Veggie Digest #14

2021 food tech trends, the environmental impact of food packaging, plant-based carnitas, and much more!

Welcome to the latest installment of the Veggie Digest, the newsletter that keeps you on top of the latest in sustainable food innovations. 

Note: The Veggie Digest will be taking next week off for the Thanksgiving holiday. The next issue of the newsletter will appear at the end of the month.

Headlines and Trends

A curated roundup of interesting food tech news from the past week.

📰 After Selling 1.3 Million Vegan Bacon Strips in the US, Hooray Foods Expands to Canada (VegNews)

Hooray Foods, a San Francisco-based vegan food brand,  is expanding its products into Canada right as the Canadian market for meat alternatives is rapidly expanding. The brand developed plant-based versions of pork products, the most popular of which is its plant-based bacon. The pork alternative features a mix of umami, salty, sweet, and smoky flavors using ingredients such as coconut oil, rice flour, tapioca starch, liquid smoke, and umami seasoning. Hopefully, the company can achieve its goal to reduce the environmentally damaging effects of the pork industry. 

📰 Barvecue is One of First Alt-Meat Brands to Enter the Hispanic Market with New Vegan Carnitas (Vegconomist)

Although Mexican food is popular among vegans due to its extensive use of vegan ingredients such as beans, corn, and avocado, very few plant-based alternatives are available for traditional Mexican dishes that contain meat. Luckily, the North Carolina-based company Barvecue has just launched one of the first Hispanic-inspired alt-meat products: wood-smoked plant-based carnitas, which will be available in US grocery stores.

📰 The Environmental Impact of Food Packaging (Food Print)

Unfortunately, most of the food we buy comes in single-use packaging that cannot be recycled and produces chemicals that end up polluting groundwater, soil, and our oceans. Each form of food packaging, whether it be plastic, aluminum, paper, or even glass uses a lot of resources like energy, water, chemicals, wood, etc to produce. It also generates air emissions including greenhouse gases as well as wastewater and sludge that contain toxic contaminants. Additionally, packaging sent to landfills often takes many years to degrade. According to the EPA, food and food packaging materials make up almost half of all municipal solid waste. 

📰 FoodTech Trends in 2021 (Digital Food Lab)

Paris-based Digital Food Lab, an industry research and strategy consultancy, has released its fourth annual report on the state of food system innovations. The report tracks 23 individual trends that are grouped into five “mega trends.” The key trends are sustainable proteins, resilient farms, the future of retail, food automation, and personalized food. The full report can be downloaded for free via this link. 

The chart below maps the trends identified in the report using the Gartner Hype Cycle (a graphic representation of the key phases emerging technologies experience on the path to mass adoption):

📰 The Great Organic-Food Fraud (New Yorker)

This long-form article by Ian Parker chronicles the “largest-known fraud in the history of American organic agriculture.” In the early 2000s, organic products flooded mainstream groceries and organic food sales doubled annually (today the figure is around $60 billion). Organic foods were lucrative: an organic product could be sold for twice the price as conventional. Unfortunately, organic certification and regulation were relatively weak in the United States; an overreliance of trust existed in the supply chain despite the strong incentives to cheat the system. One cheat was Randy Constant who sold organic goods that were, in fact, conventional and GMO crops. Constant’s products represented, by one estimate, some 8% of the overall U.S. soybean and corn crop; he sold nearly a quarter billion of fraudulently labeled products. On account of the complexity of the food supply chain, challenges in testing product authenticity, and weak regulations, this article calls into question how trustworthy the present-day organic food supply chain really is. One example: “A farm’s certification is good for a year. It doesn’t get used up by sales. If a farmer has only a dozen organic apple trees but sells you a million organic apples, you’re unlikely to learn that you have a problem merely by looking at the orchard’s certification.”

Food Lingo: “Biochar”

There’s a lot of jargon in the food technology and sustainability space. Each week I highlight an important concept to improve your food lingo literacy.

Biochar is a charcoal-like substance that is produced by burning organic material from agricultural and forestry waste in a process called pyrolysis. During pyrolysis, organic materials are baked at a high temperature in the absence of oxygen and are converted into biochar, a stable form of carbon that can’t easily escape into the atmosphere. The energy or heat created during pyrolysis can be captured and used as a form of clean energy. 

🎙️What Is Biochar? (Ag Future)

Biochar technology has been a recent strategy for carbon sequestration and is being used more in agriculture as it reduces the need for synthetic fertilizers. Solids from manure can be converted into biochar which allows all the carbon and nutrients to be in the manure to be stabilized. It can then be spread on fields and be used to absorb methane, hydrogen sulfide, and ammonia. The porous structure of biochar gives it the ability to hold water, metals, microbes, and other nutrients, all of which are very beneficial in soil. Its sponge-like properties are beneficial in times of extreme weather events caused by climate change. Biochar can absorb excess water in the soil to reduce erosion or runoff and store it for later to release it in times of drought. Some companies are currently using biochar made from manure to produce synthetic natural gas and bio-oils which can be burned to make renewable electricity, diesel fuel, and natural gas.

Sustainability Beyond Food

A handful of non-food-specific pieces to keep you abreast of other environmental items of interest.

📰 6 Takeaways from the COP26 U.N. Climate Conference (New York Times)

Diplomats from almost 200 countries struck a major agreement to increase efforts to fight climate change at the UN climate summit in Glasgow. The top priority is to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels. The agreement also includes many steps the world should immediately take to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures such as significantly reducing carbon dioxide and methane emissions as well as ending deforestation by 2030. 

📰 To Get Serious about Climate Change, We Need to Get Serious about Peat (The Independent)

The Earth’s peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the planet’s forests combined. If all the stored carbon is released (either through the clearing of peat for palm oil plantations or by farmers setting fires that burn the soil), the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere would accelerate the Earth on its trajectory towards catastrophic warming. At COP26, the government agreed to spend more than $1bn by 2025 on peat restoration, woodland creation, and habitat management. Preserving peat will be a powerful and necessary tool to counter rising emissions.

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