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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Waste Reduction

Coca-Cola Unveils a Prototype for Paper Bottles

Beverage giant Coca-Cola recently unveiled a prototype for its first-ever paper bottle, the first step in the company’s goal to create a bottle that can be recycled like any other type of paper product (h/t Food Navigator).

This first-generation prototype, for which Coca-Cola partnered with paper bottle company Paboco, still contains some plastic. Coca-Cola explained in a blog post that the prototype is made up of a paper shell with a plastic closure and plastic liner. Though the liner and closure are made from “100% recycled plastic that can be recycled again after use,” the company says its next step is to create a bottle that does not need the plastic liner.

The world’s plastic problem is now considered one of the biggest environmental threats out there, with an estimated 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the oceans alone. Big Food (and Bev) is under pressure to come up with more sustainable packaging options for their products.

Even so, any bottle containing a CPG beverage has to adhere to certain standards around safety and storage capabilities of packaging, hence the reason Coca-Cola can’t immediately switch to using just any paper bottle. The company says it is currently “putting the bottle through comprehensive testing in the lab to see how it performs in the refrigerator, how strong it is, and how well it protects the drink inside.”

The paper bottles won’t be available on grocery store shelves any time soon, but Coca-Cola’s prototype is another step in that direction. It follows efforts from Coke competitor PepsiCo and spirits brand Diageo, both companies that plan to release paper bottles in 2021.

 

Kaffe Bueno Raises $1.3M to Turn Upcycled Coffee Product Into Functional Food

Denmark-based biotech startup Kaffe Bueno announced this week it has raised €1.1 million (~$1.3 million USD) in seed funding from Paulig Group Venture Capital, Vækstfonden, The Yield Lab, and an undisclosed angel investor. According to a company blog post, Kaffe Bueno will use the new funds to scale up production of existing products and launch new ones in addition to growing its team and securing intellectual property protection for its technology.

Kaffe Bueno bills itself as an ingredients company that uses upcycled coffee byproducts, such as grounds, to make cosmetics, nutraceuticals, and functional food and beverage products. The company, which was founded in 2016 by three Colombian entrepreneurs, currently has three products made from coffee byproduct: a lipid used in personal care and food products, a functional flour, and an exfoliant for cosmetics.

“Growing up in Colombia, coffee is much more than a beverage, we use it for everything: wounds, skincare, desserts, you name it,” cofounder and CEO Juan Medina said in today’s blog post.

Kaffe Bueno also noted that less than 1 percent of coffee’s “health-beneficial compounds” actually wind up in a brewed cup of joe. The rest of them go to the landfill, where they emit methane, which is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Upcycling coffee byproduct for use in other products is a way to make greater use of coffee’s existing health benefits for consumers while simultaneously cutting down on waste and emissions. 

Functional ingredients and healthier cosmetics are a couple ways to make use of coffee byproduct. A growing number of other examples exist, including a McDonald’s/Ford initiative to turn coffee byproduct into car parts and Berlin-based Kaffeeform, which makes coffee cups from leftover grounds. Meanwhile, a company called Grounded will mail you a kit with which you can grow gourmet mushrooms from spent coffee grounds. 

For its part, Kaffe Bueno will launch “new food, nutraceutical, and cosmetic ingredients into the European market throughout the rest of 2020 and into 2021.

Apeel Raises $30M to Help Smallholder Farmers Fight Food Waste and Access New Markets

Apeel, best known for its edible produce peel that extends the lifespan of fruits and vegetables, announced today it has raised $30 million in funding from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Temasek, and Astanor Ventures. The new funds will be used to help smallholder farmers both reduce food loss and gain access to higher-value markets for their produce.

For this initiative, Apeel is focused primarily on smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, Mexico, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America. James Rogers, founder and CEO of Apeel, explained during a chat with me this week that in these regions, farmers face a two-pronged problem when it comes to growing and selling produce: time and access.

There is little in the way of cold chain infrastructre in many of these regions, which makes it virtually impossible to keep produce fresh long enough to go from farm to market without spoilage. This lack of cold chain operations is the main cause of food loss in these parts of the world. 

