Tasting the future of food at THE HEAT

For Skavén Ruben, the key to the food industry’s transition will be its ability to increase productivity. “A cow in the UK will produce 20 times more milk than a cow in Africa, meaning you need a lot more cows and resources to get the same amount of milk,” he says. Cutting food waste also needs to be a priority. “In poor countries, 30% of food is lost before even reaching the consumer, and in rich countries 30% of food produced is lost either at the supermarket, restaurant, or consumer level. And we need to shift to more sustainably produced and nourishing dietary patterns.”

Technology innovation is already having a remarkable impact on food systems. “Some areas that exist now hardly existed ten years ago,” Skavén Ruben says. “We went from a handful of [food-tech] companies to hundreds and hundreds, both in plant-based alternatives to animal-sourced food and cell-cultivated, or cultured, or lab-grown meat.” Does this mean that we’ll all be eating lab-grown meat and insects in a few years? “Maybe not. But some exciting innovations will let us produce and consume foods in a more environmentally sustainable and nourishing way.”

Still, we’re early on that journey. “We still don’t really understand the human gut microbiome, and I hope that ten years from now we will have a much better understanding of how food impacts us, giving us the ability to personalise nutrition,” he says. 

Following an entrepreneurial career running an e-commerce books startup and helping Danish tech companies to internationalise, Skavén Ruben fell into food and ag after studying international relations at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. “Everything sort of traces back to the food system. It’s the industry impacting the environment more than any other.” 

One startup sourced by Skavén Ruben to showcase its product at THE HEAT is Oxford-based Fermtech, which brought chocolate brownies made with Nutriferm, its high-protein, ultra-low-carbon ingredient. 

Fermtech uses “solid state fermentation” to grow Nutriferm: in other words, it grows fungi on solid substrates rather than in liquid tanks. The process harnesses the excellent bioconversion ratio of filamentous fungi, so that they can unlock sources of carbon extremely efficiently. The feedstock that they use for this process is brewers’ spent grains, thus ensuring a low-carbon protein. “We have spent grains shipped to a colocation site with anaerobic digesters,” explains Fermtech‘s CEO, Andy Clayton. “What comes in is spent grains, and what comes out is valuable human food protein and energy.”