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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Education & Discovery

Aryballe Raises €7M for its Digital Nose Technology

Aryballe, which makes a “digital nose” capable of identifying smells, announced today that it has raised €7 million ($7.89M USD) in new funding. The round featured new investors Samsung Venture Investment Corp. and Seb Alliance as well as existing INNOVACOM, CEMAG INVEST, Asahi Kasei, and HCVC. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Aryballe to €17 million ($19.24M USD).

Aryballe debuted its new, miniaturized “nose” sensor earlier this year. The sensor can be built into a range of hardware products. As we wrote then:

The new sensor is smaller than a paperclip and is equipped with Aryballe’s proprietary combination of biosensors, which capture odors in seconds. Aryballe’s software then matches the signals captured with a database of previously collected and analyzed odors to mimic the human sense of smell.

There are a lot of industrial applications for digital smelling technology. Specifically as it relates to food, Aryballe’s nose could be installed in an oven to “smell” when food is burning, or it could be placed in a fridge to let you know if food is going bad. Aryballe’s tech could also be used in coffee roasting, or to help verify the authenticity of raw ingredients like vanilla.

Aryballe also makes the standalone, handheld NeOse Pro device that can also be used for odor analysis.

Aryballe isn’t the only company making a digital nose. Stratuscent‘s eNose is based on NASA patents and was on display at CES earlier this year.

With its new funding, Aryballe said that it will double the company’s current headcount across engineering and product positions and scale up the industrialization of its technology.

Karana Raises $1.7M to Develop ‘Pork’ Products From Jackfruit

Singapore-based Karana announced today it has closed a $1.7 million seed round to further develop its plant-based meat products, the first of which are derived from jackfruit. The round was led by Big Idea Ventures, Monde Nissin Corp CEO Henry Soesanto, and Germi8, along with angel investors Kevin Poon and Gerald Li.

Karana says it will use the funding to launch its pork product made from jackfruit in restaurants in Asia, and to further its research and development around jackfruit and other plants as meat substitutes. 

Jackfruit makes a good alternative ingredient for pork products because it can be cooked and shredded like the real thing. If prepared the right way, it can mimic the textures of pork (or in some cases chicken), which is a key element to get right when it comes to plant-based proteins. The plant is native to India and also grows in Southeast Asia, Mexico, and South America. 

Karana says it uses a proprietary “innovative mechanical technique” to process the fruit, while retaining its nutritional profile and other health benefits. In other words, Karana’s products aren’t as highly processed as, say Impossible’s “bleeding” burgers or Beyond’s patties.

Karana cofounder Blair Crichton made mention of that point to AgFunder today, saying, “There are plenty of consumers — myself included — that really like those other products on the market, but don’t want to eat a heavily processed burger or sausage every day.” Substitutes derived from jackfruit are one possible alternative.

Karana’s funding announcement lands in what’s been a very busy week for alternative proteins. Since Tuesday of this week, cell-based meat companies IntegriCulture and Shiok Meats announced a new partnership, Motif FoodWorks said it is doubling down on its quest to find the perfect alt-meat texture, and fake chicken company NUGGS raised $4.1 million. In the alt-dairy space, Perfect Day made its own funding announcement, the expansion of its Series C round to $300 million. Meanwhile, sales of plant-based meat in general have gone up since the start of the pandemic, thanks in no small part to meat shortage scares and panic shopping sprees.

Karana’s choice of plant-based pork as its first product is a wise bet. Pork is the most widely consumed meat in Asia, but between the aforementioned pandemic-induced problems with meat supply and calls from Asian governments to cut meat consumption, the time is ripe for plant-based alternatives.

SideChef Launches Paid App With SideChef Premium

SideChef has gone premium.

The recipe app and smart kitchen platform startup announced last week they were launching a new premium subscription tier to go along with the company’s free app.

The new subscription offering is $49.99/year or $4.99/month. SideChef Premium includes 750 enhanced recipes that feature instructional guidance from the partner chefs, cooking techniques and tips, and voice-guided cooking.

