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- FoodTech Weekly #95 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #95 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
April 15, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #95
Hi there,
I'll be a speaker for an event highlighting the International Baby Food Day, April 17, 8pm CEST (the event will be recorded and available for later viewing). Am not sure why I'm qualified to speak, but Iwasa baby myself at one point. Sign up here.
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Earlier this spring, Sandra and I interviewed James Rogers, Founder and CEO of Apeel, for our podcast The Appetizer (more on that below -- give it a listen, it was a fun conversation!). I will do a fireside chat on stage with James at the FoodHack Summit in Lausanne next month, so if you felt some questions were left unanswered in the podcast, let me know and I might ask them to James at the Summit. Get your tickets now.
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Today's song pick Moskau is of course pure coincidence with the fact that Russian flagship cruiser 'Moskva' just carried out a special military operation to no longer float.
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I'm taking a holiday break next week, so FoodTech Weekly will be back on April 29.
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This week's rundown:
Allez Les Bleus: Umiami of France bags $30M in new funding to bring plant-based chicken breast to market
Ground Control to Major Tom, Take Your Protein Pills and Put Your Helmet On: Startup Eternal develops food-on-demand device for astronauts to print food in space
Postman Pat to the rescue? A British charity is hiring people to spend five months running the world's most remote post office - in Antartica
Let's go!
Conversations
James Rogers of Apeel was in Stockholm earlier this year so we took the opportunity to interview him for The Appetizer. James did a Ph.D. in materials science, and started Apeel in 2012, to help solve the problem that up to 40% of fresh produce is wasted. 'Food goes bad for two simple reasons: Water goes out, and oxygen goes in. From a materials science perspective, that's a diffusion problem.' When James had his idea for creating a protective coating around fruits and vegetables to extend their shelf lives, he picked up some books in a library, read them, and felt that his idea could work. And it did. Apeel takes plant material and creates an edible, transparent coating to fruits and vegetables. Waste is an invisible problem, so when Apeel started out, it had to show grocers that reducing that invisible food waste meant saving money. 'When we give food more time, we have a higher likelihood that that food makes it to someone before it goes "bad".' Today, the company has raised over $640M, has 500+ employees, and its system is used in about 40 processing locations in North America, South America, and Europe. 'We're decades from done with the work that we're doing. [...] We're on a journey to re-optimize the system', James concluded. Don't miss this conversation.
Yours truly, Sandra, and James recording the podcast
Noteworthy
Umiami of France, founded as late as 2020, announced a $30M raise to bring its plant-based chicken breasts to market. The company has developed a method which enables whole cuts comparable to animal-sourced meat. The funding round was led by Astanor Ventures, Redalpine Venture Partners, and investment platform French Partners.
Image: Umiami
Nordic Umami Company of Finland has secured a €800K grant from Business Finland and NextGeneration EU, to build an industrial-scale pilot. Nordic Umami uses natural fermentation processes to turn industrial side-streams (such as wasted plant ingredients) into umami flavors. The company now aims to raise a €2M Seed round. I spoke with Nordic Umami Company's leadership for #64 of FoodTech Weekly.
U.S. regenerative agriculture company Eco Agriculture has brought in $4.7M in new funding. The company provides technical crop advisory, plant nutrition and biological products, and plant health and soil analysis.
Brilliant Planet of the U.K. has raised a $12M round, co-led by Union Square Ventures and Toyota Ventures, and supported by e.g. Future Positive Capital, S2G Ventures, Hatch, and Pegasus Tech Ventures. The company grows algae in open-air pond-based systems to sequester carbon, and has managed to master the process of algae blooms, which lower costs. The company now plans to expand it's 3 hectare research facility in Morocco to a 30 hectare commercial demonstration facility. Brilliant Planet was previously called SuSeWi and then planned to grow algae as fish feed, but has now pivoted to carbon sequestration (meaning the algae will need to be stored, e.g. buried, to not release the carbon again).
