FoodTech Weekly #204 by Daniel S. Ruben

FoodTech Weekly #204

Hi there,

I hope you’re all doing well. I’ll soon take a well-deserved summer vacation, but I think I’ll publish for another week or two before that.

This week's rundown:

• Scoutlabs of Hungaria bags €2M for AI-powered insect monitoring

• Vytal scores €6M for reusable food packaging for e.g. food service

• Canadian politician makes history after receiving zero election votes

Let's go!

Conversations

Sat down with Giacomo Cattaneo, CEO and Co-Founder of Food Founders Studio during HackSummit back in June. Giacomo started as a mechanical engineer and went on to do a Ph.D. in Innovation Management at ETH Zurich and Aarhus University. He worked for a couple of startups, and then joined AB Inbev. Says Giacomo:

‘It’s the world’s largest brewery, and they have 5M tons of spent grain, essentially barley from which the starch has been removed, and it’s currently used as cattle feed or just burnt. We had to figure out what the global business case at scale was.’

The result was Evergrain, a spinout where Giacomo became co-founder. The company upcycled the spent grain into proteins and fibers (used for e.g. pasta, bread, in sports nutrition etc), with a 90% reduction in GHGs. After having built a European team of experts and secured $40M for a factory in Belgium, Giacomo felt he was ready for a new challenge to push for food systems change.

'The main problem I saw was that Big Food struggles to build the future of food. Internal innovation budgets are decreasing, focus is shifting from disruption to core business, from building to buying innovation, so I felt someone had to build this innovation externally’, Giacomo explains and continues: ‘It’s really everything across the value chain — ingredients, formulation, production — whatever you need to achieve truly tasty, scalable and impactful food innovations that delight consumers.’

At the same time, Giacomo noticed there was a ton of cool, innovative stuff being developed in academic institutions that had no chance of getting to market. ‘Tech transfer offices struggle to commercialize food, relying on a playbook that works primarily for biotech and pharma’, Giacomo notes and adds: ‘Due to this, a huge amount of breakthrough tech risk go to sleep in academic papers, and I felt “hell no”, we need to give these technologies a chance to impact the real world’.

He wanted to build a platform representing the problems of industry and consumers, to pull as many tech solutions as possible out of academia, by incubating the tech in a venture studio, where the Food Founders team and a new, cross-functional leadership team could transform the idea into a thriving venture. Thus Food Founders Studio was born. The studio brings every new venture to a solid pre-seed stage within 12 months, investing €1M per venture (incl. overhead for Food Founders’ fixed costs) in return for 30% equity.

‘We effectively bridge the gap of brilliant research never being commercialized, but we also create a unique pipeline for the industry to tap into’, Giacomo observes. The studio will be very curated, just building one new venture per year, and derisking it significantly; the startups will eventually exit so Food Founders earns ROI.

‘The ultimate impact we’d like to see is to move the needle for the 30% carbon footprint that food has. I for example want to see the center of plate plant-based foods become more delicious, making it the easy choice for taste, texture, and price, vs. animal-sourced foods. People don’t care that there’s an LCA showing something has 99% lower GHG than animal-sourced food — if it’s not tasty, people will not switch’, Giacomo says.

Food Founders is currently raising €3M for the first three ventures, looking for mission-aligned investors (angels, private investors, exited founders, family officers, industry leaders — especially those connected to the world of food). Giacomo is also looking to engage with brilliant researchers from academia who want to explore turning tech into companies, as well as to engage with entrepreneurs looking to launch new ventures. Giacomo can be reached via email and LinkedIn.

Noteworthy

• eAgronom of Tallinn, Estonia, which develops a crop farming business management and planning software tool for farmers, has banked €10M (appr. $11M) in Series A2 funding, led by Swedbank and joined by e.g. Icos Capital, Soulmates Ventures, and SmartCap Green Fund.

• Hungarian agtech startup Scoutlabs has harvested $2M in Seed funding for its affordable, AI-powered insect monitoring. The round was backed by e.g. Interactive Venture Partners, SVG Ventures, DEPO Ventures, and Impact Ventures.

• Vytal of Cologne, Germany, which develops reusable food packaging for e.g. restaurants, canteens, and retailers, has netted €6M (appr. $6.5M) in a new funding round led by Emerald Technology Ventures.

• Atlantic Fish Co of North Carolina, U.S., has reeled in a $1M pre-seed round from e.g. Georgetown Angel Investor Network and ProVeg Incubator.

