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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Joy Chen

Dispatches from Israel Food Tech Ecosystem: Daphna Heffetz, CEO of Wanda Fish

Daphna Heffetz is the CEO and Co-Founder of Wanda Fish, a cellular agriculture company aimed at producing cell-based fish meat, starting with bluefin tuna. We talked about making cell-based fish entirely out of plant materials, the problems our oceans face today, and why Wanda Fish will only sell to high end restaurants to start. 

J: Tell me about your background and how you came to be the CEO and co-founder of Wandafish. 

D: I have been around for a long time in the biotechnology industry but focusing on life sciences. Almost two years ago, the Kitchen Hub approached me and tried to interest me in establishing Wanda Fish. I didn’t know enough about the issues of the ocean at that time, so I started to read and speak to several people. 

J: Can you tell me more about what Wanda Fish does and what makes it unique from other cell-based fish products? 

D: What we are doing is a variety of cultivated fish filets. Our strategy is to have a premium product that originates from the top fish species like bluefin tuna and yellowtail. We produce a whole-cut fish filet consisting of muscle and fat cells and make it similar to the fish itself by taking all the elements from the fish itself. We first take a one-time single sample of the fish tissue and never go back to the fish. We separate required cells, mainly muscle, and fat, which compose the fish filet and grow them in the same manner they would grow in the fish body. We are doing it in the lab initially and later on in a hygienic manufacturing facility in a bioreactor. All the elements are plant-based, no animal is used as the animal components are replaced with plant-based ones. We don’t add any supplements or additives because all the cells are taken from the fish and have the elements from the fish itself. 

J: What is the significance of the problem that Wanda Fish solves? 

D: The reason it’s so needed is because the population of the world is growing so rapidly. Also, the ocean is becoming very much polluted and 80% of its pollution is manmade. Also, there is unregulated fishing which is causing many types of fish to be endangered. More than 70% of the oxygen we all breathe is from the ocean. 

J: What stage is Wanda Fish currently at? 

D: It is already in the lab stage but in process development and gradual scaling. We are working with tabletop bioreactors that have all the elements of big bioreactors. 

J: Who are the ultimate customers? 

D: The product at the beginning will be served to restaurants. However, at the next stage, it will be sold in retail and you can get it in the supermarket. 

J: What is the reason for this strategy? 

D: More companies that are more advanced in us that started in 2017 or 2018 are also looking to sell to restaurants. One of the reasons for that is that it’s like a clinical study, you are selling to people, and you get feedback. Also, this helps spread branding. And most of all, in restaurants, the selling price is higher. Even before having price parity, you can sell to restaurants without losing money because the price point is much higher. 

J: Is there a specific type of restaurant that you are selling to? 

D: Because we are focusing on the top fish species, we are looking to start in high-end restaurants. This will be everywhere, hopefully in Asia and Japan and in the U.S. and Israel. We are going to do sales in countries based on the economic and regulatory situation. 

J: What are the challenges of adapting to sell in different markets? 

D: Unique market education. Because we won’t be the first in the market since there are a couple of companies ahead of us, still in production, market education will be minimal when we enter the market. In principle, there are some voluntary organizations, like GFI, that have done market and consumer research on the consumer world already. Through them, we have ideas of market acceptance. 

J: What do the next few years look like for you, and what are the goals that you are trying to hit? 

D: We are progressing with bluefin tuna as our first product and gradually scaling up with cost reduction and price parity. This can be done by increasing the density of cells in the bioreactors, lower-cost ingredients, and recycling of the medium. We are starting the regulatory process in several territories and hoping to collaborate with big international food suppliers. 

J: When do you think you’ll be ready for market? 

D: This will take a couple of years, but the goal is to be in the market in 2026.

Dispatches from Israel Food Tech Ecosystem: Anat Natan, CEO and Cofounder of Anina

I talked to Anat Natan, the co-founder and CEO of Anina. Anina is an Israeli startup that takes imperfect food and transforms it into ready-made meals in pods. Food waste has significant economic and environmental implications, and it is estimated that the greenhouse gas emissions from food contribute to 7% of the overall greenhouse gasses emitted globally. We talked about the technology that powers Anina, operating in markets outside of Israel, and what she believes sets Israeli founders apart. 

J: Talk to me about the technology behind Anina. 

A: We create these laminates, these vegetable sheets, and we try to incorporate as much food waste as possible. The laminate is strong but flexible. We try to take the ugly produce, and we try to incorporate all this food waste in our production process because we care about all the factors of the produce outside of how it looks. A third of the produce in the US goes to waste due to aesthetic reasons. I think there’s a catch-22. As consumers, we want to be more and more sustainable, consume more sustainable brands, and support sustainable production. But on the other hand, we become, as consumers, more concerned about what’s perfect. 

After we create these laminates, we mold them, we fill them, and we close them. Our technology is protected IP, and this IP contains the process from fresh produce to the pod, including the laminate. We’re registering it in the US, the EU, Israel, and Singapore. 

J: Did you choose those markets because those will be your first entry points? 

A: Our go-to market is divided into two approaches. With the US, our brand will have partners to get to the market efficiently and reach customers in the right and creative way. With the rest of the world, we are going to use a B2B approach, which is a joint venture. We bring to the table what we know how to do, which is the production process and R&D. And everybody does what they know how to do best. The partners know the market, the consumers, and the supply chain. We start by creating pilots, and we’re going to conduct pilots in Israel, Spain, Andorra, and Singapore to understand the right way to approach the market. And after that, we will create a long-term collaboration with them. 

J: What type of consumer testing have you done so far? 

A: So much. We have conducted external research in Israel, Spain, in Italy (with Barilla) and very in-depth design thinking research. In the US, we have done a market analysis that organizes qualitative, quantitative, demographics, and surveys. Every time we ask the question, do you understand what it is? Do you know how to use it? We give the product to people to try at home and then answer surveys. Anina was established in June 2020, and I’ve been conducting research since August 2020 because I believe that innovation needs to go hand in hand with understanding how to approach the consumer. Obviously, they cannot imagine what they don’t have in front of them. But you have to evaluate what they think to make sure that you don’t bring an alien to them eventually. 

J: You mentioned a lot of different markets in the US, Europe, Israel, and Singapore. Have you noticed differences in the customers in each place? Maybe customers have different preferences, or it has to be given to them in a certain way? 

A: Yes and no at the same time. Our consumers are millennials and Gen-Z and they care about what they eat and care about investing in themselves. And then, when you look at it, the first difference between the countries is the culinary element. We have five different recipes. One of them has beetroot, spinach, and quinoa, and in Singapore, they told us how nobody eats beetroot. And then we spoke to a Russian lady. And she said, ‘that’s my favorite.’ You can talk about pasta. The Italians don’t want pasta in their meals because they know they do it better, but the rest of the world desires pasta.

The understanding of the culinary element is a very local element: What type of ingredients? What type of produce to use? What’s interesting? What’s weird? What’s familiar? So first, the culinary element. And yet, I will tell you that the differences we have expected to be bigger, but it appears that there are more similarities than what we have expected. When we showed them our recipes, there were only adjustments, mainly in the seasoning, not in the whole concept of the recipe. And I was actually curious about it, and I think there’s more similarity in that generation rather than Gen X because of social media. They’re more exposed to the same culinary element. And yet, there are differences.

