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FoodTech Weekly #191 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
April 05, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #191
Hi there,
Over 100+ of you have already joined the FoodTech Weekly Community Discord since we launched it last week. I think this can become a really powerful platform to connect global FoodTech / AgTech folks — whether it’s to share news on an upcoming event, post a job, or meet your future co-founder. Join us today.
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What else? I provided some thoughts on what’s ahead for the AgriFoodTech sector in Forward Fooding’s ‘2023 FoodTech 500 White-paper’:
This week's rundown:
Onego Bio lands €37M for egg protein produced via precision fermentation
Ironic Biotech clinches €1M to help 2B people with iron deficiency
A new gene-edited cow can produce human insulin it its milk
Let's go!
Conversations
Chatted with Danny Weiss, CEO and Co-Founder of Wonder Veggies. In short, the company develops a platform technology and formulations to enrich naturally growing vegetables with healthy probiotics, meeting the surging consumer demand for food as medicine and improved gut health by marrying a $1.5 trillion global fresh produce market looking for innovations with a $70B probiotics market projected to grow to $200 billion by 2032. But let’s start from the beginning.
Danny spent 15 years in the startup space, cofounding and leading a few healthtech startups. He also worked in cleantech, and worked for a big telco. ‘I’ve always been drawn to good ideas and entrepreneurs that make life better for people and for the planet’, Danny says.
One such thing was probiotics. They are live microorganisms that, when consumed in adequate amounts, can provide health benefits (often for gut health and the immune system). Probiotics can be found in e.g. dairy products like yoghurt and kefir, fermented foods like kimchi, sauerkraut, tempeh, and kombucha, and in supplements. ‘The issue with current probiotics however is that many people can’t or doesn’t want to consume dairy, fermented foods, and supplements’, Danny explains and continues: ‘Bioavailability is also often very low — up to 95% of the probiotics that you consume don’t survive the acidity of the stomach or do not germinate at the gut.’
Together with Professors Oded Shoseyov and Betty Schwartz of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Dr Lilach Iasur Kruh of the Braude College of Engineering in Karmiel, Danny co-founded Wonder Veggies setting out to change the current standards. ‘We have a great R&D team in Karmiel in northern Israel, led by our R&D Director, Yuval Peles, bringing two decades of industry experience, where Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Druze work side by side to help commercialize our innovations’, Danny proudly states.
He continues: ‘We had to find a way for probiotics to penetrate, propagate, and survive in the tissue of the plant. And we did.’ Wonder Veggies has developed and patented a non-GMO way to enrich fruits and veggies like leafy greens, carrots, cucumbers, berries, and mushrooms with probiotics, without any change in taste, color, texture, or smell. The produce helps protect the probiotics from the harsh acid environment in the gastrointestinal tract on their way to the gut, and helps probiotic microorganisms colonize in the gut. This provides what Wonder Veggies claims is the most effective delivery system for probiotics, offering no consumption limitations and the highest bioavailability.
Danny believes it’d be great if people ate more fruits and vegetables: ‘And if you add the beneficial effects of probiotics, you get two great things in one. Maybe you can eat this instead of food supplements and yoghurt. You eat something good (probiotic) and put it on a good delivery system (fruit and vegetables). Eating healthier with accessibility is at the core of the 'food as medicine' trend and new White House initiative, bringing nourishing foods to the wider public. By creating a new fresh produce category, Wonder Veggies will give consumers a unique option to improve gut health, affecting their physical, mental and emotional wellbeing’, Danny concludes.
Wonder Veggies will work with growers, B2B2C, providing them with a liquid formulation so that their produce is enriched with the probiotics. This translates into a 20% price premium vs. regular fruits and vegetables. The company, which has raised $3M from JVP, plans to launch in the U.S. next year.
Wonder Veggies is gearing up for a Series A round later this year, and is also eager to partner with large growers. Danny can be reached via LinkedIn and email.
Wonder Veggies (Danny pictured third from left)
Noteworthy
Onego Bio of Helsinki, Finland has closed a €37M (appr. $40M) Series A round, led by NordicNinja and joined by Tesi, EIT Food, Agronomics, Maki.vc, and Holdix Turret. Founded in 2022 as a spinoff from VTT, Onego manufactures real egg protein through precision fermentation. The company claims its Bioalbumen ingredient has a 90% lower environmental footprint vs. chicken eggs, and that it can replace 6M egg-laying hens with a 2M liter fermentation capacity.
