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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Funding

Loch Electronics Launches Kickstarter Campaign for Its Handy Countertop Dishwasher

Depending on where you live, getting a dishwasher isn’t a given, hence the growing market for tiny dishwashers (like Tetra) that can live on a countertop and are also well-suited to smaller households.

The latest comes from Scottish consumer electronics startup Loch Electronics, which today launched a campaign for its Capsule dishwasher on Kickstarter. The project has already far exceeded its pledged goal of $99,254. As of this writing, more than 650 backers have pledged over $270,000. Which just goes to show you, there are still a lot of folks out there in need of dishwashers. 

Loch bills the Capsule as an “all-in-one solution.” First and foremost, the machine functions as a mini-dishwasher that, according to the company, can wash two meals worth of dishes in 15 minutes. The 22-pound device is meant to fit neatly on the average kitchen countertop and not take up too much space. It has a mode for washing fruits and veggies, and a UV light feature that be used to disinfect non-kitchen items, such as a phone case, keys, or a wallet.

Users can either plumb the Capsule into their kitchen or simply place the device near the sink, where it will drain when the wash cycle is finished. The device is also extremely portable — in theory, you could even take it camping if you really wanted to.

Those that pledge £283 (about $402 USD) will get a Capsule unit with all its accompanying accessories. The price tag is about 33 percent off what Capsule will retail for when it eventually hits the market. Those wanting more than one machine can pledge either £488 ($692) for two or £707 ($1,000) for three.

Capsule is expected to ship in February 2022 to anywhere in the world. 

Sharebite Raises $15M for its Get-and-Give Corporate Catering Platform

Corporate catering startup Sharebite announced today that it has raised a $15 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Lafayette Square led this round with participation from Essential Capital, Liberty City Ventures, Percy Capital, Reign Ventures, River Park Ventures, London Technology Club and the founders and former executives of Seamless (now part of Grubhub) and Delivery Hero.

On the surface, New York City-based Sharebite is similar to most other corporate catering services. The company’s online platform allows its corporate customers to provide delivered meals to their employees from various restaurants in its service areas (Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, Austin, Charlotte, Irvine, and Washington, DC.). Sharebite’s clients can set up parameters like which meals will be delivered and how much of a subsidy per employee is provided.

But what makes Sharebite different from other corporate catering services is its get-and-give approach. For every meal ordered through its service, Sharebite makes a donation to City Harvest to alleviate childhood hunger. As Sharebite Co-Founder and CEO, Dilip Rao explained to me last year, the company gets paid a commission by its restaurants, and a portion of that commission is donated to a local charity.

In its press announcement, Sharebite says that it works with more than 3,000 restaurants and its corporate client list includes WeWork, Coinbase, Better.com, McKinsey and Horizon Media with “hundreds” of companies nationwide in its pipeline.

Sharebite’s fundraise comes at an interesting moment for the entire corporate catering sector. With vaccinations rolling out, companies (and employees) are beginning to determine their office return policies. As companies look to balance productivity, employee interaction and safety, paid office lunches could be a perk that helps ease employees back to their office desk. Or, with fewer people in the office, it could be a nice-to-have that is no longer needed.

Oceanium Raises £2M to Turn Seaweed into Food and Packaging

UK-based seaweed processing startup Oceanium announced today the first close of a Seed II Round of funding worth approximately £2 million ($2.7M USD). The round was led by Green Angel Syndicate with World Wildlife Fund. This round of funding follows a previous undisclosed investment from venture capital firms Katapult Ocean and Sky Ocean Ventures, as well as Scottish Enterprise.

Oceanium refines sustainably grown seaweed to produce a number of products that range from home-compostable packaging materials to food ingredients including protein, fibre and nutraceuticals. These products are still under development and will be sold under the brand names Ocean Actives, Ocean Health, and Ocean Ware. The first line of Ocean Active nutraceuticals is projected to launch in Q4 of this year.

Oceanium is among a host of startups repurposing seaweed into new foods and materials. Loliware makes plastic-like straws out of seaweed. New Wave Foods makes a plant-based shrimp out of ingredients including seaweed. And AKUA makes a plant-based jerky out of seaweed.

It’s not hard to understand why seaweed is suddenly a hot ingredient for eco-conscious startups. According to Oceanium’s website, using seaweed as a base ingredient for its products has a number of environmental benefits including absorption of CO2 from the air and Nitrogren from the sea, as well as seabed protection and zero need for land or fresh water to grow.

