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FoodTech Weekly #83 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
January 21, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #83
Hi there,
Is it too late to share my 2021 In Review?
This week's rundown:
Bringing home the bacon: La Vie raises €25M for plant-based alternatives to pig products
F*ck cancer: Faeth Therapeutics bags $20M to identify nutrients that can starve cancer tumors
The world is your oyster: Pearlita Foods launches to cell-cultivate mollusks
Let's go!
Conversations
While quick delivery 'FoodTech' startups in Europe and the U.S. are raising billions and fighting over who gets to deliver bananas and toilet paper to consumers in 10, 12, or 15 minutes (with tricky unit economics), entrepreneurs elsewhere are trying to solve real problems that matter.
Post-harvest food loss is a huge issue in emerging markets. One reason is the lack of cold chain. ColdHubs in Nigeria tries to solve for this. They operate solar-powered cold rooms (run by women) located at major outdoor markets and farm clusters, with a 'pay-as-you-store' model. Farmers and market vendors pay to store their produce in the cold rooms, extending shelf life for fruits and vegetables from two to 21 days. ColdHubs reduces post-harvest food loss, improves access to nutrition, strengthens food security, and creates jobs. Out of 400 nominations, ColdHubs was recently one of 6 finalists for the $2M Food Planet Prize (although they didn't end up winning).
Together with Sandra Malmberg, I recently had a chance to speak with ColdHubs' Founder and CEO Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu, for our podcast The Appetizer. Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Noteworthy
French alternative protein startup La Vie, which specializes is plant-based alternatives to pig products like bacon, announced a €25M Series A round. The company will use the new funding to intensify R&D and expand across Europe. The round was led by Seventure Partners, and joined by e.g. Partech, Oyster Bay Capital, Capagro, Entrepreneur First, and Bleu Capital. Angels like Natalie Portman and Oatly chairman Eric Melloul also participated.
Image: La Vie
U.K.-based Omni has landed a $1.5M round, backed by ProVeg International, Trellis Road, Purple Orange Ventures, Kale United, FoodHack, and angel Vera Baker. The startup develops plant-based dog food.
Vertical Future, a vertical farming company HQ'ed in the U.K, has bagged$29M (at a $136M valuation) in what it claims is Europe's largest-ever Series A round for a vertical farming startup. Investors include Pula Investments, Nickleby Capital, Dyfan Investment, and SFC Capital. Across the pond, U.S. vertical farming company Bowery has secured a $150M credit facility supported by KKR. This brings Bowery's total debt and equity capital raised to more than $647M. The company will now build new farms in Atlanta and Dallas, both opening in Q1 2023. And Brooklyn-based Upward Farms says it'll launch a massive 250,000 sq. ft (25,000 sq. m) aquaponics vertical farm in Pennsylvania in 2023, focusing on microgreens. The company raised a $121M Series B last year.
Norwegian aquatech company Bluegrove has netted a $13M Series B round, in a round led by Dutch sustainable aquaculturee fund Aqua-Spark and European investment firm Breed Reply. Bluegrove (formerly called Cageeye) develops technology to optimize and automate fish feeding. In 2019, it acquired fish farming equipment producer NorseAqua, and in 2020 it acquired underwater camera vision technology startup Selab.
U.K. vegan fried chicken startup VFC Foods has brought home a $10.2M investment, led by impact VC fund Veg Capital. The company offers a range of frozen chicken alternatives like nuggets, bites, popcorn chicken and fillets. VFC now plans to boost capacity, expand the team and R&D, and launch in the U.S. The company also plans to raise an A round in 2023. VFC's co-founder Matthew Glover has noted that the company's products are 'not a health food'.
Israeli startup Sweet Victory has created a line of chewing gums designed to stop sugary treat cravings. The proprietary technology works within two minutes by blocking the sugar receptors on the tongue, and its effect can last up to two hours. During that time, eating sweet foods or beverages that normally taste, well, sweet, instead taste bland or even sour, abating the impulse to eat sweet stuff. Silly 25 sec video here, but the technology has been succesfully piloted at the Obesity Research Center of the Sheba Medical Center in Israel.
Image: Gilad Mashiah
Hivos-Triodus Fund has provided $1M in senior debt to Apollo Agriculture, a Kenyan AgTech company which uses machine learning and other automation to help small-scale farmers maximize their profitability. Some 89% of sampled Apollo farmers report productivity increases.
