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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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The Spoon’s Food Tech Weekly: ChatGPT and a Nest Exec’s Entry Into Smart Kitchen

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You’ve probably seen folks on Linkedin or Twitter posting poems or other examples of content created by the buzzy AI chatbot ChatGPT. 

Bad poetry is fun and all, but what if you could actually use generative AI for something useful, like answering back office questions about the restaurant kitchen you manage? What if it could answer questions like “What are my top selling items this week?” or “I only have 20lbs of chicken in inventory, what’s the chance I’m going to run out today?”

That’s what the team at ClearCOGS wanted to achieve with the recent integration of their restaurant operations software and ChatGPT. 

I’ve seen other interesting examples of generative AI at work in other food verticals, which is why we’ve decided to bring some of the folks building these tools together in a few weeks to explore how generative AI could impact the food business. If you’d like to attend our free event, How ChatGPT & Generative AI Will Change the Food Biz, go ahead and register here (if you’d like to inquire about sponsorship, drop me a line).  If you are working on an interesting project that connects generative AI to food in some way, we’d like to hear more. 

CES & Food Tech: Year Two

Speaking of events, CES 2023 was less than two weeks ago, and we’re still busy writing up all the interesting innovations we saw in Vegas. Unlike last year when attendance at the show was light due to the late-breaking arrival of the omicron variant the month before, this year felt like CES was getting back to its old self, with the food tech area being especially active.

It was the second year food tech had its own dedicated area on the show floor, and, whether it was the consistent crowds sampling ramen at the Yo-Kai booth, trying out plant-based cheese at Armored Fresh, or watching the cooking demos at the Tramontina and CookingPal booths, there was lots of energy and excitement about the category.

We also felt the same excitement at the CES Food Tech Conference. This year CES gave The Spoon a full day to program, and we had great sessions on the big stage about everything from the future of farming to cultivated meat to space food. We’ll be getting videos from CES of the sessions this month and will be featuring some of those on The Spoon.

And, naturally, we couldn’t go to CES without having a party for the food tech community. The Spoon Food Tech happy hour was a lot of fun, and it featured one of the first-ever tastings of Pairwise’s gene-edited mustard greens.

As the world’s biggest tech conference, CES sets the agenda every year in the world of innovation, and we are excited to help shine the spotlight on food tech. We’ll be bringing it back again next year and hope you can be involved in some way. Drop me a line if you’d like to get an early start on participating in the CES 2024 food tech program. 

As for CES 2023, we are wrapping up our CES Food Tech report, which will publish next week. We’ll be looking at every company that we found showcasing something interesting in food tech, so keep an eye out for that. 

Food Tech 2023 Survey

We are going to be sending out our annual food tech outlook survey next week to our newsletter subscribers.  The survey will be a part of an ongoing set of surveys this year we’ll be fielding as part of a broader expansion of our research efforts at The Spoon. If you’d like to participate in our smaller focused surveys highlighting specific topics, I’d encourage you to sign up for The Spoon’s food tech research panel. 

That’s it for now.  We’re excited to bring you news and analysis from the world of food tech this year. On to the stories…

Until next week,

Mike

How will new tools like ChatGPT impact the world of food? We’ll be discussing just that during the Spoon’s mini-summit on February 15th. The event is free, so register here today before the session fills up. 

Mill Wants You to Create Chicken Feed Out of Food Scraps

Want to stop sending food waste to the landfill?

A new device and service from a company called Mill will help you do just that while also letting you feed a chicken or two while you’re at it.

Debuting this week, the Mill kitchen bin, a new eponymous device from a company founded by a couple of ex-Nest execs, will take your food waste and shrink & “de-stink” it as it turns into what it calls Food Grounds, something the company says is a “safe and nutritious chicken feed ingredient.”

Here’s how it works:

You sign up for a Mill “Membership,” a $33-a-month subscription service that includes a kitchen bin and a pickup service for the processed Food Grounds. You connect the Mill to Wi-Fi, activate it using the Mill app, and start tossing in your food scraps. Once the bin is full, you put your Food Grounds into a prepaid box and schedule a pickup with the Mill app.

You can read the full story here on The Spoon.

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

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

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

Read the full story at The Spoon.

