I had the opportunity to go to the 2018 Protein Trends and Technology Seminar in Chicago last month and received a huge amount of cutting-edge insight into the world of proteins.

Though expensive, ranging from the thousands, the conference was extremely valuable in a knowledge basis, networking angle, and I got a really cool ingredient out of it.

Here I want to give a short, but a quick summary of the event and why it might be important for your company to go. I think it is well worth a company’s money to go to this event and I was actually surprised I was the only “startup” there. Well, according to the owner, he told me that. Cool!

The Setup

The Seminar is a 2 day event that focuses on the trends and technologies of the protein world. Day 1 involves business strategies and day 2 is a bit more technical. Both are important, with more people attending day 2 than day 1. Being a gigantic nerd, I went to both.

Day 1 showed that the protein trends will not stop, especially plant protein. Almost every topic on both days involved plant proteins. One topic talked about whey (which was a very good presentation) but other than that, the biggest topic was about plants.

What was also nice was a really good panel about entrepreneurs in the food space. Miyoko from Miyoko’s kitchen and Dairuish, the VP of Beyond Meat were there talking about the struggles of building their products and it was nice to see the strategies used when building their business.

They also had a lot of tastings. After the breaks, companies from the B2B and B2C end displayed their innovative products from whole crickets, to chicken crust pizza, to, of course, the myriad of vegan cheeses and milks. Some products are really good, some miss the mark.

The makeup of the guest lists were pretty powerful companies that deal with the protein trend often. It was mainly B2B, with companies like Kerry and Roquette being people in there. This makes sense as the people in the conferences are on the cutting edge of proteins.

Overall, the protein seminar is worth it. You can get a tremendous amount of value just about knowing what’s hot and what’s not. The technical pieces, though hard for the average consumer to understand, had a huge amount of hidden gems that will help you become competitively advantageous in the future. If you’re a protein company of any size, it’s a sound investment to go to this event.

There are three topics I’d like to talk about I took away from in the seminars. I can’t share with you all the secrets, but I hope this convinces you to go next year.

Plant Proteins in a nutshell

Everyone talked about plant proteins to the point of exhaustion. This pretty much tells you the time is now to look into plant alternatives if you haven’t already.

Though growth is huge in plant proteins, it is mentioned that the volume of these SKU’s is not as impressive if compared to their animal counterparts. Though plant proteins are growing at triple digit growth, their market share is perhaps single digit. Maybe that just means now is the perfect time to consider plant proteins as an alternative.

There is also mention that soy and wheat is the new devil and pea, rice and other sources are getting more popular yet supply chain has been crushing the high demand of these proteins.

As mentioned in a previous article, the supply of actually growing crop or the technology hurdle of processing the plants cannot mean the demand of the growth of plant alternatives which makes sense because plants take a while to grow and technology takes a while to implement.

In fact, one presenter stated that it took 30 years for soy to be commoditized. This is actually really important as now we know that there is a time frame before something like say, pea protein will be cost competitive. Though I have a hunch now it WON’T take 30 years for new plant proteins to be commoditized, even taking half or a 1/3^rd of that is a long time in the food industry. However, due to a lot of companies investing in pea protein, this will probably be the next overly abundant crop availible. With this, will come amazing breakthroughs in processability.

Another interesting discussion is the subject of allergens.

Biggest issue? Well, proteins cause allergic reactions but the allergens that are being vetted are chosen because of the frequency of allergen-related incidences. So if pea protein is commoditized, then you can bet that it will be on the allergen list very soon. With the trend of anti-allergen popping up, this might be a headache.

It’s also interesting to note that just like oats and wheat being paired as an allergen, pea and soy are also being paired as having similar allergens. In a world where we want no-allergens, is it possible to please everyone? The personalized nutrition trend says…no. But at what cost? Time will tell.

Nutrition and Sports Nutrition

Most people realize meat is bad so they are becoming flexitarians. Most people want to eat less meat but will only truly eat less meat if they taste something equal or better than it. This is pretty hard because I will argue that most plant alternatives would not convince a meat eater to switch completely. Though we are getting better at the science of proteins.

Another thing to note is that sports nutrition is still growing at a triple-digit space. Not only that, but sports nutrition has the best barrier to entry when it comes to testing trendy ingredients and also the best way to gain a profit of it due to the premiumization aspect of sports nutrition. So if you enter the sports nutrition market, you can capitalize on a unique ingredient and charge a higher profit.

Another interesting study is protein pacing, where one presenter talked about that it’s better to spread your protein intake through your 3 meals than all at once. So as you can see, it wasn’t just about plant proteins.

Networking

The more you network face to face, and have a darn good discussion, the more you’ll be remembered. I scrounged for advice and ingredients at the conference and I got a lot of benefits just talking to people.

For example, not only was I able to put a face on Zak Weston from the Good Food Institute, I also met his boss, Brad Barbera. I was able to talk and collaborate with many protein suppliers, with friends from previous ventures, and I was able to complement a speaker at the conference when I was in Canada this week. I was able to get advice from the scientists at Beyond Meat and meet some really cool people.

Networking is never a requirement for any seminar or expo, but the better you do it, the more value you acquire out of the conference. All it takes is one good conversation (usually implying buying their product) to do this.

Overall, I recommend this conference if you’re a huge company with a lot of SKU’s, especially protein focused. I would also suggest people who are looking to get into the plant based protein game to go to this. I would not recommend this conference if you’re just relying on one type of product to innovate (an example would be, RXBar before it was sold to Kelloggs would probably not find value in this conference). If you want to know the cutting edge of proteins and the challenges and innovations that come with it, then the investment to go here is worth it.