Apeel’s technology, of course, builds time into the food supply chain via its edible peel that coats fruits and vegetables and to keep them fresher longer. But as Rogers noted, that extended shelf life is only truly valuable to farmers if they have access to markets with buyers, which is the other part of the food waste problem for smallholder farmers. Up to now, a lack of extra time when it comes to produce lifespan has barred farmers from reaching buyers outside of local markets and as a result has limited any economic gain.

Apeel’s new funding will in part go towards alleviating that second hurdle. In addition to providing investment, IFC is also partnering with Apeel to create programs that will plug these smallholder farmers into the Apeel supply chain and give them access to markets in the U.S. and Europe, where the economic opportunities are higher.

By way of example, Rogers explained that a mango grown on a smallholder farm in Kenya might sell for 1 cent in a local setting. If that mango makes it to one of the country’s urban centers, it might sell for $1, bringing greater economic gains for the farmer. Getting the mango to even higher-value markets like the U.S. and Europe only increases the economic gains. 

In a sense, the one couldn’t exist without the other when it comes to the combination of Apeel’s technology and its IFC partnership that gives farmers access to exporters. As Rogers explained to me, the technology — that is, the edible peel that extends shelf life — builds more time into the supply chain, enabling the produce to reach exporters before it goes bad. “The time creates the access,” he said.

In more developed countries like the U.S., Apeel has made a name for itself partnering with major retail chains like Kroger and Walmart. The company also raised $250 million in May of this year.

But this latest fundraise and the IFC partnership is Apeel’s first major step into developing countries that experience food waste and loss in the earlier stages of the food supply chain — though such a move has been on the company’s radar for a long time. Rogers explained that when Apeel started a decade ago, one of its goals was to provide the same supply and demand opportunities for people in parts of the world that don’t have refrigeration and cold chain tech.

“[Food is] only valuable if the underlying infrastructure is there to make it valuable,” he said, adding that part of Apeel’s mission with this new fundraise is to “bring demand from some of the largest markets in the world and be able to make the world much larger for these smaller farmers.”

Burger King Partners with Loop to Pilot Reusable Packaging

Burger King announced today that it has partnered with TerraCyle’s circular packaging service, Loop, to test out the use of resuable food and beverage containers.

Starting next year, select BKs in New York City, Portland (the announcement didn’t specify Maine or Oregon) and Tokyo, will give consumers the option of getting their sandwiches, sodas and coffee in the reusable containers and cups. Customers opting for the reusable packaging are charged an undisclosed deposit upon purchase that is refunded when the containers are returned to a collection system at the restaurant. From there the containers will be picked up by Loop, cleaned and sanitized and reused by Burger King.

If this sounds fast food news sounds familiar, that’s because McDonald’s announced a similar partnership with Loop last month to trial reusable cups in the U.K. next year.

Both of these trials are good news as fast food giants like Mickey D’s and the BK Lounge are both sources of a lot of single-use packaging waste. Their involvement in the battle against waste will be important, as my colleague, Jenn Martson recently wrote:

Whether you love big restaurant chains or fear they’ll be the only ones left after the dust from the restaurant industry upheaval settles, it’s worth acknowledging that they’re typically the ones with the deep enough pockets to invest in new forms of to-go containers.

For people who care about waste and recycling, it should be noted that Loop continues to expand its services. In addition to Burger King and McDonald’s, Loop is broadening its CPG shopping service across the U.S. and its parent company, TerraCycle, is working with Hive’s just-launched online market.

This reusable container partnership with Loop also reinforces Burger King’s sustainability commitments, which include having 100 percent of its customer packaging be sourced from renewable, recycled or certified sources by 2025, and recycling of customer packaging in 100 percent of restaurants in Canada and the U.S. by 2025.

