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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food Waste

Foodoo.ai Applies Machine Learning to Reduce Food Waste in the “Grab & Go” Sector


Almost all workplaces and college campuses offer a vending machine filled with snack items such as chips, pretzels, cookies, and candy. While shelf stable, these sugary and salty snack items are less nutritious and not nearly as tasty as fresher options like fresh sandwiches or salads. And yet these long-lasting, less healthy items persist as a mainstay in the office vending machine because fresh items expire three to four days after they are prepared, therefore increasing the risk of these products ending up in a landfill.

Foodoo.ai wants to change all that by giving offices the ability to offer fresh food without all the food waste. The Czech Republic-based startup’s mission is to provide food delivery to offices with what it calls “zero waste nutrition.” The company works with certified commercial kitchens to prepare fresh, healthy food options, delivers them to workplaces, and then uses its proprietary software and hardware to ensure little to no food is wasted.

Once Foodoo.ai’s kitchen partners finish prepping individually packaged fresh food dishes like sandwiches, veggies and dips, soups, and salads, the company then attaches an RFID (radio-frequency identification) tag to the outside of the packaging. This tag contains important information like the dish’s name, the ingredients, and the expiration date; all of this information is sent to the company’s data center.

Foodoo.ai has developed a proprietary hardware kit that can be installed into any existing refrigerator, mini-fridge, vending machine, or other food storage unit. Without the need to develop its own smart fridge or vending machine, Foodoo.ai can scale faster while also giving customers a lower-cost option that doesn’t involve swapping out their fridge.

The hardware system consists of scanners that keep track of product stock and the expiration dates. The data that is collected from the hardware is sent to Foodoo.ai’s cloud-based software, which uses machine learning to provide insight into the shelf life of products, how much product is left at the end of the day, anticipated consumption rate, user behavior, and what products are in high demand.

The grab-and-go food market has become increasingly more popular with millennials. Prepackaged, short shelf-life food items were originally considered low-quality food, often associated with gas stations or corner markets. Now, prepackaged grab-and-go food is depended on by office workers, college students, travelers, and those working or visiting hospitals.

Most people have particular food preferences, dietary restrictions, and allergies, and unfortunately, grab-and-go food cannot be customized to accommodate this. This might lead to customers picking at certain parts of the dish, and throwing the rest away. If customer demand and traffic are not accounted for, this can quickly lead to packaged fresh foods expiring and being thrown out.

According to Foodoo.ai, about 17 percent of the food it delivers to workplaces is wasted. As the company’s artificial intelligence gleans more information, Foodoo.ai believes its system can gain even more insight into food preferences and consumer behavior and help to reduce the amount of grab-and-go food wasted.


From Machine Learning to Sensor Systems, Food Tech Is Leading the Fight Against Food Waste

Food waste is endemic across the supply chain, with staggering impacts for our climate. Each year we generate a volume of greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to that of 42 coal-fired power plants, and use up enough water and energy to supply more than 50 million homes — all to produce food that goes uneaten, according to the EPA.

From the farm to consumers’ kitchens, a range of technologies is helping to reduce that waste. Below, we’ve rounded up some of the most exciting developments in waste prevention tech, from a data-driven ordering system, to a food container that sends spoilage alerts to your smartphone.


Growers & Processors

Better packaging is one piece of the puzzle. Both Hazel Technologies of Chicago and AgroFresh of Philadelphia have developed next-generation packaging products that release active ingredients into the storage environment. Those ingredients counter the effects of naturally released hormones like ethylene, which would otherwise cause produce to ripen and spoil more quickly.

AgroFresh implements its packaging solutions as a part of an integrated storage management platform, which also uses aggregated data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to provide insights on spoilage. That platform recently helped Starr Ranch Growers, a Washington state fruit producer, to transition from manual warehouse inspections to a data-driven solution.

Machine learning can be used to also cut food waste at the processing stage, as demonstrated by a study on quality management practices in the dairy industry. Dairy items are some of the most likely food products to go to waste, largely due to contamination by microorganisms. The study, which was recently published in the Journal of Food Protection, analyzed data on bacterial spoilage at different dairy processing facilities to determine which processing, equipment, and inspection factors were most likely to lead to ruined food. Analysis like this could help dairy plants and other food processors to target their efforts on improving the manufacturing processes that will make the biggest difference.


Food Service

For the food service industry, the journey to reducing waste starts with data-driven ordering. Shelf Engine, a Seattle-based startup, generates probabilistic models forecasting the demand for a given store’s individual SKUs. Shelf Engine takes over as an automated order manager, and provides weekly reporting on sales and gross profits. The company estimates that it has saved 547 tons of food from going to waste so far.

San Francisco-based startup Therma is helping retailers to make food storage smarter with a system of humidity and temperature sensors that can be set up in storage areas like freezers and dry rooms. Therma’s system constantly monitors those environments to ensure stable conditions, and creates automated data reports. One of Therma’s clients, the owner of 14 McDonald’s stores in Louisiana and Texas, estimates that the system is saving $4,500 per year in labor costs (not to mention saved costs from avoiding food spoilage).

And when restaurants find that they have surplus food on their hands at the end of the day, software like the MealPass App can help them to partner with nonprofits to deliver those excess meals to families in need. The MealPass App also helps restaurants to claim rewards for those donations by generating data reports that can be used for IRS deductions.


