Strauss – Israel’s largest food company – is active in more than 20 countries and has over 14,000 employees. Its products can be found in grocery stores around the world, and a variety of brands, including Elite and Sabra, fall under its umbrella.
What many people don’t know is that Strauss is also at the forefront of food technology – a topic I recently discussed with Strauss’s chief growth and innovation officer, Shahar Florence.
Bracha: How did you get involved in food technology?
Florence: I used to work in the high-tech industry in Israel. When I joined Strauss, people asked me, “How do you shift from tech to food?” I told them, “Look, I worked with companies that wrote vast amounts of code. I can assure you that developing a cream that will last for 30 days without losing its taste or looks and will be safe to eat is not less techie than what software companies do”….
As the population keeps growing, finding new sources of food will become essential. We need food that is healthy, nutritional, and tasty – and for that, you need tech. That’s why Strauss recently partnered with Aleph Farms to grow beef using cellular agriculture [which doesn’t require killing animals]. Strauss also recently developed Astro, a new snack that consists of nutritional cubes made up of freeze-dried and pressed fruits, vegetables, and grains.
This futuristic-type snack has been in the news recently. But do you think the public will embrace it?
People have changed the way they eat. Fifty years ago, people ate three meals a day – breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now they eat six, seven times a day, many of which are snacks eaten outside the home.
Snacking has become a major trend. But many ingredients in snacks are less than desirable. Many are preservatives, which companies add so the food can stay fresh for longer. Fat and sugar are natural preservatives, so many snacks have them, but too much sugar or fat is unhealthy.
We were looking for a way to make healthy, nutritional, and long-lasting snacks, and that product is Astro.
Can you talk more about preservatives? In our health-conscious world, people are wary of them. Can technology help?
The need to preserve food existed throughout history. You want to be able to eat something not in season or the place where it grows, so the need to preserve exists to feed the world. People used salt to preserve fish and meat in pre-historical times. Preservation also helps prevent food contamination and illnesses. You can eat the same food without preservatives, but sometimes there are bacteria and viruses in it.
The challenge is finding the right balance. Using technology, we’re trying to expand the shelf life of products without adding ingredients to them. One way to do that is to keep the production line very sterile, which minimizes contamination. But sterilization sometimes reduces the nutritional value of food and changes its taste and smell due to heating. So we developed a system to sterilize food without heating it for more than a few seconds.
The preservation process also includes packaging. For example, you can add nitrogen to a sealed package instead of regular air and it will prevent oxidation and bacteria from growing. When you open the package, the nitrogen will disappear. There’s nothing harmful in nitrogen. In fact, nitrogen is a gas that is naturally found in the atmosphere.
We’re also looking at other alternatives. Sugar and fat are natural preservatives, but not all the molecules of sugar and fat act as preservatives. It’s only some parts of the molecules, and we’re trying to take only the good things out of those molecules in order to preserve food and at the same time keep our bodies safe.
(To be continued)