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FoodTech Weekly #127 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
December 16, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 14 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #127
Hi there,
In case you missed it, the Atomico State of European Tech 2022 report is out. Some 87% of all VC funding in Europe goes to men-only teams, while the proportion of funding raised by women-only teams has actually fallen from 3% in 2018 to 1% in 2022. Surely we can do better?
This week's rundown:
Ÿnsect and Believer Meats plan big new U.S. factories for production of insects and cultivated meat, respectively
Naïo Technologies harvests €32M investment for automatic weeding robots
What it takes in L.A. to get a Permanent Unicorn License
Let's go!
Conversations
I briefly met Shimrit Lev, Co-Founder and COO of Sweet Victory Gum at FoodTechIL recently, and about a week ago we finally had time to chat. Shimrit told me that she and her co-founder Gitit Lahav previously ran a company together related to health and wellness. 'Our personal backgrounds play an important role. We have both dealt with health challenges in the past. So we know, from personal experience, how it feels to lose control over your own body and health. So we had a deep desire to help people take back control,' Shimrit explains, and continues: 'Sugar was the problem for both of us. It's the mother of everything that's wrong.' One day, Shimrit was in her car, chewing on some leaves (used for another product) before ordering a fruit shake. Once she took a sip from the fruit shake, it tasted like water. She didn't understand why, so she went to her friend Gitit's house, where they chewed some more leaves, ate some chocolate cake, and had to spit it out because it suddenly tasted so bad. 'We knew, then and there, that we were going to create magic', Shimrit smiles. They made the first hundred pieces of chewing gum in Gitit's kitchen using 'The Young Scientist's Kit for Making Chewing Gum' that Gitit ordered off of Amazon. What they had come across was the active ingredient in the Gymnena Sylvestre plant, which fills the receptor locations on the tongue's taste buds, preventing someone to feel sweet taste for up to 2 hours. Knowing that they wanted to fight sugar, they founded Sweet Victory in 2020. Today, the company produces a chewing gum (containing the active ingredient) which is sold via distributors all over the world. 'Our vision is that everyone will have Sweet Victory chewing gums in their pockets -- we'll have products both for adults and children, and also non-chewing gum products that'll help block the sugar craving', Shimrit explains. A year ago, CPT Capital took the entire preseed round of Sweet Victory, and the company is about to kick off a bridge round. Sweet Victory is looking to connect with potential distributors in Europe, as well as with relevant potential investors for the bridge round. Shimrit can be reached via LinkedIn and email ([email protected]).
Shimrit and Gitit (left), the gum (right)
Just had the pleasure of meeting Jere Vento of Five Letter Foods (FLF). Jere, who hails from Finland, is a serial entrepreneur, musician and founder of Five Letter Foods. He has a couple of exits under his belt, and was tuned into dog food after his own dog Rokki got sick from junk food. Jere reached out to Anna Hielm-Björkman, a vet and nutrition scientist, after her name appeared in books and publications. Together they founded Five Letter Foods, together with Erdogan Pekcan Erkan (a Ph.D & molecular biologist who grows human flesh in a lab for cancer research), and Patrik Erävaara (a biochemist and fermentation geek). Jere's vision is a world without factory farming where humans and pets mainly eat cultivated meat. 'I'm a vegan and animal rights advocate. Still, I think people want to continue eating meat even if the planet is burning, Jere explains and continues: 'Our existing products are vegan, but we are not saying that dogs are fully vegans. We want to make real meat without slaughter, which is technically not vegan. What are we then? Bob Dylan wrote the song "Love is Just a Four-Letter Word". Well, vegan is just a five letter word, so we're calling ourselves Five Letter Foods. We need new labels.'
Their recipes are based on Anna's research. 'We know what evidence-based diet is best for dogs', Jere says. FLF is about whole foods, raw meat, and variety. 'Even high-quality ingredients lose their health benefits in ultra-processing and the heat treatment creates toxic compounds. We will produce raw food diet in a way which is better for the environment, and cruelty-free.'
Last spring, Jere went around Helsinki pitching his dog food to local cafes, making e.g. dog kombucha and ice cream. Business picked up, and Five Letter Foods today partners with the biggest raw dog food brand in the Nordics called MUSH BARF, to create home delivered meal kits that are 75% meat- and 25% plant-based (mostly from upcycled food waste). FLF is working on cultivating reindeer meat, cooperating with several universities (lab facilities, student resources) which is cost-effective. FLF will gradually increase the amount of cultivated meat in their meal kits. 'We are a modern meat company partnering with a traditional meat company. Science is the true punk today. While anarchy makes headlines, real change in the meat industry starts from the inside'.
