ALT-PROTEIN RESEARCH
Industrial animal agriculture is not sustainable - full stop. Whether it is climate change, soil and water degradation, antibiotic resistance, pandemic risk, or a myriad of other bad outcomes, the system must change now. The entire global population needs to modify what they demand and consume (a notoriously difficult thing for even the most motivated person to do), and so perfect analogues to animal products available everywhere and at low prices are no longer a “nice to have.” They are a must have in order to get the global population to lower its animal product consumption.
Source: United States EPA
Agriculture is a major contributor to climate change, and animal agriculture and its inputs are the worst offender. The industrial human food system is dependent on animal proteins that are no longer scalable or sustainable. Growing nutritious crops only to then feed to animals must change, and time is fast running out.
We believe the most effective way to shift our food system to one that is sustainable and nutritious is to create and offer to people around the globe the very tastes and textures they seek from animal products, but produced in more sustainable and humane ways. Once those new products exist and are widely available where people eat, and if the price is the same or lower than the unsustainable animal products they are meant to replace, the challenge of getting consumers to modify their behavior should be much easier.
So we are bringing to life the Sustainable Protein Action Lab- a dedicated facility to solve the most crucial bottlenecks holding back alternative proteins.
We are working with the global consulting firm Accenture to scope out and create the Action Lab that will bridge the gap between plant-based and other alt-protein startups who cannot risk the time and cost of fundamental research, and universities who engage in crucial basic research, but cannot be fully focussed on the problems that need to be solved and how to bring to market the solutions as we create them.
We help direct funding to the most important and potentially impactful alt-protein research.
We work with philanthropists to help direct funding to the most valuable programs and scientists working on things likely to speed the transition to a sustainable food system, including the GFI Research Grant Program.
Where we provide funding directly, we select the most potentially impactful projects. Note we do not make grants where a portion of funds is applied to indirect (overhead) costs except in certain special cases, and then we have a policy of not allowing more than 10% of granted funds to be used for such indirect costs.
We are funding and helping spearhead an initiative to drastically lower the price of alt-proteins.
Normally, prices drop for a new category of products as innovations in production occur and as demand rises allowing economies of scale. The problem as it relates to alt-proteins is climate change is occurring much too quickly, and we must reduce global reliance on animal agriculture much more quickly than we are on track to do.
So we are funding and supporting a creative initiative using “market shaping” to understand what steps along alt-protein supply chains could lower cost, and providing the risk reduction strategies that allow those component prices to drop in advance of market demand. By lowering the price of alt-proteins in this way, consumers can purchase products at a much lower price, which in turn will spur the demand that would not have been present at the higher price. This will accelerate all the benefits associated with a reduction in the number of animals in the human food system.
We are looking at how machine learning and artificial intelligence can make extrusion of plant-based meats more resource efficient and cost-effective.
Many plant-based meats on the global market today are made using a machine called an extruder, which mixes and cooks ingredients and causes the end product to have particular shapes and textures. Extruders are used in food production all the time (they are essentially a combination of mixers and ovens), but they were not specifically designed for the type of uses needed to create great plant-based meats.
We are experimenting with creating a category of products called Plant-Rich Meat.
Plant-based meats are already significantly more healthy than the animal products they are meant to replace. But some meat eaters report that the flavor and texture are not quite where they need them to be in order for them to start using them on a daily basis.
As an interim step while plant-based meats continue to improve in their sensory appeal, we are looking into the possibility of using some amount of an actual animal product to combine with plant-based ingredients to make a “mostly plant-based” meat product we call Plant-Rich Meat.