TRANSCRIPT 🔗
Jennifer Strong (00:03):
What would you say if someone offered you a taste of a visually perfect salmon filet that doesn't contain any fish? What if the macros, meaning the protein content, carbs, and even the omega-3s were basically the same? And what it doesn't contain are things like microplastics and mercury. This week, we're going on a field trip to take a factory tour of a startup called New School Foods to take a deep dive into next generation plant-based foods. If you haven't joined us for one of these visits before, think of it like the grownup version of Mr. Rogers visiting a crayon factory. It's a chance to peek behind the curtain at some of the cool work that's happening in science and tech. I'm Jennifer Strong, and this is SHIFT.
Show Open (00:48):
Now here on the steering column is a device called auto cruise. You simply set the speed you want - Self-driving robo taxis are already on the road in two weeks.
Show Open (00:58):
The mirror reflects the light in the way that depends on how the signal was recorded.
Show Open (01:03):
This is the 100 terabyte. I present to you, Electro, the motto man, ladies and gentlemen. I would say that one of my greatest skills is my ability to interact with you.
Jennifer Strong (01:20):
This episode, we head to Toronto, Canada and tour a fish-free fish factory that's also working on stakes.
Chris Bryson (00:05):
All right. Now that we've just walked in to the front door, one of the things that you'll see right ahead of you is our workshop, which might surprise you. My name is Chris Bryson, and I'm the founder and CEO of New School Foods. So most of the time, if you came into a food company, you would expect to see food, a kitchen, maybe people putting together formulations. Now you see a workshop with woodworking and 3D printers and all kinds of stuff like that. The reason why that's the case is because even though externally people tend to see New School Foods as a alternative seafood company, we view ourselves actually more as a manufacturing technology company, because what we've been working on over the last four years is actually the machine that makes the product. So part of our team includes about five or six engineers who are always taking off the shelf equipment, modifying it, creating different components or parts that make their way onto our assembly line that makes this new manufacturing process a reality.
Chris Bryson (00:58):
So if you come over here, you'll see various different things that our engineers have created, which might end up, might be works in progress that end up on the production line, are part of tests or experiments. So everything from woodworking to plastic working to drill presses to 3D printers upstairs. We actually have two other workshops that also give us the ability to do welding. So any questions about this?
Jennifer Strong (01:20):
I'm glad you just took it head on because I'm staring at a toolbox and compound saw, et cetera.
Chris Bryson (01:27):
You did come to the right place. This is where we are making the plant-based salmon. But, um, like I said, the real product behind everything we believe is the new manufacturing technology. So fun fact, have you ever had a plant-based meat alternative before? So all of them use this technology called extrusion. Part of why we ended up starting this company is because when we looked at extrusion, we were very concerned that it was gonna be a very limited technology that when we looked towards the next frontier of meat alternatives to get cleaner label ingredients, to make more complex structures, like if you think about salmon, it's got all those white lines and the pink muscle tissue, you can't do that stuff with extrusion. And so because everyone in the industry was basically putting their collective eggs in one basket, we felt like that was a mistake and we though maybe there's a better way to do this.
Chris Bryson (02:14):
So what you're seeing in front of you is the workshop where we start to create machinery or modify machinery in order to create a different process that is a complete alternative to extrusion. Does that make sense? Yes. Great. All right, let's go upstairs.
Chris Bryson (02:37):
On this wall, you'll see both the dates and well, and, and the numbers. So RC is short for release candidate. So that means a version that we're considering putting out into the wild. Most of these have actually made their way out into the wild. Actually, version 17 was the first one that made its way onto a restaurant menu or closed our first deal, I think. And obviously what we do is we're always continuing to improve the product. So every single week we're running tests that can improve the flavor or the texture. And some of those tests work out, some of them don't. And the winners then make their way into trial candidates that we then take to our restaurant partners and we say, "What do you think? Do you like this better than the last version? Yes or no?" And when there's strong consensus, we'll then change our production process to incorporate that new formulation and we ship it to market.
Chris Bryson (03:23):
So the latest version that's now in, in restaurants is called version 26. We don't necessarily broadcast that on our social media, but that's our internal versioning system. And we're obviously already working on version 27 and 28. So you'll see those probably pretty soon.
