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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Farmstead Launches Grocery OS to Help Other Grocers Get Those Online Dollars

Delivery & Commerce

Online grocer Farmstead announced today that it is making its in-house grocery delivery software, Grocery OS, available to other national and regional grocers.

Farmstead’s pitch is that Grocery OS can help traditional grocers migrate from physical stores to online, working up through dark stores and into warehouse-only formats. In doing so, Farmstead says Grocery OS will also provide more delivery capacity and get retailers more e-commerce revenue.

Grocery e-commerce has experienced record growth throughout the year as the COVID-19 pandemic pushed more people into online grocery shopping. According to a recent Mercatus study, online grocery shopping will continue to grow, hitting $250 and accounting for 21.5 percent of total grocery sales by 2025.

“COVID shows there is pent-up demand for online grocery,” Pradeep Elankumaran, Farmstead Co-Founder and CEO, told me during an interview this week. Of course, this pent-up demand translated at first into delayed grocery delivery windows, often needing to be scheduled weeks out, as well as waitlists and other breakdowns in the process.

Though things have calmed down and plateaued in grocery e-commerce, the trick now for traditional retailers is to build a system that can scale to meet continued demand. As Elankumaran said, however, running a digital-first store is a lot different from running a traditional store that people go in and shop at.

That’s where Farmstead claims its Grocery OS software stack can help. Grocery OS, which Farmstead uses for its own operation, promises to help traditional grocery retailers boost their delivery capacity, manage inventory, picking and packing orders, and handle marketing.

But as Elankumaran pointed out, transitioning to e-commerce isn’t just about grabbing a bigger piece of the pie. It’s also a defensive move for existing retailers. “You also have a whole bunch of pressure from Amazon and Walmart driving pickup and delivery,” he said.

Indeed, Amazon just opened up a delivery-only Whole Foods in Brooklyn and Walmart launched its Walmart+ subscription service that includes free grocery delivery.

According to the press announcement, Grocery OS is already being used by one of the “top 3” national grocers in the U.S. As noted, it’s also been used by Farmstead as that company has weathered its own pandemic growth spurt. While he wouldn’t provide specifics, Elankumaran said that Farmstead has experience 6x growth in revenue over the span of three or four months, grew its team size by 3x and moved into a 17,000 sq. ft. facility from its former 3,000 sq. ft. warehouse.

But Farmstead isn’t giving up its own grocery ambitions. Elankumaran’s goal is to build and scale Farmstead into a national retail brand. And he’ll be using Grocery OS to do it.

Odeko AI-Driven Platform Aims to Boost the Supply, Demand, and Lifespan of the Indie Coffeeshop

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

A lot of us dread the idea of a world where speciality coffeeshops are gone “going for coffee” means getting a Starbucks latte delivered via DoorDash. 

Dane Atkinson, CEO of tech startup Odeko, clearly doesn’t want that day to happen either, which is why his company has developed a mobile ordering and supply chain management system that is, for now, specifically geared towards keeping specialty coffeeshops in business. 

Speaking on the phone this week about his company’s overall mission, he said “the really important message [is that] if we don’t sustain this industry, it really will become Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. They will consolidate in smaller locations and the community and neighborhoods will suffer.”

NYC-based Odeko, which closed a $12 million Series A round in August, recently merged with fellow coffee tech company Cloosiv, has since the start of the pandemic looked for ways to help businesses make both the front and back ends of the coffee shop more efficient, less wasteful, and more financially sustainable over the long haul.

The consumer-facing side of Odeko’s business functions similar to those of mainstream coffee retailers. Customers order and pay for pickup through the company’s mobile app or website. At the moment, Odeko has about 10,000 coffeeshops on the platform across multiple U.S. states. Atkinson says the benefit for customers is its current focus on speciality coffeeshops, which simply means less sifting through irrelevant options to find a high-quality espresso. (Odeko vets its potential merchant partners in order to ensure they actually are specialty coffeeshops.)

The coffeeshops themselves get perhaps the most benefit from the platform. Listing a business on the platform means the coffeeshop itself doesn’t have to come up with the resources to create a mobile order app from the ground up. Odeko charges a 5 percent commission fee per order, which small compared to others, including third-party aggregators a la Grubhub.

