FoodTech Weekly #163 by Daniel S. Ruben

FoodTech Weekly #163

Hi there,

I spent yesterday at The Drop climatetech conference in Malmo, Sweden with 950 founders and investors working in the climatetech space. It was a ton of fun — I moderated a roundtable (with Anna of Mudcake) on how to decarbonize the food system, I was inspired by outstanding keynotes, and I met countless amazing changemakers believing we have the necessary solutions. The ambience was great.

But there is a deeper meaning to all of this. Climate change is real, and the food system is a big part of the problem (about 1/3 of all GHGs). Sometimes you tend to forget the human impacts of climate change. And then you come across something — like the picture below — that make you stop and think:

Venky Ramachandran offer some important reflections on this:

This haunting image of Ragi Pardhi praying to her beloved bull in the recent landslide incident at Irshalwadi village in Maharashtra poignantly captures the perfect moral storm confronting us in an age of runaway climate change. What do we do when those living zero-carbon footprint lives, those living on the teetering edge of climate chaos with deep sensitivity towards nature, are those who are the most vulnerable to climate change?

So I never forget why I’m doing this. And why we must fix the food system.

This week's rundown:

• Israeli FoodTech incubator The Kitchen FoodTech Hub raises $70M fund; opens new innovation center

• Dutch large-scale microalgae cultivator Phycom bags $9M round

• The world’s oldest chicken is now old enough to buy alcohol in the U.S.

Let's go!

Conversations

Got to know Alexandra Ferreira, CEO and Co-Founder of FoodFacts. Alexandra is French and started her career doing management consulting and other strategy work in Paris and Madrid for several years. In 2008, she moved to Sweden and worked for Oriflame for 12 years. ‘I then had a mid-life crisis and realized I wanted to focus my work on sustainability', Alexandra admits. Not long after, she became CEO and Co-Founder of FoodFacts.

‘The lack of data flow in the food industry is such a big pain point, especially as it comes to health data. So that’s where we started, but it became obvious that we needed to integrate sustainability as well. Combining health and sustainability perspectives is core to our offer today’, Alexandra explains.

FoodFacts is trying to make sure food companies and ultimately end-consumers have access to relevant data, and that the data is easy to understand and act upon. ‘We want to accelerate the transition to a sustainable food system, and this starts by giving companies the knowledge to make informed choices’, Alexandra says.

Working with a range of carefully developed methods, including AI, FoodFacts converts raw standard product data into intelligent food information, including carbon footprints, health labels and customized filters. The company works with experts and researchers in nutrition and sustainability to build and validate their methodologies (such as their automated carbon footprint developed with expertise from Stockholm Resilience Centre). 

They are B2B focused today and help retailers, food services and food producers get actionable health and sustainability data on their assortments. Coop Sweden is one of their clients. They are using FoodFacts services and platform to calculate their sustainability declaration, one of the most advanced sustainability assessments in the industry, covering 10 different environmental and social indicators.

Right now, FoodFacts has 235,000 products in their database (mapped to the ingredient level) and it keeps growing. The company is now gearing up to grow the team and internationalize from Sweden. To do this, the company is looking to raise €700K to €800K. Alexandra is interested in engaging with B2B companies like food producers and retailers that want to get stronger on food data. And she’s also open to connecting with investors, as well as relevant actors to do pilots with. She can be reached via [email protected] or the FoodFacts website.

Noteworthy

• Phycom of Veenendaal, Netherlands has snagged a €9M round, backed by Carbio, Phase2.earth, Invest-NL, and Invest International. The company does large-scale cultivation of microalgae in bioreactors; the algae is dried into a powder high in protein and omega-3, which can then be used in e.g. alternative meat and dairy products.

• Toulouse, France-based startup Abelio has bagged €4M in fresh funding, for its solution to digitally transform the ag sector (h/t DigitalFoodLab). The company already works with 10+ farmers; by aggregating data from e.g. satellite images, meteorological data, agronomic surveys and drone images, Abelio gives farmers insights to act upon.

• Plant-based egg (and cultivated meat) scaleup Eat Just, Inc has secured ‘short-term boost funding’ from VegInvest/Ahimsa Foundation. The exact amount wasn’t disclosed, but Bloomberg reports that the Ahimsa Foundation provided $16M in funding.

