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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Funding

Gathered Foods, Maker of Good Catch Secures $26.35M for Plant-Based Seafood

Gathered Foods, which makes the Good Catch brand of plant-based seafood, announced today that it has secured $26.35 million in a B-2 bridge funding round from investors including Louis Dreyfus Company, Unovis Asset Management and Big Idea Ventures.

This new financing follows the $36.8 million Series B round the company raised in January 2020. With the B-2 round, Gathered Foods has raised more than $75 million to date.

The Good Catch brand currently offers lines of plant-based fish products, including tuna, frozen fish burgers, fish cakes and crab cakes. Good Catch has a distribution partnership with Bumble Bee Foods and its products are currently available in the U.S. and Canada as well as in various European countries.

While plant-based burgers from the likes of Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat grab most of the headlines, we’re starting to see more plant-based seafood products enter the marketplace. Revo Foods (formerly Legendary Vish) is launching plant-based salmon strips and salmon spread, and is developing a 3D-printed plant-based salmon filet. Tyson-backed New Wave Foods launched a plant-based shrimp product last month. And Ocean Hugger is back, making its plant-based eel and tuna after ceasing operations because of the pandemic.

All of this activity is buoyed by the fact that the entire plant-based food sector has seen rapid sales growth over the past couple of years. According to recent data from the Good Food Institute and the Plant-Based Food Association, retail sales of plant-based foods hit $7 billion in 2020, growing 27 percent over the past year, nearly two times faster than total U.S. retail food sales.

In its funding announcement today, Gathered Foods said it will use the new funding to ramp up product innovation, increase the number of products it offers and fuel international retail expansion.

Trax Raises $640M for its Computer Vision-based Grocery Inventory Management

Trax, a computer vision company that helps physical retailers and CPG companies with inventory management, announced today that it has raised a $640 million Series E round of funding. The round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and funds management by existing investor BlackRock. Other investors include OMERS and Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Trax to more than $1 billion.

The Trax system uses a combination of camera installations, shelf-scanning robots and computer vision to monitor products on store shelves. Product Images are sent to Trax’s cloud-based machine learning system to analyze and identify when inventory is low on store shelves, or when items are misplaced.

Trax is also used by CPG companies to help them audit store shelves to ensure they are getting the placement they paid for.

Trax, which launched its Retail Watch service in the U.S. back in October of 2020, isn’t the only company using computer vision to help stores manage inventory. Cashierless checkout systems like Grabango and Trigo promise similar, constant shelf monitoring and visibility through camera installations and advanced computer vision. And robots from Simbe and Bossa Nova offer less installation-intensive solutions.

Trax is certainly striking while the funding iron is hot. Grocery related startups have raised a bunch of money in 2021. In addition to the raft of grocery delivery startups that have secured big raises, companies that are helping physical grocery retailers are also raking in cash. Stor.AI, which helps grocers deploy online shopping services, and Shelf Engine, which helps grocers with inventory forecasting, both raised significant rounds last month.

Bartesian Raises $20M Series A for its Countertop Cocktail Appliance

Bartesian, which makes a pod-based countertop cocktail appliance, announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Cleveland Avenue, LLC, with participation from Stanley Ventures.

The Bartesian device has cannisters that you fill up with liquor such as tequila, vodka or rum, which it then mixes with a variety pods that contain different flavorings, juices and bitters. Place a glass underneath and push a button and Bartesian dispenses a perfectly mixed cocktail.

By next-gen kitchen appliance standards, Bartesian is a downright old timer. The product launched on Kickstarter back in 2015, where it raised more than $115,000. In 2018, Bartesian decided that it was in the drink business and not the hardware business and licensed manufacturing to Hamilton Beach. The first units started shipping to Kickstarter backers later that year and became more widely available at retail in December of 2019.

According to today’s funding announcement, the Bartesian system has served more than five million cocktails, experienced 975 percent year-over-year revenue growth in 2020, and grew its subscriber base 30x compared to March 2020.

Without actual numbers, those stats aren’t super helpful in determining the actual success of Bartesian, and one has to wonder how much the pandemic helped boost interest and use in the Bartesian. With bars and restaurants closed and people relegated to their homes throughout much of last year, having a robot bartender like Bartesian on your counter made a lot of sense. With vaccination rates accelerating, bars and restaurants re-opening, and people being able to once again hangout in person, will consumers still want a home drink system?

