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FoodTech Weekly #102 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
June 10, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #102
Hi there,
I've always had a thing for this time of year. Perhaps it's the fact that my birthday is in mid-June. Or the nice weather. Or the vibe of the school graduations. Or the general anticipation for what the summer has to bring. It's a period of transition, of excitement. L.M. Montgomery nailed it when she pondered: 'I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.'
I've had one of those exciting June weeks, at Stockeld Dreamery (where I work), for several reasons. We moved into a new 900 sq. m (9,000 sq. ft.) office + state-of-the-art lab space; the place looks amazing, and I hope to share some pics and videos at some point. As much as I appreciate flexible work, remote work, and coworking spaces, having a place of your own to interact and connect with your colleagues in person is unbeatable. This week, we also unveiled our new website (which looks great) -- and we launched our second product, Stockeld Spread, which is a plant-based cream cheese. Cheese is a product loved by millions of people worldwide (it's a $100B market) but it also has a massive environmental footprint. We (and many others) are trying to change this. Our new Stockeld Spread is one small step.
Images: Stockeld Dreamery
This week's rundown:
SciFi Foods bags $22M in funding to bring cultivated meat to market
Brazilian food rescue app startup Food to Save lands $272K in 24-hour crowdfunding campaign
Electrolux launches a redesigned kitchen system to help people eat more sustainable
Let's go!
Conversations
Spoke with Marc St-Onge, Founder and CEO of Smallfood. Marc has been an entrepreneur within food and sustainability for over 20 years. He was always fascinated by microbes, and had a strong drive to start his next company at the nexus of sustainability and health. Smallfood began looking for the perfect, sustainable protein, and spent years bioprospecting, characterizing over 20,000 microbes. Eventually Marc found a marine organism that was high in protein and was a good producer of DHA omega-3 -- and that doubled in biomass every 2 hours. 'Growing up in Nova Scotia, Canada, seafood meant everything to me. And we wanted to translate our microbe, which comes from the sea, to a food that people would love and purchase. So we decided to take our biomass and make the next generation seafood - a fish filet,' Marc says, and explains that they're also working on different forms of sashimi, salmon tartar, fish burgers, crab cakes, and more. Unlike many other alt seafood companies, Smallfood's products taste like seafood, are affordable, and are high in proteins and long-chain omega-3's. The company has also done an LCA which shows its product is much lower in environmental impact than most other protein sources. Today, the company has raised close to $20M in funding, and has a team of 10 FTEs, with a pilot plant in Halifax, Canada. Smallfood is looking to work with e.g. manufacturers with fermentation capacity that can help the company scale; the company is also talking to leading plant-based and cell-based seafood companies, to explore ways of including Smallfood's ingredient in their products to enhance the taste and nutritional profile. And finally, Smallfood is raising a $15M Series A. Marc can be contacted via email and LinkedIn.
Image: Smallfood
Noteworthy
Israeli FoodTech startup Brevel announced a $8.4M Seed round. The company uses a microalgae to produce a protein that can be used as an ingredient in e.g. plant-based alternatives to animal products (but doesn't change the taste, color, or texture of those products).
Also in the algae space, French startup Seafood Robotics banked a €3.2M Seed round; the company uses algae to produce plant-based seafood.
French vertical farming startup Agricool, which had raised around $40M in investments, was declared bankrupt earlier this year. Now it has found a buyer in Lyon-based Vif Systems - for just €50K.
Culina Health brought home almost $4.8M in Seed financing, in a round backed by Rethink Impact. Culina is building an affordable personalized nutrition platform.
Spanish FoodTech company Cocuus has nabbed €2.5M in "pre-Series A" funding, in a round led by Big Idea Ventures, Cargill Ventures, Eatable Adventures, and Tech Transfer UPV. Cocuus uses 3D printing to produce realistic meat analogs.
Image: Cocuus
SciFi Foods (rebranded from Artemys Foods) has secured $22M in a Series A round led by a16z (Andreessen Horowitz). The company cell-cultivates meat for e.g. burgers, and will produce blended products (with a mix of plant-based and cell-based ingredients). The company has not announced a date for when it will launch its products.
Brazilian startup Food to Save, which fights food waste, raised 1.3M reais ($272K) in a 24-hour crowdfunding campaign. Since starting a year ago, the company has saved 150 tons of food. The company has developed an app that rescues food with short expiry dates from restaurants, cafes, and supermarkets. Other companies to watch in this space include e.g. Too Good To Go and Karma.
Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have developednanoparticle sensors that can detect pesticides on fruit in just a few minutes. While the technology is still in its infancy, the researchers hope their solution will eventually enable people to be able to consume fruits with confidence that the produce has safe levels of pesticides. Here's the peer-reviewed paper if anyone wants to geek out.
A new database of 50,000 foods built by researchers at Northeastern University can tell what's been chemically altered in the foods. The study is part of the Foodome project, which aims to do for food what the Human Genome Project did for human genetics. The aim is to map out all of the chemical components of the human diet, to better understand how what we eat impact our health.
Electrolux has unveiled a new kitchen system called GRO. It uses sensors and AI to provide personalized eating and nutrition recommendations, partly based on recommendations from the EAT-Lancet report. The system includes e.g. a glass-enclosed showcase for fruits and vegetables, a temperature-controlled home fermentation cabinet, and an 'appliance garage'. I'm intrigued.
Image: Electrolux
Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn will fully electrify its Dutch city fleets of vehicles by 2023.
People now eat a credit card worth of plastics every week, in the form of microplastics.
Mothers to-be that follow a high-salt diet induce high blood pressure in their offspring, a new study in China show. The researchers recommend all people, and especially pregnant women, to stay within recommended guidelines for salt intake.
Google 'Fine dining faces its dark truths in Copenhagen'. Important read (the direct link to the FT article seems paywalled).
Intermittent fasting (or time-restricted eating) means limiting your eating to 6-10 hours per day, in an effort to lose weight. Scientists have now done a year-long study, and found that participants who confined meals to certain hours lost no more weight than those who ate at any time (h/t: Matthieu Vincent).
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
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Random Stuff
Ukrainian tractors destroyed by anti-tank mines left by the Russian army. Seeing this, and reports of blocked food trucks as well as the systematic destruction of grain and crops exports, is infuriating. These actions could trigger a food crisis significantly harming the most vulnerable populations and countries worldwide. And it's entirely avoidable.
The aerodynamics of the beaver:
This robot thinks outside the box (18 sec video):
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to Everywhere by Fleetwood Mac. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter. And here's the Appetizer which I co-host. Did your brilliant friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.