The voice guidance appears to be one of the primary differentiators with the free SideChef app. While SideChef has been working to integrate with voice assistants like Alexa and Bixby for some time, much of the focus of these efforts have been centered around their smart kitchen integrations with bigger appliance brands.

In some ways, SideChef Premium is reminiscent of the Food Network Kitchen app, which made a big splash back when it launched last fall. At the time, the Food Network Kitchen app was positioned as something of a Peloton for the kitchen, but since launch it appears the company has dialed back the ambitions a bit on the live cooking classes and today primarily feature lots of archived video recipes and cooking how-to’s with Food Network cooking personalities.

For SideChef’s part, the company has assembled a group of partner chefs such as Chris Cosentino (a Bravo Top Chef Masters winner),
Manon Lagrève (Great British Bake Off) and Logan Guleff, the wunderkid winner of the 2014 MasterChef Jr.

The company had previously worked with popular budget-focused chef Beth Moncel in creating a dedicated paid-app and, as of today, the app is still ranked in the top 10 for paid food and drink apps. Moncel is also one of the 11 launch chefs with the SideChef Premium app.

SideChef’s success at getting paid subscribers will likely depend heavily on prospective consumers wanting access to the more immersive content from collective of chefs the company has put together for the app. The success of the Budget Bytes app with Moncel could be an indication of how SideChef Premium could perform, especially if it gets its partner chefs to evangelize the app.

Today SideChef Premium is available through an app, but the company has indicated that this fall subscribers will be able to access through a browser on any computer at Sidechef.com.

Motif FoodWorks and University of Illinois Are on a Quest to Find the Perfect Texture for Plant-based Meat

Food ingredient innovator Motif FoodWorks announced today it has struck partnerships with two universities to further research the properties of plant-based foods and develop technologies to improve elements like texture. For the research, Motif will work with the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana.

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of Motif forming a partnership with the the University of Guelph to research plant-based fats in order to make them more like the real thing.

Fat is a key part of what makes meat taste good. And so is texture and mouthfeel. Achieving better versions of those latter two elements in plant-based meat is the driving motivation behind Motif’s partnerships with the University of Illinois. As we’ve written many, many times before, texture is one of the keys to making plant-based meat more appealing to mainstream consumers. 

In its press release today, Motif’s lead for food science, Stefan Baier, said that in order to get textures more precisely like those of actual meat, “we need to continue to evolve the way we approach food design” rather than relying on decades-old tools and technologies that might work for meat-meat but not so much for alt-meat.

Baier will lead the two-year-long project with UIC and UICU, working with the schools’ experts on advanced rheological techniques from the fields of mechanical and chemical engineering.

This isn’t the first time Motif has partnered with higher education to solve the texture riddle. In 2019, the company said it was working with the University of Queensland in Australia on improving texture of plant-based meats.

Motif’s quest to make plant-based meats replicate the properties of animal meat comes at a time when demand for plant-based meat is steadily on the rise. Many companies in the space are expanding in response. Impossible launched its direct-to-consumer site recently, and its chief rival Beyond has plans to launch a similar e-commerce store. And other companies are tackling the texture issue, too, from Redefine Meat‘s 3D-printed steaks to Ecovative’s mycelium scaffolding to Emergy’s fermented fungi steaks.

One thing Motif will need to consider in its research is just how closely consumers actually want their plant-based staples to replicate the real thing. Catherine Lamb, the Spoon’s former expert on all things plant-based meat, often said plant-based meat was too meaty. This nine-year-old concurs. But Catherine is a longtime vegetarian and the nine-year-old is, well, nine. Which is to say, adults who’ve been eating real meat for decades may prefer a more exact replication. At the moment there isn’t too much data out there on this subject, but it’s one Motif and others will most definitely need to tackle on the quest to make the perfect plant-based meat.

Singapore to Allocate $40M to Help Agtech and Aquaculture Startups Grow More Local Food

Singapore agtech is about to get an investment shot in arm, one that could give the whole world a clearer vision of alternative farming’s role in our future food system. Enterprise Singapore, the government agency committed to startups, said last week it will invest roughly $40 million USD into agtech and aquaculture companies, according to AgFunder News. 