Food Retail

These New Scanners Will Help Us All From Squeezing (and Damaging) The Avocadoes

Every year, tens of thousands of tons of avocadoes are thrown into the trash or compost. Whether on the farm or in our fridges, the delicious fruit is one of the most difficult to get right when it comes to determining ripeness, resulting in a whole lot of wasted food.

One startup hoping to help us reduce the amount of avocadoes going to waste is OneThird, a startup out of The Netherlands that has built a line of spectral scanners that determine the freshness of an avocado.

When a OneThird scanner looks at the spectral fingerprint of an avocado, it compares the data gathered to its database to determine how ripe the fruit is and then sends the information to its app.

You can read the full story and watch a video of OneThird’s technology at The Spoon. 

Drive-Thru Grocer JackBe Opens First Location in Oklahoma City

JackBe, which claims to be the country’s first curbside drive-thru grocer, opened its first location this week in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, according to a release sent to The Spoon. The store will allow customers to place orders via the JackBe app and pick up their groceries at a drive-thru bay, where a JackBe employee will deliver the groceries right to their car.

The new 17,000-square-foot location carries in-demand products across a number of categories, including produce, meat, bakery, deli, and consumables. JackBe is also planning to roll out prepared meals and local brands in the future.

You can read the full story at The Spoon. 

Food Delivery

Wonder Pulls a Zume, Drops Futuristic Food Trucks as it Pivots to Lower Cost Operating Model

According to a report this week in the Wall Street Journal, food delivery startup Wonder is laying off employees and will begin to phase out its signature food delivery trucks in the hopes of creating a lower-cost operating model.

This is a massive shift for a company that became the talk of the food delivery business for a high-touch approach built around its delivery vehicles. Wonder not only brought the food to a customer’s home, but it cooked it curbside in vans that had become ubiquitous over the past year and a half in the North Jersey market in which it operates.

According to the Journal, the company will pivot to a more conventional ghost kitchen model, operating ten kitchens around New Jersey and New York. In addition to delivery, Wonder will offer in-location dining and pickup at locations.

Tightening venture capital markets have cast a pall over the startup world over the past 12 months, and today’s news suggests that even superstar fundraisers like Wonder founder Marc Lore aren’t immune to investors’ darkening moods. It had always been an open question whether Lore could continue to raise enough money for an operating model that looked incredibly expensive from the outside, and now it looks like we have our answer.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Future Food

GOOD Meat Receives Approval in Singapore to Use Serum-Free Media for Cultivated Meat Production

GOOD Meat, the cultivated meat division of Eat Just, announced today that it has received regulatory approval from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) for the use of serum-free media for the production of cultivated meat.

Many in the industry believe that using animal-free growth media will not only help the cultivated meat industry achieve what is effectively its raison d’être through the severing of reliance on a cruel animal agriculture industry, but it will also lead to greater scalability, lower manufacturing costs, and a more sustainable product. It also paves the way for the production of larger quantities of real chicken made from cells.

GOOD Meat had previously obtained approval from SFA for its first chicken product in November 2020, and subsequent approval for new formats of its poultry in November 2021. With the latest regulatory approval for serum-free cultivation media, Eat Just says its cell ag meat division will soon transition to a more efficient and favorable production process.

You can read the full story at The Spoon.

Aqua Cultured Foods Building Manufacturing Plant to Commercialize Fermentation-Derived Seafood

Chicago-based food tech start-up Aqua Cultured Foods has begun building a new manufacturing facility for its plant-based seafood products in the West Loop area of the city. The facility, nearly three times the size of Aqua’s current base, is already food-grade and requires minimal upgrades to enable the company to scale production of its fermentation-derived protein.

According to the company, their production methods use standard food production equipment, allowing quicker buildout. Aquaculture says its production methods are also space-efficient, comparing their space usage to vertical farming.

To read the full story, click here. 

Food Robotics

Watch LG’s Server Robot Bring Dishes to Customers at Popular Korean Restaurant in Georgia

One year ago, LG announced the debut of its new hospitality server robot, and now the Korean tech giant’s CLOi Servebot is showing up at restaurants like the Airang K in Johns Creek, Georgia. Since June 2022, four “LG CLOi ServeBot” robotic assistants from LG have been assisting wait staff by accompanying them to guests’ tables while carrying multiple dishes at once.

