local
I n 2021, Shalom Daniel founded Mush
Foods in Israel with the future of
alternative proteins in mind.

The start-up would use mycelium,
a root-like structure of mushrooms, to
mimic meat, from chicken to beef to
seafood. The product, called CUT50,
could combine with meat to create a
realistic final product. Mush Food’s goal
is to reduce animal-based products
that are harsh on the environment
and are less healthy than plant-based
alternatives. “We don’t believe that most of the
people in the world are going to be
vegetarians or vegans,” Daniel said. “But
we do want to reduce meat consumption,
and we do want to improve the nutritional
value of the food that we are eating.”
To reach the market by January 2024,
Mush Foods is building its home not in
the land of milk and honey but near the
City of Brotherly Love.

Backed by a Philadelphia-based
investor, Daniel plans to set up
Mush Foods’ first facility at Rutgers
University’s Food Innovation Center
in Bridgeton, New Jersey. He hopes
to partner with mushroom growers in
Kennett Square in the coming year.

Mush Foods is one of about five Israeli
food technology startups with ties in
Philadelphia, according to Philadelphia-
Israel Chamber of Commerce Executive
Director Ravid Butz. Its move to the
U.S. marks a growing trend of Israeli
food tech startups wanting to call
Pennsylvania their home.

According to Butz, 40% of Israeli
startups turn to the American market
to help grow their business, and the
Northeast is a particularly reward-
ing region. Densely populated and
with New York, Boston, Philadelphia,
Baltimore and Washington, D.C., within
proximity of one another, the region is
rich with resources — from manufactur-
ers to investors — for Israeli businesses
6 MAY 25, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
to scale up.

PICC works with Israeli companies
and connects them to appropriate
resources in the Philadelphia area to
grow business in the region and assist
overseas startups. Over the next year,
it is hosting a series of webinars on
food industry and tech, culminating in a
September symposium.

“We map out the local ecosystem,”
Butz said. “We go to our members; we
go to our board; we go to people in our
community, and we map out the most
strategic introductions that those Israeli
companies need, and we’ll keep doing
it, to open up meaningful conversations
for them that can lead to whatever that
company needs.”
Philadelphia and Israel have partner-
ships in industries such as gene and
cell therapy, but the ties in food tech are
also strong.

Israel is a world leader in the food tech
industry. According to a study by the
Good Food Institute, a global nonprofit
advocating for plant- and cell-based
alternatives to meat and dairy, Israel
invested $160 million in plant-based
food product startups in the first half of
2022, accounting for 22% of the world’s
total products in this sector, Times of
Israel reported in August 2022.

Israeli startups, rich with intel-
lectual resources, have sought out
Pennsylvania for its abundant agricul-
tural capital. According to Michael Roth,
director of conservation and innova-
tion at the Pennsylvania Department
of Agriculture, the commonwealth has
100,000 acres of land permanently
preserved for agriculture, represent-
ing about 6,000 farmers. The diversity
of crops in Pennsylvania means one
industry doesn’t lead the others. The
state relies on a variety of products,
and, when it comes to outside business,
a variety of investors.

“We don’t have the mega-farms that
we’ll see in some other states, so we
really have to be nimble,” Roth said.

Along with acres of land are a
A 2023 Drexel Food Lab student
Ben-Gurion University nursing students and seniors at a community center
in Be’er Sheva, Israel
plethora of academic institutions that
support agricultural innovation, said
David Briel, deputy secretary of inter-
national business at the Pennsylvania
Department of Community and
Economic Development.

Pennsylvania sells $49 billion worth
of goods overseas, Briel said. The
commonwealth works with 5,000 inter-
national companies.

The connections between Israeli
startups and Pennsylvania resources
are harder to quantify. The plant-based
industry has only taken off in the past
five years, Briel said, and cell-based, or
lab-grown, meats are an even bigger
question mark. Daniel said Mush Foods
is ahead of the game, as it looks to go
to market within five years of launching.

Most startups take 10 years, he said.

The potential of the industry means
that Pennsylvania has to “stay in the
Courtesy of Rinat Avraham
Sasha Rogelberg | Staff Writer
Photo by Craig Schlanser
Israel-Philadelphia Connections
Grow Food Tech Industry



local
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com Miss Rachel’s Pantry Chef to
Appear on ‘Beat Bobby Flay’
Sasha Rogelberg | Staff Writer
C hef Rachel Klein of Miss
Rachel’s Pantry will be the
latest Philadelphia-area
Jewish chef to go into culinary battle
against celebrity chef Bobby Flay.

Klein will face off against Flay in a
vegan-themed episode of “Beat Bobby
Flay,” airing on the Food Network
on May 25. In the episode “‘Glaser’-
Focused,” comedian Nikki Glaser and
chef Michael Voltaggio bring in Klein
and chef Troy Gardner, owner of TLC
Vegan Kitchen in Dallas, Texas, to best
Flay in an all-plant-based challenge.

