- FoodTech Weekly
- Posts
- FoodTech Weekly #224 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #224 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
November 29, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #224
Hi there,
I’m not saying I ate too much at TONIC Food Business Summit last week. What I am saying is that a flight attendant had me move to another seat because they needed to ‘rebalance’ the weight of the plane for required stability .
On that note, Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate.
This week's rundown:
💰 Oceanwell secures $11M to produce freshwater from offshore desalination plants
🛑 XPRIZE declares there is no winner of its $10M alternative protein prize
🪖 South Korean sentenced to prison after gaining weight to evade army service
Let's go!
💬 Conversation with Shahar Margalit and Asaf Cohen Jonathan of The Fat Company
Processors and factories for conventional meat blend unhealthy animal fat into various meat products to improve the taste, texture, and juiciness — but conventional animal fat is costly and unhealthy, and supply is limited. The Fat Company has developed plant-sourced fat particles that replace animal fat — without cholesterol and trans fat, but with the same taste and texture. Read the full conversation with the company co-founders, Shahar Margalit and Asaf Cohen Jonathan.
Shahar and Asaf / The Fat Company
💰 Funding
🇬🇧 Three-Sixty Aquaculture, which uses RAS (a recirculating aquaculture system) to produce prawns in land-based farming, has scored £3.5M (appr. $4.4M) in Series A funding led by PrimeStar Industries.
🇳🇱 Tract, a SaaS platform which specializes in improving sustainability in ag supply chains, has bagged $11.2M in new funding. The round was backed by existing investors ADM, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus, and Olam, as well as new backers The Working Capital Fund and Rabo Investments.
🇺🇸 EarthOptics, which professionalizes in soil digitization and predictive agronomy, has raised a $24M funding round led by Conti Ventures and The Production Board. The company uses soil-sensing, genomics, and data science to provide farmers and ranchers actionable insights into how the soil is doing. In related news, Spatialise (🇳🇱 )has nabbed €350K for its AI-driven soil health monitoring platform.
🇺🇸 Oceanwell has closed $11M in Series A funding from e.g. Kubota Corporation. The company has developed a modular reverse-osmosis desalination plant that can be planted more than 1000 ft (300 m) underwater, leveraging the ocean’s gravitational pressure to produce up to 1M gallons (about 4M liters) of on-demand freshwater, daily. The water can then be used e.g. in agriculture. Frequent droughts have exacerbated freshwater shortages in California.
🇺🇸 Vegan seafood startup Finneato Fysh Foods has reeled in $150K from a Shark Tank deal with Daniel Lubetzky.
Image: @zoyaroya (Instagram)
🎙️ Investment Climate: Fabian Riedel of Oceanloop shares how to get funded in 2024
This week, Alex Shandrovsky spoke to Fabian Riedel, Founder and CEO of OceanLoop, a FoodTech company which develops and scales up a platform technology to farm fish or seafood land-based anywhere in the world. Oceanloop recently secured a $35M loan from the European Investment Bank. The episode is available on Spotify and Apple.
Three top findings from this conversation:
Look out for alternative funding sources like venture debt. “The venture debt program is without any securities like you usually have to provide when you talk about a classical bank financing. They have a certain interest rate that can be high when you are very successful, but in general, that is a very fair program—big upside for equity investors because the EIB takes on part of the risk.”
Focus on the product that is primarily imported in the country. “White tiger prawns are farmed in Southeast Asia or South America and are imported to Europe. Shrimp is a high demand protein. So why don't we use technology and innovation to farm that species? We plan to have a fully independent, highly automated and software controlled environment for farming”
Build a direct relationship with the customer. “I kind of bootstrapped my company where we introduced other high quality seafood products under our roof. We sell D2C and ship to private customers every day in Germany, Austria, Switzerland.”
🧐 Noteworthy
😮 In 2020, XPRIZE launched the ‘Feed the Next Billion’ competition (with $10M in prize money) to find alternatives to chicken breasts and fish fillets capable of competing with conventional products. Now, XPRIZE has announced that ‘no grand prize winner was declared.’
🥔 Smart Vision Works has developed the SiftAI Robotic Sorter, which has been federally approved for final inspection of potatoes (assessing greening, cracks, odd shapes, mud, sprouts, bruises, fungus, and rot) — and is more accurate than human inspectors. Here’s a video on how it works (h/t: Ottomate)
🥛 Two news from the alt dairy space: Molecular farming startup Alpine Bio has harvested its first large-scale crop of soybeans that contain casein proteins. And Israeli precision fermentation dairy company Imagindairy has received regulatory clearance in Israel, meaning it can now sell its cow-free whey protein to food manufacturers.
💵 Hort Innovation and Artesian are teaming up to launch a new $60M VC fund backing early-stage startups tackling challenges for fruit, vegetable, and nut farmers.
🇰🇷 Biotech company Infinite Roots has introduced its mycelium-based meat alternative products to supermarkets for the first time — in South Korea.
Infinite Roots
🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community
👨🏻💻 Ki Tua Fund (U.S.) is hiring an Investor… Beans (France) is recruiting a Growth Manager and a Marketing & Content Specialist… Win-Win (U.K.) is looking for a New Product Development Manager.
🎟️ Thinking of attending HackSummit NYC? Use the code BLACKFRIDAY40 for 40% off (valid until EOD Monday Dec 2, 2024).
🤝 SPECTRA is a (James Bond-like) innovative applied research collaboration, led by Wageningen University & Research and starting Q2 2025, that will focus on applying hyperspectral imaging in the operations of food manufacturers to detect and predict quality and shelf life. It’ll work with processors and their retailers that have beef, chicken, fish in their portfolio and want to extend internal shelf life, reduce operational costs, and prevent food waste. SPECTRA will convene a consortium of industry partners, with 50% public funding from the Dutch government. The other 50% of the budget is contributed by the private partners, both in kind and in cash. SPECTRA is looking for 2-3 additional partners; food manufacturers passionate about innovation who want to be at the forefront of this deep tech collaboration, preferable with beef, chicken, fish or hybrid products in their portfolio. More info here, or by reaching out to Sanne Stroosnijder via email.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
🎲 Random Stuff
🤖 Just two robots spending the night shift folding towels:
Watch as these two robots spend the night shift folding towels. They can do this 24/7
— Interesting As Fuck (@interesting_aIl)
4:32 PM • Nov 28, 2024
🏁 Forklift racing is a thing in Germany.
📱 British telecom provider O2 has developed Daisy, an AI granny who wastes phone scammers’ time.
🥱 Dull Men’s Club is a club for, well, dull men to convene and discuss the very boring details of their lives. And they have 1M+ members.
🚨 A 10-year-old called 911 to get help with his math homework — and the police actually came.
⚖️ A South Korean man has been sentenced to one year in prison for deliberately gaining weight to evade military service.
I love you.
Daniel
- - -
🎵 This issue was produced while listening to Lovin’ Feelin by French 79 and Kid Francescoli.
🤳Follow me on LinkedIn and X.
👉 Did your brilliant friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.
✏️ Start your own Beehiiv newsletter.
📈 As of today, FoodTech Weekly has 3,012 subscribers, of which 54 are Premium. Please join them.