Jennifer Strong (03:39):
Yeah. Awesome. Actually, I will pause for some context because I do also cover lab grown and other things. Okay. So what is in this salmon?
Chris Bryson (03:47):
Ooh. First we make basically the outer shell. So it's what we call a scaffold, basically the building blocks. And we make that scaffold using seaweed extracts. So it comes from seaweeds. The two ingredients are agar and alginate. And then we also insert some fat. So those white lines include also fats. We use fats that come from the ocean actually, so algae oils. And the idea is to
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create almost like this outer shell, this outer structure. So when it first starts out, it doesn't even, it looks like sort of transparent. We'll show it to you as we go through. But then the, the real question that everyone wants to know is what's the protein? So we use potato protein for salmon, but the really cool thing about the scaffolding technology that we've made, which is the alternative to extrusion, is that we can put anything into that scaffold that we want.
Chris Bryson (04:34):
So for salmon, it might make sense to use potato protein, but with other products it might make sense to use pea protein or chickpea protein or sunflower protein, whatever. It also gives us the ability down the road to work with cell-based proteins or recombinant proteins because our scaffolds are basically vessels. So you can put whatever you want into them.
Chris Bryson (05:01):
And then up here we're now in our current office. So another couple things that you'll notice about this space here is these are some photos of other product applications we've been working on. So remember how when we first got in here, I said the real product is the technology itself. If you think about any meat or seafood species, all of it really boils down to two, you know, atomic units, if you will. So you've got muscle fibers and connective tissue. It's just that each animal is a different arrangement of muscle fibers and connective tissue. Fat layers like those little white lines, but in salmon you have those very consistent sort of parallel white lines. Instead, it's this random assortment, right? So we though, well, if we can create muscle fibers and we can create connective tissue, surely we can make much more than salmon. And so you can see here are some prototypes that we've toyed with in terms of making other fish species, but we've also taken that technology and made steak prototypes.
Chris Bryson (06:01):
We've made ribs prototypes. We've never publicly told anyone that we're doing this, but that's the beauty of the technology is the technology. Using the same assembly line equipment can make basically anything under the sun as far as we can tell so far. So far
Jennifer Strong (06:15):
As I know, this would be the only steak experiment in North America.
Chris Bryson (06:18):
I can't think of one that's the space in North America, that's right. So we've toyed with both extending into other species for seafood, but also into red meat applications. We've also noticed that when we make our fish, just like the fishing industry, we're, we're almost sort of cutting out our filets from a larger block. When we do that, we get trimmings. And so we've taken those trimmings, just like the meat industry does, and we process those into secondary applications. So we're now soft launched on a secondary skew, which is a second skew, which is our burger. And that is a waste product that helps us improve our unit economics and make sure that we process our waste. You'll see a few 3D printers up here. And then as we move into this area here, this is our lab. And this is where we work on new formulations, tweaks to the formulation.
Chris Bryson (07:09):
So that might be things to help improve the color or the flavor. So everything that you see in the lab here, we have these scaled down versions of the machinery that we have in the production line area. So you'll notice here we have this, what we call a plate freezer. And the plate freezer that you'll see in the production area is a much larger machine. In fact, there is no such thing as a lab scale plate freezer. So we had to make it ourselves, which I think you can kind of see if you were looking at this right now, it looks homegrown , but that's fine. It still carries out the physics that, that we're looking for. So this is where we work on the new RCs, both for salmon as well as the other prototypes that, that we're actively working on. If we walk a little bit further in, you'll notice that we also have not just the ability to create new formulations, but also to be highly analytical with all the products that we make.
Chris Bryson (08:02):
So we're big on data. And so these machines here help us to understand all kinds of different things about the product. So we can analyze flavor profiles. This is called a GCMS machine, helps us to understand what flavor active compounds are inside each product. So we can analyze salmon, we can analyze our own, we can see what's missing. We can also look at how salmon is different from tuna and understand what makes salmon salmon. So this is a very powerful machine. We also have other machines that help us to analyze texture across different temperature ranges. So one of the really hard and annoying things about food is you can create a perfect product when it comes right out of the oven, but then you give it 10 minutes and then it cools down, right? So one of the things that was a problem with a lot of other plant-based burgers is they got mushy and soft, right?