Sales data is then used, via AI, to predict volume so that coffeeshops know how much to order in terms of paper supplies, baking ingredients, beverages, and other items needed to run a coffeeshop. Businesses can browse the company’s Cafe Supply Catalog to find all of these items, which Odeko then delivers as a single shipment. 

Atkinson said this supply side of the business is “exploding” now that restaurant industry margins are so tight that any amount of money lost through inventory waste or inefficient supply chain processes can spell the end for a business. “Previously, as a shop, you could get away with some waste in your inventory,” he noted. Now, throwing out unused inventory is akin to “your own salary you’re throwing out.” He says the system is “90 percent accurate” in terms of predicting inventory needs for a week.

The need to digitize the back of house and make it more efficient is a theme that comes up a lot nowadays, with companies like Galley and Souszen applying software, automation, and IoT to change how the back of house is run. Odeko stands somewhat apart from these companies because of its accompanying consumer-facing tech, and also its focus on independent and specialty retailers. It’s main competitor in the coffee-specific mobile order space is Ritual, though Ritual does not have a supply chain side of its business.

Odeko doesn’t necessarily want to solely commit itself to coffee for the long haul. Atkinson says the system could actually work for other types of food businesses, including juice bars or full-service restaurants, and that at some point down the line the company will expand in terms of the types of food businesses on its platform. For now, keeping the independent coffeeshop, the connective tissue of many neighborhoods, alive is its main mission. 

InFarm Raises $170M to Expand Its Vertical Farming Network

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce, Foodtech

Berlin, Germany-based vertical farming company InFarm announced today it has raised $170 million in the first close of its Series C round, bringing its total funding so far to $304.5 million.

The investment round, a mix of equity and debt financing, was led by LGT Lightstone with participation from Hanaco, Bonnier, Haniel, and Latitude, as well as existing investors Atomico, TriplePoint Capital, Mons Capital and Astanor Ventures. InFarm said in today’s press release that it expects the Series C round to eventually reach $200 million.

InFarm has built its reputation, not to mention its coffers, on the idea of getting fresh, local greens to more cities around the world via its network of high-tech vertical farms. The farms are smallish, pod-like devices that can live in grocery stores, restaurants, and food distribution centers. The farms use hydroponics and cloud-based software to grow leafy greens in completely controlled environments. A big benefit with InFarms’ approach is that, since farms are placed inside grocery stores, greens can be harvested onsite and sold without having to travel. 

Sourcing greens close to the store is becoming more commonplace as companies develop smaller vertical farms. While InFarm might be the most high-profile player in this area of vertical farming, it isn’t the only company bringing greens literally to market. Farm.One just installed its own mini-vertical farm at a Whole Foods in Manhattan and has plans to expand to other stores soon. Vertical Field launched a geoponic vertical farm at New York’s famed Evergreen market in August. Brooklyn-based Square Roots puts a slightly different twist on the concept by placing its shipping container farms next to food distribution centers. The company currently has a partnership with North American distributor Gordon Food Service.

All of which is to say, InFarm may be leading the farm-in-a-grocery-store movement, but it won’t be the only company grabbing major investment dollars for long.

InFarm raised $100 million in June of 2019. Since then, it has struck deals with major grocery retailers around the world, including  Aldi Süd in Germany, Kroger in the U.S., Empire in Canada, and Kinokuniya in Japan, among other places. The company said today it expects its farming network to total more than 5 million square feet by 2025, making it the largest distributed farming network in the world. 

To do that, the company will expand to new cities in future. The new investment capital will go towards that goal. InFarm will also use some of it to complete development on a next-gen version of its farm. 

Apple App Clips is Out Today, Right in the Middle of the Contactless HeyDay

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

Apple’s iOS 14 drops today, which means a bunch of new features are coming to your iPhone. Among the batch of goodies to be found in the update is the release of App Clips, which could help accelerate the adoption of mobile contactless payments across the food retail and restaurant space.

We covered App Clips back when the service was announced at Apple’s WWDC event. In a nutshell, App Clips allows you to pull down just a portion of a native mobile app to give you its basic functionality, without needing to download and set up the full app.

Let’s say, for example, you are at a Starbucks but don’t have the Starbucks app installed on your iPhone. Normally, you’d have to download the full app, set up an account and then enter a payment method before you could even start your order. Through App Clips, you can grab just enough of the Starbucks app to order and pay. No need to download the full app, no need for an account and since it uses Apple Pay, no need to enter credit card information.

