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- FoodTech Weekly #11 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #11 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
August 07, 2020 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #11
Hi there,
Last week, I cited (paywalled) an obscure news outlet called The Financial Times, which said that Nando's would start feeding algae and insects to its chickens, in an effort to reduce its reliance on soy as animal feed. FoodTech Weekly reader David B made me aware that Nando's have no such plans (thank you David!). Going forward, I promise to use more reputable sources than FT.
On with the show. I really love this 45 sec ad by Matsmart (watch it!). Swedish startup Matsmart (Swedish for Food Smart) has raised $46M, and sells surplus food online in Sweden and Finland (as well as in Denmark and Germany under the brand Motatos). Their annual revenue is already north of $30M. Food waste is a huge problem that we need to solve. But I have mixed feelings about Matsmart. They claim that they're rescuing 'perfect food' from being wasted - yet a lot of what they sell and market is ultra-processed junk food; sugar-sweetened beverages, cookies, candy, snacks, potato chips, chocolate, and so on. Hardly perfect food.
Highligths
Conversations: Arye Lipman
Noteworthy: AppHarvest bringing hope to Appalachia; huge funding rounds by Indigo Ag and Farmers Business Network; Minnow's contact-free delivery pods; saving the Cavendish banana with GM tech.
The Profile: Brita Rosenheim
Random Stuff: IKEA's mesmerizing infomercial; dumb U.K. food policies; domesticated watermelons. And more.
Conversations
Hopped on a Zoom with Arye Lipman of MarsBio. MarsBio is an L.A.-based seed stage venture fund, established by Rob Rhinehart (founder of Soylent), that invests at the intersection of biotech and food, agriculture, and health. Their portfolio companies make innovative products using fermentation, microbiome, gene circuits, and cell-free production systems. MarsBio has invested in nine companies so far and are currently raising money from private LPs to close out their fund. (Arye's background is in molecular biology, so it took about 3 seconds before he started using scientific words I couldn't understand.). One of their portfolio companies, Armada Biosystems, is scaling biomanufacturing for the synthetic biology industry. They are building a "single use" pilot foundry focused on new probiotic products and are looking for partners who need help scaling - in particular those developing GM probiotics and probiotic spore-formers for food/nutrition. Another portfolio company, Spira, is an algae-based ingredient company. They have developed a natural, stable blue dye derived from Spirulina (a single-celled algae) called Electric Sky. Electric Sky is already used in juice, ice cream, and baked goods, and the company is cash flow positive. Spira are looking for large distributors and new markets for the dye, as well as interest in their next generation spirulina-derived protein isolate (coming soon). If you'd like to get in touch with Arye, you can email him here.
From left to right: The MarsBio team, Armada's cool tech, and Spira's Electric Sky blue dye.
Noteworthy
The Impossible Burger, from Impossible Foods, will soon be available at 2,000 Walmart stores across the U.S., as well as in Trader Joe's - bringing Impossible's retail footprint from 150 stores at the start of the year, to 5,000 stores today. And Sunfed Meats of New Zealand has launched a Boar Free Bacon in local supermarkets. Plant-based meat is getting closer to ubiquity.
Mission Barns, which cultivates bacon in bioreactors, will do public tastingsin San Francisco in mid-August, inviting 50-100 people to try the product. This will be one of the largest public tastings of cultivated meat ever conducted. Artemys Foods meanwhile emerged out of stealth; the startup plans to sell a beef burger combining plant-based and cell-based meat. Speaking about tastings, Michael Wolf of The Spoon tried Brave Robot, the new ice-cream brand from Perfect Day's new spinout The Urgent Company. His verdict? It tasted just like dairy-based ice cream. (Eclipse Foods, which is fully-plant based ice cream, meanwhile launched into retail).
AppHarvest announced a $28M Series C round, bringing total funding to $150M -- and that the company would add J.D. Vance, Martha Stewart, and (Impossible Foods CFO) David Lee to its board. AppHarvest plans to build a huge cluster of greenhouses in Appalachia, reducing unemployment in the region (where the coal industry is disappearing) while bringing nutritious foods closer to the Eastern U.S. AppHarvest is inspired by the Netherlands, a world leader in greenhouse farming and agricultural exports.
Elo Life Systems has inked a strategic partnership with Dole, to save the Cavendish banana (hat tip: Ron Shigeta). Fusarium Wilt (TR4) causes the Panama disease on bananas, and there is no known protection or cure. Elo's GM technology will try to develop bananas resistant to TR4.
Vitamix has launched a $399 at-home device to turn food waste into soil nutrients. The company markets this as an easier alternative to composting. This 90 sec video shows how it works.
Image: YouTube screenshot.
Several big financing rounds were announced this week. Farmers Business Network, a farmer-to-farmer network and e-commerce platform with 12,000 members across North America and Australia, raised $250M in Series F. Indigo Ag, which has been described as five startups in one, raised $360M in Series F, bringing total funding to $1.2B. And Sustainable Oceans Fund announced a final close of $132M; there are relatively few investment funds focused on seafood and aquaculture, and even fewer with a explicit sustainability focus.
Kuleana, of Y Combinator, is attempting to produce a plant-based raw tuna. Jacek Prus, Co-Founder and CEO, previously helped set up the ProVeg International incubator in Europe. Prus says to TechCrunch that the main challenge isn't getting the taste right, but the texture. Other companies to watch in this space include e.g. Hooked and Good Catch.
Minnow has raised $2.2M for contact-free delivery pods. The pods are installed in high-traffic locations (e.g. office buildings and residential buildings), and enable consumers to unlock a specific cubby / box using their cell phones. The combination of ghost kitchens / cloud kitchens, and consumer reluctance to visit restaurants in a COVID world, may prove a winning concept for Minnow.
Image: Minnow
The Profile
Brita Rosenheim is a Partner at Better Food Ventures, which invests exclusively in early-stage companies leveraging ICT to transform the ag and food sectors. She's tracking 2,500+ FoodTech companies, and is the author of the FoodTech and Media Landscape. This image really speaks for itself, and her accompanying analysis is outstanding. For anyone interested in learning more about the FoodTech ecosystem, Brita Rosenheim is a key person to follow.
Random Stuff
The U.K. government has launched the Eat Out to Help Out program for all of August, where restaurant-goers get a 50% discount (worth up to £10 per diner) at eligible restaurants, in an effort to get people to go out to restaurants again. Critics claim the government is subsidizing the least healthy area of the restaurant market; an entire Big Mac Meal will now cost just £2.30. Meanwhile, the U.K. government has also launched an ambitious anti-obesity program; two-thirds of adults in England are overweight or obese [insert joke here about governments using tax money to subsidize unhealthy food, and then spending more tax money on mitigating the consequences of people eating unhealthy food]. In a pep talk, PM Johnson encouraged citizens to exercise more: 'The great thing about going for a run, at the beginning of the day, is that nothing could be worse for the rest of the day.'
This slow-paced infomercial from IKEA on how they create their new plant-based meatballs is really mesmerizing. (Here's the story, with some visuals etc, on how the video was made).
Speaking about slowing down, Maori Sakai's animated gifs of mundane life are just wonderful.
This is fascinating:
Source: The Insider.
I love you.
Daniel
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