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FoodTech Weekly #30 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
December 18, 2020 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #30
Hi there,
This is me, with 2020 behind me.
While 2020 has been a challenging year, we also achieved a lot of things. And there's been a tremendous amount of positive progress in the FoodTech space, too -- some snapshots of which I've tried to cover.
This week, Arman Anatürk and I mapped some of the most interesting Singaporean FoodTech startups worth keeping an eye on. Singapore has set a goal of making sure 30% of all food consumed is produced domestically, by 2030, and is investing considerable resources to make this happen. Arman and I have previously mapped some of the most impactful FoodTech startups in Sweden, Switzerland, Israel, and the Netherlands-- all those lists are worth checking out.
For the past year, The Rockefeller Foundation has run the Food System Vision Prize. Over 4,000 organizations from 119 countries formed 1,300 teams, submitting visions for how they'd like their future food systems to look like, creating a more nourishing and regenerative tomorrow. The signals and ideas have now been analyzed and summarized into a beautiful new report, which gives fantastic insights into what challenges, and solutions, people around the world see for their future food system.
I helped build a pretty neat video too, about some of the main findings in the report (let's just say it helps to have a two-time Emmy winner on your team when building video content).
As I'm not yet sure yet whether there'll be enough relevant news for me to publish FoodTech Weekly on Dec 25 and Jan 1, or whether we'll take a short break, let me take this moment to wish you all a happy holiday season. Thank you for subscribing, and for all your support. I appreciate each and every one of you.
Highlights
Conversations: Erik Månsson (Innoscentia)
Noteworthy: EAT Just starts commercial sales of cell-based chicken in Singapore; cell-based dairy companies raise big rounds of $$$; the FDA approves a genetically modified pig; SunCulture bags $14M to expand access to solar pumps for irrigation in Africa; investors take a $600K bait as Hooked nets money for plant-based tuna
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Random Stuff: Kitchen robots from Spyce, 3 Easy Steps to get Nobel Prize money, how much plastics we eat. And more.
Conversations
Our long-term readers might recall the convo I had with Erik Månsson of Innoscentia, back in #2 of FoodTech Weekly. In short, the company has developed a super cheap analog label (and a digital one too!), which can be put on sealed environment food packages, indicating when the food is starting to go bad. This can help increase shelf life and food safety while reducing food waste at the same time. Well, I caught up with Erik this week. Since we last spoke, they've made a lot of progress on the analog label; it's currently being tested in their Hyderabad lab in India, and they plan to commercially launch it within 18 months in the Nordics and the Netherlands, followed by the U.K. and Germany. Furthermore, Innoscentia has launched a partnership to develop its digital version of the label. They've signed letters of intent with various market actors, including meat industry producers. And they've expanded their team (now up to 2 full-time equivalents or FTE's in Sweden, and 6 FTE's in India). In Q1, Innoscentia will raise a €1m pre-seed round. To learn more about this (or other things re. Innoscentia), you can reach Erik here.
Left: Innoscentia label on sealed-environment food package. Right: Erik Månsson, Innoscentia
Noteworthy
The biggest news item this week was undoubtedly that Eat JUST will start commercial sales of their cell-based ('lab-grown') chicken nuggets, at the 1880 restaurant in Singapore. The first sales will commence this Saturday, Dec 19, 2020, and the product will be called GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken. The news comes shortly after EAT JUST won regulatory approval to sell this specific product to consumers in Singapore. Michal Klar has done a great write-up of what this all means, e.g. that the chicken takes a few weeks to grow to harvest size in a 1,200-liter bioreactor (at an unknown cost), that we yet don't know what 1880 will charge for this new product, and that Singapore's regulatory approval so far extends to this particular product only.
Following Israeli Remilk's $11.3M raise last week, U.K. startup Better Dairy secured £1.6M in funding from investors such as CPT Capital, Veg Capital and Stray Dog Capital. Better Dairy, like Perfect Day Foods, works to produce real dairy through fermentation in bioreactors (think beer brewing). Meanwhile, in Singapore, TurtleTree Labs yesterday (Dec 17) announced a $6.2M pre-Series A round. TurtleTree develops cell-based breastmilk, targeted for applications in both infant and senior nutrition.
The FDA has approved the first genetically modified pig for human consumption. The new breed doesn't produce a specific sugar called alpha-gal which normally triggers allergic reactions amongst tens of thousands of people. The FDA's approval specifically covers a single hog farm in Iowa that has the capacity to produce 1,000 'GalSafe' pigs per year. Speaking about pigs, North Carolina plans to turn its (huge amount of) pig feces and urine into methane gas, as part of a $500M project. Some residents are unhappy.