Koh Poh Koon, Singapore’s senior minister for trade and industry, said during the announcement that “Using agritech can help to make [Singapore’s] food supplies more resilient by building a bigger margin of local food capacity.”

Sinapore relies on imports for about 90 percent of its food. As the pandemic has shown us, that reliance on external sources can be problematic if the supply chain gets disrupted. The city-state already has one initiative in place to address this, the “30 by 30” program, which aims to have 30 percent of Singapore’s food produced domestically by 2030. 

The newly announced funding will go towards agtech and aquaculture startups that apply through the Singapore government’s Business Grants Portal. 

Singapore has become something of a hotbed in the last couple years for food tech, especially when it comes to alternative proteins and alternative farming methods. Last year, the city-state’s National Research Foundation allocated $535 million (USD) to increase R&D efforts in cell therapy manufacturing, digital technology, and sustainable urban food production. Food-focused accelerators like GROW’s Singapore Food Bowl program are also emerging as a resource for startups. Meanwhile, individual companies are also developing ways to make Singaporean food more local, from SinGrow’s proprietary strawberries, to Turtle Tree Labs’ cultured human breastmilk.

Those uses of alternative farming and food production could be a clue for the rest of the world about how technologies like high-tech farming systems, post-harvest technology, and raising alternative protein sources fit into the broader picture of the future food system. Many of these technologies are nascent and have yet to prove themselves economically scalable. If Singapore can use them to meet its “30 by 30” goal and beyond, it could provide a blueprint for the rest of the world as the population increases and demand for local food production grows.

Up Next for the Astronaut’s Diet: Space Peppers

Two things we love here at The Spoon: space food and indoor farming tech. So I got pretty excited to come across a HoritDaily article today about  Jacob Torres, who works at the Space Crop Production Lab at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and is currently researching how to grow chile peppers in space. 

The idea is to eventually supply astronauts that spend a lot of time in deep space with fresher foods to accompany their packaged items. Torres is starting with peppers, which can add more important vitamins to astronauts’ diets, not to mention bring some much-needed flavor to the food.

For those peppers, Torres uses the Española Improved pepper, which performs especially well in a space environment compared to other breeds. Conducting research inside the NASA-developed Plant Growth Habitat, he is also experimenting with different light “recipes” and finding a solution to watering plants in an environment without gravity. “Existing hydroponic systems are largely inoperable in microgravity,” he told HoritDaily.

He finally settled on the Passive Porous Tube Nutrient Delivery System (PPTNDS), which forces water upwards to water the plants and, he said, could eventually be used on earth for those hard-to-reach upper levels of vertical farms that growers can’t get to as often.

An underlying goal of the project is to create an indoor grow system that needs little input from the astronauts themselves, who wouldn’t have the kind of time to devote to plant cultivation that other indoor growers have.

But back to space. One of the reasons we’re seeing an uptick in food projects beyond planet Earth is what Spoon Publisher Michael Wolf calls “the renewed interest in space travel.” NASA wants to put people on the moon again, and there’s of course interest in Mars. As Mike says, “Whether it’s the actual habitation of Mars or some other place in the galaxy, simply packing up freeze dried food won’t cut it.” And from Japan’s Space Food X initiative to space-friendly bake ovens to tomatoes, there’s a ton of companies and projects out there now figuring out how to feed people in space. Torres’ ongoing research is certainly bringing some new spice to this mix.

If you’re into space food, join us for our free live virtual event on Tuesday June 30th where we’ll talk with the inventors of the Zero G Space Oven.

AppHarvest Partners With the Dutch Government to Make Kentucky an Indoor Farming Powerhouse

Agtech startup AppHarvest this week announced a partnership with the Dutch government, the state of Kentucky, and several other organizations including universities to turn Appalachia into an “ag-tech epicenter,” according to the Louisville Courier Journal. 

