FoodTech Startups News: March #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 🥣
Cleaning up plant protein ingredient lists is possible from farm to fork
Despite the ‘natural’ branding, processed plant proteins can contain a lot of additives. But it doesn’t seem to matter to most consumers — and they can be removed at almost every step of the farm-to-fork process anyway, says the Good Food Institute.
The demand for plant-based protein is exploding. But as manufacturers try to recreate the taste, texture and appearance of meat and dairy products using plant proteins, they inevitably need to use additives such as flavours, colours and emulsifiers.
Do consumers accept these as being the natural, healthy and clean label products they are looking for or could there be a backlash beckoning?
The High Cost of Lab-to-Table Meat
Forget free-range, antibiotic-free, and grass-fed — tomorrow’s burger will be lab-cultured. Scientists are creating a new slaughterhouse-free food group called clean meat: edible animal protein grown in a vat. Stem cells are extracted from animals, brewed in a bioreactor, fortified with nutrients like amino acids and glucose, and structured around collagen “scaffolds.” It’s not just about cultivating the ideal boneless chicken wing: These miracle meats could reduce the planet-depleting land and water use of traditional animal agriculture by more than 80 percent. “From an investment standpoint, this is potentially a trillion-dollar market opportunity,” says New Crop Capital partner Christopher Kerr, leading VCs to grab a stake in their labstock of choice.
Seducing Ploutos 💸
100+ Investors, $103 M in Ancient Nutrition Capital Round
It helps to have friends — and soon bone broth products company Ancient Nutrition will have many friends to lean on. The brand of “real food nutritional products” announced today the close of a $103 million minority investment. Led by VMG Partners, the deal also included investment from Hillhouse Capital, ICONIQ Capital and a distinctive network of friends — a 100-plus member co-investor network hereon known as the “Ancient Pioneers.”
AgriFood Tech Investment Surges to $10.1bn Bringing in a New Normal
Early Stage investment in agrifood tech startups reached $10.1 billion in 2017, posting a 29% year-over-year increase and reversing the downward trend of 2016 when agrifood tech investing dropped 9% to $7.8 billion from $8.6 billion in 2015.
2017 was a year of extremes. Large deals pushed the total investment volume up to post an encouraging 29% growth, but deal count fell by 17% to 949, with the most dramatic contraction at the crucial seed stage.
Large deals characterized 2017 funding for agrifood tech startups as the sector continues to mature and some large, international investors entered the space.
Karyogamy 🤱
Insect Food Company Aspire Acquires Cricket Protein Bar Maker Exo
Aspire Food Group, which manufactures a variety of food products made from crickets, announced Thursday that it has acquired Exo, which makes protein bars made from crickets. The acquisition is effective as of today.
Interestingly, Aspire cofounders Mohammed Ashour and Shobhita Soor and Exo cofounders Greg Sewitz and Gabi Lewis were all members of Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2016. And it was that Under 30 connection that helped lead to the deal being made.
Citius, Altius, Fortius 🎟️
Kraft Heinz launches new platform to ‘shape the future of food’
The Kraft Heinz Co. is launching Springboard, a new platform “dedicated to nurturing, scaling and accelerating growth of disruptive U.S. brands within the food and beverage space,” the company said.
The Springboard platform seeks to partner with and help develop brands within one of four pillars: natural and organic; specialty and craft; health and performance; and experiential brands.
Natural and organic products, according to the Springboard web site, may fit the following descriptions: certified organic, plant-based proteins, locally sourced, farm-to-table and nutrient-dense superfoods.
Rod of Asclepius 💊
Habitual protein intake may explain ‘no effect’ of insect protein supplementation, study says
Supplementation using insect-derived protein appears to offer no muscle mass or strength advantages over carbohydrate supplementation, according to a pioneering Danish study.
The preliminary study demonstrated a non-significant effect between treatment groups — an observation explained by the habitual high protein intake of the young men featured in the study as well as the small sample size.
Using protein isolate extracted from the lesser mealworm (Alphitobius diaperinus), these men enrolled in the first-of-its-kind trial to see if any physical improvements to eight weeks of resistance training could be gained using insect protein as the main protein source.
Dining with Lucullus 🍽️
Millennials’ eating habits are wildly different from their parents’ — and the food industry has to face urgent consequences
Millennials, the largest living generation, are poised this year to have more spending power than baby boomers, according to analysts at Bernstein.
And so, it’s important to understand what they’re buying, and how they’re different from their parents.
“What was once an academic exercise (how will millennial spending trends affect demand in some fuzzy future?), takes on a new sense of urgency,” Bernstein’s Sara Senatore and Alexia Howard said in a note on Friday.
Cornucopia 🍱
Scan and go: Co-op shoppers to avoid tills with phone app
The Co-op is set to roll out technology that allows shoppers to scan and pay for items on their smartphone while they shop, and then walk out of the store without visiting a till.
The retailer’s “shop, scan and go” service follows Amazon’s experiment with an automated convenience store in the US. Such initiatives could spell the beginning of the end for the supermarket checkout — fuelling fears that automation could eventually eliminate millions of retail jobs. In Britain, 2.9 million people are employed in the retail trade.
