FoodTech Startups News: February #2
Stay up to date with what’s cooking in the food startups world!
Welcome to ShakeUp Factory’s News Digest!
Here are the latest impacts startups had on the food world:
Pygmalion’s Kitchen 🥣
How Cancer Researchers Are ‘Rebuilding Meat’
“It’s one thing to create a sausage with a homogeneous bite,” Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown says. “It’s another thing to create the varied texture of muscle, tendon, fat, sometimes even a little bit of bone. It took a really long time to get that right.” About nine years, actually — that’s how long the company’s been around.
Seducing Ploutos 💸
Balderton Capital leads $25M Series A in ‘urban farming’ platform Infarm
Infarm, a startup that has developed vertical farming tech for grocery stores, restaurants and local distribution centres to bring fresh and artisan produce much closer to the consumer, has raised $25 million in Series A funding.
The round is led by London-based VC firm Balderton Capital, with participation from TriplePoint Capital, Mons Investments, and previous investors Cherry Ventures, QUADIA and LocalGlobe.
It brings the total raised by the Berlin-based company to $35 million, including a $2.5 million grant from the European Commission as part of the Horizon 2020 program.
Danone Manifesto Ventures Leads $30M Investment in Harmless Harvest
Organic coconut beverage brand Harmless Harvest today announced it has raised $30 million in growth capital in an investment round led by Danone Manifesto Ventures, the venture arm of French multinational food and beverage corporation Danone.
The San Francisco-based company, which markets refrigerated coconut water and probiotic drinks, will use the the investment to enhance sustainable production capacity in Thailand, increase brand awareness and widen distribution, according to a press release.
Swiggy garners $100 million Series F funding led by Meituan-Dianping and Naspers
Swiggy, the Bengaluru-based foodtech company has raised Series F funding of $100 million led by Meituan-Dianping, the Chinese e-commerce, and hyperlocal giant and existing investor Naspers.
The company had raised Series E funding of $80 million in May last year. The funding will primarily be used to strengthen their market position, new service and product offerings. The total funding raised by Swiggy so far is $255 million in six funding rounds.
Karyogamy 🤱
Logistics startup Genie acquires food delivery platform Dinein
Chennai-based hyperlocal delivery and logistics startup Genie Solutions Pvt Ltd has acquired food delivery firm Dinein.in an all-stock deal, a company statement said.
As part of the deal, Genie will acquire the Dinein.in brand, the 25-member team, the delivery fleet, restaurant partner contracts, technology and the startup’s call centre business, the statement said. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Fighting the third Horseman ⚖️
9 Startups Taking a Bite Out of Food Waste
We love our food here at Nanalyze. Globalization means that all of our favorite cuisines can be sandwiched onto one urban foodie block. It’s possible to buy tropical fruits like mangosteens in wintry Vancouver or navel oranges in an open-air food market in Thailand. All that food comes with a price, and we’re not just talking the markup in hipster whole food co-ops. Food waste is a trillion-dollar by-product. Or, more accurately, food waste costs the world about $1 trillion per year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30 to 40 percent of the food supply. That’s more than $200 billion ending up in the compost heap (though only about 25 percent of Americans actually compost).
Now You Can Buy Insanely Cheap Restaurant Leftovers Using an App
The concept of food waste usually conjures images of servers removing half-eaten meals from diners’ tables and chucking the remains of the meal into the trash. There is, however, a completely separate type of restaurant food waste: the untouched edibles thrown out of the kitchen. Maybe someone ordered too many avocados, or the chef made more soup than there are diners to eat it. Whatever it may be, a lot of perfectly edible food is going to waste, and more and more see this as a big problem.
Rod of Asclepius 💊
There’s an absurd amount of sugar hiding in most of the food you eat — and Silicon Valley has a new way to reveal it
Sugar lurks in countless unsuspecting foods, including ketchup, granola bars, salad dressings, and yogurt. A glass of orange juice has roughly the same amount of sugar as a can of Sprite. Foods like white rice, white bread, and bagels may as well be sugar given the effect they have on your body.
“If you go out to fast-food places and you watch them prepare these meals, they’ll put on the order of three cups of rice on the plate — so somewhere around 120 grams of carbs — before any real food has hit the plate,” Edward Damiano, a diabetes researcher and professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, told Business Insider. “That’s massive: That’s twice the carb load recommended for one person in a single meal.”
