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FoodTech Weekly #67 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
September 17, 2021 • Estimated Reading Time: 14 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #67
Hi there,
I've received a bunch of responses for the 30 second survey on FoodTech Weekly I'm doing, and will share some key takeaways next week. I'll start applying some of your ideas and suggestions immediately. Your opinion matters, so let me know what you really think about this newsletter.
That 1950s butter boy pic I shared last week? Fake. (Thanks, J dlP, for pointing it out). Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, I guess.
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Enjoy this read -- and your weekend!
Highlights
Formo scores $50M for cheese made using precision fermentation
New innovative freezing method promises huge savings in energy use
Scientists have potty-trained cows
Conversations
Noteworthy
German FoodTech startup Formo has raised a $50M Series A round, allegedly the largest ever Series A round for a European FoodTech company (I suppose you could say Formo created VC FOMO...) Formo uses precision fermentation to develop cheese without using cow's dairy. The company aims to replace 10% of dairy products in Europe by 2030 using precision fermentation, according to Formo CEO and co-founder Raffael Wohlgensinger.
Entoprotech, based in Israel, has secured $2M from Granot, one of the largest Israeli agricultural cooperatives. The funding is part of a $30M Series A round which the company hopes to close by Q4 2022. Entoprotech rears black soldier fly larvae and turn them into animal feed and fertilizer.
U.S. company Misfits Market has closed a $225M Series C round, led by SoftBank's Vision Fund. The company, which has raised $562.5M in total, is now valued at $2B. Misfits delivers fresh organic produce, pantry staples, proteins, and other grocery items to customers in 43 states, at up to 40% off traditional grocery store prices. The products sold have been rejected by other retailers, often for cosmetic reasons, and would otherwise go to waste. The pandemic has proven positive for Misfits Market as millions of Americans have avoided physical stores and started to buy their food online for the first time.
Israeli startup Alfred FoodTech has announced an innovative new platform to produce plant-based whole-cuts, using 'simple ingredients', that mimic animal-derived products. The company will sell its solution B2B to meat and poultry companies, alt meat companies, and cultivated meat startups. Formed in 2021, Alfred FoodTech has raised $1.3M in seed funding so far, and introduced 2 prototypes, according to a statement sent to FoodTech Weekly.
Image: Alfred FoodTech
Wild Earth has bagged $23M in new funding. The North Carolina-company produces pet food using plant-based ingredients, and is now aiming to add cell-based beef and seafood to its product line. Pet food in the U.S. constitute about 25-30% of the environmental impacts from animal production in terms of land use, freshwater use, fossil fuel use, phosphates and biocides, and startups are tracking to tackle this problem in different ways.
AgTech/FoodTech startups globally raised $24B in the first half of 2021, according to data from AgFunder. This is very close to the $30B raised in total during 2020. eGrocery was been the best-funded category, followed by Midstream technologies and In-Store Retail and Restaurant Tech. DigitalFoodLab has noticed similar trends in a recent analysis of the European FoodTech investment landscape; at €3.3B, investments in European FoodTech startups are already higher for the first half of 2021, than for all of 2020 and 2019. The Nordics is the leading European region, with €950M in investments into FoodTech startups in 2021.
Image source: AgFunder
A new U.N. FAO report is claiming that almost 90% of the $540 billion given in subsidies to farmers each year are harmful - damaging human health, exacerbating the climate crisis, and contributing to environmental degradation, to mention a few things. Examples include price incentives for specific livestock and crops, subsidies for fertilizers and pesticides, as well as price distorting mechanisms such as export subsidies and import tariffs. The largest emitters of greenhouse gases such as beef and milk receive the biggest subsidies. The level of subsidies are on track to increase to $1.8 trillion a year by 2030. The report called for reduced subsidies for meat and dairy in high-income countries, as well as reduced subsidies for chemical fertilizers and pesticides in low- and middle-income countries. Instead, the report believes public subsidies should e.g. support healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables.