Oceanium says that it will use the new funds to scale its biorefinery and processing model to “open up the market” for sustainable seaweed farming.


Click & Grow’s Tabletop Smart Garden Is Insanely Popular on Kickstarter Right Now

It says something about the popularity of at-home indoor farms when a Kickstarter campaign for one meets its funding goal in 20 minutes. 

Such was the case recently with Click & Grow, an Estonian-born startup that cites NASA as the chief inspiration behind its smart garden systems. Click & Grow was one of the original wave of companies bringing the concept of at-home indoor farming to the masses. Thanks to the pandemic, food supply chain disruptions, and general concerns about health and wellness, the idea of growing produce on your own countertop has only become bigger over the last year or so.

Hence the company’s Kickstarter campaign for its Click & Grow 25 device reaching its $35,000 goal so darn quickly when it launched a few days ago.

The Click & Grow 25 is a tabletop farm that, in the company’s own words, “works like a Nespresso coffee machine, only instead of coffee pods, you use biodegradable Smart Soil plant pods to grow fresh greens all year round.” The Smart Soil is one of Click & Grow’s claims to fame. It’s a plant-based growth substrate that was developed in-house. When placed in pods that are then inserted into the garden, the Smart Soil releases a mixture of nutrients, oxygen, and water, with levels of each calculated for the specific seed type in each pod.

An accompanying mobile app provides timelines and grow tips for each plant, along with reminders and the ability to control the lighting settings on the actual device. It also offers recipe suggestions.

The device also features removable trays, so that one can be removed at harvest time and replaced with another full of fresh seeds, keeping the grow cycle constant. As of now, it can grow 25 plants simultaneously per module. Since the device is modular, grow units can be added based on the number of people in a household. Click & Grow recommends one unit for a single-person household, one to two for a couple, and two to three and above for families.

The campaign has already nabbed over $360,000 and has 22 days left. Those that pledge $499 or more get one Click & Grow 25 device that includes a three-month supply of grow pods. That’s a substantially lower price point than the $799 estimated retail price the device will carry when it is officially launched.

Click & Grow says devices will ship in February of 2022.  

  

Daring Secures $40M in Series B Round for Plant-Based Chicken

Daring, which makes realistic plant-based chicken analogues, this week announced a $40 million Series B funding round. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, D1 Capital Partners led this round, with participation from Maveron, Palm Tree Crew, and the Canadian rapper Drake.

Daring said it will use this most recent funding round to triple the size of its team. Additionally, the company will grow its presence in foodservice and retail channels, as well as focus on product development.

The main ingredients in Daring’s alternative chicken pieces are quite simple: water, soy protein concentrate, and a variety of spices and herbs depending on the flavor. Due to the use of soy, the product boasts 13 grams of protein in one serving. Currently, Daring chicken pieces come in four flavors: lemon & herb, cajun, breaded, and original.

The U.S. is the largest producer of poultry and the second-largest exporter of poultry in the world. Americans also consume more poultry than beef, pork, and other meats. But with veganism continuously on the rise in the U.S., there will be an increasing demand for plant-based chicken products.

Several other startups in the U.S. are focused on crafting plant-based chicken products. Nowadays, a newer start-up, recently raised $2 million in a pre-seed round of funding for its plant-based chicken nuggets. Nuggs also makes chicken nuggets, but announced last year it would also focus on creating alternative hot dogs. Rebellyous originally began with its only product being chicken nuggets, but has expanded its product line to include alternative chicken patties and tenders. Besides these startups, there are also large players like Gardein and Quorn that offer a variety of alternative chicken products.

Towards the end of last year, Daring raised $8 million in its Series A round, and used this capital to expand to 1,000 more retailers in the U.S., including Sprouts, Costco, Wegmans, and Kroger. Online, Daring’s products can be purchased on its website and via Imperfect Foods. The company plans on expanding to more retailers in the upcoming months.

Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Raises $170M, Brings Its Cultivated Meat to More Restaurants

Eat Just announced today that its GOOD Meat division has raised $170 million in new funding. The round included UBS O’Connor, Graphene Ventures, K3 Ventures, and others, and officially makes GOOD a subsidiary of Eat Just.

The company said today it plans to use the new funds to increase capacity of GOOD’s cultured meat production in addition to furthering research and development. 

Eat Just became the world’s first company to receive regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in December of 2020 in Singapore. It quickly followed that up with the actual sale of GOOD meat at the 1880 restaurant in the city-state. Since then, 1880 customers have continued to order GOOD’s cultivated chicken product at the restaurant, and can now even get it for delivery via foodpanda.  