The big limitation right now is that a cafe, restaurant or retailer has to be participating the program and developed an App Clip. But if/when they do, App Clips can be opened by scanning QR codes, tapping NFC tags, or opening links via Apple services like Messages or Safari. For a full run down of how App Clips works, check out this post from 9 to 5 Mac.

App Clips is definitely arriving at the right time. The COVID-19 pandemic’s sustained presence here in the U.S. is pushing cafes, restaurants and grocery stores towards more contactless payment systems in an attempt to reduce human-to-human contact.

There are a ton of companies bringing contactless payment tech to market. Order for Me, PayJunction and Bbot are among the many startups building contactless payment systems for restaurants. Kroger launched a contactless payment pilot at its QFC store in Seattle last month. And there are a number of other companies doing contactless 2.0, basically through holograms, voice control and pay with your face.

The difference with App Clips, though, is Apple’s massive iPhone installed base. If this catches on, and given it’s utility (no downloading full apps just to get a cup of coffee!), that seems very possible, it could spur vast numbers of people to switch to contactless mobile payments. We just need to see if Apple has the right, well, touch.

Delivery Hero Acquires Glovo’s Latin America Operations

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

Berlin, Germany-based Delivery Hero announced today it has acquired fellow third-party delivery service Glovo’s Latin American operations for €230 million (~$272M USD). The transaction is expected to close in the next few weeks, according to a press release from Delivery Hero.

The deal covers all Latin American countries in which Glovo operates: There is some overlap here, as Delivery Hero already has operations in Argentina, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Acquiring Glovo obviously means Delivery Hero will widen its reach in Latin America considerably. 

Any delivery service aiming to enter or expand in the Latin America market will need to ensure they offer affordable options for restaurants. By some accounts, roughly 96 percent of independent restaurants in Latin America are not even online right now, and restaurant tech is far less developed than in, say, the U.S. and Europe. Even so, the Latin American market is the fastest-growing one outside the Asia-Pacific region.

Delivery Hero CEO Niklas Östberg said in today’s press release that Latin America “is a region with exceptional growth potential for online delivery.” 

The acquisition also means more consolidation for the Latin America food delivery sector. Glovo actually exited two Latin American markets earlier this year. Meanwhile, iFood and Domicillios.com merged in April and together compete with the other major player, Softbank-backed Rappi.

Delivery Hero’s last big acquisition was at the end of 2019 when the company bought its South Korean food delivery rival, Woowa Bros.’ Baedal Minjok service, for $4 billion. Prior to that, it had acquired InstaShop, an online grocery marketplace with operations in the Middle East and North Africa. Delivery Hero now operates in 44 countries worldwide.

Glovo will continue to operate its Latin America markets until March 2021, at which point, pending regulatory approval, they will become a part of Delivery Hero’s network.

Phytolon Sees Green with $4.1M in Funding its for Natural Food Coloring

Foodtech

Phytolon, which uses fermentation to create plant-based food colorings, announced today that it has raised $4.1 million in funding. Millennium Food-Tech, EIT Food, Consensus Business Group, The Trendlines Group, Yossi Ackerman and the Israel Innovation Authority participated in the round.

Founded in 2018 and based in Misgav, Israel, Phytolon wants to change up the food coloring space by replacing the artificial and synthetic materials used in the process with natural ingredients. Phytolon does this via a technology the company license through the Wiezmann Institute of Science that uses the fermentation of yeast. The Phytolon website didn’t provide much detail on the technology, but claims its approach is environmentally sustainable, GMO-free, and offers a wide color spectrum across a number of food applications.

While we may not know all the specifics around Phytolon’s technology, we do know that fermentation is hot right now. Perfect Day is fermenting yeast to make non-animal dairy proteins. Both Mushlabs and Emergy Foods are fermenting mushrooms to create alternative meats. And Solar Foods is using gas fermentation to create protein out of air.

Phytolon is also not the only company creating food coloring via fermentation. Michroma is created dyes through fermentation of mushroom roots.

