A New Year's Letter from Jakub

This year was mainly marked by adaptation to the current global situation around the energy crisis, pandemics and their impact on production, logistics, availability and increased prices of raw materials.

From the very beginning of 2021, global production has plummeted and raw material resources have become rapidly more expensive and logistics disproportionately longer. What used to have a delivery time of a month now has three months and costs tens of percent more. Despite this, we have managed to place our products on the American continent and have also gradually started to prepare for local production. Overall, 2021 has been a successful year for Mana, especially given the situation the world is in now. I am proud that Mana is a company that has steadily weathered such a period as well.

This year we've been hard at work on a new ManaDrink and ManaPowder Mark 7 recipe, which we'll be introducing soon. We have again looked at all aspects within the nutritional composition and ingredients as well as the latest clinical studies and recommendations from global institutions. We have redesigned the micro- and macronutrients. It is the best and most infused Mana we have ever produced. We have now completed our first beta production, everything looks very good and there is nothing stopping us from going into large scale production.

Manaburger. The product, which I am very proud of from a development point of view, won the Plant Product of the Year 2020 award, which is very satisfying. The product was created in 2019 mainly because we love cheeseburgers :) We wanted our own alternative, so we developed the world's first, nutritionally complete plant-based burger and in 2021 we worked on its availability. We fulfilled our promise from the beginning of the year and we have brought it to the US. We also brought it into retail chains in the Czech Republic, but also other restaurants and bistros. We're also conquering steakhouses and pubs within Prague, teaching people to think about meat alternatives in places you might not expect.

In March of this year, I founded a new startup, Rocket Lunch Inc, based in Texas, to work as a small team to try to win a contract from NASA as part of the Deep Space Food Challenge, part of the so-called Centennial Challenges. Translated, the Centennial Challenges identify unfinished technology gaps that NASA needs to close in the short term so that we as a civilization can begin to colonize deep space. The first Artemis mission aims to start colonizing the Moon, it's going into space in 2025, and we want to be there.

Mana's internal R&D team and our other kindred spirits participated in the 9-month project. At the end of the year, NASA notified us that we had been awarded the contract for the proposed "Bistromathic" solution and we were moving on to phase 2, building a prototype! Bistromathic is a technology that will allow food to be dispensed on a 3-year mission for 4 astronauts, specifically the Artemis mission. We were awarded the opportunity to build a prototype as one of 18 companies in the world, with the goal of unveiling a working prototype in early 2023. Congratulations to the entire team, you guys are awesome! Working on this project for NASA has been extremely eye-opening - we have started to look at everything we do in a completely different way, from the ground up. We have the ambition to enter the space program and also produce our own raw materials for it. This year we have also been working on the concept of our own feedstock factory, which would not only provide supplies for Mana, but also supply deep space missions and be compatible with NASA's needs.

We call it the “Mana Power Plant”. We have enriched the R&D team with botanical expertise and knowledge of the technology to refine each raw material into the form we need. In the concept, we have translated the current raw material needs into area and technology. We are now somewhere around 300 hectares of outdoor farming for taller plants and other associated indoor technologies such as bioreactors for growing unicellular algae or indoor hydroponics and aeroponics for small and medium sized plants. All this is complemented by all the necessary technologies for breeding, cultivation and harvesting.

These are a large number of complex technologies that are demanding in their chemical, physical processes and bringing them to the required production scale. We have the ambition to gradually implement this plan. This is how we see the future. Finally, let me thank you in the name of Mana. For your trust, for your support as well as your constructive criticism. It motivates us to keep pushing our boundaries.

So, all my loved ones, Mana team, Rocket Lunch team, friends, fans, customers, partners and competitors, may your life be healthy, fulfilled, rich, happy, crazy and hungry for new challenges, just like ours.

— Jakub Krejčík

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