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- FoodTech Weekly #8 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #8 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
July 17, 2020 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #8
Hi there,
Before I forget it - I'm a mentor for accelerator Big Idea Ventures (BIV), which focuses on plant-based and cell-based protein alternatives. They've now opened for applications for their next accelerator cohort, in NYC and Singapore, spring 2021. BIV invests $125K plus $75K in-kind. More info here, apply here.
If your company is already too big for an accelerator, you might want tolook at the Novo Nordisk Foundation's new Proteins For Tomorrow's Food program, which will award up to DKK 120M ($18M). You will need Danish co-applicants (don't worry, they're the second happiest people in the world).
Plenty of exciting news below but first, if you want a fascinating read for the weekend, I recommend this piece on biotech startups making breastmilk without the breast (full disclosure: I'm an advisor to BIOMILQ). Here's an excerpt from the article:
Breast milk is also a dynamic fluid that changes by the minute and the week: The fat content gets higher at the end of each feed as a satiety signal to the baby, while the overall nutritional profile shifts as an infant moves through developmental stages. The components of breast milk can even change in response to spit from the baby’s mouth, alerting the mother’s body when a baby is sick and needs slightly different nutrients to get better.
Mind-blowing!
Highligths
Conversations: Björn Öste, Oatly / Good Idea
Noteworthy: Flippy the burger robot comes to White Castle. Climate neutral beer, through algae. Oprah says Oat Yeah to Oatly.
The Profile: Howard Yana-Shapiro
Random Stuff: Heartbroken penguins. Chicken backpacks. An app to kill locusts. And more.
Conversations
I caught up with Björn Öste, co-founder of Oatly (currently valued at $2B). He said he can die a happy man, because now he's been on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, mentioned alongside Oprah, Natalie Portman, and Jay-Z. Björn is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded (with his brother Rickard) Oatly, about 20 years ago. Today the company sells its products in over 20 countries, and will do hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in 2020. Björn is really exited about this day and age, despite COVID, not least because there's so many fantastic things happening within the FoodTech world - from automation, personalized nutrition and last-mile delivery, to the plant-based revolution, new logistics solutions enabled by IT, new marketplaces, cell-based protein alternatives, and more (Björn discussed some of this with Louisa Burwood-Taylor of AgFunder News in this recent podcast which I recommend). Björn is currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and spends most of his time building what may become his next success story; Good Idea. Good Idea is a naturally flavored sparkling water with a blend of five amino acids and chromium, proven to help healthy individuals handle sugar spikes from carb-rich foods. It's free from sugar and sweeteners, and has zero calories. Good Idea came out of Aventure, an R&D FoodTech center in southern Sweden run by Björn, his brother Richard and some partners. Millions of dollars have been invested into Good Idea - research, clinical trials, etc. The startup will hit the market in a big way in the coming years. Good Idea is raising a $2.5M Seed round - if you're an accredited investor or know one who wants to get in touch, email Björn here.
Noteworthy
White Castle has announced a partnership with Miso Robotics to bring the robot Flippy ROAR (Robot on A Rail) on board. Flippy can cook up burgers, fries, chicken rings, popcorn shrimp, corn dogs, onion rings, mozzarella sticks, and more. Each robot costs $30K upfront and $1.5K in monthly subscription, but will never call in sick. Automation of repetitive tasks is a mega trend that COVID has accelerated. Miso is currently bringing in new funding through a crowdfunding campaign.
Image: YouTube
Is the future of farming indoors?, Brian Kateman asks in a great Forbes piece. I think the jury is still out. In the meantime, Chilean startup AgroUrbana, which has created South America's first vertical farm, just closed a $1M seed round. The company is planning for a larger, 30,000 sq. ft (3,000 sq. m) facility bankrolled by Series A funding later this year.
Bulgarian insect-as-animal-feed company Nasekomo has raised €4M, building the first industrial-scale facility for insect rearing in southeastern Europe. The company hopes to service e.g. the fish farming industries of Greece and Turkey with it's insect-based animal feed.
Australian brewery Young Henrys realized that beer brewing releases a lot of CO2. So the company started growing algae to absorb the CO2 from the beer brewing. Pretty cool.
FreshFry, of Louisville, Kentucky, has raised $3.3M. The startup has developed a plant-based product that helps food service businesses extend the life of frying oil, by stripping out any impurities like acids and metals.
