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Diving overview:
- Better Meat Co., an ingredients company that offers mycoprotein formulations through its Rhiza products, announced significant reductions in production costs.
- The company says it can produce larger quantities of mycelium while reducing feedstock costs, resulting in a reduction of more than 30% across scale. This will allow Rhiza to compete with beef on commodity prices, the company said.
- Better Meat Co., Ltd.'s R&D team has been researching cost reduction measures for over a year.beautiful. CEO Paul Shapiro told Food Dive the company: “We have implemented advanced fermentation methods that have dramatically improved the conversion of carbon to mycelial biomass, and our feedstocks are now fine-tuned to the specific needs of our production strains.”
Dive Insights:
According to CEO Shapiro, these latest developments mean that Rhiza mycoprotein is expected to compete on price with regular beef at scale, even if R&D does not advance further.
Rhiza mycoprotein is a natural, whole food ingredient with no allergens, the company said.
According to Better Meat Co., they contain more protein than eggs, as well as more iron and iron. It has more zinc than beef, more fiber than oats, and more potassium than bananas. The company also said that the meat-like texture was noticeable.
Unlike animal meat, Rhiza mycoprotein is free from cholesterol, saturated fat, and trans fat.
“If we want to feed humanity without destroying the planet, we need to grow small-scale by farming microorganisms rather than growing big by farming animals, and we have proven that we can do so cost-effectively,” Shapiro said in a statement.
In a statement to Food Dive, Shapiro said through the company: Our pilot plant in Sacramento has the capacity to produce enough mycoprotein to supply our current production to Northern California restaurants. The company has also signed several letters of intent “with major CPG brands and foodservice companies,” according to Shapiro, which currently indicates demand for 33 tons of dried mycoprotein per month (equivalent to 99 tons of meat per month when hydrated) .
Some of the company's active customers include Sacramento's Buddha Belly Burger, but The Better Meat Co. aims to expand and supply more major food companies.
“We have been sampling Rhiza mycoprotein as a single-ingredient, non-animal protein option and found it to be unrivaled in taste, texture and nutrition. “Once this ingredient becomes commercially available on a larger scale, we hope to put it on our menu.” Monty Staggs, CEO of US food service provider SFE, said in a statement to Food Dive.
To successfully advance its production method, the company screened hundreds of food-grade mycelium strains to identify the fastest-growing, most meat-like and best-tasting products.
“We identified key characteristics that lead to better mycoprotein production and developed a method to quantify them in mycelium. This opens the door to implementing advanced natural breeding programs that can further optimize mycelium for production processes,” Shapiro said.
