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- FoodTech Weekly #217 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #217 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, Food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
October 11, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #217
Hi there,
I’m starting a media collaboration with Investment Climate, a podcast run by the one-and-only Alex Shandrovsky. He’ll promote FoodTech Weekly, I’ll promote the podcast. I might even co-host some episodes in the future, let’s see.
Why do I think this podcast is relevant for you? Well, it’s fully focused on interviewing ClimateTech and FoodTech CEOs, to uncover how they successfully raised their funding rounds — as well as interviewing investors to help us understand how they think. So read on (further below) to learn more about the most recent episode, where Novameat CEO/Founder Giuseppe Scionti explains how he raised a €17M Series A round — trailer here:
Maybe I should do more to promote FoodTech Weekly, but it’s not really something I’m losing sleep over. FYI, almost 3,000 of you are subscribers, and most of you also open and read the newsletter on a weekly basis:
I’ve set the system to automatically unsubscribe folks who don’t open the newsletter for 6 weeks, so the list is constantly pruned
About 55% of my subscribers are based in the U.S., followed by Switzerland (9%), Sweden (8%), Great Britain (5%), Finland (4%), and countries all over the world. I get many of my new subscribers from FoodHack Weekly, so now returning the favor — if you don’t already subscribe, I highly recommend it.
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This week's rundown:
💶 La Vie bags €25M in funding for plant-based pork products
🪰 Entosystem secures $58M to turn insects into animal feed and fertilizer
🏄🏽♀️ No more fat people in Rio de Janeiro?
Let's go!
💬 Conversation with Julia Schimanietz of ProteinDistillery
Sidestreams like brewer’s yeast are currently sold cheaply as animal feed. But companies like ProteinDistillery instead upcycles the biomass into functional protein that improves the taste and texture of alternatives to meat, dairy, and egg. To learn more, I spoke with Julia Schimanietz of ProteinDistillery — read the full conversation here.
Julia Schimanietz / ProteinDistillery
💰 Funding
🇫🇷 La Vie, which produces plant-based pork and deli, has bagged €25M (appr. $27M) in new funding from e.g. Zintinus and Sparkfood, crowdfunding, as well as existing investors. The company has reported revenues of €19M (appr. $21M) so far in 2024, and is selling across 8K+ retail and restaurant outlets across Europe.
🇨🇭🇮🇹 xFarm Technologies, which develops digital tools to help manage farmers, has secured €36M in Series C funding in a round led by Partech. It now plans to offer loans and insurance to farmers.
🇨🇦 Entosystem, which produces BSFL (Black Soldier Fly Larvae) and turn them into animal feed and organic fertilizer, has harvested $58M in fresh funding from Idealist Capital, Sanimax, and Fondaction, to boost production output and build a second commercial plant (h/t ClimateHack). In related news, 🇵🇱 Proteine Resources, which creates insect feed for e.g. poultry and pets, has snapped up $1.4M from SMOK Ventures and Bitspiration Booster VC.
🇺🇸 California Cultured, which produces e.g. flavanol-rich cocoa via plant cell culture, has secured a ‘significant’ investment from Sparkalis, the corporate venture arm of chocolate giant Puratos. The company hopes to complete construction of a 12K sq. ft. (appr. 1,100 sq. m) facility in West Sacramento by mid-December.
🇨🇭 BE WTR has been splashed with CHF 39M (appr. $45M) in Series C funding led by Convent Capital and joined by e.g. PeakBridge, HHT, and Edmond de Rothschild Direct Investments. The company provides premium sustainable circular bottling solutions to reduce the reliance on single-use plastics and bottled water.
BE WTR
🏴 Aquaculture solutions Ace Aquatec has reeled in a grant from Michelin Development. (I interviewed Ace’s CEO, Nathan Pyne-Carter, earlier this year).
🇳🇱 BlueRadix has raised €5M (appr. $5.5M) from Navus Ventures and Horticoop. The startup develops autonomous greenhouse solutions e.g. for climate and irrigation control, enabling growers to optimize crop production.
🇺🇦 S.Lab has received $100K in non-dilutive funding from Google to advance its hemp and mycelium-based packaging. The company says its packaging offers the same properties as polystyrene, but that it biodegrades completely in 30 days.
🇬🇧 Nukoko has netted an investment from German food manufacturing specialist Döhler; the company ferments fava beans into cocoa-free chocolate, which it plans to launch in 2025.
🇮🇱 Nanovel has raked in $900K in non-dilutive funding from California’s Citrus Research Board, where Nanovel will deliver a citrus-harvesting robot after a series of field trials. The company’s robot helps alleviate farm labor shortages, and can pick citrus in dense foliage, using AI and advanced vision systems to understand when fruit is ready to be harvested.
