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- FoodTech Weekly #154 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #154 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
June 30, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 14 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #154
Hi there,
Congrats to my friends at Trellis Road VC, who have rebranded to Mudcake — symbolizing what it means to be a founder building something from scratch. Mudcake is a $18M microfund investing $200k-$600k in pre-seed and seed founders globally that reshape how we produce, distribute, and consume foods. I’m a proud advisor to Mudcake. So if you’re a founder building something exciting, get in touch with them.
This week's rundown:
Bluu Seafood of Germany pulls in €16M for cultivated seafood
Omnivore, Innova Memphis, and Joyful Ventures all launch funds to invest in e.g. AgTech/FoodTech
The EU may relax regulations around CRISPR
Let's go!
Conversations
Had an opportunity to chat with BloomX Founder and CEO Thai Sade. He grew up on a kibbutz near Haifa, Israel, and had lots of exposure to agriculture. After his army service, Thai opened a restaurant with his mom and sister, which they ran for almost ten years. Thai felt he needed to do something more fulfilling, so after travelling the world and getting a degree in sustainability, he went into the startup space. He did a deep dive on pollination, and decided to establish BloomX in mid-2019. ‘The main challenge is how the world relies on insects to pollinate commercial crops’, Thai explains and continues: ‘The amount of honeybee hives has grown 80% since the 1960s, but the amount of plantations needing honeybees has grown exponentially and this created too much stress on the colonies, e.g. pushing the bees on crops they don’t like — or even are suited — to pollinate, exposing them to pesticides, moving them around.’ So BloomX came up with an artificial pollination approach to mimic the natural pollination process. One of their products is Robee (pronounced Ruby) that passes by crop rows of e.g. blueberries, applying a frequency of vibration that makes the crop self-pollinate. Based on an algorithm, BloomX knows the right time of the week, day, and hour to pollinate, and how environmental conditions affect the flowering behavior. This all creates better financial outcomes for the growers, improving yields by up to 30%, increasing the share of large scale fruits, lengthening shelf life, and saving labor costs. BloomX, which now has a team of 16 people and plans to be cash positive in 2025, doesn’t sell products, but instead pollination-as-a-service, in e.g. Latin America. Next up is to build an automated solution for crops like tomatoes and bell peppers in greenhouses, and to expand further into North and South America. BloomX is currently in the process of raising $8M to support the company's growth through the end of 2023 and 2024. The company is also looking to engage with the right distributors, like machinery companies, in some geographies. Thai can be reached via [email protected]
Thai Sade and BloomX
Noteworthy
German cultivated seafood startup Bluu Seafood has landed a €16M ($17.5M) Series A round, and is now going for regulatory approval in different markets, starting with Singapore — initially focusing on hybrid products such as fish sticks and fish balls made from cultivated fish cells blended with plant-based proteins. The round was led by Sparkfood and LBBW VC, and joined by e.g. Delivery Hero, Manta Ray Ventures, Norrsken VC, and Dr. Oetker.
Next Gen Foods, which is behind plant-based chicken brand TiNDLE, has announced a media-for-equity deal valued at at least $10M with SevenVentures, the investment arm of German media/digital corporation ProSiebenSat.1.
Carbonwave of Puerto Rico, which upcycles Sargassum seaweed into e.g. biostimulants and fertilizers, has fetched $6M in new investment from Pegasus Capital Advisors and the Global Fund for Coral Reefs.
The EU may be moving towards relaxing its current regulations around gene-edited foods. The EU has until now viewed food developed using e.g. CRISPR gene-editing technology as basically the same as genetically-modified food (GMO) — where genetic material from different organisms is mixed — meaning the regulatory pathway for CRISPR foods has been just as long and expensive. Now, there’s a growing recognition that Europe needs to embrace new innovations to deal with e.g. climate change and food security.
U.S. startup SnapCalorie has, well, snapped up (ba-dum-tss) a $2M Seed round from investors including Accel, Index Ventures, and Y Combinator. SnapCalorie — which is of course powered by AI — allows users to take a photo of their meals using a smartphone, to get an accurate calorie count and macronutrient breakdown. Others in this space include Foodadvisor, Lose It, Calorie Mama, and Bite.AI.
