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- FoodTech Weekly #13 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #13 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
August 21, 2020 • Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #13
Hi there,
Summer is almost over, and my beard has gotten so long that I would probably get randomly selected at airport security, would we still be able to fly. Some people apparently miss the entire experience of flying so much, that they're ordering airplane food to eat at home.
People form very strong personal, cultural, and spiritual connections to food. It's more than just fuel for the body. Every meal we eat can bring us closer together, help us understand our past, connect us to where we live, and tell a story about where we want to go. And, as it turns out, even airplane food can do that for us.
Highligths
Conversations: Petra Kaukua (Grim)
Noteworthy: Root AI raises $7.2M for tomato picking robot; Allergy Amulet nabs $3.3M to develop food allergen detection device; huge difference in Sprite sugar content across Europe; Legendary Vish 3D prints shockingly realistic salmon fillets
The Profile: Kate Kreuger
Random Stuff: Beyond's Sausage Party; how cheeses go extinct; shark boxing; Swiss chocolate rain
Conversations
Had a long and fun conversation with Petra Kaukua this week, CEO and Co-Founder of Grim.
Petra is from northern Finland, and met her co-founder, Caro Schiemer, while studying at Copenhagen Business School 5 years ago. They wanted to focus on an area where one could create meaningful impact, so they did research on food waste, and truly geeked out about it -- spoke to farmers, restaurants, food retailers, and consumers, did dumpster diving, and more. They were especially taken by how frustrated and powerless farmers felt, seeing perfectly good produce going to waste as it didn't meet supermarket standards. By the time Petra and Carolin graduated at the end of 2017, they decided to rent a car and some boxes, make some leaflets and an online landing page, and pretend they were a business. They ran a trial with 30 customers, of a food box subscription service. It worked, and the startup Grim was born. Grim (Danish for 'ugly') is a marketplace for ugly fruits and vegetables; the produce can be too big or too small, have the wrong color shade, the wrong shape etc. Today, Grim delivers boxes of ugly, organic, and seasonal fruits and veggies to consumers all over Denmark (recipes are included!), who just have to pick the box size and delivery frequency, before Grim handles the rest. Grim also sells to the foodservice sector. Petra says Grim is competitively priced; the produce costs about the same as in the cheapest supermarket chain in Denmark. As roughly 170,000 tons of fruits and vegetables grown in Denmark (about 30%) is not sent for human consumption (the equivalent number for Europe is 50+ million tons) Grim has a lot of food rescuing ahead of them, and will need to expand internationally to get the impact Petra is hoping for. Grim is currently recruiting. The startup is also looking for a 1,000 sq. meter (app. 10,000 sq ft) warehouse in Denmark. And they've just opened a €1M Seed round. If anything of this piques your interest, get in touch with Petra here.
Image source: Grim.
Noteworthy
Lever VC has launched a new fund targeting early-stage alternative protein companies; the Fund has $23M in commitments so far, and has already deployed $5M in 10 startups including Turtle Tree Labs (cultured breastmilk), Better Meat Co (plant ingredients for hybrid animal-meal/plant-based meat products) and Mission Barns (cultured pork fat). Lever's managing partner Nick Cooney previously co-founded Good Food Institute and New Crop Capital.
Pairwise, of Durham, NC, is using gene editing to remove seeds and pits from specialty crops such as berries and stone fruits, to make them more snackable. The company can also eliminate the bitter taste of some vegetables, e.g. mustard greens. Previously, farmers rather than consumers saw tangible benefits of GMOs and gene editing. What's new is that an increasing number of gene edited products with clear consumer benefits, such as the non-browning Arctic Apple from Okanagan Specialty Fruits, are now entering the marketplace.
Mexican AgTech / InsurTech startup Luxelare has raised about $338,000 in a crowdfunding campaign. The company, which is a Certified B Corp, provides software tools to farmers keep track of their fields' health (with drones and satellite-based monitoring); it also helps farmers secure farm insurance.
Boston-based startup Root AI has secured financing of $7.2M, bringing total funding to $9.5M. The company has developed a produce picking robot - the first target crop is tomatoes. Boston is of course also home to Boston Dynamics, the company behind Spot, a robot now being trained by New Zealand company Rocos to herd sheep.
Root AI's tomato picking robot. Screenshot: YouTube.
