Animal-based food is considered by many as a product that should be eliminated. There are several ethical dilemmas associated with the production of animal-based food, but there are also environmental reasons such as the high impact in terms of CO2 emissions and water consumption related to the production of meat, eggs, dairy products, etc. To tackle this problem, many have tried to replicate animal-based products using only vegan food. It is possible to find in the market vegan meat, vegan cheese, vegan milk, among others. However, most of these products fail to imitate their animal-based counterparts in many aspects, making vegan or vegetarian people their largest consumer groups.
What if we could create vegan food that replicates not only the flavour of animal-based food but also its texture, behaviour to different temperatures and smell? This may now be possible thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). A Chilean unicorn company called NotCo has developed an AI (which they named Giuseppe) that is able to find components in animal food and then find the best combination of plants to imitate certain characteristics.
Few plants are used to make most of the vegan food that aims to imitate animal-based food. There are hundreds of thousands of plants, all with different characteristics that could give a recipe what it needs to be even more similar to animal-based food. For example, they are able to recreate the flavour of blue cheese using cocoa beans, as Giuseppe identified that they share 73 flavour-related molecules. Or the fact that they use pineapple and cabbage to make milk. These are unusual vegetables to be used to replicate these animal-based products because it is unlikely for a human to make a connection between them. This is not the case for Giuseppe, which is more objective and data-driven than humans.
The impact of the company is such that it has raised over $100.000.000, including a big investment by Bezos Expedition, owned by Jeff Bezos. Their meat is sold in Burger King and Papa John’s in Chile and their products have reached several countries in America, including the United States, Mexico and Brazil. If eventually, after years of learning, Giuseppe is able to exactly replicate meat, dairy or eggs, why not give it a try?
PS: I have tried all of their products. Hamburgers are almost indistinguishable from real meat hamburgers, but I would say their milk still needs some adjustments.
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