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- FoodTech Weekly #109 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #109 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
August 12, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #109
Hi there,
I'm thinking about switching newsletter provider. Tinyletter caps the number of subscribers at 5,000 and we're already more than halfway there. Plus, it's a very old school platform. Am currently looking at Beehiv. Any strong opinions? Speak now or forever hold your peace.
This week's rundown:
Everytable secures $55M to bring healthy, affordable foods to more U.S. communities
Enko bags $70M Series C to develop non-chemical ways of fighting pests and feeds
U.C. Davis scientists make progress on nitrogen fixation
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New exciting conversation coming up next week (I think)!
Noteworthy
San Francisco scale-up Afresh has bagged a massive $115M in new funding. The company develops an AI-based system which helps grocery stores to manage fresh food inventory and sales, in order to reduce waste. More than 3,000 U.S. stores use the solution, and Afresh now aims to reach 10% of all U.S. supermarkets by the end of this year, and eventually expand into Europe. About 40% of food produced in the U.S. is thrown away (according to the National Resources Defense Council), and often ends up in landfills. One culprit of food waste is confusing expiration dates.
Swiss-Italian xFarm Technologies has raised €17M in Series B funding. Founded in 2017, the company deploys in-field sensors on farms that collect and analyze data on e.g. pests, weed growth, and irrigation needs, which help farmers make better decisions. The platform is used by 110,000 farms in about 100 countries.
U.S. healthy foods company Everytable has scored $55M in Series C funding, led by Creadev, Desert Bloom Ventures, and Gullspång Re:food, and backed by e.g. Kimbal Musk, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and Beacon Fund. Everytable runs restaurants (as well as subscriptions and smart fridges) that price their meals based on the zip code median income, making sure the food is affordable for everyone.
U.K. harvesting robot startup Muddy Machines has secured a €1.8M seed round. The company now plans to e.g. build a 'small herd' of its Sprout robots for the 2023 asparagus harvest season.
Image: Muddy Machines
Israeli FoodTech startup GreenOnyx has landed $18M in fresh funding (expected to rise to $23M). The company grows fresh greens such as water lentils using vertical farming; it then turns them into grains and packages them, enabling consumers to eat fresh green vegetables directly from the package with a spoon, without any preparation. GreenOnyx will use the new capital to set up marketing teams in the U.S. and Europe.
All G Foods of Australia has gulped down $25M in a new round led by Agronomics. The startup cultivates dairy proteins, and aims to make its precision fermented milk cheaper than cow-based dairy.
AppHarvest, which builds and runs high-tech greenhouse farms in the U.S., has taken in $50M in non-dilutive funding from the USDA. The funding will be used to finalize the construction of AppHarvest's berry-growing facility in Somerset, Kentucky.
Danish food rescue platform Too Good To Go has raised $27.4M in equity funding, CB Insights says.
Icelandic plant-based seafood startup Loki Foods has reeled in a $650k pre-seed round. Their first product is an Atlantic cod analog. Investors in the round included Sustainable Food Ventures, MGMT Ventures, VegInvest, FoodHack, Kale United, and Lifely VC.
Image source: Loki Foods
Agricultural machinery giant John Deere has made a minority investment into Kenyan startup Hello Tractor. The Nairobi-based company has developed a system and app that allows farmers to track and manage their vehicle fleet, book customers, and access financing options.
Plant-based beef has the potential of reducing CO2 emissions by up to 13.5%, new research from Cornell and Johns Hopkins shows, but wide-scale adoption could also threaten over 1 million current jobs in the meat industry.
Enko banked a $70M Series C round in late July led by Nufarm. Based in Connecticut, the company uses machine learning to develop non-chemical ways of killing agricultural pests and weeds. Overuse of herbicides and pesticides have led to weed resistance that threaten food supply and agricultural productivity. Enko's 2020 Series B round of $45M was led by theGates Foundation, which hopes that Enko's product can be made available at affordable prices to smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia.
Researchers at UC Davis say they've found a way to reduce the amount of nitrogen fertilizers needed to grow cereal crops, by using nitrogen fixation. Nitrogen is essential to plant growth, so farmers use it to boost productivity, but excess nitrogen often leaches into soils and groundwater, leading to eutrophication.
I found this interesting:
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Fermify (Austria) is hiring a Scientific Lab Manager... Nasekomo (Bulgaria) is recruiting a Chief Accountant... Time Traveling Milkman (The Netherlands) is looking for a Commercial Director... SuperMeat (Israel) has an open role for a Media Development Scientist.
Check out FoodHack's listing of 30 women angel investors funding food and climate startups.
Can photosynthesis be hacked? Fascinating article by Niko McCarthy.
My friends over at climate VC fund Pale Blue Dot are co-hosts of The Drop, a 'meeting of minds' on climate where 500+ people (founders, investors, students, researchers, policymakers and scientists) will convene on Sept 21, 2022 in a converted rail locomotive workshop in Malmö, Sweden. The Drop will feature quick-fire panel discussions on 20 climate topics, 8 unconferences inside the venue, and much more. Don't miss out.
Food Innovation Summit 2022, the largest alternative protein conference in the Baltics and the Nordics, takes place on October 25 in Tallinn, Estonia and will highlight the latest trends, technologies and the biggest growth engines in the field of plant-based food and cultivated meat. The conference will also hold a trade fair, where you can taste exciting plant-based products and network with industry experts. More info and early bird tickets here.
Fantastic candidate up for grabs: Carolin Schulte is a computational biologist and sustainability enthusiast with a Ph.D. in modelling plant-microbe interactions and wide-ranging experience in both experimental and computational methods. She is looking for a position as a computational biologist/data scientist in the alternative meat/dairy space starting in early 2023. Carolin can be reached via LinkedIn and email.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
This is a long but beautiful story about a family immigrating to Canada and building what eventually became an epic cheese store in Toronto.
There's probably a bigger point here about demography: Abandoned Japanese primary school is now used to age barrels of whiskey.
ICYMI: French scientist's photo of distant star was actually a slice of chorizo:
This carrot harvester is mesmerizing:
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to What u see is what u get by Young Dolph & Key Glock. 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.