The last bite: Plant-based luminaries will headline Minneapolis food and ag event

Welcome to “The last bite,” an end-of-week food and ag roundup from the Minnesota Star Tribune. Reach out to business reporter Brooks Johnson at brooks.johnson@startribune.com to share your news and favorite burger toppings.

This one’s for the plant-based faithful.*

*and anyone else interested in hearing from food entrepreneurs who took once-niche ideas national.

Patrick Brown, founder of meat substitute brand Impossible Foods, and Miyoko Schinner, founder of vegan dairy Miyoko’s Creamery, will kick off Food, Ag, Ideas Week in Minneapolis this fall. Brown, a Stanford biochemist, launched the Impossible Burger in 2016 while Schinner founded her plant-based alternatives in 2014.

Their timing was right, as both rode a wave of investor excitement and strong consumer trial thanks to improved taste and nutrition, particularly in comparison to past plant-based innovators.

But as the boom fades, the industry now needs to lower prices to truly compete, experts and surveys have said. The appeal also needs to widen to strengthen growth: Impossible now says it is not just for vegetarians and vegans, “setting its sights on the 100+ million flexitarians driving the future of food.”

Food, Ag, Ideas Week is an annual Naturally Minnesota event that’s all about food-as-health this year, bridging two of the state’s leading industries.

“Minnesota, of anywhere, should be the place to lead the new frontier of how food and ag and health care intersect,” Naturally Minnesota executive director Allison Hohn said earlier this year. “We have a mega-complex for each, but they are tankers moving in opposite directions.”

Certainly, the Make America Healthy Again movement has sparked new conversations about how food shapes health, for better and worse. Minnesota could be the place where health shapes America’s food.

“If you could rewrite the system, what would fundamentally need to change?” Hohn said. “If we got to scrap it all, what is the visionary moment?”

Brown and Schinner will speak at 2 p.m. Oct. 13 at the Walker Art Center.

Now something for the carnivores: No doubt many of those grilling burgers this the Fourth of July will notice the price of beef just ain’t what it used to be.

In fact, a pound of ground beef hit another record high this spring at just under $6 per pound. It spent many pre-pandemic years at or under $4.

As ever, supply and demand help explain the why. Demand for beef rose steadily in recent years, with U.S. per-capita consumption now at 59 pounds. (The all-time record of 91 pounds consumed per person was from 1977. Since then, inexpensive and lean chicken has taken a lot of that protein market share.) More important, global beef consumption keeps climbing as populations grow wealthier and eat more meat.

Meanwhile, the U.S. cattle inventory has been falling for five years. That’s partly because droughts and high costs have limited the supply of beef to meet that rising demand, which, of course, pushes prices higher.

With all eyes on the upcoming tariff negotiation deadline Wednesday, it’s too early to take any solace in the gently rebounding corn and soy prices of late.

America’s agricultural output is an easy target for countries to impose tariffs on in retaliation, given its massive importance and widespread impact. But the market might have already priced in those risks, some analysts said, as the broader commodity price downturn seems to have found its bottom.

Several ag-tech companies are vying for the Minnesota Cup this year and made it to the semifinals in the food-and-ag division.

Matthew Fitzgerald, who runs an organic farm in Hutchinson, envisions FarmFlow as a smarter spreadsheet for farmers to track their fields and tasks.

KartVeyor, based in Elrosa, boasts a high-speed crop cart that can unload 35 tons of sugar beets or silage in under 90 seconds.

Judges pick MN Cup finalists in early August. Finalist pitches happen at the end of that month, and the winner of each division competes for the $50,000 prize Oct. 6. Last year’s food/ag/beverage division winner was Northfield’s Loon Liquors Distillery, which took home $25,000 in seed money.

Good news for grocery stores and our collective expectation of abundance as major distributor UNFI said it has “contained” a cyberattack. Its electronic ordering and invoicing systems are thus back online.

“We are delivering products to grocery stores across our network at more normalized levels,” the Rhode Island-based wholesaler and owner of Cub grocery stores announced last week.

The nearly month-long response to the hack, first detected June 4, is going to cost the company, according to a SEC filing. The company hasn’t disclosed just how much yet. But let this additional nugget from the filing be a warning — and ad — for others in the industry: “The company holds cybersecurity insurance that it currently expects will be adequate for the incident.”