Ryan Close, Founder and CEO of Bartesian told me by phone this week that while his company did get a COVID bump, it was already experiencing triple growth rates prior to the pandemic (they got off to a nice start by being an Oprah pick in the winter of 2019). Close said that the company has generated more sales in the first quarter of 2021, than it did during the first half of 2020.

The competitive landscape has also changed for Bartesian over the past couple of years. Drinkworks, which is a joint-venture between Keurig Dr Pepper and Anheuser-Busch InBev, and is also a pod-based drink machine, has been rolling out to different states across the country throughout the past year. And Barsys, which foresakes the pods for straight bottle attachments, is another option for the automated cocktail curious.

The one thing going for pod-based setups like Bartesian and Drinkworks, however, is the ability for people to have a full bar in their homes, without a collection of bottles taking up a lot of space. It’s much easier to store a bunch of flavor pods than a variety of juices, bitters and other drink ingredients. Plus, when people do have parties again, guests can easily make themselves a variety of cocktails with little to no mess.

With its new funding, Bartesian says that it will accelerate its growth domestically and internationally, scale up its production and expand its team. One of the investors, Stanley Ventures, is the venture arm of hardware company Stanley Black and Decker, which, Close said, is looking to bring Bartesian to Europe.

Bartesian also announced today actor Mila Kunis has joined the company’s board of advisors to provide guidance on brand strategy and growth.

Indian Food Delivery Startup Swiggy Raises $800 Million

India-based food delivery startup, Swiggy, has raised an addition $800 million in funding, The Economic Times reported today. The round was led by Falcon Edge, Amansa Capital, Think Investments, Carmignac and Goldman Sachs, with participation from new investment from sovereign wealth funds Qatar Investment Authority and GIC of Singapore. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Swiggy to roughly $2.4 billion.

India went on a severe national lockdown during the pandemic last year and Swiggy reportedly saw its daily business drop to processing fewer than one million orders a day, down from three million prior to the pandemic. The strict measures forced Swiggy to cut more than 2,000 jobs and scale back on its ghost kitchen ambitions.

But the Economic Times writes that food delivery was designated an essential service by the Indian government and that since then, both Swiggy, and its rival, Zomato have rebounded. Each company recorded their highest levels of business on December 31.

In an internal email sent out to the company (and viewed by The Economic Times) announcing the new funding, Swiggy Co-Founder and CEO, Sriharsha Majety wrote:

The fundraise gives us a lot more firepower than the planned investments for our current business lines. Given our unfettered ambition though, we will continue to seed/experiment new offerings for the future that may be ready for investments later.

With its new funding, Swiggy is now valued at $5 billion. The fundraise and new valuation come as Zomato, which is valued at $5.5 billion is prepping to go public later this year.

MicroSalt Reformulates Salt So You Use Less of It

It’s not until you start reading food labels that you realize just how much salt is in what we eat. It’s everywhere!

MicroSalt aims to reduce the amount of salt we consume by changing up salt delivery itself, and the company is running an equity crowdfunding campaign to help expand its market presence. MicroSalt’s crowdfunding prospectus describes its product as:

…a particle coated with nano-sized salt crystals that range in size from 0.2 um (microns) to 0.6 um. The carrier (usually maltodextrin) simply acts as a vehicle molecule to deliver the small salt crystals. These salt crystals naturally attach to the carrier through electrostatic forces. When consumed, MicroSalt® dissolves almost immediately due to the extremely small size of its crystals, which is what allows for that authentic, salty flavor.

MicroSalt says that its product can deliver the same amount of flavor using 50 percent less sodium compared to table salt. MicroSalt has created its own line of potato chips using this technology called SaltMe!, but its main business is to sell its salt as an ingredient to other packaged foods companies.

The company says that MicroSalt is better than other reduced sodium products on the market because current alternatives use potassium chloride. But potassium chloride isn’t the same salt and has a different flavor. MicroSalt still uses salt, just in a different form.

MicroSalt’s approach to reducing salt use is similar to DouxMatok’s method for reducing sugar consumption. DouxMatok makes a “more efficient” sugar by binding it to silica, the result of which is better diffusion on our tongues so you can use up to 40 percent less sugar in whatever you’re making.