Consumer Kitchens

New technologies are increasingly becoming available to consumers who wish to cut food waste in their own homes. U.K.-based startup BlakBear is developing smart food storage solutions for consumers as well as processors and retailers. As The Spoon reported last year, the company’s smart food containers sense the gases that food items emit as they go bad. The consumer version of the system will incorporate a smartphone app with analytics and alerts about impending spoilage.

To Good To Go, based in Denmark, allows consumers to purchase surplus food from restaurants at a reduced rate. The Too Good To Go app expanded to the U.S. in September, and recently announced a new partnership with restaurant chain Le Pain Quotidien.

The technologies above are saving food from going to waste in the first place. For food waste that does occur, upcycling can help to prevent spoiled food items from languishing in landfills, where they release methane, and instead find them second lives as valuable products. For example, ALT TEX is turning food waste into a polyester textile alternative.

In 2022, we’re likely to see further development of both food-saving technologies and the upcycling industry, as businesses increasingly recognize the cost savings that can go hand-in-hand with reducing waste.

Why “HOW” Is The Next Big Frontier In Food Marketing

The organic food movement was born way back in the early 1900s as a response to the shift towards synthetic fertilizers and pesticides in the early days of industrial agriculture. However, it wasn’t until 1972 when John Battendieri founded Santa Cruz Organics and marketed some of the first packaged organic products. And it wasn’t until 2002 when the USDA adopted national standards for organic products (National Organic Program). This new USDA designation served to usher organic into the mainstream and by the mid-2000s, organic food sales entered a rapid growth phase, increasing by roughly 17-20% per year (compared with 2-3% for conventional food sales). Today, the organic market is a massive 14 billion dollar-a-year industry that continues to grow. Even large corporations such as Wal-Mart are now offering organic choices to their customers.

Ultimately, people wanted to know what was in their food and, more to the point, they wanted to feel good about it. They wanted food to be natural and non-artificial, the way nature intended.

Having satisfied concerns about ‘what’ was in their food, the next question for many of these mainstream consumers became ‘where’ – and quickly, the local food movement exploded. We now see the “local” designation everywhere, from restaurants to grocery stores. Walk into any Sweetgreen, and you’ll see a list of the local farms which have produced all of your salad’s ingredients. And like organic, local is great, the food is fresher and more sustainable.

However, with the ‘what’ and the ‘where’ boxes checked, it’s fair to wonder what the next big question for the more conscious food consumer is going to be. I’m betting it’s ‘how’ — and ‘how’ is about to go mainstream in a very big way.

One of my “aha” moments came during the most recent Super Bowl. Alongside your standard advertisements for new products (GM EV car batteries, 3D Doritos) and tried and true services (Rocket Mortgage, Uber Eats), there was a somewhat unusual yet fascinating ad from Chipotle Mexican Grill. The spot, titled “Can a Burrito Change the World”, featured no new product, and in fact, it barely featured Chipotle at all. In the ad, a young boy asks the question, “What if this [his burrito] could change the world?” The commercial then rapidly tracks the burrito back through the food supply chain, through the planting, watering, growing, shipping stages, and touching on related topics of healthy soil and carbon emissions. The ad ends with the words (notice the “how’s”), “How we grow our food is how we grow our future” — and if that sounds serious, that’s because, well, it is!

The world population is increasing — rapidly. There were 5.4 billion people in 1991, there’s 7.9 billion people currently, and we’re projected to reach 9.9 billion people by 2051. In other words, we’re well on our way to doubling the global population in a period of just 60 years. That’s a lot of mouths to feed, and with the FAO estimating that 1/3 of all food produced globally is lost or goes to waste, it also comes at a huge cost to the planet.

How huge? Roughly 8-10% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) comes from food waste. In fact, if food waste were a country, it would be the 3rd largest emitter of GHGs behind only the US and China.

Therefore, reducing food waste and maximizing efficiencies within the food supply chain is not only critical to feeding our expanding global population, but it’s also a key factor in fighting climate change and saving the planet. Which brings us back to the conversation of ‘how’. Or again, as Chipotle posited, “How we grow our food is how we grow our future”.

Thankfully, the ‘how’ conversation now carries some hope thanks to some incredible change and innovation happening across the food world. From modern vertical farming to booming urban agriculture industries, we’re learning how to grow food locally, more efficiently, and more sustainably. The startup company I helped co-found, Hazel Technologies, has developed solutions to safely and effectively extend the shelf life of produce by controlling the atmosphere around the produce during its shipping process. The result? Shoppers get to buy fresher, longer-lasting produce, food growers net bigger profits, and the environment sees less food waste. This year alone Hazel is projected to save over 500 million pounds of wasted produce — and we’re just getting started.

Fresher, longer-lasting produce that also benefits the environment would seemingly be a hit with the same customer base that buys organic and local, and in fact, that’s exactly what we’re starting to see on the marketing front. Some of the largest farming companies in the world like Mission Produce (the world’s largest avocado distributor) and Oppy (Canada’s largest fresh produce distributor) are now promoting the use of Hazel’s technology in their supply chain. These market leaders see Hazel’s benefits as a major selling point for environmentally conscious consumers — or even just for those who want longer-lasting produce.

