AI, 3D printing primed to power meatless modernization

Plant-based foods may suggest a simple, natural approach to eating, but the process of developing and creating these foods is getting more high-tech by the day. And that’s exactly how it should be, according to Oliver Zahn, Ph.D.

“Food is the biggest conceivable vertical [market] of AI for both climate change and human health. There’s nothing else that really comes close to it,” claimed the former head of data science at Google, who is now using artificial intelligence to create plant-based cheese at the startup Climax Foods. He believes food production has widespread impact on resources like water and land, and calls food “the most outdated technology that humans still use on Earth today.”

Here’s how several leaders in the plant-based market are using the latest technology to create the next generation of meat-free products and solutions, which you can read more about in SupplySide Food & Beverage Journal's plant-based digital magazine.

3D-printing: Meat alternatives

Austria-based Robin Simsa founded Revo Foods in 2019 with the goal of providing realistic plant-based salmon products to the European market. After years of experimentation and several well-received plant-based salmon spreads, the business released a fully 3D-printed salmon fillet last fall, which Simsa said made Revo “the first company in the world to launch 3D-printed foods in supermarkets.”

3D printing is a perfect fit for fish and meat analogues, Simsa said, because it allows the fat and protein layers (in this case coming from mycoprotein and sunflower and microalgae oils) to be integrated rather than separated. “This leads to a really fascinating new texture and mouthfeel of the final product,” he suggested.

It also allows for quick scaling. Revo is currently printing tens of thousands of fillets monthly, but the company is also scheduled to open what Simsa referred to as “the largest industrial production system for any type of 3D printing anywhere in the world” in Vienna by August. This will allow the business to print salmon “by the ton,” but Simsa said he’s in discussion with a range of food companies to use his organization’s printing technology to create not only other plant-based fish and meat products, but also baked goods and chocolate.

“3D printing is so cool because it allows you to perform thousands of operations, whereas normally machines have like one or two operations that are super-specialized,” Simsa explained. “Now it’s just about the speed.”

AI: Market research, consumer insights

Customer data and insights factor into every aspect of new food and beverage products, from the way they taste to the font and color of the packaging. Thor Olof Philogène, CEO and co-founder of Stravito, said this means “the industry is in a unique position to effectively employ AI tools.” His AI-powered market research firm is used by companies ranging from French dairy multinational Danone to Danish brewing brand Carlsberg.

In recent months, Stravito launched the generative AI conversational tool Stravito Assistant to allow clients to drill deep into market data and consumer behavior by typing simple questions. When asked to help provide insight for a vegan cheese snack, Philogène said a generative AI tool could instantly produce everything from data-rich bullet points to entire presentations through prompts such as:

AI chat tools like ChatGPT have been criticized for an over-reliance on publicly available information, leading to either plagiarism or the often-bizarre mistakes known as “generative AI hallucinations.” But industry-specific tools like Stravito Assistant can set the guardrails more precisely, pulling from a user’s owned data and providing citations and footnotes.

But perhaps the most promising aspect of AI is that it grows and develops so quickly, sometimes we hardly know what it’s capable of. “What’s not possible with generative AI today may very well be just a few months from now,” Philogène predicted.

AI: Unlocking plant-based functional matches

Zahn calls himself “a big cheese lover that for ethical reasons had transitioned out of cheese-eating gradually.” But the astrophysicist with experience in major companies like SpaceX used his combined passions to launch Climax Foods in 2019. Currently, the company offers four plant-based cheeses that Zahn maintained “in blind tastings are indistinguishable and are nutritionally superior and cheaper to produce” than traditional milk-based cheeses.

How is that possible? It started with the ambitious project of building what Zahn coined the “largest database that exists on animal food functionality,” looking at every aspect of what makes traditional cheeses, eggs and meat taste, smell and feel the way they do, and how that translates into nutrition. “We learned very quickly that there’s no publicly available data that is useful here, so we had to build it all from scratch,” he reported.

By feeding this information into an AI platform, Zahn noted Climax can look for plant-based sources of the same ingredients. “We simultaneously optimize for flavor, texture, nutrition and price. It is all part of the AI,” he explained. It also allows the company to predict and avoid common allergens and other safety risks.

After creating thousands of prototypes and “feeding them back into models to predict how to make better prototypes,” the business released its take on four iconic cheeses: brie, feta, blue and chevre. All are entirely plant based and can be produced at scale in traditional dairy facilities (so long as trace allergens aren’t a concern).

In each case, Climax tested its creations with renowned chefs and traditional cheesemakers, who Zahn said were uniformly supportive of the product — especially once they tasted it. He recalled one leading French cheesemaker at a brand with a 300-year history trying the brie: “She said in a French accent to her whole team, ‘This is mind-blowing. This is the future.’”

And it’s a future that’s close at hand. Zahn said certain Climax Foods cheeses, including the feta, will begin to be widely available in the U.S. in late 2024 or early 2025. Bel Group, the maker of the Babybel and Laughing Cow cheeses, also acquired an equity stake in Climax in 2023, and Zahn shared that a plant-based version of the Babybel is scheduled for release in 2025.