You can buy SaltMe chips online, where they cost roughly $20 for a six-pack of, 5 oz. bags (they are also available in 71 stores across the Northeaster U.S. and Texas). While this is a little pricier than box of Lays, SaltMe’s pricing seems to be in-line with other specialty chips on the market.

As of this writing, MicroSalt has raised more than $380,000 of its $750,000 Seed round equity crowdfunding goal. MicroSalt plans to expand into Mexico and Latin America throughout 2021, and into Asia in 2023. The company says it is already developing an 80 percent less salt version of its product.

Spain’s Glovo Lands €450M to Expand Its Dark Convenience Store Delivery Business

Delivery service Glovo announced today it has raised €450 million (~$528 million USD) in Series F funding. The round was led by Lugard Road Capital and the Luxor Capital Group, with participation from returning investors Delivery Hero, Drake Enterprises, and GP Bullhound. 

Barcelona, Spain-based Glovo says that this fundraise — its largest to date — will go towards expanding Glovo’s reach in the 20 markets in which the company already operates. In particular, the company will expand its Q-Commerce, aka ghost convenience store, division in these areas. 

Customers order online from these convenience stores, which carry food and household items and deliver goods to customers in 30 minutes or less. Glovo launched its concept of the dark convenience store delivery in 2019 as a way to stand out from other delivery services, most of which were focused primarily on restaurant food at the time. Glovo said today it can provide delivery in 10 minutes or less in some urban areas, and that it anticipates “a permanent shift in consumer habits towards same-day and instant delivery.”

Recent funding in the realm of super-quick delivery suggests the same. In Europe, that includes Berlin-based Gorillas, which raised $290 million in March, Italy’s Everli, which just raised $100 million, and Rohlik, a Czech Republic-based company that recently nabbed $230 million. Activity (and investment) is equally big in the states, notably with Fridge No More’s $15.4 million fundraise and a whopping $1.5 billion for GoPuff last month.

Glovo plans to have 200 dark convenience stores running by the end of 2021. Currently, they are in Barcelona and Madrid in Spain as well as Lisbon, Portugal and Milan, Italy. Future stores are planned for Valencia, Spain; Porto, Portugal; Rome, Italy; and Bucharest, Romania.

As part of this q-commerce growth, Glovo will also build up its deals with major supermarkets. Right now, its roster of stores includes Carrefour, Continente, and Kaufland.

Grocery Apps Remain Popular with VCs as Everli, Nice Tuan and Zapp Raise Money

Given the frothy state of funding, it feels like there is a giant online supermarket stocked full of grocery-related startups and VCs are just wandering the aisles, filling up their baskets with companies promising to revolutionize the way we get our food.

At the beginning of March, we wrote about a single 12-hour period in which four grocery startups got funding (Instacart, Crisp, Rohlik and Flink). And it seems that VCs were just getting warmed up. Since that day, we’ve seen a number of grocery startups raise money including Stor.AI, Fridge No More, Jiffy, Shelf Engine, Weee!, Gorillas, Getir and GoPuff.

That list has grown once again this week as three more grocery startups have raised rounds of funding:

Everli, which is kind of like a European Instacart facilitating grocery pickup and delivery from local stores, raised a $100 million Series C round of funding led by Verlinvest (hat tip: TechCrunch).

Nice Tuan, a Chinese app that focuses on community grocery shopping received a $750 million investment round led by Alibaba Group Holding and DST Global (hat tip: Deal Street Asia).

Zapp, a London-based operator of delivery-only stores has received an undisclosed round of funding, TechCrunch reports from multiple sources.

There are couple things of note from this round of news. First is that European speedy delivery startups remain popular with investors right now, especially London-based ones. Zapp faces competition from the likes of Weezy, Jiffy, Getir and Gorillas.

Second is that these funding rounds are no joke. Nice Tuan’s $750 million haul follows fellow Chinese grocery app Xingsheng Youxuan’s $2 billion funding round in February. In the U.S., goPuff raised $1.5 billion, In Europe Gorillas raised $290 million and Getir raised $300 million (evidently startups starting with the letter “G” are also popular).

