Have you ever tasted one of these?
It’s troublesome.
This little thing?
Why?
It will grow bigger, right?
And it’s very, very sturdy, so you definitely need a sharp knife and a strong arm to cut it.
And it releases a lot of very sticky latex, so everything gets very, very messy.
How about one of these?
You can really see how this product has like a fibrous texture that very much resembles
pulled pork or like a pulled meat muscle.
Now, they’re available as one as the co-founders of Karana attempt to take a bite of Asia’s
alternative meat market with their jackfruit-based pulled pork substitute.
I was very much a vegan-skeptic, a meat-eater for a lot of my life,
and I've taken a major turn.
Karana is the Singapore food start-up behind the meat substitute
made entirely from jackfruit, oil and salt,
which it calls “whole-plant” meat.
This is unlike other products that may contain processed ingredients and preservatives.
Started in 2018 amid growing demand for meat alternatives,
the business produces sustainable, minimally processed meat substitutes
designed specifically for Asian cuisines.
We really focus on using whole plants, that’s the main differentiator for us.
Co-founder Dan Riegler, who built a career working in
agricultural supply chains across Southeast Asia, told me more.
We saw a huge need to identify products that had more local applications,
you know, for APAC.
Pork is the number one meat that’s consumed in this region
and that’s where we didn’t see a lot of products really addressing a need.
Half of the world’s pork is produced and consumed in Asia,
with most of that demand coming from China.
So in 2018, Dan and his co-founder Blair Crichton, formerly of Impossible Foods,
set to work finding an environmentally-friendly alternative.
There’s about 150,000 edible plant species and we consume about 150.
It wasn’t long before the pair identified Karana's flagship product:
a pork substitute made of jackfruit sourced from smallholder farmers in Sri Lanka.
Jackfruit has a long history in South and Southeast Asian cuisines,
especially in vegetarian and vegan dishes.
Known for its densely packed, fibrous texture and meat-like qualities,
the unripe young jackfruit is commonly used in savory foods,
while the sweet, ripe jackfruit is eaten raw.
In Sri Lanka, the jackfruit tree is such a national treasure,
it is known as bath gasa or ‘rice tree.’
In Sri Lanka, it’s actually illegal to cut down a jackfruit tree,
because it’s considered such a national treasure.
Carsten Carstens, Karana’s chief science officer and first hire,
shared more about jackfruit’s natural properties.
Jackfruit, as a crop, does not need irrigation, does not need pesticides, does not need herbicides.
So it’s a very hardy tree, and when it yields fruit, it’s very, very prolific.
Jackfruit is so abundant in the region that tons of it goes to waste every year.
That is due in part to the complexity of processing and cooking it.
That’s income that’s not getting into the hands of farmers,
that’s crops that’s going to waste.
The founders thought jackfruit was ripe for mass consumption.
The formats that it was available in, we saw, were just not exciting to us.
They were very difficult to work with, they were not yielding interesting textures and end results,
and we knew that jackfruit was not living up to its potential.
So, they set to work experimenting, eventually devising a chemical-free, mechanical process
at their manufacturing hub in Singapore that would transform the fruit into a shredded,
meat-like product that’s simple for chefs and consumers to use.
Our intention was really to create something that chefs can take
and create amazing dishes with.
The unique qualities of the fruit such as its stickiness
meant that preparing it would be a challenge.
Even in the countries where jackfruit is grown,
you need to have a lot of knowledge on how to best process it.
And for the modern kitchen in a modern F&B operation,
it is just too labor-intense for most chefs to even dare working with it.
Karana’s invention comes as demand for more ethical and sustainable food
grows across Asia and beyond.
Even before the pandemic, the alternative meat market was estimated to hit $140 billion
— or 10% of the global meat industry — within a decade.
Mirte Gosker, acting managing director at The Good Food Institute Asia Pacific,
says that demand for meat substitutes is increasing in Asia
as awareness of food safety and nutrition grows.
First of all, we see sustainability picking up as a consumer trend,
and I think that blew over from the West to Asia.
But what is more interesting is that here in Asia we see a real demand for healthy products
with high nutritious value.
And specifically in China, one of the reasons for people to buy plant-based meat, actually
the biggest reason, is the wish to lose weight.
Current farming methods and large-scale industrial farming practices are not sustainable, says Mirte.
The Food Agriculture Organization has declared that animal agriculture
is the top two or three contributors to the most pressing environmental challenges
on our planet right now.
So that includes air pollution, water pollution, water shortages,
and loss of biodiversity, for example.
And if you look at the animal agriculture,
it’s just a highly inefficient way of creating meat.
We really need to rethink, you know, how we’re producing food from the ground up.
We rely way too much on a very small number of crops and animals
that are extremely destructive to the environment.
If we don’t do it by choice now, we will be forced to.
By 2050, I mean, we see it in weather patterns
and the implications for the farmers we work with.
We see it in the pressure that is building on our current food supply chain systems.
We’ve seen it with Covid, with Swine Flu in China.
It’s not up to us.
Investors are recognizing the potential of the alternative meat sector too.
Demand for plant-based meat is skyrocketing.
We have seen in 2020 a 300% increase globally on investments in this specific space,
and here in Asia Pacific, we actually saw a sixfold rise in investments in alternative proteins.
In July 2020, Karana raised $1.7 million inseed funding
from investors, including Big Idea Ventures,
a fund dedicated to plant-based foods backed by Singapore’s Temasek
and US meat company Tyson Foods.
The investment fueled the company’s 2021 debut in Singapore,
where its plant-based pork is now available in nine restaurants and counting,
in local dishes from dumplings to local pork rolls.
Next up will be its rollout in Hong Kong,
as well as the launch of a line of Karana retail products.
We’re focusing on very convenience-focused, very iconic ready-to-cook products starting
with frozen dim sum.
So frozen dumplings, frozen bao.
The company is also investing in a new innovation lab
to experiment further with jackfruit and other whole-plant meat substitutes.
We also have a number of crops in our pipeline that have a similar approach, where there’s
a lot of it available, a lot of waste happening and a lot that we can do to bring these new,
king of less thought about, less familiar ingredients to market.
All that comes as the alternative meat space becomes increasingly crowded.
It won’t be easy winning market share, but Dan says he welcomes the competition.
There’s a lot of buzz and this is a very hot space, but it’s still so early, there’s
such a massive market opportunity.
The more good products that are out there,
the more consumers will increasingly switch to plant-based.
So I think the more innovation, the better.