4 machines about to revolutionize the way we prepare food
4 machines about to revolutionize the way we prepare food
3D print veggie meat or burgers that taste like the real
deal, shape a cake to your exact specifications or prepare a complete meal in
three minutes.
By Abigail Klein Leichman DECEMBER 2, 2018, 8:40 AM
Eshchar Ben-Shitrit grew up on a kibbutz where his mother
ran the dairy farm. He observed the strong bond between cows and their calves,
and this memory triggered something in him when he became a father four years
ago.
“When my first son was born I felt it was not possible to
eat meat anymore. I felt I’d be eating someone else’s child,” Ben-Shitrit tells
ISRAEL21c. “I got obsessed with finding a solution for people who enjoy meat,
like me, but don’t want to eat animals.”
Using professional expertise honed at printing companies
including HP Indigo and Highcon, Ben-Shitrit quit his job earlier this year and
founded Jet-Eat. Working with food scientists, he’s developing 3D printing
technologies to produce plant-based “beef” with the approximate appearance,
texture and mouth feel of cattle meat.
“We need to make a steak without killing a cow,” he says,
pointing out that the 20,000 liters of water and 20 kilograms of feed necessary
to produce 1 kilogram of meat is horribly inefficient and wasteful. In addition
to using far less water and raw materials, his product would contain hardly any
cholesterol, more fiber and none of the risks of contamination that come with
fresh meat.
Ben-Shitrit’s technology is not the same as cultured or
“clean” meat manufactured from live animal cells, although this is another
rapidly advancing industry in Israel with startups including Jerusalem-based
Future Meat Technologies and Tel Aviv-based Aleph Farms and SuperMeat.
Let’s take a closer look at Jet-Eat and three other
Israeli startups finding high-tech ways to cook up edibles from vegan meats to
cakes.
Jet-Eat
Using individual ingredient cartridges of plant proteins,
fats and other ingredients, Jet-Eat aims to print fresh vegan “meat” ready to
join the food manufacturing supply chain. Adjusting the fat content and other
parameters could yield ersatz ground round, roast, stew beef or steak.
“Our product has to have a high resemblance to meat in
many properties. A steak is basically muscle, fat and blood in a complex
structure that influences mouth feel and how it cooks. The flavor profile is
connected to how the fat is marbled in the muscle and melts when you cook it,”
says Ben-Shitrit.
“We need to emulate the chemical and physical properties
and the structure. We’ve mapped a lot of these elements for our printing
process.”
Ben-Shitrit, 34, grew his company in the European
Institute of Technology accelerator at the Technion-Israel Institute of
Technology in Haifa. Jet-Eat is backed by a few angel investors and is working
toward its first big funding round.
He wants to bring Jet-Eat to market in Israel at a price
point identical to real meat in about a year. Then he envisions forming
strategic partnerships in Europe and North America. With many major meat
companies now investing in alternatives sought by vegans as well as
flexitarians and “conscious carnivores,” Ben-Shitrit believes the time is
right.
“What we’re trying to do is challenging but not
impossible. We already have some prototypes and the basic configuration of the
printer,” he says.
SavorEat
This will be a “digital chef” platform to print — and
simultaneously bake, grill or fry – personalized plant-based meat-substitute
meals using room-temperature ingredient cartridges with a six-month shelf life.
The key ingredient in each cartridge is submicron
crystalline cellulose, a zero-calorie derivative of plant fiber – the most
abundant biomaterial on earth — as a self-assembling binder in place of starch,
egg whites, gluten or gelatin. The printer and proprietary ingredients are
patent-pending.
“By controlling the water content in the crystalline
cellulose composite via the heat source of the printer, we are able to
determine the texture from soft fat to fibrous meat to hard as a bone,”
explains Racheli Vizman, who is poised to lead the company.
The first product likely will be a meatless burger.
Because the system can produce dishes in forms that never existed before, it
could be something as unusual and personalized as a veggie burger with fries in
the middle.
SavorEat is based on the research of Hebrew University
professors Oded Shoseyov and Ido Braslavsky. It will be incorporated upon
completion of a licensing arrangement from Yissum, the tech-transfer company of
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, the founders are raising $2 million and
developing the printer and cartridges under the umbrella of the university in
cooperation with established Israeli companies in the fields of natural
flavorings and 3D printing.
Commercial activity will focus for the first five years
mainly on restaurants.
“We are working with a top Israeli chef who has
restaurants in Israel and New York. We will disrupt this market dramatically,”
Vizman predicts.
“Restaurants and cafés will be able to plan better for
fluctuations in demand, keep less inventory on hand and create new menus for
people with a variety of food needs and preferences. Because you won’t need
refrigerated trucks, transportation costs will be greatly reduced as will
inventory costs and food waste.”
The long-term goal is to create a home appliance capable
of preparing meals tailored for each family member.
Genie
The Genie countertop “smart oven” cooks meals and snacks
from freeze-dried pods within three minutes, with no preservatives, artificial
flavorings, colorings or additives.
The food-prep system is being scaled for mass production
in Israel and will launch in the United States, starting at a few workplaces in
New York City and branching out later to coffee shops, hotels and hospitals.
The oven and pods will be available via lease-or-buy plans similar to an office
coffee machines.
The ingredients for meals such as pasta Bolognese and
oatmeal with apples and cinnamon are sealed in for a shelf-life of one to two
years. When the smart oven scans the bar code printed on the outside of the
pod, it registers the instructions for how to prepare that dish in a
proprietary sequence of heating, cooling, agitating, microwaving and steaming.
Genie is based in Rishpon and has a manufacturing
facility in the northern town of Karmiel. The company co-owns a pod-filling
facility in Meron, in the Upper Galilee, with the capacity to manufacture 10
million meals per year for the Israeli market.
InnoCake
Now being developed at the 3D Innotech food-tech
accelerator in Ramat Hasharon, InnoCake is a computerized device that turns a
plain block of cake into a sculpted replica of whatever image was scanned into
it at the start of the process.
InnoCake was conceived in March 2016 as a more accessible
way to produce the kind of luxury custom cakes costing tens of thousands – and
sometimes millions – of dollars (the record-holder is a $75 million
diamond-studded cake made by British designer Debbie Wingham for a client in
the United Arab Emirates three years ago).
It would replace the painstaking, time-consuming and
extremely expensive work of trained pastry chefs with a combination of deep and
cutting-edge technologies like a 5 axis computerized machining tool.
“We intend to go for the high-end market for starters,”
says founder Shai Bar Zev, who says these machine-made custom cakes would cost
in the thousands.
Down the road, however, he’d like to see InnoCake
branches operating in shopping malls. You’d come in and hand over a photo and
come back after your shopping to pick up your dessert masterpiece.
“There’s nothing else like it,” says Bar Zev, who has
proof-of-concept models of two models of the machine. He’s making the rounds of
international confectionary shows and looking for investors.
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