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FoodTech Weekly #93 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
April 01, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #93
Hi there,
This is me, emerging from the two year isolation of reverse fat camp that COVID imposed.
I'm very ready to start seeing people in person again. So I'm really excited for the FoodHack Summit in Lausanne, on May 12-13, 2022, which I'll moderate. Grab your tickets before they sell out.
This week's rundown:
Europe is booming: DigitalFoodLab sees record-high activity for European FoodTech in new major report
Saving ugly produce: Diferente of Brazil bags $5M to salvage ugly produce and sell at a discount to consumers
Going horizontal: French vertical farming company Agricool is insolvent and is seeking a buyer
Let's go!
Conversations
Grabbed lunch in Stockholm this week with Anastasia Trofimova and Anna Sjöharald, Co-Founders of Your Beet. Anastasia has a background as a management consultant with BCG in Australia for many years; Anna spent almost a decade with H&M, e.g. on the e-commerce side. 'We need more solutions to help people transition from unhealthy and random food choices, to more healthy, climate-friendly and personalized food', Anastasia explains and continues: 'We personalize everything in our life, all our choices -- so why are we still eating generic, like one-size-fits-all'? Your Beet is an app, where consumers that onboard answer some questions around taste preferences, health, and nutritional needs; the app then suggests relevant plant-based meal recipes with customized, science-backed macro- and micronutrient profiles. And the consumer can then easily shop the foods needed for all the meals in-app, in a few clicks from an online grocer. Your Beet hosts many influencers (with hundreds of thousands of followers) that post their favorite recipes, which allow the community to conveniently buy and cook those meals. The first beta version of the app is launching in spring 2022, and the company believes the U.S., U.K., and Nordics will be their biggest markets, aiming for 5M users by 2025. Your Beet is currently hiringa CCO, and is kicking off a Seed round, so the company is interested in talking to strategic investors that e.g. are mission aligned, consumer-focused, and can help Your Beet successfully launch in the U.S. To get in touch with Anastasia, you can reach her via email and LinkedIn.
Anna Sjöharald and Anastasia Trofimova
Noteworthy
MycoTechnology of Colorado, U.S., announced a $85M Series round, bringing its total funding to $200M. The company uses mushroom fermentation to enable everything from alternative meats and bitter blockers to flavors and sugar-reducing solutions.
Lyon, France-based precision fermentation startup Bon Vivant, which focuses on dairy proteins to create e.g. cheese without cow's milk, has raised €4M. Investors in the round included Alliance for Impact, High Flyers Capital, Kima Ventures, Founders Future, and Picus Capital.
Resugar of Israel has bagged $3M; the company has developed an ingredient that can be substituted 1:1 to sugar but that reduces the sugar content by 70% and the calories by 50%.
Beewise, which is based in Israel and develops robotic beehives, banked a major $80M Series C round, backed by Insight Partners, Sanad Abu Dhabi, Fortissimo Capital, Corner Ventures, lool ventures, Atooro Fund, andMeitav Dash Investments. Beewise has developed Beehome, a solar-powered container that uses AI, robotics, imaging, software, and a mobile app to monitor and care for honeybees. The container houses up to 24 bee colonies and adjusts for e.g. climate and humidity, detects and eliminates pests and parasites, and can even harvest the honey the bees produce.
Israeli startup BioBetter is using tobacco plants to help scale production and bring down the production cost of cultivated meats. The company turns tobacco plants into bioreactors that produce growth factors that's needed in the production of cultivated meats.
Image: BioBetter/Alexander Seleznyov
French food safety company Novolyze has clinched $15M in Series A funding in a round led by WAVE Equity Partners, and supported by the European Innovation Council and Liberset. The company will use the new funding to staff up and expand its product offering. Novolyze helps companies digitalize food safety, sustainability and quality processes (e.g. sanitation control, traceability, energy and water reduction) which helps these customers save money.
Brazilian startup Diferente has secured 24M reais ($5M) to help rescue and deliver 'ugly' fruits and vegetables to households, using a subscription model. The company claims the sum raised is a record amount for a FoodTech startup in Latin America at this stage. The round was led by MAYA Capital, and joined by Collaborative Fund and FirstMinute Capital, as well as angels such as Matias Muchnick (NotCo), Abhi Ramesh (Misfits Market), and Hamish Shephard (HelloFresh).
