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- FoodTech Weekly #107 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #107 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
July 29, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #107
Hi there,
I'm back. Still on semi-vacation, but guess too eager to share some FoodTech updates with y'all.
Curious about canned food? Marina Schmidt just released the latest episode of Red to Green podcast, focusing on this topic and why such a useful technology was held back by scandals. Listen to this 15 minute episode wherever you find your podcasts, incl. Spotify and iTunes.
By the way, Chris Albrecht (of OttOmate, and formerly e.g. the Spoon) is up for grabs! He's awesome. More on that further below.
This week's rundown:
Meati rakes in $150M for mycelium-based meat analogs
Crop One opens the world's largest indoor vertical farm in Dubai
S*x toys for cows is now a thing
Let's go!
Conversations
Still paused for the summer!
Noteworthy
Blue Ocean Barns has secured $20M in Series A financing; the Hawaii company farms and sells a seaweed-based feed additive for cows that reduce methane emissions by up to 80%. The round was led by Valor Siren Ventures and included Tao Capital Partners. Just a few weeks ago, Rumin8of Australia landed $7M to commercialize feed additives that reduce cow methane emissions.
U.K. startup Tropic Biosciences has raised $35M, which was announced earlier in July. The company uses gene editing to improve crops like banana, coffee, and rice.
Meati, a U.S. scaleup which uses mycelium to produce meat analogs such as chicken and steak, was just foie gras'd with $150M in Series C funding led by Revolution Growth. The company (which has raised $278M in total) has already launched products in the U.S. under the brand Eat Meati, and plans to expand production and distribution in the next few years.
Image: Meati
Crop One Holdings has announced the opening of what they claim is the world's largest vertical farm. Located in Dubai, the facility is 330k sq. ft (30k sq. meters) and will produce over 2M pounds (0.9M kgs) of leafy greens every year. One major customer is Emirates Airline, which will serve Crop One products on their flights. In related news, Canadian CEA (controlled environment agriculture) startup Fieldless Farms recently brought in $17.5M in funding; the company grows leafy greens that are sold in Canada.
Ucrop.it of Argentina has raised $3.1M to help LATAM and U.S. farmers improve crop traceability, and shift to more sustainable agriculture practices.
A graduate student of Northumbria University has developed an aroma detector called Snoot that can detect whether food is about to go bad, and provide recipe suggestions for using the food. Some 4.5M tons of edible foods are thrown away in the U.K. every year.
Image: Snoot / Dezeen
DoorDash has decided to shut down salad robot startup Chowbotics, a mere 18 months after acquiring it.
Metabolic health startup NutriSense of Chicago has banked $25M in fresh funding. The company pairs data from continuous glucose monitoring with personalized dietitian coaching, to help consumers personalize their nutrition and receive instant feedback to drive behavior change.
A new report from BCG has found that plant-based meat is by far the best climate investment, and yet the food sector has received much less mitigation capital than other sectors such as buildings.
Source: The Guardian / Boston Consulting Group
U.S. AgTech investor SVG is launching the $50M THRIVE Australia Venture Fund to invest in Australian and New Zealand AgTech startups. Recently, Shore Capital Partners closed a $290M food and beverage fund.
A historic drought is putting one-third of Italian agricultural output at risk; production of things like rice, tomatoes, corn, olive oil, apricots, peaches, and pears is expected to fall significantly.
Israeli FoodTech startup Maolac bagged $3.2M in new funding earlier in July; the company uses computational biology to identify and extract functional proteins from bovine colostrum, a nutrient-rich milky fluid that cows produce in the first few days after giving birth (and 95% equivalent to milk proteins found in human breast milk). Maolac aims to produce a mixture to strengthen the human immune system, and will now build a small-scale production facility.
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Melt&Marble (Sweden) is looking for a Head of Food Science... World Economic Forum (Switzerland) is recruiting a Community Success Lead for Uplink Food Systems... Formo (Germany) is hiring a Sustainability Manager.
As mentioned above, Chris Albrecht, a veteran writer with deep experience as both a B2B tech journalist and startup marketer with expertise in food tech, automation, web3 and videogames, is currently looking for new opportunities to create corporate communications including web writing, blog posts, email newsletters, podcasts and more for cutting-edge technology companies. Full-time/Full-time contract preferred. If interested, please email him here.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
The Moroccan octopus mafia (no joke, check the link) is accused of poaching octopus, creating a 60% population decline of said cephalopod.
Ece Tan, a graduate of London design/arts college Central Saint Martins has designed a range of s*x toys for cows. Rather than being intended for actual use, the toys are meant to serve as tools to remind desensitized consumers of the range of emotions animals can feel.
A date night for Paleo and Keto fans was held a few weeks ago in the U.S. To each their own, I guess.
A cucumber house being built by a LEGO robot (2 min video).
Hilarious 1 minute music video on all the options provided when receiving a second call on the iPhone.
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to Without Me by Eminem. 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.