The second one is about instructions on how to cook. For example, do you give a range of timing of cooking? Do you prefer words or icons? There’s a lot to how you communicate information. But what’s very amazing is that it doesn’t matter if it’s the US, the land of convenience. If it’s Singapore, which I think is the gate to innovation for tech in the Far East. Or if it’s Spain or Israel or Italy, which are very traditional countries when it comes to cooking. The acceptance of the product is unheard of, and everybody appreciates a good home-cooked mouthfeel experience with convenience.

J: So it’s not just about the product but about the experience and how the user sees it, what kind of instructions and images are used? 

A: The most important thing is the mouthfeel and the taste and flavor experience. We know how to control when and how the pod will break down during the cooking process since not all the ingredients get the same amount of time to cook. The pod from the outside is cooked the whole time, while the filling inside is cooked only part of the time.

What is the result? It’s multi-texture because when you cook different things at different times, it’s not that everything is soft. And then people do not understand that. But they say ‘Wow, it tastes like home cooking, it tastes like each ingredient got a different treatment of cooking.’ And this doesn’t exist in the food industry. 

J: Is this a prototype, or is this what you sell? 

A: This is what we sell now in Israel. We have already planned to do a joint venture with Strauss which is the second-biggest food company in Israel. 

J: Where can people buy this? 

A: Mainly online. 

J: I want to ask about is scaling. You have a very unique technology with the food as a laminate, and I imagine this packaging is also custom. How do you tackle the challenge of scaling up? 

A: We are supported by engineers. We have an advisory board that comes to support us so that we scale up in an efficient way. We already have the capacity to produce a few thousand units a month, and there’s a full plan for mass production. We have to do it as fast as possible to get to the most efficient objectives. 

J: What does the timeline look like for entering other countries? 

A: This year, we’re already doing the pilots in the countries I’ve told you about. 

J: How did this idea start? 

A: I met my other two co-founders, Meydan Levy and Esti Brantz. They are industrial designers from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.  They invented the product. They wanted to overcome the challenge of food waste and ugly produce, and they saw it as a phenomenon that only increases with time. With their knowledge, ability, and their artistic way of looking outside of the box, they brought a lot of techniques from other industries to produce all this starting with the laminate and eventually building the pod.

They came to the Kitchen Hub, which is where I met them. The Kitchen Hub creates new teams of founders, allocating technologies, products, innovation, and ideas, and then bringing the right CEO who invents the business.

J: I saw Anina last year in New York at the NY-Israel Foodtech Bridge conference. From your perspective, what was your experience of that conference? 

A:  I met a lot of interesting people that we are even today still thinking of how we can collaborate within the US market. I think the exposure to the US market was very interesting.

J: How would you say Israeli startup founders are different? 

A: There’s a thing in Israel about getting to the bottom line: it looks like being rude. And a lot of Israelis, if you live here, it feels like it’s rude, but we cut to the chase. You can be aggressive in your movement and still be a friend when you finish the meeting, and that’s something that doesn’t exist in the world. I think there are a lot of benefits to that.

Joy Chen is a contributor at the Spoon and has been writing about robotics and alternative proteins for the past year and a half. Although originally from the United States, she is currently studying at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, Israel. 

Dispatches from Israel Food Tech Ecosystem: Roee Nir, CEO and Cofounder of Forsea

I had the opportunity to talk to Roee Nir, CEO and co-founder of Forsea. Forsea is producing cultivated seafood, starting with cultivated eel. Prior to Forsea, Nir headed the business development for a biopharmaceutical company in immunology. We chatted about the differences between cultivated meat and cultivated seafood, customer preferences, navigating the regulatory environment, the foodtech ecosystem in Israel, and how startups raise money in Israel. 

J: Why is eel your first product?

R: We start with eel because our strategy is to target highly priced fish with real market demand that is unmet and endangered species. The place that we go to look for the endangered species is the IUCN Red List and eel was answering these criteria quite significantly because eel has declined 90 to 95% in recent decades and the wholesale price is between 60 to $75 per kilo. Just to understand how big the market need is, Japan, for example, consumed about 160,000 metric tons in the year 2000. Now, they consume around 14. So, there is a big gap between the demand and the current supply and for us that was a no brainer to tackle this market.

J: How did you as a founder become passionate about this problem? 

R: We are in the center of a revolution. Looking at fish and seafood, the demand for them is expected to double by 2050. Already now, less than 7% of the fisheries are being fished at levels below sustainability. Aquaculture has its own environmental and food security issues. There is a great need to close the supply and demand gap.

J: Israel is very strong and cultivated meat, especially because there are a lot of people that don’t eat meat here. How do you see differences in the development of cultivated meat vs. cultivated seafood startups? 

R: Cultivated meat had some background from medical research related to tissue engineering and organ substitutes and so on. The challenge was taking it from that vertical into the right applications in the food. For fish, there was no research and every cultivated fish and seafood company is doing very basic research because the cells develop differently. Each of us is more or less targeting different markets at the beginning (tuna, scallops, shrimp, etc) which require their own modifications. There are some ancillary companies joining the ecosystem related to cell line development, scaffolding, growth factor developments, contract manufacturing, piloting, etc for cultivated meat.

J: So when the Kitchen came to you and approached you with the idea of this startup, and they already had the technology, what was that technology based on? 

R: We are a completely different company than any other cultivated company. Almost all cultivated meat companies do more or less the same thing, they will go to a certain source of stem cells and use a technique called directed differentiation to grow the cells. Then the cells have to communicate which they do by using a scaffold where the cells are seated on the scaffold pre-maturation. This is used as a building block of the tissue.

What my co-founder Iftach Nachman discovered is a technique to take important stem cells which are cells that have the potential to differentiate to any type of cell. And these are usually being created only when you have a fertilized egg. So you have a fertilized egg that doubles to two to four to eight, and so on. These cells upload but they have the potential to differentiate to any type of a cell. He found a technique to take these cells and to aggregate them into a special form called an organoid and give these stem cells the feeling that they are in the early stage of their own development. What happens is that these cells start to grow as if they weren’t each. They grow into many tissues that are naturally composed of edible pieces. 

So we barely use growth factors. We do use some growth factor to direct this organoid tissue to have the composition that we want, but it’s a very minimal usage compared to the directed differentiation methodology. Then these many tissues of this organ start to develop autonomously up to less than a millimeter before we start building tissue from it. 

And by this method, we are tackling the largest challenges of the cultivated meat space. We eliminate the scaffolding stage because each one of these organoids is its own connective tissue. They communicate together and we don’t need to synthetically put them on a scaffold. We also simplify the production process so we are much more scalable. These advantages allow us to bring our product to plate faster and reach price parity faster. Also, the tissue is more natural in the way that we manufacture the cut.

J: When do you expect that consumers will be able to try your seafood? 

R: We are in the R&D phase and are planning to launch the first product to market at the end of 2025. 

J: When a new product enters the market here in Israel, especially food tech, what kind of adjustments do you have to make toward customer preferences? 

R: The final product that we launch will probably be more suitable for the Asian territories. As a company for our product of eel, we would want to do the market adaptations in Japan, not in Israel. I think that overall most companies are going to try Israel or Singapore as a test country but we are all aiming at selling globally. Because our industry is an industry that requires a lot of CapEx and we need markets that justify such an investment. Our vision is that our first launch would be in Asia.

