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Lypid enters the B2B vegan-fat market with PhytoFatTM, a plant-based fat with a healthy profile and rich, authentic mouthfeel.

Californian food tech startup Lypid has scored $4 million in a seed funding raise to scale their vegan fat. Green Generation Fund led the round, with Big Idea Ventures and SOSV’s Indie Bio participating, amongst others. New investment will be used to, hopefully, scale and commercialise the company’s flagship fat development, PhytoFat. More data is said to be needed to fully ascertain the viability of scaling.

Plant-based meat alternatives are getting 'meatier' by the day as brands reverse engineer animal products and put them back together with plants. But getting plant-based fat to behave like animal fat has been a major stumbling block for the industry, says foodtech startup Lypid, which has just raised $4m in seed funding to help commercialize its ‘PhytoFat’ platform.

The search of animal fat alternatives is taking off. Demand for flavourful cultivated meats, realistic plant-based options, and palm oil-free products is increasing, and in parallel, a variety of fats are being developed to cover a spectrum of needs. Below, we highlight five food tech startups focusing on the business of fat.

CP Foods plans to co-develop better tasting plant-based meat with U.S. startup Lypid

Michelle Lee, PhD, is CTO of Lypid, a food tech start-up developing a natural vegan fat with a rich meaty mouthfeel that can replace animal fat. She says: “As a leader, what I care about most is whether the people I'm working with feel like they have growth, like they’re learning something in the process. Because that’s what I personally care about, learning."

Thai pork and poultry giant CP Foods has joined forces with US vegan fat startup Lypid. The San Francisco-based food tech develops vegan fat with an animal fat mouthfeel to increase the authenticity of plant-based meats.

Charoen Pokphand Foods Public Company Limited (CP Foods) has partnered with “Lypid”, startup from the United States, to create plant-based meat that has the same taste and texture as real meat with its innovative “vegan fat”. CP Foods expects to start commercial phase of this collaboration in the next two years.

Among the other winning startups (not related to 3D printing but still interesting), Oxyle took second prize, with a technology that eliminates highly persistent, organic pollutants from industrial and municipal wastewaters. Lypid took third prize for developing a vegan fat that can be tuned to precise textures and melting points, mimicking animal fat.

The CPF Innovation Challenge: Enhancing Texture, Juiciness and Aroma to Create Healthy Plant-Based Meat Alternatives

Winner: Lypid (USA); Finalists: Novameat (Spain) and Audra Labs (Singapore)

Two Taiwanese researchers from Cornell University, Huang Jen-Yu and Michelle Lee, saw the trend of plant-based meat and became the first-ever to use the encapsulation technique to produce “alternative fat,” which enables plant meat to taste like real meat. They established Lypid and got selected by global accelerator IndieBio, and plan to go into mass production next year.

其實肉好不好吃的關鍵在脂肪，而植物肉的脂肪只能用植物油替代，這有根本上的差異，也是植物肉要邁入下一個階段的關鍵。

Lypid is a San Francisco food tech that makes vegan fat. Fat is the component that makes some of our favourite animal foods taste delicious—think marbled steak or streaky bacon. So if we’re going to get consumers to choose plant-based alternatives, we need to find a substitute that can perform just like animal fat. That’s why Lypid is working on creating a 100% plant-based fat that can give a “rich meaty mouthfeel” to elevate vegan alternatives.

Lypid

Located in San Francisco, CA, Lypid creates vegan oils designed to make vegan meat taste like the real thing. It's also developing a vegan animal fat replacement to elevate alternative proteins.