• Aurea Imaging of Utrecht, the Netherlands, has nabbed €2.8M (appr. $3M) in Series A funding from e.g. Pymwymic, ROM Utrecht Region, Knop Ventures, Goeie Grutten Impact Foods, and BarUni Family Fund. The company provides agronomic intelligence tools for orchard management.

• ProNuvo of Costa Rica, which develops insect-based animal feed (using Black Soldier Flies), has scored $2M in funding from the IFC (part of the World Bank Group). The company will use the new funding to launch a new plant capable of producing 4,000 tons of product annually; their animal feed requires much less land and water than conventional animal feed.

• MOA FoodTech of Spain has completed a $3M Series A round, led by ICOS Capital and joined by e.g. Viscofan and SODENA. The company develops an AI-powered B2B discovery platform for alt proteins and sustainable ingredients for the food and bev industry.

• As of the end of June 2024, cellular ag companies had raised $283M across 16 deals. This can be compared with $169M raised across 27 deals in the first half of 2023, and $1.2B across 79 deals in the first half of 2022, the CellAgri Newsletter reports.

• Spanish fund manager Seaya has secured €300M for its latest fund for climate technologies, Andromeda, which will invest €7M to €40M in Series A to C stage startups in several spaces, including sustainable food systems.

• EPFL scientists are working on a fully edible robot, which they hope one day will e.g. reduce electronic waste, help deliver nutrition and medicines to people and animals in need, monitor health, and even unlock novel gastronomical experiences (h/t: Marie Dollé)

• The Irish government will provide €1.4M (appr. $1.5M) to scientists at the University of Galway to research methane reduction strategies in agriculture.

• A new genetically engineered potato might enable healthier potato chips (h/t AGFO).

• Cultivated meat pioneer UPSIDE Foods has initiated a new round of layoffs in an effort to extend its funding runway.

• Swedish vertical farming company Optima Planta has filed for bankruptcy, Impact Loop reports.

• Members of the Global Salmon Initiative have since 2013 cut the use of antibiotics with 75%, the use of fishmeal and fish oil by 51% and 30% respectively, and cut the treatment of sea lice by 60% (self-reported data) (h/t AGFO)

News from the FoodTech Weekly community

• Improvin’ (Sweden) is hiring software engineers.

• Applications are open for Carbon13's 20 week Venture Launchpad accelerator program — which is especially looking for food and agritech solutions. There’s £200,000 investment available and applications are open now to start October.

Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.

Random Stuff

• Some Boston subway trains have been fitted with googly eyes, and its kinda cute:

• This is peak season for home avocado injuries.

• Too much food waste creates a murder of crows.

• The claws of a mantis shrimp can accelerate as quickly as a .22-caliber bullet, meaning scientists must keep them in thick plastic tanks because their punches can break glass (h/t The NatureTech Memos).

• The Illusionist Dry Gin changes color when tonic is added (h/t Marie Dollé):

• “Cut grass smell” is actually a cry for help.

• North Korea sells human hair like wigs which helps fund its nuclear weapons program, The Guardian writes.

• This gave me nightmares, now you can have them too: Scientists made a creepy-looking smiling robot face from human skin cells.

• An editor from The Atlantic just ate fancy dog food.

• The DivGrass project uses AI to analyze bird song to promote biodiversity at European dairy farms (h/t AGFO)

• If you ever feel like a loser, just send a thought to Canadian political candidate Félix-Antoine Hamel who received zero votes in the Toronto-St. Paul local election, making him the first Canadian to face such a loss. Says Hamel: ‘When I saw the result, I was like, “Well, I am the true unity candidate. Everyone agrees not to vote for me”’.

​I love you.
Daniel

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This issue was produced while listening to Fall At Your Feet by Crowded House. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter. Did your brilliant friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.

Disclosures: I'm founder of Solvable Syndicate. I’m an operating advisor to VC/investment firms Nordic FoodTech VC, Mudcake, and Blume Equity. I'm a mentor at accelerators Katapult Ocean, Big Idea Ventures, and Norrsken Accelerator. I'm an advisor to BIOMILQ, FoodHack, Hooked, Ignitia, Improvin, IRRIOT, Juicy Marbles, Lupinta, NitroCapt, Oceanium, petgood, Rootically, Stockeld Dreamery, Transship, VEAT, and Volta Greentech; in some of these startups, I have equity.

Boring disclaimer: The newsletter content is intended only to provide general and preliminary information to folks interested in FoodTech, and shall not be construed as the basis for any investment decision or strategy. I assume no liability in regards to any investment, divestment, or retention decision taken by readers of this newsletter content.