WWF has led a $1.5M investment round into seaweed startup Ocean Rainforest, in the Faroe Islands. Seaweed (macroalgae) looks super compelling on paper - it's cultivation needs no freshwater, arable land, fertilizer, herbicide, or pesticide. It's also extremely efficient in absorbing CO2 from the ocean, and reducing acidification. But seaweed is tricky to grow, and labor intensive to harvest and process. Hopefully Ocean Rainforst will solve these challenges.
Allergy Amulet, which makes a portable device to detect food allergens, has nabbed $3.3M in seed funding, bringing its total funding to $4.8M. Users swab food with a test strip, and insert it into the device; results are returned in under a minute. There are 200,000 ER visits each year in the U.S. alone due to food allergies; if Allergy Amulet, and competitors like Nima are successful, this number could go down significantly in the future.
Biotech firm Ecovative in New York is using mycelium (basically the root structure of mushrooms) to grow a packaging material similar to Styrofoam. Ecovative's material is biodegradable in 30 days; Styrofoam takes at least 500 years to biodegrade. Ecovative is also working on vegan leather, as well as a mycelium-based alternative to chicken, bacon, and steak (the ingredient is high in fiber, and contains the same amount of protein as a slice of bacon). The company has raised $30.1M so far; a competitor, Mushlabs in Germany, just closed a $10M Series A round.
The sugar content for Fanta varies wildly in 12 surveyed European countries, a new study from the Swedish Cancer Society shows. Each 100 ml (3.3 fl. oz.) of Fanta contains 12.3 grams of sugar in Sweden, vs. e.g. 7.2g in Denmark and Finland, 4.6g in the U.K, and 4.5g in Spain. For Sprite, the differences were even more stark; 10.6 grams of sugar in Sweden, vs. e.g. 3.3g in the U.K. and just 2g in Spain, per 100ml (3.3 fl. oz). Coca-Cola Classic (original) contained 10.6 grams of sugar per 100 ml in all countries surveyed. Ulrika Årehed Kågström, Secretary General at the Swedish Cancer Society, says that the difference in sugar level in these sodas between countries is mainly due to local sugar taxes, forcing recipe reformulation. She also notes that while sugar itself isn't carcinogenic, it may lead to overweight and obesity, which is a risk factor for 13 forms of cancer.
Image source: Pxhere, CC0.
Vertical indoor farming has, so far, mainly focused on leafy greens and herbs, as the method hasn't been deemed competitive for staple crops like wheat. Google X, for example, tried and failed to grow grains and rice. U.S. researchers now believe it'll be possible to grow wheat in vertical indoor farms, with higher yields, lower water use, and no herbicide and pesticide use compared to field-grown wheat. The high energy cost of powering an indoor facility is however still a major obstacle.
Legendary Vish of Austria is using 3D printing and plant-based ingredients to re-create a realistic salmon fillet. As the Spoon noticed, and images show, Legendary Vish's plant-based salmon looks shockingly real.
The Profile
Kate Kreuger graduated from Yale University with a PhD in Cell Biology. After founding a introductory program to teach data science for women (Learn to Code), working as a Graduate Research Assistant at Yale, and interning at Perfect Day Foods in its infancy, she spent 3+ years as Research Director of New Harvest, a donor-funded research institute focused on cellular agriculture (e.g. growing animal protein in a bioreactor). New Harvest sponsors scientists at leading academic institutions to advance the entire field of cellular agriculture, and the organization also puts together an annual conference which convenes the entire cell ag ecosystem. Since a few months, Kate runs Helikon Consulting, where she advises organizations and individuals on breakthrough technologies that promote human health and sustainability -- doing due diligence on cutting edge startups and their business models, sourcing scientists and CTOs, and much more. Yes, she's awesome. Follow her on Twitter here.
Kate speaking at a panel during New Harvest conference 2017
Random Stuff
A cheese is just one small piece of the world—one lump of microbe-riddled milk curds—but each is an end point of centuries of tradition. Some disappear for months or years; others never return.' Fascinating piece from The New Yorker about British cheesemaking, and how cheeses go extinct.
The Rockefeller Foundation announced the 10 Finalists of the Food System Vision Prize - meet them here.
Cloudy with a chance of chocolate balls: After a 'malfunction' at a nearby Lindt factory, a Swiss town was covered in a fine layer of cocoa dust.
Peak Australia: Husband punches shark to save his surfing wife.
I'm unable to caption the below image without running into some serious NSFW issues, so I'm just going to leave it here (h/t Amir Sariaslan):
I love you.
Daniel
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