The partnership comes just as AppHarvest is building out its massive 2.76-million-square foot indoor farming facility in Morehead, KY that’s scheduled to open in Fall 2020. That facility will grow 45 million pounds of fresh produce each year, with an emphasis on tomatoes. The company says it expects to eventually deliver produce to not just grocery stores in Appalachia but also those in surrounding states that are within a day’s drive.

The AppHarvest facility will use hydroponics to vertically grow produce inside high-tech greenhouses. In addition to supplying more local produce to surrounding regions (as opposed from shipping that produce in from Canada or Mexico), the new facility will also create about 285 jobs encompassing everything from “head growers” all the way down to entry-level positions. The addition of those jobs is especially important to Appalachia — an area of the U.S. ravaged by persistent poverty. 

The goal of the new partnership is to create even more jobs in addition to getting more locally grown food into surrounding regions. The agreement, signed yesterday by the different parties involved, will create a series of research programs as well as a “center of excellence” for agtech innovation. 

Why The Netherlands? According to the Courier Journal, that country has spent decades building its own sustainable food supply chain through a network of more than 10,000 high-tech green houses. “The year-round, temperature-controlled farms have made the Netherlands the world’s second largest agricultural exporter and a leading ag innovator,” AppHarvest founder Jonathan Webb said at a press call cited by the Courier Journal.

The new partnership also includes participation from two higher education institutions in The Netherlands as well as Morehead State University, Berea College and Eastern Kentucky University, University of Kentucky and University of Pikeville. 

AppHarvest closed an $11 million funding round in January, bringing the company’s total funding to $120 million.

Dining With Mannequins: Max Elder on How to Think Like a Futurist About Our Food System

“Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.”

So said Max Elder, Research Director at Food Futures Lab for the Institute for the Future. Elder joined The Spoon yesterday for a virtual workshop on how to think like a food futurist during these uncertain times, and he had a wealth of tools and advice to offer attendees.

Besides the aforesaid quote, one of those nuggets was that you might be dining beside a mannequin next time you go out to eat. Sounds a little William Gibson-esque, right? Personally, I thought immediately of the ’80s film Mannequin, and some folks are no doubt creeped out by the whole idea.

But whatever images it conjures in your head, the concept actually already exists in some places. During yesterday’s workshop, Elder highlighted a Michelin-star restaurant in the Washington, D.C. area, The Inn at Little Washington, that is using mannequins to fill empty tables now that social distance guidelines require restaurants to run at reduced capacity in the dining room. 

This isn’t a widespread trend — yet. It’s what Elder calls a “signal.” Signals, as we discussed at the virtual workshop today, are facts about the present we can use to make predictions about the future. They’re especially important at a time when there’s so much uncertainty about so many parts of the food system, from the supply chain to restaurants to how we’ll get our groceries in future.

So how does one restaurant seating its empty tables with mannequins become an actual trend in the restaurant biz? For that matter, do we want it to become a trend? To answer these questions, Elder led the group in discussing the consequences, good and bad, of restaurants using mannequins as stand-in customers.

Ideas included:

  • Monetizing mannequins with ads
  • Mannequins becoming an extra item in the restaurant to clean and sanitize
  • Creating a Walking Dead-themed restaurants with mannequins
  • Ensuring mannequins are inclusive from racial, gender, and cultural angles
  • Mannequins becoming robots and therefore potential diner companions that could talk to you
  • Said robot-mannequins becoming holograms

The list goes on and on.

As a side note, mannequins and other doll-like figures aren’t just at the Washington Inn. A restaurant in Tokyo, Japan has strategically placed them around its establishment and even partnered with a clothing brand to make the mannequins as stylish as possible. And restaurant in Thailand uses stuffed animals, because who doesn’t want to eat across from a giant stuffed panda bear? 

If it all sounds a tad ridiculous, that’s the point. And as Elder and the workshop audience showed, seemingly ridiculous ideas can sometimes lead to us pondering the bigger implications of signals poised to become trends.

That’s just a smidgen of what we talked about at the workshop. To learn more about what signals are and how they become trends, what a future wheel is and why it’s important to making forecasts, and a bunch of other tools, watch the full video.

