- FoodTech Weekly
- Posts
- FoodTech Weekly #29 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #29 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
December 11, 2020 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #29
Hi there,
Two weeks ago, I wrote how Swedish non-sugar ice-cream brand Nicks has done a limited release of an ice-cream in the U.S. created with whey and casein protein from Perfect Day Foods, and how this long-term trend should be a big concern for dairy farmers. Two days ago, Remilk in Israel (a competitor to Perfect Day) announced a $11.3M funding round. So this trend just got stronger.
I'm doing a new mapping together with Arman Anatürk of FoodHack, of impactful FoodTech / AgTech startups from Singapore🇸🇬. If you know of any cool companies from the Little Red Dot that should be on our radar, please chime in here.
I was interviewed by Morten Seja for SolveCast, around the future of food. We spoke about everything from poor diets, personalized nutrition, and food waste, to plant-based and cell-based alternatives, alternative animal feed, and food system impacts. The conversation is about 9 minutes; listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Lots of new subscribers for FoodTech Weekly since last week - a warm welcome to you all! If you enjoy this newsletter, please share the subscription link on your social media, or add the link to your email signatures. Much obliged.
Highlights
Conversations: Liudas Mikalkevičius (Grainly)
Noteworthy: First head of government tries cell-based meat; Afresh raises $13M to reduce grocery store food waste; Europe's largest indoor vertical farm; facial recognition for pigs; Aphea.bio secures $14M to expand biobased alternatives to herbicides and pesticides
News from the community
Random Stuff: Using beer and chips to reduce climate emissions; electric snowbikes; sanitizing your food. And more.
Conversations
Spoke with Liudas Mikalkevičius of Grainly this week (which I think is my first convo with a Lithuanian FoodTech entrepreneur). Liudas has a background in biochemistry and worked within tech, innovation, sustainability, and renewable energy in Switzerland, Stockholm, and the San Francisco Bay Area for several years. And he really enjoys hiking. Doing his thing in the outdoors, he quickly realized that most food made for sports/outdoors (from simple snacks to full meals made on a campfire) contained animal-sourced ingredients, were packed in plastic pouches, and had boring branding. So he decided to develop Grainly -- dehydrated and freeze-dried plant-based meals for the outdoors, in packaging that's biodegradable (compostable) in less than 66 days. He's now looking for fellow travelers on his greatest hike yet -- starting with a Kickstarter campaign which launches today Friday, Dec 11, 2020. To get in touch with Liudas, you can ping him on LinkedIn or via email.
Grainly products, and the company founder, Liudas Mikalkevičius
Noteworthy
Aphea.Bio of Belgium has secured €14M in Series B funding (led by Astanor Ventures, which just launched a $325M Global Impact Fund focused on FoodTech and AgTech). Modern agriculture relies on chemical-based crop treatments (as herbicides and pesticides). Aphea.Bio develops biobased alternatives to herbicides and pesticides, that help farmers e.g. control fungal diseases in maize and wheat.
Insect-as-animal feed company Beta Hatch, based in Washington state in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, just closed an oversubscribed $9.3M Series A round. The company raises yellow mealworms, and pursues a hub-and-spoke model, where Beta Hatch produces and hatches eggs, and then send the young larvae to other ranches for fattening, before the mealworms are processed into animal feed.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin 'Bibi' Netanyahu, as the first head of government in the world, has tried out cell-based meat -- more specifically the cultivated steak by Israeli startup Aleph Farms (this 2018 video shows an earlier prototype of that steak). Bibi said that 'it's delicious and guilt-free', and that 'Israel will become a powerhouse for alternative meat and alternative protein.' Aleph Farms has raised a little over $14M so far. About a week ago, another Israeli FoodTech startup, Meat-Tech, announced it had 3D printed cultured beef fat structure, 10mm (0.4 in.) thick. And Mosa Meat, co-founded by Dr. Mark Post who unveiled the world's first cultivated burger in 2013, got a $19.7M capital injection this week, bringing its total funding to $91M. The company aims to have a product on the market at the end of 2022. It's worth noting that Dr. Post's 2013 hamburger cost almost $300,000 to produce; today, it's perhaps 88x cheaper (and the culture medium is also animal-free).
Photo by Aleph Farms.
