The fifth and final session of our 9th annual virtual Food & Beverage Trend Summit this month covered the Future of Food with Eleni Yianna Hogg and Ira van Eelen taking to the virtual stage.
Marketing Lead from Newfish in New Zealand, Eleni was first to take to our virtual stage to discuss how her company is working to reimagine seafood with ocean-based, plant-based foods, and the company's journey so far. Another leading topic of the conversation was the development of the use of seaweed and micro algae too.
"Micro algae is this enormous untapped resource. There's only a few strains commercially available when hundreds of thousands exist. We're working on projects to explore different strains and also strains that may be endemic to New Zealand. The existing strains already are absolute superfoods and incredible but to us we don't even know what's below the surface."
Following Eleni on the virtual stage was Ira van Eelen, co-founder of RESPECTfarms, Cellulaire Agricultuur Nederland board member, founder of KindEarth.Tech and a Next Nature fellow. Ira joined Charles to discuss cellular agriculture technology and the latest developments in the field, as well as how the work Ira and her peers are doing is bridging the gap between scientists and the theory and farmers too.
Ira also covered the modern wave of cultivated meats and proteins developed using the latest cellular technology and knowledge. In discussion with Charles about the bioreactors her team and other companies are working with, Ira commented: "Let's make it real - price parity is an important thing. Everybody will try to get the highest yield out of their sales, out of the machine they have to buy, out of the food they are giving those cells. That is right now the holy grail, how cheap can I make it.
"The assessment's done on this - and it's not been proven yet - that it's possible with cultivated meat to actually end up at a lower price than conventional meat because it's such a very very efficient way of growing these meat cells."
Watch Ira's full discussion in the video below.
You can watch the full playlist of videos from the Trend Summit on our YouTube channel here.