Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

agtech

Minneapolis-St.Paul

Techstars Unveils Startup Accelerator for Foodtech Innovators

Agriculture in the U.S. is a $3 trillion industry, but, paradoxically, it’s innovations in technology that have slowed growth in terms of how many people the agriculture industry employs. All that’s to say there are fewer workers on farms nowadays, which means fewer people and less time for innovative ideas.

Entrepreneurship network Techstars wants to change that with its latest startup accelerator. The Farm to Fork Accelerator is Techstars first program that will focus on helping companies in the food and tech side of agriculture develop their ideas and businesses. Early- and late-stage startups from areas like AgTech, manufacturing, food safety, and waste reduction are invited to apply for the three-month program, which will be held in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area this summer. 

Techstars has partnered with the $13 billion water and energy provider Ecolab, as well as food- and agriculture-services provider Cargill. “The Techstars Farm to Fork Accelerator is the perfect platform to connect these global giants in food processing, food safety and agriculture with innovators who have ideas and technical knowledge,” Farm to Fork managing director Brett Brohl recently wrote.

The three-month program helps entrepreneurs across several stages: finding mentors, building out products, and learning how to communicate with investors and major stakeholders. The program ends with a demo day where participants show off their progress.

Techstars says its choice of The Twin Cities as a host for a food innovation program is a strategic choice: food and ag tech programs there are worth more than $25 billion, and these companies employ over 100,000 people. “Our history is food and agriculture and with programs like this food and ag tech will play a big part in the region’s future,” Brohl says.

Agriculture technology has a growing number of startups in it these days that cover everything from farm data platforms and online marketplaces for imperfect produce to livestock management and using blockchain to assess sustainability. “Digital agriculture” is a trend to watch out for in this space in continuing search for more sustainable farming methods and using biotech to create food alternatives (e.g., plant-based “meat”). Given those trends, now feels like an exciting and appropriate time to launch a startup accelerator focused on this area.

The Farm to Fork program will run from July 16–October 11, 2018. Applications open on January 8, and close on April 8.

Côtes du Robot, Historic French Vineyard Goes High-Tech

We often think of winemaking as an art. A mysterious dark art that only a few have mastered. But the truth of it is, winemaking is farming, and robots are becoming an increasingly important part of any farm — even for historic French vineyards dating back hundreds of years.

Decanteur magazine has a story up about “TED,” a new robot from Näio Technologies, being used by Château Clerc Milon to help tend its high density vineyard. As you can see from the video, TED is an arch-shaped autonomous vehicle, that runs up and down the rows of grapes cultivating the soil and tending to weeds.

The TED trial took place earlier this year, and a spokesperson for the winery told Decanteur that robots are good for arduous, repetitive tasks (something we’ve heard before) involved with agriculture, and there is an added environmental benefit with the reduction in fossil fuel usage. The winery says, however, that humans are still needed for the selecting and picking of grapes.

As The Spoon founder, Mike Wolf, pointed out in our podcast earlier this week, farms are the perfect place for robots like TED. They feature wide open spaces, defined geometric areas (straight rows!) and a lack of people to run into or around.

This automated approach may be new for a hallowed French winery, but robots have been steadily taking on more complex wine related tasks such as yield monitoring, vine pruning, and grape sorting. And with the advances in image recognition, AI and spectrometry, robots will only get better at the more nuanced necessities of wine making and play an even bigger part of what goes in your bottle.

Hopefully, hundreds of years from now, we can figure out a way co-exist with robots so us humans have more time to enjoy their wine.

Want to hear an audio version of this story? Click below. And while you’re at it, subscribe to the Daily Spoon on Amazon Alexa.

Farmers Business Network Raises $110 Million Series D Round

Farmers Business Network, an online platform for farmers to share analytics, purchase materials and sell their product, announced today that it has raised a $110 million Series D round of funding. This latest money will go towards bolstering its existing services as well as international expansion.

For a $600 a year subscription, Farmers Business Network (FBN) provides a number of digital services that allow farmers to connect with one another and share their data. By aggregating this information, FBN allows farmers to learn about various farm optimization techniques, and creates price transparency for inputs such as seed and fertilizer.

FBN also has a both end e-comerce platform that not only sells inputs directly to farmers, but can also serve as a marketing service selling farmers’ outputs directly to food buyers.

FBN Co-Founder and VP of Product, Charles Baron told AgFunder News that FBN’s membership is “doubling” year over year and currently has roughly 5,000 member farms across 16 million acres. Baron also said the company wants to remain independent and expects to go public in 2 – 5 years.