Initially, Arirang K had deployed two of the Servebots to help their employees but soon upgraded to four. “Everybody liked the first two so much that we upgraded to four LG ServeBots to maximize service levels and guarantee that every customer gets to see the robots in action,” said Miok Kim, general manager of Arirang K.

The LG Servebot has 11 hours of operating time and three shelves that hold up to 22 pounds. They also feature sensors and cameras that enable autonomous driving, obstacle avoidance, and recognition.

To read the full story, click here!

Google’s Farm Tech Moonshot Mineral Becomes Alphabet Company

Google parent company Alphabet has added a new company to its portfolio this week in Mineral, a farm tech startup that spent the last five years incubating within Google’s X.

The news of Mineral’s graduation to full-fledged Alphabet company came in the form a blog post by Mineral CEO Elliott Grant (previously of Shopwell, a shopping startup sold to Innit). According to Grant, the mission behind Mineral is to “help scale sustainable agriculture”, which they are doing by “developing a platform and tools that help gather, organize, and understand never-before known or understood information about the plant world – and make it useful and actionable.”

According to Mineral, they have analyzed over 10% of the total farmland on Earth, modeled more than 200 plant traits, phenotyped 17 crop varieties, and developed more than 80 high-performance ML models. Mineral’s ag-optimized analysis tools will be used to process large unstructured sets of the world’s agricultural data, sourced from satellite images, farm equipment, public databases, and Mineral’s own proprietary data streams. The company will make this data available to partners to combine this data with their private data to derive insights into yield, genomic understanding, and agronomic discovery.

To read the full story, click here. 

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

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

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

You can watch the Evigence system in action below:

Real Time Freshness Monitors

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

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

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

GOOD Meat Receives Approval in Singapore to Use Serum-Free Media for Cultivated Meat Production

GOOD Meat, the cultivated meat division of Eat Just, announced today that it has received regulatory approval from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) for the use of serum-free media for the production of cultivated meat.

Many in the industry believe that using animal-free growth media will not only help the cultivated meat industry achieve what is effectively its raison d’être through the severing of reliance on a cruel animal agriculture industry, but it will also lead to greater scalability, lower manufacturing costs, and a more sustainable product. It also paves the way for the production of larger quantities of real chicken made from cells.

GOOD Meat had previously obtained approval from SFA for its first chicken product in November 2020, and subsequent approval for new formats of its poultry in November 2021. With the latest regulatory approval for serum-free cultivation media, Eat Just says its cell ag meat division will soon transition to a more efficient and favorable production process.

According to the company, its chicken has been featured on menus at restaurants, in hawker stalls, and via food delivery. And now, beginning this month, diners can reserve weekly tables to try out Good Meat’s cultivated chicken at Huber’s Butchery, a Singaporean producer and supplier of meat products.

The company is also working on a Singapore production facility with production partner ABEC. According to Good Meat, the new facility will hold the largest bioreactor in the cultivated meat industry and will be able to use the serum-free production process for its cultivated meat when it opens next year.

“Not too long ago, observers thought removing serum was a major limiting step to scaling cultivated meat,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just. “I could not be prouder of our team for doing just that and receiving approval to commercialize it this week. It’s yet another step forward for our company, the cultivated meat industry, and the health of our planet.”

This week has been a big one for animal-free growth media. On Monday, Multus announced they had raised $9.5 million to fund the production of a growth media production plant. And yesterday, cultivated meat pioneer Mosa Meat announced they had been able to grow cultivated fat without fetal-bovine serum.

Mill Wants You to Create Chicken Feed Out of Food Scraps

Want to stop sending food waste to the landfill?

A new device and service from a company called Mill will help you do just that while also letting you feed a chicken or two while you’re at it.

Debuting today, the Mill kitchen bin, a new eponymous device from a company founded by a couple of ex-Nest execs, will take your food waste and shrink & “de-stink” it as it turns into what it calls Food Grounds, something the company says is a “safe and nutritious chicken feed ingredient.”