With the new funds, Eat Just will expand the availability of GOOD’s cultivated meat from that single restaurant to another, the JW Marriott Singapore South Beach’s Madame Fan. Notably, the JW Marriott location has said it will outright replace its conventional chicken with GOOD’s cultivated version at certain times of the day. To start, GOOD meat will replace conventional chicken for delivery items ordered on Thursdays, starting May 20. GOOD will be available “for once-a-week dine-in starting soon.”

Eat Just CEO and founder Josh Tetrick has said before that he sees a world in which “restaurants remove conventional meat from their menu[s].” Eat Just’s plant-based egg products have already fully replaced their traditional counterparts at some restaurant chains, and more restaurants around the world are now exploring alternative protein as a regular staple on the menu.

For cultivated meat, the march into restaurants won’t happen overnight. Eat Just remains the only company in the world that can currently sell cultivated meat, and Singapore is still the only place in which the company can do that. However, other countries and companies are already in the process of granting and getting regulatory approval, which means in the next year or so, we’ll see more restaurant menus around the world debuting cultivated meat products.

Pizza Robot Company Picnic Raises $16.3M Series A, Adds Strategic Partners

Picnic, which makes pizza assembly robots, announced today that is has raised a $16.3 million Series A round of funding. The new round was led by Thursday Ventures, with participation from existing investors Creative Ventures, Flying Fish Partners and Vulcan Capital (and includes the $3M bridge funding from October of last year). This brings the total amount of funding raised by Picnic to $34.2 million. At the same time, Picnic also announced new strategic partnerships with with food service industry company Orion Land Mark, Ethan Stowell Restaurants, National Service Cooperative and Baseline Hardware Financing.

Seattle, Washington-based Picnic makes modular pizza assembly robots capable of topping hundreds of pizzas an hour. These automated machines can be placed in a row, with each one dispensing their own ingredients. Pizza crusts are place on a conveyor belt, which runs under the dispensers which dish out the proper amounts of sauce, cheese and other toppings. Picnic announced its second generation robot in October of last year, which featured a switch to transparent walls and containers so operators could see in real time when toppings need to be refilled.

Interest in food robots and automation has accelerated thanks largely to the pandemic. Not only can robots work 24 hours a day and not call in sick, they also reduce human contact with food and create more social distancing in kitchens. But Clayton Wood, CEO of Picnic, told me by phone last week that the pandemic has ushered in entirely new thinking about foodservice. “What we really see as we come out of the pandemic is the foodserice industry has been reimagined,” Wood said. “It’s divorced the idea that the kitchen has to be attached to a dining room.”

As such, there are new opportunities for Picnic and other food automation companies where there are high volumes of takeout and delivery. Wood cited ghost kitchens and even grocers as two examples.

In addition to adapting to new post-COVID workplace realities, Wood is quick to point out that Picnic also helps food operators with ingredient cost. “There’s a lot of denial about food waste, even though the industry average is 10 percent,” Wood said. Robotic systems like Picnic’s can help lower waste and cost because they dispense the exact same amount of toppings every time without any overages.

Pizza is becoming a popular food for robotics. In addition to Picnic, xRobotics has its own take on automated pizza assembly, and Middleby launched its PizzaBot 5000 last year. In addition to pizza making robots, we’re also seeing a number of pizza vending machines come to market like Piestro, API Tech and Basil Street.

“It’s a sign of the industry maturing,” Wood said of all his competition. For its part, Picnic will use its new funding and partnerships to separate itself from the pizza pack. The company says it will use its new money to hire out its team and expand commercial operations, which will most likely be made easier by the company’s new strategic investors. Orion Land Mark is one of the biggest suppliers of pizza and pizza supplies to convenience stores around the world and Ethan Stowell Restaurants operates a number of eateries in the Seattle area.

BEERMKR Opens Up About its “Shark Tank” Experience

It’s important to remember that reality TV isn’t “real.” Even a show that’s pretty cut and dry like Shark Tank is edited down for broadcast. That’s why when I watched the guys at BEERMKR ptich their connected, all-in-one home beer brewing system to the Sharks last week, I wondered what was cut out. Thankfully, BEERMKR CEO Aaron Walls gave us a peek behind the curtain in a blog post this week, talking about their experience on the show.

SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t watched the episode and don’t want to know how it ended, stop here. If you do know or it doesn’t matter to you, then continue reading.