One of the side effects of the COVID pandemic is more people re-evaulating what foods they consume. Given that many food dyes on the market are made from petroleum because they create more vibrant colors, the market seems ripe for a more natural and less chemical-y solution to the food color spectrum.

Phytolon has recently conducted proof-of-concept experiments at production lines with different food companies. The company says it will use its new funding to help get its product reach the market.

Yelp: Permanent and Temporary Restaurant Closures Are Increasing

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

Roughly 61 percent of businesses listed as “closed” on Yelp have shuttered permanently, according to the platform’s latest Local Economic Impact report.

A total of 32,109 restaurants that were marked as open on the Yelp platform on March 1 are now closed, the new report details. Those numbers make the restaurant industry the most impacted by the pandemic of any business type on Yelp.

Those numbers, of course, only account for the restaurants listed on Yelp’s platform. The National Restaurant Association, which represents the entire restaurant industry, released its own findings this week that said 100,000 restaurants, or nearly one in six, are closed either permanently or for the long term. But whether you go by Yelp’s numbers or the Association’s more widespread findings, the conclusion is the same: the uptick in restaurant closures continues to rise.

As far as Yelp’s new data is concerned, restaurant closure rates vary across the country. As today’s report notes, “Bigger states and metros with higher rents and more stringent local operations for small businesses throughout the last six months have felt a greater toll.” Geographically speaking, California, Texas, Florida, and New York had the highest number of closures of states, while Los Angeles, NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, and Dallas topped the list for cities.

Types of restaurants with the most closures include breakfast/brunch spots, burger joints, sandwich shops, dessert places and Mexican restaurants.

Yelp’s report wasn’t all gloomy news, though. It also noted that some restaurants have been able to maintain low closure rates. Not surprisingly, those are the restaurants focusing on delivery and takeout, offering food that travels well. While a small silver lining, that point suggests the work restaurants have been doing for the last six months to shift their strategies towards more to-go-friendly formats is not in vain.

Yelp’s new report, along with the Association’s figures, both come just days after the the CDC released findings that suggest those who eat in restaurant dining rooms are twice as likely to be at risk for COVID-19.

Kbox Global Raises £12M to Expand Its Virtual Restaurant Network

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

Virtual restaurant platform Kbox Global announced this week it has raised £12 million (~$15.5 million USD) to expand its food delivery concept. The round was led by London-based venture firm Balderton Capital, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Founded in 2019 in London, Kbox operates more than 30 delivery-only restaurant brands. It licenses these brands, along with a technology stack, to restaurants and other foodservice operations looking for incremental revenue to add to their businesses.  

To do this, Kbox assesses each restaurant, including its location and main demographic, then uses those factors to choose the most relevant virtual restaurant brands for the business to offer. Restaurants cook and fulfill the orders themselves, with their existing staff, while Kbox’s tech stack integrates with third-party delivery services that handle the last mile of the delivery.

The company says there are no upfront fees for restaurants looking to utilize this concept, which is a way for restaurants to diversify their food offerings without investing in a full brick-and-mortar operation. In essence, restaurants are turning themselves into ghost kitchens for Kbox brands by partnering with the company.

The idea of one restaurant licensing and running a completely different brand from a third-party is a more recent development in the world of ghost kitchens, though Kbox isn’t alone in expanding the concept. Chicago-based Wow Bao said in April it was licensing its own menu to other restaurant brands in much the same manner as Kbox. Some Fatburger locations double as ghost kitchens for the chain’s sister brand Hurricane Grill & Wings. And let’s not forget about the celebrities launching their own virtual restaurant brands that existing businesses cook and fulfill. 

Needless to say, restaurants need any extra revenue they can get right now, thanks to the pandemic shuttering dining rooms left and right and all but forcing many brands to go the ghost kitchen route. However, we’ve yet to see many numbers about how financially fruitful it is to run a third-party brand out of one’s own restaurant kitchen.

For its part, Kbox says it is on track to have 2,000 of these kitchens in the UK before the end of 2021, and is also in the midst of an international expansion. The company has franchise agreements in Australia and India and says operations will launch in another eight countries at some point next year. The new capital from Balderton will support this expansion, as well as help Kbox establish a presence in the U.S. in earl 2021.