Image: Brilliant Planet's pilot facility in Morocco
AgTech startup Right Farm, based in the United Arab Emirates, has nabbed$2.8M in fresh funding. The B2B platform sources produce directly from local and international farmers, and then supplies the fruits and vegetables to the local food and retail sector.
California company Eternal, which develops a device that can print food-on-demand for astronauts (using a mycoprotein ingredient, i.e. derived from mushrooms) is setting up a lab at the NASA Kennedy Space Center. (h/t: Codon).
Fascinating article in The New Yorker on True Cost Accounting, which e.g. visits the grocery store De Aanzet in Amsterdam, which lists two prices for each product; the normal price and the 'true' price, to highlight the hidden social, environmental, and health costs of food production. Shoppers may choose to pay the true price for products, and the extra money is then redirected towards projects that aim to mitigate the harms of the current food system.
OK, one more article really worth reading, on whether produce prescription programs can help reverse the trend of increasing diet-related diseases. In perhaps related news, a new study has found that plant-based diets are associated with lower Type 2 diabetes risks.
California company Living Carbon says it has sped up tree growth by 53% by inserting new genes into poplars, meaning the trees are able to store atmospheric carbon more quickly. Photosynthesis is the biological process by which plants convert light into energy, and has pretty much looked the same for at least hundreds of millions of years. It's also an inefficient process, as crop plants convert less than 1% of the light they are exposed to into usable energy (as comparison, modern photovoltaic cells used to generate electricity are able to transform about 20% of the sunlight into electricity). Improving the efficiency of photosynthesis in plants could have significant impacts on agriculture, reducing the amount of land and water needed for food production. American scientists have already e.g. increased the yields of tobacco plants by upwards of 20% by inserting new genes into the plants.
RoboBurger, a robotic vending machine, can cook burgers in minutes -- without any human involvement (well, except for restocking the machine every few days). Video here (which also shows some other robotic food cooking vending machines).
Image: YouTube
This piece of news is actually from late February, but I had missed it: Danish AgTech weather startup FieldSense raised a $2.9M Seed round from Danish Agro, Rockstart, and Pajbjergfonden. FieldSense provides hyper-local weather information and forecasts, based on data from in-field, solar-powered weather stations. to help farmers make better decisions.
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
MeliBio (US) is hiring for a number of positions... Nowadays is recruiting a Director of Customer Retention... Gainful (US) is seeking a Head of Product Innovation.
About two weeks until the application deadline for the Nutreco Feed and Food Tech Challenge.
FACT, the Food and Ag Conference at Tuck, is taking place April 26-28, 2022. Virtual conference bringing together thoughtleaders discussing topics such as affordable nutrition, insect protein, the economics of carbon programs, blockchain and food traceability, and more. For the full conference agenda and to register, visit here. The event is open to the public and all registration proceeds are donated to the conference partner, the Daily Table, a non-profit grocery chain dedicated to providing nutritious foods to communities most in need in the Boston area.
A Ph.D. student at the Swedish University of Agriculture (SLU) is conducting research on SMEs in ag/food, collecting input from industry insiders. The student is looking for online or in-person interview opportunities (email him here, time commitment is 30-45 mins) or for people to answer his online survey (for founders/employees or suppliers/consultants/other stakeholders of Ag/Food/social enterprise companies, or for founders/employees or suppliers/consultants/other stakeholders of non-Ag/Food/social enterprise companies).
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
This robot made of magnetic slime designed to be deployed inside a human body to perform various tasks is absolutely not the stuff nightmares are made of:
Source: New Scientist / Twitter
A British charity is seeking people to spend five months in Antarctica, to run the world's most remote post office. In addition to postal duties, candidates should also be prepared to welcome visitors to the small on-site museum as well as conduct counts of the nearby colony of Gentoo penguins. Says one of the former postmasters: "You have to do a lot of cleaning and there's lots of penguin poo, which we call guano, but there's never time to be bored - it's a really interesting place."
The new Politics of Protein report looks promising, but I haven't had time to read it yet (h/t: Phillip S). Here's a take based on the report.
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to Moskau by Dschinghis Khan. 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.