Some Asian investors have called on alternative protein entrepreneurs to focus more on product innovation so as to create a truly far-reaching social impact in the wake of likely deteriorating global ecological environment.
Looking into 2025, David Yeung, founder of Green Monday from Hong Kong, said that many signs have pointed to a worsening ecological condition down the road for Mother Earth, citing the frequent fire disasters in California and the melting North and South poles, and that all industrial sectors, including the food industry, ought to join hands in innovation to nurture sustainability.
"I have repeatedly stressed to my staff the urgency of innovation," said Yeung, who produces and markets his own imitation pork, called OmniPork, in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and recently in the Chinese mainland and Thailand, and made product demonstrations for the Chinese and Japanese culinary circles in London early this month.
Speaking in a panel discussion in the recent 2019 Future Food Forum China & Veggie World Beijing, Yeung said that he would bring his Omnipork, and a host of foreign brands for which he acts as their distributor, which include Beyond Meat and Califia, to Japan, Korea and possibly also UK during the first half of next year.
Nick Cooney, founder and managing partner of Lever VC, also accentuated the importance of product innovation. He said that he noticed some tendency among many start-ups to prioritize marketing and branding over research and development, warning “The look and feel is critical...but it cannot be all show and no substance."
“So if the company with excellently tasting product but mediocre marketing, they can go somewhere, not as far as they’d like they think they can go somewhere; a company with excellent marketing but not a very good product, they might get a lot of news headlines and they might get some early accounts, but ultimately they are not going to go where Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods (go) as well," the New Yorker said, adding: "It cannot be done to the neglect of research and development, and creating a really excellent product."
Ryan Xue, Secretary-General of the China Plant Based Foods Alliance (CPBFA), speaking separately to the Chinese media during the tea break, urged start-ups to give more technological input to sustain this round of industrial revolution, in the wake of unprecedented interest in alternative meat among both investors and consumers. In addition, rather than positioning alternative protein as disrupting the traditional meat and dairy, "plant-based eat, cell cultured meat and traditional meat will need to collaborate, not necessarily compete against each other" to plug a gap of 38 mn tonnes of meat in supply by 2050. The gap is estimated at the present race of consumption.
Industry insiders say that compared with Israel, West Europe and the US, China, and in fact much of the rest of Asia, have far fewer start-ups in alternative protein, and the handful of start-ups are constrained with a lack of creditable food scientists and biologists.
Among the hurdles facing the nascent Chinese alternative protein industry, many speakers and panelists also pointed to the lack of a commonly recognized terminology for this category and some of its major constituents. Some people use the term "artificial meat" to refer to plant-based meat and cell cultured meat, while others use it to refer to plant-based meat only. Wilfred Feng, Senior Counsel of Dentons, a law firm, proposed naming cell-based meat as "factory meat" to differentiate it from meat produced by traditional farms, and suggested naming the latter as "farm meat".
In addition to the confusion in terminology, many conference participants also expect some need for the government to produce a set of regulations or laws to govern the behaviours of the market players, before it comes as an issue like in the West.
Despite all these hurdles and issues, hardly anyone did not cherish some amount of euphoria over the bright prospect for the alternative industry in the conference. Joseph Zhou, partner of Bits X Bites, believes that his strategy of focusing on biotech investing will bear fruit and that cultivated meat and fat will be commercially mature within the next five years in a country which prides itself as the world's most developed and widespread in terms of fermentation technology and application. "(The biotech) meat will be "no more expensive than what we have now," he said.
Bits X Bites has invested 14 food-tech and agri-tech start-ups in the past three years since its inception, including Future Meat Technology of Israel, which produces lab-grown chicken fat.
Nick Cooney is a bit more cautious. He believes that while the world's plant-based protein industry will likely double if not triple by 2025, cell-based pork and fat will only start to be blended with plant-based protein in Beyond Burgers, Impossible Burgers and OmniPork, and only a year beyond that will clean meat or cultivated meat "start taking a significantly larger share (of the market)".
Lever VC has invested in four start-ups in the past half a year, which are located in China, Germany, France and the US. Two of them are cell-based meat start-ups, one in Hong Kong and the other in the US. The former, Avant Meats, showcased its fish maw in Hong Kong last month while the latter, Bond Pet Foods, piloted its “cultured chicken protein” targeting pet cats and dogs in February this year.
Also joining the panel discussion was Alvin Yan, Executive Director of Highlight Capitall, both based in Shanghai. As a five-year-old PE fund, it is the only investor in the panel that has yet to make an investment in the alternative industry. It has invested mainly in growth-stage health-care and pharmaceutical companies so far, first stumbled upon lab-grown human organs, bones and blood vessels in the US in 2016, but then set their sight on alternative protein last year, and has since then been scouting for viable cultured meat start-ups.
"Medical technology shares much in common with cultured meat," said Yan, explaining his capital firm's natural extension into alternative meat, adding "we look most closely at technology itself".
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