J: With this product, what kind of regulation or intellectual property protection challenges do you have to navigate? 

R: The first wave of companies has to face two aspects. One is regulation, and the other is market education. The way is being paved by them for us. Any company that is getting the approval, it’s a very big advancement. I’m quite confident that our process will go through there quite smoothly as any cultivated meat company. From an IP perspective, everything that we do is completely innovative. We are submitting a few provisionals these days, based on the research that we generated in our lab. But really everything that we do is very innovative and this is how we protect ourselves. 

J: There are probably a lot of challenges as a first mover entering the market, especially around customer reception. What are the other challenges associated with developing not just a technology, but also a business that has to have customers? 

R: First, every consumer research that has been done says that the most important thing in the product is taste. So it’s on us to deliver a product that is high quality. From a market perspective, we, as a company, do not plan to be the ones that are marketing the product. For example, now we are looking for strong partners in the different territories that we target to partner with to make the right market adaptations to the target market. And also such companies which are seafood manufacturers and seafood traders that already have their own relationships with the restaurants and the retail stores. They will be the ones that will take the path of introducing the product into the market. That’s our strategy. Specifically with the eel, more than 80% of it is being sold in restaurants and that’s also our strategy: to start with the restaurants and then expand to the stores. 

J: Are there any other food tech companies from Israel or from other places that you really admire for their innovation or their business strategy? 

R: I think that Aleph is doing amazing work. I love their strategy. I love their technology and I think that it’s very well managed. I love the technology of Imagindairy also, they have very deep technology for the milk space. Also mushfoods, it’s a hamburger that’s 50/50. 

J: It sounds like the startup ecosystem here within food tech is very well connected. Would you say that the ecosystem here is generally a very close-knit and supportive community? 

R: First of all, in cultivated meat, no one needs to speak now on competition. Even the ones that are very soon going to launch their products, the market is still big and everyone is still starting. Everyone should collaborate in order to help us all bring this industry up, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the IP of others. 

As part of the larger ecosystem in Israel, we all collaborate. We are Israelis and we are very communicative within ourselves. We like to meet, we like to share ideas, and we love that this is a very central industry that is erupting from Israel. We also share investors. Sharing investors is a very connective thing.

J: And you talked about investors, so what is it like raising money here? 

R: So many of us, certainly all the companies from the Kitchen, have received Israeli Innovation Authority funding. We had to go through a very rigorous application and many meetings and once we were approved to be financed by the Israeli Innovation Authority and by the Kitchen, we were given 3 million shekels ($900,000). And it’s a very smart thing to do from the government’s point of view because it’s their way of incentivizing innovation. Then you have to start raising and from the earlier stages you can probably target angels as well. But most of my investors are Vc’s and only one angel. My preference is either VC’s or CVC’s, professional investors that not only know the business but support additional fundraising in the next stages, networking, etc. There are less investors in Israel than US or Europe so more investors are American or European. But there are also Israeli VC’s that have started to be more interested. 

J: You mention corporate venture capital, is that very common here? 

R: It is a source of funding. Of course, VC’s are more active, and naturally, there are much less CVC’s and their process is much longer and they are more conservative. For the relevant companies, it’s there. There are less investors in Israel than US or Europe, so more investors are from US or Europe.

Joy Chen is a contributor at the Spoon and has been writing about robotics and alternative proteins for the past year and a half. Although originally from the United States, she is currently studying at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, Israel. 

Dispatches from Israel Food Tech Ecosystem: Amir Zaidman, The Kitchen

Last month, I visited the Kitchen Hub at their office in Ashdod, Israel and sat down with Amir Zaidman, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of the Kitchen. Prior to co-founding the Kitchen, he spent 10-14 years in business development in medical technology working on both the startup and investing sides. 

We chatted about what the Kitchen does, what sets Israeli startup founders apart, what the ecosystem needs, how precision fermentation is the new software, and what it’ll be like for Israeli customers to try the first cultivated meat product. 

J: Let’s talk about what the Kitchen is and what it does. 

A: First and foremost, we have capital we invest in startups like a seed or pre-seed stage venture capital. We have more money than a typical seed stage venture capital would invest because we are also getting money from the government to invest in those startups. While a typical seed stage fund would not invest $200-0.5M, we can invest closer to $1M in a company. Those companies become portfolio companies and they have access to the facility but it’s also the very close support that the team in the Kitchen is giving the teams in the companies. At least for the first 2-3 years after we invest in them, it’s a very intense relationship. 

J: Would you say the Kitchen is like a venture studio? 

A: Not exactly. For us, venture studio is when we start with a blank page. Then we brainstorm and figure out what we want to do based on needs from the industry, global trends, and where the industry is going. We start scouting for the enabling technologies, science, intellectual property that might be relevant for the project. When we find that, we go into negotiations with universities or research institutes and we go into a licensing agreement to own the license for that technology. Then we go recruit the team and give them equity into the new company that we created that holds the license for the technology. The venture studio model for us is starting from nothing and bringing all of those building blocks together. 

The third thing the Kitchen does is activity in the foodtech community in Israel. 

J: Let’s dive into your role here, I understand there’s two main components so can you elaborate on what those are?

A: I take part in this venture studio model by thinking about our new directions and what we need to do. The most significant part is making deals with universities and entrepreneurs for the terms under which they’ll come into the Kitchen. It depends on whether or not it’s a venture studio or a regular investment. But if it’s a regular investment, it’s very much in line with a typical VC investment model. And if it’s on the other side, then it’s more complicated with the licensing agreement and everything that has to do with that. 

The second thing, which is the part of my job that keeps me most busy, is working with the CEOs of the startups on their business development activities, around possible agreements that they might have like joint development or collaboration agreements, and most importantly, on their next round fundraising.

J: You have a view of the entire food tech ecosystem here because you’re working with many startups, but you also have a more specific view of individual startups and what they need. What secret weapon do startups here have that make them competitive in a global market? 

A: I think there’s a few elements to that. One is that Israelis are very entrepreneurial, which means that a person might define himself as an entrepreneur, regardless of the vertical that he’s working in. One day, he’s an entrepreneur in medical technologies and the next in food tech. When there is a new field which is impactful, it will draw seasoned entrepreneurs from other verticals to come and build their next startup in the space. 

The second thing is that there’s a lot of innovation in Israel. 

But I think the most important is that because Israel is such a small market, all Israeli startups are born global. They never consider the Israeli market first. They think of Europe, the US, and Asia first. They have to think global which helps them get a bigger sense or a better sense of the bigger picture.

J: Where do you find the best research and the best founders here?

A: Everywhere. The food tech sector is so diverse. If you look at cybersecurity, they come from specific intelligence units in the military. It doesn’t work like that in food tech in Israel. We source the IP and science from specific research institutes, but the entrepreneurs themselves, we get them from everywhere. We get them from previous entrepreneurs of biotech companies, medical technologies, or food companies.

J: They come from everywhere but what are the characteristics that they share? When you’re thinking about building a community of food tech startups here, what are you looking for? 

A: You don’t stumble upon foodtech. It’s not something that you do because it was there, you have to want it. And you typically want it because you feel that this is something that can change the world for the better. All of the CEOs and founders of those companies are passionate like that and this is what makes them unique. 