Techstars covered Five Letter Foods' pre-seed round of €120K in August; now the company is raising a €600K seed round (already 1/3 committed by Business Finland). Five Letter Foods is also looking for partners that provide home delivered meal kit services. Jere can be reached via email ([email protected]) as well as LinkedIn.
Jere (left) and the Five Letter Foods dog icecream
Noteworthy
Chilean alt protein scaleup NotCo has banked $70M in a Series D extension round, bringing the company valuation to $1.5B. The company, which sells plant-based alternatives like NotMilk, NotBurger, and NotChicken, is preparing for an IPO, likely in 2025.
French insect production company Ÿnsect is planning to build a large-scale farm in the U.S. Construction will start in late 2023, and the factory will eventually produce up to 55K tons of insect protein, oil, and frass (insect poo, which is used as fertilizer). The company has also announced plans for a new factory in Mexico.
Israeli cultivated meat company Believer Meats, meanwhile, is investing $123M in building what it says will be the world's largest cultivated meat facility, in North Carolina. At full capacity, the plant will produce 10,000 metric tons of meat per year.
Crop breeder Equinom, also from Israel, announced a $35M funding round led by Synthesis Capital, and joined by e.g. BayWa, CPT Capital and Bunge Ventures. Equinom uses a non-CRISPR, non-GMO platform to breed crops such as yellow pea, soybean, and sesame seeds, that are optimized for e.g. nutritional content, taste, color, and performance.
Portuguese biotech startup SilicoLife has scored a Series A round of €9.8M led by Blue Crow Capital. The company uses e.g. AI and precision fermentation to develop currently unavailable pure ingredients for the dietary supplements industry.
SilicoLife
Fresh Inset of Poland, which develops a sticker that is applied to fruits and vegetables to keep them fresh longer, raised a €2.1M Series A round.
Israeli scientists have developed a species of egg-laying hens that only produce females. This could help prevent the annual culling of about 7 billion male chicks every year (that are killed because they can't lay eggs, and are not suitable as meat).
Petfood startup VEGDOG of Munich, Germany, has scooped up €3.5M in new funding led by the Green Generation Fund. VEGDOG develops and sells vegan dog food.
New Zealand will start taxing ag emissions by 2025; Irish farmers are expected to cut their emissions by 25% before 2030. And Denmark wants its farming and forestry sectors to cut emissions by up to 65%. But farmers worldwide are struggling to meet these goals, and protests are erupting from the Netherlands to New Zealand. Important piece by Bloomberg.
Naïo Technologies of France, which develops weeding robots, has landed a €32M funding round, led by Mirova. The capital injection will be used for international expansion; Naïo hopes to double its fleet in operation from 300 today, to 600 in 2024. Naïo was founded in 2011 and today employs 70 people. It says the robots can help tackle labor shortages, help reduce soil erosion, and cut the carbon footprint of farming as well as herbicide use.
Image: Naio
Nevada, U.S. startup Arkea Bio has secured a $12M investment from a group of investors led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Arkea develops a vaccine that will be administered to ruminants like cattle and sheep, and which aims to block the microbes in these animals that generate methane.
Clean Food Group of the U.K. has received an undisclosed sum in investment from Doehler Ventures. The company produces sustainable alternatives to ingredients such as palm oil.
IKEA, one of the largest food chains in the world, is launching a new market hall concept called Saluhall (for its smaller urban stores), which will be 80% plant-based, and completely plastic free.
Good article from AP discussing various startups combating food waste, such as Apeel, Hazel, Innoscentia, and SavrPak.
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Hyfé (U.S.) is hiring a Fermentation Scientist as well as a Downstream Process Engineer... Cultivated Biosciences (Switzerland) is recruiting a COO and a CCO... Planet A Foods (Germany) is looking for a Senior Process Engineer... The Periodic Table of Food Initiative is hiring a Research Scientist.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
South Korea is changing its traditional age-counting practices to align with international standards, meaning that all South Koreans will soon be at least one year younger. Under the traditional way of calculating the age, all South Korean babies are automatically counted as 1 year old when born, and then have one year added every year on January 1. But for some settings, such as school grading, birth years (regardless of month) have been used. This wonderful system has (no surprises!) led to South Koreans being confused about what age they should state, depending on what circumstance they're in.
The County of Los Angeles sent a 'Permanent Unicorn License' to a young girl named Madeline, after she sent them a letter asking for permission to own a unicorn. In their response, city officials required e.g. that the unicorn must be given regular access to moonbeams and rainbows, and that the horn must be polished at least once a month.
Unicorn license
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to Love Tonight by Shouse. 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.