Thursday Food News — Edition #1
Welcome to our first Thursday Food News!
Every Thursday we’ll share articles about what’s new in the food industry, from the new shiny delivery startups to what we could eat 50 years from now.
How a tech startup accidentally cut down on food waste
In New York City, as much as one third of business waste is from food scraps and food-soiled paper and yard waste.
Now, an unlikely entrant to the battle against food waste is software company BlueCart, which found itself in the food waste solution game completely by accident.
It’s a mobile platform that was designed to make it easier for restaurants to order from all of the various suppliers via mobile phone, saving time and money and as it turns out reducing wasted food too.
Eight disruptive startups are shaping the future of food and technology
Meet eight innovative food disruptive startups honored by the first ReThink Food Innovator Program. The RTF’s inaugural program “recognizes eight disruptive startups shaping the future of food and technology,” according to a release from MIT Media Labs.
The eight companies were chosen by MIT Media Labs, CIA, and Ideo global design company.
The program this year looked for the “freshest thinkers” in six focus areas: Fermented Foods & the Microbiome; Back to Basics; Urban Agriculture; Food Science for Greater Good; Eating for the Eco-System; and Culinary Confidence.
The Future Of Food Tech & How To Raise $100k In Your First Day On Kickstarter
David Rabie is the Founder and CEO of Tovala, the creator of a smart oven that cooks perfectly made meals by baking, boiling and steaming them in under 30 minutes. The meals can either be delivered prepackaged from Tovala or be made using a crowdsourced recipe.
Last winter, Tovala graduated from Y-Combinator and a few months ago Tovala launched a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised $255,603 with over 1,000 backers.
What You Missed from the MUNCHIES Future of Food Week
This week, MUNCHIES has been exploring the future of food on planet Earth. Where do restaurants, grocery shopping, chefs, fishing, and farming sit at the dinner table of tomorrow?
While no one can know for sure what we’ll be eating when our great-grandchildren are berating us for not knowing how to make a holographic FaceTime call on the iPhone 375c, they had a go at exploring the food issues that’ll be impacting our mealtimes for decades to come.
Online food delivery still presents a $210B market opportunity
According to research firm CB Insights, international inflows of capital to the food delivery category dropped 69 percent in Q1 ’16, and then dropped another 49 percent in Q2 ’16.
While the tide has definitely turned from a financing perspective, the market opportunity presented by online food delivery still remains as large as ever.
In fact, in an updated industry report from June of this year, Morgan Stanley Research points to a core addressable restaurant spend of $210 billion, of which online food delivery comprises only $10 billion — less than 5 percent.
By those metrics, online food delivery is unequivocally “still in its nascency.”
Nerds Over Cattle: How Food Technology Will Save the World
There’s fun food technology, like meal and grocery delivery, and then there’s urgent food technology: the kind that can address the looming questions of how we’re going to feed 9.7 billion people by 2050, and how we’re going to do that without worsening the climate crisis.
This might sound like it would require radically more efficient crops — a new green revolution. Or maybe it will require a new type of fertilizer, a crazy advance in nanotechnology, or something involving interstellar farming. Paging Elon Musk!
But no, in fact the solution to both of the big problems in food technology — how we’re going to feed a burgeoning population and what we’re going to do about climate change — is actually pretty simple: plant-based protein.
Here’s How Scraps Can Help Grow The Food Of The Future
It’s tough to think of something more mundane than getting your electric bill in the mail. But that’s what launched two Chicago scientists down a path that just might lead to a farming revolution.
About five years ago, chemistry professor Elena Timofeeva and physics researcher John Katsoudas, who both work at the Illinois Institute of Technology, began to dabble in aquaponics, a soil-free method of farming that grows plants and aquatic life through connected systems.
The two, who are married, built an aquaponic system in their basement and began growing produce. But the eye-popping electric bill quickly showed them that the cost of powering their fledging farm was far greater than what they could grow. Power costs, it turns out, are a major drawback to the aquaponics industry.
