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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Alison Davis

Evigence Raises $18M for Its Food Freshness Sensors Small Enough to Fit on a Packaging Sticker

Food technology company Evigence announced the close of an $18m series B funding round this week. The company, which makes real-time food freshness detecting sensors, plans to use the money to further develop its system’s data collection and analytics capabilities and launch additional commercial partnerships in the US and Europe

Evigence’s sensors, which are small enough to be incorporated into a sticker that goes onto produce packaging, can detect the temperature and time passage and uses that data to calculate the current and projected freshness of produce. Retailers, distributors, and consumers can use them to determine the real-time freshness of a product. Evingen’s sensors can give visual cues such as through color change on the sticker or have an hourglass empty to let the consumer know when a product is no longer fresh.

You can watch the Evigence system in action below:

Real Time Freshness Monitors

“At Evigence, we aim to redefine the way the world manages fresh food”, said Evigence Founder & CEO Yoav Levy. “Today there is no objective way to measure freshness. Small variations in temperature during transit or storage can lead to waste of perfectly good food on one end of the spectrum, or problems with food safety on the other end. Date codes don’t account for these fluctuations. We want to change the paradigm.”

The company recently announced it is working with meal kit delivery company Marley Spoon by Martha Stewart. Marley Spoon implemented the Evigence solution, wich allows it and consumers to ensure freshness of meal kit ingredients when they arrive to customers’ homes. Evigence’s sensors track time and temperature exposure over the course of the meal kits’ shipping journey, from packing to the customers’ doorstep. When the meal kit arrives at home, customers can scan the sensor upon receipt of the meal kit to confirm freshness.

According to Levy, “tens of millions” of Evigence sensors have been deployed across a variety of food and beverage markets which has collectively resulted in 20% shelf life extension and 33% reduction in waste.

Afresh Rolls Out Its AI-Powered Fresh Food Management System to 2,200 Albertsons

Afresh Technologies, a fresh food management technology company, has announced the rollout of its predictive ordering and inventory management platform to more than 2,200 Albertsons Companies stores in the United States, including Safeway, Jewel-Osco, Shaw’s, Vons and ACME. The platform, which helps store teams to better order and plan fresh produce inventory, reducing food waste and achieving superior freshness in their stores, was implemented within seven months, making it one of the fastest in-store technology rollouts in the grocery industry.

The Afresh platform also provides department managers with easy-to-use ordering tools that leverage real-time insights. The company’s CEO and co-founder, Matt Schwartz, said that “supply chain and store technology implementations typically require a multi-year transformation and radical overhauls,” but that Afresh and Albertsons Companies were able to complete the roll out of the system in just months.

Suzanne Long, Chief Sustainability and Transformation Officer at Albertsons Companies, said that “driving sustainability practices across Albertsons Cos. is essential to our business and the communities we serve. Our partnership with Afresh helps us improve ordering and better manage our inventory of fresh fruits and vegetables so our customers have access to fresher products, and we’re able to make meaningful progress toward achieving our goal to have zero food waste going to landfill by 2030.”

Afresh, which raised a $115 million series B in August (bringing their total funding to $148 million), has been gaining momentum over the past year. The company currently has its software in 3,000 stores in the US, including Heinen’s, Save Mart, Bashas, Cub Foods, and Albertsons.