Shahar Florence— Director of Innovation and Development at the Strauss Group, heads the company’s recently created
Strauss Group- an international beverage companyfood products. Based in Israel. The company's portfolio includes the production of coffee, water, snacks, pasta, oil and confectionery. In Russia, Strauss sells coffee for HoReCa under the Totti brand and freeze-dried coffee for retail under the Black Card brand. The company invests in innovation in the food industry. Strauss's FoodTech division is involved in research and development, creating a global food ecosystem.
Enriched water
— There is an increasingly acute shortage of clean drinking water in the world. From Strauss's perspective, what's the best way to solve this problem?
- There is really not enough drinking water in the world. The most popular solution to this problem is bottled water. You take water in one place and take it in bottles to another. This creates a whole range of problems: plastic, logistics and carbon footprint. Therefore, we decided to find another way to provide people with drinking water and developed a unique purifier. He takes bad substances out of the water, but leaves all the good ones: minerals, magnesium, calcium and the like.
People’s water use is growing at 1% per year,since 1980. This growth will increase until 2050, according to a UN water report for 2019. This is facilitated by the growing needs of industries, an increase in the world's population, and climate change.
Today in the world three out of ten people do not haveaccess to safe water. Half of the people drinking water from unsafe sources live in the Black Africa region - countries of the African continent located south of the Sahara desert. Tops the list of countries where the population suffers from a lack of clean water, India.
According to UN analysts, by 2050 half of the world's population will experience a shortage of clean fresh water. To a greater extent this will affect residents of large cities.
When people used to purify water, it’s notminerals remained. And the human body cannot live without minerals, magnesium and calcium. People drank clean water and then took pills to replenish the supply of minerals. Strauss has developed a device that you can place in your home, connect to any tap water in the world. The output is water without pollution, but all useful elements are preserved.
Later we added water enrichment. Now we not only store the necessary substances, but also add them additionally - magnesium, calcium and vitamins. The device is sold in China with Haier, in the UK with Virgin under the Virgin Pure brand, and in Israel. We plan to come to other countries of the world. Such water is useful in every country. For example, chlorine is added to any municipal water in the world, otherwise it will not be safe. Chlorine has an aftertaste, affects the taste of tea and coffee.
Freeze Dried Fruits - Healthy Snack
- Not so long ago, you presented food cubes made from sublimated products using the technologies used in astronautics. What is the innovation of your cubes?
- This is a question of people's access to healthy food. For fresh fruits to be found everywhere, a complex and costly logistics system and refrigerators are needed. In many countries, especially in vast Russia, fruits are produced in one place and sent to the other end of the country. It is expensive and affects their cost.
Another method is to process fruits and extend their shelf life. But if you heat and process the fruit for too long, their nutritional value is destroyed.
We thought about freeze-drying technology. Yes, it is not new and has long been used for making coffee. But the same technology works for fruits and vegetables. With such drying, they are not processed and retain all vitamins and nutritional value. These are all the same natural fruits and vegetables, without additives, sugar or preservatives, but with a shelf life of six to nine months.
This technology was used to provideastronauts powered. We made it economically viable. We will launch this project in January 2020. I hope this gives people the opportunity to have a healthy meal. The product is also suitable for diabetics. In the process of freeze-drying, the glycemic index of fruits becomes low. Moreover, they are 100% natural, sugar is not extracted and is not added.
- The production of freeze-dried products received a big push during the Second World War. What is causing interest in sublimation products today?
- We want to allow people to eat healthy food, butwithout the complicated logistics needed for fresh fruit. You can put a banana in your purse, but you won’t be able to take berries with you for a snack, they will turn into soup. This is an inexpensive solution that will improve people's health - for this reason we came up with a product.
Photo: “Open Innovation”
- Are such freeze-dried snacks possible?
- Freeze-dried meat can be made, but itperfectly preserved in large pieces. Meat contains a lot of fat, and fat is a natural preservative. If you do not sublimate, but simply dry the meat, it will already be good enough. You do not need sublimation technology to process meat and meat products. You can do this, but this is not necessary. For vegetables, sublimation is necessary, because otherwise you can not save them for a long time without adding sugar and without heating.
Lab steak
- You support start-ups involved in vegetable meat. Besides religious reasons, what is the reason for the growing popularity of this product?
- Most meat animals, in largeparts of it are cows, are not an “effective mechanism” for processing grass into protein. To produce 1 kg of meat, you need 30 to 60 kg of grass and about 50 to 70 liters of water.
If now there are 7 billion people on Earth, then when will10 or 12 billion, there will be a shortage of food. We are investigating solutions to this problem. One of them is insects. Flies or grasshoppers much more efficiently convert grass or vegetables into animal protein. For a cow, the percentage is 1 to 50 or 1 to 100, if you count the water. This is not a very high indicator. But the larvae of flies convert 95% of what they eat into protein. In many world cultures, people eat insects: grasshoppers or worms. In other cultures, this is not so common, but in the future people will have to eat them. There are companies that already use protein from fly larvae.
On the other hand, Impossible Foods andBeyond Meat produces cow meat substitutes. The product is similar in taste to it, but does not contain real meat. The list of ingredients in these vegan burgers contains about 20-30 items. In another way, they cannot get a good taste. We are trying to get the same flavor profile, but using six to eight natural ingredients.
A study published in the journal Science,showed that animal husbandry occupies 83% of the land suitable for agriculture, while it supplies only 18% of calories and 37% of protein. Livestock production accounts for 60% of greenhouse gas emissions among crops and contributes significantly to species extinction.