Here’s how it works:

You sign up for a Mill “Membership,” a $33-a-month subscription service that includes a kitchen bin and a pickup service for the processed Food Grounds. You connect the Mill to Wi-Fi, activate it using the Mill app, and start tossing in your food scraps. Once the bin is full, you put your Food Grounds into a prepaid box and schedule a pickup with the Mill app.

While it’s tempting to call the kitchen bin one of a new cohort of smart food composters, Mill wants you to know that its box is definitely not a composter. The Food Grounds “aren’t compost,” says Mill, because instead of having the food sit and get eaten by microbes, it’s processed into an edible chicken feed ingredient they say can be put back into the food system.

Still, aside from the chicken feed system, the Mill isn’t that different from some of the other composters we’ve written about. Like the Lomi and the Kalea, the machine accelerates the shrinking and drying of the food into something other than the original food waste you dropped into the container.

The framing of the Mill is primarily about sustainability and reducing food waste, and it’s a positioning that makes sense. If we’re going to throw food out, it’s better to have those scraps turned into something that can feed chickens or your local garden than end up in a landfill.

That said, the optimal solution for food is not to have it end up as food waste at all, but instead, have it eaten by humans. That’s why I’m hoping the Mill team’s next product will be something that helps us preserve food from entering a waste bin altogether.

For those interested, Mill is taking reservations now and plans to ship the kitchen bin this spring.

These New Scanners Will Help Us All From Squeezing (and Damaging) The Avocadoes

Every year, tens of thousands of tons of avocadoes are thrown into the trash or compost. Whether on the farm or in our fridges, the delicious fruit is one of the most difficult to get right when it comes to determining ripeness, resulting in a whole lot of wasted food.

One startup hoping to help us reduce the amount of avocadoes going to waste is OneThird, a startup out of The Netherlands that has built a line of spectral scanners that determine the freshness of an avocado.

When a OneThird scanner looks at the spectral fingerprint of an avocado, it compares the data gathered to its database to determine how ripe the fruit is and then sends the information to its app. You can see the scanner in action in the video below:

A Look at the OneThird Ripeness Checker at CES 2023

According to company CES Marko Snikkers, because farmers and distributors often don’t know how ripe avocados are, they will often ship the produce to retailers when it should have gone to a processor or some other application that can make use of ripe or overripe produce.

“What we try to do is give our customers the data so they know if it should go to the store or be repurposed for other methods such as dry freeing or juices,” said Snikkers.

The company debuted their in-store version and the quality lab version of their scanners at CES 2023.

OneThird isn’t the only company with a spectral imaging scanner targeted at grocery retailers to determine avocado freshness. In October of last year, Apeel debuted their avocado scanner, which it built using technology acquired from Impact Vision.

I for one am looking forward to seeing one of these scanners in my local grocery store, not only because it’s hard to determine freshness without it, but also because it would hopefully prevent me and others from squeezing the fruit.

“We all squeeze,” said Snikkers. “And that is definitely damaging the avocadoes.”

ClearCOGS ChatGPT Beta Will Help Restaurant Managers Predict If They’ll Run Out of Chicken

Last week, restaurant software technology company ClearCOGS announced a new ChatGPT-3-powered beta of their restaurant management software. According to the company, the new beta will enable restaurant owners to “understand and respond to even the most complex questions about your restaurant’s inventory, sales, and operations.”

According to a post on the company’s website, the ClearCOGS beta will enable real-time queries from managers about their operations using a natural language interface. The new pairing between the company’s predictive forecasting system and ChatGPT is designed to answer questions such as “What are my top selling items this week?” or “I only have 20lbs of chicken in inventory, what’s the chance I’m going to run out today?”. ClearCOGS says this will allow its customers to make informed decisions about their inventory and operations more quickly without more labor-intensive (and old-school) hours spent diving into spreadsheets and reports.

Last month, I wrote about how generative AI tools like ChatGPT could make a difference in the home kitchen, but it’s not all that surprising that we’ll likely see these tools enter the restaurant space. ClearCOGS is a back-of-house operations tool, and I expect we’ll see similar tools debut soon for front-of-house, customer-facing interactions as well.

ClearCOGS is currently accepting signups for the beta pilot of their ChatGPT-enabled system. Restaurants interested in participating can sign up on their website.