Chris Bryson (08:42):
You were talking about that before. So this helps us to analyze the texture across various different temperature ranges, which is very, very important. And then we also have a machine here for protein analysis to make sure we're getting all kinds of, we're getting all the protein into the product that we want, as well as color analysis. We wanna make sure that it looks great, people eat with their eyes, and so appearance is a big, big selling point of our product. When you look at it, it actually, for many people, confuses them. They think it might actually be salmon. So I think the one that we're gonna be cooking for you today is right here. Uh - Looks like salmon. Looks like salmon. It's got all the nice white lines. It looks raw. And this is actually something that early on when we started doing the initial fundamental research was really key to what set us apart from extrusion.
Chris Bryson (09:29):
Because we're creating, if you look really
closely, you see all those shiny like little mini white lines?m. Or mini lines, sorry, that, that run perpendicular to the white lines? Yes. Those are your little mini muscle fibers, okay? And those muscle fibers are created through a process called directional freezing. And as you can tell by the name, freezing implies it's a cold-based process. Extrusion, on the other hand, creates muscle fibers using heat and shear. When you use heat and shear, you basically pre-cook your proteins. So most of your plant-based burgers are effectively in some ways pre-cooked. That means you can never achieve with extrusion something that looks like this, which looks raw. So when you cook this, and we're gonna cook it for you in the oven over here, what happens is that your proteins go from being raw or what's called undenatured to being denatured, which creates a visual transformation from being raw to cooked.
Chris Bryson (10:20):
And so this is a huge advantage for us because we, we get to take this product to chefs. We show them this, and most of the time they don't think that this is possible with plants. So when you show it to them and they say, "Well, is this lab-based? Is it actually salmon?" I
Jennifer Strong (10:37):
Get that. The only thing that doesn't seem... Is it like the, the end is so perfectly squared?
Chris Bryson (10:41):
Yep. We're actually, we're working on a new shape where, uh, it's gonna be less of a boot cut. It's gonna be more of a smooth transition. Okay. So, so now we're gonna, we're gonna go into our V1 production area. So we will need to gown you up, put you in lab coat, hair net,
Speaker 3 (10:57):
All that kind of stuff. We're supposed to take off rings and bracelets - Okay. So that we don't drop that accidentally. Yeah. Come on in.
Chris Bryson (11:08):
And welcome to the world's first assembly line built around directional freezing.
Chris Bryson (11:15):
Let's start in the middle. This is what is currently making our salmon, but all of the equipment that you see here is the same equipment that we use whenever we make other products as well. This assembly line is designed to output somewhere between 100 to 200 kilograms of product per day. So nothing huge, but enough for us to validate the process and to know what the machinery needs to look like and do. Proof of concept would be an unfair characterization because this is producing product commercially, but it's our validation stage. They're using off the shelf equipment or off the shelf components, right? So you'll see protein tanks in the back, very standard equipment, you'll see globe mixers here, you'll see blast freezers, kettles, combi ovens, fridges, freezers. All of this is totally standard equipment. The stuff that you might not recognize, like this machine here, which helps us make the white lines within salmon, is using off the shelf components.
Chris Bryson (12:11):
So all the different parts that, that we're using here can be ordered very, very quickly and thus scaled very quickly. Watch your step. Careful. Effectively, to keep it pretty simple, the way that we make our scaffolds is we first make basically a plant-based jello. You've had jello before? Yes. Okay. So we, instead of using gelatin, which is what you would use for jello, we use seaweed extracts, so agar and alginate, and those seaweed extracts give us something that's very much like a plant-based jello. And there's a few other that you can use, but for salmon specifically, that's what we're using. So we make this plant-based jello and it comes out kind of like a, a bit of a goop, right? It hasn't yet set down. And what we do when it comes out of the machines that make that is we put it onto this machine here.