Imperfect Foods’ New Snack Box Lets You Fight Food Waste Through Holiday Gifting

A key tactic for fighting food waste at the consumer level is to incentivize folks with easy, affordable solutions that don’t require a whole lot of work. Bundling food-waste-fighting concepts into holiday gift ideas seems like one surefire way to do that, and it’s something food redistribution platform Imperfect Foods will be doing in 2020. The company today announced the launch of its first-ever holiday gift box containing a mix of so-called “imperfect” snack items, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Imperfect, which raised $72 million earlier this year, “rescues” surplus and cosmetically imperfect food items from grocery stores and delivers them to consumers at discounted prices. That includes fruits, vegetables, and pantry items as well as meat and dairy. 

It follows, then, that all snack items included in the newly announced holiday gift box come with their own rescue stories. Those include:

  • Dried mango considered too “sunburnt” to sell at grocery
  • Almond butter toffee that broke into pieces
  • Peppermint- and dark chocolate-covered pretzels that broke into pieces during production
  • Surplus seasonings
  • Leftover snack mix bits like peanuts, pretzels, and sesame sticks
  • Almonds with “blemishes”

While the above list would satisfy most snack lovers’ cravings, it more importantly offers a quick snapshot of the many ridiculous reasons retailers throw food out — food that could otherwise be purchased for lower prices or given to those without access or means to regular grocery store items. In high-income countries like the U.S. and many places in Europe, the majority — more than 80 percent — of food waste happens at consumer-facing levels like retail. Needless to say, there are a lot of blemished almonds out there that need a home, and a lot of people in the country who could benefit from keeping them out of the landfill.

Nor is Imperfect the only food rescue service out there. Two other notables include Misfits Market, which operates similar to Imperfect and recently raised $85 million, and Flashfood, a Canada-based service that currently works with Meijer grocery chains to rescue food.

Packaging rescued snack items as holiday goodies may also be a way for a company like Imperfect to make the concept of fighting food waste more appealing and, well, fun. No other food waste apps besides Imperfect have yet to surface with a holiday offering, though it wouldn’t be surprising if they did over the next few weeks.

The Imperfect Foods Holiday Box will be available for both Imperfect subscribers and nonmembers for $24.99 starting November 16. The company said in today’s press release will save about nine pounds of food from going to waste. Proceeds from the boxes go towards Feeding America.  

SKS 2020: Why Singapore Is Fast-Becoming Food Tech’s New Superpower

That Singapore is a fast-rising superpower in food tech is something that’s become apparent over the last several months. And yesterday, during a SKS 2020 panel on the Asian food tech landscape, the city-state came up in conversation again as an enormously important location to watch when it comes to food innovation and investment.

“If I had to place my bet I would place it on Singapore,” said Michal Klar, an angel investor who also writes the Future Food Now newsletter. Joining him on the panel were Winnie Leung of Bits x Bites and Spoon Publisher Mike Wolf, and together, the group unpacked some of the reasons why so much food tech innovation is coming out of Singapore right now.

Arguably the biggest driver is that, at the moment, Singapore imports 90 percent of its food. That’s a precarious position to be in during the best of times, never mind during a pandemic that’s disrupted the global food supply chain. In response, the Singapore government launched a $21 million grant fund this year as part of its 30×30 initiative, which aims to have 30 percent of Singapore’s food produced locally by 2030. 

At the same time, that reliance on imports for the majority of its foods may actually help Singapore innovate on food tech faster for the short term. Since so much of the city-state’s food comes from outside its own borders, Singapore lacks some of the constraints other countries face when it comes to getting pushback by established players.

Alternative protein is a good example. Here in the U.S., both plant- and cell-based meat companies must go toe-to-toe with Big Meat producers and lobbyists over labeling of their products, shelf placement, and other issues. By contrast, Klar suggested that because Singapore’s meat supply is imported there’s nobody to push back on new developments and regulations happening in the city-state around alternative forms of meat. That, Klar reasoned, is one of the reasons Singapore is home to Asia’s best-funded cell-base meat startup, Shiok Meats, as well as a number of other up and coming players.  

Indoor agriculture/vertical farming is another area that could potentially thrive because of a lack of existing incumbents. Last year, local farms produced just 14 percent of leafy vegetables consumed by Singaporeans, so there’s little in the way of traditional agriculture to disrupt. At SKS, Leung noted that Singapore’s “highly urbanized” environment makes it an ideal setting for high-tech innovations in indoor farming. We’ve seen this in recent months with companies like SinGrow, which is growing a proprietary breed of strawberries in its vertical farm, and ag tech accelerators like GROW. Leung also flagged aquaculture as a sector to watch in Singapore.