From grocery store shelves to Super Bowl ads, it’s clear that ‘how’ is emerging as the next big frontier in food marketing. Case in point, this year’s CES conference, the most influential tech event in the world, will offer Food Tech as a featured part of the conference for the first time ever. Conference attendees can expect to see an incredible showcase of innovation with much of it dedicated to ‘how’ topics like growing, production, and sustainability.

Producing enough food to feed a growing population without over-taxing the planet is going to be one of the world’s biggest challenges in the coming years, but through innovation it can be done. It all boils down to ‘how’.

This industry perspective was written by Pat Flynn. Flynn is CMO and cofounder of Hazel Technologies, a food tech startup that develops products that extend the shelf life of produce.

Hazel Technologies Announces New California Hub To Expand Produce Conserving Technology

Starting in the mid-twentieth century, the advent of new fertilizer production technologies allowed the world to grow crops at a new scale. While that so-called Green Revolution helped producers to feed more people than ever, it also created a focus on crop production rather than systems efficiency. And that imbalanced focus has led to a worldwide agricultural system that wastes about a third of the food it produces, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

During a stint as a chemistry fellow at the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern University, Dr. Aidan Mouat wondered what could happen if we used chemistry to create a new revolution — one that targeted the food supply chain. That idea led to the 2015 launch of Hazel Technologies, a Chicago-based company that manufactures high-tech produce packaging and storage solutions to extend shelf life.

Mouat, Hazel’s co-founder and CEO, told The Spoon that the company’s technologies will save about 500 million pounds of food from going to waste this year. And with a funding arsenal that includes about $90 million in private equity as well as grants from the USDA, the company is working on expanding, starting with a new hub in Fresno, Calif.

A primer on how Hazel’s technology works: The company’s packaging products extend the shelf lives of perishable foods, but not by adding chemicals to the foods themselves. Instead, they release ingredients (in the form of vapor) that help to control the atmosphere around the foods. One product, a sachet the size of a sugar packet, releases ingredients that counteract ethylene — a molecule that accumulates in the atmosphere around packaged fruits and vegetables, and triggers metabolic responses that make them go bad.

Hazel’s Aidan Mouat

Hazel also offers technologies that slow down microbial growth and sprouting. The company’s products come in different forms, from pads and papers that can be inserted into packages, to larger-scale solutions for entire warehouses.

The new Fresno location will bring Hazel closer to California’s bounty of fruit and vegetable producers, facilitating closer cooperation. “In order to do the best analytical postharvest work we can do, we need to be able to simulate the supply chain as perfectly as possible,” Mouat told The Spoon. “And that requires us to be on site with our customers, performing commercial-scale studies in order to truly understand the full ROI and impact that our products can provide for them.”

For instance, Hazel will be able to perform more on-site trials for customers like the Specialty Crop Company, the world’s largest fig producer. It’s the difference between “sending some fruit back east, or getting it to them today, so they can throw in a sachet and pack it today, and get back that real-time data,” Erik Herman, a farming and sales officer at the Specialty Crop Company, told The Spoon.

Mouat said that Hazel has broken ground on the new hub, and that the team is hoping to open the office by the end of this year.

Along with a customer support office and research center, the Fresno facility will incorporate a microdistillery. “As part of our zero waste focus, and in keeping with one of my various hobby interests, we do a lot of distillation of fermented food,” Mouat said. “It’s a great way to make sure that we squeeze out every last calorie, even from our test fruit.”

In the future, Hazel plans to expand its presence in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, establishing a network of food science research centers. The company will also work on expanding its range of product offerings to protect meats and other foods outside of the produce category.

Hazel also has its eyes on another kind of growth. The company wants to apply its technology at all of the stops along the food supply chain, from the pre-farm stage all the way to retail. The team even hopes to launch a line of consumer products sometime in the next few years.

To Mouat, the key to Hazel’s expansion lies in the accessibility and adaptability of the company’s packaging solutions. Hazel’s products can be integrated into existing supply chains around the world without the need for investment in new infrastructure or heavy equipment.

“You’re not going to be able to protect every crop on the planet, every category of food, with the one-channel approach of reconfiguring supply chains to suit the benefits of some new technology you’re trying to offer,” Mouat said. “If you want to approach a truly democratic solution for world agriculture, you have to lower the use barrier as much as possible — and we’ve done that.”

Kaffe Bueno Wins $2.8 Million Grant To Build the World’s First Coffee Biorefinery

According to CarbonBrief, coffee has a larger carbon footprint per kilogram than fish, poultry, or pork. At the farming stage, it’s one of the top seven agricultural drivers of global deforestation, according to the World Resources Institute. Then there are emissions associated with processing and transportation. And once coffee grounds end up in landfills, they release methane (a greenhouse gas) as they degrade.

Danish biotech startup Kaffe Bueno wants to make the coffee supply chain more environmentally friendly by giving those used grounds a second life as food, nutraceutical, and personal care ingredients. The company announced this month that it has secured new support for that goal: The team received a $2.8 million grant from the European Innovation Council, which it will use to construct its first—and the world’s first—coffee biorefinery.