Chris Bryson (13:00):
This machine here is designed then to add a different gel into the goop. And I really shouldn't call it the goop, makes it unappetizing. But you're basically putting one gel into another gel. It's an injection technology that we've been developing over the last two years that allows us, like I said, to make the connective tissue. So this, this machine here, which has a series of nozzles, basically operates on a gantry system that deposits these nozzles into the, into the jello and then deposits the white line material. And it does that in a way so that the white lines stay in place, which is a very, very difficult technical achievement. You're putting one, basically one liquid into another liquid and trying to get it to stay in place. So this machine adds those white lines in that pan. It's a larger, like I said, block. So you emerge at the end of this process with a block that has a bunch of white lines added into it.
Chris Bryson (14:00):
Once those white lines have been added, we then cool the product so it's in a firm state. So these machines here help to cool it down. We have a few different pieces that help with that process. And then we cut it up into filets. And then those filets we then take over to our plate freezer. So this is called a horizontal plate freezer and it is the smallest plate freezer that we could find. That's why we had to make our own for the lab. So remember that very homegrown looking plate freezer. This is an industrial plate freezer that they use, ironically, in the commercial fishing industry to flash freeze fish. On boats, right? On boats. Yes. So we're using the same stuff they use to process fish to make fish alternatives, which is not just poetic, it's also scalable. So this is a very proven, well-established technology.
Chris Bryson (14:52):
We're just using it in a bit of a different way. Do you want to geek out? You want me to explain? Yeah. Okay. So what happens is that your jello gel, it's effectively still a gello gel in the shape of a salmon filet, is being frozen from the bottom to the top. When that happens, instead of it, if you were to put those gels in a freezer, it would freeze from all directions. Here it's freezing directionally. So you end up with thousands
of little ice crystals that are slowly making their way up through the gel, and it restructures the gel where once it's done at the top, you can kind of look down and almost see a honeycomb structure. So it's transformed from a jello gel that is uniform to something where you have now all these small little, very thin ice crystals surrounded by the gello material.
Chris Bryson (15:39):
So that honeycomb structure, what we later wanna do with that is melt the ice channels, remove the water, and then you're left with a scaffold. These tiny little channels that run from the very bottom to the top that we can then fill in with protein and fats and flavors and colors. So basically these, this freezing process is helping to bore these channels that we can later then remove the ice and then fill it back in. And then over here we have our tanks where we then take it from a frozen state to a, an unfrozen state. So we thaw them out in these temperature controlled tanks, so we have a few of them. And then after you've thawed those products, we then have steps over here that help us to dry out the filets and remove the water. And after that, we then use a series of vacuum pieces of equipment to then vacuum proteins, fats, flavors, and colors into the scaffolds.
Chris Bryson (16:35):
So we make our proteins over here. The other thing that's worth noting about our proteins, many of the plant-based products today suffer from off flavors. They taste like the earth, right, to put it simply. What we do is we s - before we put that, that earthy protein into our product, we actually first remove a lot of those off flavors. That means that we don't have to over flavor it or overcompensate and drive up our costs, and we're left with a cleaner base. So we have this process over here that we've recently filed for a patent on that helps us to remove a lot of those off flavors and get a cleaner flavor profile. And that's effectively it. I've, I've oversimplified it because there's a bunch of different trade secrets to every individual step and, uh, but hopefully that gives you a sense of, of how it's made.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
So this is Chef Matthew. Hi. And Chef Matthew is going to, like I said, be giving you two samples, one that is hiding behind literally nothing at all. It is just the product on its own. One that also has a Harisa lingenberry sauce. And then we're also going to be giving you the salmon burger, so which is our waste product. One thing that's worth mentioning is that maybe you have, but most people certainly have not tried a plant-based meat on its own. You don't eat plant-based burger meat without putting it on a burger and putting all your condiments. So the bar for us in creating salmon, we felt was obviously much higher because it needs to stand on its own. It needs to be something that with a little bit of salt and oil needs to be good. The other thing that's really cool about those white lines, so in salmon you see the same thing where the white
lines basically render and that allows the layers to slide off of each other and flake.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
So I think you'll see the same thing. You'll see that how those lines will melt and, and allow the layers to sort of separate and flake apart.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Speaker 1 (01:10):
One of the, one of the differences relative to salmon is that you have to cook it a little bit higher, but it's not such a huge difference that it's been a problem for our restaurant partners. It's just, it's a couple minutes or it's a slightly higher temperature. But yeah, I mean, if you look at these two, right, this is what it looks like after. So this goes back to what I was saying before about proteins being undenatured here and then being denatured here. So those white lines are starting to melt and you'll see that as those lines melt, they start to separate so the layers can flake apart. If you look at the two most successful products in the plant-based category, which I would argue is Impossible Foods and Just with the Just Egg, where they've succeeded at creating a product that people use on a repeated basis, both of those products are amazing in terms of replicating the cooking experience.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
No one gives them credit for that. But if you think about it, if you provide a product to someone that has a cooking experience that makes you feel uncomfortable or that you need a PhD to do it, you're probably not gonna buy that product again. And so I think one of the unsung benefits or, or reasons why those two products are so successful is because they have such a great cooking experience. But yeah, we've effectively been quietly soft launched for the last four to five months, something, something to that effect. Cool. Um, this is the first time that we're actually telling people that we've launched and we're out there.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Okay. So I don't think I've seen this in New York.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
No, but we have every intention of being in the US as quickly as possible. A
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Little bit fumbly here with one hand on the mic
Speaker 1 (02:39):
And one hand. Here, I'll hold that for you.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Oh, well thank you. There you go. All right.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
He's being interviewed now.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Is
Speaker 4 (02:44):
That still too hot? Mm-mm .
