Technology is revolutionizing food, but how can it be explained to consumers?

Change Foods is two years away from having a product on the marketplace, but its website is full of carefully curated information about what it will be.

The site is full of pictures of cheese — stretching out, melting on pizza, tacos and sandwiches, and being enjoyed by smiling consumers. It has pictures of nature, with sweeping vistas. There’s a photo of a cute calf.

Text on the site lays out Change Foods’ core principles and manufacturing process in simple terms: “We (re)create real dairy foods that delight the taste buds, nourish people and sustain the planet, by using the magic of microbes instead of animals.”

“The magic of microbes” is how Change Foods explains its process for creating cheese products using dairy proteins made through precision fermentation. While fermentation has been used for centuries to create food and drink like sauerkraut and beer, precision fermentation is a newer process that involves encoding microbes with information to engineer a protein typically produced by an animal, and producing the protein in a fermentation tank. Change Foods uses microbes, including those in yeast, that contain sequences to make a selection of dairy proteins identical to those that come from milking cows. The only difference is the origin.

Irina Gerry, the company’s chief marketing officer, is concentrating on how to tell that story so consumers understand what it is when the first product arrives on shelves. 

“The technological capabilities are outpacing our linguistic framework and our understanding of what these things are,” she said. “…Very much a part of my job is to think about and understand: How do we bridge that gap in the way that’s least confusing and most easily understood?” 

This linguistics issue is not limited to precision fermentation. As consumers become more interested in knowing the story behind what they eat, companies that create next-generation products need to both explain the science and present a desirable product. Makers of cell-based, fermented, plant-based and tech-heavy products have been busily rebranding, launching PR campaigns and working through consumer research to spread their message to potential consumers. 


“The technological capabilities are outpacing our linguistic framework and our understanding of what these things are.”

Irina Gerry

Chief marketing officer, Change Foods


Few products in this realm are currently on the market, but Dan O’Connell, founder and CEO of Foodmix Marketing Communications, said that now is the time for these companies to start talking about them.

“They’re starting early with the conversations,” O’Connell said. “… [Companies are] already identifying, before they’re ready to formulate, who the influencers are. They’re beginning to share and have dialogues, and then as they get closer to market, they’re continuing those conversations. …Every step of the way they’re communicating, but they’re also listening and learning.”

What is this product?

At Gerry’s previous job as senior brand manager for Silk and So Delicious at Danone, explaining the alternative dairy products she worked with was relatively simple.

Now, it’s not that easy. Although most consumers actually have firsthand experience with precision fermentation — it’s how most rennet used to make cheese has been produced for more than two decades — consumers think more about the milk in cheese than the rennet that is vital in making it cheese. 

While there is no universally accepted language for these ingredients, Gerry said that the handful of companies in the space describe them as “animal-free.” Perfect Day, the only company with products on the market, lists “animal-free milk” as the first ingredient in pints of its ice cream made by its affiliated CPG manufacturer The Urgent Company. 

“The challenge for us now is to make sure that we’re aggregating and coalescing around common language, but also that we are seeding that and including a framework for people in the broader universe,” Gerry said. “So, do people understand that ‘plant-based’ is unique and different from ‘animal-free,’ that’s unique and different from ‘cultivated.’?”

Many companies in these alternative protein spaces are truly inventing them. Eat Just pioneered plant-based eggs with its Just Egg brand, and debuted the first cell-based chicken with its Good Meat product. At the virtual Future Food-Tech conference in June, Tom Rossmeissl, head of global marketing, said that it’s important for descriptions on packages, menus and in marketing to clearly and accurately tell consumers what the product is.

Terminology needs to be descriptive and truthful, he said, “so if a consumer sees it on the shelf, they’re able to understand and become educated about what the product is,” Rossmeissl said.

Cell-based Good Meat chicken

Courtesy of Eat Just

 

On the website for Good Meat, consumers can scroll through a detailed description of the process for making cell-based meat, which involves selecting animal cells to produce, feeding them a growth medium of nutrients in a bioreactor so they grow and divide, and harvesting them to become finished products. The site also explains how cultured cells can become meat products by growing them on a natural scaffolding, 3D printing them into shapes, using extrusion to improve the texture, and molding them into a desired form.

Rossmeissl said it’s important that consumers know exactly how the products are made. Good Meat chicken is currently only available through limited foodservice venues in Singapore, and he said the company is using the tech explanation in its marketing there. 

Nicki Briggs, vice president of corporate communications for Perfect Day, said her company’s products are not a new entrant — they are an entirely new category. Nomenclature has always been a challenge, since leading up to product launches, all consumer research came through describing a type of product people had not yet seen or imagined. 

Perfect Day is an ingredient provider — although The Urgent Company, which is one CPG company currently selling products made with Perfect Day’s proteins, is affiliated with it. In this role, Perfect Day doesn’t have much control over the messaging that individual brands put forward about their products, Briggs said.

But for consumers who see the Perfect Day logo on a product and want to know more, the company has created an online Knowledge Base that answers commonly asked questions, and has blog posts about its technology, how the proteins work and should be labeled, and sustainability issues. Briggs said the information on the Knowledge Base came from listening to consumers. The company plans to continue adding information as new issues arise and products hit shelves.


“[Companies are] already identifying, before they’re ready to formulate, who the influencers are. They’re beginning to share and have dialogues, and then as they get closer to market, they’re continuing those conversations. …Every step of the way they’re communicating, but they’re also listening and learning.”

Dan O’Connell

Founder and CEO, Foodmix Marketing Communications


Transparency is one of Perfect Day’s key issues, she said, and likens the communication process to a funnel.

“The grand majority of consumers kind of sit at the top of the funnel where they want to know it tastes good, they want it to be convenient, it needs to be the right price, and if it checks those core boxes, they’re really open to trying it,” Briggs said. “And then there are some consumers who want to go a little deeper in the funnel, and they might be curious about the process, or they might be curious about precision fermentation — and just given the diversity in terms of awareness level, want to learn more. We really want to make all of the information available and accessible for anyone that wants to access it.” 

Nature’s Fynd, which uses biomass fermentation to create meat and dairy analogs, has been tweaking its communication approach in the nearly 10 years since the company was started.



Source: fooddive.com

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