Kaffe Bueno partners with a transportation service that collects spent coffee grounds from commercial and industrial businesses. Via a fractionation process, those spent grounds get broken down into different compounds.

The company’s first two products have applications in both the food and personal care industries. There’s KAFFOIL, an oil that can be used as a flavoring agent and preservative; and KAFFIBRE, a gluten-free “coffee flour” that can be used in baked goods, confections, and snacks.

In addition to selling its products directly to manufacturers, Kaffe Bueno offers a private label service with customizable formulations. The company partnered up last year with Danish hotel chain Sinatur Hotel & Konference to collect spent grounds from different hotel locations, and then return them to the hotels in the form of upcycled personal care products.

The Spoon reported last year on Kaffee Bueno’s $1.3 million seed funding round, which the company used to begin scaling up production of its coffee-based products. Now, with the European Innovation Council grant funding and biorefinery construction plans, the company should be on track to unlock further production capacity and seek out new partnerships.

FryAway Turns Your Used Cooking Oil Into a Disposable Solid

When used cooking oil gets poured down the drain, it doesn’t disappear. It ends up in sewer systems, where it congeals. Over time, more oil and other debris amasses, forming blockages called fatbergs—which cost some cities millions of dollars per year to clean up, and can also cause sewer overflows that pollute surrounding waters.

The alternative method for getting rid of cooking oil—pouring it into a plastic container or glass jar, waiting for it to congeal, and then throwing it away—isn’t perfect, either, as it relegates a recyclable container to a landfill.

FryAway offers another solution. The plant-based powder transforms liquid oil into a solid that can be scooped out of the pan or fryer and thrown away. This week, The Spoon joined FryAway’s founder and CEO Laura Lady on Zoom to find out where the idea came from, and how the product works.

The story of FryAway starts with Lady’s own love of cooking. “Not only am I from New Orleans, I’m also a Latina from New Orleans, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that we love fried foods,” she told The Spoon. “I cook a lot at home. I fry a lot. I am guilty of having poured oil down the drain and not really thinking about where it went.”

Lady first learned about fatbergs and sewer overflow through conversations with friends. At one dinner party, a friend brought up a Japanese product that solidified cooking oil, making it easier to throw away. The idea caught Lady’s interest, and after looking into the product, she decided to develop a similar solution for the U.S. market.

Before FryAway, Lady worked in marketing and product development for children’s toys. “I think product development in general is very much about solving problems creatively. When it comes to toys, you’re trying to figure out how to bring a character to life,” she said. In founding FryAway, she carried over that problem-solving experience into the food space. “It was like bringing two universes together—one being my love for building brands and products, and the other being my love for food.”

During the product development process, Lady drew on chemistry knowledge from her undergraduate years. “I started researching, reading, trying to figure out how an oil could be solidified,” she said. “And I came across the process of hydrogenation, where you add hydrogen to a molecule to harden it.”

Hydrogenation is a familiar term because the process is used in the food industry. Margarine, for example, is made by solidifying vegetable oil using hydrogen-rich saltwater. And that’s basically how FryAway works: You stir the product (a hydrogenated fatty acid) into your used cooking oil while it’s still hot, and a reaction occurs between the two, causing the fat to solidify.

“Once the mixture cools down to room temperature, you start seeing that transformation from liquid to a gelatinous form to a waxy, hard substance that can then be tossed in the trash,” Lady said. “As it solidifies, it will also trap all of that gunk and debris that’s left behind when you’re frying, so that all of that comes out of the pan in one easy step.”

Two versions of the product (one for pan frying, and one for deep frying) are available to consumers on the company’s website and via Amazon. The team is mostly relying on word-of-mouth marketing to raise awareness about the product.

While larger commercial kitchens are already required to use oil remediation services and grease traps, there could be applications for FryAway in smaller restaurants and catering operations, Lady said.

The company has plans to launch a third product in early 2022, and after that, Lady will continue to explore other solutions for repurposing used cooking oil. Driving that expansion and exploration is the idea that we all want to take care of our shared infrastructure and environment—but need simple ways to improve our habits. “At the end of the day,” Lady said, “it’s about making life easier for those of us who love to cook.”

FloWaste Raises a $1.1M Pre-Seed Round To Reduce Food Waste With Machine Learning

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 85% of greenhouse gas emissions from landfilled food waste can be attributed to missteps that occur before the food ever reaches a consumer’s plate—from production to processing to distribution. FloWaste, an Indiana-based startup, is addressing food system inefficiency at the processing stage using a proprietary machine learning system.

FloWaste announced today that it has raised a $1.1 pre-seed funding round, which it will use to scale up and improve its technology. Last week, The Spoon got on Zoom with company founder and CEO Rian Mc Donnell to find out how FloWaste can help food producers send less food to landfills.

Mc Donnell had the idea for FloWaste while studying mechanical and manufacturing engineering at Trinity College Dublin. “I gravitated toward the topic of food waste because by that point, I knew that whatever I did, my life was going to be sustainability-focused,” says Mc Donnell.

Here’s how FloWaste works: Customers identify 20 foods that they’d like the system to track, and the team trains their machine learning system to recognize those foods. Then the team installs cameras above customers’ workstations, production lines, and trash cans. The cameras monitor the food production process, automatically classifying food items and quantifying how much gets thrown away.

