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FoodTech Weekly #87 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
February 18, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #87
Hi there,
What if you could extend your life expectancy by a decade, just by changing your dietary patterns? A new academic study gives clear guidelines -- more on that further below.
I'm an incurable optimist, so I really loved this long-read article by David Deutsch of Oxford University. A select quote:
Not only was fire always dangerous as well as beneficial, so was the wheel. A spear could injure or kill your friends, not only your dinner. With clothes came not only protection but also body lice. With farming came not only a more reliable food supply but also hard, repetitive work – and plunder by hungry bandits. Every solution creates new problems. But they can be better problems. Lesser evils. More and greater delights. That’s what progress is. That is what is most visible today. And that is what cynicism must therefore besmirch, obfuscate and argue away if it is to make itself, and pessimism, superficially plausible. So, let us instead exalt humans, and their ideas, and their civilization and its achievements.
I'm a Premium Supporter of Warp News (a global community of fact-based optimists), where the article was published. Right now (until Feb 27), annual memberships are just $25 instead of $100. Please consider joining.
This week's rundown:
Carbon farming takes off: Agreena secures $22.5M for platform helping farmers turn land into carbon sinks
In queso emergency: Change Foods raises $12M for precision-fermented cheese
New record: Global AgTech funding increases from $3.3B in 2020 to $5B in 2021
Let's go!
Conversations
I'm having plenty of interesting conversations, I just need to find the time to summarize them for you. Please have patience :-)
Noteworthy
Singapore-based Next Gen Foods announced a record-breaking $100M Series A round, the largest in the sector thus far. The company's vegan chicken TiNDLE is available in 200 restaurants in 6 cities worldwide. Investors included e.g. EDBI, Temasek, and Bits x Bites. Next Gen Foods will use part of the funding to build a new research hub in Singapore, but also to expand especially in the U.S. in a big way.
Image: Tindle
Change Foods (which was founded in Australia but has since relocated to the U.S.) has banked a $12M Seed round. Investors included e.g. Upfield, Sigma, Orkla, Blue Horizon Ventures, Clear Current Capital, and Better Bite Ventures. Change Foods uses precision fermentation to produce animal-free dairy, focusing initially on cheese. The company also announced strategic collaboration agreements with Upfield (owner of plant-based cheese brand Violife) and yoghurt- and cheesemaker Sigma. Change Foods plans to launch a first product in late 2023.
voilà of Berlin has snagged €8.8M in funding, in a round led by EQT Ventures and joined by FoodLabs, Shio Capital, and angels. The company was founded in May 2021 and launched in August of last year. voilà does home deliveries of fine dining, which also includes e.g. playlists curated by the chef to go with the food. The company has already delivered to more than 1,200 cities and towns across Germany.
voilà founders Mostafa Nageeb, Julius Wiesenhütter, and Florian Berg
Cultivated steak startup Seawith in South Korea has landed a $5.4M Series A round. The company uses algae as scaffolding to grow meat, and claims it will be able to produce beef at $3 per kg (2.2 lbs) by the end of the decade.
Agreena of Denmark has brought home a $22.5M Series A round; the company runs a platform where farmers can earn carbon credits for turning their land into carbon sinks, increasing farmer profitability. Kinnevik led the round, joined by Giant Ventures, Vaekstfonden (The Danish Growth Fund) and angel investors. In somewhat related news, the USDA announced a $1B investment in pilot projects that support farmers, ranchers, and landowners to implement climate-smart conservation practices (e.g. cover crops, low-till or no-till farming, agroforestry, rotational grazing, and reforestation).
NourishedRx has received a $6M funding injection, from S2G Ventures and other investors. Launched in 2019, the company aims to make nutritious food accessible for health plan providers' most vulnerable members. NourishedRx provides policyholders with advice and even grocery deliveries. The idea is that better dietary patterns will result in improved patient health, and lower healthcare costs.
Last year saw $5B invested into AgTech over 440 funding deals, according to Crunchbase, up from $3.3B invested in 2020.
U.S. fast food chain White Castle will install Miso Robotics' Flippy 2 Robot at 100 restaurants, at the frying stations (1 min video of the robot in action). And Colombian robot delivery startup Kiwibot announced a $7.5M Series A round, bringing its total funding to $14M. Sodexo was one of the lead investors, and Kiwibot now to add 1,200 delivery robots across 50 U.S. college campuses.