Become a Food Futurist

Thailand’s SPACE-F Opens Applications for Its 2020 Accelerator and Incubator Programs

Asia-based food tech startups, take note. SPACE-F, an accelerator and incubator program in Thailand, is now taking applications for Batch-II of its program (h/t Green Queen). The program works with Southeast Asian startups working to improve a number of areas across the the food and be industries.

Batch-II, which officially kicks off in October 2020, will consist of both an accelerator and incubator program.

SPACE-F was founded in 2019, making it a relatively new entrant to the food tech accelerator/incubator space. Program founders NIA, Thai Union PLC, and Mahidol University have partnered with ThaiBev for Batch-II.

The biggest differences between accelerator and incubator programs has to do with the stage of growth participating companies are at. Accelerators tend to work with early-stage companies looking to grow, while incubators tend to host companies that might not yet be ready to commercialize. (Read our full breakdown of the differences here.)

Reflecting those differences, SPACE-F’s program invites companies with compelling prototypes and ideas to apply for its incubator, while startups wanting to join the accelerator should already have a product/technology and customer traction. The accelerator runs four months, and the incubator runs 9–15 months, depending on the specific company. 

All participants will be working to solve challenges in the food industry, though SPACE-F’s range of areas is quite wide. Alt-protein, restaurant tech, manufacturing, novel ingredients, and food safety are just a few of the areas listed on the SPACE-F website. 

Participants will receive equity-free investment (a specific sum isn’t named), mentorship, networking opportunities, and access to SPACE-F’s facilities. That said, SPACE-F notes on its site that because of COVID-19, at least part of the program will take place virtually. As is the case with other startup accelerators and incubators, when and how any in-person sessions will take place will depend on the changing nature of the coronavirus crisis. 

Applications for SPACE-F are open until July 12, 2020.

SynchroLife Raises $2.6M for Restaurant App That Rewards Reviews with Cryptocurrency

Ginkan, the Tokyo-based company behind restaurant discovery and review app SynchroLife, announced yesterday that it had raised a $2.6 million Series A round of funding (hat tip to beincrypto). This round was led by MTG Ventures, and brings Ginkan’s total amount of funding to $3.7 million.

SynchroLife bills itself as a restaurant review platform that combines AI with cryptocurrency. Users that post “high-quality” restaurant reviews and information are rewarded with SynchroCoin (SYC), the platform’s own cryptocurrency. Restaurants can also be on the platform to offer SynchroCoin-based coupons. On its website, Ginkan says its token system will eventually be used as payment at restaurants.

Beincrypto writes that SynchroLife already has more than 210,000 reviews of 100,000 different restaurants. The company uses this growing database of reviews as the basis of its AI to make restaurant recommendations. The SynchroLife app is available in 155 countries and in English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Restaurant reviewing has definitely gotten more difficult over the past few months, as the COVID-19 pandemic forced dining rooms to close. To adapt, last week SynchroLife expanded its restaurant recommendation and review platform to takeout meals.

There is definitely an opportunity for a new restaurant review platform to capture eaters’ attention. Longtime social reviews site, Yelp, had to lay off 1,000 employees and furlough another 1,100 in April as restaurants across the country shuttered. Google, on the other hand, has been building up its own restaurant discovery tools. Last year Google Maps started surfacing popular dishes in restaurant search results.

Regardless, with fresh capital in the bank, SynchroLife can expand and see if cryptocurrency rewards are enough to carve out its own niche to attract and keep restaurant reviewers on its platform.

GrowSquares Will Personalize Your Garden With Data Science, Microbiology, Feathers

“High-tech gardening” usually brings to mind the automated indoor vertical farming devices everyone from startups to major appliance makers are pushing these days. Those are great for time-strapped folks or those who tend to just kill plants. But for people who want to keep their hands in the soil, technology in the smart garden will need to play a different role — that of assisting the human rather than automating their entire process.

NYC-based GrowSquares has found a way to leave the human element in the gardening process while still taking advantage of tech to improve the grow process. 