How long with this frothiness continue? That’s unclear. Will startups like Weezy or Fridge No More, whose funding is only in the double digit millions feel pressure to raise more to compete? And what about the overall grocery delivery space? The pandemic forced record amounts of grocery e-commerce, but a market correction is predicted for this year bringing those numbers back down to earth. But many of these startups are looking to change the way we grocery shop altogether by turning it into more of an always-on utility. Will people adopt speedy delivery as their new norm?

We don’t have a particular crystal ball for that, but we at The Spoon will chronicle it all as the market unfolds.

MeliBio Raises a Sweet $850,000 Pre-Seed Round for Bee-Less Honey

MeliBio, a startup that makes real honey without the need for bees, announced today that it has raised an $850,000 pre-seed round of funding. Investors in the round include Big Idea Ventures, Joyance Partners, 18.ventures, Sparklabs Cultiv8, Sustainable Food Ventures, Capital V, angel investor Courtney Reum and two mission-driven family offices.

Founded in 2020, the Berkeley, California-based MeliBio uses precision fermentation, synthetic biology and plant science that replaces bees as the medium for making honey. The result is a “honey” that has the same taste, texture and mouthfeel of real honey without any harvesting from bees.

MeliBio is among a number of startups using precision fermentation to recreate familiar foods. Change Foods is making cheese from fermented microbes. Perfect Day is re-creating dairy proteins for foods like ice cream through precision fermentation. And Mushlabs is using fermentation to turn mycelia into a meat alternative.

The reason for all of this activity is to tackle the needs of feeding a growing global population while reducing the environmental impact that can come from traditional agriculture. Additionally, these new fermentation techniques could cut down the production time it takes to make these foods because you aren’t relying on traditional animal or crop growing cycles. MeliBio says its approach can help save 20,000 wild and native bee species that are essential to Earth’s flora and fauna.

According to the press announcement, MeliBio says it will supply food service companies with its plant-based honey as an ingredient. The first such product will be soft launched by the end of this year to its first customers. The company expects to expand its commercial product rollout in the first half of 2022.

To learn more about MeliBio, check out the recent podcast we did with MeliBio CEO, Darko Mandich at the end of last year.

iKcon Raises $20M to Expand Its Ghost Kitchen Network

Ghost kitchen provider iKcon announced over the weekend that it has raised $20 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Mohamed Yousuf Naghi Group, AlTouq Group, Derayah Ventures, B&Y Venture Partners, AbdulMohsin Al Houkair Holding Group, and Nazer Group. and brings iKcon’s total funding to date to $32 million.

Dubai-based iKcon, which was founded in 2019, says it will use the new funds to expand the company’s ghost-kitchen-as-a-service model to new markets, starting with Saudi Arabia. Currently, iKcon operates 15 cloud kitchens across the United Arab Emirates; it plans to grow that number to 50.

The iKcon model differs a little bit from many ghost kitchen operations in that it handles everything for restaurants, from staffing to cooking to actually delivering the food. In the company’s own words, it “acts as a franchisee” on behalf of the restaurant, and provides services for both brick-and-mortar brands as well as virtual ones. (Kitopi is another notable example of a ghost kitchen network using this model.)

Its proprietary tech stack is another important selling point of iKcon’s business. Part of the company’s funding will go towards further building out the technology side of the ghost kitchen, focusing specifically on those tools that can automate more processes and in doing so ensure better quality and consistency of the food as well as faster speed of order times.

Those elements are important for a ghost kitchen that’s acting as a franchisee for the restaurant. Under this model, restaurants part with a lot of control over their food and brand, since they’re not the ones actually cooking and fulfilling the orders. Being able to assure those restaurants that a high-quality, consistently good product will arrive to customers on time will be an important point for iKcon to get right as it expands into new markets.

Turkey: Getir Raises $300M to Get People Groceries in Ten Minutes

Turkish on-demand grocery delivery startup Getir announced on Friday that it had raised a $300 million Series C round of funding. The new round was led by Sequoia Capital and existing investor Tiger Global, and comes just months after Getir finalized a $128 million Series B investment round. The company has raised $470 million to date.

Getir is part of the current crop of startups that promise super speedy grocery delivery. Getir operates a number of smaller distribution centers that are set up in different neighborhoods within a city. Users order items via an app and couriers are dispatched to complete deliveries in roughly 10 minutes.

