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- FoodTech Weekly #157 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #157 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
July 21, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #157
Hi there,
Big congrats to my friend Gil Horsky who just launched FLORA Ventures together with a fantastic team. At $80M, FLORA is reportedly the largest agrifood-focused VC in Israel, and it will invest from pre-seed thru Series A across Israel and Europe by writing $1M to $4M checks.
This week's rundown:
Simbe Robotics raise $28M Series B for inventory monitoring robots thay may make retail work a bit less dull
Nitrofix scores $3.1M round for its green ammonia technology
How beer may help salmon find their way home
Let's go!
Conversations
Had an opportunity to speak with Emma Kvitnitsky, Founder and CEO of Nuversys.
‘I’m a typical Soviet Union industrial chemist, with lots of experience in production, logistics, and so on, and I’m happy for this. My friends and colleagues moved all over the world in the early 1990s, and it’s given me a strong professional community in for example Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Israel, and the U.S. Personally I moved from Kyiv, Ukraine to Israel in 1990’, Emma explains.
For almost 30 years she headed the laboratory ‘Chemistry of Plant Extracts’ at MIGAL Galilee Research Institute in Israel, working closely with the industry. ‘I’m not a researcher, I don’t make the R, but the D, in R&D’, clarifies Emma. She also taught at various universities and colleges.
‘The food industry is low-tech. It’s not like pharma. Still, consumers these days are educated and critical towards the food they eat. They want to consume more healthy foods, enriched by essential nutrients’, Emma observes. She had noted how the industry struggled to enrich foods with essential nutrients, with challenges around taste and smell, instability, incompatibility, and how to target the release in human organisms. This led to a very low number of enriched food products, for select nutrients only, with lower dosages than recommended. ‘Some nutrients like omega-3 are essential, and there’s no good solution to get your recommended dose — kids for example don’t eat enough fish so they don’t get DHA. No yoghurt in the world contains the required levels of omega-3, because it would taste fishy. But underconsumption of things like omega-3, magnesium, and Vitamin K causes diseases. And many people, especially seniors, pregnant women and children don’t want to eat these big pills with DHA or magnesium. This effect called ‘pill fatigue’ is well-known today. It’s better to just enrich food products like yoghurts, health bars, or plant-based protein foods with omega-3 for example’, Emma states.
Since Emma is a serial entrepreneur, she decided to do something about it. Three years ago she founded her third company, Nuversys, together with Ram Snir, Ph.D in food technology & nutrition, and Roni Kobrovsky (past President and CEO of CBC Group, which is Coca Cola Israel). Today, there’s 12 people in the team.
Nuversys has developed a novel technology of microencapsulation called N-PEARLS. It locks ingredients in a microcapsule (the size of 100 microns), secures them during food preparation and storage, and releases them in a controlled way in the human gastric tract. ‘This is a revolutionary technology, bringing a solution the food industry has waited a long time for’, Emma claims.
She hopes that in the future, we’ll be able to enrich many types of food — such as dairy, health bars, alt protein products, smoothies, spreads, sport nutrition products and jams — with essential nutrients like vitamins and minerals to reduce diseases and improve health outcomes everywhere .
Later this year, Nuversys will raise a $6M Series A round, to continue to expand its marketing activity with food producers and increase the pilot plant production capacity from 2 tons of N-PEARLS per year today, to 20 tons. In the longer term, Nuversys plans to license its technology to the big companies like Arla, DSM, ADM, Firmenich, Givaudan, BASF and so on, taking Nuversys to break-even in 2025.
Nuversys is interested in collaborating with innovative companies producing unique ingredients, polymers, and microencapsulated materials. The company has also started to build an advisory board. And Emma is interested in talking to investors such as Syndicates and big ticket angels for the Series A round. She can be contacted at [email protected].
Images: Nuversys (Emma Kvitnitsky in white shirt, top left image)
Noteworthy
French alt protein company NxtFood has netted €10M in a fresh investment from its backers Creadev and Roquette. Nxtfood, which was founded in 2019, has raised €40M so far, and sells products under the brand Accro.
U.S. startup Simbe Robotics has scored a $28M Series B round led by Eclipse for its inventory robots that monitor supermarket aisles to scout for missing items (h/t: DigitalFoodLab).
Aviwell, an AI-based ‘discovery platform’ for the Ag and Food sectors, has banked a €9M Seed round co-led by Elaia Partners and MFS. The startup believes its AI solution can help industries like aquaculture and chicken farming improve their efficiency.
FarmTrace of the Netherlands and California has raised a $6.5M Series A round, led by Surmount Ventures and CBNN Equity Partners and joined by Fulcrum and Stage 1 Ventures. The company has developed an animal farming data and analytics platform that helps farmers e.g. track key metrics around animal well-being and health.
Nitrofix of Israel has bagged a $3.1M Seed round. The company produces green ammonia using just water, air, and a catalyst, and hopes to bring costs down to $500 per ton, similar to the cost of conventional ammonia (which is produced using fossil fuel gas and high heat, and causes 2% of total GHGe). Nitrofix’s Seed round, which will help develop a prototype by 2025, was led by Clean Energy Ventures and joined by e.g. SOSV, Zero Carbon Capital, High House Investments and Morocco-based UM6P Ventures.
Image: Nitrofix
Oritain of New Zealand has fetched a €57M Series C round led by Highland Europe to expand its forensic product traceability platform; the company can analyze ratios of stables isotopes and trace elements such as zinc, iron, and potassium in food crops such as coffee and cocoa, to uniquely identify their origin. This helps larger companies verify where their raw materials and ingredients really come from.
Drones are helping farmers pick rocks off of their fields.
Adding the red algae Asparagopsis taxiformis to cow manure led to methane reductions of 44%, a new study from Sweden shows.
FFAR has awarded a $1.8M grant to Ohio State University to develop strawberry varieties that can be grown indoors that will yield ‘premium, novel flavors.’
Chipotle is testing a new avocado processing robot called Autocado at its Cultivate Center in Irvine, California. Designed by Vebu Labs (which Chipotle has invested in), the robot can hold, cut, core, and scoop 25 lbs (11 kgs) of avocados at once. Chipotle hopes the machine will help the company save on labor costs, as the guac prepping time will now be cut from 50 to about 25 minutes.
Image: Chipotle
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Cultivated Biosciences (Switzerland) is looking for a Food & Biochemistry Intern… Cirkulär (Sweden) is recruiting a Head of Fermentation… Fermify (Austria) is hiring a Food Product Development Scientist… Kanpla (U.K.) wants to bring on a UK Business Development Lead… Oceanium (U.K.) has an open role for an R&D Manager.
Nutropy of France, which grows dairy proteins using precision fermentation, just won the i-Lab Grand Prix, the annual innovation contest organized by BPI France and the French Ministry of Research and Innovation. Only 2% of companies are selected for the Grand Prix (which comes with a grant of up to €600K), and Nutropy is the first alt protein company to win this Award, through 25 editions of the competition.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
A German blogger called the leader of the Green Party fat; she sued and had Deutsche Bank block the blogger’s bank account.
The scent of beer could help salmon find their way home, researchers suggest.
There are too many VC firms, and some are already ‘dead but still walking.’
Burger King in Thailand is offering a burger with no meat, and 20 slices of cheese (h/t Marie D):
Llamas are better at solving tasks after watching humans, or other llamas, do it first.
Some Japanese universities allow students to wear anything they want for graduation day:
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to Whopper Whopper by Burger King. 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.