Nanovel
🎙️ Investment Climate
In the newest episode of Investment Climate (available on Spotify and Apple), Alex talks to Giuseppe Scionti, CEO/Founder of Novameat, a Barcelona-based FoodTech startup focused on creating next-generation plant-based meat alternatives (whole cuts, deli cuts, and shredded cuts.). Novameat just closed a €17.5M Series A round.
Three top findings from this conversation:
Long timelines. It took 18 months to close this round and Giuseppe was prepared with that timeline in mind. Be realistic in terms of how long time rounds take and work your way backwards.
Make in-person conferences special. Guiseppe brought the R&D head of the world's best restaurant with him to conferences to offer unique experiences to investors and VIPs. ‘Because we are in Barcelona, you need to take advantage of what you have. We have the number one best restaurant in the world, Disfrutar. I brought with us the R&D chef. I brought a lot of investors in the back door of the hotel, in the actual kitchen, where the chef of the hotel really loved our product. But this was not shown in the conference. It was a VIP experience that nobody knew about.’
Be prepared to stalk. When you are in a room with a VIP investor which might be hounded by others, take the time and wait until s-/he goes to a more secluded spot. Come up and thank them for the impact of the talk or their work and start to build the relationship. You will be afraid but do it anyway. ‘I actually stalked one of the most famous investors in the cafeteria outside of the conference. I actually followed the person because everybody was talking to this famous person. I was drinking coffee alone outside of the hotel in San Francisco since nobody would follow him outside of the hotel. I stopped him when I saw him and said “Hello. It was great to listen to you in the panel and you may be interested in this or that.”’
Investment Climate
🧐 Noteworthy
🍌 Chiquita has announced the introduction of Yelloway One, a banana hybrid resistant to fusarium TR4 and partially to Black Sigatoka, diseases that have caused losses worth hundreds of millions of follars in recenty years. Project collaborators included KeyGene, MusaRadix, and Wageningen University & Research. Field trials are now planned for Indonesia and Philippines, to crease more genetically diverse and resilient banana varieties.
🗑️ A Cornwall pub has begun charging people for leaving food on plates, in an effort to curb food waste.
🌭 France can’t ban sausage and burger names for alternative protein products, the European Court of Justice has ruled.
📈 A new economic analysis from Systemic, financed by GFI Europe, shows the cultivated meat sector could contribute €85B annually to the EU economy by 2050, and €170B to €510B globally by the same year. At this size, 3.5 GT of GHG emissions would be mitigated, equivalent to 17% of total 2050 food system emissions.
📊 Funding for AgriFoodTech startups is stable, at around $3B to $4B per quarter, new data from DigitalFoodLab shows. Funding is highly concentrated; 48% of investments went to the top 10 deals alone.
DigitalFoodLab
🚰 Desalination costs have fallen 45% in the last decade, Warp News reports.
🤝 Simulate, which produces e.g. plant-based chicken nuggets under the brand NUGGS, has been acquired by Ahimsa Companies. The startup had already raised $57M in capital.
🥩 The U.K. says it’ll create Europe’s first cultivated meat regulatory sandbox, to improve the country’s Food Standards Agency’s (FSA) scientific knowledge of the sector. Some £1.6M (appr. $2M) will be used by FSA and Food Standards Scotland to help cultivated meat companies demonstrate product safety and submit applications for regulatory approval.
👃How chain restaurants, hotels, and flagship stores use smells to entice consumers.
🍣 Revo Foods has opened what the company says is the world’s largest factory dedicated to 3D printed food, capable of producing up to 60 tons of product per month. The first product will be a whole cut mycelium salmon fillet.
Revo Foods
🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community
🧑🏼🔬 FTW Weekly reader Adar Friedman, a food scientist with an MSc from Wageningen University, is set to begin his Ph.D. at Copenhagen University in January. With experience from companies like Nestlé, he’s offering support in product development, food research, and technical due diligence. Adar can be reached via LinkedIn.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
🎲 Random Stuff
💩 A Minnesota inventor has created the world’s ‘first aerial bound dog poop removal system’, dubbed “The Poopcopter.”
🤩 The Big Desk Energy website (by Tyler Denk) brings back lots of memories.
💸 Startup founders set up meetings with European VCs weeks ahead of U.S. ones for practice, which is kinda cute (h/t Nordic9).
🫠 Switzerland and Italy have had to redraw their border due to melting glaciers caused by climate change.
🤖 A confused robotaxi in San Francisco (because where else?) recently halted the motorcade of VP Kamala Harris:
💉 Rio de Janeiro Mayor, Eduardo Paes, has promised that if he wins reelection, he’ll make a generic version of Ozempic available for all who wants it. Says Paes (who lost 30 kg / 66 lbs while taking the drug himself): ‘Rio will be a city where there will be no more fat people. Everyone will be taking Ozempic at family clinics.’
I love you.
Daniel
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🎵 This issue was produced while listening to Where Is My Mind by Pixies.
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