FoodTech Weekly #209 by Daniel S. Ruben

FoodTech Weekly #209

Hi there,

I hope you all have had a fantastic summer (and whatever season it is right now in the Southern Hemisphere).

This week's rundown:

🥛 Big funding rounds for oat milk startups in Singapore and Germany
🍔 Plonts emerges from stealth with $12M; launches aged plant-based cheese
🐩 Luxury perfume for dogs hits the market

Let's go!

💬 Conversations

💰 Funding

🇸🇬 Oat milk company Oatside has secured $35M of its Series B funding round, aiming to raise a total of $74M.

🇬🇧 Adamo Foods, which makes beef steak alternatives through fungi/mycelium, has scored $2.5M in Seed funding co-lead by U.K. Innovation Science and Seed Fund (UKI2S) and Joyful Ventures. (I interviewed Adamo back in March 2024.)

🇺🇸 Plant-based cheese startup Plonts has emerged from stealth with $12M in funding from e.g. Lowercarbon Capital, Acceler8, and Ponderosa Ventures. Plonts is now launching an aged plant-based cheddar at restaurants in NYC and San Francisco.

🇩🇪 Plant-based food producer Veganz Group AG has secured equity financing of up to €10M (appr. $11M). The company produces ‘Mililk’, a milk alternative supplied in the form of 2D-printed sheets that can be blended with water. The company claims this saves around 88% in packaging material and 80% in weight compared to regular milk alternatives, making it more sustainable.

🇸🇪 VEAT, which offers plant-based grab-and-go food at e.g. offices, hospitals, schools and public transport stations through vending machines, has scored an undisclosed investment sum from PolarVentures (full disclosure: I’m an advisor to VEAT).

🇮🇱 Blue Tree Technologies — which can selectively remove sugars such as sucrose, lactose, and maltose from natural beverages such as juicy, milk, and beer without sacrificing taste — has clinched $2.26M in funding led by OurCrowd and joined by Sucden Ventures.

🇮🇳 Agtech startup Oorja which provides solar irrigation to smallholder farmers has harvested $1.5M in pre-Series A funding from e.g. Acumen, Elea, and Echoing Green.

🇧🇷 Agtech startup B4A, which specializes in soil microbiology analysis, has raked in R$3M (appr. $0.5M) in funding from Rural Ventures, Bossa Invest, and Setter Tech.

🧐 Noteworthy

🥔 ReaGenics of Israel has created cell-based potatoes with 31% protein content vs 2% of conventional potatoes, Green Queen reports. The primary market is currently for animal feed, and still needs to pass regulatory approvals.

🐮 Bezos Earth Fund is providing a $9.4M grant to the Pirbright Institute and the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) to explore interventions including a vaccine that may help significantly reduce methane emissions from cattle. In related news, CH4 Global (which uses red seaweed-based feed supplements to slash methane emissions from cows) has signed its first offtake agreement with Australian protein producer CirPro.

🌹 Scientists have found the gene (called LOG or Lonely Guy!) that causes plant species to develop thorns/prickles (as a defensive mechanism). The researchers hope we’ll now be able to domesticate more plant species, removing the prickles that make these species hard to harvest.

🥩 Will cultured meat ever work? Good lay of the land by Christine Hall at TechCrunch.

🚜 Could AI robots with lasers make herbicides — and farm workers — obsolete?

♻️ Swedish FoodTech company Deligate has signed an agreement with Carrefour Belgium to optimize the grocery giant’s data management and expiry date sales, as Carrefour aims to cut food waste by 50% by 2025. The new tool will manage over 40K different discounts and price reductions daily.

🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community

👨🏻‍💻 GFI (U.S./remote) is hiring a Senior Fellow, Regional Bioeconomies.

🐄 The YieldLab is launching The Global Dairy Sustainability Challenge, in partnership with Nestlé, GOKE, and Wageningen University. Selected startups will get to pitch industry leaders and potential investors, standing a chance to win a €100K investment. For more info and how to apply, click here.

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

🎲 Random Stuff

🖼️ Fridgescaping: the art of decorating a fridge’s interior, is a new trend.

🛑 Public health experts want the Olympics to break up with Coca-Cola.

🤯 Why the cluttered Chinese app design works (10 min video, h/t Steve S):

🌎 List: Percentage of population that speaks fluent English.

🐌 The U.K. recently hosted the World Snail Racing Championship.

📉 Venezuela's GDP per capita in 2022 was lower than it was 77 years earlier:

📣 The secret art of announcing a funding round.

🐶 Dolce & Gabbana is launching luxury perfume for dogs.

🛫 ICYMI, Milan Malpensa Airport has been renamed ‘International Airport Milan Malpensa — Silvio Berlusconi.’

🧀 Olympic silver medalist and Italian gymnast Giorgia Villa is sponsored by Parmigiano Reggiano (a.k.a. Parmesan):

​I love you.
Daniel

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🎵 This issue was produced while listening to Butterflies by Tom Odell and AURORA.
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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, HackGroup, 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.