The offices of plant-based protein startup Heura are tucked away down a narrow street a short distance from one of Barcelona’s main tourist draws. But the team of entrepreneurs and food scientists won’t be remixing their protein cocktails in close proximity to La Sagrada Família for much longer — they’re moving to new, larger digs in Poblenou, a district where industrial-scale office space is a lot easier to come by.

As we’re shown around the “Heura House :)”, as the startup’s HQ is named (complete with beaming smilie), you can see why they want a bit more room to cook stuff up. A lower level of the narrow building is packed with lab machinery where a multi-disciplined team of scientists is developing the bases and textures that will underpin future food products. Up a metal staircase are two floors of office desks and meeting rooms and, higher still, a conference-room sized kitchen spans the back of the building. This is where foods can be prepared for tasting and presented on a large stainless steel table.

This is where TechCrunch meets Heura’s CEO and founder Marc Coloma and chief scientist Isa Fernández after getting a whistle-stop tour of the labs where the startup is working to serve up a smorgasbord of food IP.

Heura’s looming office move is not just a tale of a scaling startup outgrowing its digs. It coincides with a shift in strategy as the company gears up to use patent-pending blends of plant-based proteins to try to address another huge problem for the mainstream food industry: the poor nutritional quality of so much processed and packaged food.

This strategic shift beyond (pure) meat replacement looks smart. Focussing on nutrition and health may be a more mainstream-friendly way for Heura to get more people to reduce their meat and dairy consumption by buying into healthier substitutes that just happen to be vegan.

“What we are focused on is creating structures and matrices in many of the most consumed food categories, through plant proteins, and then also developing technologies that will help us to decrease costs of these formulations and increase the sensory aspect,” Coloma tells TechCrunch. “To keep improving flavor, keep improving taste — while reducing costs.”

Its €40 million Series B is helping juice the new strategy which will see it licensing its inventions to food manufacturers wanting to improve the quality of the products they sell, as well as bringing more new products to market under Heura’s own yellow-liveried consumer-facing brand.

Targeting the food industry’s quality problem

The problem Heura is setting its sights on is that industrially produced food is pretty often quite unhealthy, formulated with “no protein, high saturated fat, high sodium, no fiber,” says Coloma.

Such products were once generally referred to as junk foods. More recently there’s been a shift to defining the problem by applying a more scientific-sounding (less judgemental?) badge of ‘ultra processed food’ (UPFs).

UPFs is an imperfect label that tries to bundle up common industrial food techniques like refining, which removes healthy fiber and amps up simple sugars, and extensive use of additives, which can upset gut health and have other health impacts. The core problem Herua has in its sights, by targeting UPFs, can thus be boiled down to convenience foods that last long on shelves but have low nutritional density and are increasingly linked to poor health outcomes for consumers.

Heura is aiming to maintain convenience while ditching the junk by applying what it calls a “science-based approach” to reformulate a range of familiar foodstuffs in such a way as to avoid nutritional pitfalls. It’s doing this via a scientific process of microstructural design which it says allows it to control interactions between ingredients to yield foodstuffs with pleasant textures and an “amazing” nutritional composition, as Coloma tells it.

The thermo-mechanical techniques it’s using to process its selected plant-based ingredients are not different to standard food industry methods. Instead, the startup claims the innovation is in the level of micro-control it’s applying to designing food structures and interactions in order to serve up nutritionally dense foods with a great sensory experience. Or, put more simply, it’s designing foods that are healthy — or at least less unhealthy than conventional alternatives — but which are also enticing to eat.

“What we are doing is making the soy protein aggregate interact within itself in a specific way that nobody has been able to do through controlling processing conditions and then pH, [calcium] ions and things like that,” explains Fernández, discussing the work Heura’s scientists are undertaking in the lab. “So it’s all the scientific knowledge that we generate [which] allows us to create these micro structures — using, again, specific protein analytes that gives these textures.”

The food industry isn’t set up to take such an approach, argues Coloma, who says big players are mainly focused on product development. They’re looking at remixing available processing solutions plus functional ingredients, rather than changing the mix and micro-structure of ingredients to alter the nutritional profile of foods.

“They don’t know how to do it,” he suggests. “From a technology perspective, this holistic approach — about interactions — requires you to have a trans-disciplinary and holistic knowledge about many scientific disciplines. And this is not common.”

“And it’s not easy,” Fernández chips in. “We have a lot of people that have been looking at this problem, including me, for a long time.”

Using standard processing techniques in a way that can deliver novel food outcomes is how Heura is banking on achieving mass scale for this expansion into licensing its IP.

“Why we take this route is because this can make a mass market product,” says Coloma. “Because it’s scalable using industrial process that are simple and then with raw materials that are very available. We really believe in this route of interactions in order to unleash scalability.”

A long tail of poor nutrition

Poor nutritional value is not limited to packaged foods that contain animal-derived ingredients, of course. It’s a problem that cuts across the industrial food industry — from pot noodles to packets of ham and processed cheese to hot dogs and frozen pizza and beyond — and the plant-based category certainly hasn’t been immune.