Scientists from the University of Twente, the Netherlands,It was estimated that 15 thousand liters of water are consumed for the production of 1 kg of beef. Significantly less - 5-6 thousand - will go to the production of pork and chicken meat, as these animals require less food to build mass.
Eating meat, a person indirectly uses 5 thousand liters of water daily. Livestock and meat and dairy products consume a quarter of the world's water reserves annually.
Humanity will have to eat more vegetarianfood, because the meat will not be enough. Millions of years of evolution have led us to be non-vegetarians. We have teeth that are not suitable for this, our digestive tract is not like the long digestive system of a cow. But it is not as short as that of a lion or a wolf. We are stuck somewhere in the middle of evolution.
You cannot evolve to 100 yearsfull vegan. A person needs vitamin B12, iron, protein, and it is difficult for many vegetarians to get it. The task of the food industry is to provide people with the necessary nutrients using as little meat as possible. Give another product of animal origin, different from the chicken, pig or cow that we now use. It is they who eat the majority of the world's population.
- The prospect of natural meat grown from individual cells looks very tempting. When will we try such a steak, and its price will be equal to the traditional one?
- This is another way to solve the shortage problem.meat. You can get it in a more effective way than in nature. We are trying to grow steaks in the laboratory. We produce muscles, we do not need bones, skin and internal organs of the animal that people will not eat.
It turns out a full, not processed piecemeat. It contains muscles, fat, connective tissue, and hopefully we will grow blood soon, while this is problematic. And this is real beef, not something vegetarian. The only difference is that the meat is not grown inside the cow, but in the laboratory or factory in the future. The meat was produced in a controlled environment, so there is no need to use antibiotics and hormones, with which cows and hens are now gaining weight. These substances harm the human body, and we consume them with meat. Laboratory meat is free from contaminants. You can also control the fat content of the steak.
Impact of the current meat industrydestructively, cows are responsible for approximately 30% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. They destroy water sources and eat a lot of grass. Laboratory meat farming is more effective than cow farming. This is currently too expensive. And this is a problem for the industry - it will be resolved in the long run.
Sweet protein
— There are rumors that in the jungles of Africa you found some rare fruit containing a substance thousands of times sweeter than sugar. Have you already learned how to synthesize it?
- It's about sweet protein. Sugar is good because it gives energy. But it was good for humanity when there was not enough food. If you give the horse carrots and potatoes, she will choose carrots, because in the brain a sweet taste is associated with good. This cannot be changed quickly. But today, people eat too much sugar.
The solution is to provide a good taste, butwithout sugar molecules that harm the body and blood. Sugar destroys your ability to see, ability to regenerate, causes blood problems, people die from diabetes. Some solutions already exist. These are chemicals that contain less sugar, such as aspartame. But this option has other problems. Some of these substances are unstable, it is difficult to work with them in the food industry.
We are developing a protein based solution. Our body knows how to digest protein. The product will taste sweet, sugar will taste in your mouth, and it will digest in your stomach like protein. We developed a technology that takes a molecule that looks like a sweet protein flower from a jungle. We change it a little, stabilize when heated and in an acidic environment. Tongue receptors recognize it as sweet, but it is made up of protein, and that's natural. So the flower and deceives insects in nature. If we succeed, theoretically we will solve all the problems of diabetics in the world.
We do not believe in trying to teach people to eat lessSahara. Millions of years of evolution have taught us that sweet is good. Most people love him. Sweet protein will solve the problem: on the one hand, the substance will be sweet, but on the other hand, it does not contain carbohydrates, so even people with diabetes can eat it, it does not affect insulin at all.
Miracles from the basics
- In Israel, Strauss has restrictions related to its dominant market position. Does this limit your ability to innovate?
- Israel is known as a nation of startups. About 8 million people live in Israel, that's about half of Moscow. There are practically no natural resources: oil, gas and water. Half of the country is a desert. People have to invent in order to survive.
But food innovations went unnoticed,because people perceived the food industry as a low-tech industry. We have gone eight years trying to explain that there is a lot of innovation in food. We found out that a lot of knowledge has been accumulated in universities, but they were not directed in the right direction. They took the developed technologies and turned them into useful ones in practice. Used technology from other industries and applied it in the food industry.
Now people understand that the food industry isn’tless high-tech than the basics of programming. In Israel, we are a large company, but by world standards, our company is small. Strauss has approximately $ 2.5 million in revenue, it is also valued at $ 2.5-3 billion, we have about 14 thousand employees. The idea is to improve people's lives, wherever they are. The only way a small company can achieve this is through technology innovation. Our motto: “We do miracles from the basics.” The basics - proteins, carbohydrates and fats - existed before us. And now we are trying to work miracles out of them.
- Strauss is also one of the world's largest producers of hummus and chocolate. It would seem that these products have been manufactured for a thousand years, what can be invented here?
- Innovations can be applied even with the mostsimple things. For example, now we are launching chocolate, which contains 70% less sugar than a traditional product. We have already discussed that if you make sweets fresh, people will say: “No, this is not tasty!”. They know that sugar is unhealthy, but they are used to a certain taste profile. The trick is to develop food that has more health benefits, but it’s tasty, otherwise people won’t buy it. We replaced sugar with nuts and achieved almost the same taste profile, using 70% less sugar. Reducing the amount of sugar is not a problem. The problem is to keep the same taste. This is a challenge, this is what we are trying to invent.