Multus Biotechnology Raises $9.5m Series A To Build Growth Media Production Plant

Multus Biotechnology, a UK-based startup, has announced the close of a $9.5 million Series A investment round to build a growth media production facility. The funding includes an equity-free grant of $2.5 million from Innovate UK through the EIC Accelerator. The round was led by Mandi Ventures, with key investors including SOSV, Big Idea Ventures, SynBioVen, and Asahi Kasei Corp.

With new funding in hand, Multus plans to build a growth media production plant in the UK that it hopes will accelerate the cultivated meat industry towards price parity with affordable food-safe growth media at commercial scale. The London-based startup will also accelerate product development in advanced growth media formulations and food-grade raw materials. This week’s funding follows a $2.2 million raise in 2021 and the launch of the company’s first product, Proliferum® M, an all-in-one solution to eliminate the use of foetal bovine serum in cell culture.

Last week, the Spoon discussed the new funding round and the company’s plans with Multus CEO and cofounder Cai Linton.

Tell us about Multus platform.

“At Multus we combine novel ingredient discovery with intelligent formulation design to create high performance growth media suited for the cellular agriculture industry. For example, we use precision fermentation and computational protein design to make growth factors affordable and unlock capabilities in growth media design.”

Like many in this space, Multus is focused on creating animal-free growth media. Tell us about your thinking here and how your platform gets there

Growth factors have historically been a leading cost-driver in serum-free growth media. Another area we are investing heavily is nutrient-rich plant-derived ingredients that are food-safe, affordable and scalable using well-established food-manufacturing practices. These complex ingredients allow us to design high-performance growth media for a variety of cultivated meat-relevant cell types with no animal serum and a clear route to scale. To capture the complexity of a large ingredient library and new cell types and performance objectives, we combine machine learning with high-throughput formulation screening to optimise our growth media efficiently in our MediOp platform.

How did the Multus founding team get started and how did you decide what problem to tackle?

We have taken the challenge of designing affordable, food-safe growth media for the cellular agriculture industry to be an engineering challenge. At Imperial College London, I met my co-founders – Kevin with a background in data-science, Reka with synthetic biology and regenerative medicine, and myself with bioengineering – to combine data science and engineering principles to biology and build enabling technology to accelerate the cellular agriculture industry’s time to market and time to price parity and scale.

There is no silver bullet in growth media. Every aspect from amino acids and growth factors to the formulation optimisation and manufacturing is considered in our interdisciplinary approach. With growth factors, we realised in 2020 that similar proteins are already produced at much larger scale and lower price points than we will ever need in the cellular agriculture industry by companies in the industrial enzyme industry. The difficulty with growth factors is that they inherently have a short half-life due to their function as cell-to-cell signalling molecules in dynamic systems (i.e. humans/animals). When the system is stable (i.e. a large bioreactor), the rapid degradation of growth factors creates an expensive problem. Therefore, we decided to utilise readily scalable and affordable technology in precision fermentation and focus our innovation in computational protein design to create biodesigned growth factors with enhanced potency and prolonged activity.

Can you tell us more about how you are using computational biology and machine learning to solve the problem of growth media.

We also recognise scientific understanding of cell metabolism in the new cell types used in cultivated meat is not sufficient to prompt rational design of growth media, especially when using complex or food-grade raw materials. As such, we have turned growth media optimisation into a data-science problem by capturing large amounts of data on cell behaviour and using computational modelling and machine learning to analyse the data and efficiently find the best combinations of ingredients to maximise performance.

As time goes on, we are accumulating more and more data with different ingredients and different cell types to continue improving the efficiency of our platform and thus the control we have over cell growth. One of the unique benefits of our MediOp platform is that we can efficiently customise growth media to meet multiple objectives in a short time-period. This will be especially important when large-scale production of cultivated meat puts constrains on access to raw materials and rapid re-formulation becomes an important business need Multus will be able to meet.

Tell us your plans post-funding.

To bring our novel ingredient discovery and intelligent formulation design, we are investing in a first-of-its-kind production facility to make food-safe growth media at commercial scale with non-dilutive funding from Innovate UK through the EIC Accelerator. We recently announced we achieved ISO22000 certification in our production lab, a major step forward in becoming the all-in-one solution and preferred supplier of growth media to the cellular agriculture industry. Our facility is being built in the UK and will be able to support several companies scaling from bench to pilot, and pilot to commercial manufacturing.

