SAN JOSE, Calif. _ Your fridge is connected to the internet, your car parks itself and you do all your shopping online from the comfort of your bed. But are you still eating low-tech food?
A new generation of startups wants to change that. They're cooking up everything from nutrient-rich meal-replacement drinks to bio-engineered fake meat, with the goal of making mealtime healthier, more efficient and better for the environment. Venture capitalists have poured nearly $110 million into these next-generation food startups so far this year, according to PitchBook Data, and a few companies have developed a cult following of techies.
Eager to see what all the buzz was about, I gathered a panel of reporters and editors from The Mercury News to sample meal replacement products from Soylent and MealSquares. Then I tasted plant-based burgers from Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. The verdict? No one is giving up their favorite lunches.
Still, these alternative food startups fit right into Silicon Valley _ their leaders put a premium on efficiency and talk about farming and raising livestock the way someone else might talk about an outdated computer.
"Animals are just a technology for food production _ a prehistoric technology for producing meat and dairy foods," said Patrick Brown, CEO and founder of plant-based "meat" maker Impossible Foods.
Brown, who is opening a new factory in Oakland this summer, spent three years in a lab using plant compounds to reverse engineer the taste, smell, texture and look of ground beef.
Southern California-based Beyond Meat has the same idea, selling "the future of protein" in the form of plant-based burgers and chicken strips intended to taste like the real thing. Clara Foods in San Francisco is making egg whites without the chicken. And San Leandro-based Memphis Meats recently produced the world's first lab-grown chicken meat _ made by cultivating and harvesting real meat cells _ and plans to have its products on the market by 2021.
Meanwhile, companies like Los Angeles-based Soylent want to replace food altogether. Soylent makes 400-calorie drinks designed to take the place of breakfast, lunch or dinner, and San Jose-based MealSquares makes prepackaged bars with the nutrition of a full meal.
But what do they taste like? I sampled two of the engineered burgers and decided that while they have a definite meaty flavor I've never tasted in another veggie burger, they're nowhere near ready to replace In-N-Out Burger or other favorites. Our test panel also tried Soylent and MealSquares, and the consensus was if we were locked in a doomsday bunker during the apocalypse or traveling through outer space, they'd be great. But for a quick meal at our desk? We'll probably stick with a sandwich.
