Sheetal Shah and Angel Turner met at agtech networking events in the Triangle. In 2020, they took a road trip to Washington, D.C., which turned them from colleagues to award-winning business partners.
“We started talking about what we think about the future of agriculture and our personal values,” said Shah. “I found that we had so much in common, so when I heard about the NASA competition, […] she was the first person that came to mind.”
Cosmic Eats—Shah and Turner’s Cary-based startup—won the Phase 1 competition of NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge in 2021. [Note: We also wrote about the startup’s presentation as part of the Demo Day for CED’s Gro Incubator last June.]
As indicated by its name, the startup addresses feeding astronauts in deep space, where food cannot be delivered.
By using off-the-shelf agricultural technologies, Cosmic Eats’ system can grow plants, fungi or algae with minimal supplies or space required, making it ideal for astronauts to grow food in the tight quarters of a spacecraft.
The system’s ability to grow the combination of plants, fungi and algae set it apart from competitors. In addition, Cosmic Eats can dictate how much of each plant, fungi or algae should be grown to meet the nutritional needs of the astronauts.
“Most indoor systems will grow either just plants or just fungi or just algae, but nobody is combining all three to say this combination is going to deliver your nutrition,” said Shah. “The really unique thing that our system does is it’s a nutrition-led approach. We are enabling the production and processing of food, thus generating both fresh and shelf-stable outputs. And our system is sustainably designed using circular principles, so it has a minimal environmental footprint.”
Military applications
Representatives from the U.S. Department of Defense have expressed interest in Cosmic Eats’ products as well, according to Shah. The military’s supply chain systems are congested and vulnerable to attack, making their food supply potentially vulnerable along supply chain routes.
Cosmic Eats could help protect the military’s food supply or even replace it altogether through its system that produces food at the point of need. Similarly, the startup’s system could be used in disaster-relief situations, especially in areas where supply transport routes might be compromised by severe weather events.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), one of The Department of Defense’s funding agencies, reached out to Cosmic Eats to express interest in potential applications of the startup’s product in December 2021.
“Anything that doesn’t need to be shipped but can be produced at the forward operating base, they want to shift [those] things to be locally produced,” said Shah. “What we designed for the astronauts, it’s in a very small space. We’re now scaling up our solutions using the same principles of growing plants, algae and fungi… Everything stays the same, except now you can scale it up to a bigger footprint because we’re not confined to the spacecraft.”
Cosmic Eats will generate revenue from by selling its equipment and through the recurring subscription-based model for its software to help run the system.
Shah also noted that Cosmic Eats is going to be building out its commercial team as soon as it can, as the startup looks to develop products for markets outside of the military.
“We want to start exploring what are those tweaks or adaptations we need to make to fit different markets,” said Shah.