In February, Getir expanded to offer delivery in London, and the company says it will use its new funding to expand into The Netherlands, Germany and France. But it will face competition as it does so, as a number of speedy grocery delivery startups in Europe have received funding recently. In London, Weezy and Jiffy offer similar services. And in Germany, Gorillas just closed a $290 million round last week for its own Euro expansion.

As we covered last week, all of these startups (plus the ones in the U.S. like GoPuff and Fridge No More) are all angling to change the way consumers view grocery shopping. By providing delivery in 10 minutes or less, companies essentially turn groceries into a utility that is available on tap. Shoppers could literally get groceries multiple times a day to fulfill a need or even just on a whim because they want something.

It’s still very early stages for all of these startups however, and it remains to be seen if and how customers will respond to such a service, and how far these types of services can scale. Can speedy delivery only work in dense urban environments? And as more players compete, how many micro-groceries stores does one neighborhood need? Given the rate of funding in the space, I assume we’ll find out pretty fast.

Allergy Amulet Expands Seed Round to $4.1 Million

Allegy Amulet, which makes a portable device to detect food allergens, announced today via press release that it has expanded its Seed round of funding to $4.1 million. This represents an additional $800,000 over the initial $3.3 million announced last August. The new investment comes from Aller Fund and Lightship Capital, and brings the total amount of funding raised by Allergy Amulet to roughly $5.6 million.

As we wrote previously:

There are two parts to the Allergy Amulet system: A USB stick-sized reader and the accompanying test strips. Users swab their food with the test strip and insert it into the test strip case. That case is then plugged into the device, which “pairs molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) technology with an electrochemical system to detect target allergenic ingredients” and returns results in under a minute. There is also an optional mobile app to help store and share results (to alert others about allergens at different restaurants, for example).

According to the Allergy Amulet FAQ, the company plans to offer tests for the eight most common food allergens: peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, wheat, eggs, milk and soy, as well as gluten and sesame. It aims to launch the peanut and soy tests “towards the end of 2021.”

The Food Allergy and Research and Education (FARE) website reports that “32 million Americans have food allergies, including 5.6 million children under age 18,” and that every year, 200,000 people require emergency medical care because of allergic reactions to food.

Other startups tackling problems associated with food allergies include Nima, which also makes portable sensors to detect peanut and gluten, Further up the chain is Ukko, which is looking to engineer gluten without any of the compounds that trigger allergic reactions.

Allergy Amulet says it will use its funding to speed up manufacturing, expand its allergen detection and grow its team.

Telenutrition Platform Foodsmart Raises $25M

Foodsmart, a personalized telenutrition service, announced yesterday that it has raised a $25 million Series C round of funding. The new round was led by Advocate Aurora Enterprises, a subsidiary of Advocate Aurora Health, with participation from Mayfield Fund, Seventure Partners (Health for Life Capital), New Ground Ventures, Benefitfocus Founder Shawn Jenkins, Classpass CEO Fritz Lanman and former Darden Restaurants CEO Clarence Otis. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Foodsmart to $76 million.

Based in San Francisco, CA, the Foodsmart platform hosts a national network of registered dietitians to counsel users, and offers subscribers personalized meal plans as well as a marketplace to order food online. The company works with employers and health plans, and says it has 1.25 million members. Foodsmart also does price comparisons and discount discovery to help families on the SNAP program.

Foodsmart is also offers Foodscripts through its platform. These Foodscripts use clinically validated diets to help users overcome obesity, hyperglycemia, heperlipidemia, hypertension and more through nutrition.

The company is part of the food-as-medicine movement, which encourages healthier eating as an important part of creating a healthier life overall. Last year, grocery giant Kroger jumped into the space by testing out a concept where doctors wrote food prescriptions for their patients. These food prescriptions were fulfilled at a Kroger store with the help of a Kroger health professional. Genopalate is taking another approach by personalizing nutrition based on a person’s DNA.

The pandemic changed the way a lot of us eat, as restaurants shut down and we reached for more snacky, comfort foods. Now that the pandemic is receding and we go back out into the world, the food as medicine trend could kick back up as people re-connect with more active lifestyles.