Wine bottles come with a heavy carbon footprint. New York-based startup Good Goods wants to solve for this; it has launched a wine bottle return and reuse program. According to Good Goods, some 20,000 wine bottles have been returned to date; 50 retailers in the New York/New Jersey area participate, and another 100 retailers are on the waiting list. The company aims to expand to other parts of the U.S. during 2022.
Image: Good Goods
Botanical Solutions of Davis, California, has banked a $6.1M Series A round led by Otter Capital. The company develops and sells e.g. biofungicides, that control harmful fungal diseases such as Botrytis cinerea which cause damages worth hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.
Faeth Therapeutics of the U.S., a startup developing precision nutrition solutions to combat cancer, has received $20M in Seed funding. The round was led by Khosla Ventures and Future Ventures, and was joined by AgFunder, Digitalis Ventures, S2G Ventures, KdT Ventures, Cantos, and Unshackled Ventures. Faeth is developing a machine learning platform, MetabOS, which aims to identify what nutrients that can have a positive or negative impact on the growth of tumors. The company aims to 'starve' tumors by 'exploiting the differences in metabolism and nutrient uptake between healthy and cancerous tissues.' Patients onboard to a highly personalized precision nutrition program combining customized meals and snacks delivered to the patient's home, as well as therepeutics and advice from a team of dieticians. Faeth believes that 'modulation of dietary nutrients' will become a new powerful tool in the toolbox, alongside with surgery, radiotherapy, small molecules and biologics, to treat cancer.
Danone North America is supporting an innovation challenge by Future Food Tech for startups to develop innnovative solutions that can help solve for the functionality (such as melting and stretching) of plant-based cheese alternatvies. Animal-free casein is one such solution. Meanwhile, Dutch startup Fooditive has unveiled a vegan casein made from peas using precision fermentation.
Startup Pearlita Foods has launched in North Carolina, aiming to develop and launch the world's first cell-cultivated oysters. The company is backed by Big Idea Ventures and Sustainable Food Ventures,
Image: Guido, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Canadian robotics startup Barnstorm AgTech has been awarded a $350,000 grant to continue the development of autonomous driverless tractor swarms. This comes after a CAN$1M Seed round in 2021, from angel syndicates 99Tartans and Reinforced Ventures. Barnstormer inteds to complete basic farm operations like tillage, spraying, and spreading, at reduced cost, labor need, and environmental impact.
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
Melt&Marble (Sweden) has several open positions for scientists... Seedling(Switzerland) is looking for a Program Manager, Philanthropy (NB, job ad in German)... Mycorena (Sweden) is recruiting a Fermentation Engineer... Better Dairy (UK) is hiring for a number of technical roles... Meatable (The Netherlands) wants to bring on an Analytical Technician... Pearlita Foods (US) is looking for a Cell Biologist... Vow Food (Australia) is hiring for a ton of roles... Phytoform Labs (UK) has a number of open roles available for scientists.
+impact accelerator 2022 is open for applications until Feb 13, 2022. With 100+ alumnis like Hooked Foods and Peas of Heaven, +impact offers an equity accelerator for Nordic-based growth-stage startups. The program will run March 8 thru April 13, and selected startups will get hands-on support to scale their growh.
GlobalSF will bring leading edge food companies, investors, and chefs from the San Francisco Bay Area to explore regional food tech ecosystems and the way the world reinvents production and consumption of food. Email Laura Jenkins to join or partner. There'll be a Nordic Tour (June 1-9 2022, including at Sweden Food Tech Big Meet June 1-6) and a Japan Tour (September 2022, Tokyo-Osaka-Kyoto).
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
Italy's Supreme Court has decided a 19-year legal battle, and ruled it to be a human rights violation that a couple in La Spezia has had to endure hearing their neighbors' flushing toilet at night. Journalist Massimiliano Parente wrote (in Il Giornale) that this court case highlighted Italy's slow justice system, and that Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativty in less time than it took for Italy's courts to solve this case: 'At the judicial level, we are a big, huge, gigantic, clogged toilet.'
This baby doll on a baby motorcycle made my day (1 min video).
How Nordic people do laundry (it's not that far from reality):
Image: YouTube
Eat a Swede (clever ad campaign)
Recall the story from last week of the Chinese woman stuck with her blinddate for 4 days in his apartment due do a lockdown (and who said her date was as talkative as a 'wooden mannequin')? Well, another Chinese couple who had planned to meet for a day got stuck in lockdown together, and are now engaged.
I read this quote in Janette Barnard's newsletter, and found the text meaningful, so I thought you'd might too.
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to And So It Goes by Billy Joel. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter. And here's the Appetizer which I co-host. Did your brilliant friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.