Both Klar and Leung also pointed to Singapore’s regulatory environment as a reason for the city-states speedy growth in food tech innovation. There is only one agency in Singapore that regulates foods, said Klar. In other words, when companies prepare for the phase in which they must get government approval for their products, there’s no doubt or confusion as to who they must go to. This could speed up the process of regulatory approval, which in turn would mean a faster time to market for many companies. 

The above factors are just a smattering of reasons for Singapore food tech’s continued growth, and over the next several months we will continue to see new advances in ag tech, alt protein, packaging, and other areas of the food supply chain emerge.

‘Make Food Waste Less Possible’: How Businesses Can Help Consumers Fight Food Waste at Home

Tackling the food waste topic in a 30-minute panel is something of an impossible undertaking, given the size of the problem. That’s why at Day 2 of Smart Kitchen Summit 2020, myself, Apeel Sciences’ CEO James Rogers, Chiara Cecchini of the Future Food Institute, and Alexandria Coari of ReFED zeroed in on a few major causes and solutions around food waste.

One of those was the role of consumer behavior in the fight against food waste. Right now, according to ReFed, 80-plus percent of food waste in the U.S. happens at the consumer level, with more than 40 percent of that occurring in our own homes. But is it even realistic to expect consumers — for whom convenience and speed tend to be top priorities — to alter their behaviors around cooking, shopping, and eating in order to bring that number down?

Maybe. But as panelists explained during today’s talk, one of the keys to changing consumer behavior belongs not to the individual but to consumer-facing food businesses — the grocery stores, restaurants, and other retailers of the world.

Coari pointed out that these food businesses have a lot of influence up and down the value chain. Those businesses can enable consumer behavior change by making their environments, whether in the store or in the restaurant, less conducive to food waste to begin with. They can, as Coari said, “Make food waste less possible.”

Apeel, which makes a natural coating for produce to extend its shelf life, is one such example. Selling, say, avocados preserved in Apeel’s coating means consumers have more time between buying the product and eating it at home. Extending this lifespan, there’s a better chance the avocado will get eaten before it goes bad.

Neither the coating nor the extra several days of shelf-life happen because of anything a consumer does. They’re just buying the avocado. Instead, Apeel has used a technology and process that allow a consumer to get more mileage out of the food they buy.

Cecchini pointed out that educating consumers and helping them shift their perspective around certain foods is another important area of consumer behavior change. Take the so-called ugly produce: misshapen-yet-edible fruits and vegetables that are often sold at discounted prices. Cecchini suggests removing monikers like “ugly” or “imperfect” from the food waste vocabulary and trying to put a more positive spin on the concept to make it appeal to as many consumers as possible. In that way, grocery retailers, too, might not have to put as much effort into cosmetically perfect produce and wind up throwing out the rest.

There are tons of other examples of business innovation influencing food waste behavior at the consumer level. While we certainly didn’t cover all of them in the span of a half-hour, today’s talk certainly left me thinking about what food businesses can do to help us get more mileage out of the food we have and waste less of it in the process. As Rogers said at one point, “We can’t hope people [will] do the right thing. We have to make the right thing the easiest, cheapest, best for the planet thing to do.”

Food Waste App Too Good to Go Makes Its U.S. Debut in NYC

Food redistribution app Too Good to Go made its U.S. debut today in New York City. With it, restaurants, cafes, and markets in the Big Apple can redistribute to consumers their surplus goods that would otherwise go to the landfill.

Copenhagen, Denmark-based Too Good to Go already has a presence in several markets around Europe, including the U.K., Spain, France, and Italy. The app acts as a marketplace for surplus food, where businesses can post their leftover food at a discount. Users then search among the local restaurants and grocery stores listed on the app, place and order, and retrieve their food from the merchant.