J: With the Kitchen’s access and view of the food tech community as a whole, what is it that you think that founders here really need? What kind of resources do you hope will become more accessible in the coming years?

A: You’re touching a very hot point, because we’ve been talking about those issues for the past three years. If you’re a food startup in the US, you’ll come up with the idea, you will go to a research center, and they will help you develop it. In Israel, you cannot outsource the development or the manufacturing.There’s a lot of infrastructure that is missing. And we’re working on that. Not the Kitchen specifically, but the Israeli community with some support from the government. Every startup in precision fermentation has to buy some equipment and there’s a movement to set up a precision fermentation center, which will be like cloud computing but for precision fermentation. You can do the very small scale in your lab and when you go up one notch to bigger fermenters, you will be able to lease and not buy. 

J: This is interesting because food tech is a very capital intensive industry compared to software.

A: Software used to be capital intensive, because you used to have to own your own servers,  until AWS and Amazon invented web services. And suddenly, it didn’t have to be so capital intensive because you can have everything on the cloud. 10-15 years ago, it wasn’t like that. This is now also changing in food tech.

J:Ultimately, the goal of food tech is to change the way people eat which requires a big behavioral change, even if the technology is there. How would you say the consumers here in Israel have been reacting to things like cultivated meat? 

A: I can’t really say because no cultivated meat product has been launched in Israel yet. We’re hoping the first ones will be launched by the end of this year. I can tell you that Israel is very fast to adopt new trends and technologies and it’s very plant based. I expect those new technologies to be very well accepted. Although the market is small, it’s gonna be a very good test market for every new product. We have a lot of chefs that are extremely interested in what’s happening in food tech because they want to incorporate the new technologies into their menus. It wasn’t like that, three-four years ago but now the culinary world and the food tech worlds are getting closer together.

J: Cultivated seafood was one of the theses the Kitchen had that resulted in Wandafish and Forsea. Clean packaging and reduced sugar have also been themes among the Kitchen’s portfolio. My final question is, as you’re thinking about the trends and new theses to follow, what technology are you hoping to see?

A: One of the main things we are hoping to find is technologies that will enable sophisticated technologies like precision fermentation and cell cultivation to produce products that will be affordable. Because today those technologies are expensive and they produce expensive products. Cultivated steak will probably be more expensive than a regular store-bought animal based one because the meat industry is good at creating affordable products at mass scale. It’s very difficult to compete. The companies that are creating cultivated meat are very close to market but they have premium prices. So we’re looking for the technologies to enable them to reduce costs, to reduce price, to be more efficient, and to bring the gospel to the people. 

Edited for clarity and length

Dispatches From the Israel Food Tech Ecosystem

When I first attended the Greencircle NY-Israel food tech conference in New York City last year, I never imagined that I would be living in Israel just a year later, exploring the food tech ecosystem for myself. I relocated to Tel Aviv in mid-January for an exchange program and have since been discovering the richness of Israel’s culture, language, cities, people, and places. While the high-tech innovation was a significant draw, my primary goal was to immerse myself in the culture and history of Israel as a whole. In the short time I’ve been here, I learned that the country’s foundation lies in its entrepreneurial mindset.

As I met more local Israelis, I was struck by the sheer number of people working in the high-tech industry. It makes sense considering Israel’s startup history dates back to the country’s founding. As a young nation facing existential threats, Israel’s defense system has always had to adapt to new scenarios, avoiding heavy reliance on conventional methods. There is a strong culture of questioning everything, evident in both political protests and companies that foster a climate of critical thinking. This environment encourages innovation not only for entrepreneurs but also for intrapreneurs, who develop new ideas and frameworks within existing organizations.

Food tech and ag tech are thriving industries in Israel, driven by the nation’s limited natural resources, water shortages, and a broader global climate crisis. According to the Good Food Institute Israel, alternative protein startups in the country raised $454 million in 2022, making up 30% of climate tech investments. Moreover, Israel ranked second globally, only behind the US, in alternative protein investments. The Israel Innovation Authority, an independent publicly-funded agency, is a significant driver of the country’s food tech advancements, offering a variety of practical tools and funding platforms to meet the needs of local and international innovation ecosystems.

Leading universities such as Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Technion University in Haifa, and Tel Aviv University also contribute to food tech innovation through academic research. However, beyond government funding and academic research, I am particularly interested in the intangible aspects of Israel’s culture that foster a high concentration of founders and an environment conducive to risk-taking. 

Roee Nir, the co-founder of Forsea, a cultivated fish company making an eel product, told me what sets Israeli founders apart is, “We are Israelis, and we are very communicative within ourselves. We like to meet, we like to share ideas, and we love that this is a very central industry that is erupting from Israel.”

Similarly, Anat Natan, the co-founder of Anina Culinary Art, credits the Israeli mindset of daring, inventive, and non-traditional thinking.  When asked where this mindset comes from, she told me “If you look back, the Jewish needed to survive. Even though we’re very advanced as a country in a lot of aspects, we’re a startup nation. We’re only 75 years old. We’re still establishing (ourselves), and when you’re building something, you have to do more than when you maintain something. We’re still in the building phase of the Israeli country.” 

In this series, I will continue to explore that startup mindset and developments in Israel’s food tech industry through interviews with founders and investors. I will delve into how startups are established, the groundbreaking innovations taking place, and the implications for Israel’s agricultural sector, environment, economy, and even its conflict with Palestine, because no analysis of food technology in Israel would be incomplete without considering the complex political environment. The food chain is an intricate web that intersects all aspects of society, which is especially true in a region as diverse and multifaceted as the Middle East.

Stay tuned for my first interview tomorrow!

Joy Chen is a contributor at the Spoon and has been writing about robotics and alternative proteins for the past year and a half. Although originally from the United States, she is currently studying at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, Israel. 

Food Robot Roundup: Grubhub & Cartken Head to College, The Story of a Stir-Frying Robot

Happy Monday! We’ve got a round-up of recent food robot news to get your week kicked off right.

This month, Singapore-based food robotics firm Ross Digital announced a $4.2 million ($3 million USD) Series A+ round led by food conglomerate Fraser and Neave. According to the company, which makes robotic arms for serving coffee and cocktails, the new funding will be used for product improvement and expansion into Thailand and Malaysia.

Ross Digital sells unmanned robotic baristas that can serve different types of drinks. An accompanying digital platform called Ross Cloud powers its baristas and provides a suite of restaurant solutions such as mobile app, a point-of-sale system, and an ordering kiosk. The company already has 15 units deployed in Singapore and China and aims to put out 40 robotics arms in the markets by the end of 2022. Some of its clients include Razer (whose venture arm also joined the funding round), CNBC, and Alibaba. 

Ross Digital’s expansion is yet another sign of Singapore’s active food robotics landscape. Last August, Stellar lifestyle and Crown Digital teamed up to launch ELLA, another robotic barista that can serve up to 200 cups of coffee an hour. The two companies plan to bring ELLA to 30 Mass Rapid Transit stations by the end of 2022.

The Story of a Stir-Frying Robot

One of my favorite easy meals to cook is stir fry because I just add everything I like in the pan with oil and call myself a chef. It’d be even easier if I could have a cooking robot to do the work, and if researchers from Idiap Research Institute in Switzerland, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Wuhan University have anything to say about it, someday I just might.

