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- FoodTech Weekly #171 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #171 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
November 03, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #171
Hi there,
The prize for the most generic statement in a very long while goes to the big FoodTech VC firm who in their newsletter a few days ago went to great efforts not to offend anyone or anything (it felt like it was written by ChatGPT):
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This week's rundown:
Mushroom farming system startup Tupu bags $3.2M
Kuva Space beams up €16.6M for microsatellites that can help improve food security
The EU mandates all fishing vessels to carry tracking devices and submit electronic reports of every catch, in transparency push
Let's go!
Conversations
Chatted with Netherlands-based David Kat of Wasteless. The company was started by Oded Omer and Yossi Regev in 2017, and David joined shortly after as SVP, Business Development. Oded and Yossi had sold a Data for Food company to AB InBev, but felt that data in the food system should also be used to heal the planet. They came across WWF data that eventually proved that 40% of food produced is never consumed (meaning that 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions are caused by food waste). Oded and Yossi realized we have massive amounts of waste in the Global North, and that that’s by and large food running through supermarkets. This led to the creation of Wasteless.
‘In Europe, there are a few million farmers, producing our food and ingredients mostly for a few hundred food corporations, who sell food through 200 large supermarket chains to 500M consumers. What we realized was that if you work closely with these 200 supermarket chains, you can really drive a big impact in terms of cutting food waste, of cutting carbon emissions, of making fresh food available to more people’, David explains.
About 90% of food waste in supermarkets happens because products run past of their expiry dates. ‘When supermarket consumers are faced with buying a quinoa salad expiring the day after tomorrow and a quinoa salad expiring five days from now, everyone will pick the salad with the five day shelf life. Because the price is the same. But what if we’d have dynamic pricing, that is able to nudge consumers to forgo a bit of freshness, for a lower price?’, David elaborates.
In 2021, Wasteless implemented a full end-to-end solution with a large German retailer. It was time-consuming. Today, the company can launch by giving supermarket staff an app, train them for 20 minutes, and show how to print stickers for each food item (if digital pricing labels aren’t used). Any packed food with a barcode such as e.g. meat, salads, convenience foods, sandwiches and so on, ideally with a 2-30 day expiry date, is the Wasteless sweet spot.
David claims that Wasteless’ solution can help drive a 25-100% margin increase, and a 5-25% revenue increase on the products they work on. And, a 30-85% food waste reduction in the categories where Wasteless works.
Today, the company has 15 employees and works with half of the top 10 retailers in Europe. But getting commitment from decision-makers takes time. ‘The big problem with food waste is that no-one owns the problem’, David notes.
Wasteless has raised $11M so far, and plans for a Series B round in 2024. The company is interested in partnering with senior people from the leading food retailers. Wasteless also wants to put food waste on the agenda as both a store performance and climate mitigation tool. And it wants to engage investors interested in driving true impact within food. David can be reached via email or LinkedIn.
Image: Wasteless
Noteworthy
German organic mushroom farming system company Tupu has netted $3.2M (appr. €3M) in a Seed round co-led by FoodLabs and Zubi Capital, and joined by e.g. Clear Current Capital, FoodHack, and Coast Cap. The new funding will be used to scale production and help supply major actors in foodservice and retail. Founded in 2021, the company has developed e.g. a mushroom harvesting robot and are using AI and IoT to improve their farms.
Swedish indoor vertical farming company Ljusgårda has secured SEK 87M (appr. $7.8M) in new funding, from existing investors (e.g. Back in Black, Philian, and Jula Miljö & Energi) and its founders. The valuation was cut from the SEK 1B (appr. $90M) of the previous round, to SEK 437M (appr. $39M) today.
Osiris Agriculture of France has raked in €2.1M for its robot-based irrigation system (h/t Impact Alpha)
b4waste of Brazil has bagged 2M reais (appr. $400K); the company partners with food retailers to cut food waste by discounting and selling items that are close to the expiry dates directly to consumers.