Flowaste Animation

Video: FloWaste food identification and qualification. Source: FloWaste

“We gather a ton of data,” says Mc Donnell. “And we can chop and change that data based on ingredient usage, yield, shift performance, or daily performance. We present those insights to the management, and then they can make procedural changes.”

The technology can be used in both the industrial and the commercial food sectors. One of FloWaste’s current customers, a European protein producer, is using the system to monitor waste on a beef production line. “There’s this huge financial return because proteins are expensive,” says Mc Donnell, “but also this huge environmental return because any increase in yield means that you’re effectively killing less cows in the long term.”

According to Mc Donnell, the task of training the machine learning system to recognize different foods has been time-consuming. But he hopes that as the system builds knowledge, it’ll become easier and easier to expand its use. “If we go in with someone and they’re doing fries, it means the next time we go and search for fries, we’ve already got a head start,” he says. “We’re slowly getting more and more robots to the point where eventually we’ll be able to just do a general use case of food as a whole.”

This pre-seed funding round will help FloWaste to build up scale with its technology: The company has signed agreements to launch the system at over 100 locations with its pilot customers in the next nine months. The funding will also help the team contend with the challenges of creating a hardware system from scratch using off-the-shelf cameras. In the near future, Mc Donnell is planning to bring on a full-time IoT engineer to make the system simpler and more reliable.

FloWaste is participating in the current cohort of Europe’s Rockstart accelerator-VC. The company has also received funding from U.S. venture funds, including Underdog Labs and Flywheel Fund.

In the longer term, the team hopes to expand through new partnerships. “We’re working on installing in cafeteria kitchens and doing post-consumer analytics for customers who want that,” says Mc Donnell. “And we’re looking at quick-service restaurants because they have such an emphasis on optimizing their processes and their yield of food in the kitchen.”

Ultimately, the company is on a mission to help food producers discover how more environmentally friendly processes can also boost margins. “The best way to see a sustainability benefit is to tie it to the financials of business,” says Mc Donnell, “and actually teach businesses how they can be making more money by being more sustainable.”

SKS 2021: Meet Clew, a Startup Making a Home Food Waste Recycling Appliance

We’re heads down in preparation for Smart Kitchen Summit 2021, but we couldn’t be more excited to showcase some of food tech’s more innovative startups as part of the 2021 Startup Showcase.

To whet your appetite, The Spoon team is going to be rolling out almost-daily video interviews with the leaders of these startups over the next two weeks.

First up is Clew. Clew makes a countertop appliance that grinds, heats, and dries all residential food waste (including animal bones, fruit pits, and coffee filters) in under 2 hours into a shelf stable and consistent output that is over 80% mass-reduced. The output can then be easily-refined into compost, gifted to a local garden, or put into an appropriate organics recycling stream for further processing.

You can watch our interview with Clew’s Chief Experience Officer Spencer Martin below.

If you’d like to connect with Clew or any of the other startups pitching at SKS 2021, get your ticket today!

The Spoon Interview With Clew, Maker of a Smart Home Food Waste Recycling Appliance

Researchers Have Developed a Chameleon-Inspired Solution to Keep Fish Fresh

Red light, green light. Your first thought may be Squid Game, but these two colors are part of new food technology used for real squid.

Researchers invented a material that changes color to measure how fresh seafood is, inspired by (you guessed it) chameleons. It can save consumers from eating spoiled fish and can keep food waste out of landfills.

Why does your fish smell so fishy?

You probably are familiar with fish that smells… well, too fishy. This unpleasant odor comes from volatile gases in seafood, such as dimethylamine or ammonia. As the temperature of fish rises, its acidity changes, and ammonia is released.

Your salmon or shrimp has definitely spoiled if you can smell this gas — but ammonia can increase to dangerous levels before your nose can detect it. “Seafood easily spoils due to microbial growth that produces volatile amine gases,” said researcher Tao Chen in an interview.

A key part of seafood production is the ability to detect these volatile gases. Current standards take about four hours to find ammonia or dimethylamine in just one sample of fish.

Imagine if the commercial fishing industry had to set aside four hours for every piece of fish in their warehouse. The process would take days, and all the food would be at risk for spoiling. In reality, most fish inspections are done visually and are highly prone to error.

Here is where a team of food scientists and chemists enters the picture. New technology from Chen and his team at the Key Laboratory of Marine Materials detects when seafood has spoiled.

Chameleon skin inspired this material.

The skin of a chameleon can shift its hue to blend into different environments in just a few seconds. In a similar show of colors, the hydrogel can change its fluorescence from red to blue to green in a few minutes. These three colors allow scientists to visualize changes in response to stimuli.

The hydrogel changes color as heat and ammonia levels rise. The technology is easy to use, as the hydrogel can be placed directly into any package to check if fish or shellfish are safe to eat. Though customers should not eat the gel, it will not affect the product’s taste.

The soft material is unique in its ability to change colors. Both chemists and material engineers have struggled to design a synthetic fabric that could change colors. Until this study, scientists have been unable to model the structure of panther chameleon skin in a lab.

“Is it possible to mimic this unique structure into artificial color-changing materials? As described in our paper, the answer is yes,” Chen said.