That’s because these researchers have taught a robot how to make the stir fry motion. The three labs have been collaborating for about 10 years with a specific interest in teaching robots to prepare food for people. Junjia Liu, one of the researchers, noted that “Food preparation and cooking are two crucial activities in the household, and a robot chef that can follow arbitrary recipes and cook automatically would be practical and bring a new interactive entertainment experience.”

Researchers were able to achieve this feat by decoupling the two arms of the robot into a leader and a follower and teaching them separately through machine learning. The two arms were then combined through general bimanual coordination and movements were subsequently adjusted automatically by giving visual feedback of the contents of the pan. The robot was able to complete the motions of stir-fry, but the paper doesn’t mention whether the robot was successful with heat, which is likely the next step. 

This isn’t the first time robots have dabbled in stir fry. Spyce, the robotic restaurant acquired by Sweetgreen, also served stir fry prepared by robots. Instead of using robotic arms, Spyce stir fry system utilized rotating compartments that cook and dispense stir fry. Spyce later pivoted to a different food robot that involved placing dishes on a conveyor belt that ran underneath dispensers that portioned out warm and cold ingredients. 

Grubhub and Cartken Head to School

Grubhub announced a partnership with Cartken, a maker of self-driving AI-power robotics and delivery operator, to bring robots to college campuses around the US. The partnership will allow Grubhub to leverage Cartken’s artificial intelligence and camera-based navigation and mapping technology. The robots operate at up to 3 miles per hour on campus and can handle various weather conditions including rain and snow, perfect for the Ohio climate they tested in. 

Grubhub and Cartken piloted the robots at Ohio State University this spring and are planning a full rollout in the fall. College campuses are the most saturated area for food delivery startups to test and operate in. Kiwibot announced plans to enroll in 50 college campuses by the end of 2022 and Starship Technologies is already enrolled at over 20 campuses. 

In Grubhub, Cartken finds a partner already well-entrenched on college campuses. The food delivery company already works with more than 250 college campuses across the U.S. where it integrates directly with meal plans so that students can access on and off-campus restaurants for delivery and pickup.

SCiFi Foods Raises $22M With Andreessen Horowitz’s First Investment in Cultivated Meat

SCiFi Foods, a Bay Area-based food tech startup, announced that it has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), making it a16z’s first investment in the growing cultivated meat market. The company, formerly known as Artemys Foods, also announced that it will be adding a new board member, Myra Pasek, the General Counsel of IronOx, who will be utilizing her expertise from Tesla and Impossible Foods to help SCiFi Foods bring its novel plant-based and cultivated meat hybrid through regulatory approval to the market. 

The new funding raises SCiFi Foods’ total funding to $29 million and will primarily be used to scale R&D efforts, build out the leadership team, and market the company. 

The Spoon sat down with CEO and co-founder, Joshua March, to learn more about SCiFi Foods’ new name, a hybrid meat product, and what it looks like to raise funding from one of the most famous venture capital firms during a recession.

What’s the story behind the rebrand? 

The original company name had always been a holding name. Over the last year, we spent a lot of time doing research and thinking about our brand strategy and positioning. First, while I’m really excited about our strategy, and I think what we’re doing is pretty unique and will give us the ability to get to market, we know that we’re going to be launching a brand in a very noisy old meat market. We knew that if we wanted to be able to have a shot of building a truly defining brand, we needed to do something that was really distinctive, and very different to anything else that was out there today. 

We also knew that in the cultivated meat space, one of the biggest concerns that consumers will have is that it’s too scientific. The vast majority of average consumers are calling it lab grown meat. A lot of the attacks from the meat lobby, also go off on it for being lab grown meat. We think it’s really important to confront that head on, not by trying to hide the science, but by being really authentic, transparent, and bold about it. 

Besides the branding, how does the technology of SCiFi Foods stand out from other types of cultivated meats, alternative proteins, and other meat hybrids? 

It’s the combination of plant based and cultivated meat. What we found was that cultivated meat was having incredible effects on flavor, creating a much more beefy flavor and aroma than any plant based trial. Fundamentally, the most important thing is to create incredibly tasty products. And by taking a blended approach, it massively simplifies our ability to bring a product to market because we don’t need to do more tissue engineering, 3d printing scaffolding, and other complex technologies that are required if you’re trying to create 100% cultivated meat, which no one today actually knows how to do at scale cheaply. 

Our approach allows us to create really transformational products, but also allows us to actually get to market from an equal timeframe with costs that are actually closer to conventional meat. Taste and cost define the market size for meat alternatives. 

Besides taste and cost, another challenge can be regulatory approval. How does having a hybrid product help you navigate the uncertain regulatory landscape today? 

If anything, it helps. The FDA and the USDA have a pretty clear regulatory framework on how to bring cultivated meat to market. Because our approach means that we don’t have scaffolding and tissue engineering, that reduces the amount of things that we need to take through regulatory approval. 

What are your plans to scale your product and bring it to market? 

Over the next couple of years, we’re planning on building out a pilot facility and going through the regulatory approval process. Once we’ve gone through that process, and we’ve had the facility approved, then the plan will be to do a small scale commercial launch.

Do you think consumer willingness will change between now and when you’re ready for commercial launch? 

The major trends of more people, recognizing the huge environmental cost, especially with beef, is only getting bigger. People are also getting more comfortable with technology being used in the development of food. Younger generation of consumers feel those things even more strongly. 

Even with transparency around technology, there’s still questions about the development and environmental impacts of cultivated meat. How is SciFi Foods targeting those questions? 

We’ve done a lot of work, understanding those impacts. We’re very confident that the climate impacts of our products is a fraction of the climate impacts of eating conventionally. 

Beef is the least efficient of all meats in terms of calories in calories out is 3-10% efficiency, it’s a small percentage; fundamentally growing cells in a bioreactor in terms of energy in and energy out is 97% efficiency, so drastically different. And with beef, up to 80% of deforestation in the Amazon, can be traced back to the cattle industry, either pasture land or as to grow crops, that animal feed. All the methane emissions that come up like 30% of methane emissions in the US come from cattle, one of the most potent greenhouse gas emissions. 

And when you look at the emissions of complicated means, it’s basically no land use changes, minimal water, no methane emissions, you do have energy usage for powering the bioreactors. That’s less than the emissions from a cow. And, if you count that for renewable energy, then the climate impact becomes zero.

Is there a reason why SciFi Foods is targeting cultivated beef first, rather than dairy, chicken, or other meat products? 

There’s a number of reasons for focusing on beef. It does have the biggest climate impacts. It’s also one of the biggest markets. It’s also the most expensive. The highest demand for meat alternatives is also beef. And yet, in the cultivated meat space, most cultivated meat companies are going after chicken, which is complex. And the reason for doing so is basically that it’s scientifically easier to manufacture chicken cells.

What makes a16z a great partner for funding at this stage? 

a16z is one of the best investors in the world and a key part of their model is that they’re not just financial investors, but they also bring a lot of support, in terms of, help with HR, recruiting, the best practices, introductions to other investors, and various different areas. I’ve worked with a lot of VCs over my career, and they definitely have the best set of support functions and ways of helping founders and entrepreneurs that I’ve ever seen.

A lot of a16z’s track record has been with technology and they just announced a new crypto fund. What specifically are you looking for in terms of help with foodtech? 

