Pitch Competition Winner Redefines Protein Options

Judges for The Pitch! competition at the IFT FIRST Annual Event and Expo held this summer in Chicago awarded the competition’s $10,000 top prize to Plantible Foods, the company Tony Martens and Maurits van de Ven cofounded in 2016 that uses an aquatic plant called Lemna to produce a protein-rich food ingredient.

“We are growing novel aquatic plants, and we convert them into very functional food ingredients starting with a protein that’s more digestible, more nutrient-dense, and more functional than any other plant proteins on the market right now,” says Martens, referring to Rubi, short for the Rubisco protein found in leafy greens like kale, spinach, and lettuce.

“We are growing a more Rubisco-efficient plant, opening the plant cells, and removing the Rubisco from the plant matter and selling it as a food ingredient. It’s a protein that’s an upgrade instead of a replacement,” says Martens, who believes that the food system has focused too much on the idea of “replacement” or “alternative” ingredients.

“I think in the food industry, we’re just so much stuck in this story of alternatives or replacements instead of upgrades,” says Martens. “And if you look at it from any other industry, I don’t think anybody refers to the iPhone, for example, as an alternative to a dial-up phone. I mean, nobody [thinks that] it’s an ‘alternative.’”

Rubi Protein not only has a healthy nutritional profile, but it’s highly functional in food formulations, supplying foaming, gelling, and binding functions that enable it to replace synthetic emulsifiers and binders. Rubi Protein is two to four times more efficient in product formulations than egg or dairy proteins, Martens says.

Applications include bakery products, confections, sauces and dressings, snacks, and coatings. Martens notes that food product formulators seeking to reduce or eliminate their dependence on “supply chain–fragile and allergenic ingredients like egg and dairy proteins” have responded positively to Rubi. Plantible is already shipping commercial quantities of Rubi and has signed supply agreements valued in the “tens of millions of dollars,” Martens says.

Martens is also incredibly proud of Plantible’s two-year-old West Texas–based commercial facility called Ranchito. The 100-acre facility has 90,000 square feet of greenhouses, where the Lemna plants are grown, and has allowed the company to be the No. 1 employer in the region, growing household incomes by 61%. “I think that’s what food has always been about, not only creating healthier, more nutritious, and tasty products, but bringing rural communities along the way,” he says.

Lemna is an extremely fast-growing plant, Martens explains, noting that the company harvests plants nearly every other day. Plantible’s vertically integrated operation means that the collected biomass can be milled and filtered at the Ranchito using the company’s natural cold processing technology to produce a neutral-tasting white protein powder.

Plantible’s journey began in the Netherlands, where Martens and van de Ven began exploring ways to build a more climate-resilient food system. “The food supply chain has become increasingly fragile, where climate change and diseases are all impacting the stability and quality of our underlying food systems,” says Martens. “And with that in mind, we started to think, ‘Okay, what if we can find a solution that actually outperforms the ingredients that we use today, but also create a more resilient supply chain?’ And that’s what led us to Rubisco.

“It’s been considered the holy grail of proteins for the past 70 to 90 years because of its nutrient and functional abilities,” Martens continues, adding that Plantible wasn’t the first to produce the protein from Lemna plants, but it’s been more successful than others in scaling its production.

Cash prizes in The Pitch! competition at IFT FIRST were provided by Seeding The Future Foundation. Two runners-up, Crush Dynamics and Redleaf Biologics, scored $2,500 each in prize money for their innovations in upcycling the crush from winemaking and the cultivation of a sustainable and scalable variety of sorghum for botanical extract production.ft