Vertical farming startup Agricool of France is insolvent (link in French) and has gone into Chapter 11 protection; the company is now seeking a buyer. Agricool, which had raised €35M ($41M) in funding, produced things like salad, herbs, and strawberries to 100 stores in France. Meanwhile in the U.S., indoor farming company Gotham Greens is doubling its hydroponic greenhouse footprint this year to 1.2M sq. ft. (120K sq. meters).
A new peer-reviewed study shows that crops grown using regenerative agriculture practices have higher nutritional content. Due to the small sample size however, researchers noted that the findings are preliminary.
U.S.-based Regeneration VC has launched an inaugural $45M fund partly focused on foodtech; it will invest in packaging and materials, products and brands, and logistics and marketplaces.
DigitalFoodLab just released its 2022 FoodTech in Europe report. Investments in European FoodTech startups reached €9.5B in 2021, up 3x from 2020 (and the median investment in European FoodTech startups doubled to €1.8M). Europe is now home to 13 FoodTech unicorns, and DigitalFoodLab sees 10-20 'Soonicorns' that may become unicorns over the next 1-2 years. Last year also saw record-high M&A FoodTech activity across the continent. DigitalFoodLab now estimates that Europe's share of the global FoodTech ecosystem has risen from 12% in 2020 to 20% in 2021.
Image: DigitalFoodLab
Every 1% drop in plant-based burger patties lead to a 3% increase in market share, new research finds.
Indian startup AquaConnect, which digitizes the aqua value chain, has reeledin $8M in fresh funding.
French insect farming startup Ÿnsect has acquired U.S. competitor Jord Producers for an undisclosed amount, aiming to become a global market leader in the space. Meanwhile in Spain, local mealworm producer Tebrio is building a new €60M facility which will be able to manufacture 100,000 tons of products derived from mealworms every year by 2024.
eniferBio of Finland, which grows single-cell protein (SCP) using industrial side streams, is gearing up for a Series A round. The company says they're the only SCP company in the world that can achieve price parity with soy protein concentrate, which is priced at around €900 per ton and is widely used as animal feed and aquafeed.
Aqua Cultured Foods, which uses microbial fermentation techniques to grow whole-muscle seafood alternatives, says it has doubled its production output. The company has now opened its Seed round.
Image: Aqua Cultured Foods
Researchers in Singapore have produced oil from microalgae that they one day hope will be able to replace palm oil in food production. In other science news, Cambridge University's Crop Science Center will conduct field trialsof GM barley that could reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers.
The Rockefeller Foundation has announced its largest ever investment in food and nutrition, $105M, to make healthy and sustainable foods more accessible. The Foundation will invest in tools like True Cost Accounting (which evaluates all the costs of the food system beyond what consumers pay in stores), launch the Periodic Table of Food Initiative, support Food is Medicine programs, and advance Good Food Purchasing Program Standards that guide institutions like schools and hospitals around the world to make better food choices.
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
QOA (Germany) is hiring an Industrialization Lead... Fermify (Austria) is recruiting a Head of Food... The Periodic Table of Food Initiative is looking for a Postdoc Fellow... BettaF!sh (Germany) is on the lookout for a CFO... Oatlaws (Sweden) is bringing on a Key Account Manager... GFI Europe (Europe/flexible) is hiring a UK Policy Manager... MOA FoodTech (Spain) is recruiting a R&D Technician... Your Beet (Sweden) has an open role for a Chief Commercial Officer... Stockeld Dreamery (Sweden) is seeking a Quality Assurance Manager.
Sweden FoodTech Big Meet (June 1-3, 2022) is just three months away, and tickets are now on sale. For a 15% discount, use the code FOODTECHWEEKLY.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
Humanoid quad transformer video (2 min) - pretty cool!
Interesting post on animal agtech investments and startups, by Janette Barnard.
French fries are just as healthy for you as almonds (says research study funded in part by the Alliance for Potato Research and Education).
Indian farmers are using tech solutions (without using traps and poison) to keep away 'marauding monkeys' and elephants.
Some 86% of all plastics produced will be landfilled, incinerated, or leaked into the environment by 2040 if we continue with business as usual. But according to a new report released by Google, thoughtful interventions could reduce the plastic circularity gap by 59%, equal to diverting 4.5B metric tons of plastic.
Watch this guy (2 min video) having a hilarious conveyor belt five-course meal:
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to Heat Waves by Glass Animals. 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.