It’s worth noting that they have a very substantial bio fund, which led our investments. And that fund is completely focused on the intersection of biotech and synthetic biology. In many ways we combine those things. Yes, we do consumer food and food tech, but we’re also doing synthetic biology and biotech and sitting at that intersection. They have a huge amount of experience, and connections with VCs, and executives, scientists, and advisers in a lot of the real scientific work that we need to do to bring our product to market.

A lot of private funding lately hasn’t been very active and it’s been hard for startup founders to raise. What has navigating that landscape and raising a round been like for you? 

The market is very volatile right now. There’s always capital looking for really great companies that have a very differentiated approach and the ability to drive a significant IP advantage and who can have a defensible advantage. Fundamentally, that’s what an investor needs in order to be able to pack a company that can have a big impact on the world, but also have a great financial return.

With Foodtech Bridge, Green Circle Capital Highlights the NYC-Israel Food Tech Connection

Food tech might not be the first thing you associate New York City or Israel with, but Green Circle Capital Partners, a boutique investment firm specializing in natural product brands and food tech, is on a mission to change that. Last month, I joined investors, startups, academics, industry enthusiasts, and commercial partners from the United States and Israel at the Cornell Tech campus for the Green Circle NY-Israel Foodtech Bridge Conference.

The conference, hosted in collaboration with The Kitchen FoodTech Hub, Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Technion, explored a variety of food tech related topics including climate solutions, intellectual property, venture financing, scaling and finding distribution partners, and research and academic opportunities.

Although it covered many topics, it was clear the conference had two goals: to support cross-border collaboration between Israel and the United States and to establish New York as a hub for food tech. It’s difficult to achieve those goals in a single conference, and some of the missions described sounded very far-off, but I enjoyed learning about the small steps that can be taken in the right direction. 

Photo credits: Dave Neff, Neffpix

The startups pitched ideas related to alternatives, including cultivated meat, plant-based and cultivated fish, animal-free dairy products, fermentation, and microalgae. One memorable insight was from The Good Food Institute’s Bruce Freidrich, who noted that alternative proteins are the only climate solution in food and agriculture tech analogous to electric vehicles or clean energy. This was particularly interesting to me because the scalability of alternative proteins is something that is often questioned since they are still more expensive than their traditional counterparts in the same way that electric vehicles are often more expensive than gas ones.

A number of alternative protein startups from Israel pitched during the conference, including: 

  • Profuse: reducing the costs and accelerating the production of cultivated meat muscle through biological pathway manipulation. This startup takes stem cells and turns them into muscle at 50% of the existing cost. 
  • Plantish: making whole-cut plant-based fish filet with structure, texture, and scalability. The company will be launching at pop-up locations later this year and plans to be commercially available in 2023. 
  • Mushlabs: using mushroom mycelium to create raw ingredients for hybrid meat alternatives that are 50% animal and 50% mushroom. The company raised a $10 million Series A round in late 2020. 
  • Forsea: harnessing nature’s way of tissue formation and an organoid-based approach to replicate natural composition and lower costs by up to 90%. The company’s first product will be cultivated eel meat. 
  • Yeap: repurposing yeast that would otherwise be broken away into a functional concentrated protein. The end product will act as an egg, milk, or soy replacement. 
  • Meatfora: creating a clean meat platform based on scalable edible carriers and matching processing methodologies. Meat is grown from cells using edible and affordable plant-based platforms. 
  • Brevel: leveraging microalgae to achieve a more neutral flavor, neutral color, and full amino acid profile in alternative proteins. The startup combines fermentation and light in industrial-scale indoor bio-reactors.

Photo credits: Dave Neff, Neffpix

With so many different companies working towards the same goal of using food tech to combat climate change and increase sustainability in food systems, it was no surprise that collaboration and trade secrets were topics of conversation during the day. One discussion explored the idea of open-source research to allow alternative protein companies to collaborate and drive scientific discovery together. It made sense since one of the conference’s main goals is to drive collaboration, so it is only natural that the scientists, startup founders, investors, and commercial partners meet each other and find ways to work toward the common goal of a healthier food system. 

The most exciting part of the conference was the startup pitches. The other startups from Israel that pitched at the conference included: 

  • Biotic Labs: using microalgae to create bio-based, biodegradable RPBHV polymers. The goal is for this to be used in plastic to eliminate recycling limits and costs. 
  • Imagindairy: creating animal-free proteins for dairy products through precision fermentation. The startup closed a $13 million seed round late last year and is partnering with leading dairy companies to offer their dairy-free proteins. 
  • Maolac: creating functional milk proteins for adults for brain, bones, eyesight, skin, and immune system and development support. A unique algorithm identifies proteins in breast milk for different mammals and amplifies absorption. 
  • MyAir: leveraging wearable data and a nutrition bar to offer insights into stress and deliver actionable insights into diet. The nutrition bar is currently available online. 
  • Yarok: developing fast testing technology for food companies to identify dangerous microbes and plant pathogens. The technology aims to protect the entire food supply chain.

The NY-Israel Foodtech Bridge will be traveling to Tel Aviv in November. In the meantime, the conference organizers hope that the connections and insights exchanged at the event will translate into actions and partnerships.


Photo credits: Dave Neff, Neffpix

“A one-day conference isn’t going to save the world, but incrementally each of us doing our own part can chip away at a problem,” said Stu Strumwasser, Managing Director of Green Circle Capital Partners. “And that’s how things change.”

The Food Robot Roundup: A Robot Chef Finds Its Taste Buds

In this week’s food robot roundup, a robot gets its taste buds, delivery robot legislation marches forward and the impact of robots on jobs on college campuses.

Robot chef finds its taste buds 

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have trained a robot “chef” to taste food at different stages of the chewing process and evaluate the taste to become better cooks. A probe attached to a robot arm acts like a saltiness sensor which the robot used to “taste” the dish as researchers varied the number of tomatoes, saltiness, and texture of the egg. The robot then tasted nine different variations of scrambled eggs and tomatoes at 3 different stages of the chewing process and then produced taste maps of each dish. In order to recreate the chewing experience, researchers used a blender to process the food. The robot was able to produce taste maps for each stage of the chewing process to better understand the flavor profile of the dish and assess the saltiness of the dish more quickly and accurately. 

Study co-author Dr. Arsen Abdulali explained the significance of their achievement: “Current methods of electronic testing only take a single snapshot to form a homogenized sample, so we wanted to replicate a more realistic process of chewing and tasting in a robotic system, which should result in a tastier end product.” In the future, researchers are considering investigating the effect of saliva on taste by using chemical reagents in the sample to mimic the enzymes present in human saliva. 

One eventual application of this technology is personalization. Much like how human chefs are able to make modifications to what they cook based on the diner’s preferences, robots that can taste and understand flavor and consistency may be able to adapt how they cook later down the road. 

Lawmakers bring delivery robots to Rhode Island

Autonomous delivery startups typically expand their areas of operation state by state, but states vary in the rules and regulations they have toward autonomous vehicles. 

In Rhode Island, lawmakers in the Senate and House of Representatives are sponsoring autonomous delivery bills that will allow unmanned vehicles to operate in streets and sidewalks. Despite the increasing popularity of delivery robots in other states like Texas and California, some are not optimistic about the prospect of Rhode Island’s adoption. In the past, similar legislation has not passed the General Assembly and the Division of Motor Vehicles has expressed opposition to robots in neighborhoods. The main concerns from the recent Senate hearing deliberating this new legislation include worries that delivery robots could damage pedestrian infrastructure with their heavy weight and fear that they could take away jobs from people. 

