Using plant power in unusual ways
PARTNER CONTENT
Étienne Cuerrier is not someone you’d expect to work in vegan cuisine.
As a child in the 1990s, he’d roam the woods behind his parents’ cottage in the Outaouais region of Quebec, snaring rabbits with homemade traps and shooting deer with a BB gun.
In 2015, he co-founded the Meat Press, an Ottawa sandwich shop that cured its products on site. The deli became famous for its cold cuts, sausages and foie gras.
Étienne Cuerrier had doubts, though. He’d always sourced his meat from local farmers with sustainable practices, but demand for his products was skyrocketing.
“To keep pace, we’d have to go to industrial suppliers,” he says. “I wasn’t too fond of that idea.” In 2021, he shuttered the restaurant and took a job as a culinary instructor at La Cité Collégiale, an Ottawa arts and tech college.
There, Étienne met Anna Canto, a scientist who leads research and development at Whiteboard Foods, a startup affiliated with La Factorie Desjardin, an incubator at the college for early-stage entrepreneurs. Whiteboard’s specialty is plantbased meat, a product that made Étienne instantly skeptical. He’d sampled such wares before: The worst were unpalatable, the best tasted like flavoured tofu.
If only to confirm his suspicions, Étienne gave Whiteboard’s smoked salmon a try and was shocked. The flavour wasn’t perfect, but it was close, and the texture — gelatinous, yet firm — was nearly identical to the genuine article. Could plantbased meat have a future after all? And what on Earth were Whiteboard’s products made from?
The answer to these questions was more surprising still. Whiteboard was in possession of a radical new technology that could change medical science, too.
Structures of healing
Around the time that Étienne was opening his restaurant, Charles Cuerrier, a pharmacologist (with no relation to Étienne), was cofounding a company of his own: Spiderwort Inc., an Ottawa medical startup. He’d come to this venture through happenstance.
In the early 2010s, when he was a post-doctoral student in pharmacology at the University of Ottawa, a PhD student came into the lab with an apple and a hypothetical question for his colleagues: Could the structures of the apple be implanted into human tissue? It was a provocative idea. The lab’s methodology was “to try bold things,” Charles says. “You can fail, for sure, but you can also create something new.”
The apple idea became the basis for Spiderwort, which Charles cofounded in 2015. Spiderwort’s original interest was spinal cord injuries.
When people experience such injuries, the wounds don’t heal properly. Instead of an ordered mass of cells, the body creates a messy cluster of scar tissue, a kind of cellular barrier that blocks signals between the nervous system and the brain, rendering the patient unable to move. But if the cells could be embedded in some kind of structure — a scaffold, say — they might come to resemble healthy tissue. Communication between body and brain could be restored, and so too could mobility.
Spiderwort’s key insight is that such scaffolds exist in nature. All plant cells are embedded in cellulose, an organic latticework, which holds cells much as an egg carton holds eggs. As it happens, the cellulose structures of asparagus are optimally configured for mammalian spinal tissue. “From asparagus,” says Charles, “we can create a scaffold that’s similar to what you’d find in a human spine.”
In 2020, the Spiderwort cofounders, along with other researchers, published a study of cellulose scaffolds. When the materials were implanted into rats with spinal-cord injuries, the study showed, the animals improved over six months. The company has now received a “Breakthrough Device” designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which will enable it to accelerate its research toward human trials. If those trials are successful, the technology could restore mobility to tens of millions of injured people.
From the OR to the breakfast table
This innovation has non-medical applications, too, such as plantbased meat. The Spiderwort team reasoned that, if you can create meatlike tissue with plant cellulose and then embed flavours in the scaffolding, you can mimic the taste and texture of actual meat. In 2020, Spiderwort hired a team of food scientists to adapt its technology for culinary purposes. The next year, that entity became Whiteboard Foods, a subsidiary that will soon be spun off into its own company.
According to Prashant Jairaj, Whiteboard’s general manager, Whiteboard has one major leg-up on its competitors: the sensory experience it provides. When marketing plant-based meat, you can talk up the health benefits (it’s free of hormones and antibiotics) or the environmental impacts (it generates fewer greenhouse grass emissions and uses up less land and water) but such arguments appeal, ultimately, to people’s sense of virtue rather than their sense of taste.
If you really want to win customers over, Jairaj argues, you must give them something delicious to eat.
For its initial retail offering, Whiteboard is focusing on seafood — smoked salmon and tuna sashimi — which are undersupplied in the plant-based meat industry.
Whiteboard’s goal is to get its products into restaurants and eventually grocery stores. It will launch its smoked salmon this year, pending approval from Health Canada and the FDA.