• Bulgarian insect-as-feed company Nasekomo has been awarded a €2.5M grant under the European Recovery and Sustainability Plan (I interviewed Nasekomo’s co-founder Xavier Marcenac in #141 of FoodTech Weekly).

• Israeli FoodTech incubator The Kitchen FoodTech Hub is raising a $70M fund (backed by anchor investor Strauss Group), and will open an innovation center for FoodTech startups at the R&D stage called Kitchen Labs. The fund has already made three investments, and will soon make two more.

• Bayer will spend €220m (appr. $236M) to advance more sustainable crop protection products in Europe, as part of efforts to break into the regenerative agriculture market. The money will buy a new ‘product safety facility’ in Monheim, Germany with labs, offices, a greenhouse area, and enough space to host around 200 employees.

• ViAqua Therapeutics of Israel has reeled in $8M+ in a round led by S2G Ventures (and joined by e.g. Rabo Ventures, Nutreco, Trendlines, and Agriline) to keep developing its oral feed for disease prevention in aquaculture. It can help address e.g. the White Spot Virus which causes $3B worth of damages in annual shrimp production.

• DSM Firmenich says that its feed supplement Bovaer reduced enteric methane emissions in cows by 44% to 50%, in two trials in Italy.

• AI Agtech startup Agrematch has received a $2M investment from ICL Planet Startup Hub; the two companies will launch a joint, multiyear program using Agrematch’s AI system to discover novel crop nutrition solutions. Agrematch, which was founded in 2020 and is based in Israel, has raised $8M so far.

• Funding for autonomous food delivery companies has pretty much dried up, according to CB Insights data:

• New research shows that adding a vegan/vegetarian label has a statistically significant, negative effect on the number of people choosing meat-free dishes.

• French fermentation giant Lesaffre has acquired 10% of Israeli startup Yeap, which develops proteins from upcycled yeast

• ‘The vertical farming boom is over (for now). What went wrong?’ Good piece in Sifted.

• In a large study covering almost 4,000 people from low-income neighborhoods in the U.S., who received food vouchers of $15 to $300 per month to buy more fruits and vegetables from farmers markets and grocery stores, researchers found that participating adults ended up consuming about 30% more produce every day, the Washington Post writes.

• Danish diabetes drugs company Novo Nordisk has had so much sales success with its new weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy that the Danish central bank has been forced to keep interest rates lower than

  it otherwise would. Last year, 2/3 of Denmark’s economic growth could be attributed to the pharma industry (note: It’s sort of similar to how Beyoncé’s visit to Sweden a few months ago fueled national inflation there) Novo Nordisk has now become Europe’s most valuable company, dethroning luxury goods group LVMH.

News from the FoodTech Weekly community

• Hyfé (U.S.) is looking for a Director of R&D… Mosa Meat (Netherlands) is hiring a Regulatory Affairs Associate.

• Vinnova is hosting an info meeting on Sep 12, in Swedish, about funding opportunities in FoodTech (with an emphasis on alt proteins) between Sweden, Israel, and Switzerland. Priority is given to plant-based, fermentation-derived and cell-cultivated proteins, or a combination of these techniques.

• I’m excited to attend FoodTechIL (together with 3000+ attendees and global FoodTech leaders), one of the key global FoodTech conferences and startup expos, in Tel Aviv on Nov 7-8. For a 10% discount on registration, use the code FoodTechWeekly10

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

Random Stuff

• This is me, realizing summer is pretty much over:

• A man and a woman in China have been detained after using an excavator to build themselves a shortcut — through the Great Wall of China.

• The world’s smallest functioning coffee machine (14 sec video):

• The world’s oldest chicken is 21; like any good senior citizen, she likes to sit and watch TV. Says Marsi Parker Darwin: ‘Peanut is a sassy little chicken—if she doesn’t get her blueberry yogurt in the morning, I definitely hear about it.’

​I love you.

Daniel

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This issue was produced while listening to Alors on danse by Stromae. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter. Did your brilliant friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.

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

Boring disclaimer: The newsletter content is intended only to provide general and preliminary information to folks interested in FoodTech, and shall not be construed as the basis for any investment decision or strategy. I assume no liability in regards to any investment, divestment, or retention decision taken by readers of this newsletter content.