Freezing food can help preserve nutrients and taste, but also come with a big energy price tag. U.S. researchers have found a new way of freezing food that drastically reduces energy use, without any big changes required in current food manufacturing equipment and infrastructure. The new technique, called isochoric freezing, relies on storing foods in a sealed, rigid container made of hard plastic or metal that is filled with a liquid such as water, and placing it in a freezer. As long as the food items remains in the liquid portion, they're safe from ice crystallization. The energy savings come from not having to freeze foods completely solid, which uses a huge amount of energy. The researchers are now scaling up the technology to industrial level.
Dutch cell-based meat startup Meatable has announced a joint development agreement with DSM to develop growth media for cell-based meat. Meanwhile in Switzerland, companies Givaudan, Bühler and Migros have formed The Cultured Food Innovation Hub outside of Zurich, to accelerate the development and market penetration of cell-based products.
Half of all nitrogen applied to crops is lost. Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for plant growth, and food production from nitrogen inputs fed half the world's population in 2008. But nitrogen applied to crops often end up elsewhere, e.g. getting washed away before the plant can use it. And excess nitrogen can (via microbes in the soil) turn into nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300x as potent as CO2.
A new comprehensive study published in Nature Food (and discussed in Scientific American) shows that animal-based foods produce about twice the emissions of plant-based ones. The study uses data on 171 crops and 16 animal products from more than 200 countries to calculate the amounts of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide that are contributed by various individual elements of the food system.
Image source: Xu, X., Sharma, P., Shu, S. et al. Global greenhouse gas emissions from animal-based foods are twice those of plant-based foods. Nat Food (2021).
Robots are picking up unwanted jobs at U.S. restaurants, as U.S. companies struggle to find employees (Amazon, for example, offers a $18/hour starting wage and to pay college tuition for 750,000 employees). Taco Borga of Dallas restaurant La Duni says that the robots cost $15 a day each, but are not taking anybody's job, because it's impossible to find employees right now. The robots help green customers, carry trays of food to tables, and will even sing 'Happy Birthday.'
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Hooked Foods (Sweden) is hiring for a bunch of positions... Jellatech (USA) is recruiting a Lab Operations Intern... C16 Biosciences (USA) is looking for a Marketing Manager... Good Food Institute Europe (EU/remote) is hiring a Policy Manager.... Moving Floor (Sweden) has several open roles... Foodstuff (UK) is recruiting an Operations Executive... Foodetective (France) has three open positions.
Kaila Colbin has written a good piece on lab-grown meat and the exponentials of food.
Forward Fooding has opened for applications for the Forward Fooding FoodTech 500 (deadline Dec 15, 2021).
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
Cows pee eight gallons (30 liters) of urine per day, and when mixed with cow dung, this creates ammonia, which pollutes the air (and has led e.g. Dutch politicians to consider cutting the livestock numbers by a third). Scientists have now successfully potty-trained cows for urine, and hope to train the cows to poop in the right places, too. The biggest environmental impact from livestock is however the methane gas that cows emit when burping and farting, and the cows can't be trained to stop doing those things as "they would blow up.' (according to Senior Research Study Author Lindsay Matthews).
In other important science news, researchers have established that plant-based diets make people fart more (let's celebrate by watching this thermal camera video of...well).
The number of days a year where temperatures reached 50 degrees C (122F) or above has doubled since the 1980s.
Netherlands-based e-bike manufacturer Van Moof experienced high levels of shipping damage when starting shipping bikes to customers in the U.S. back in the U.S. The company decided to put an image of an expensive flat-screen TV on every box -- and shipping damages dropped 70-80% overnight.
Image source: Van Moof
The Financial Times has listed the top 100 entrepreneurs in the U.K. As Sarah Drumm noted, congrats to three (3) women who made it to the list.
This 2,064 piece Super Mario 64 LEGO set is pretty cool.
It could've happened to anyone of us: A Dutch F1 fan was mistaken for a Sicilian mafia boss, and arrested after Dutch police raided a restaurant in The Hague where the man was dining.
Seen in the 2021 Meat Atlas:
I love you (especially if you take the quick survey on FoodTech Weekly)
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to Mirage by Shazz and Michael Robinson. 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.