FoodTech Weekly #150 by Daniel S. Ruben

FoodTech Weekly #150

Hi there,

Am at Sweden FoodTech Big Meet and Nordic Future Food & FoodTech in Stockholm this week. You tend to bump into the same FoodTech ecosystem folks time and again at these events all over the world, making it a bit of a traveling circus (and I’m one of the clowns). But I like this tribe.

I mentioned last week how Incredo (the company formerly known as DouxMatok) just brought home $30M in fresh funding for its sugar reduction technology. I got hold of some Incredo samples at FoodTechIL last year — below is a picture of the empty candy bag because I obviously stuffed my face with these vegan gummies as soon as I could. And it made me think of this story we read about in grad school:

Some years ago, the Indian government wanted to reduce water use in agriculture, so it incentivized farmers to use drip irrigation, which has the potential to drastically cut water use. Well, it turned out that the farmers just used the saved water to irrigate a larger acreage instead, now that they had more water to use. Unintended consequences are always fun to observe.

Going back to Incredo: If food companies start selling candy with 50% less sugar use, do we think consumers will actually consume fewer calories — or just feel that they now can eat twice as much, thanks to the sugar savings? I suspect the latter (based on myself, and extrapolating to everyone on the planet). What do you think?

This week's rundown:

• PitchBook says funding for food/bev fell by 30% between Q1 2022 and Q1 2023

• Swedish researchers find that two-thirds of grocery chain ads market unhealthy foods

• Indian government official emptied dam of millions of liters of water to receive lost cell phone

Let's go!

Conversations

Spoke with Erik Jonuks, CEO of ag robotics startup Ekobot. Erik is an agronomist who was working as a crop advisor, before increasingly getting into the world of tech startups. In 2019 he started consulting for Ekobot, and in 2021 he was appointed CEO.

Ekobot is focused on fighting weeds in open field crops/cash crops, to replace conventional herbicides and manual labor. ‘Fighting weeds is a huge challenge, and cost, for many farmers’, Erik explains, and continues: ‘Many herbicides are being regulated off the market, and the availability of farm labor keeps declining. This hurts production volumes and profitability.’ Ekobot concentrates on yellow onions and similar row grown crops , building electric, battery-powered robots with machine learning and AI capabilities. The robots, which move in low speed (under 1 km/h or 0.6 mph) can therefore autonomously decide on fighting the weeds, by mechanically cutting the weed root under the soil surface, with millimeter precision. ‘Yellow onions are actually one of the hardest crops to protect from weeds, as they have zero ability to compete with weeds’, Erik says.

Today the company can replace 80% of the herbicides on a yellow onion field, meaning the diesel use also goes down as you don’t need to drive around a tractor to spray. ‘And the yield goes up, because the crops are hurt by herbicides.', Erik claims. The robots are leased to farmers (directly and via distributors); organic farmers get ROI in the first season, as manual labor is expensive. Ekobot, which today has around 15 employees, aims to enable the robots to provide more insights to farmers; whether e.g. water or fertilizer is missing, if the crops are pest-infected, and so on. At the start of 2023 Ekobot, which is publicly listed, raised $2.5M in a rights issue. The main shareholder is Navus Ventures, which is the fully owned investment arm of the Lely family; Ekobot is looking to add one more strategic owner. The company is also looking for partners for offgrid (battery and charging solutions) — and since Erik was just recruited to run turnkey cultivation systems provider Agtira, Ekobot is looking for a new international CEO. Erik can be reached via [email protected]

Noteworthy

• U.S. startup Pluton Biosciences announced it has closed a $16.5M Series A round, led by Illumina Ventures and RA Capital. The company identifies and deploys beneficial microbes that can e.g. sequester carbon in soil, or fight pests such as the Fall Armyworm.

• Anuvia Plant Nutrients, which aimed to replace traditional fertilizer and had raised north of $300M, has decided to shut down and liquidate all assets, its CCO announced.

