Future Foods: Alternative Sources of Protein with Ÿnsect, Meatable, and Plantik Biosciences

What do insects, cellular agriculture, and cannabis have in common? They all provide alternative sources of protein.

Today, agriculture is among the greatest contributors to global warming, emitting more greenhouse gases than the transportation industry, with methane released from cattle rearing largely responsible. Yet, by 2050, food production needs to increase by 70% to respond to population growth. This discrepancy means that we are in dire need of a new food system that will not overwhelm the planet despite our growing demand for food.

In this episode, we tackle the future of food with Antoine Hubert (co-founder & CEO of Ÿnsect), Ying Shao (co-founder & CEO of Plantik Biosciences), and Daan Luining (co-founder & CTO of Meatable). We discover the new breeding technologies for plants and meats that Ying and Daan are respectively developing. We learn about insects as an alternative source of protein with Antoine and dive into the most interesting innovations in food today.

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Deezer & Google Podcast.

Speakers

Antoine Hubert, co-founder & CEO of Ÿnsect

An agronomy engineer by training, Antoine is the CEO of Ÿnsect and also leads the cooperative insect industry association, the International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed (IPIFF), and is a Board Member of Agrocampus Ouest, Agriloops, and LFD. Prior to co-founding Ÿnsect, Antoine worked on scientific projects in environmental risk assessment, biomass and plastics recycling. Together with Alexis Angot, he co-founded NPO WORGAMIC and the company ORGANEO.

Ying Shao, co-founder & CEO of Plantik Biosciences

Ying, an experienced startup operator formerly at Devialet, met co-founder Aditya Nayak, a structural and molecular biologist specialized in plant sciences and gene editing, in the Entrepreneur First program at STATION F. Together, they co-founded Plantik Biosciences to develop a new plant breeding technology that accelerates the traditional plant breeding process manifolds. Their first target? Cannabis.

Daan Luining, co-founder & CTO of Meatable

As the CTO, Daan is responsible for everything scientific at Meatable. Before founding Meatable together with Krijn de Nood, he worked with Maastricht University Professor Mark Post on the world’s first laboratory-grown hamburger in 2013.He later joined New Harvest, an NGO funding academic research in cultured meat, as the research director and started thinking about the huge gap in Europe when it comes to cellular agriculture and cultured meat. After speaking with many interesting people on the subject, he co-founded Meatable with Krijn. Through Meatable he is realizing his ambition to scale-up cultured meat.

Topics

01:22 — Ying on what cannabis has to do with the future of food

02:53 — Ying on what Plantik does with cannabis

03:54 — Daan on Meatable’s lab-grown meat

05:02 — How does Meatable’s technology work

05:56 — How does Meatable compare to other alternative meats on the market

07:25 — Ying on the importance of producing crops differently today to respond to food scarcity

08:45 — Daan on the environmental footprint of traditional cattle production

10:47 — Company stage and product timeline for Meatable

12:35 — Company stage for Plantik Biosciences

13:35 — Ying on consumer attitudes around cannabis and gene editing

16:25 — Daan on consumer attitudes for culture meat

18:48 — The perspective from animal activists

20:47 — On regulations: working with low THC vs. high THC plants, gene editing techniques, food in general

25:09 — Meatable starting the first European trade association for cellular agriculture

25:52 — Other innovations in the food space and other opportunities left to be addressed

30:23 — Introduction of Antoine

30:42 — Antoine on why Ÿnsect grows insects for animal feed rather than human consumption

32:05 — Why what animals eat matters

33:33 — Doing more with less: on vertical farming

34:04 — Antoine’s background: from agricultural engineering to starting his own NGO to raise awareness around food waste before starting Ÿnsect

35:35 — How the idea of Ÿnsect came about

36:50 — On the research that goes into Ÿnsect

39:44 — Going through food regulations

41:05 — Ÿnsect’ product vs. traditional fishmeal

41:53 — The commercial side of Ÿnsect

42:48 — Production, company, and market evolutions since the beginning

44:25 — On Ÿnsect’s $372M Series C with Astanor Ventures, Upfront Ventures, Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, and many more from around the world

47:07 — Algae, biotech, and other technological developments in the food space

47:42 — On the importance of fighting food waste and changing consumer behaviour

51:41 — In 2050, how will we be eating?