Image: Kiwibot
AgTech company Carbon Robotics (which closed a $27M B round back in September 2021) is launching an autonomus laserweeding pull-behind robot. Farmers typically rely on traditional weeding methods such as herbicides, mechanical weeding, and hand weeding. Herbicides however can adversely impact the health of the crops, mechanical weeding can damage the plants, and hand weeding is expensive. Laserweding can save up to 80% in weed management costs, says Carbon Robotis.
The European Commission has authorized the marketing of house crickets as a novel food in the EU. This follows recent approvals for mealworms and locusts. The house crickets will be available in its entirety, either frozen, dried, or as a powder.
The world is spending $1.8 trillion every year in subsidies that drive the annihilation of wildlife and increase global warming, according to a new report. The fossil fuel industry ($620B), the agricultural sector ($520B), water ($320B) and forestry ($155B) account for the majority of the $1.8 trillion.
Researchers at the University of Florida have found a new way of 'tasting' produce like fruits and vegetables, based on the chemical profile. Flavor is the result of a complex interplay of dozens of chemical, and breeders still mostly rely on field experimentation to develop new flavors. The scientists have now found a way to use machine learning to develop new and exciting flavors.
Inari of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is using CRISPR gene editing to improve plant traits -- aiming to reduce water and nitrogen needs for corn by 40%, and increasing corn and soybean yields by 20%.
Dietary risk factors cause an estimated 11 million premature deaths every year. A new scientific study now shows that a young adult in the U.S. could add more than a decade to their life expectancy by changing their diet from a typical Western one to an optimized diet. The largest gains would be made by eating more legumes, whole grains, and nuts, while reducing the intake of red meat, processed meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, and refined grains. The new model is available as an online calculator here.
Expected increase in life expectancy for optimizing different food groups from various age. Image source: Fadnes LT et al., 2022, PLOS Medicine, CC BY 4.0
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
GFI Israel (Israel) is looking for an Operations Manager... The Periodic Table of Foods (US) is hiring a Project Manager... QOA (Germany) is recruiting a Commercial/Supply Chain Manager... The Breakthrough Institute is hiring a Senior Food and Agriculture Analyst... Ivy Farm (UK) wants to bring on a Financial Controller... Wildtype (US) is recruiting a Head of People... Revo Foods (Austria) is hiring a Senior Food Scientist... Evo Foods (India) has an opening for a Head of R&D... Stockeld Dreamery (Sweden) is recruiting a Business Controller.
Forward Fooding has released The 2021 FoodTech 500 list of finalists; the top 10 companies are Infarm, Plenty, Ÿnsect, Benson Hill, Imperfect Foods, Bowery, Hello Fresh, Pivot Bio, Too Good To Go, and NotCo.
EIT Food Accelerator is calling for new evaluators, to help identify and select the most promising startups for the EIT Food Business Creation programmes. In particular, EIT Food Accelerator is looking for investors, corporate professionals (R&D, innovation, corporate/startup collaboration, product development), as well as startup founders and subject-matter experts, all from the AgTech/FoodTech space. More info here.
Rockstart AgriFood is looking for AgTech and FoodTech startups with some traction to apply for their program. Founders get access to mentors, investors and peers, an initial investment as well as potential future co-investment from Rockstart up to Series B. Applications close April 15.
The Sustainable Food Awards 2022 is now open for nominations.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
Chewing gum sales started to plummet as the iPhone became ever-more popular, meaning people became distracted on their phones in the grocery store checkout lines, making fewer impulse purchases (h/t Marie Dollé):
Chewing gum isn't...sticking around (ba dum tss)
A new research paper, Does The Mafia Hire Good Accountants?, found that Italian mafiosos tend to hire meticulous and detailed accounting firms to cook their books with care (and that being associated with the mob had no negative impact on the accounting firms' reputation).
Authorities in New Zealand trying to break up a protestors camped outside the parliament played Barry Manilow's greatest hits on repeat.
Dumpster diving videos are taking off on TikTok. Interesting read.
If you're a VC, you need to read this thought-provoking piece on whether venture capital is about to have a Minsky moment (e.g. startups raising down rounds at lower valuations, with lower IRRs for VCs reducing their ability to raise funds, etc in a negative loop).
I need this:
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to Bruxelles je t'aime by Angèle. 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.