Ag retailers are not necessarily as thrilled by the success of FBN, however. CropLife reports complaints among retailers include FBN cutting into already thin margins, and questioning whether it can sustain as a long-term business. Having said that, these same retailers agreed that FBN can’t be ignored.

FBN’s Series D was led by two institutional investors: T. Rowe Price and Singapore state fund Tamasek. The company has raised $200 million to date.

Building A Common Language For Food

Perhaps the most overused buzzword in the past several years is IoT – Internet of Things. We’ve even seen IoE (Internet of Everything) and IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) emerge – but this year at SKS 2017, we were introduced to another Internet of phrases – one that has a chance to completely transform how we interact with food in our lives.

IoF stands for the Internet of Food, an effort to create a digital language and infrastructure for food. At the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit, Dr. Matthew Lange of UC Berkeley and IC-Foods presented on the beginnings of IoF, describing it as “bring[ing] a common data language and ontology to the world of food and the impact on activities, such as food shopping and cooking.”

Despite its name, the Internet of Food is not just about food; it’s about every process and industry related to food, such as the environment, agriculture and health. The idea is to create a language to operationalize all food-related data pertaining to these subjects and impact every industry that may touch the food chain.

This means thinking about food outside of the kitchen—before it gets into the kitchen, and after it leaves the kitchen before we eat it. Lange explains that IoF is about annotating these processes and building a vocabulary that can explain the likes of flavor components, nutrient components, energy usage, etc. By developing an ontology about how food moves through the supply chain, farmers, for example, can be given more appropriate advice about how to best grow, store, and deliver food.

When it comes to smart things in the kitchen, most people immediately jump to thinking about appliances. But Lange insists we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Suppose, for instance, you have a sensor that measures the precise humidity and temperature of a drawer in your refrigerator. Seems handy, right? “But this doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know at what humidity and temperature that spinach should be stored,” notes Dr. Lange.

This is where the Internet of Food comes in. When we bring smart into the kitchen, we have to think one step before appliances and gadgets and get smart about food itself first—and we have the data to do it.

There is already a plethora of food data available: there are traditional data sets harvested from governmental and private researchers, and there is data about food sourced from the Internet of Things. The vision for the Internet of Food is to combine all these data sets and develop an ontology to tag the data, making it interoperable between scientific disciplines and different people on the supply chain.

Beyond technical efficiency, the IoF also aims to improve perhaps the best part about food: its flavor. The question is: How can we know which flavors go well together? Lange makes an analogy to musical notes; if you dissect a musical scale, you’ll see that C plays in harmony with E, but no so much with F#. What if we can apply this systematic principle to food and food flavors? According to Lange, with a developed ontology for food, we can find an algorithm to make sense of why certain flavors are in harmony with one another.

The Internet of Food expands “smart” out of the kitchen into every process related to food harvesting, shopping, and cooking. Watch Dr. Matthew Lange’s full talk from the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit:

With Big Names Behind It, Plenty Aims To Rule the Vertical Farming Market

A $200 million investment in indoor farming startup Plenty has caught the attention of venture capitalists and those who follow the emerging world of tech-driven, commercial indoor farming. What separates the San Francisco-based agtech company from other indoor farming manufacturers is its claim to be able to grow everything except for tree fruit (lemons, oranges, etc…) and root vegetables. The vast majority of competitors focus solely on greens, herbs, strawberries and the occasional tomato.

Perhaps of even greater significant than its crop yield are the profiles of Plenty’s new investors. The high profile roster for this latest round include Softbank CEO, Masayoshi Son, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Attached to each new investor comes an opportunity. For example, Son could bring Plenty to Japan and the rest of Asia. Schmidt’s VC firm Innovation Endeavors has CropX in its portfolio which boasts an adjacent technology that offers adaptive crop irrigation.

Bezos, on the other hand, stands out because of Amazon’s recent purchase of Whole Foods. The intersection of Plenty with bricks and mortar stores, home delivery of groceries, restaurant delivery and meal kits is a near harmonic convergence. Controlling a prime part of the value chain that goes from farm to table or farm to home puts Amazon in a prime position to level its competitors in a number of markets.

The implementations of Plenty with Whole Foods run from the obvious to the imaginative. It’s easy to see Amazon being able to offer premium produce directly to customers via home delivery, but it also could use Plenty to draw more people into its retail stores. Taking a page from Infarm, which has its indoor farm in a Berlin supermarket, Whole Foods adding sleek vertical farms to its stores would be a lure to its clientele—a predominately upscale  group prone to loving shiny, new objects. Not only would shoppers take notice of this high-touch addition, the farms would have the practical objective of selling fresh goods to fussy shoppers.

