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FoodTech Weekly #55 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
June 25, 2021 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #55
Hi there,
It's Midsummer here in Sweden (the biggest holiday of the year), so it's a bit of a miracle that I managed to produce this week's newsletter at all. Here's the official version of Midsummer, and here's the IKEA Germany 2005 satirized version of Midsummer (which was banned by HQ).
I'm spending Midsummer outside of Stockholm, enjoying the warm summer nights and eating way too much food. Lucy Maud Montgomery once wrote: "I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June."
I think it'd be something like this.
Anyways. Summer is here. Turn off your computers and go out and play.
Highlights
Conversations: N/A
Noteworthy: Enough raises $51M and and Mycorena $9M, both in the mycoprotein space; Deliveroo France starts offering reusable containers; Heura secures €16M funding for alt meat expansion; Better Juice banks $8M for tech that can reduce 80% of sugar in natural juice; demand for shark fin products falls in Hong Kong; Helsinki may limit outdoor advertising for meat
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Random Stuff: Ultraprocessed foods can sometimes be healthier than unprocessed foods; growing food on Mars (and washing your underwear there too); California police cracks pistachio case. And more.
Conversations
Noteworthy
Two big investment announcements in the mycoprotein space this week: Enough raised $51M in Series B, and Mycorena secured $9M in pre-series A. Enough, which is based in Glasgow, develops its mycoprotein product Abunda from fermenting fungi. This complete protein is then sold to businesses such as Unilever as a base ingredient for the production of alternative meat, seafood, and dairy products. The company is building a protein factory in the Netherlands which will produce 10,000 tons of Abunda protein per year. By 2032, Enough aims to grow 1M tons per year, equal to removing 5M cows from the food system and cutting CO2 emissions by 6M tons per year. Mycorena, based in Sweden, develops Promyc, also as a protein ingredient in alternative protein products. The company will also build a manufacturing facility, which will come online in mid-2022.
Images: Mycorena
Speaking about fermentation, Chicago startup Aqua Cultured Foods is developing whole muscle cuts of alternative seafoods like shrimp, ahi tuna, white fish and calamari, using fermentation.
If we maintain status quo, 86% of plastics will be mismanaged by the year 2040, equal to 7.7 gigatons of plastic waste that will need to be landfilled, incinerated or leaked into the environment, according to Google's newly released Closing the Plastics Circularity Gap. Luckily, initiatives are happening worldwide to avoid a business-as-usual scenario. Deliveroo France and barePack just started offering customers of the Deliveroo delivery service to get the food in reusable containers. Customers will need to pay for an annual subscription (about $23); so far, about 60 restaurants participate.
Babylon Micro-Farms, which operates indoor growing systems at U.S. foodservice venues such as hospitals and cafeterias, has received a $1M grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant money will be used to further develop BabylonIQ, the company's tech platform that remotely manages its distributed network of farms.
Spanish plant-based meat startup Heura has raised a €16M round, from investors such as Impact Fooding, Lever VC, Capital V, and Green Monday.The company was founded in 2017 and already has a €8M annual turnover.
S2G Ventures has announced the first five investments for its Oceans and Seafood Fund. I spoke with Larsen Mettler of S2G's new Fund back in October, for #21 of FoodTech Weekly.
Israeli FoodTech startup Better Juice has raised $8M in seed funding from investors such as Maverick Ventures, FoodTech Lab TFTL, The Kitchen Hub, NEOME, Schestowitz Group, and Semillero. The company has developed a technology which can reduce sugars from natural juices by up to 80%, instead turning them into probiotic dietary fibers. The new funding will be used to build a full-scale factory in Israel which has the potential of generating $50M in annual revenue.
Images: Better Juice
Ideanomics has acquired Solectrac, which develops electric tractors for different use cases on the farm.
BonBot of Sweden has raked in €2M in fresh funding. The startup, which was founded by Thomas Hartwig (co-founder of gaming studio King, that developed Candy Crush) aims to deploy a chain of ice cream shops powered by ice cream making robots. The company then plans to expand into other product categories, beyond ice cream.
U.K. startup AgriSound has developed low-cost acoustic sensors to detect and count pollinator levels, and flag areas of pollinator abundance and/or deficits. Farmers can then better target appropriate solutions, such as e.g. planting wildflowers or creating new habitats to meet farm biodiversity goals.
A fully automated commercial farm is being developed in Wagga Wagga, Australia (to be honest, I'm partly linking to this article just because I like the sound of Wagga Wagga).
The ABC Fund (Agri-Business Capital Fund) has invested $1m in Kenyan AgTech firm Apollo Agriculture, which uses tech to help smallholder farmers access financial and other resources needed to boost productivity.
Taiwanese cloud kitchen startup 3 SQUARE has raised $1.2M in Seed funding. The company's first location is in the center of Taipei City (a mix of delivery, takeaway, and dine-in). 3 SQUARE aims to become the category leader in Asia. When I spoke to Victor J. Chow, Founder and CEO of 3 SQUARE, one of the many things he was excited about was the fact that many of their in-house brands have overlapping ingredients, meaning Victor hopes they'll be able to cut food waste.
Image: 3 SQUARE
Demand for shark fin food products is falling significantly in Hong Kong, new surveys show (am sure this Yao Ming commercial made all this difference).
Helsinki City Council is exploring ways to limit outdoor advertising for climate-harmful products, such as e.g. meat, air travel, and fossil fuel products like petrol cars (article in Finnish).
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Monterey Bay Aquarium is looking for a Seafood Watch Aquaculture Scientist... Agricola Moderna is hiring a R&D Agricultural Scientist... the Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) is recruiting a Global Director... Stockeld Dreamery has an open role for a Food Researcher... HIER Foods is hiring a Business Development Associate.
The Global Alliance for the Future of Food just launched a new book, True Cost Accounting for Food: Balancing the Scale. True Cost Accounting aims to evaluate the actual costs and benefits of different food systems, and the impacts and dependencies between natural systems, human systems, agriculture, and food systems.
Karl Söderman and his team just launched the free app Ingmar (in the Nordic app stores, soon in more countries too). Similar to e.g. Plant Jammer, Ingmar shows users what recipes they can cook based on the ingredients they already have at home. The goal is to make life for families a little easier, while helping to reduce food waste. (Trivia: Ingmar is an abbreviation of the original company name Ingredient Matcher).
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
This Twitter thread by Tamar Haspel on ultraprocessed foods and health impacts is worth a read. (And Tamar is worth following!)
NASA and the German space agency are learning how to farm on the moon, and on Mars (very cool article, make sure to read it). And while they're at it, NASA and Tide are trying to figure out how to clean dirty laundry in space.
Nut Job: A California man has been arrested for allegedly stealing 42,000 lbs (19,000 kgs) of pistachio nuts.
"What pistachios?"
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to Sunset Lover by Petit Biscuit. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter (I'm @danielsruben on Clubhouse). Did your brilliant friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.