Image: SnapCalorie
Spanish startup Rice in Action, which develops healthy, fortified rice, has closed a €870K funding round.
Agripolis, a French urban farming startup, has been put into receivership (bankruptcy, essentially). (h/t: DigitalFoodLab)
Plant-based seafood startup Hooked announced it has raised SEK 6M (appr. €500K) in it’s first crowdfunding round on Crowdcube. With the new capital, it will expand to Germany through a partnership with sales agency Ooha (full disclosure: I’m an advisor to Hooked).
Agtech VC Omnivore has announced the first close of its third fund at $150M, The Omnivore Agritech & Climate Sustainability Fund, which invests in ag, food, climate, and rural economy-focused startups in India, in the Seed and Series A stages. In related news, U.S. Innova Memphis has done the first close of its $40M Innova Ag Innovation Fund VI. Also, U.S.-based, women- and LGBTQ-led Joyful Ventures announced it’ll raise $23M to invest in sustainable protein startups. The VC industry has over $2 trillion in assets under management, but women-led funds manage a little under 2% of total venture capital.
DigitalFoodLab just released its FoodTech Unicorns 2023 report. Last year, 12 new FoodTech startups became unicorns, mostly focusing on digitalization in the retail supply chain and the foodservice sector.
New York City is starting to crack down on wasteful delivery packaging, by fining restaurants and food delivery services $50 to $250 for including utensils and items like soy sauce and ketchup packages to customers who didn’t ask for them, as part of a ‘Skip the Stuff’ bill which was signed into law back in February.
Swedish plant-based alternatives startup Havredals has secured SEK 5M ($0.42M) in fresh funding. The company produces plant-based burgers, ground beef, and milk substitutes.
AgTech startup eAgronom of Estonia has banked $5.5M in fresh funding from Icos Capital, Soulmates Ventures and SmartCap GreenFund (and a grant from Enterprise Estonia) to help farmers adopt more sustainable farming methods, incentivizing them with a carbon credit program.
Bunge Ventures has invested an undisclosed sum into Singapore-based insect ingredient producer Nutrition Technologies. The company has raised at least $34M so far, according to Crunchbase.
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Mineral (U.S.) has a number of open roles, incl. for Product Managers… Fermify (Austria) is hiring a Junior Sales Manager… Micvac (Sweden) is recruiting a Technical Sales Manager…
Hooked is looking to expand their product development team with a senior food scientist / product developer that has minimum 2-3 years experience in developing plant-based protein products. This will be a key role that will bring new innovative alternative seafood products to market and work closely with the production site to scale up recipes and tweak the current portfolio. For more info and to apply, contact CEO Tom Johansson at [email protected]
The Future is Fungi Award is looking for scientists or startups with frontier fungi innovations. Two award winners will each receive €10K, access to mentors, networks, ecosystems, and much visibility. Applications are open Sep 5 - Oct 15, more info here.
Lantmännen Research Foundation has an open call until Oct 2 for SEK 25M (appr. $2.3M) within the areas of Ag & Machinery, Food & Health, and Bioenergy & Green Materials.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
A university in Albany, New York has filed a $1M lawsuit against a cleaning firm after one of its janitors was annoyed by an alarm from a lab freezer and thus turned the freezer off — ruining samples from twenty years of research.
Hard pill to swallow: The latest food fad in China is stir-fried stones.
Image: CNN
Domino’s has trialed pizza deliveries using jetpacks in the U.K (40 sec video)
Dolphin moms use baby talk to call their young, new research shows
Plans for the world’s first commercial octopus farm are moving ahead; experts are questioning whether such farming can be done ethically.
Researchers are using CRISPR to try to control agricultural pests such as the glassy-winged sharpshooter that destroy about 40% of global crop production each year. The efforts could also reduce the reliance on pesticides.
‘Cheese isn’t just a snack, it’s an ecosystem. Every slice contains billions of microbes — and they are what makes cheeses distinctive and delicious.’ Fascinating article.
Police in the eastern state of Odisha, India have decided to retain a flock of 100+ carrier pigeons for use when disasters strikes and modern communication tools are cut off. Says historian Anil Dhir, who works with the police: ‘Even in the unlikely event that every mode of communication breaks down tomorrow, the pigeons will never fail.’
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to 夢中人 by Faye Wong. 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.