Locations
United States · Palo Alto, CA, USA · San Francisco, CA, USA · Kansas City, MO, USA · Hayward, CA, USA
industry
Food · Food Production
Size
1 - 10 employees
Stage
Seed
founded in
2013
Planetarians turns food security into a profitable business with 10x cheaper than beef alternatives, and you can join it! TLDR: Our patented technology transforms unavoidable sidestreams of food and beverage industries into a clean, nutritious, and delicious source of protein. Narrowing down food to first principles, we come to the question - where do we get the nutrients? Regardless of how you make food - plant-based, via animal agriculture, or growing cells in reactors - you need ingredients. Population is growing. The land is limited. So, where can we get initial nutrients? This is the question we asked ourselves 8 years ago. Looking at the food system from the helicopter view, we noticed that 1/3 of all grown crops are discarded one way or another. Imagine you want an orange… you have to peel it. Where does a peel go? Landfill, composting, animal feed… For us, it was the untapped source of nutrients. It accounts for 1/3 of all crops grown. But how can we eat that? This is the challenge we jumped. We thought that if we could unlock nutrients from it for human consumption, we could feed 50% more people on the planet without the need to grow more crops. It took longer than we expected, but with our better-for-you protein, we proved that it was feasible: - It has more protein than beef. - It’s a quality protein with 82% PDCAAS. - And it has a shape of versatile whole cuts. We narrowed our formula down to 2 whole ingredients - spent yeast, a sidestream of beer fermentation, and spent beans, dry matter left after soybeans were pressed for vegetable oil. We simplified the texturization process to 2 minutes and a $5M line to get 500 tons per month of better-for-you protein at 1/10 of the beef cost. To make it everywhere, we partnered with world-leading beer company AB InBev (supply, investor) and Clextral (equipment). Selling in U.S. schools, we know people like it - 72% acceptance rate! And business is profitable even at low prices the government pays.
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