BioConsortia of California has secured $15M in an internal financing round led by existing investor Otter Capital. The company develops microbial products that help increase crop yields by fixing nitrogen or controlling nematodes (roundworms), fungal and soil insect pests.
Climax Foods of Berkeley, California, which uses AI to develop ‘groundbreaking’ plant-based dairy proteins, has raised a Seed extension round, backed by e.g. Untapped Ventures, At One Ventures, and Index Ventures, bringing total funding to $28M.
U.K. plant-based chicken company SHICKEN has bagged £4M (appr. $5M) in fresh funding from Veg Capital. The company will now scale up manufacturing.
Lund, Sweden startup Ironic Biotech has scored €1M (appr. $1.1M) from Nordic FoodTech VC to help 2B people (mostly women) suffering from iron deficiency and anemia. Ironic has discovered a new generation of plant-derived proteins that contain highly bioavailable iron. The proteins are made using precision fermentation, and can be used as ingredients in food or in food supplements.
Nelida Leiva Eriksson / Ironic Biotech
Orchard Robotics of the U.S. has nabbed $3.8M in pre-seed funding led by Contrary and a Seed round led by General Catalyst. The company has developed a vehicle-mounted, AI-powered vision system that gathers data incl. fruit size, count, color, growth rate, and more, about the fruit on each individual tree. This helps farmers make critical crop management decisions.
Fieldwork Robotics of the U.K. has secured a £600K grant from DEFRA and Innovate UK to further develop its autonomous raspberry harvest robots.
Over 80% of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy supports emission-intensive animal products, new research published in Nature Food shows.
Scientists from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil have gene-edited a cow that produces human insulin in its milk. The cow produced the equivalent of a gram of insulin per liter of milk, equal to almost 29,000 units of insulin. And each cow can produce 50 liters of milk per day. The researchers believe a small herd could produce all the insulin needed for the U.S.
DigitalFoodLab launched its new report ‘State of the European FoodTech in 2024’. European FoodTech startups raised €4.3B in 2023, a 35% decrease vs. 2022, and 56% from 2021 when investments peaked. DigitalFoodLab notes that when excluding investments into delivery startups, FoodTech investments in Europe were almost stable.
Image: DigitalFoodLab
Seattle, U.S. agtech startup Pollen Systems has raked in $2.4M in new capital; the company deploys drones that collect aerial imagery and uses visual AI to assess crop health (e.g. irrigation needs, presence of pests and heat stress, etc).
REDUCED of Copenhagen, Denmark has pulled in €6M (appr. $6.5M) in funding from e.g. Rockstart, Novo Holdings, EIFO and Einar Willumsen. Founded in 2020, the company uses fermentation technology to transform food and ag industry sidestreams into natural food ingredients, such as umami flavors.
RipeLocker of Seattle, U.S. says its reusable, portable, near-vacuum chambers can almost double the shelf-life of some high-value crops, such as blueberries, kiwifruit, cherries, and walnuts.
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Nutropy (France) has many open roles, e.g. in food science and business… Oh Mungood (Sweden) is hiring an Admin coordinator… Tupu (Germany) is recruiting a Head of Robotics… Full Harvest (U.S.) is hiring for a number of jobs incl. Head of Business Development and Sr. Account Manager.
Are you passionate about food and technology? Want to learn how to launch your own FoodTech startup? Get ready to hear from the leading experts in the Israeli FoodTech ecosystem, known as the best ecosystem worldwide outside of the U.S. This digital event takes place on April 17, 6:30pm (ISR time). Register here.
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Random Stuff
No fowl play; an airport in Alaska will use robots disguised as coyotes and foxes to scare wildlife away from runways:
‘Give me your snacks, or I’ll byte!’ Image credit: AP
An AI model trained on 250 Belgian beers can predict what a beer tastes like and how to improve it, based on the chemical makeup — pretty cool stuff (note to self: I wonder what would happen if I trained on 250 Belgian beers).
Not sure how to caption this, so here goes:
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to Ironic by Alanis Morissette. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter. Did your brilliant friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.