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Okay. It's very good.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Thank
Speaker 3 (02:49):
You. It's not starchy. Of
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Course
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Not. Well, you say of course not, but I have tried a lot of things. And normally there's either like something artificial in the flavor or it's kind of starchy
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Or both. And it's funny, people often start out thinking that it's gonna be starchy because we use potato protein. So there's a, an inherent assumption that it will have starch in it, but there's actually very few carbs in this product just like salmon. By the way, if you have any feedback, we can weave that into version 27 and 28. I mean, all joking aside, we're, we're very big on encouraging people to tell us where they think the product can, can improve. We think this is a, a great and tremendous product, but you can always make everything better. And so - Oh, it's very good. That's a - It's
Speaker 3 (03:31):
Missing the, it's very good. It's missing the oily bit. Yep. And there's, you can taste the fiber a little bit more
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Than - You can. So those are two things that we're actually actively working on as part of version 2728.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
I've never been mic'd while chewing before. But at least this time I'm smiling - Yes. Because there are definitely times I wouldn't have wanted to be miked.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yep. Fair enough. And so this is the burger. It's a chunky, it's a premium burger, if you will. It's chunky. Mm-hmm. But you're still getting, uh, all the muscle fibrousness that you would get, which helps to deliver not just the taste, but also the texture. This
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Is better than a salmon burger, actually. It's very good.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Better than a salmon burger. Yeah. That one in the added - That's the headline. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
They could be in the preparation, by the way, but -
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Well, to be honest, when you're creating a burger and you're breading it and you're deep frying it, the bar is certainly a little bit lower.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
With the extra cooking, you don't notice the fiber as much. Mm. Correct. And probably the oil from the deep fryer is also helping it out a little bit. Correct.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah. So actually being able to sort of take the same product or relatively the same product, but see how it performs differently and under those conditions helps highlight those things and helps to inform like, oh, maybe that's how we fix this problem. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
So in terms of macros, like you said, it's similar in protein. Is it all probably not similar in fat? I mean, it's probably also has fiber, which fish doesn't
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Usually. Yeah. So it has a little bit of fiber. Fat content's virtually the same because we're putting in, but we're not... The nice thing about this relative to other plant-based products and maybe other meats is that we're not using saturated fat. So we're using sunflower oil, algal oil, and another one called ahi flour oil, which provides omega-3s. Overall, fat content's very similar. Calories are virtually identical. There's basically no carbs, same iron content, exact same amount of omega-3s that you would get within salmon. Uh, we're aiming for roughly 15 grams of protein per filet. So it's, it's a little bit lower in protein content, but that's something that we're actively working at bridging the gap. But the real main reason why people say, "Well, why would I eat this plant-based salmon?" You're getting all your omegas, you're not getting any of the mercury. You're not getting the microplastics, you're not getting the antibiotics, the sea lice, all the garbage that you would get if you were eating farm fish.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
This episode was produced by me and Emma Silicons and mixed by Garrett Lang with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Thanks for listening. I'm Jennifer Strong.