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FoodTech Weekly #42 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
March 26, 2021 • Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #42
Hi there,
I don't want to toot my own horn or anything, but it's now been 12 months since my most recent plane flight #climatehero #blessed #rolemodel #absolutelynotrelatedtoCOVIDlockdowns
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Got my hands on some aloba plant-based ground meat a few days ago (which is only available in 5 stores in Stockholm so far). Bunch of ingredients including e.g. pea protein, chick peas, oats, carrots, quinoa, and sugar kelp. The ground meat itself is pretty neutral in taste; when I cooked it up with some onion, garlic, chili, cherry tomatoes, olive oil, parsley, and spaghetti, it all tasted amazing. But what's special with aloba is that it was developed by Aventure-- the same team that created Oatly. Could this be the next Oatly? Time will tell.
Aloba plant-based meat
I watched Seaspiracy this week. It highlights some significant problems relating to seafood -- environmental issues, slave labor issues, animal welfare issues. But unfortunately the documentary has some serious shortcomings in terms of facts. While it e.g. correctly claims that aquaculture/farmed seafood is 50% of total global seafood supply, Seaspiracy then goes on to say that farmed seafood isn't a solution because it relies on (wild caught) fishmeal and fish oil, which is unsustainable. But the vast majority of aquaculture feed containsnofish-based ingredients - instead it consists of cereals (e.g. maize, wheat, rice), oilseeds (e.g. soy, canola) and pulses (e.g. peas). Carnivorous species like salmon do rely on fishmeal and fish oil, but even for salmon, fish free feeds are being tested and developed. And I noticed many similar errors (or straw men arguments) in the documentary, which sadly dilutes the overall message.
For the past few months, I've been involved (somewhat modestly, but still) in working with IDEO, Thought for Food, EAT, and my colleagues in The Rockefeller Foundation Food Team, in developing the Food Systems Game Changers Lab, a multi-phase program leading up to the first-ever U.N. Food Systems Summit this fall.
We just launched The Global Open Call -- an invitation to individuals, teams, institutions, companies, and cooperatives everywhere to pitch their ideas, initiatives, or innovations for food systems change in collaboration with others. Select ideas will be featured in a flagship publication and matched with potential implementation partners or investors during the U.N. Food Systems Summit.Submit your ideas byMay 14, and please encourage your networks to do the same!
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Highlights
Conversations: Mari-Ann Meigo Fonseca (Gelatex) and Victor Håkansson (Green Adviser)
Noteworthy: Vertical farmers Jungle and Eden Green banks money; European cell-based startups Meatable and Bluu raise $47M and $7M respectively; JUST secures $200M in fresh funding; ICIPE identifies natural predators to the fall armyworm; the U.K. might lighten its regulations on gene-edited foods
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Random Stuff: Sushi robots; face masks turning into flowers; fish astronauts; how to block world trade in 3 easy steps. And more.
Conversations
Had a chance to speak with Mari-Ann Meigo Fonseca, Co-Founder and COO of Gelatex. Gelatex, which is based in Estonia, makes edible nanofibrous scaffolds for cultured meat, in order to enable affordable mass-scale production of structured cultured meat. Sounds complicated, but what it means is that we'll need technologies like these in order to produce cultured meat products like steak. The company started back in 2016, although not initially with a food focus. Today, they're working with several of the large international cultured meat companies, half of them as paying customers. Gelatex is currently raising a $1.5M seed round. They have a local co-lead investor and over half the round committed, and are looking for an investor with experience or connections in food tech, biotech, or cellular agriculture to join. To get in touch with Mari-Ann, you can email her here.
Left: Nanofibrious scaffold produced by Gelatex. Right: Team. Image credit: Siiri Kumari. ©Gelatex
Chatted with Victor Håkansson of Green Adviser. Victor grew up on a farm in Sweden and went on to study at SLU, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Realizing how time-consuming, inefficient, and frustrating it was for farmers to connect with relevant advisors and service providers (e.g. veterinarians, agronomists, tractor technicians, etc) he established Green Adviser. It saves time and money for both the farmers as well as the service providers (that oftentimes have to make unnecessary visits to farms), as they can now handle many things digitally by using the solution, sort of like a telehealth app. Green Adviser will raise a $300K-$500K pre-seed round, to accelerate growth. To get in touch with Victor, shoot him an email.
Victor + the Chief Barketing Officer
Noteworthy
Swedish surplus food rescue platform Matsmart / Motatos has raised €35M, from a group of investors including IKEA, Edastra, Leadx (Metro AG), Northzone, D-ax, Norrsken VC, SEB, and Gullspång Re:food. The new funding will be used for international expansion. [I have mixed feelings about Matsmart, which I've written about here].
Eden Green Technology, a startup in Texas combining greenhouses and vertical farming technologies, has raised $12M. And in France, Jungle, a vertical farming startup, has bagged €42M in fresh funding (a mix of equity and debt). The company is building a 5,500 sq mt (55k sq. ft) farm about an hour outside of Paris. The company co-founder Gilles Dreyfus says they can grow pretty much anything except for truffles. Meanwhile, in Israel, local startup Ilsar has completed a $5M funding round, to use biotech to cultivate (rare and expensive) ...black winter truffles [note to self: set up Jungle and Ilsar on a blind date]. For anyone interested in indoor AgTech, this recent article is worth your time.
