The cofounder and CEO of Eat Just and Good Meat is embattled yet again. He’s got advice for his younger self—and everyone else in alternative proteins.

He’s certainly war-scarred from his efforts to mainstream first plant-based replacements for mayonnaise, then eggs, and more recently cultivated meat from chicken cells.

If you’re not olive oil in the kitchen, you’re nobody. But olive oil, which is healthy and delicious, is expensive, and it isn’t a workhorse. That award goes to canola, palm and soybean oil, of which Americans consume an estimated 11.56 million metric tons per year. And increasingly, they’re being scrutinized for their impact on our planet and health. 

You know things are hot when celebrities are signing term sheets. While helpful, it’s not their money that’s propping up the food-tech ecosystem. So the question here is this: Do VCs have the fortitude to continue supporting the more than 150 startups seeking to design a cell-cultured analogue to cheap meat? Perhaps the better question is: Should they?

Mycelium may not be popular enough to be considered a hot ingredient, but in the alternative protein space, it’s fire. The biggest name selling myco-protein foods is Quorn, which you can find in the frozen aisle, but Boulder-based Meati is launching its “chicken” jerky that will compete in a far more ambitious category: snacks.

Vegan cheese convinces no one. It doesn’t stretch, it hardly melts, and if you leave it out too long, it separates into an oily mess. Typically made from a blend of nuts, fats, gums and binders, it’s also usually unhealthy.  

But things may be looking up. Oliver Zahn, an astrophysicist turned data scientist and founder of Berkeley company Climax Foods, has discovered new combinations of plant proteins and fats that can do all the things vegan cheese historically couldn’t — including fool chefs.

Tissue engineering doesn’t sound very foodie, but turns out it’s the primo specialization needed for reimagining meat. Experts in the field aren’t easy to steal away from the medical world, but it’s happening. Sometimes they even launch their own company, like Ali Khademhosseini, who started Omeat.

Whether it’s food or medicine that’s more crucial to humanity is up for debate.

Cell-cultivated meat may appear to be proceeding ever closer to being on sale in the United States, but production, cost, and formulation issues are still bedeviling the one-time disruptors.

This month, the USDA approved labeling of the food once called lab-grown meat. In quick succession the regulatory agency granted Eat Just and then Upside Foods approval of what the startups could call their product. The verdict: cell-cultivated meat.

Eric Schulze helped Upside Foods score the first U.S. regulatory approval for its cultivated chicken, and he’s just getting started.

Eric Schulze likes to cook meat. Roasted, basted, smoked, rubbed, cured, pulled, even spatchcocked—you name the preparation, and he’s tried it. This makes Schulze a typical American carnivore, but his habits do set him apart at his day job.

Before voting to adopt California’s $308 billion state budget last month, Assembly Member Ash Kalra, a Democrat from San Jose, took a tour of Upside Foods, a food technology startup in Emeryville.

One of the Bay Area’s leading food-tech companies just inked a deal to manufacture the world’s largest known bioreactors for growing meat from cells. Ten of them.

Chefs around the country are buzzed on the vegan alternative, but not all are convinced it’ll save the bees.

Plant-based bacon is challenging to pull off. But the version from Berkeley’s Umaro Foods is wooing investors and chefs.

The decadent smell of chocolate wafted my way. I approached the table in front of me, and a chef with a bushy mustache handed me a thimble of hot cocoa. I tipped it back, swirled the liquid around in my mouth, and swallowed: creamy and sweet.

Given the current obsession with plant-based cooking, cheese might seem like a food in decline. But curd consumption has risen 19% in the past decade, according to recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.

We’ve entered a new era in our love-hate relationship with sugar. After decades of trying to make substitutes like Sweet’N Low, Splenda and Stevia work for consumers, the sugar-alternative industry is fielding contenders with a better chance at unseating that ubiquitous substance.

Kale might be a fixture on restaurant menus and with nutritionists, but vertical farmers aren’t convinced of its infallibility. Among their descriptions are that it’s “bitter,” “difficult to work with,” and “tastes like leather.”

There’s no denying the appeal of bacon. The pork product represents a heart-stopping 99% of the total bacon market. In 2020, sales of the breakfast staple totaled $6 billion through November.

You can now order cultured meat for dinner, as long as you live in Singapore. This landmark move comes from Eat JUST, which now sells chicken nuggets made from a hybrid mix of plant protein and cultured chicken cells.

The war on eggs started back in the ’70s, not with the company formerly known as Hampton Creek but with a little café-grocery store in Los Angeles.

Regenerative farming is fast becoming the higher standard for consumers seeking to protect their health and the planet.

A novel technique for manipulating light could prove a boon to agriculture on our planet—and beyond.

At least one habit wasn't upended by the pandemic: We're still sipping coffee in the mornings and during the workday, albeit at home.

You do not want to be an independent restaurant right now. Depending on where you’re located, first you had to close, then you got to open, then you had to close again. Over 100,000 establishments have shuttered either permanently or long term since March, according to recent numbers from the National Restaurant Association.

When Danny Stoller and Marc Schechter opened Square Pie Guys in 2019, they anchored their Detroit-style pizza shop with what they thought was essential to turning a profit: tables and chairs.

Remy Labesque has a compelling day job: He’s senior industrial designer at Tesla Inc. in Los Angeles. But for three years, he’s worked on a side project that’s enviable to people outside Elon Musk’s universe. Labesque has reengineered the classic chocolate chip because, he says, the 80-year-old teardrop shape is ill-suited to its function.

Seth Stowaway signed a lease for his first restaurant in San Francisco just two weeks ago. While the hospitality industry is still struggling to pay bills and wondering how to reopen, the 36-year-old chef has been meeting with architects, designers and lawyers to open Osito, a live-fire, fine-dining establishment in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood. "It's scary for sure, but you only have one shot to try," he said.

On a recent Monday morning in a Shanghai conference room, four executives from a major Chinese food producer and distributor sat socially distanced from one another, pulled down their masks, and tried some fake eggs. In a makeshift basement office in San Francisco, 15 hours behind, Josh Tetrick, the chief executive officer of egg-substitute maker Eat Just Inc., watched via Zoom.