In the vegan food aisle, heavy use of ingredients like modified starches which end up as simple carbohydrates, high levels of sodium (salt), and saturated fats like coconut oil can result in plant-based foods with poor health profiles. The meat lobby has often seized on such products to attack the alternative protein category generally. Such attacks ignore the existence of better quality vegan foods and seek to redirect attention away from the fact that many animal-derived packaged foods are cardinal UPFs themselves.

Nutritional problems for meat and dairy can include high saturated fat content, high sodium, low fiber and the use of additives (including things like antibiotics and growth hormones that may be fed to livestock) — while meat processing techniques can further exacerbate problems, such as curing amping up salt content and preservatives or frying leading to the formation of harmful compounds.

In the case of processed ham and other red meats these products have been classified as carcinogenic to humans. You’ll just never hear the meat lobby harping about that.

The alternative plant-based formulations Heura is cooking up aim to address the food industry’s quality problem broadly — cutting across categories, both animal-derived and plant-based — with the aim of driving positive change at industrial food scale.

The Barcelona-based startup is best known for its own brand meat replacement products, especially its chicken-style soy-based bites. Last year, it added plant-based Jamon York-style slices to its range. And that latter cold cuts product, which it’s been selling in Europe since October 2023, was the first developed through its new R&D intensive approach.

In the future, Heura will be expanding its efforts to commercialize a pipeline of lab-based inventions so it can reformulate many more types of foods. It says it’s setting its sights on “the most consumed” food categories — with cheese and pasta seemingly next in line for nutritional remixing.

Coloma jokily says they’ll start by drawing up a list of the “ten worst” UPFs to choose where to start. “We are already seeing that around 30% of people are looking for healthier options of the food that they love,” he adds. “So it’s changing the foods that they love without changing the taste.”

In Heura’s brightly lit demo kitchen, TechCrunch had the chance to sample a few of the prototypes Fernández and her team have been developing in the basement. Including some (tasty) Feta-style chunks and mini Mozzarella-esque balls. We also tried three other cheese prototypes, which ranged in texture from medium/chewy to softer.

The startup is keeping the full scope of its expansion plans under wraps for now because it still has multiple patents to file. But Coloma did let slip that future products formulated through this approach will include “indulgent” foods — his eye straying to a bank of frosted glass refrigerators at the side of the kitchen. So it sounds as if desserts could be in the mix too. (Protein-boosted vegan ice-cream is already a thing, after all.)

“Our vision is to become the Intel Inside for high value nutrition with amazing taste,” he told us, trying out the mouthfeel of a soundbite that Heura’s marketing team must have been cooking up in parallel to its lab-coated staff.

A twist on very familiar foodstuffs

Heura stressed that the prototype foods TechCrunch tasted were not yet finished products. These samples offered an early glimpse of what’s coming as it expands its plant-based range — so, essentially, we were getting a demo of texture and mouthfeel possibilities.

Fernández emphasized that no active flavors had been added beyond some herbs floating in oil in a jar of the faux Feta (hence that one stood out as tasty). All that work comes later when the product development team takes over from the food scientists, she noted.

Per Coloma, the prototypes also won’t make it to market for some years yet either. 2026 is the anticipated timeframe for Heura to commercialize this next wave of R&D. So we’re reserving judgement on the startup’s plant-based cheeseboard for now. But the selection we tried showed that textural variety is possible. Even as some of the samples tended towards more of a paté mouthfeel than a conventional cheese.

For another tasting, another staffer cooked us up a plate of reformulated spaghetti. The pasta looked and tasted exactly as you’d expect a conventional spaghetti (and was pleasingly al dente). But the twist is the pasta has been enriched with Heura’s legume-based protein — boosting the protein content of the dish up to 50% (whereas Coloma noted that pasta in mainstream foods typically contains 10% or less protein; or, for a higher quality pasta, 17% protein at the top end).

Heura is also adding fiber to its alternative formulations as another nutritional upgrade. Modern Western diets are known to be chronically short of fiber — which plays a key role in digestive and gut health, with many associated benefits including helping regulate blood glucose which also links to weight management and cardiovascular health.

Exact advantages of Heura’s formulations compared to the conventional foods it’s aiming to replace (or supplant) will vary. But in the case of the cheese products Coloma suggests its plant-based nutritional blends will be much healthier than conventional dairy-based cheese on account of not being larded with saturated fats.

Vegan cheeses that use coconut oil can have even higher levels of saturated fats than dairy-based cheese. So Heura is also able to offer its alternative blend of proteins and fats to other vegan food makers to improve their products. (Indeed, it already is: Coloma notes it’s inked a “collaboration agreement” with Upfield, which owns the Violife plant-based cheese brand for example — a faux hard cheese product that can have a bottom-of-the-range Nutri-Score of E (“bad nutritional quality”), per Open Food Facts.)

