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- FoodTech Weekly #19 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #19 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
October 02, 2020 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #19
Hi there,
I learnt a new word this week - 'doof'. It was brought up in a panel discussion with Dr. Brent Loken, Prof. Joshua Spodek, Carolyn Steel, Amb. Banashari Bose Harrison, and chef Mathias Dahlgren, at Sweden FoodTech Big Meet this week. So what is 'doof'? Joshua Spodek suggests it's meant to describe 'industrial products designed to entertain your mouth and for profit, without regard for your health'; products like junk food and fast food.
It sort of reminds me of Howard-Yana Shapiro's famous line that'if it's not nutritious, or not safe, it's not food.'(I did a portrait on Howard-Yana in #8 of FoodTech Weekly).
Let's see if doof catches on.
Highlights
Conversations: Yair Moneta and Patricia Bubner
Noteworthy: Shiok Meats raise $12.6M for cell-based shrimp; a 12-storey pig farm built in China; Walmart skips cucumber-plastic thanks to Apeel technology; robots silently judging grocery store shoppers
The Profile: Talash Huijbers (InsectiPro)
Random Stuff: A $1 Ebola test; a $10+ potato chip; Berkeley, CA bans candy at check-out aisles. And more.
Conversations
Had a chance to get to know Yair Moneta and Inspecto better, through an interesting call this week. Yair co-founded in Inspecto in 2016 together with a partner. Investment, and real momentum, came in 2018. In short, Inspecto is developing a portable device for early detection o
f food contaminants in the field. solutions can cost $250 for a scan, take 2-3 weeks, and include a lab. Inspecto's solution can be used by farmers, producers, suppliers, buyers, retailers, and quality assurance all along the supply chain. The food industry currently doesn't have good tools in place to quickly and inexpensively find out about contaminants in foods - chemical, biological, pesticides, herbicides, and microtoxins. One example is acrylamide, which can be founded in processed food like baby food, potato chips, crackers, cookies, coffee beans, etc. There are no national labs for Israeli food manufacturers today to test for acrylamide, so samples are sent to Europe for testing. Inspecto will cut the costs andtest times drastically. The company will start selling a semi-manual kit by mid-2021; eventually, it will sell a fully automated device that can be deployed everywhere. Inspecto has raised $1.8M so far, and is currently raising a pre-series A of a few million dollars. If you're an investor interested in getting in touch, or a food processor or food company interested in e.g. acrylamide detection, you can get in touch with Yair via LinkedIn.
This week, I also was able to get to know Dr. Patricia Bubner and Orbillion Bio a bit better. Patricia got her PhD in biotech in Austria, before relocating to California for a postdoc at UC Berkeley. After brief lovestories with biofuels and millets, she was blown away by the concept of cell-based meat. Together with some co-founders with deep technical expertise, she looked at ways to accelerate the cultivated meat industry. They decided to focus on improving the cell lines, as a way of driving down cost for cell-based meat -- and Orbillion Bio was born. Just like electric cars need cheap batteries to lower the sales price, cultivated meat needs cheap cell lines to do the same thing. Orbillion's goal is clear; by 2023, the company want to enable cultivated ground meat at a cost lower than $10 per pound (0.45 kg), and have the best cell lines available, from the best animals. Patricia feels fairly confident that they can get to that price point within that timeframe -- 'it's just an engineering problem.' Right now, Orbillion focuses on beef, pork, and bison, but the company is open to taking on avian and fish cell lines later. The company has 6 staff, and enjoys being in California 'because you can hire strong talent here.' Orbillion is looking to hire more stem cell scientists -- and is also raising funds on SAFE notes for their pre-seed funding. If any of this sounds like you, Patricia can be reached by via email here.
Dr. Patricia Bubner
Noteworthy
Shiok Meats of Singapore has raised $12.6M (S$17.3M) in a Series A round, to build the world's first commercial plant for cell-based seafood production. The round was led by Netherlands-based sustainable aquaculture fund Aqua-Spark. Shiok aims to release a minced shrimp product to the market in 2022 (frozen cell-based shrimp meat for use in dumplings and other shrimp-based products). The startup claims it can grow crustaceans 4x faster than conventional product. The company has raised $20M (S$27.6M) so far.
Image: Shiok Meats CC BY.
Walmart is now able to skip the plastic wrap on long English cucumbers in ~100 select stores, as these cucumbers have been coated by a plant-based material developed by California startup Apeel Sciences. The coating is edible, invisible, organic, and doesn't smell - but dramatically extends shelf-life of fresh produce. This cool 30 second video gives a glimpse of how it works. Traditionally, plastic wrap forms a protective layer to preserve quality and shelf life. For every 500,000 cases of cucumbers shipped, Apeel believes it will eliminate the equivalent of 820,000 single-use plastic bottles. Speaking about plastic-free packaging, Israeli startup W-Cycle has developed SupraPulp, a fully compostable packaging made from upcycled sugarcane waste.
