As Chairman of Revieve, I speak regularly at conferences around the world, frequently meeting fellow speakers and CEOs who declare that their company is about to change categories like health, beauty, wellness—and food. When I met Alan Hahn at an event recently, I was reminded that his Denver-based company, MycoTechnology, is influencing the evolution of food, by creating essential ingredients that are often overlooked to scale the next generation of food.
Standing in their booth on the show, as I sampled the world’s first mushroom milk that Alan’s team had just produced (yum, no mushrooms, just cream), I invited him to join me on an episode of The Reboot Chronicles to discuss the opportunities and risks surrounding the future of food. You can watch it here at Forbes or wherever you listen to the podcast.
I should clarify that this isn’t something found in the pack at the supermarket or the trendy psilocybin game, but rather unleashes the power of a mushroom-based food processing platform to change the taste of farm produce. As Alan puts it: “If we grow as a world population from 7 billion to 10 billion by 2040, that is a 50 to 70% increase in protein requirements. So we really need to use this food that’s going to be wasted and recycle it into the food stream. This will be a great way to meet our exponentially growing needs.”
The company is growing fast, having an impact in over 100 countries, and raising over $200 million from investors such as Manna Tree (of which I am an advisor), Wavemaker Partners, Seventure Partners, Middleland Capital, GreatPoint Ventures, S2G Ventures, Tao Capital Partners , Emerson Collective, Continental Grain Company, Tyson Ventures, and Greenleaf Foods.
Make Protein Rich Drinks Taste Good
With the largest fermentation facility in the world, MycoTechnology uses the power of mushrooms to make food taste better without the triad of salt, fat and sugar (yum) that tends to make food taste appealing. As Alan tells, this story begins in ancient history. “To preserve something, you ferment it, so it will last a long time without refrigeration. We as Americans consume about 70% of all our calories as fermented foods, but those are very simple organisms like yeast or bacteria. And that’s great if you want to make alcohol. But when you want to really change something, you need a much stronger organism. And that’s why fungi and their mycelia, their root system, are transformative. They are biological machines.”
They have purchased mushroom strains that are categorized and certified by the university to grow them in large barrels, something like the one used to ferment beer. He’s like a shroom macro maker. One use is to correct a challenge that so many plant-based laboratory-developed foods have: terrible taste and smell. “We take a mix of pea protein and rice protein, and blend it in a ratio that makes it nutritionally equivalent to beef, as far as protein quality goes and with the nine essential amino acids in the right ratio,” he says. But, “it smells terrible, it tastes terrible.” They took the same mix of beans and rice, put it in a fermenter and added mushroom mycelia. The fungus begins to break bonds in substances that create bad smells as well as those that create bitterness, acidity and astringency and phytic acid, which blocks the ability to absorb nutrients such as iron.
Sustainable Plant-Based Foods With Less Salt and Sugar
The value proposition is clear, plant-based food manufacturers, like Plantra and their Ozo burger, could use less sugar and salt. One look at their ingredient labels shows how much smaller it is than the competition. “It looks like something you’d make in your kitchen when you look at the materials deck,” he says. “They can use less ingredients that we don’t really want to overuse. It’s part of overcoming illness that we can actually change by what we eat. But, you have to give people choices that taste good!”
Alan knows about food and health matters personally. She is on the slippery slope of diabetes and has managed to improve her health by changing her diet, thanks in part to foods made by partner companies.
Another application of MycoTechnology to the mass market, which I think has potential is a bitter inhibitor that can help produce actually healthier chocolate. This can reduce the amount of sugar you need to sweeten chocolate—yes please—by half the sugar normally needed to block the natural bitterness.
In addition to enhancing the taste and improving the nutrition of existing foods, MycoTechnology handles nearly 40% of the food produced each year is wasted. “Instead of throwing it in the trash, we use leftover food and extract sugar from it to grow mushroom-based proteins,” he said. The chemistry is quite simple. “You need carbon and energy sources like sugar, and you need nitrogen. Cheap carbon sources are essential to actually growing these organisms in very high volumes. You’re not just talking about removing leftovers, you’re saying taking the by-products of food manufacture and using them to make other things.”
As cool and sustainable as all of this is, Alan recounts how the VC was hesitant at first. They don’t want to invest in anything involving steel in the field. Thankfully that has changed in the 9 years the company has been in business. We’ve seen the VC, PE, and CVC communities congregate around the food industry, funding competitive companies like Quorn and Enough—and targeting all the categories that feed the global food, health and wellness ecosystem.
Perhaps the greatest potential in my mind is when we stop trying to imitate the experience of meat, chicken, or fish and create something fundamentally new. Alan took it a step further to think of food as a healer. “Instead of taking a multivitamin that the body doesn’t absorb well, what if you eat nutrient-dense foods that provide these benefits.” Mushrooms, with their anti-inflammatory antioxidants known to improve cognitive abilities, may be the solution. “There are a wide variety of interesting compounds that can be mixed in different combinations into food additives to create truly medicinal foods.”
What’s Next in the Future of Food
I appreciate leaders who understand what brought them to where they are now is not what they need next. To impact global food supply chains, you have to think big and have a plan that goes beyond what’s known—with speed and agility.
MycoTechnology started by creating a food processing platform that uses fungal mycelia to create new, new foods. Now their development is turning to mushroom-based proteins, which come from a product that would be useless. They’re also developing new lines, such as honey truffle sweetener, the first high-intensity natural sweetener in 30 years—which has no calories, no taste, and appears to be a thousand times sweeter than sugar! What follows is the exploration of compounds. To scale at speed, you need high-throughput screening methods that can reduce the time it takes to evaluate compounds—which can then produce methods and processes to produce the industrial quantities the world needs.
“As our population grows we will need every form of protein we can produce, whether it’s animal, vegetable, cultivated, mushroom. I’m excited to really contribute to the solutions out there for how we feed everyone and do it in a way that really caters to people’s tastes.” To increase this promise, we need to continue to fund hundreds (and then thousands) of organizations that can bring together new products, technologies and partnerships to increase the next generation of global food supplies.
