Israeli foodtech startup SavorEat on Tuesday launched a plant-based burger system personalized to each customer, one of the first companies to use 3D printing technology to cook food.

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Typically, vegan burgers from companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are frozen and later cooked on a grill.

SavorEat's technology, however, are made on site by a self-contained 3D printer with three cartridges containing oils and other ingredients. Customers can choose how much fat and protein they want in each burger, which takes about six minutes to cook.

"It's a mix of innovation of meat alternative and digital manufacturing where we can also cook the product," Racheli Vizman, SavorEat's chief executive, told Reuters.

She said the firm's burgers are made with a combination of potato and chickpea and pea protein.

Demand for meat alternatives by health and environmentally conscious consumers has jumped in recent years, while alternative protein startups raised more than $3 billion in 2020.

Another Israeli company, Redefine Meat, last month started to deploy meatless whole cuts in European restaurants.

SavorEat, funded mainly by Israeli institutions and whose Tel Aviv-listed shares rose 11% on Tuesday, said its products would initially be served at a local burger chain.

The company is also collaborating with food service firm Yarzin Sela that supplies Israeli high-tech companies and forged a deal with Sodexo to serve its vegan burgers to US universities.

"There is a growing segment of people called 'flexiterian' – people who are actively trying to look for meat alternatives to reduce their meat consumption," Vizman said, citing about one-third of the US population.

Oded Shoseyov, chairman and chief scientist of SavorEat, said the firm is also working on a plant-based version of a pork breakfast sausage for the US market.

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Students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology's Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering have won top prizes in a European food innovation competition designed to develop healthy and sustainable food for everyone.

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The EU-supported Food Solutions Project is part of EIT FOOD – a program that fosters innovation to create healthy and sustainable food for all. The premise of the competition was to take real-world nutritional and sustainability challenges faced by the food industry and come up with solutions that can potentially transform the food system and promote sustainability and health.

Experts and mentors from top European universities supervised the student's progress, together with leading companies Nestle, Danone-Nutricia, Döhler, IMDEA and Puratos.  Two Technion teams won first place prizes, and another came in third.

This year, the Technion's participating teams chose to tackle two challenges: GrOAT: creating an innovative, healthy, and sustainable product using an oat-based ingredient (a challenge presented by the Finnish company Myllyn Paras, which invests considerable resources in "plant-based innovation"); and FoodFE: (Food for the Elderly) – to design novel food products for the elderly that address the issue of loss of taste, palatability, and efficiency of nutrient uptake.

Once the teams had formed, they spent some six months developing their products. The process involved attempts to assess product manufacturing at the Technion's food pilot plant and support from senior industry representatives. The students also consulted with chefs at Tel Aviv culinary school Bishulim, who helped refine and resolve some of the culinary aspects of the projects.

The Bioat Group – graduate students Maayan Ben-David, Liora Bernstein, Carolina Lejterer, and Gil Raphael – won a first place prize for their vegan "labaneh" cheese spread, based on a fermented oat ingredient. The team's product also came in first in the crowd favorite category.

Judges praised their vegan labaneh as delicious, and employees from a company with origins in the Middle East said that the taste was very close to that of dairy-based labaneh.

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The CRACKEAT Group – Dor Abu Hazira, Shlomit Hakim, Hadar Kochavi, Victoria Skortov, and Linor Rochlin – won first place for a soy-based, creamy treat for the elderly with a crisp cookie on top. The product was praised by the judges for its unique presentation and taste. The final product provides a complex experience of different textures, while also being more environmentally friendly than current packaging solutions. It is high in protein and fiber, sugar-free, and low in saturated fat.

Coming in third place in the Food Products Challenge for the Elderly was another group from the faculty – Shahar Hefner, Nova Neumann, Christine Oviad, and Dana Raz. The four developed Lite Delight, a unique nutritional snack based solely on natural ingredients and tailored to the needs and desires of the senior population. The product offers something chewy, but not too chewy, that is portable and tasty. The individual brownie-like cake bar was praised for its soft, fluffy texture, combined with a sweet taste and no added sugar.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the groups did not fly to Europe to present their products but sent them by courier to the judges so that they could taste them first-hand. The judges praised Bioat, CRACKEAT, and Lite Delight for their quality and congratulated the teams on their professionalism and attention to detail in their packaging and branding.

"This win wraps up a whole year of hard work," said faculty members and mentors Dr. Maya Davidovich-Pinhas, Professor Uri Lesmes, and Professor Avi Shpigelman.

"This achievement demonstrates the excellence of students in this faculty, not only in the engineering and technological aspects, but also creatively and in their ability to deal with all aspects of the process from market research, creating a business feasibility study, addressing regulatory and marketing issues, conducting shelf-life analysis, planning the commercial manufacturing process, and of course presenting their product to experts," they said.