“We’re the opposite of automated gardening,” GrowSquares CEO Zachary Witman said over the phone last week.

The company uses data science (advanced LIDAR and location data) as well as microbiology to determine the best plants for a specific user’s space as well as the most optimal elements to include in the soil. An accompanying app then helps the user monitor the plants, though watering and feeding them are still manual tasks.

“We look at sun, wind, taxonomy of the soil. We capture those things and then using a lot of data science we create a microenvironmental profile and say, ‘Based upon this, the attributes of your space, (time of year, etc.) these are the plants that will grow best,'” Witman explained.

Users see a scoring system where plants are rated Optimal, Good, Fair, and Poor based on location data. For example, in Nashville, TN, Basil grown at my address gets a score of 93 for this time of year, which means it’s an optimal plant for growing right now. Spinach, on the other hand, just scores 51, making it a bad fit for my backyard at the moment.

The system can actually get even more granular in terms of a users’s location than just their city. Using a customer’s geo-coordinates, the company then uses data science and machine learning models to determine which plants are best for that particular user’s garden. The recommendations may or may not be the same as the person two doors down.

“We break down each individual client’s soil. Fidelity of our data showcases the difference between you and your neighbor.”

Once a user has purchased the right plants, GrowSquares sends the necessary seeds along with optimal spacing and depth and a soil formulation for your individual garden. That might include green sand, coconut husks, feather, alfalfa, or other elements the company uses to formulate soil. Meanwhile, the app also sends notifications for when it’s time to water the plants and time to harvest them.

The actual squares in which the plants grow are made of palm leaf that naturally decomposes over time. Since it’s a modular system, users can add more squares over time, and the squares can be configured to fit different environments, balconies, backyards, and rooftops among them. Since the squares decompose, they actually replenish the soil. 

Like other consumer-grade smart garden companies, GrowSquares has seen an uptick in sales thanks to the pandemic. Witman told me the company started out servicing just three cities, Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles. Because of COVID-19, demand spiked and GrowSquares went national — a decision that’s temporary stressed the supply chain. Right now, new users must reserve their GrowSquares and wait, though Witman told me it would not be too long before things return to normal. 

He was also cautious to attribute too much of the product’s popularity to the pandemic. “I think everybody has their own reason for why they want to garden,” he said. The pandemic is one, but so is a desire to eat locally or the wish to avoid industrial-scale farming companies. And for some, going out to the balcony or backyard to grab some herbs is just easier than ordering them via Whole Foods or going to the store.

Lumen, the Handheld Metabolic Breathalyzer, Goes on Sale

If you’ve been sheltering in place for the past couple of months, you’ve probably been eating a ton of carbs. Between that and the constant wearing of sweatpants, you may have put on unwanted pounds (or maybe you welcome them!).

If that’s the case and you want to get back to your pre-pandemic weight, perhaps you can pick up a Lumen, which is now available for purchase. Lumen is a handheld breathalyzer that promises to help you “hack your metabolism” by measuring the CO2 in your breath. The device then tells whether you are burning fat or carbs and provides personalized nutritional guidance based on your metabolic efficiency.

You can check out this video Catherine did with with Dror Ceder, the Founder and CEO of Lumen at CES last year.

The Spoon look at Lumen, a handheld breath detector for measuring metabolism

The device started out as a crowdfunded project on Indiegogo back in 2018, and has gone on to raise more than $2.5 million dollars. In September of last year, Lumen raised an $8.5 million round of funding (the company has raised $15 million in total). At that same time, Lumen said that it had sold 11,000 devices.

Now the Lumen is available to general public for purchase. The device is available through Lumen.me, costs $299 and is shipping worldwide.

We can’t speak to the device’s accuracy, but we do know that Lumen isn’t the only company out there that wants you to breathe out. The Keyto breath sensor is $99 and gauges whether or not your body is in ketosis.

Exhaling has certainly taken on new weight during this pandemic (wear a mask!), but perhaps breathing out can be a way to help people find some post-pandemic fitness.