First off, it may surprise you to learn that BEERMKR actually filmed their episode back in September of 2020. And while they shot for an hour, fielding all types of questions from all of the Sharks, the segment was edited down to just eight minutes. As Walls wrote:

Since our aired segment was only 8 minutes long, the show producers had to cut roughly 90% of what we discussed to focus on the stuff that would make for a great TV show: beer and drama!

But the bigger issue for BEERMKR was the timing of their episode taping. After COVID-related productions delays (an issue for a lot of companies last year), BEERMKR still hadn’t shipped its product. When asked about units and revenue, the BEERMKR team had to admit there were only 24 of its machines out in the world. This was a huge stumbling block for the Sharks, and all but one passed on the deal. Kevin O’Leary (who seemed oddly fixated on the fact that the BEERMKR guys went to Cornell) was the only Shark who was interested.

If you want to know the specifics of his deal proposal, I suggest you go watch the episode segment (pay TV subscription required). Long story short, the BEERMKR guys didn’t like O’Leary’s numbers and passed. As Walls writes:

So did we miss an opportunity to partner with a Shark? Absolutely. The problem in my view was one of timing, and the deal we got was a direct result of us being in an awkward pre-shipping / pre-revenue stage when we filmed. There was nothing we could do about the Sony Entertainment / MGM / ABC’s production schedule, and there was nothing we could do about covid delaying us by 9+ months. If we had the choice, we would have chosen to pitch AFTER we had shipped product, had sales to prove our model, and had positive reviews from our early brewer base. Unfortunately, you don’t get to choose when to pitch on Shark Tank, and if you get the opportunity to pitch, you have to take it, so we went in with the valuation we believed in and stuck to it. We did succeed in introducing BEERMKR to millions of new people, so I consider that a success.

The story does have a happy ending. The same day its Shark Tank episode aired, BEERMKR had launched an equity crowdfunding campaign, which raised more than $250,000 of its $1 million goal in its first week. No Sharks needed.

Forager Raises $4M for Local Food Procurement Platform

Forager, a digital platform that grocers and food retailers can use to easily source local food, announced this week that it has raised $4 million. This funding round was led by Duncan Saville of ICM Limited and Coastal Enterprises Inc., with participation from other private investors.

For a food retailer, connecting with hundreds of local farmers, fishers, ranchers, and artisanal producers can be an arduous process. This is where Forager comes in handy; rather than a grocer having to deal with each local producer individually, Forager’s platform lists available local producers and their products in one place. This allows local farms and such to update their inventory on-demand with a phone or computer, and buyers from grocery stores can immediately see the amount of stock available and price of each product.

Forager’s new capital will be used to expand key product features, further develop sales channels, and incorporate upgrades to their product. Towards the end of last year, the company announced that it had partnered with Roche Bros. supermarkets to be used in 20 of its locations and subsidiaries in the Boston Metro area.

Eating food that has traveled shorter distances typically tastes better, helps support a farmer in your community, and is more resilient to supply change disruptions. With all of these benefits, it makes sense that the demand for local food has spiked has spiked, and why more companies in the food tech space are catering to this. Cropswap launched at the start of the pandemic in 2020, with its app connecting consumers to local farmers in their area. Grubmarket, a virtual farmer’s market, raised $60 million in October of last year. Chipotle launched a virtual farmers market last summer to give its customers the opportunity to source food from its ingredients suppliers.

As Forager continues to expand, hopefully local food will become more of the norm in standard grocery stores. To date, Forager has sourced over 200,000 local products through its platform, and currently operates in 12 states with more than 40 grocers and retailers.

All Day Kitchens Raises $20M, Launches in Chicago

San Francisco Bay Area-based All Day Kitchens (formerly Virtual Kitchen Co.) announced today it has raised a $20 million Series B round, bringing the company’s total funding to $37.5 million. This round was led by Founders Fund with participation from Khosla Ventures, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, and Opendoor CEO Eric Wu. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Base10 also participated. 

The new funds will support the company’s debut in Chicago, Illinois, which happens today. The company has partnered with a mix of local and independently owned restaurants for its Chicago facility. 

This is All Day Kitchens’ first expansion outside of the Bay Area. Up to now, the company has operated a handful of facilities around that region, where they currently have 10 locations and 16 restaurant partners. That includes San Francisco institutions like Dosa and Nopalito. 

Further locations are planned for San Francisco, as well as in other (to be named) parts of California. All Day Kitchens also plans to set up shop in Texas “within the next year,” according to today’s news announcement.

