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- FoodTech Weekly #177 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #177 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
December 15, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #177
Hi there,
This year I’ve written 21K words for FoodTech Weekly, had 165K impressions, and added another 1K subscribers (almost hitting 4K). About 50 of you are even Premium Subscribers which I’m extra grateful for.
About 46% of my readers are U.S. based, 13% are in the U.K and 12% are in Sweden. I’ve also had some decent engagement numbers (well, people smarter than me say these numbers are good).
I think I’ll publish next week too, before taking a little holiday break for a week or two.
This week's rundown:
U.S. e-commerce startup Martie bags $7M to cut grocery food waste
The EVERY Company launches egg made via precision fermentation
Enorm finalizes factory to produce 10K tons insect meal annually
Let's go!
Conversations
Met Lucas Jacquet of Umiami at TONIC in Helsinki the other week. Lucas went to ESSEC Business School in France and ‘because I was a lost soul not knowing what to do, I of course went into investment banking and P.E.’ While doing that for a few years, Lucas got interested in solving the climate crisis, and understood the strong link between food system emissions and climate. One of his classmates from ESSEC, Tristan Maurel, had started plant-based meat company Umiami; Lucas made an angel investment into the startup, and eventually joined full-time earlier this year as Chief of Staff (‘a title which means nothing, because everytime you speak to a Chief of Staff it’s a different position from the same role at other companies’), mainly overseeing fundraising and corporate development.
Umiami describes itself as a deeptech company that has developed a new way to texturize proteins, which enables them to produce whole cuts (thicker than 1.5 cm / 0.6 in.) starting with plant-based chicken breasts. The product has 7 ingredients, with similar nutritional value as chicken and a Nutri-Score A, and no additives. Lucas explains: ‘The term ultraprocessed often means a product is high in sugar, sodium, and saturated fats, but nothing of that applies to us.’
Umiami sells its products private label / white label B2B to large food companies, as well as food service actors and ready meal producers, in e.g. France, Switzerland, Iberia, Benelux, and Italy (while eyeing the U.S. and the Nordics). A year ago, Umiami bought a factory from Unilever near Strasbourg, and the first production line is up and running, with a capacity of 7,500 tons per year. The company plans to sell thousands of tons of plant-based meat in 2024, and when all production lines are online, the factory will be able to produce >20,000 tons per year.
‘We’re a mission-driven company’, Lucas says and continues: ‘Our founders wanted to solve for both animal welfare and the environment, and that’s what we’ll do. When our factory is at full capacity, we’ll save tens of millions of chicken lives every year, and we’ll have a lower environmental footprint vs. animal-sourced foods for all the key metrics — land, water use, energy, and so on.’
So far, Umiami has raised about €60M in equity, and above €100M if including debt and other non-dilutive funding like grants. What’s next for Umiami?
‘We want to have the biggest impact possible, meaning we want to sell large amounts of products, which will require more distribution. We can ship our products frozen from our production facility to anywhere in Europe or the U.S. We want to talk to everyone that can help us find the right partners, whether it’s restaurant chefs or large distribution partners’, Lucas states.
Umiami will eventually need more financing to build production sites in North America. And right now, the company is especially focused on boosting its presence in Northern Europe, the Nordics, and the U.S. Lucas can be reached via LinkedIn.
Lucas Jacquet, Umiami
Noteworthy
U.S. e-commerce startup Martie, which rescues shelf-stable grocery products with short expiry dates and sells them to consumers at a discount, has closed a $7M funding round led by Upfront Ventures and joined by Day One Ventures.
Seasony of Copenhagen, Denmark has scored €1.5M (appr. $1.65M) in funding led by North Ventures and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark. The company develops mobile robots which help automate much of the work of vertical farms.
Noriware of Aargau, Switzerland has secured a CHF 1.4M (appr. $1.6M) grant from Innosuisse, bringing total funding so far to CHF 2.7M (appr. $3.1M). The startup develops a seaweed-based packaging film, using existing packaging machines.
A new roadmap for philanthropy outlines $300M in ready-to-fund investment opportunities to reduce food waste and food waste-related emissions in China, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, South Africa, the U.S., and Brazil.
The EVERY Company of California has debuted its hen-free egg made via precision fermentation; it will be available at restaurants during 2024.
Image: The EVERY Company
Norwegian yellow mealworm startup Invertapro just raised $1.6M through a crowdfunding round. The company, which produces mealworms e.g. as livestock feed, aquafeed, and pet food, will now build a factory in ‘industrial symbiosis’ with a biogas plant in the Voss region of Norway.
Danish company Enorm, which produces Black Soldier Fly as animal feed, has completed the construction of a 22K sq. m (236K sq. ft) facility, which will produce 10,000 tons of insect meal annually, to be used as animal feed. The larvae will be fed with by-products from the food industry — e.g. delactosed permeate from the dairy sector.
U.S. restaurant chain Chipotle’s $50M Cultivate Next fund has invested in autonomous farming robots manufacturer Greenfield Robotics that e.g. can cut weeds, plant cover crops, and add nutrients to plants. Cultivate Next also disclosed a new minority investment in Nitricity, which uses solar electricity to produce nitrogen fertilizer.
Canada will introduce incentives for cattle farmers to reduce methane emissions from cows.
Michal Klar of Future Food Now has written an outstanding piece on the food climate footprint, funding gaps, and some COP28 reflections. It’s full of great visuals and links — highly recommended read.
Ghost kitchens (a.k.a. cloud kitchens and dark kitchens), that were all the rage during the pandemic, are now crashing.
Reminder: While the food system accounts for 21-37% of total global greenhouse gas emissions (depending on how you count), it only received $43B or 3% of the $1.3 trillion in climate finance last year.
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Essential (Kenya) is hiring a Strategy Lead… Karma (Sweden) has a number of open roles… Fermify (Austria) is recruiting a Strain Engineering Technician and a Food Product Development Scientist… NitroFix (Israel) is looking for an Electrode Development Engineer… Cultimate (Germany) wants to expand the team with a Bioprocess Engineer…
Susanne Gløersen is seeking venture partners with investment experience from VC (pre-seed, seed or series A, or investing in the commercialization of research) - alternatively experienced angels - for a micro investment vehicle focused on environmental biotechnology. More info here.
Gil Horsky of FLORA Ventures together with a group of people from the Israeli AgriFood ecosystem are developing a new philanthropic fund, ReGrow Israel, to rebuild agricultural communities devastated by the war.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
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Random Stuff
How to feng shui your fridge to cut food waste.
Nubz the chicken was missing toes and couldn’t walk. Fans have sent him 60+ tiny shoes so that he now can (cute video here).
In 2022, out of one food dollar farmers received 7.9 cents, according to the USDA.
USDA
A lost tomato grown in space was found on the International Space Station after eight months of [insert dad joke] fruitless searches, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli has announced.
Also on the International Space Station: Spinning the dreidel.
I love you.
Daniel
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