In the first round of competition,
Klein and Gardner will square off to
prepare a dish with a mystery ingredi-
ent of Flay’s choice in 20 minutes. The
winner of that round, selected by three
celebrity judges, will challenge Flay to
a 45-minute battle to create a dish of
the challenger’s choosing.

The owner of Miss Rachel’s Pantry,
named after her grandmother Sybil
Klein’s Center City luncheonette, Klein
hosts five-course set menu dinners
from the South Philly restaurant. Her
all-vegan menus have previously
incorporated plant-based takes on
Ashkenazi comfort foods such as
matzah ball soup and carrot lox.

But for this episode of “Beat Bobby
Flay,” taped in March 2022, showrun-
ners asked Klein to draw from her
Philly roots in case she made it to the
second round.

“They wanted something iconically
Philly, so I made that happen,” Klein said.

Two weeks before her trip to New
York to film the episode, Klein prepared
for her appearance by timing herself
cooking a quintessential Philly dish in a
messy kitchen to mimic the conditions
of the show.

Preparing for the first round was more
complicated: She made a flowchart of
what to cook, depending on the secret
ingredient revealed at the beginning
Courtesy of Food Network
game” by having policies that are
welcoming and supportive to interna-
tional businesses looking to set up shop
here, Briel said.

This doesn’t mean the food tech
collaborations between Pennsylvania
and Israel have no tangible impacts
today. Jonathan Deutsch, a profes-
sor in the Departments of Food and
Hospitality Management and Nutrition
Sciences at Drexel University and head
of the Drexel Food Lab, urges people to
think of food tech more broadly.

“There are a lot of things that are
technologies, right?” Deutsch said.

“Cooking is a technology, and cellular
engineering is a technology, and they’re
very different.”
The Drexel Food Lab, with a mission
to “apply culinary science and food
innovation to improve the health of
people, planet and economies,” creates
appealing and healthy products using
food waste or upcycled foods that are
gentler on the environment.

Founded in 2014 by Deutsch and
former student Alexandra Zeitz, Drexel
Food Lab was a model for universi-
ties interested in food tech research
grounded in local interests and
resources. It also inspired Rinat Avraham,
post-doctoral fellow and nurse educa-
tor at Ben-Gurion University of the
Negev in Israel, to create the Negev
Food Lab, which is in part supported by
Ben-Gurion University and the Jewish
Federation of Greater Philadelphia.

The Negev Food Lab has been custom-
ized to serve the vast Negev region of
Israel, which makes up about 4,650
square miles, or 55% of Israel’s land.

Many people there live in food deserts
and have little access to health care,
making preventative health measures,
such as a healthy diet, important to the
population’s well-being.

The lab has worked with commu-
nity centers in Be’er Sheva to provide
cooking lessons to isolated seniors and
investigated school-provided subsi-
dized lunches to make them more
appealing to students.

“Our perspective is much more wide
about food — not only the nutritional
aspect but also food as [it] affects other
things in the community,” Avraham said. ■
Rachel Klein of Miss Rachel’s Pantry will compete on “Beat Bobby Flay”
on May 25.

of the episode. If the ingredient was
a root vegetable, she would make a
soup. If it was an artichoke, she would
make a riff on a griddle cake she’s
served at the restaurant.

“Things that I know how to do, I’m
going to incorporate them,” Klein said.

“‘Glaser’-Focused” is “Beat Bobby
Flay”’s second entirely-vegan episode,
following “A Deal to Beat Bobby,”
which aired last January. Rodger
Holst, sous chef and co-owner of Miss
Rachel’s Pantry, touts the episode as
good visibility for vegan cuisine and
“proves, hopefully, that vegan food
is not what it’s often perceived to be,
which is boring, very vegetal and all
those things.”
“Hopefully, we’ll get some new, inter-
ested people to come through,” he
said. In the context of “Beat Bobby Flay,”
Flay’s reputation has more notori-
ety than plant-based cooking. While
the chef is depicted as the show’s
villain, Klein said that not only was Flay
pleasant on the set, but the purpose of
“Beat Bobby Flay” is to spotlight fellow
chefs under the guise of competition.

“Some of the shows that he’s on,
he’s positioned — or his company has
positioned him — to be the authority
when he comes in, and he’s like, ‘Oh,
that thing that you do, I’m going to
try to do it better,’” Klein said. “And I
almost think it’s a humbling thing what
he does. Because, without outwardly
saying it, he’s kind of giving people a
space to show off what they do.”
Klein will have the chance to show off
what she can do on May 25 at 9 p.m. on
the Food Network channel and online
streaming. Additional showtimes will
be on May 26 and 28.

If Klein bests Flay, she will join the
ranks of sandwich shop Huda’s Yehuda
Sichel and Essen Bakery’s Tova du
Plessis, both Philadelphia Jewish chefs
who won on “Beat Bobby Flay” in April
and December 2021, respectively. ■
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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