San Francisco-based startup Afresh has bagged $13M in new funding. The company develops software that helps grocery stores reduce food waste (up to 25% less, according to Afresh). Grocery stores struggle with ordering too much food (which when unsold goes to waste) or too little (which means consumers may go elsewhere for their shopping). Financial Times recently ran this good piece on how tech startups are tackling food waste. In other food waste news, Danone has partnered with Full Harvest to source ugly / rejected fruit, which is used for new yogurt brand Good Save.
Europe's biggest vertical farm is currently under construction in Denmark (in a 7,000 sq. mt / 75,000 sq. ft. facility outside of Copenhagen). It's being built by YesHealth Group of Taiwan and Nordic Harvest. The new farm, which becomes operational in Q1 2021 and will grow leafy greens, will use a mixture of YesHealth Group's technologies, such as hydroponics, robotics, liquid microbial fertilizer formula, 20,000+ LED lights, and smart software. Across the pond in the U.S., Gotham Greens, which grows leafy greens in high-tech greenhouses, just raised $87M in new debt and equity capital. Other companies in the vertical farming and high-tech greenhouse that have taken in new funding this year include e.g. Plenty, AppHarvest, BrightFarms, RevolGreens, and Urban Oasis.
We previously reported in FoodTech Weekly (#19) about the multi-story pig farm being built in China. Here are some more pictures and facts. It aims to produce 2.1M pigs per year and is the biggest pig farm in the world. The farm will use intelligent feeding systems, manure cleaning robots, infrared cameras to detect when pigs have a fever, and more. Researchers are worried that the high density may create huge risks for new diseases spreading. While we're on the topic of China and pigs, facial recognition for pigs is a growing trend there.
Australian SwarmFarm Robotics has raised $3.3M to scale up production from one robot per week, to one robot per day. SwarmFarm robots can be adapted to perform different tasks, e.g. fully autonomous weed spraying.
Finnish alternative protein company Solar Foods has received a €4.3M ($5.2M) grant from government organization Business Finland, bringing the company's total funding to €24.8M ($30M). Solar Foods produces single-cell protein by capturing carbon dioxide from the air and combining it with bacteria. The company says its manufacturing facility will be operational by 2022.
News from the community
Catherine Kolta and her team at XPRIZE just launched the new $15M Feed The Next Billion XPRIZE. Watch this 2 min launch video. This new grand challenge, which takes place over 4 years, will incentivize teams to produce chicken breast or fish fillet alternatives that replicate or outperform conventional chicken and fish in terms of access, environmental sustainability, animal welfare, nutrition, health, taste, and texture. You can learn more, and register your team, at xprize.org/feed.
Emily Ma of X, the moonshot factory of Google, is graduating Project Delta into Google. Emily and the team she leads have spent a few years on Project Delta to figure out how to reduce food waste, and food insecurity -- and making the food system smarter (if you want to dig into the project details, more info can be found here and here). Below is a gif of Project Delta's prototype food identification and categorization system, which uses machine learning to automatically identify different types of food (in this case, grapefruits from the lettuces). The team hopes that the tools they've built will help better match food system supply and the demand, as well as reduce food waste.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
British startup CCm has developed a process to slash CO2 emissions from the manufacturing process of potato chips by 70%. Here's how it works: CO2 captured from beer fermentation in a brewery is mixed with potato waste and turned into fertilizer; this fertilizer is then spread on fields to feed next year's potato crop. So it both captures CO2 emissions from beer brewing and reduces CO2 emissions normally generated by manufacturing fertilizer. Another reason to enjoy beer and chips responsibly, I guess.
Canadian company Envo Drive is taking pre-orders for a $2,000 kit that turns your bike into an electric snowbike. The top speed is 11 mph (17 km/h ) and the range is just 6 miles (9 km), but it looks fun!
They say humor = tragedy + time. So now that we've hopefully passed the worst, tragic impacts of COVID (at least vaccinations are getting started), can we discuss this video which went viral back in March (26M views), of a medical doctor taking extreme precautions to sanitize all food items coming into his home? Food items like frozen pizza, snacks, sugary cereals, white bread baked on refined flour, etc etc. Foods part of dietary patterns that contribute to obesity, diabetes, and hypertension (that increase the risk of hospitalization with COVID-19 by 16x). The irony.
A viral video about avoiding a virus.
I love you.
Daniel
- - -
This issue was produced while listening to exile by Taylor Swift (feat Bon Iver).
Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter. Did your brilliant friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.