- FoodTech Weekly
- Posts
- FoodTech Weekly #98 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #98 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
May 13, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #98
Hi there,
Greetings from beautiful Lausanne, Switzerland, where I'm moderating the FoodHack Summit. The impressions are really too many to summarize (but I'll try to do that next week). In short, it's been amazing to convene with the entire community for 2 days; 550+ people from all over the world, ranging from startups and scaleups to investors, corporates, journalists, and thoughtleaders.
Nothing beats meeting, and connecting, with people in person. Catching up under the shade of a tree with a bite to eat. Bumping into someone that you've only ever seen on Zoom calls. Grabbing a random drink or dinner with others. It's been magical.
I've done fireside chats on stage with e.g. Björn Öste of Oatly and Eric Archambeau of Astanor, as well as panels with folks like Talash Huijbers of Insectipro (Kenya), Ady Beitler of Nilus (Argentina), Nina Mannheimer of Klim (Germany), and Nnaemeka Ikegwuono of Cold Hubs (Nigeria). I've had countless meetings, booked and serendipitous, and tried many novel foods and ingredients, from bee-free honey to plant-based salmon filets.
Cultivated meat is getting closer and closer to market (in a big way). Plant-based alternatives are improving in terms of both texture, taste, and nutrition. Investments are reaching entrepreneurs, in new geographies, aiming to tackle complex challenges.
There's been so much energy and such passion to try to solve the big issues of the food system, through using technology and innovation. These days at the FoodHack Summit shows that the future is worth looking forward to.
Fireside chat with Guy Galonska, CTO and Co-Founder of Infarm
This week's rundown:
Full Harvest bags $5M more in Series B funding, helping the company expand its ugly produce platform
Brightseed banks $68M for machine learning platform that discover new helpful substances in plants
Duck runs marathon, gets medal
Let's go!
Conversations
I've had countless interesting conversations this week at the FoodHack Summit. Hope to be recap at least one of them, next week :) But in the meantime, I'll share a couple of more photos from this week in Switzerland:
Noteworthy
Full Harvest, a California startup which runs a digital B2B marketplace that connects farmers selling imperfect and surplus produce with commercial produce buyers, has announced an extension of its $23M Series B round by another $5M. The new growth financing comes from Rabobank's Food & Agri Innovation Fund and JAL Innovation Fund.
Spanish startup Cubiq Foods has banked $6M in fresh funding from investors including Cargill and Blue Horizon, to bring its cell-cultivated fat ingredient to market by 2023. Cubiq says its fat can give alternative meat products a more realistic flavor profile.
Mooji Meats, which 3D prints plant-based meats, has secured $3M in new funding. Investors in the round included The Good Startup, Collaborative Fund, Lever VC, and AgFunder.
Brightseed, which has developed a machine learning platform called Forager that it says might discover new and helpful substances in plants, has announced a $68M Series B round. The company has already mapped two million plant compounds, and says its process is 100x faster than the traditional lab-based process.
Estonian startup Gelatex says its nanofiber scaffolding system can now support the production of 300 tons of cultivated meat per year. Gelatex claims it has brought down the cost of cultivated meat scaffolding by 99% compared to other, conventional alternatives.
French alt seafood startup SEAFOOD REBOOT has closed a $3.2M pre-seed round, less than 6 months after the company was founded. The startup uses algae and seaweed to develop its products, hoping to launch pilot production next year.
WNWN, a U.K. company using traditional fermentation to create cocoa-free chocolate from ingredients such as barley and carob, will launch the world's first consumer sale of its cocoa-free chocolate. In related news in the cocoa space, Swiss-Ghanaian company QOA nabbed $10M in Series A funding to upcycle cocoa pulp (currently considered waste in the industry) into useful products.
Image: WNWN
Sencrop of France announced $18M in Series B funding, led by Jerusalem Venture Partners. The company is deploying a network of Internet-connected weather stations, and with precise and real-time insights from these, farmers can e.g. anticipate weather conditions like frost, mildew, and other problems. The stations also provides information on disease and pest development conditions.
A new report from environmental groups Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics shows that plastic recycling rates in the U.S. dropped to about 5% in 2021 (down from 8.7% in 2018). Per capita plastic waste in the U.S. has gone up from 60 lbs (27 kgs) per year in 1980, to 218 lbs (99 kgs) in 2018 - an increase of 263%.
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
VEAT (Sweden) is hiring for several roles, such as Head of Growth, a Sales and Business Dev Manager, and Sr. Full Stack Developer... Hooked Foods(Sweden) is recruiting a Key Account Manager... Oceanium (UK/remote) is looking for a Finance Director... Motatos (Sweden) is bringing on a Strategy Manager.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
Random Stuff
A new virtual reality headset developed by Carnegie Mellon University scientists is able to recreate the sensation of touch, in and around the user's mouth.
Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig, a climate research scientist at NASA and Columbia University, is this year's World Food Prize Laureate. She won after having done pioneering work modeling the interaction between climate change has on food systems. This has helped 90+ countries develop adaptation and mitigation plans.
New research shows that Medieval kings mostly ate vegetables, cereals, and bread (rather than meat and beer).
Man builds rail carts and rides abandoned railroad tracks in Southern California (video, 30 sec).
This duck runs a marathon, wins medal (video, 30 sec).
I love you.
Daniel
- - -
This issue was produced while listening to Rosa himmel by Molly Sandén. 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.