Other concerns include possibly obstructing wheelchair users or those who are visually impaired or deaf. There have also been reports of accidents between robots and cars and trucks.  Right now, legislation differs on municipal, state, and national levels, and in the past decade, at least 20 US states have passed laws with explicit regulation on delivery robot operation in regards to weight, cargo, sidewalk speed, and liability coverage.

For example in Pennsylvania, the legislation establishes design and safety standards and classifies autonomous delivery devices as pedestrians with the same rights as people, except for a few limitations. However, although legislation within a state standardizes operation with that state, there is still much variation between states. The speed limit for a robot on a sidewalk is 12 mph in Pennsylvania, 7pmh in Maryland, and 6 mph in Washington, which can make it difficult for startups operating across state borders to scale. Some are even calling for an international standard since some startups operate across borders. For example, Starship Technologies, which has robots on over 20 US college campuses in 15 states, is based in Estonia. 

As for Rhode Island, lawmakers are still debating legislation that would allow robots to make deliveries, but this is just an example of a challenge that robot delivery startups are facing when it comes to expanding to new places. 

Robots deliver jobs, not just food, to university students

College campuses are a popular launchpad for food delivery robots because of the concentration of customers that are tech-savvy and eager for a quick and convenient meal. While one ongoing concern about robotics is their potential to displace workers, the addition of delivery robots is having the opposite effect on some college campuses. At OSU, for example, robots have increased the number of on-campus jobs at most restaurants because it’s a full-time position to place food orders in the machine and send it off. In fact, this new job is called “Robot Runner” and another component is packing the order. 

It’s unclear whether delivery robots are creating a net number of new jobs since they are replacing people who would otherwise make deliveries via bike or car. However, drivers are now traveling to customers farther away, with an increase in mileage of 43%. Delivery robots offer the opportunity for restaurants to reach a larger market and increase their sales, thus increasing a demand for labor at the restaurant itself. 

Despite the net positive effect robots may be having in some college towns, they are not always well received. Two UT Austin students have been charged with vandalism after intentionally damaging a Starship delivery robot by slamming it onto the ground. Both students are facing a count of felony vandalism of over $2,500 since it costs $5,500 to replace a robot. While it’s difficult to discern the motive of the students, thankfully the occurrence of some incidents is extremely low as this is the first recorded incident of intentional damage done to a delivery robot on a college campus.

From SpaceX to Pizza Robots on Wheels: The Story of Stellar Pizza

In 2019, Benson Tsai left his job building rockets for SpaceX to start a company building a different type of technology-powered vehicle: a truck with a pizza robot inside that cooks and delivers finished pies to customers.

“My parents were immigrants from Taiwan, and they opened a restaurant when they first moved to the U.S., selling fish and chips of all things,” Tsai told The Spoon in a recent interview. “But food has always been central to my life, and it’s been my one real passion.”

While he was at SpaceX, Tsai would go off campus during lunch with his coworkers to explore neighborhood restaurants. Before that, he started his own electric truck company, his first venture-backed startup. With his latest startup, Stellar Pizza, he can finally combine his love for food and expertise in engineering.

According to Tsai, the main problem that Stellar Pizza solves is the rising food costs in the United States. The USDA found that the restaurant purchases consumer price index, a measure of inflation, rose 0.7 percent in January 2022 and was 6.4 percent higher than in January 2021. There was more inflation for grocery and supermarket store purchases with the consumer price index for those purchases increasing 1.2% in January 2022 and being 7.4% higher in January 2021. 

Stellar Pizza hopes to address this problem directly by selling to its target customer: people who want food quickly and conveniently. With this comes the challenges of refining the recipe to something that customers will love, particularly working with the dough, and developing systems that can accommodate all the different pizza inputs. The culinary challenges are accompanied by the challenges of the approach they are taking by operating as a company that is building new technology and a restaurant brand simultaneously. 

“The development of food robotics as compared to developing space technology is a whole different ball game, it’s lower stakes,” Tsai said.  

Stellar Pizza’s solution is to build serially by first developing the technology and then the restaurant brand. The reason why Stellar Pizza chose to operate its own restaurant brand is to stay vertically integrated and customize the technology to fit its needs. 

“If you look at SpaceX, raw metals show up at the door of the factory, and they sell rides to space, not rockets or any of the technology.” 

Another aspect of operating a restaurant brand is consumer perception. Consumer response to automation in the restaurant industry has, in general, been mixed, with some praising it for making food cheaper and more available while others worried that it will take away jobs. 

“All of the fast food in the world is already made by robots,” Tsai said. “Like the sausage patty you get in your burger is made by a factory somewhere so automation in food has already been a part of our lives for decades. We’re just moving the robotics a little closer to the customer.”

The long-term vision for Stellar Pizza is to move the pizza production closer to the customer by having just one person, a driver, who hands off the pizza to the customer or another delivery driver. This application is a hub and spoke model with the main truck and a fleet of delivery drivers making deliveries. Last-mile delivery has been a huge area of innovation since the start of the pandemic, especially automated delivery. McKinsey found that of the $11.1 billion raised by last-mile delivery startups, $9.9 billion went to startups with unconventional technology such as drones and autonomous vehicles. 

Stellar Pizza isn’t the first company to combine robotics and truck delivery in one startup. Zume Pizza developed a cobot method where a robotic assembly line spread dough balls and sauce before human employees added toppings. Another robot transferred the pizza into a double-decker oven where it was par-baked and then transferred onto a rack. From there, humans loaded the pizzas onto the delivery trucks, where the pies were baked while in transit to the customer. 

Zume raised $375 million in funding from SoftBank in late 2018 before it had to fold its pizza delivery operation. Stellar Pizza is different in that the robots are directly on the delivery truck. Stellar Pizza has already raised $9 million from three firms: Root Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and Crosslink Capital. It plans to launch this summer in Los Angeles, California.

Food Robot Roundup: Beewise Comes to the Rescue, Banana-Peeling Robot

Welcome to the food robot roundup, where we look at some of the most interesting stories in food robotics from the last couple of weeks.

Last month, Beewise, a robotic beehive startup founded in 2018, announced an $80 million Series C funding round and unveiled a new version of its Beehome system. Beehome is an outdoor box that functions as a solar-powered automated apiary. It enables climate and humidity control, pest monitoring, swarm prevention, automated harvesting, and real-time problem alerts to combat colony collapse disorder. 

Beewise Using Robots to Rescue Distressed Bee Colonies

Colony collapse disorder is an abnormal phenomenon where adult honeybees suddenly disappear from the hives, and the queen and young bees are left unattended in the hive. This leads to colony collapse because the queen and young bees cannot survive without the adult honeybee. Scientists have not identified a single cause of CCD and have thus concluded that it is a complex combination of multiple factors including pathogens (disease-causing organisms). 

Beewise claims to reduce bee mortality by 80%, increase yields by at least 50%, and eliminate 90% of manual labor compared to traditional beehives. They offer their product to farmers through a robotics-as-a-service model costing $400 monthly plus $2,000 for delivery/setup fee that includes 24 colonies and ongoing maintenance. Farmers are willing to pay for the robotic beehive because it improves bee yields and the pollination of surrounding plants. Beewise has raised $120m in funding to date and has saved over 160 million bees in the past year. The startup currently manages more than 7 billion bees, equating to 25,000 acres of pollinated crops.