• New data from PitchBook shows that Q1 2023 saw 1,030 transactions raising $1B in the food and bev space, compared to 1,340 deals totalling $1.3B during Q1 2022. The drop from Q4 2021 to Q4 2022 was even more profound, from $2.3B to $0.8B. Investors have in the recent 18 month shifted focus from growth to profitability. Some countries bucked the trend however; France e.g. saw FoodTech investments soar by 39% in 2022 to $1.3B

• Spanish plant-based meat startup Heura raised €3.4M in new funding via crowdfunding platform Crowdcube. The company has now secured €12M from retail investors over three rounds. This is on top of the e.g. €20M Series B the company secured in 2022 and 2023. Heura’s revenues surged by 80% to €31.4M in 2022, according to company co-founder and CEO Marc Coloma.

• VC funding for indoor farming is down 91% year-over-year, new numbers show. A year ago (Q1 2022), the segment saw $879.5M invested across 46 deals; during Q1 year, just $75.8M was invested across 14 deals. Some companies like Kalera and Future Crops have folded, and others like Infarm have done massive layoffs.

• Big Idea Ventures has made a first close for its New Protein Fund II, which it targets to become $75M. The fund, which is backed by e.g. AAK and Bühler, will support alt protein and ingredient startups across the world (full disclosure, I’m a mentor at the Big Idea Ventures accelerator).

• South Korea-based CellMeat secured $17.4B won (appr. $13M) in Series A funding, to keep developing its cultivated seafood technology.

• Qiyun Woo of Green Queen tasted Solar Foods’ Solein protein, made from air. Here’s her takeaways.

• New research from the University of Gothenburg, published in BMC Health, showed that unhealthy food dominated the weekly grocery store flyers. As much as two-thirds of the space was taken up by less healthy foods (e.g. high-sugar food and drinks). The ads are at odds with the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations, the researchers note.

• Speaking about dietary guidelines, Mexico has issued new ones, calling from more consumption of vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains, and water — and less beef, processed meats, ultra-processed foods and alcohol. And to ‘enjoy meals with family and friends’. (h/t Marion Nestle).

News from the FoodTech Weekly community

• NitroCapt (Sweden) has a number of open roles, including R&D Manager and Fertilizer Product Developer… Chromologics (Denmark) is looking for a Senior Research Scientist… Hoxton Farms (U.K.) is recruiting a Finance Manager… The Kitchen FoodTech Hub (Israel) is hiring a CTO.

Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.

Random Stuff

• A Japanese farmer is selling mangoes that sell for $230 each (clearly, I’m in the wrong business).

• Researchers at the University of Hong Kong have developed an ink, inspired by the octopus, that can ‘display different colours by moving dyed particles in response to light exposure.’ True camouflage clothing may soon be here.

• A government official in India took a selfie but dropped his phone in a large dam. He ordered the dam emptied, and millions of liters were pumped out. When the phone was eventually found, it was too water-damaged to work.

• French officials destroyed 35,000 bottles of soda from Haiti that were illegally labeled ‘champagne.’

• The Drone Bird Company of the Netherlands has built a fleet of drones that resemble birds of prey, hoping that they will keep real birds away from e.g. farms and airports. A German blueberry farmer who tested the drones saw crop losses decrease from about 50% to 5%.

​I love you.

Daniel

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This issue was produced while listening to Stockholmsvy by Hannes and waterbaby. 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.

Disclosures: I'm Head of Strategy and Special Projects at Stockeld Dreamery. I'm an operating advisor to VC/investment firms Nordic FoodTech VC, Trellis Road, and Blume Equity. I'm a mentor at accelerators Katapult Ocean, Big Idea Ventures, and Norrsken Impact Accelerator. I'm an advisor to BIOMILQ, FoodHack, Hooked, Ignitia, Improvin, IRRIOT, Juicy Marbles, Lupinta, NitroCapt, Oceanium, petgood, Rootically, Transship, VEAT, and Volta Greentech; in some of these startups, I have equity.

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