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VeganNation, an Israeli startup, is slated to launch its new mobile app this week with the goal to create a vegan global community.

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Isaac Thomas, founder and chairman of VeganNation, told i24NEWS that he started with a mission "to build a technological platform connecting businesses and consumers around the world and to make plant-based [products] and sustainability accessible and affordable."

The platform is designed to unite the global vegan community into a shared economy with a designated marketplace and payment solution, as well as the company's own community-based digital currency "GreenCoin."

Lata Kennedy, the owner of the herbal medicine store Flower Power Herbs & Roots in New York, spoke to i24NEWS about the gratitude she feels for the expanding vegan community.

"I'm so gratified over the course of the last 28 years to see so many people becoming vegans," Kennedy said.

"We need this collective to show the market what value we have as plant-based consumers," Kennedy said.

While visiting restaurants in New York that participate in the VeganNation program, Thomas discussed his vision for the new app with i24NEWS.

"[The app] is a business directory where we will be able to find every plant-based and sustainable business around us, from food to fashion, health to wellness… and pay the business through our digital wallet GreenPay."

VeganNation's digital wallet, GreenPay, facilitates in-app purchases as well as a loyalty rewards program, in an effort to make the startup's currency, GreenCoin, the official alternative currency instrument for the global plant-based community.

This article was first published by i24NEWS.

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Else Nutrition's Plant-Based Complete Nutrition for Toddlers has been ranked the number-one selling product on Amazon's Hot New Releases for the retail giant's Baby and Toddler Formula category, the company announced Monday.

As of Nov. 17, the product's single and four-pack varieties held the first and second spots on the list, respectively.

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The Amazon success comes after the company took to social media to advertise itself in the US via an animated campaign.

"We are overwhelmed with excitement by the demand we are seeing for our Toddler Nutrition on the Amazon platform," said Else co-founder and CEO Hamutal Yitzhak.

"The strong uptake confirms that US parents are looking for novel healthy nutrition alternatives for their children," Yitzhak added, noting that the Amazon demand echoed consumer feedback the company was receiving through its own online store and in brick and mortar retail outlets.

Earlier this week, Else Nutrition announced that is had commenced shipment of its product with KeHE Distributors.

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An Israeli manufacturer of plant-based baby food is taking to social media ahead of its product launch in 380 retail outlets across the US.

Else Nutrition Holdings hired an award-winning animator to conceptualize an animated campaign that includes an interactive Instagram Live series with featured appearances from leading pediatricians, registered nurses and dietitians. The series airs on Tuesdays at 1 p.m. EST.

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Using colorful animation, the Else Nutrition campaign welcomes consumers to an "Else World" where whole-food, plant-based nutrition is everywhere, especially in the baby aisle, with focus on its breakthrough product: Else Plant-Based Complete Nutrition for Toddlers.

The company is marketing its plant-based, non-soy, formula as a "clean-ingredient alternative to dairy-based formula." Else Nutrition won the "2017 Best Health and Diet Solutions" award at the Global Food Innovation Summit in Milan.

Else Nutrition co-founder and CEO Hamutal Yitzhak said, "We're inviting all parents to join us in building an Else World: the kind of world our babies and children deserve: with cleaner, less processed, whole-food plant-based nutrition, and a healthier planet.

"We've seen how our ground-breaking plant-based nutrition has helped families around the US provide their children with proper nutrition," Yitzhak added.

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Founded in 2018 based on technology licensed through the Weizmann Institute of Science, Phytolon leverages fermentation-based technology to produce plant-based food colors.

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In 2019, the food coloring market reached $2.85 billion. Demand for natural food coloring is increasing as consumers become aware of the possible health risks of some of the existing synthetic food dyes.

Since Phytolon was founded, it has received numerous awards. The company was a finalist at MassChallenge Israel 2020, AgriVest 2019, Slingshot 2019 and a runner up in the Calcalist-Tnuva Foodtech 2019 competition.

Investors in this round included Millennium Food-Tech (an R&D partnership that invests in food-tech companies); EIT Food (Europe's leading food innovation initiative); Trendlines Group (an Israeli-Singapore-based investment group focused on high-growth medical and agri-food technologies); former CEO of Elbit Systems Yossi Ackerman; and the Israel Innovation Authority.

Phytolon CEO Dr. Halim Jubran said that the funding round would allow his company's products, which "offer a high quality and cost-efficient solution to the food industry," to reach the market.

"The new round will also promote our collaborations with potential clients," Jubran said.

Prof. Asaph Aharoni of the Weizmann Institute, who played a key role in inventing the technology that Phytolon is licensing, said, "Phytolon's success provides an excellent example of how cutting-edge, basic science sets the stage for novel applications in the industry. Phytolon's product is a step forward towards reducing the segment of synthetic chemistry and increasing sustainability of natural resources for the food industry."

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