Finnish scale-up Kuva Space has scooped up €16.6M (appr. $17.6M) in Series A funding (appr. $17.6M) led by existing investors Voima Ventures and Nordic FoodTech VC (full disclosure: I’m an advisor to NFT VC) and joined by Earth VC, Spingvest, and Business Finland. The company launches hyperspectral camera-equipped microsatellites that can distinguish almost any material on Earth, meaning Kuva Space can monitor things like e.g. crop types, plant health and biomass, biodiversity, soil conditions, algae blooms, and much more.
Image: Kuva Space
U.S. agtech firms AmplifiedAg will build a $1.2M controlled environmental farm at a women’s prison in South Carolina, U.S. The facility will allow career training inmates to grow and process up to 48K lbs (almost 22 metric tons) of lettuce, which will be served at the prison’s cafeteria.
TELUS’ Pollinator Fund for Good has led Climate Robotics $20M funding round; the company uses robotics and AI to convert on-farm agricultural waste into biochar for sequestering carbon.
French agricultural machinery marketplace Farmitoo has banked €2.5M in funding (h/t DigitalFoodLab).
The European Parliament has adopted new rules that require all fishing vessels to carry tracking devices as well as to submit electronic reports of every catch, in order to provide more transparency of this industry, from sea to plate. The new rules go into place January 1, 2024.
Corporate venture capital (CVC) funding has fallen 73% from its all-time high of $48.6B just two years ago, CB Insights reports.
CB Insights
AI tools may be able to give food a longer shelf life, Clemson University researchers write.
The Global Alliance for the Future of Food has released new research showing that food production, transport and storage drives as many emissions as the EU plus Russia combined. That’s ‘at least 15% of all fossil fuel emissions every year.’
VisVires New Protein of Singapore has rebranded to Clay Capital, and also announced the closing of its $145M Fund II, which will back startups in Europe (incl. Israel) and Asia that applies technology to ‘remedy fundamental problems in the food system.’
South Korea has unveiled a national plan to promote the production and consumption of plant based foods including alternative proteins, Green Queen reports. The news comes just 2 weeks after the Danish government made a similar announcement.
Sheeps are grazing at solar farms in Texas, as agrivoltaics gains in popularity.
Grazing sheep (in Belgium). Image: Antalexion, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Liberation Labs (U.S.) is hiring a Senior Process Engineer… WNWN Food Labs (U.K.) is recruiting a Sales Director… Nium (U.K.) is on the hunt for Advisory Board Members… Libre Foods (Spain) has an open role for a Bioprocess Engineer… La Vie (France) wants to find a CFO.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
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Random Stuff
A baby snail walking is the cutest thing you’ll see today (7 sec video):
How agritourism, more specifically ‘haunted farms’, help farmers stay in business.
Amazon drivers have had to urinate in bottles, due to long delivery routes with no breaks. A U.K. journalist and stunt puller collected these bottles by the side of the road, rebranded them to an energy drink called ‘Release’, and sold them…on Amazon (no members of the public were sent actual urine).
Atlanta lady has 48 oysters on the first date, and ends up having to pay her own tab.
An Italian woman just won a court case to evict her two sons (both age 40+), who didn’t contribute financially nor with household chores (I found this story in La Repubblica).
Norwegian sales of new petrol and diesel cars have fallen from 100% in 2010 to just 4% in 2023 (h/t Azeem Azhar).
There’s a new hottest pepper in the world, known as Pepper X, according to Guinness World Records. It measures an average of 2.7M Scoville Heat Units (SHUs), compared to e.g. the 2,000 to 8,000 SHUs of a jalapeño, or the 1.6M SHUs of the previous recordholder, the Carolina Reaper. Here’s Chili Klaus eating Pepper X.
Pepper X. Image: Jack, CC BY-SA 4.0 Wikimedia Commons
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to Now and Then by The Beatles. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter. Did your brilliant friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.