Watch LG’s Server Robot Bring Dishes to Customers at Popular Korean Restaurant in Georgia

One year ago, LG announced the debut of its new hospitality server robot, and now the Korean tech giant’s CLOi Servebot is showing up at restaurants like the Airang K in Johns Creek, Georgia. Since June 2022, four “LG CLOi ServeBot” robotic assistants from LG have been assisting wait staff by accompanying them to guests’ tables while carrying multiple dishes at once.

Initially, Arirang K had deployed two of the Servebots to help their employees but soon upgraded to four. “Everybody liked the first two so much that we upgraded to four LG ServeBots to maximize service levels and guarantee that every customer gets to see the robots in action,” said Miok Kim, general manager of Arirang K.

The LG Servebot has 11 hours of operating time and three shelves that hold up to 22 pounds. They also feature sensors and cameras that enable autonomous driving, obstacle avoidance, and recognition.

“As the CLOi Servebot is cruising down the path to deliver food to a table, if a chair is pulled out a little bit too far, It will notice the surroundings in the settings and direct to a different route,” said Brittany Marubio of LG.

If you haven’t seen a server bot in one of your favorite restaurants, chances are you will soon as the server-bot market pioneered by Bear Robotics is becoming more crowded. In addition to LG and Bear, solutions from Pudu Robotics and Keenon Robotics are also beginning to be deployed. Restaurants are using these robots to not only deal with understaffing but to take the burden off of employees and make their jobs safer.

“The main dishes that come on in our restaurant are mostly hot, and it can be dangerous,” said Taylor Robinson, a server at Arirang K. “So the LG Servebots are able to help us by bringing those dishes up for us and all we have to do is hand it right off at the table.”

You can see the LG Servebot in action in the video below:

LG ServeBot at Arirang K Restaurant

Google’s Farm Tech Moonshot Mineral Becomes Alphabet Company

Google parent company Alphabet has added a new company to its portfolio this week in Mineral, a farm tech startup that spent the last five years incubating within Google’s X.

The news of Mineral’s graduation to full-fledged Alphabet company came in the form a blog post by Mineral CEO Elliott Grant (previously of Shopwell, a shopping startup sold to Innit). According to Grant, the mission behind Mineral is to “help scale sustainable agriculture”, which they are doing by “developing a platform and tools that help gather, organize, and understand never-before known or understood information about the plant world – and make it useful and actionable.”

According to Mineral, they have analyzed over 10% of the total farmland on Earth, modeled more than 200 plant traits, phenotyped 17 crop varieties, and developed more than 80 high-performance ML models. Mineral’s ag-optimized analysis tools will be used to process large unstructured sets of the world’s agricultural data, sourced from satellite images, farm equipment, public databases, and Mineral’s own proprietary data streams. The company will make this data available to partners to combine this data with their private data to derive insights into yield, genomic understanding, and agronomic discovery.

One such partner is Driscoll’s. The large berry company has been working with Mineral to explore ways to improve data collection in its breeding operations and work on better yield forecasting. The two also worked together to enhance berry inspection using Mineral’s perception tools and, according to Driscoll’s, was able to build a system that many believe performed similarly to human experts.

Another Mineral project Mineral was the creation of a special crop-roving robot named Don Roverto. Don Roverto was used by Mineral to assist the Alliance for Biodiversity and CIAT to accelerate their work to understand and uncover hidden crop traits within the world’s largest bean collection. Using Don Roverto, the Alliance, after thirty years of searching, found a “magic” bean with intrinsic drought-resistant characteristics.

Google has often used X to incubate mission-based startups, and Mineral is no different. According to Grant, they chose ag as a vertical because it is “increasingly believed to be a major contributor to the climate crisis — but it is also a victim of a changing climate. There is no time to waste to find more climate-resilient crop varieties, to transition to less chemical- and fossil fuel-intensive practices, to improve soil health, and to restore biodiversity.”