Qualitas Health of Texas (doing business as iwi), which produces omega-3 using algae, has closed a $12.5M Series A round. The leading investors were Grupo Indukern and Gullspång Re:food. Qualitas cultivates its algae in pond systems built on nonarable land in the desert.
Image: Qualitas Health's algae ponds
Researchers at ICIPE in Nairobi (which last year won the prestigious $1M Food Planet Prize), have identified three native parasitoids of insect species whose larvae live as parasites that eventually kill the host -- in this case, the fall armyworm. The fall armyworm feeds on e.g. maize, rice, sorghum, sugarcane, cabbage, beet, soybean, and millet, causing $4.6B in annual losses in Africa alone, according to the FAO.
Dutch cultivated meat startup Meatable has raised a whopping $47M Series A round. The company focuses on pork and beef products. And Bluu Biosciences, which develops cultivated salmon, trout, and carp, has banked€7M from investors including e.g. CPT Capital, Lever VC, and Norrsken VC. Think tank RethinkX has predicted that the beef and dairy industries will collapse by 2030. Another new report, from BCG, believes cultured proteins will reach price parity with animal-sourced meat by 2032, and that the total global market for alternative protein could reach at least $290B by 2035.
Feeding cows the seaweed Asparagopsis taxiformis reduces cow methane emissions by up to 80%. As I reported last week, a recent study from WURshowed that high levels of bromoform could end up in the milk. But a new study from UC Davis was unable to replicate those bromoform results (but did show an impressive 82% reduction in methane emissions).
U.S. company JUST, which sells cultivated chicken nuggets in Singapore, and has had great success with its plant-based egg substitute JUST Egg, has secured $200M in a new funding round (bringing its total funding to $650M). The JUST Egg product is available in over 20,000 retail points -- but not yet in Sweden, so I brought some with me from the U.S. two years ago, and cooked it. It scrambles like eggs, with great texture as well as look and feel. There is a slight bean scent and taste (not surprisingly, since it's based on mung beans).
JUST Egg
Startup Therma is helping companies like 7-Eleven and Domino's keep the right temperature in freezers, by monitoring these freezers in real-time. The tech reduces food waste and saves energy.
The UK is considering departing from EU regulations on gene-edited food, opening the door for e.g. CRISPR-edited crops.
The Nature Conservancy is building a portfolio of 10 or so AgTech startups to improve soil health. Early investments include Growers Edge (income insurance for farmers), Kula Bio (bio-fertilizer), Swarm Farm (robotic farming tech), Pattern Ag (soil microbiome analysis), and Stony Creek Colors(sustainable plant-based dyes).
Interesting long read: The egg industry is racing to develop tech-driven solutions that can avoid the culling of billions of day-old male chicks every year (that are currently killed by being tossed into shredding machines, gassed, or suffocated in plastic bags). If you want to ruin Easter for someone, tell them to go to YouTube and search for 'chick culling'.
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Kyriacos Koupparis of the WFP is looking for a Innovation Scaling Venture Project Manager to join their team at the WFP Innovation Accelerator in Dar Es Salaam... Cultured Decadence is hiring a Senior Scientist and a Research Associate to join the team in Madison, WI... The Global Alliance for the Future of Food is hiring for an Operations Assistant to join their remote team... Hampus Jakobsson of Pale Blue Dot VC is looking to hire a Research and Insight professional to join (remotely)... Tom Prins of Aqua-Spark is hiringa Fundraising & Investor Relations Manager.
Roy Steiner of the Rockefeller Foundation has written a great piece in Nature on how positive visions can catalyze change to make food systems more nourishing, more regenerative, and more equitable.
Kulvir Gill and his team at the World Innovation Network (TWIN) have launched The NOURISH Movement, with the purpose of bringing together innovators and their innovations to empower human health through food, sustainably. They're uniting the worlds of food, healthcare, and technology to collaborate through a model designed around grand challenges. Their first Open Forum the week of April 26, on 'Scaling Food is Medicine', will be a series of online sprints for senior leaders to co-create a portfolio of opportunities, from quick wins to moonshots. Email Kulvir to learn more.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
Japanese airline ANA has sold $1.8M worth of economy class (!) meals to Japanese consumers for in-home dining. Says Makoto Shimizu, ANA's chef in charge of inflight meals: 'Hopefully, after the pandemic fades away, they [consumers] will choose to fly with us because of our high-quality in-flight meals.'
Startup Origami has built a sushi robot. How cool is this video?
129 billion face masks, many made with plastics, are thrown away every month. An innovator has developed a biodegradable facemask made from layers of rice paper, that can be buried in the ground once you're done wearing it -- and it will grow flowers, as the rice paper contains flower seeds that can sprout under the right conditions.
French researchers are designing a lunar fish farm that could help feed residents of the future Moon village. Right now they're trying to figure out what fish species is the most spaceworthy. In other space/France/food-related news, bottles of Bordeaux wine suspended in space for a year (at the International Space Station) still taste excellent, says wine experts.
In case you missed it, the Suez Canal (one of the most important shipping lanes in the world) is blocked because someone accidentally got stuck with their gigantic container ship. The holdup is causing $10B worth of traffic jam, every day ($10B is what Oatly is rumored to IPO for). Personally though, seeing this I can't stop thinking of Austin Powers trying to make a 3-point turn.
If you had a bad day at work, at least you're not the captain of Ever Green.
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to And The Living Is Easy by Guts. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter (I'm @danielsruben on Clubhouse). Did your brilliant friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.