When it comes to taste and texture, whether plant-based cheeses will ever really be able to mimic the experience and mouthfeel of conventional dairy remains to be seen. A growing number of startups in the precision fermentation space are growing bio-identical proteins to animal-based cheese. They suggest that making similarly tasty alternatives to conventional cheese is no cakewalk. But even taking a chunk out of conventional dairy could mean big business for Heura’s plant-based remixers.

The startup is experimenting with traditional fermentation in its labs. But Coloma said that it’s more about exploring ways to use bacterias instead of aromas for flavor — the latter are expensive. It doesn’t plan to get into the precision fermentation game, he confirmed.

For Heura’s already-on-sale ham-style slices, its science-based approach has delivered a high convenience product that’s popular because it mimics the taste and look (and gelatinous feel) of the processed meat products it aims to replace. (We also got to nibble on a sample of this and found it uncannily meat-like.)

A tasty new health-focused strategy?

So will Heura be able to pull off similar nutritional swaps across many more food categories? When it comes to pasta, its planned formula has much more protein but, in our experience tasting the prototype, looks, tastes, smells (and moves) just like real spaghetti — so it seems like a clear win-win.

Disrupting dairy-based cheese is probably going to be more complex. At a minimum, there are still textural differences between Heura’s plant-based versions and conventional cheeses. Plus the prototypes we sampled won’t melt like real cheese — although we’re told some can be grilled, Halloumi-style.

It’s fair to say a cheese connoisseur will be hard to convince by plant-based substitutes. But Heura isn’t going after the artisanal end of the market. It’s more likely to be targeting a product such as a supermarket own-brand plastic bag of shredded mozzarella which costs a few euros. So there’s a lower food comparison bar to meet.

Its plant-based cheeses could also offer a cheaper ingredient for food manufacturers on account of using lower cost (and healthier) fats. Although Heura says cost changes from its formulations will vary per product and Coloma admits there could be situations where very poor quality foods remain cheaper still. (“If it’s really, really cheap — because they are using really cheap ingredients — there will be more difficulty [to undercut or achieve price parity],” he says. “But in some we can even be more efficient.”)

Heura’s biggest boast for forthcoming products made using its patent-pending IP is the claim of a healthier nutritional profile than conventional fare.

How the food industry will react to this pitch remains to be seen. But companies do have a range of commercial reasons to take an interest, especially as food makers are under growing pressure to find ways to reduce their carbon footprint. And swapping animal-based cheese with Heura’s plant-based alternative could rapidly improve a dairy product’s environmental impact, for example.

Additionally, there is a trend of rising awareness and interest among consumers about how healthy particular foods are. It could nudge more food makers to investigate swaps that can be marketed to consumers as better for them than the usual version.

Given such pressures — and assuming Heura is able to smoothly translate its lab work into a defensible portfolio of enticing food IP — it’s not too hard to imagine it could end up cutting itself a bigger slice of the food pie in the coming years.

Still, Coloma cautions it will take time to build up a licensing business as established food industry processes (and supply chains) clearly won’t flip overnight.

“This is our dream,” he says, when asked whether Heura is working towards the assumption that this licensing play will end up being the bigger portion of its business in the future. “We went into technology in order to open and license these solutions to other big players that already have a scale that we have to build [as a food startup].”

“The issue here… is that it takes a lot of time… This is a technology about the processing of the product, so we have to develop the product for them; get the agreement; get launched into the market; test and scale — so it will be processes, normally, of two to three years [to commercialize IP from lab to plate]. But from 10 years’ perspective, what you said, it could be a scenario.”

Coloma, who has a background in food activism, emphasizes that their goal with the new strategy is to push into many more food categories in order to dial up its ability to have a positive impact on the food system as a whole, both for food consumers and for the environment.

And while there are other food-tech startups with the same mission that are exploring even more radical protein bases than plants, Heura doesn’t have to wait for regulatory sign off to get its foods onto people’s plates. Coloma also argues that legume proteins are hard to beat when it comes to scaling high quality nutrition cost effectively — being orders of magnitude more efficient, in terms of land and resource use, than the animal-derived ingredients it wants to edge out.

A manifesto that looms several meters high on the Heura House stairwell inks the scale of its ambition in white-on-black block text. “We are the generation who will stop the exploitation of animal sources by delivering incredibly delicious plant based meat,” it reads.

Heura’s freshly expanded mission means its marketing team may soon need to sub out the word “meat” — and swap in “meals”.

When the company closed its Series B round earlier this year it set out a plan to reach net profitability by Q3 of next year. Coloma says the business is on track with that goal, noting that as well as using the money to expand its technology and IP portfolio they have been focusing on growing retail sales of their own brand meat replacement products around Europe.

“We are very focused in France, in Italy, in Portugal,” he says, noting its top three products currently are its faux chicken, plant-based burgers and the alternative Jamon York. “We are advancing a lot towards being the leader in the analogous category in the south of Europe. That’s advancing well… With the growth, with the structure that we have, we can reach profitability.”