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FoodTech Weekly #65 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
September 03, 2021 • Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #65
Hi there,
Today's newsletter might be a bit shorter than usual, because I've had a busy week. The startup I work for, Stockeld Dreamery, announced a €16.5M Series A round yesterday (possibly the largest-ever Series A round for a plant-based alternatives company in Europe). Check out the coverage in e.g. TechCrunch, AgFunder, Green Queen or The Spoon for more details.
And the Mayor of Stockholm, Anna König Jerlmyr, decided to pay us a visit too yesterday, for some cheese tasting and a conversation around food innovation, foodtech, and how Stockholm could play an even bigger role. Earlier in the morning, we met with a leading U.S. trailblazer in food who happened to be in town. So exciting day -- and that was just one day of the week.
OK, shifting gears here.
'Poor people hate being treated like they're poor.' Don't miss my inspiring conversation with Ady Beitler of startup Nilus from Argentina below -- how they're solving food waste while delivering nutritious foods to some of the most vulnerable communities in Latin America.
Wishing you a relaxing weekend.
Highlights
Conversations: Ady Beitler (Nilus)
Noteworthy: Duckweed producer Plantible raises $21.5M Series A round; AquaBounty invests $200M to build Ohio indoor aquafarm for genetically engineered salmon; field trials start in the U.K. of CRISPR-edited wheat; OmniFoods and TMRW Foods expand to the U.S.; automated kitchen startup Spyce is acquired by sweetgreen; researchers in Japan grow teeny-tiny Wagyu steak
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Random Stuff: The cost of cell programming is declining rapidly.
Conversations
Had an opportunity to grab dinner with Ady Beitler of Nilus recently. Ady, who is from Montevideo, Uruguay and trained as a lawyer, spent 10 years working for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). When working in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, Ady notice how basic food (for various reasons) there was more expensive than in the fanciest restaurants in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. That's when he first got the idea for Nilus. When you're poor, you pay more for everything. The supply chain is broken. Slums in poor countries hinder supply chains -- through e.g. narrow, insecure streets. It's inefficient, slow, dangerous, and expensive to handle logistics there. So companies don't ship to the slum, and that makes products like food more expensive there. Ady left the IDB 'in order to do real impact.' He worked at an Innovation Lab 2018-2019 at Harvard, to figure out how to divert food destined for waste so that it instead gets to people who need it. Ady met some co-founders, and went to work in Buenos Aires. They started renting warehouses, hiring drivers, and developing the tech. 'Our insight was that we need to treat the poor people like customers, not clients. That's how to give people their dignity back. Poor people hate to be treated like they're poor. So we can't sell them a single peach that's bad -- because then we remind people that they're poor -- and they will hate us for it.' Nilus started selling e.g. ugly and unwanted fruits and vegetables B2B, to churches, schools, and community kitchens. Watch this 3 minute video - it's really inspiring. But the initial business model didn't translate into savings for poor people, and it didn't compete with the convenience stores of the favelas. So Nilus started working with community group buying. Through a simple app, people in the favelas see a menu of food that they can pre-order. Once the system detects that a minimum group order size has been reached, the order is shipped. The entire transaction is cashless and run via What's App. Nilus is confident it has found a product/market fit, and is now expanding across Latin America. Nilus is raising a Series A which the company hopes to close in Q4, and is talking to mission-aligned investors. Ady is also interested in connecting with food companies that has operations in Mexico, Argentina, or Puerto Rico. You can reach him via LinkedIn or email.
Ady Beitler, Nilus
Noteworthy
Kellogg's corporate VC arm Eighteen94 invested in the $21.5M Series A round (led by Astanor Ventures) of Plantible Foods. California-based Plantible produces duckweed (also known as water lemni). Duckweed grows on the water surface, year-round, and doubles in plant mass every 48 years. Plantible says its protein emulates the functional, taste, and texture characteristics of widely-used animal-based proteins, and will be cost-competitive with e.g. egg whites. The new funding round will be used to build the company's first commercial facility, which will bring products to market next year (fun random fact: Sorosh Tavakoli who co-founded Stockeld Dreamery explored, in 2018, starting a duckweed startup before settling on plant-based cheese instead).
AquaBounty, which grows genetically engineered Atlantic salmon in land-based facilities, will invest $200M to build a 480k sq. ft (app. 45,000 sq. m) land-based fish farm in Ohio. Construction will begin late this year and the facility becomes operational in 2023. AquaBounty's salmon grows to harvest size in just 16-18 months instead of the usual 3 years, and needs less feed.
U.K. research institute Rothamstead Research has been granted approval to run field tests of CRISPR-edited wheat. It is the first such trials anywhere in the U.K. or Europe. The goal is to reduce levels of acrylamide when wheat in e.g. bread, chips, and potatoes is baked or toasted (acrylamide causes cancer in rodents and is considered 'probably carcinogenic' for humans).
TMRW Foods of Canada has raised $2.6M. The startup develops e.g. plant-based burgers and sausages. The funding will be used to enter the U.S. market.
Also expanding into the U.S. is OmniFoods of Hong Kong. OmniFoods has developed plant-based products such as OmniPork; the company sells products at 40,000 locations in 20 countries. OmniFoods will initially be available in the U.S. at grocery chains Whole Foods and Sprouts.
Semi-secretive company Compound Foods has bagged $4.5M in fresh funding; the startup 'recreates' coffee using synthetic biology, but doesn't disclose many more details on how exactly.
Automated kitchen startup Spyce has been acquired by U.S. salad bar chain sweetgreen for an undisclosed sum. Here's a 20 second video of the food-making robot in action - the machine can sear, steam and assemble meals by itself in 2-3 minutes. Sweetgreen has grown to 130+ locations in the U.S, since launching in 2007, and is currently valued at almost $2B. Spyce, which was founded by a group of MIT students in 2015, had raised about $25M before being acquired.
Scientists at Osaka University have 3D-printer cell-based steak. The researchers harvested stem cells from Wagyu cows, incubated them, and converted them into muscle, fat, and blood vessel cells. The end product is 5 x 10 millimeters in size (so not exactly a T-bone).
Qatar is working with Eat Just to establish a $200M cell-cultured meat hub in the country.
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Mzansi Meat Co (South Africa) is hiring an R&D Director... Umami Meats (Singapore) is recruiting a Senior Scientist... Jellatech (USA) has three open roles... Hooked Foods (Sweden) is hiring for a number of positions... v2food (Australia) is looking for a Senior Product Developer.... Stockeld Dreamery (Sweden) is recruiting a Senior Brand Manager...Phytoform Labs (UK) has three technical role openings... Finless Foods (USA) is looking for a Chief Operating Officer.
Max Bade has launched Nucleus Capital, focusing on synthetic biology, climate, an food technology. The fund has already invested in e.g. QOA, Juicy Marbles, HIER, Orbillion Bio, and Hoxton Farms.
The top 10 finalists for SVG's THRIVE Europe Challenge have been selected (from nearly 300 applications). Make sure to vote (oh -- and one of the companies I advise, Lupinta, is one of the finalists).
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
Is it unethical to farm insects as animal feed? Interesting piece in Aeon.
Between 2017 and 2025, the cost of cell programming (the ability to tweak the outputs of a cell) will have dropped around 100 fold (h/t Azeem Azhar).
I've shared this before, but it still really gets to me: The area of soy planted in South America has doubled since 2000 (meaning that an area the size of Spain is now covered by this crop, used as animal feed and biofuel).
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green Day. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter (I'm @danielsruben on Clubhouse). And here's the Appetizer podcast which I co-host. Did your brilliant friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.