The NYC launch coincides with the UN’s first-ever International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, which is today. New York, meanwhile, makes for an appropriate place for a food-waste-fighting app. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimates that average NYC households waste 8.4 pounds of food per week. Too Good to Go’s own recent survey found that while 86 percent of the city-area residents want to waste less food, 88 percent don’t realize the connection between food waste and climate change. And as we outlined in a recent food waste report on Spoon Plus, food waste’s global carbon footprint right now is about 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases.

So far, food redistribution apps that directly connect the consumer and the retailer are few and far between in the U.S. Canada-based Flashfood app teamed up with Meijer grocery stores in last year to sell the chain’s surplus food in the Midwest U.S. So far, however, the market in this country is ripe for new entrants. 

Too Good to Go says it already has “nearly 200” merchant partners signed up, including Stumptown Coffee, Prince St Pizza, and Brooklyn Fare. 

LARQ Raises $10M for its UV-Light, Germ-Killing Re-Useabale Water Vessels

LARQ, which makes germ-killing, reuseable hydration products, announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Seventure with participation from DCM.

Launched in 2018, LARQ’s first product was a reusable water bottle. What makes LARQ different from other reusable water bottles on the market is the built in UV-C light inside the container. Push a button and the light turns on for 60 seconds, which according to the company is enough to neutralize up to 99.9999 percent of harmful bacteria and viruses. The interior surface of the LARQ also has a special optical coating to reflect the light for maximum efficacy. The UV light used does not contain mercury.

With its new money, the California-based LARQ plans to expand internationally and into new product categories. Earlier this month, the company launched its new water pitcher on Kickstarter (where it blew past its $50,000 goal to raise more than $674,000 dollars). In addition to the UV light, the LARQ pitcher also features a plant-based carbon filter that the company says uses 75 percent less plastic than other water filter pitchers.

LARQ’s bottles and pitcher are certainly arriving at the right time for a number of reasons. Plastic waste remains a huge problem for our planet. More than 8 million metric tons of plastic waste wind up in our oceans each year, and that stat was prior to the COVID pandemic. Since the pandemic hit the problem has only gotten worse with the surge in single-use items like gloves, masks and food containers. Oh, and then there’s the recent reveal that we were misled about plastic’s ability to be recycled in the first place.

Speaking of COVID, given how the pandemic continues to run its course around the U.S. and internationally, people have a more heightened sense of the germs they are exposed to. Having a reusable water bottle that reduces plastic waste and cleans itself seems to the right idea at the right time (though it doesn’t appear that LARQ makes any specific claims about COVID-19).

According to the press release, LARQ sold more than 75,000 units in 2019. LARQ bottles sell for $78 a pop, and are available online and through a number of retail partners like Nordstrom and Bloomingdales.


Sept. 29 is International Day of Awareness on Food Loss and Waste Reduction

By United Nations resolution, tomorrow, Sept. 29, is officially recognized as an International Day of Awareness on Food Loss and Waste Reduction. The theme for this year’s observance is “Stop food loss and waste. For the people. For the planet.”

Given that between 30 and 40 percent of the world’s food supply goes to waste each year, the issue is a social, moral and even economic one. As the UN wrote:

Actions are required globally and locally to maximize the use of the food we produce. The introduction of technologies, innovative solutions (including e-commerce platforms for marketing, retractable mobile food processing systems), new ways of working and good practices to manage food quality and reduce food loss and waste are key to implementing this transformative change.

Reducing food loss and waste requires the attention and actions of all, from food producers, to food supply chain stakeholders, to food industries, retailers and consumers.

Avid Spoon readers know that food waste and loss is an important area of coverage for us. The more awareness we can create, the better off we all are. To that end, here’s a collection of stories we have written over the past few months about the food waste issue and the companies actively tackling the problem:

Reducing food waste and bringing more equity to our food system is going to take a concerted effort across the public and private sectors. But most of all, it will take effort from all of us individually to change our wasteful ways.

The Wonderful Company Wants New Innovations for Its 50,000 Tons of Pomegranate Husks

The Wonderful Company, best known for its pomegranate juices, is ready to infuse some cash into creative reuses of its pomegranate biomass.  

