKinsey & Company report titled, Cultivated meat: out of the lab, into the frying pan. On the regulatory front, Singapore was the first country to approve the product for retail sale. Last November, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared its first-ever cultivated meat product (chicken breast developed by California-based Upside Foods) as safe for human consumption. Mintel estimates cultivated meat will be a US$25 billion global market by 2030.

While eating meat born in a Petri dish may address environmental and ethical issues related to livestock production, one could argue people should just eat less meat. But, as with a lot of things, old habits die hard.

“I’ve been in food research for 15 years and the one truism is eating habits are tremendously hard to change,” says Joel Gregoire, associate director, food and drink, at Mintel. “I don’t see people globally eating less meat, so the question is how to change the way we produce meat.”

Gregoire believes cultivated meat can be “a transformative innovation in the food space,” as it helps address sustainability challenges. “Technology has the potential to have a profound impact in making sure we have a reliable food source, without changing a lot of habits people have and having less impact on the planet,” he says.

Promising as it may be, cultivated meat has big barriers to overcome before it hits the mainstream, including technical, regulatory and scale issues. But perhaps the biggest one is the ick factor consumers associate with these products. The Hartman Group’s Food & Technology 2023 report notes that cultured meat “both fascinates and repulses people,” with 45% of U.S. consumers surveyed indicating the top barrier to trying cultured meat products is they don’t taste good.

“There is nothing familiar to consumers about cellular agriculture, and there’s the question: what are these products made from?” says Shelley Balanko, senior vice-president at The Hartman Group. For companies in this space, she adds, communicating that real animal cells are the foundation of cultivated products would be a helpful bridge.

“Consumers would understand these companies aren’t creating something out of thin air, but rather it does have roots in a real animal, in a natural entity,” Balanko says. “But [cultivated meat] is one of those further-out innovations and it will take a lot of effort on the part of those companies to communicate familiarity and underscore the lack of risk. In addition, it will likely take a lot of third-party certification and assurances around safety for this to be fully embraced.”

CELL-BASED PLANTS

Lab-grown meat isn’t the only cell-based product under the microscope: lab-grown plants are another emerging alternative.

“It’s not crazy to think there is a time in the foreseeable future when we would be able to make cocoa, vanilla and coffee [in Canada] and not have to import them,” says CFIN’s McCauley. “We could reduce food miles and have a domestic supply of those kinds of foods by using cellular agriculture.”

Cult Food Science, a B.C.-based investment company focused on cellular agriculture, is an early mover in this space.

The company recently launched its Cult Food Division to develop and commercialize cell-based products in collaboration with affiliate companies. Cult Food Division is launching two products: Zero Coffee, a sparkling coffee beverage made with cell-based coffee, and Free Canada, a “performance gummy” made with cell-based collagen. Both products are meant to be sustainable alternatives without negative impacts on animals and the environment.

“Food is not just being impacted by climate change, it also adds to it,” says Lejjy Gafour, CEO of Cult Food Science. “The way we have produced food historically is now becoming fragile. Zoonotic diseases, loss of land, overuse of water— these are all impacts of increasing environmental effects on our food production. We have to work towards a more resilient food system. And cellular agriculture has the potential to produce food sustainably as we head towards an uncertain future.”

The potential isn’t limited to replicating products, but incorporating cell-based ingredients into other products. “Many products include individual ingredients that are traditionally animal derived that can now be replaced by cell-based components,” explains Gafour.

While cell-based products won’t hit the mainstream overnight—the industry, overall, is focused on scaling production—Gafour is optimistic about the future of food. “Every 1% of change we can affect by making more sustainable options available for consumers adds up,” he says.

Vertical Farms

Another area of progress in the plant world is vertical farming. This indoor farming technology grows crops in vertical layers in controlled environments—and it’s popping up in grocery stores. In 2020, for example, Empire partnered with German-based Infarm to bring in-store farming units to select stores. The partnership was later expanded, with Infarm supplying produce