Amazon has committed to roughly $22 billion in future food purchases as it bulks up Whole Foods
A small footnote in Amazon’s annual report shows the kind of financial commitment the company is making to the grocery business, beyond the $13 billion it spent last year on Whole Foods.
Amazon’s “unconditional purchase obligations,” a required disclosure for future payment agreements, ballooned to $24.2 billion in 2017, according to its 10-K filing last month. Amazon had just $1.6 billion of such obligations prior to the Whole Foods deal, and never had more than $2 billion in company history.
Beating Pheidippides 🏃
Weight Watchers plans launch of branded meal kits
Look out, Blue Apron, Weight Watchers is coming for a piece of the meal-kit industry pie.
The weight loss company is set to launch a line of “quick prep” meal kits at grocery stores, according to a report from Bloomberg.
The Oprah Winfrey-backed company already has a partnership with Chef’d, which provides customers with the option to select meals that have been approved by Weight Watchers.
Ocado has ‘need to know’ projects that even some staff don’t know about
Online grocery business Ocado has super-secret internal projects that even many staff don’t know about, according to its chief technology officer.
Paul Clarke told Business Insider at Retail Week Live this week in London: “We’re reasonably secretive about things internally too. We have projects that are on a ‘need to know’ basis. It’s done on a project by project basis. It’s an important part of protecting our future.”
Blue Apron will start selling its meal kits in stores
Blue Apron announced today it will bring its meal kits to stores. The news arrives at a time when the meal kit subscription company is struggling to grow and retain its users, who are often put off by the expense of the direct-shipped meal kits and the need to commit to an ongoing subscription. In recent months, Blue Apron has also laid off hundreds, lost its CEO, and has continued to post disappointing earnings.
In February, the company reported its subscriber base had fallen to 746,000, down from 856,000 the prior quarter, and down from its peak of one million last year.
Sons of Ivaldi 🛠️
Meet Brain, the company bringing robots to your supermarket
Self-driving cars have dominated chatter about the potential of autonomous technology. However, focusing on just vehicle applications misses how far and wide automation has already begun to go.
Take Brain Corp, a US-based developer of tech for self-driving robots that raised $114 million last summer in a round led by the SoftBank Vision Fund. So, what application for autonomous tech convinced the Japanese investment powerhouse to part with its cash?
Cleaning.
47.3 million U.S. adults have access to a smart speaker, report says
Nearly one in five U.S. adults today have access to a smart speaker, according to new research out this week from Voicebot.ai. That means adoption of these voice-powered devices has grown to 47.3 million U.S. adults in two years — or 20 percent of U.S. adult population.
To clarify, “access to a smart speaker” means the adults have one in their home, but they may not be a primary user. So, a spouse, a roommate, or a live-in partner would also qualify as a smart speaker user, according to this study.
Forging Gleipnir 🔗
Carrefour uses blockchain to create “transparent” chicken
Consumers that want to know everything about the chicken they eat will rejoice at Carrefour’s latest addition, because it will detail everything about the origin of its private label chicken thanks to blockchain technology.
Whoever is concerned about the Auvergne-based chicken’s cycle before it arrives in the supermarket, can easily track that soon: Carrefour will place all the information on the label, from where it was bred, what it ate and where it was slaughtered. Every step in the supply chain (breeder, processor, butcher, …) will need to register their information in a fraud-proof and secured database, namely blockchain. The difference between a traditional database and blockchain is that the latter does not store the information centrally and that no one has access to all the data. That means that neither Carrefour nor someone in the supply chain can intervene.
Return of Persephone 🌱
Major trends in agtech for 2018
The disruption over the last decade in the retail food value chain gained momentum in 2017 with the IPO of Blue Apron, and acquisitions such as Bai Brands($1.7 billion), Sir Kensington Condiments and Whole Foods by Amazon ($13.7 billion). This wave of disruption is being paralleled in the agricultural value chain, driven by increasing land turnover and altered land use, renewed focus on sustainability and, as in retail, changing consumer preference.
From strawberries to apples, a wave of agriculture robotics may ease the farm labor crunch
Some farmers are responding to the worsening farm labor shortage by turning to automated harvesting equipment and other advanced technology that perform tasks such as pruning, seeding and weeding.
Robotic harvesting vehicles are being tested in Florida and California to pick strawberries and replace labor-intensive tasks normally performed by dozens of farm workers. Also, robotic machinery is being tested to harvest apples and other crops, and efforts are underway to develop small agriculture field robots that can attack weeds or take care of other farm work.
Global ag tech startup investments rise 29 percent in 2017 -study
Global agriculture and food technology startups received a record $10.1 billion in investments in 2017, up 29 percent from 2016, according to an annual report from food and agriculture investment platform AgFunder.
The number of deals fell 17 percent to 994 as investors made larger bets on fewer companies, the data showed.
*The year featured DowDuPont’s $300 million purchase of farm management software company Granular and Deere & Co’s $305 million deal for ag robotics company Blue River Technology. They were the two largest ag tech acquisitions since Monsanto Co’s nearly $1 billion purchase of Climate Corporation in 2013, AgFunder said.
That’s all for today, thanks for reading!
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