“Up to now, the responsive color-changing capacity of synthetic materials was still far inferior to that of the natural chameleon skin,” researcher Patrick Théato said in an interview. Théato collaborated with the team in China for this bio-inspired project.

Science: Taste the rainbow.

The team discovered that the secret was in the separation. Instead of placing all fluorescent materials onto one sheet, each color has its own layer.

As seen in the diagram below, at the core of the hydrogel is a red layer that stays true to its hue. A middle blue layer measures the temperature of the seafood, and an outer green layer tests acidity and ammonia levels.

The hydrogel changes color in the presence of ammonia (NH3) or heat. It shifts to a green hue when ammonia is present or becomes more purple as the temperature rises. At either end of the spectrum, the fish in question is unsafe to eat.

The blue hydrogel layer changes color from purplish red to blue when the temperature rises. At 20º Celsius, the material appears to be purple or red, and when the heat rises to 50º Celsius, the hydrogel turns blue. The whole hydrogel turns green when ammonia is present and has no color change if ammonia is not present in the sample.

Not only do the different layers mimic the skin of a chameleon, but they also let scientists test the environmental variables on their own. Existing methods combine heat and ammonia into one reading and are less accurate. For example, current technologies would likely miss a slight change in acidity if the temperature stayed static.

Almost one-third of food in China is wasted.

Chen spoke to his personal motivation to create seafood-focused technology. His team hails from Ningbo, a coastal metropolis in China. “Many people in this city love seafood very much,” Chen said.

However, a significant amount of this catch ends up in landfills. A new study shows that 27% of all food in China is wasted per year. To put that number in perspective, food waste emissions in China are equal to total emissions in the United Kingdom.

How is the country keeping food out of the garbage? Well, President Xi Jinping declared war on food waste last year. As of April 2020, it is illegal to order too much food at a restaurant. ‘Mukbang‘ videos are similarly discouraged and were removed from many social media sites.

Another potential solution? The hydrogel. It can help reduce food waste on an industrial level. Commercial fisheries can use the gel for faster and more accurate readings and take immediate action if some of their seafood is beginning to spoil.

Color in cephalopods.

Théato, Chen, and many of their collaborators are working on a new project inspired by a different type of animal: Cephalopods.

These ocean dwellers – cuttlefish and squids, to name a few – are masters of camouflage. They can change their color faster than a chameleon. The researchers are creating a fluorescent hydrogel that takes notes from octopuses.

The team’s original hydrogel looked to acidity or temperature as the catalyst for color change. The new version has an electric stimulus, which is easier to control and free from any chemicals. It is currently under development for larger-scale applications.

Seems that octopuses are teaching us, after all.

The Week in Food Tech Funding: Culture Biosciences & Tufts Nab Funding as Interest in Scaling Cell Ag Grows

Over the past 12 months, money has poured into cultivated meat startups as venture investors, celebrities, and governments look to get in on what many believe is the next big thing in alternative protein.

However, as the excitement grows, some are taking a harder look at how to scale the production of lab-grown meat to make a dent in the larger animal-based meat market. According to one estimate, the industry will need up to $30 billion invested in cell-based/fermentation production capacity if the alternative protein market hits just 11% of total meat consumption by 2035 and significantly more if consumer adoption exceeds expectations.

Much of that $30 billion will be directed to capital investment in building out long-term production capacity. However, before we get there, the industry first needs to invest in organizations building the necessary technology and production platforms to enable scale-up. This week saw two significant investments intended for just that: Culture Biosciences ($80 million) and Tufts University & partners ($10 million).

Culture Biosciences helps companies developing future food products with its bioreactor-as-a-service platform. The company introduced its first product a couple of years ago, a cloud-connected benchtop bioreactor service for cell-culture and bioprocess development. With their new round of funding, Culture looks to move beyond the bench with cloud-connected 5L and 250L bioreactors-as-a-service that will help firms optimize for pilot scale bio-manufacturing.

The second investment isn’t a traditional venture investment, but the $10 million USDA funding award to Tufts University for a cultured protein center of excellence is a vital investment nonetheless. In partnership with others, Tufts will lead an Institute for Cellular Agriculture to develop foundational technologies and processes to enable the cultivated meat industry to progress towards scaled production. The foundational work done by this organization will include everything from research on next-generation cell-culture medium to the development of education and leadership programs for the cultivated meat industry.

As companies try to take cultivated meat from the lab to the manufacturing plant, some question if cellular agriculture will ever be able to scale upwards cost-effectively and safely enough to justify all the investment. While we won’t know the answer to this question for a few years, it’s an encouraging sign that investments are being made to address the next big challenge in cellular agriculture.

And now, the rest of this week’s funding news:

Food Supply Chain

TrusTrace – $6 Million: TrusTrace, a Sweden-based startup building food supply chain traceability software solutions, has raised a $6 million Series A funding round. TrusTrace uses blockchain, AI, and bots to track products as they navigate their way through the supply chain. The company claims to have 8 thousand suppliers and 250 thousand products on the platform. My guess is TrusTrace and other traceability platform players are getting lots of inbound inquiries as everyone from ingredient and component suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers are trying to figure out how to work through the great 2021 supply chain disequilibrium.

