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- FoodTech Weekly #9 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #9 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
July 24, 2020 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #9
Hi there,
I miss the good old days, when people wore pants during Zoom calls. COVID changed a lot. Thoughts and prayers to all the paparazzis struggling for chances take pictures of celebrities not leaving their houses due to lockdowns -- or wearing masks when venturing outside.
I just co-authored a blog on visions for how future food systems may look like for cities -- check it out. Also, I was recently interviewed by the podcast On Sustainability (available on e.g. Spotify and Apple Podcasts, if you have 25 minutes to spare). Hearing my own voice, and thoughts, makes me cringe. But at least I wore pants.
No matter what -- the FoodTech space keeps growing and developing - plenty of exciting news stories to share!
Highligths
Conversations: N/A
Noteworthy: Beewise nets $10M for smart beehives; AquaBounty's genetically engineered salmon for sale in October; Future Foodways is a new £30M FoodTech fund.
The Profile: Louisa Burwood-Taylor.
Random Stuff: Too obese for Venice. Scream on Iceland. Food system dashboards. And more.
Conversations
Noteworthy
U.K. company Higher Steaks says it has managed to produce bacon strips and pork belly, using cellular agriculture. The products were made of 50-70% cultivated animal cells, as well as plant-based proteins, fats, and starches. This is the first lab-grown prototype for bacon. Benjamina Bollag, Founder of Higher Steaks, says that the production cost is still in the thousands of British Pounds per kilo, so the products will not hit the stores for a few years. She hopes the products may become available in premium restaurants, in small quantities, within 2-3 years, and in supermarkets in 5 years time. (Production costs are falling rapidly in the industry. Mosa Meats for example announced this week that they've achieved an 80x reduction in growth-medium cost, for creating cultivated meat).
Image source: Higher Steaks
KFC, meanwhile, announced that they're working with a Russian 3D bioprinting firm, to 3D print cell-based chicken nuggets (i.e. cells grown in a bioreactor). They hope to do a testing later this fall, in Moscow (although there's no information as to when customers may try this new product). Says Raisa Polyakova, General Manager of KFC Russia and CIS: 'Crafted meat products are the next step in the development of our “restaurant of the future” concept. Our experiment in testing 3D bioprinting technology to create chicken products can also help address several looming global problems.'
Crisp, a demand forecasting platform for the food industry, has raised $12M (in total, the startup has raised $24M). The company, which is based in New York, helps food suppliers and distributors to visualize their data, in real-time -- bringing together a lot of data points like sales, inventory, marketing data, promotions, weather, and holiday dates. Crisp's platform helps improve revenues and reduce food waste. This week, food delivery service Misfit Markets also announced an $85M Series B raise, from a range of investors including the husband of famous actor Mila Kunis. Misfit has rescued more than 40M pounds (18M kgs) of ugly shaped produce (they also sell many other products these days). It has 600 full-time employees, and serves about half of all U.S. states.
U.S. company AquaBounty will start selling its genetically engineered AquAdvantage salmon in the U.S. Midwest in October. The salmon is a mix of Pacific Chinook Salmon, Atlantic Salmon and Ocean Pout, and grows to harvest size in 18 months vs. 24 months for conventional salmon. The AquAdvantage salmon is grown in indoor tanks; the company says the fish is antibiotic free, and hasn't been exposed to chemicals, disease, or predators. AquaBounty also says its fish isn't decimating the wild-caught salmon populations, and that the carbon footprint is lower than the fish imported from Norway and Chile.
AquAdvantage salmon vs. conventional salmon at same age. Image: J LEVIN W / CC BY-SA
Future Foodways, a new London-based FoodTech VC part-owned by Katapult, has raised £30M, which will be invested into 20 startups (incl. follow-on investments), from the seed stage to Series A, over the next three years. The first investment will be made in early 2021. Europe has fairly few dedicated FoodTech funds so this is great news for the FoodTech ecosystem.
Exofood will open a store in Bangkok, growing insects on-site. Initially they will sell the insects as feed for exotic pets, but aim to eventually sell insects to humans for protein consumption. Meanwhile in Singapore, insect-farming startup Protenga has bagged a $1.6M investment. Protenga, which produces Black Soldier Flies in Malaysia for animal feed (aquaculture, livestock, and pets), will use the funding to boost production and increase its research on improved insect genetics.
The Exofood store in Bangkok. Image: Space+Craft / Santana Petchsuk.
A new U.S. startup, Food ID, says it can test for 95% of the most common antibiotics used in beef, pork, and poultry, in less than 10 minutes. Customers (companies) will be able to see whether meats marketed as e.g. antibiotic-free and hormone-free truly are that. Today, 75-80% of all antibiotics used in the world, are given to farm animals, not humans. Antibiotic overuse will make humans more vulnerable to infections and pandemics in the future.
PlantLab, a vertical-farming company based in the Netherlands, has taken in€20M in investment, to expand to new locations and improve its technology. WilderFields, in Chicago, will turn an abandoned Target store into a vertical farm, where it will produce 25M heads of lettuce annually, which will be sold to local grocery stores.
Israeli startup Beewise has raised $10M in Series A funding. The company makes smart beehives, meaning the hives can be monitored remotely, and treated without human contact. Beewise's product, Beehome, can detect disease and house up to 40 colonies at once. Last year, another team of Israelis - students, in the BeeFree project, showed it was possible to produce real honey without using bees.
The Profile
A FoodTech ecosystem is made up of many parts. Innovators, entrepreneurs, researchers. Academics, students, investors. Folks working in incubators, accelerators, startups, and corporates. But some people are nodes, connecting all the dots. Louisa Burwood-Taylor is one of them. She's the Head of Media & Research for AgFunder, a large AgTech/FoodTech VC. As such, she's chief editor for AgFunder's news outlet, AgFunderNews. It provides daily news on funding news, new FoodTech and AgTech trends and innovations, and much more. She publishes a weekly newsletter which goes out to 80,000+ people, and also does the podcast Future Food. In January 2020, Rabobank, one of the largest food/ag banks in the world, named Louisa the #1 influencer in the industry. Follow her and her work via AgFunderNews, her pod, and her Twitter.
Random Stuff
The 433 gondoliers of Venice have reduced the maximum number of people allowed on their boats, citing the problem of "overweight tourists". Capacity has now been reduced from 6 to 5 people on smaller vessels, and from 14 to 12 on larger vessels. Says Raoul Roveratto, the President of the Association of Substitute Gondoliers to La Repubblica: 'Tourists are now overweight. From some countries, bombs load [on to the boats]. Advancing with over half a tonne of meat on board is dangerous.'
Iceland has launched a new ad campaign, calling on people fed up with 2020 to record their screams into their mobile devices, which will then be broadcast through 1 of 7 speakers set up across the country.
OK, let's end with some food-related news: The FAO, GAIN (the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition) and the Johns Hopkins University recently launched the Food Systems Dashboard - an easy-to-use online tool designed to help decision-makers understand their food systems, and decide what action to take. Pretty neat!
I love you.
Daniel
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