Burger King released this somewhat eery ad, to promote that they've managed to reduce cow methane emissions by an average of 33% in a trial, by letting the cows eat lemongrass. Bloomberg calls it a stop-gap solution. I however think there's a need for methane-reducing technologies (also see e.g. Volta Greentech or Mootral). Just like regulations forced the car industry to use catalytic converters for the 1B existing cars, trucks, and buses, I think there'll eventually be regulations forcing the livestock industry to reduce theirmethane emissions -- and feed additives can function as catalytic converters for the world's 1.5B cows, reducing the environmental harm.
Image: YouTube
Sun Genomics has closed an $8.6M Series A round. The startup enables consumers to test their microbiome, and then recommends personalized probiotic products based on their gut profiles. There are about 100 trillion bacteria living in the human gut. We're only getting to know them. Bill Gates, for example, believes understanding the gut microbiome will transform human health.
The high level of activity in the alternative protein space continues: U.K. company Mighty Pea (producing plant-based milk from peas) raised £1M in funding; plant-based chicken startup Nuggs took in $4.1M; plant-based cheese company Grounded raised $1.7M; Swedish algae-for-omega-3 company Simris secured appr. $3M in financing, and U.S.-based Barvecue, which produces plant-based BBQ meat, raised $2M. IKEA is launching a plant-based meatball -- a plant-ball, made out ingredients like pea protein, oats, apples and potatoes, in Europe in August. And Spanish food-tech startup Cubiq has developed a 'smart fat' behaving like animal fat, to substitute coconut oil in plant-based products.
An investment group including Natalie Portman, Oprah, Jay-Z and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz participated in Oatly's recent $200M round (raised at a $2B valuation). Oat milk sales increased 686% in 2019. Meanwhile, annual cow milk sales fell from $15B in 2015, to $12B in 2019, in the U.S. Many actors, including Oatly and Perfect Day, are going after this billion-dollar market. A recent study found that plant-based meat products sell 23% more, when placed in the meat aisle.
This WEF video of Israeli startup Redefine Meat 3D printing steak is pretty cool.
The Portrait
Howard-Yana Shapiro, PhD is the retired Chief Agricultural Officer of Mars, Inc. He set up an organic seed company which was acquired by Mars in 1997, which is how he ended up there. He's has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Ford Foundation Fellow, an adjunct professor at UC Davis, and a Fellow at the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi. He founded the African Orphan Crops Consortium, he led the global effort to sequence the Theobroma cacao genome - and much more.
A few years ago, he launched the FoldIt Aflatoxin Puzzle - an online puzzle game where you fold proteins. You can manipulate it to create new enzymes that don't exist in nature. The idea was to gamify the scientific process of finding a solution to aflatoxins. Over 1.5M puzzles were solved by 460,000 gamers, and now scientists have 20 strong candidate solutions to combat aflatoxins.
One quote from Howard-Yana that has stuck with me, is: 'If it's not safe and nutritious, it's not food.'
Image: Howard-Yana Shapiro. CC-BY Jan Jaap Heine.
Random Stuff
There's an app for that: The FAO has trained 'locust scouts' in Kenya to use an app, E-Locust, to take pics and videos of young locusts; once uploaded to the server, a team is alerted and deployed to spray the insects to prevent them forming swarms.
Scientists have equipped chickens with backpacks full of sensors, to track chicken activity and detect parasite infections in real-time.
Speaking about Burger King, last year they did a marketing stunt in Mexico City, delivering Whoppers to people stuck in traffic jam, leveraging smart tech. I'm not sure about you, but that Burger King ad made me think of the folks shuttled around in lounge chairs in Wall-E. (ICYMI, in 2013, Mexico ranked #1 in terms of obesity in the world).
Not fishy: New research shows that in terms of what to label seafood grown in bioreactors, consumers prefer the term cell-based (over other terms such as e.g. 'cultivated', 'cell-cultured', 'cultured', 'produced using cellular agriculture, 'grown directly from cells of the animals', etc).
Kyoto Aquarium keeps close tabs on the romantic relationships of their penguins. One of the penguins, Tera, is known as a heartbreaker as she's dumped at least 6 different males.
Image: Kyoto Aquarium
I love you.
Daniel
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