H-E-B to Use Swisslog for Automated Micro-Fulfillment

Connected Kitchen, Robotics, AI & Data

Even though everything is bigger in Texas, the San Antonio-based H-E-B grocery chain is going small. Today, the chain announced it has partnered with Swisslog to install automated micro-fulfillment centers at an undisclosed number of stores (tip of the hat to Grocery Dive).

According to the press announcement, H-E-B will make use of Swisslog’s AutoStore solution, which will use a combination of bins and robotics to shuttle grocery items around. Swisslog says that it has more than 170 AutoStore installations worldwide. H-E-B has 400 locations across Texas.

Swisslog’s micro-fulfillment centers will help H-E-B speed up the processing of online grocery orders for delivery and curbside pickup. Keeping up with the crush of new e-commerce customers was something retailers across the country struggled with throughout a good part of this year as pandemic fears pushed people into online grocery shopping.

While the first few months of the pandemic saw record amounts of online grocery shopping, recent survey data from Brick Meets Click shows that grocery e-commerce dropped in August to $5.7 billion, down from its peak of $7.2 billion in June. Having said that, August’s online grocery numbers were higher than the the $5.3 billion in April.

Swisslog is among a number of companies angling to bring more automation to grocery e-commerce fulfillment. Alert Innovation is being used by Walmart, Fabric is working with Fresh Direct, Takeoff Technologies has lined up Albertsons, ShopRite, and Loblaw’s, and Kroger is building out its own centers using Ocado.

While we’re still waiting to see exactly how many people stick with online grocery shopping (FWIW, even Whole Foods’ CEO thinks a lot of people won’t go back into grocery stores), H-E-B’s announcement shows that retailers continue to make big investments in micro-fulfillment. Will these micro-moves yield Texas-sized returns?

Surplus Food Startup Hungry Harvest Closes Series A Round at $13.7M

Business of Food, Delivery & Commerce

Food rescue startup Hungry Harvest has closed its Series A round at $13.7 million, according to a company press release. The round was led by Creadev with participation from Danone Manifesto Ventures, Quadia, and Maywic Select Investments.

Hungry Harvest is one of several companies out there rescuing “ugly” produce and other staples from groceries in an effort to curb food waste and redistribute food to those in need. The company collects fruits, vegetables, and other items deemed cosmetically unfit for mainstream retailers and packs them into variety boxes customers can order and have delivered to their doorsteps. Users can customize their boxes based on how often they cook, how many people they are feeding, and whether they prefer organic produce or will eat anything. Boxes range in price from $15 for a “Mini Harvest” all the way up to $42 for a “Super Organic Harvest.”

The company also donates to local organizations fighting food insecurity in the U.S. Hungry Harvest says it plans to use the new funds to improve the customer experience for its products and scale its social mission of getting affordable food to those in need. 

The concept of rescuing ugly produce from landfills has steadily grown in popularity over the last couple years as the world’s multibillion-dollar food waste problem becomes more top of mind for more consumers. Those consumers now have ample options when it comes to purchasing cheaper produce that would get tossed at a grocery store, including Karma, Imperfect Produce, and Misfits Market. Some of these companies are actually partnering with grocery stores, as Flashfood is doing with Meijer stores in Detroit. 

For it’s part, Hungry Harvest currently delivers to Baltimore, D.C., Philadelphia, Charlotte, Raleigh, Miami and Detroit.

Fighting Consumer Food Waste at Home Means Rethinking the Refrigerator

Business of Food, Connected Kitchen, Next-Gen Cooking

What’s the most effective way to fight food waste in the home? Take a look at your fridge.

Most consumers at this point are aware of the world’s multibillion food waste problem. A great many more now understand that, at least in North America and Europe, the bulk of that waste happens at consumer-facing stages of the food journey, including our own homes. What we’re less certain of is how to curb that excess.

Researching solutions for “The Consumer Food Waste Innovation Report,” which you can read on Spoon Plus, I came across a number of different methods for reducing food waste in the home. But after sifting through the many storage and preservation options out there, the meal-planning and meal-sharing apps, I’m left wondering if the trick to reducing at-home food waste isn’t just re-envisioning the refrigerator itself.