When the company launched its first kitchen in 2019, delivery-only and distributed kitchens were little-known phrases in the restaurant industry, let alone with the general population. The move towards this format of using kitchens designed specifically for delivery meals was well underway at the start of 2020. To say the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated restaurants’ adoption of the delivery-only kitchen into their operations is the understatement of the week. What was not so long ago a niche concept now sees participation from major QSR brands, fine dining establishments, and celebrities alike. 

One oft-overlooked segment, however, is the one for smaller restaurants and independent chains. Moving forward, All Day Kitchens’ focus on that could be an important point of differentiation. 

Future plans include adding more onsite ordering and pickup at locations, which could start to double as food halls with that functionality. 

Solar Biotech Raises $2M for Its Fermentation Tech

Raleigh, North Carolina-based Solar Biotech has raised a $2 million in a debt-financing round from a single, unnamed investor, according to WRAL Tech Wire, which first broke the news. The funds will go towards scaling up Solar Biotech’s renewable-energy-powered fermentation technology, which it licenses to other companies.

That technology consists of what Solar Biotech calls “SynBio Hyperintegration Algorithms.” These allow for customized plant architectures, dubbed “BioNodes,” for each synthetic biology product and can be used for, among other things, functional food ingredients.

The end goal is to provide a platform through which other companies can scale up and get their products to market faster without having to build their own technology platform. Solar Biotech claims its first working prototype, BioNode-1, will reduce products’ time to market “by 10-fold” for “a fraction of current costs.” Practically speaking, that means Solar Biotech wants to help companies get their fermentation products to market in months, rather than years, and eventually days.

It’s an ambitious goal, but one very fitting for the times. Fermentation is widely seen as “the next pillar of alternative proteins” alongside cultured and plant-based protein. 

Fermentation uses microbes to produce proteins and functional ingredients that can be used in meat and dairy alternatives. Unlike the nascent process behind cultured protein, fermentation is more or less a proven process that’s available to food companies now. The challenge for fermentation companies nowadays is more about scale than anything else. 

Fermentation has a lot of potential uses cases, from animal-free dairy a la Perfect Day to alternative bee honey to steak. Solar Biotech joins a number of other companies, including MycoTechnology, Nature’s Fynd, and HakkoBako, in focusing on the actual tech that will make fermentation more widely available at a lower cost. 

Food Tech News: Powdered Oat Milk, Vietnamese Coffee Pour-Over Kits

Welcome to the weekend, the peak of spring, and your favorite place to catch up on food tech news. A few stories caught our eyes this week including China’s recently passed food waste law, new high-protein sesame seeds, Copper Cow Coffee’s latest funding round, and oat milk in the form of powder.

Copper Cow Coffee secures $8.5M in Series A funding round

Copper Cow Coffee produces Vietnamese coffee pour-over kits, and this week the women-owned company raised $8.5 million in funding that will be used for expanding distribution and product innovation. The round was led by Cultivian Sandbox and Arborview Capital and saw participation from Siddhi Capital, Silverton Partners, Social Starts, Montage Ventures, CRCM, and Stormbreaker Ventures. Copper Cow Coffee sources its coffee from farms in Vietnam that apply organic agricultural and processing practices. The company’s pour-over kits include condensed milk or coconut milk creamer packets and Vietnamese coffee, with flavor varieties including vanilla latte, churro, rose, and vanilla. The pour-over kits require no special equipment because the coffee bags fit over the rim of any mug or cup (as depicted above).

Photo by Diego Morales on Unsplash

High-protein sesame seeds for plant-based alternatives

Equinom, a seed-breeding technology company, has partnered with Dipasa, a sesame seed processor and exporter, to develop a high protein sesame seed for use in plant-based protein alternatives. The new sesame seed will be bred using Equinom’s AI-backed genomic optimization algorithms and distributed globally by Dipasa. Sesame seeds do not naturally have a high protein content like soy or wheat does, but the new high-protein sesame seed will contain 65 to 70 percent protein content (a normal sesame seed has a 23 percent protein content). Boosting the protein content of a sesame seed will make it a more viable option as a base for plant-based products.

Photo from Blue Farm’s website

Blue Farm aims to make oat milk more sustainable

Berlin-based Blue Farm has created a powdered oat milk base with the intention of making the plant-based milk sector more sustainable. Transporting liquid-filled cartons across the country, or even globally, releases transportation emissions. On top of this, many plant-based milk cartons are not recyclable. Blue Farm’s oat milk powder comes in a compact, 100% recycled plastic packaging which can be recycled again. The oat milk powder is shelf-stable, and simply must be shaken with water to create liquid oat milk.