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- FoodTech Weekly #188 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #188 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
March 15, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #188
Hi there,
Last week I asked whether you’d be open to joining a Discord for the FoodTech Weekly community. Of the 141 votes, most of you said yes:
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yes (81)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ No (39)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ MySpace and ICQ is all I need (21)
So I’ll make a Discord happen. Stay tuned.
— — —
I’m going to Lausanne 🇨🇭 in June, where I’ll moderate a stage at HackSummit, an event Sifted calls ‘one of the best tech conferences in Europe.’ With 1,500 founders, funders, and operators in FoodTech and ClimateTech attending, it’s going to be epic. Use code FOODTECHWEEKLY20 for 20% off.
Next week, I’ll be in Cologne, Germany for Anuga Foodtec with 50,000 other folks (let me know if you’re attending and we’ll meet up). On Tuesday at 5pm local, I’ll join a Future Food panel with Dr. Sara Marquart of Planet A Foods, Dimitri Zogg of Cultivated Biosciences, and Tilo Hühn of ZHAW. The event will also be broadcast online.
Anuga shared a template to let me design my own speaker visual. There’s not that many testimonials about me, but I did find one on Glassdoor which I included.
Two more quick things to mention - DigitalFoodLab has created a FoodTech Index of 22 publicly listed FoodTech companies such as Oatly, Beyond, HelloFresh, and Ocado. It shows that since Feb 2022, the total stock market is up about 9%, but the FoodTech index is down more than 60% - yikes.
AgFunder also just launched a report which says that agrifoodtech investing has hit its lowest point in six years, declining about 50% from 2022 to 2023.
After that healthy dose of optimism, here’s this week’s rundown:
Bezos Earth Fund invests $60M to improve alternative proteins
U.K. Winnow nets more funding to help cut food waste
Cultivated seafood startups merge in Singapore
Let's go!
Conversations
Chatted with Nick Wood, COO of Adamo Foods. Nick’s background is in cleantech, where he e.g. co-founded an EV charging startup. He met and worked with Pierre Dupuis, the founder of Adamo, a long time ago: ‘We have a combined passion in meat alternatives, so I watched jealously when Pierre went into food and FoodTech’, Nick says with a laugh.
So what problem is Adamo solving? ‘A lot of alt meat products are ultra-processed. Consumers want clean label products. And consumers want whole cuts, but those are hard to do without heavy processing’, Nick explains.
Adamo, which was founded in 2021, focuses on biomass fermentation using fungal mycelium. It’s naturally nutritious — high in protein, fiber, B12, iron, and vitamin D. And it allows you to get textures and flavors close to real meat, without using gums, starchers, binders, or other additives: ‘When you bite into the product, it feels like whole-cut meat’, Nick claims and continues: ‘And from a systems point of view, our production requires about 90% lower GHGs vs. animal beef. That’s exciting.’
Adamo, which has a team of experienced food scientists and mycologists, will start selling in food service toward the end of the year in the U.K. After the Adamo Steak, other products will follow; it could be substitutes for e.g. chicken, pork, or fish.
‘Because we’ve developed a unique tech, and will have a global patent, we see opportunities for licensing our tech to other manufacturers across the world; we’re already in various conversations’, Nick says.
The company closed a pre-seed round of about £700K in 2023, of which almost half was non-dilutive. Adamo is currently raising a £3M Seed round (again, almost half is grants which have been secured), and is still looking for the last investor. The company is also interested in go-to-market partnerships around R&D, manufacturing, and commercial. Nick can be reached via LinkedIn and email.
Adamo Foods / Pierre and Nick
Noteworthy
U.K. food waste management company Winnow has received an investment (sum undisclosed) from Singapore-based P.E. firm ABC Impact. Winnow’s AI solution is trained to recognize food waste as it’s thrown in the bin, to help chefs and restaurants cut food waste by up to 50% and save 2-8% on average, according to the company.
Amsterdam-based Vini Mini has bagged €500K in fresh funding from e.g. Rabobank, the Donor Impact Investment Fund, Angel Initiative, and Vrederijk Investments. The startup develops ‘nutritional products and supplements that are given to babies to expose them to allergens in a healthy, simple, and safe manner’.
Bezos Earth Fund will invest $60M to establish Sustainable Protein Centers that will target the major tech barriers to reducing cost, increasing quality, and boosting nutritional benefits of alternative proteins.
FoodFlow of France has clinched €2M (appr. $2.2M) for its B2B fast delivery platform for restaurants, that can order food from 5,000 suppliers as late as midnight, and get delivery as early as 6am (h/t DigitalFoodLab)
Seattle, U.S. AgTech startup FarmHQ (just rebranded from Coda Farm Technologies) has raised a $750K Seed round. The company has developed an IoT-enabled smart irrigation system, which FarmHQ says saved 365M gallons (1.4B liters) of water last year over 40K acres (16K hectares). Other startups to watch in this space include e.g. IRRIOT (Sweden).
Image: FarmHQ
Cultivated seafood companies UMAMI Bioworks and Shiok Meats have announced they will merge.
Ai Palette of Singapore has nabbed $5.7M in Series A1 funding for its AI-powered platform that enables clients to quickly identify trends, generate new product concepts, and screen them, effectively derisking the product innovation process.
Swan Neck Bio of Copenhagen, Denmark has launched a new fermentation technology platform that it says will allow its clients (food and biosolutions companies) to trial, validate, and scale microorganisms from the lab to 1,000 L more quickly and affordably.
Israel/U.S. alt protein startup Yo Egg will launch its sunny side up egg in retail, starting in Los Angeles. The eggs, made from a base of soy and chickpea protein plus sunflower oil, have zero cholesterol and are low in saturated fats.
Yo Egg
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
OlsAro (Sweden) is hiring a CCO… Cultivated Biosciences (Switzerland) has a number of open roles… Better Bite Ventures (remote) is looking for a Junior Analyst… Food Systems Innovations (U.S.) is bringing on a Director… Root Global (Germany) is recruiting for several positions.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
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Random Stuff
NASA is hiring astronauts. You need to be prepared to perform extravehicular activities (EVA) around spacecraft, space stations, and on planetary surfaces.
Deforestation in Brazil was down 30% in February 2024 vs. the same month last year.
The World Food Programme has developed AI-powered autonomous vehicles that can deliver aid in conflict zones, and they look pretty badass.
A bunch of excellent charts on climate change, from Noahpinion. The tl;dr is that climate change is starting to get severe but is manageable, the U.S. and Europe are no longer the biggest problem, green energy is for real, and cutting emissions doesn’t require degrowth.
ICYMI and didn’t already know, a new metastudy published in the BMJ shows that greater exposure to ultra-processed food leads to a number of adverse health outcomes.
U.S. enthusiasts are sharing a sourdough starter that’s been kept alive since 1847.
Famous painting pig Pigcasso has passed away at 8 years old, weighing 700 kgs (1,500 lb).
Pigcasso
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to couleur menthe à l’eau by Isaac Delusion. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter. Did your brilliant friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.