Plant-Based Food

Grounded Foods – $2.5 Million: Plant-based cheese maker Grounded Foods has announced a $2.5 million raise. The company, founded by the husband and wife team of Shaun Quade and Veronica Fil, makes cheese products with hemp seeds and cauliflower. Grounded is already in 160 different retail locations today and plans to use the funds to expand further in the US and to set up for expansion into Europe.

Ag Tech

Kuva Space – €4.2M ($4.9M): Kuva Space, a provider of realtime agricultural data using space-borne hyperspectral camera technology, has raised $4.9 million. The company plans on using the funding to launch a constellation of six-unit nano-satellites to gather imagery in the 400 to 1,100 nanometer band. The company provides data that helps farmers optimize fertilizer and irrigation needs, optimal harvesting times, and early-stage pest or plant disease detection. With its second generation satellites, the company plans to expand its carbon monitoring capabilities.

Food Waste

Orbisk – €2.4M: Orbisk, which provides professional kitchens with automated analysis of food usage and associated waste flow using machine vision and AI, has received a €2.4 million grant from the European Commission’s European Innovation Council (EIC). The data from Orbisk’s analysis allows customers to adapt processes and purchasing to better manage and reduce food waste. Orbisk won the EIC funding with a pitch for its ‘Binspector’ project, under which the company will invest in dynamic AI models to increase accuracy and rapid adaptation in international menus, as well as further development of its food management algorithms.

Fish Tech

OptoScale – $4.1m (£3m): Optoscale, which makes machine vision and sensor technologies real-time monitoring of fish farm stock, has raised £3 million led by SWEN Capital Partners. The Norway-based company says it can analyze up to 200,000 fish per day using its technology, which compares with 50 to 100 fish using traditional analysis methods. Optoscale, which currently operates in Norway, Canada, and Scotland, plans to use the money to expand operations to Australia, Chile, and Iceland.

Restaurant Tech

ResQ – $39 Million: Well that was fast. After raising $7.5 million in a June seed funding round, ResQ, which provides a software platform for managing restaurant repair and maintenance tasks, has raised a $39 million Series A. Through their platform, restaurants can request, manage, and pay for a service, as well as manage the documents for these things. ResQ also connects restaurants with a network of contractors able to perform those services. The company’s list of available services includes HVAC, refrigeration, electrical, janitorial, plumbing, pest control, grease trap cleaning, preventative maintenance, and most anything else needed to keep a restaurant kitchen up and running. Since its seed round, the company has said its customer base has grown from seven states to 36 in the US. They plan to use the funding to grow their team by 400%.

C3 – $10 Million: Virtual restaurant/host kitchen platform company C3 has raised another $10 million in strategic funding from Swiss private capital firm, Lurra Capital, just a few months after it had raised a $80 million Series B. C3 (short for Creating Culinary Communities), works with kitchen operators (host kitchens) to fulfill orders for virtual restaurant brands. As of mid-year, the company operated about 40 virtual restaurant brands. The company plans to open 1,000 virtual brand locations by year’s end and has plans to open 12,000 globally by 2023.

Food Robots

Future Acres – $1.7 Million: Farm robotics startup Future Acres has raised $1.7 million via equity crowdfunding on Seedinvest. The company makes a self-driving robot called Carry that utilizes GPS and computer vision to navigate around the field and haul up to 500 pounds of produce. The company, which has raised a little over $400 thousand in pre-seed funding, plans to use the funds for product development, payroll, marketing and operations.

Smart Food Waste Composters Are Here. Here’s a Look at Five of Them

Food waste sucks, but no matter how hard we try, most of us end up throwing out some food.

So if and when food does go to waste, the best thing to do is to make sure it doesn’t end up in a landfill. In some locations (like where I live), the city offers green bin programs with curbside yard and food waste pickup. But what option do those without city-run green bin programs have?

Composting! That’s right, no longer just for hardcore gardeners or your parents’ hippy friends, composting is becoming more popular as a way to avoid filling our landfills with carbon gas-emitting food waste, while also creating a rich food source for the home garden.

The problem? Composting takes time. In fact, it can take you up to a few months to fully compost food in a traditional composter (and that’s even after you buy worms!).

But now, there may be another answer…

Welcome To The Age of The Smart Food Waste Composter

The good news is we’re seeing a new wave of smart, automated compost systems that help the user turn food waste into compost. These new systems can compress composting time from months to days. They use internal compressors and grinders to break down the food and often have sensors to optimize the internal environment to foster microbe and nutrient growth.

Some come in economically sized countertop systems, while a couple of others look like a kitchen garbage bin or sit under your sink and connect to your plumbing system.

Most of these systems are either still in development or are just beginning to ship. And while I haven’t tested any of them yet and can’t vouch for their effectiveness, I do think – if they work as promised – these systems could potentially make composting a much more viable option for millions of households.

Here’s a look at five early entrants into the smart food waste composter category.

The Lomi

The first look at Lomi

The Lomi is a countertop system that compresses and grinds food waste into compostable material. The user drops food waste into the system and pushes a button, and the Lomi will turn the waste into compostable material in less than a day. The system has an Eco and Express mode; Eco takes about 20 hours and will produce a densely rich nutrient compost, while the Express mode takes 6 hours and produces a “neutral natural fertilizer”.