Today, the company launched its Wonderful Innovation Challenge. The competition will offer “up to $1 million” in funding and development resources to those with “pilot ready solutions for the 50,000 tons of pomegranate husks generated each year by juicing POM Wonderful pomegranates,” according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Food waste nonprofit ReFed will serve as a strategic advisor and managing partner for the competition. 

The pomegranate husk, also known as pomace, consists of the fruit’s pulpy remains after it has been crushed and its juice extracted. On the competition’s website, The Wonderful Company says the pomace is usually sold as dairy feed but “recent shifts in the market have prompted the exploration of new, alternative outlets.”

To find those alternative outlets, Wonderful’s new competition is looking for companies with ideas that are ready to pilot and backed by “a data-driven business model.” The tools, technologies, and processes companies can use is fairly open-ended: the competition only notes that concepts should demonstrate potential for positive environmental or social impact. 

Chosen winners get funding from a $1 million reward pool, as well as assistance in developing their concepts. Applicants should request the amount they will need to develop their pilots when they submit their ideas.

Wonderful is the latest company to join the movement for upcycling the inedible parts of food items, and in the last several months, we’ve seen many creative ideas come out of this movement. It joins companies like Renewal Mill, who is currently making cookies from upcycled okara flour and Harmless Harvest, a company turning leftover salmon skin into snacks. Major corporations are also getting involved. For example, researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough turning McDonald’s deep-fryer oil into 3D-printing resin.

Innovations in upcycling increase as the conversation around the world’s food waste problem gets louder. As we discussed in a recent Spoon Plus report, solutions for fighting food waste now come in all different shapes and sizes. While Wonderful’s new competition specifically focuses on food scraps that can’t be eaten, it joins other companies and organizations in the urgent fight to keep food out of landfills.

Tech has a potentially big role to play in the process of upcycling inedible food scraps, and we’ll doubtless see some of it surface in Wonderful’s competition. 

The application process is open now and runs to Dec. 7, 2020.

Zero Grocery Raises $3M Seed Round for Plastic-Free Grocery

Zero Grocery Founder and CEO Zuleyka Strasner announced today via Medium that Zero has raised $3 million in Seed funding for its plastic-free grocery delivery service. According to Strasner, “the largest check” came from 1984, with other investors such as Arlan Hamilton, AVG Basecamp Fun, Bluestein Ventures and more participating. This brings the total amount raised by Zero Grocery to $4.7 million.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Zero Grocery doesn’t use any plastic in its grocery delivery service. According to the company FAQ, food is bought wholesale and packed into glass jars, tiffins, boxes and other containers.

Zero has a membership option for $25 a month, which gives offers free deliveries and also collects empty containers from previous deliveries (which then get sanitized and re-used). You don’t have to have a membership to shop at Zero, though non-members pay a $7.99 delivery fee.

The timing is certainly ripe for Zero’s fundraise. First, the pandemic has spurred record amounts of online grocery shopping over the past six months. And while the numbers have fallen, the online grocery sector is projected to keep growing and hit $250 billion by 2025.

In the Medium post, Strasner even mentioned that the pandemic drove 20x new business for Zero, but it was it was able to adjust on the fly and survive:

As other grocery stores faced out-of-stocks due to a mutual reliance on the same distributors and sources for their products, we were able to avoid out-of-stocks and maintain a consistent customer experience. We had put our model to the test and succeeded, and it allowed us to serve customers in the best way we possibly could.

But the plastic-free nature of Zero’s service is also compelling. People are more acutely aware than ever, especially in light of a recent NPR and Frontline’s recent headline “How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled.”

Thankfully, there is a new wave of waste-free grocery stores coming up to help tackle the problem. In addition to Zero Grocery, there’s Zero Market in Denver, CO, and Nada Grocery in Vancouver, Canada. Even big brands like Unilever and Pepsi are getting in on the reusable container train through the Loop store.

All of this combined, along with $3 million means that there are a lot more zeros in Zero’s warchest to help it scale its plastic-free mission.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post misstated that there was a jar deposit for non-members.