Cornucopia 🍱
Soylent Looks to Shed Techie Image With 7-Eleven Store Expansion
Soylent is sidling up alongside Slurpee.
The company, best known for chalky nutrition-rich shakes used by coders who are too busy to eat, is trying to fuel growth by pulling in mainstream customers at the convenience-store chain 7-Eleven.
Walmart’s Latest Is Acquisition Is a Virtual Reality Startup
The big box discount chain said in a blog post early Tuesday that it had bought a virtual reality startup, Spatialand, as a cornerstone of its strategy to develop technology that it’s betting will eventually reshape how shopping takes places both in its stores and online. It is the latest acquisition by Walmart, which in the last year and a half has bought digital businesses ranging from big like Jet.com to much smaller ones such as online retailer Modcloth.
Beating Pheidippides 🏃
Blue Apron shares rally after Walmart named ‘logical buyer’ of meal kit brand
Shares of Blue Apron rallied nearly 7 percent Friday after a Gabelli & Company analyst said the meal kit company could be an acquisition target for Walmart.
Analyst Matthew Trusz initiated coverage of the brand on Friday, recommending the stock as a buy to investors. He said Blue Apron is “turning the corner on well-publicized operational issues” that dragged its share price from $10 in June to a little over $3 in current trading.
Here’s How Amazon Prime’s New Whole Foods Delivery Will Work
Amazon will be offering free two-hour delivery of Whole Foods products to Amazon Prime customers in select cities starting Thursday.
While the service is only available in Austin, Cincinnati, Dallas, and Virginia Beach for now, Amazon plans to expand the Whole Foods Prime Now service across the country over the course of the year.
GrubHub’s stock rockets as Yum partnership is seen as a ‘big win’
Shares of GrubHub Inc. shot up more than 27% in Thursday trade after the company announced a partnership with Yum Brands Inc. under which Yum will acquire $200 million in GrubHub shares.
The deal is aimed at driving online sales and delivery to Yum’s chains KFC and Taco Bell. Pizza Hut, Yum’s other restaurant chain, already fills more than 100 million delivery transactions each year in the U.S. and manages a fleet of drivers, according to the release.
Why click-and-mortar may be the key to cracking India’s grocery delivery business
What are the keys to success in the grocery delivery business? BigBasket co-founder Hari Menon thinks a deep understanding of the sector is more important than technology. Supply chain, procurement and inventory management are crucial for scaling and making profits, he says. Lastly, Menon thinks that strong linkages between offline and online are crucial for such businesses to be successful.
Forging Gleipnir 🔗
The Blockchain Comes to Agriculture
The blockchain became a huge (and, to many, difficult to understand) story at the end of 2017 thanks to one possible application for the technology: cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin. But the underlying technology of the blockchain — we’ll get to this in a sec, don’t worry — is much more than wild investment in digital money. The very first agricultural commodity trade using blockchain technology was just conducted, and you can expect to see more in the future. So what’s going on here? What does all of this mean? How does it work? Answers below!
Your “grass-fed” milk may actually not be. But a new technology could change that
How much fresh grass did the “grass-fed” cows who make your milk eat? A team of scientists from Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture has found a new technique they say can determine exactly that. Their findings, reported in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry last month, suggest that fluorescence spectroscopy — a relatively cheap and simple form of light measurement — could be a way to assure shoppers about “grass-fed” claims in the supermarket. And it could prove to be an important tool for transparency in the organic dairy sector, where cows are required to spend time foraging outdoors — something critics allege doesn’t always happen.
Return of Persephone 🌱
TechAccel Backs Chloroplast Engineering Startup Plastomics
Kansas-based agtech venture development organization TechAccel has backed ag biotech startup Plastomics.
The St. Louis-based startup is working to shorten the pipeline for developing new seeds with multiple transgenic traits, increasing the speed and lowering the cost of designing new seeds.
American Robotics Raises $2m to Bring Fully Autonomous Drones to Market
American Robotics (AR), a Boston-based startup developing a fully autonomous drone for farmers, has raised a $2 million second seed round from investors close to home.
Investors in this round were identical to those particpating in the company’s $ 1.1 seed round last year, including Brain Robotics Capital, a fund focused on AI, robotics, and IoT, and unnamed angel investors.
That’s all for today, thanks for reading!
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