One of the cool features of the Lomi is it will compost compostable plastics. Throw in those compostable plastic containers or cutlery and the system will churn it into fertilizer. The Lomi uses a replaceable carbon filter system to reduce odor, and filters need to be replaced every 3-6 months.

The Lomi is from Pela, a company that made a name for itself with compostable material phone cases. When it launched on Indiegogo this year, the Lomi easily broke the record for the most-backed product in the food waste category with nearly 19 thousand backers and $6.9 million in raised funds.

Those interested can still buy the Lomi for $399 on Indiegogo and the company says it will ship in January 2022.

The Vitamix FoodCycler FC-50

Introducing the Vitamix® FoodCycler® FC-50!

While many of the new smart compost systems are from startups who launch their products on crowdfunding platforms, the new Vitamix FoodCycler FC-50 is from a name well known for its home blenders.

Here’s how Vitamix described the FoodCycler when they announced it last year: The FoodCycler FC-50 is lightweight, easy-to-use, odorless and compact. It comes with a small food-waste collecting bucket that can be moved around the kitchen – from countertop to sink – when preparing meals. The bucket is dishwasher-safe and comes with a lid, making it easy to keep the cast-iron bucket on your kitchen counter and the FoodCycler unit in a garage, laundry room or pantry..

The FC-50 can process a bucket of food in 4-8 hours. In addition to vegetable and fruit scraps, the unit will process meat, dairy products, and even bones from bones from fish or chicken.

The Vitamix FC-50 is available today for $379 on Amazon.

KALEA

KALEA automatic kitchen composter creates more out of your food scraps – start your home composting

Unlike the Lomi or the Vitamix FC-50, the KALEA home composter sits on the floor and looks like a small garbage can. The KALEA has two main components; Food is dumped into the upper chamber, where it is shredded, and its moisture is removed (there’s also a carbon filter to remove odors). Once shredded and dried, waste then drops into the second chamber where the machine creates the optimal temperature, oxygen levels and humidity conditions to turn the waste into compost. The processed compost is ready in 48 hours and dropped into a collection tray at the bottom of the machine.

The KALEA launched on Kickstarter, and while it didn’t raise the eye-popping amount of the Lomi, the creators were able to raise a respectable €485 thousand. The first backer units were supposed to go out in December of this year, and if the updates on Kickstarter are any indication, it seems like things are mostly on track. However, if you weren’t one of the early backers and wanted to order a KALEA, you’ll have to wait until July of next year, and it will set you back €729 ($850).

Tero

Tero - The revolutionary alternative to composting

The Tero is a countertop home compost machine that turns food waste into compostable powder in 3-8 hours. Like some of the other countertop machines, the Tero compresses and grinds the food, and the company claims it reduces the total volume of the material by 90%.

The product comes in two versions, the Tero and the Tero Plus. The Tero Plus does the same amount of food as the base unit, but also comes with Wi-Fi connectivity and an app that lets you track how much food waste you have processed and order filters.

The Tero was funded via a successful Kickstarter campaign and units are shipping now to early backers. You can preorder a Tero on the company’s website.

Sepura

The Sepura is unique in that it is a system that replaces your under sink food disposal system and automatically separates food waste into a collection bin. The home owner or a plumber installs the Sepura system by connecting the separator unit to the sink. A separate collection bin connects to the processing unit, which takes about 8 seconds or so to grind the food and separate solids from liquids. When the collection bin is full, the user detaches it and puts the processed food into a compost pile or into a green bin.

Food Waste Start-up Agricycle Global Raises $2.4M Seed Round

Agricycle Global, a food and agriculture waste start-up based in Wisconsin, announced this week that it has raised a two-part seed round totaling $2.4 million. The round was led by MaSa Partners and CSA Partners, with participation from Wisconsin Investment Partners, Brightstar Wisconsin, and several angel investors.

The start-up works across Sub-Saharan Africa with local farmers and communities to upcycle food ingredients and build a sustainable supply chain. This year, Agricycle launched two new brands that were distributed to over 1,000 U.S. stores. The start-up’s mission is to work with those who have typically been excluded from global food markets, including women, youth, and smallholder farmers.

Tropicoal Ignition, one of Agricycle’s brands, employs women to gather spent cassava root, coconut shells, and palm kernel shells that would normally go to waste. These ingredients are then processed and made into cooking charcoal.

In sub-Saharan Africa, about 25 to 50 percent of all produce is wasted post-harvest and before it even reaches the market. This is due to insufficient transportation, processing, drying, and storage. To combat this, Agricycle supplies solar dehydrators to small farmers and woman-led cooperatives that harvest jackfruit, mango, and pineapple. The fruit is then dried, packaged, and sold under the brand Jali Fruit Co. Each bag of dried fruit features a QR code that consumers can use to see where the ingredients were sourced from.

Whole Foods predicted that upcycled foods would be a trend this year, and the entire market is currently worth over $46.7 billion. This past April, the Upcycled Food Association launched a “Upcycled Certified” label shine the light on CPG companies focused on reducing food waste.

Agricycle will use the capital to launch its ingredient supplying business called Field Better Ingredients. The new brand will supply organic gluten-free flours made from 100 percent fruit to CPG manufacturers and bakeries.