The appliance hasn’t changed much over the last several decades. But in 2020, the pandemic is keeping more folks at home, we have more information about how much food we’re actually wasting (it’s a ton), and more investment in the food tech sector in general. The convergence of those factors makes now an ideal time to change that point and introduce more innovation into the world of refrigerators. Here are a few ideas:

Smarter Features That Are Actually Affordable

By now, many consumers are at least aware of high-tech refrigerators that can track items placed in the fridge, alert owners when those items are running low, and scan and identify foods to help consumers plan meals and find recipes. LG’s ThinQ and the Samsung Family Hub are two appliances that lead the smart fridge market.

They also cost thousands of dollars, making them out of reach for most consumers. True, having cameras and image-recognition technology inside the fridge is a relatively new concept, so a higher price point is to be expected. But in order for the new applications of those technologies to be most effective, they’ll need to get cheaper. By that I mean, we’ll need to see options for them build into most fridges.

Another option is add-on tech for the fridge. As we note in the report, Smarter makes a device can be retrofitted for any fridge and recognize the items inside. Fridge Eye has a similar device.

Smaller Fridge, Bigger Freezer

“Everyone loses something in the back of the fridge,” food waste expert Dana Gunders told us when interviewed for the report. Her point is that the sheer size of most modern refrigerators means older items will get pushed out of view and forgotten as newer ones are placed in the fridge.

High-tech fixes like the ones mentioned above can help, but the fridge design itself seems ripe for an upgrade. Or downgrade, as it were, since a smaller fridge compartment with a bigger freezer might be a surefire way to reduce food waste. Much of our food, even items like milk and bread, can be frozen until we need to use them. And research shows that things like frozen fruits and vegetables maintain more or less the same nutrients as their fresh counterparts. 

Better Storage to Accompany the Fridge

Back in the 1930s, when the electric refrigerator was just starting to get popular, General Electric sold fridges by promoting the then-newish concept of leftovers to consumers. Along with tips and cookbooks, the appliance-maker sold food storage containers designed to stack up in the fridge and hold leftovers. 

Maybe to curb food waste, we need a kind of rebirth of that concept, this time geared towards curbing food waste and with a high-tech twist. Major appliance manufacturers could team up with startups like Mimica, BlakBear, or Silo to sell smarter storage options — think smart labels and temperature sensors — alongside their appliances. They could also find ways to integrate some of those new technologies into fridge doors, drawers, and other compartments.

For more thoughts on the reinvention of the refrigerator as well as how else we can fight food waste at home, check out the full “Consumer Food Waste Innovation” report at Spoon Plus.

Brightseed Raises $27M for its AI-Based Phytonutrient Discovery

Education & Discovery, Foodtech

Brightseed, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to aid food companies in the discovery of new nutritional compounds in plants, announced today that it has raised $27 million in new funding. The round was led by Lewis & Clark AgriFood and brings the total amount raised by Brightseed to $52 million.

According to Brightseed, just 1 percent of the compounds produced by plants is known. Brightseed’s Forager AI tool looks at plants on a molecular level to reveal these hidden phytonutrient compounds (examples of phytonutrients include caffeine in coffee and antioxidants in blueberries). Once discovered, Forager adds it to its database as uses that information to make predictions about any implications those new phytonutrients may have for human health.

In June of this year, Brightseed announced a partnership with Danone, which owns Silk and So Delicious Dairy Free brands, to discover new health benefits of soy.

Brightseed is actually in the middle of three converging food tech trends right now. First, sales of plant-based food has surged during the pandemic, so the ability to mine plant-based resources to excavate new, additional nutrition benefits could help sustain that growth.

Second, Brightseed is part of a growing movement of using AI to model and predict unique attributes of food. Spoonshot is using AI to help companies create whole products via data before they even begin prototyping in the real world. And Climax Foods, which recently launched, is using data and AI to develop new plant-based foods, starting with cheese.

The idea with all these AI tools is to do a lot of the heavy lifting via algorithm before experimenting in the more costly real world lab setting. We’re still very early on in this trend, so it remains to be see how effective AI modeling really is.

Finally, Brightseed is part of the food-as-medicine movement, which has people paying more attention to the types of food they consume. In particular, Brightseed is looking at how phytonutrients it discovers can help with metabolic health, cognitive health, immune health, bone health.

Brightseed’s financial health is certainly robust with today’s announcement. The company will be using its new bulked up warchest to invest in R&D of its AI and commercialization of its plant-based discoveries in the food and beverage sectors.