In the midst of fighting a lawsuit against plant-based food giant Impossible Foods Inc., a Boston startup announced a new capital raise and the launch of its first food products.
Food technology company Motif FoodWorks brought in a new investment from FootPrint Coalition Ventures, a firm co-founded by actor Robert Downey Jr., Steve Levin and Jonathan Schulhof.
Motif CEO Jonathan McIntyre declined to share the funding amount, but said this deal was more about the partnership and less about the new capital.
“They have this access to all of this group that follows them on social media that they can use for testing and trialing,” McIntyre told BostInno. “And then there is an opportunity for us to actually co-create, specifically in the space of a longer-term innovation platform we have here that we call veggie forward.”
In addition to pursuing alternative proteins and products that mimic animal products, McIntyre said Motif is also interested in new food forms. He said the company’s work making alternative meat, dairy and egg products will be used to make these new types of food.
“The focus is being healthy with one to two servings of vegetables, a good serving of protein and inspired by not being a mimic of a burger or something else,” McIntyre explained.
Sign up for The Beat, BostInno’s free daily innovation newsletter from BostInno reporter Hannah Green.
But first, the Boston company is bringing some of its own products to market. Alongside its new funding, Motif also announced the launch of its beef, pork and chicken burger patties. These products are available for foodservice providers, distributors, and retailers with private labels.
Motif launched as a spinout of Ginkgo Bioworks in early 2019 and landed an eye-popping $226 million in new funding two years later. It operates out of a lab-office facility in Boston’s Innovation and Design Building and has plans to open some of its 65,000-square-foot research and development center in Northborough by the end of 2022.
The company’s food technologies include HEMAMI, a yeast-derived protein that Motif says gives umami flavor and a meaty aroma to plant-based meat alternatives, and APPETEX, an edible, plant-based hydrogel developed by Motif to replicate the texture of animal tissue.
Earlier this year, Impossible sued Motif, claiming the Boston startup's fake meat too closely resembled Impossible's patented version. Both companies use a heme-based product to create their fake meat. Heme is an iron-rich protein found in living plants and animals. In response, Motif filed a petition to revoke this patent.
In its petition to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Motif argues that Impossible’s patent should never have been issued.
“We develop our products that we call our non-infringing, that we don’t believe rights on their IP,” McIntyre said. “And then secondly we think some aspects of their intellectual property has prior art and that’s why we filed what we filed.”
McIntyre said Motif will continue to develop and sell new, finished foods, as well as components of their products moving forward.
“This is a way for us to get our technology in as many places as possible to really transform,” McIntyre said. “We’re still a B2B ingredients seller, just the form that the ingredient takes may get more and more complicated based on the route to market.”
