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- FoodTech Weekly #7 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #7 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
July 10, 2020 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #7
Hi there,
Earlier this week, I spoke with a group of Italian food executives. One question that came up was whether kitchen appliance manufacturers design their products to maximize consumer health outcomes. It struck me that whileevidence saysabout half of our plates (by volume) should consist of fruits and vegetables, in most refrigerators, the crisper drawer -- the compartment designed to prolong the freshness of produce (through higher humidity levels) -- is usually hidden away at the bottom.
In May this year, Swedenintroduced a plastic bag tax, bringing the prices for plastic bags up to appr. $0.6 for a large one, and $0.3 for a small one. Many retailers have replaced the plastic bags for fruits and vegetables, with free brown paper bags.
So now millions of Swedes bring home fruits and vegetables in anonymous brown paper bags, that get hidden away at the bottom crisper drawers -- out of sight, out of mind. I can't help but think that this promotes food waste rather than increased consumption levels of protective foods such as fruits and vegetables (Vermont, by the way, justmandatedall food waste should be composted).
Time will tell.
Highligths
Conversations: N/A
Noteworthy: Perfect Day ups total funding to $361.5M; 330 new autonomous stores; ducks vs. locusts
The Profile: Selina Juul
Random Stuff: Peak Japan. Guerrilla gardening. Impulsive tattooed people. And more.
Conversations
Noteworthy
Perfect Day Foods more than doubled its Series C round with $160M in new investments, announced this week. The company has now raised a total of $361.5M. Perfect Day develops dairy products through fermentation, and has already launched an ice cream together with a partner in San Francisco. According to Perfect Day, every major multinational food company is already talking to them. Offering the nutrition and function of dairy, but bypassing the cow, Perfect Day Foods is on the way to disrupt the dairy industry, big time.
Mosa Meat, founded by Dr. Mark Post (who presented the world's first cultivated hamburger in 2013), has raised another €5M, bringing the total funding to $12.5M. The money will be used to build out the pilot facility and get European regulatory approval. In Asia, meanwhile, cultivated meat companies IntegriCulture of Japan and Shiok Meats of Singapore have started a collaboration to bring down the cost, and accelerate the time-to-market, of Shiok's cultivated shrimp.
Shrimp dumplings. Photo credit: CC-BY Shiok Meats.
AiFi, a cashierless checkout startup, announced it will deploy 330 new and retrofitted autonomous stores by the end of 2021, primarily in the U.S. and Europe. Through automated checkout, customers will not have to stand in line nor use a physical payment terminal, a significant advantage given COVID-19. COOP Sweden, the second largest food retailer chain, announced this weekits first unmanned store will soon open. And Amazon confirmed they will start selling their cashierless Go system (the Just Walk Out technology) to other food retailers. Expect this trend to continue.
COVID-19 will also accelerate the shift towards automation on the farm-level. FarmWise, which has raised $20M, is deploying weeding robots, that eliminates the need for herbicides, or manual labour to remove weeds.
Low-tech: China may send 100,000 ducks to Pakistan to mitigate the swarms of locusts (hey, that's how they tackled snails in The Biggest Little Farm movie- which is worth a watch, btw!)
Curious how Black Soldier Flies can help make eggs more circular and CO2 free? This article gives a good overview of this nascent industry.
U.K.-based Tropic Biosciences, which recently raised $28.5M, is using gene editing to develop a banana resistant to the Panama disease. The Court of Justice of the EU in 2018 ruled that CRISPR (that Tropic Biosciences is using) should be subject to same strict regulation as GMO, so it'll be interesting to see how Tropic manages this. Global banana production is under threat from both the Panama disease and Black Sigatoka, threatening the livelihoods of millions of people -- and the food security for hundreds of millions of people, for whom bananas are a staple food. Bananas are the #1 produced fruit in the world.
Banana plantation infected by Panama disease. Image: Scot Nelson, Flickr CC.
A new report from UNEP and the International Livestock Research Institute, 'Preventing the next pandemic - Zoonotic diseases and how to break the chain of transmission', outlines some solutions for preventing the next pandemic. It also examines the key drivers, including increased demand for animal protein, a rise in intense and unsustainable farming, and the increased use and exploitation of wildlife (for the latter point, also see the NYT piece Wildlife Trade Spreads Coronaviruses as Animals Get to Market). Of course, it'll take more than better food systems to stop the next pandemic - the NYT wrote a great piece on how scientists could stop the next pandemic before it starts.
Uber just bought Postmates for $2.6B, following the recent $7.3B acquisition of Grubhub by Dutch company JustEat Takeaway.com. Three companies now control most of the food delivery space in the U.S.; DoorDash, Uber Eats/Postmates, and Grubhub/Seamless (now owned by Just Eat Takeaway.com). Domino's Pizza also has a strong position.
Continued high activity in the plant-based space: Canadian government recently announced $100M in financing for the new Merit Functional Foodsplant in Winnipeg, which will produce plant protein (hat tip: Kulvir S.G.). Meanwhile, Legendary Vish have developed a process to 3D print plant-based fish, and Good Catch debuted a frozen plant-based seafood line. Impossible Foods have doubled their store sales of their Impossible Burger every month since April, and plans to expand their retail footprint by 50x in 2020 (COVID-19 has caused the biggest decline in meat eating in decades). Singapore-based Karana, that has developed a pork dumpling analog using jackfruit, announced a $1.7M seed round. And Oatly, the global leader in oat-based alternatives to dairy, secured a SEK 1.9B (almost $205M) financing facility through Rabobank.
The Portrait
Food waste is a huge global problem. 30% of food grown in developing countries is lost before it reaches the consumer (so called post-harvest loss); 30% of food bought in rich countries is wasted. In total, more than 1.3B tons of food is wasted, enough to feed a few billion people. This is not only inefficient, it's immoral. Organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation have worked hard to put this issue on the global agenda. But few individuals have done more to fight food waste, than Selina Juul. She founded the non-profit Stop Wasting Food movement in Denmark in 2008. She's helped co-develop e.g. the International Food Loss & Waste Protocol, and the European Joint Declaration Against Food Waste, has published a cookbook on leftovers, and has been a frequent speaker at key conferences -- including a 2019 one in the Vatican on stopping food waste and loss. For her work, Selina has received a number of awards and acknowledgments, including being named Dane of Year 2014.
Selina Juul. Image: Finn Nielsen, CC BY-SA 4.0
Random Stuff
Peak Japan: Japanese theme parks, re-opening, have urged riders not to yell on rollercoasters, to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Two Japanese executives just rode a coaster in total silence, ties/bowties and all, the video ending with the message "Please scream inside your heart".
Image: Screenshot from Youtube.
This 10 min TED Talk from 2013 by Ron Finley on guerrilla gardening is worth a watch: "Gardening is the most therapeutic, and defiant, act you can do, especially in the inner city."
New research in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization claims that people with tattoos, especially visible ones, are more short-sighted and impulsive than non-tattoed people. Makes one think about folks failing the marshmallow experiment...(hat tip: Erik L).
OK, I'm off to the beach:
I love you.
Daniel
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