A while back I spoke at a company that sells meat. In my presentation, I had a slide showing the products from “Impossible Meat” a fully vegetarian product that is served as an alternative to meat in a burger for example.
When the client saw my slide with “Impossible Meat” during rehearsal they asked me to take it out! They said: “We know we asked you to come here to talk about change and disruption, but we are not ready for THAT MUCH change and disruption.”
But Impossible Meat is not something from the future, It’s available on the market today.
On their website Impossible Meat writes: “Animal agriculture occupies almost half the land on earth, consumes a quarter of our freshwater and destroys our ecosystems. So we’re doing something about it: We found a way to make meat using plants, so that we never have to use animals again.”
Will “Impossible Meat” replace all meat? Not likely.
Should companies in the meat production industry pay attention to the developments in the “food tech industry”? Absolutely.
And Impossible Meat is not the only player. Another player is Beyond Meat.
This week I went to Grand Hyatt Hotel in Singapore to try out the Beyond Meat plant based burger.
It was delicious.
We are living in a time where industries are being disrupted in a pace that makes it hard to keep up, and even more interesting is the speed of innovation for what comes after whats comes next.
Want some more examples?
Researchers in Finland are experimenting with a solution to create food virtually out of water and air! Smithsonian Magazines describes it:
“The protein creation process starts with hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria, which use hydrogen as their energy source. The scientists put the bacteria in a coffee-cup-sized bioreactor along with water and an electric water splitter. The splitter splits water into hydrogen and oxygen; the bacteria eats the hydrogen. Combined with carbon from the atmosphere, and a small amount of added “fertilizers” (ammonia, phosphorous and various inorganic salts), the end product is a dry bacteria powder that is about 50 percent protein, 25 percent carbohydrate, and 25 percent fats and nucleic acids. It can be used as is, or processed more to make pure protein, researchers say.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/…/making-food-electricity-1…/
And ANOTHER research team in Finland (yes, I just picked two projects from the same country to show how many interesting things are happening right now) are experimenting with a “bio reactor” where you grow the cells of a food, instead of the actual food.
Lauri Reuter, the researcher, explained to Fast Company: ““You put in a pod, fill the tank with water, turn it on, and then it would start bubbling away,” he says. “You could harvest something like half a kilo of these plant cells in roughly a week. So it takes a bit longer than making a cup of coffee, but then again, if you would grow those berries in your backyard, it would take much longer, and the season would be only once a year. Now you can do it any day around the year, and in any place.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/…/in-the-future-you-could-eat-t…
Food from cells.
Meat from plants.
Protein from the air.
Change is coming. And one things is certain: we can not close our eyes – and deleting a powerpoint slide is not going to make the change go away.
What change is changing your world?
Fredrik Haren
PS: Make it a Creative Weekend!
Nov