Kenyan startup SunCulture, which provides solar pumps for irrigation, has raised $14M. The company plans to distribute its solar water pumps for irrigation in Ethiopia, Uganda, Zambia, Senegal, Togo, and Ivory Coast. Across the continent, 80% of families depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, but most of agriculture is still rain-fed. A major obstacle is the lack of affordable electricity. SunCulture's water pumps are equipped with 300W solar panels and 440Wh battery storage systems, which is enough to power four light bulbs, two phones, and a plug-in submersible water pump. The end-user cost for the system is between $500 and $1,000, and customers will be able to purchase systems using pay-as-you-go, facilitated by mobile banking.
Swedish plant-based fish startup Hooked Foods has reeled in a $600K funding round [full disclosure: I'm an advisor to Hooked]. Hooked also announced the launch, in the spring of 2021, of their first product Toona, a plant-based tuna. Future products include e.g. plant-based salmon and calamari. Investors in Hooked's round included e.g. Katapult Ocean Wave Ventures, +Cap, Kale United, Food Angels Germany, and ProVeg International in collaboration with mission-driven VC firm Veg Capital. Despite the fact that seafood constitutes one-fifth of global protein consumption, there are very few plant-based seafood companies [insert joke about 'plenty of fish in the sea' here]. Expect this segment to grow in the coming years.
Tom Johansson and Emil Wasteson of Hooked Foods. Like the single fish said, 'stay in school.'
Denmark-based single-cell protein company Unibio has received a large order of its single-cell protein product Uniprotein, from Chilean (food and feed) ingredient distributor Grupo Blumos. Uniprotein is based on the fermentation of microbial cultures that feed on methane, and the protein can be used to replace fishmeal and soy. Unibio's first plant is under construction in Russia, and the company is exploring building production plants in North America, Asia, and the Middle East. Due to the adverse impacts of animal feed production, innovators are hard at work trying to develop alternatives. Insects, algae, and single-cell proteins currently attract the most attention (and investment).
Finnish dairy company Valio and Dutch corporation DSM have announced a partnership to make Valio's dairy value chain carbon-neutral by 2035. DSM has developed a feed additive, Bovaer, which reduces cow methane emissions by about 30%. It will be available in the Finnish market in 2021.
Vertical insect farming startup Protifarm of the Netherlands has initiated a pilot collaboration with Swissmill (the largest flour mill in Switzerland). The side streams (by-products) of the 200,000 tons of cereal Swissmill process every year, will be used as feed for Protifarm's Buffalo Beetles. The beetles are then turned into food ingredients.
The first liquid plant-based egg product in the U.K, Crackd, has been launched in hundreds of Marks and Spencer stores across the country. Ingredients include pea protein, nutritional yeast, and vitamin B12.
Walmart will start trialing driverless trucks in its home state of Arkansas, together with autonomous vehicle firm Gatik, from 2021. The trucks will drive a two-mile (3.2 km) route, delivering goods to a Walmart store. In the next 5-10 years, autonomous vehicles will deeply impact food deliveries and the entire food value chain.
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Dr. Patricia Bubner of Orbillion Bio is hiring for a Scientist, Cell Line Development & Tissue Engineering.
Wendy Yared of Evolve.ag wrote a great piece on five future food technologies to watch, for 2021, covering things like animal-free dairy, cellular agriculture, and reduced food waste, to insect-based feed and vertical indoor farming.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
If you haven't yet bought your holiday gifts for me, can I please have this kitchen robot from Spyce?
Always, this time of year, when Nobel Prizes are announced, I'm reminded of the story of Rita Lucas who, in her 1989 divorce settlement, wrote in a paragraph saying that she'd receive 50% of any Nobel Prize money awarded to her then-husband Robert Lucas before Oct 31, 1995. Well, You Will Not Believe What Happened 21 Days Prior to Oct 31, 1995.
The winners of the 2020 Food Planet Prize were announced; congrats to Blue Ventures, FutureFeed, ICIPE, and The Land Institute (also on winning $1M each).
A 2019 study by WWF concluded that we consume the equivalent of one credit card in plastic per week, through microplastics in the food and beverages we consume. Based on this data, Reuters photographed meals made of plastic. The photo essay is worth checking out.
LEGO bricks weighing a total of 22g (0.7 oz), the equivalent to the amount of plastics that someone could inadvertently eat in one month. Image: Reuters
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to The Spoils by Massive Attack and Hope Sandoval.
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