Aqua Cultured Foods Building Manufacturing Plant to Commercialize Fermentation-Derived Seafood

Chicago-based food tech start-up Aqua Cultured Foods has begun building a new manufacturing facility for its plant-based seafood products in the West Loop area of the city. The facility, nearly three times the size of Aqua’s current base, is already food-grade and requires minimal upgrades to enable the company to scale production of its fermentation-derived protein.

According to the company, their production methods use standard food production equipment, allowing quicker buildout. Aquaculture says its production methods are also space-efficient, comparing their usage of space as being similar to vertical farming.

“This move is the final step on the road to commercialization of our alt-seafood, and it’s what we and our supporters have been waiting for,” said Anne Palermo, CEO of Aqua Cultured Food.

Unlike many alt-seafood companies creating more straightforward plant-based analogs, Aqua Cultured utilizes biomass fermentation to grow its protein. The company uses its proprietary fungi to produce seafood analogs such as tuna, calamari, and shrimp.

Aqua Cultured Foods says it is currently holding tasting events with strategic partners including restaurants and plans to roll out its products in the second quarter of this year.  

Drive-Thru Grocer JackBe Opens First Location in Oklahoma City

JackBe, which claims to be the country’s first curbside drive-thru grocer, opened its first location this week in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, according to a release sent to The Spoon. The store will allow customers to place orders via the JackBe app and pick up their groceries at a drive-thru bay, where a JackBe employee will deliver the groceries right to their car.

The new 17,000-square-foot location carries in-demand products across a number of categories, including produce, meat, bakery, deli, and consumables. JackBe is also planning to roll out prepared meals and local brands in the future.

While JackBe claims to be the first drive-thru grocery, another startup named Opie actually beat them to it when it launched its first location in South Caroline in 2021. To be fair to JackBe, at three thousand square feet, Opie’s is something more akin to a drive-thru convenience store than a grocery store. Before Opie, Amazon opened a drive-thru pickup location in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle for customers who ordered groceries through its website. Interestingly, Amazon announced this week they are closing that location (the e-commerce giant only has one other drive-thru location).

According to Supermarket News, JackBe closed a $3.5 million seed round in April of last year and plans to raise an additional $3.5 million in pre-Series A funding to fund the building of two more stores in the Oklahoma City area in early 2023.

No Meat Factory Raises $42 Million to Expand Plant-Based Meat Manufacturing Capacity

No Meat Factory, a leading plant-based alternative protein manufacturer, announced today that it has closed a Series B funding round, raising $42 million USD. The funding round was led by new investor Tengelmann Growth Partners, with participation from existing investor Emil Capital Partners (ECP). The company plans to use the funding to expand its production footprint in North America and build out its manufacturing capabilities to service the global market, increasing access to affordable alternative proteins for mainstream consumers.

No Meat Factory will use its new BRC-certified facilities in British Columbia to produce plant-based alternative protein products for its brand partners. Products will include meat alternatives for convenience products like nuggets and hamburgers and whole-muscle alternatives. Its second production facility, which will begin operations in early 2023, will increase production capacity and provide additional manufacturing capabilities for plant-based deli and sausage alternatives.

“The traction No Meat Factory has experienced in just a few short years is evidence that consumers want greater access to plant-based alternative proteins and brands are looking for ways to deliver quality at an affordable price,” said Dieter Thiem, CEO and cofounder of No Meat Factory. “With this latest funding round, we are excited to not only expand our operations to meet the needs of our partners, but to take advantage of the support and expertise of our investors as we expand our footprint globally.”

No Meat Factory will also continue to make significant investments in its global research and development organization that focuses on commercializing the latest innovations in alternative protein.

“No Meat Factory has an exceptional founding team with decades of experience in the plant-based industry, and we are thrilled to come on board to support the company’s next phase of growth,” said Patrick Schaich, Investment Partner at Tengelmann Growth Partners.

The funding is notable because it comes at a time when the plant-based meat industry has been struggling and has seen overall VC capital going into the space decline significantly. One factor in No Meat’s Factory’s favor may be its cofounder team, which includes Dieter Thiem, who was the former president of plant-based meat manufacturing company Flora Protein (which sold to Garden Protein) and COO Leon Bell, who was previously with ADM, where he helped launch the company’s plant-based meat solutions.