Beewise isn’t the only startup trying to save the bees. In October of 2021, BeeHero announced $19M in new funding to scale its markets and find more uses for its active honeybee hive data collection. The startup uses IoT tech to track the movements and health of bees in real-time and has worked with several of the top almond growers in California.

FlyTrex Lands in Texas

Flytrex drone delivery is making its first U.S. expansion out of North Carolina to Granbury, Texas (right outside DFW) as part of the $40 million Series C funding round it raised last November. The startup is promising restaurant takeout delivery in under 5 minutes to those who live within one nautical mile. It will achieve this through its partnership with Brinker International, a restaurant group with brands like Chili’s and Maggiano. 

Flytrex targets suburbs as opposed to urban areas because it can be expensive to do delivery on the ground in areas where people and restaurants are more spread out. The challenge for Flytrex, though, is to get FAA approval to expand the range of delivery past one nautical mile.

The people behind Flytrex’s new city expansion and fleets of drone delivery are trained “flight operators” who work via third-party companies to operate the drones. In fact, remote operators seem to be a growing segment of the workforce as robotic delivery expands. Even some autonomous delivery robots on the ground aren’t fully autonomous and rely on people on the ground to pilot them. 

Fruits of Labor

We discussed the challenges of automating fruit picking, especially when the fruit is small and delicate, in the last food robot roundup. And while U.S. startups seem to be struggling to make rapid progress, researchers and engineers in other countries have been tackling the same world. 

Researchers in Japan have developed a dual-armed machine capable of peeling a banana. Although this might sound like a very simple task to a human, it’s impressive that the robot can do this without bruising the fruit inside. The researchers used a deep imitation process where they demonstrated the banana-peeling action hundreds of times to the robot to produce sufficient data for the robot to learn the actions and replicate it. It took more than 13 hours of training for the robot to learn and it is only successful 57% of the time. However, there’s potential for this to alleviate the labor shortage problems Japan is currently facing in the food processing industry.

At EPFL, a Swiss university specializing in natural sciences and engineering, engineers are training robots to understand the process of picking raspberries. Delicate fruits like raspberries can be expensive for both consumers and farmers because harvesting the delicate fruits is difficult. High labor costs and a shortage of workers also contribute to the high price to harvest and resulting loss of harvest. 

“It’s an exciting dilemma for us as robotics engineers. The raspberry harvesting season is so short, and the fruit is so valuable, that wasting them simply isn’t an option,” says Josie Hughes, a professor at CREATE Lab. 

The team has designed and built a silicone raspberry that can tell the robot how much pressure is being applied. This is measured by a fluidic sensor consisting of a soft silicone tube within the raspberry. The raspberry separates from a 3-D printed receptacle that models the stem and it is attached to the raspberry by two magnets. The silicone properties can be adjusted to simulate the fruit’s resistance and require the robot to exert the necessary picking force. The feedback the raspberry provides trains the robot to harvest the fruit without damaging it. In addition to applying the right force, the robot also needs to learn how to loosen its grip once the raspberry detaches from the receptacle

Now what does the future look (quite literally) like? The next step is for the CREATE team to develop a camera system that would enable the robots to “see” where the raspberries are located and identify whether they’re ready to be harvested. The team is also hoping to apply this process to other fruits that are difficult to harvest such as berries, tomatoes, apricots, or grapes.

You can watch the raspberry-picking robot in action below.

Soft sensorized physical twin for harvesting raspberries 🍓

Sodexo Expands Reach of Tech-Forward Solutions at School

U.S. foodservice contractor Sodexo announced plans to increase the convenience of its offerings to college students through virtual brands, ramen vending machines, and check-out free grocery stores. These three digital initiatives aimed at college students will accomplish Sodexo’s goal of engaging a younger, more technology-savvy audience that values convenience, affordability, and variety. 

Students will be able to order from virtual brands through Sodexo’s partnership with Virtual Dining Concepts, which offers brands like Mr. Beast Burger, Mariah’s Cookies, and Buddy V’s Cake slice. Virtual brands are already offered by Sodexo at Gonzaga University but will be expanded to more campuses, although it’s unclear which ones. Adding to the convenience is the feature that meals will be delivered via robots. 

Sodexo also announced a partnership with AiFi, an artificial intelligence firm, to offer checkout-free grocery shopping at the University of Denver starting this month. 

The third offering of ramen and udon vending machines will be accomplished through Sodexo’s partnership with Yo-Kai Express, an autonomous vending machine manufacturer that is already present on some campuses. 

College students can be a difficult customer group to capture because many are on a dining plan. However, Sodexo believes its offerings can be a complement to meal plans, allowing students can get meals after dining halls close. In fact, Sodexo has been making a variety of plans to target college students including announcing they would bring 1,000 delivery bots to college campuses in partnership with Kiwibot and expanding Jamba by Blendid to more campuses. 

Beyond college campus foodservice, Sodexo also provides catering, facilities management, employee benefits, and personal home services to various sectors, including hospitals, senior living communities, government agencies, military bases, and prisons. Some of these settings might also be conducive to automation so it will be interesting to see if Sodexo graduates its use of robotics beyond schools.

The Food Robotics Market Report 2022

Imagine sitting down at a restaurant to a meal cooked entirely by robots instead of human chefs, would you taste the difference? 

Or imagine walking up to a sleek vending machine and ordering a bowl of hot, freshly made soup or a tossed green salad.

This future is here today as the food robotics industry has been one of the fastest growing sectors in food tech. This growth is in part due to the challenges faced by the restaurant and food service industry over the past couple years, as well as confluence of advancements in automation and robotics that have fueled a new cohort of startups to enter this space. 

Restaurants have been the largest end-market for food robotics over the past five years as they look to address the rising cost of labor and increase efficiency. Research conducted by Square found that 62% of restaurants say that automation would fill critical gaps in managing orders placed online, at the restaurant, and via delivery apps. 90% of restaurants agreed that increased automation for back-of-house operations would allow staff to focus on more important tasks. 

Automation in restaurants serves as a solution to improve the efficiency and productivity of restaurant employees, automate repetitive and mundane tasks, speed up service, streamline interactions between businesses and guests, advance guest recognition and customer relationship management, address language barriers, enhance personalization, and provide entertainment and novelty to the guest experience. In-house automation offers benefits to restaurant operating costs including labor, food waste, real estate, and rent as well as changing consumer preferences in regards to omnichannel ordering and food safety. On the other hand, consumer-facing kiosks allow restaurants to bring their food to markets it might not be able to reach with the investment of a large retail space. 

The intersection of food and robotics presents new business model opportunities including white label robotic offerings, wholly robot-powered restaurant brands, and robotics as a service business model. Food robotics can be applied to help power entirely new operating models such as ghost kitchens to make them more efficient and keep operating costs low.

This report will evaluate the factors driving food robotics innovation, explore the different contexts in which food robotics are used with a focus on in-house automation and independent consumer-facing kiosks, analyze the advantages and disadvantages of this new technology, dive into major players, explore challenges and barriers to development, overview the investment landscape, and discuss the future of food robotics.

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