Robots are entering the food system, big time. Increased automation is happening on the farm level; in restaurants, robots greet and chat with guests, take orders, and run food for the kitchens; in grocery stores, robots stock shelves, check inventory, do cleanups, and respond to questions from shoppers; and robots are increasingly used for delivery. The rollout isn't always easy, however. Sometimes, delivery robots take a plunge into a canal -- and grocery store shoppers have complained that the in-store robots following you around are 'silently judging you.'
The company Yangxiang in China is building high-rise pig farms with up to 12 stories. The complex will produce 840,000 pigs a year when production is complete. Each floor will hold upwards of 1,300 pigs, and the animals will be restricted to one floor for their whole lives to avoid mixing animals. China has lost upwards of 200M pigs in a year to African Swine Fever, and is pushing hard for increased biosecurity. Yet, scientists are concerned that concentrated farming operations creates conditions for cross-infection among the pigs, and that limited space, concrete forms, and the inability to display natural behaviors could lead to a decline in pig immunity; 'there's not a lot of room or environmental complexity here just to let pigs be pigs.'
Erik Byrenius of Trellis Road has written an excellent landscaping (yet 3 min read!) brief of the plant-based and cell-based seafood landscape.
British biotech company Oxitec has, with the help of genetic modification, developed a self-destructing caterpillar. Once a male mates with a female, the resulting egg becomes overloaded with a key protein and quickly diets. Oxitec has begun small field trials in Brazil, and to expand the trials next year. After the caterpillar moth landed in West Africa in 2016, it causes $6.3B in damages; about ~18M tons of corn crops are eaten by the fall army work each year, forcing growing in many low- and middle-income countries to start spraying pesticides. Oxitec's solution is pesticide free, and the company hopes it can help knock out the fall armyworm population in specific areas.
Fall armyworm at IITA Ibadan (Photo by IITA, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Startups and scientists are racing to redesign sugar, making it just as sweet but with fewer calories - as regulators are stepping up, and consumers are speaking up, against sugar. Fascinating long-read in the New Yorker. Israeli startup DouxMatok is mentioned -- one of their key patents was filed by their Co-Founder Avraham Baniel at age 96 (!); that was 5 years ago and Prof. Baniel is now 101, and has retired.
The Profile
Talash Huijbers has a Dutch dad, and Kenyan mom -- and is based in Kenya. She wanted to go into fish farming, but realized that imported Chinese fish was cheaper than local fish grown in Lake Victoria, because local animal feed was so expensive (up to 70% of the animal rearing cost is the feed). She started experimenting with growing crickets, but ended up with Black Soldier Flies. Today, she runs InsectiPro as CEO and Founder. Running an insect-as-feed company in Africa has advantages and challenges. Electricity is expensive, finding large-scale financing is hard, but labor is cheap (although access to skilled talent is tough), and the climate is stable. There's also plenty of waste (to feed the insects), in urban areas like Nairobi. InsectiPro grinds food waste down to a level where the insects can eat it quickly (e.g. ripping the peels of mangoes). The company is growing an increasing amount of insects, constantly optimizing machinery and business processes. InsectiPro also wants to have a setup where they breed the insects, sell to outgrowers, and then take the big larvae back for processing, before selling them as insect protein to the feed manufacturers in the region. The feed manufacturers will then be able to sell their product at parity with e.g. fishmeal (which is $1.25 per kilo in Kenya). Talash is an excellent example of how a determined person with a vision can help catalyze an industry. More on her, and InsectiPro, in this video.
Talash Huijbers
Random Stuff
The City Council of Berkeley, CA, has banned items like chips, candy and soda at grocery store checkouts. The new policy goes into effect in March 2021. The purpose is to nudge consumers to buy fewer unhealthy food items, without limiting what they can buy.
Scientists in the Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and the U.S. have developed a $1 Ebola and Lassa virus test. The test benefits from CRISPR technology.
Speaking about CRISPR, the science and tech policy think tank ITIF released a new report that concludes that gene-editing technologies like CRISPR could lead to a 50% improvement in agricultural productivity by 2050. Examples include plants that last longer (thus reducing food waste) and require less pesticides, herbicides, and water, reduced emissions from cattle, and improved plant use of photosynthesis (meaning plants also become more efficient at capturing and sequestering carbon from the air).
A Swedish brewery has developed the world's most expensive potato chips; a limited-edition box of 5 handmade chips will set you back SEK 499 ($55). The key ingredients include matsutake mushrooms, truffle seaweed from the Faroe Islands, crown dill, India Pale Ale wort, and Ammarnäs potatoes. The 100 available boxes sold out immediately, and all proceeds were donated to charity. I hear you, it's doof, but I wouldn't have minded trying one of these chips...
I love you.
Daniel
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