Whole Foods’ profile perfectly fits this scenario. In past years, innovation was the company’s strong suit. The Austin-based chain was among the first premium supermarkets to feature in-store, full-service restaurants as well as bars featuring local brews on tap. Noted for working closely with local farmers, it would make sense for Whole Foods to select local organic growers to take ownership of and maintain the Plenty-built vertical farms.

Whole Foods and Amazon could make for an exciting team in advancing the commercial aspects of Plenty. With Softbank’s Son in the mix, Japan and Asia are a solid target for expansion, but Europe is a far larger and more immediate major opportunity. One sign of that Europe is a hot agtech market is seen via Germany’s darling, Infarm. Infarm’s successful implementation in Berlin also has caught the attention of investors and partners. Now working with German grocery chain, EDEKA, Infarm has recently closed a four million Euro round led by Berlin’s Cherry Ventures.

Showing his astute understanding of the market for its vertical farming technology, Infarm co-founder Osnat Michaeli outlines how her company’s growth has defined the future of indoor farming in Europe and beyond.

“When we started out, we were looked at as ‘idealistic dreamers’. In part, this might have been because we were self-taught and not many believed that we had the necessary expertise needed to invent a new agricultural solution,” Michaeli told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

“The challenge [now] is in finding the right partners. Our initial focus is on supermarket chains, online food retailers, wholesalers, hotels, and other food-related businesses, for whom the superior quality and range of produce — with no fluctuation in costs — makes Infarm an attractive partner. In return, we can reintroduce the joy of growing to the urban population”.

Image credit: Flickr user Euro Slice under creative commons license

Calling All Startups: Apply To Pitch & Demo At 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit

One of the best parts of attending the Smart Kitchen Summit is getting a front row seat to brand new technology and innovative products that are coming down the pipeline. The event’s startup showcase is now in its third year and invites all startups in the food tech and smart kitchen space to apply for a spot.

Details

The Startup Showcase is the perfect way to demonstrate the most innovative new ideas, products and companies reinventing food, cooking and the kitchen. If you have the next great idea that will change the way we buy, cook, store, or consume food, apply today on the SKS website. Anyone with a working product that is either a late-stage working demo or actually shipping is welcome to apply free of charge.

SKS organizers will select 15 startups as finalists and they will be invited to the event to demo their product and get on the Summit stage to talk about who they are and how they’re going to change the future of food, cooking or the kitchen.

From these 15, a winner will be chosen from a mix of judges and crowd-voting and be crowned the winner of the Startup Showcase on October 10th.

To apply, fill out the application and make your case for why you deserve to be a finalist – the more articles, photos, videos and compelling info you can provide on your product and company, the better your chances are of grabbing one of the coveted tables at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit.

Past Startup Showcases

The Startup Showcase in 2016 proved to one of the top highlights of the Smart Kitchen Summit – attendees poured into the showcase room to see live demonstrations of 3D food printing, home growing systems, smart precision cooktops, connected spice racks and more. For startups, the Smart Kitchen Summit audience consists of directors, executives, investors and press across the tech, food, design, housewares and appliances, commerce and retail spaces.

AJ7A3037
AJ7A3081
AJ7A3145
AJ7A2948
AJ7A3068
AJ7A3048

The 2017 Showcase will not only offer a demo table and an eager audience but a demo space in the heart of the main Summit event at Benaroya Hall and a chance to pitch a panel of judges and the audience. No event brings together the decision makers and disrupters from across the food, cooking, appliance, retail and technology ecosystems. The Startup Showcase provides a platform for exciting startups, investors and entrepreneurs to demonstrate what they are working on and let others experience it firsthand.

The deadline for applications is August 15.

Google Hopes Investment in AgTech Bears Fruit

Google and Apple together in an investment deal? Wait, it appears to be Google and apples—as in the fruit.

GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) is among those leading an investment round for Abundant Robotics, a Hayward, Calif.-based company whose robotic apple-picking machine has gained a lot of interest from the agricultural and financial sectors. Well into several trials, the device uses a combination of robotics and AI (in the forms of computer vision) to gently pluck apples from trees and carefully place them in bins for washing and packaging.  The $10 million Series A round will be used to commercialize the product.

Dan Steere, co-founder and CEO of Abundant Robotics says the path from prototype to the current stage—ready for commercialization within a year—is a slow and patient process. “The biggest challenge is understanding when you’re at a point with a set of technology that you can move from research to actually building a useful product, and that’s the hard part about startups; understanding when the capabilities are really ready,” Steere told AgFunder News in a recent interview. “In our case, there was a lot of foundational work and early research.  It wasn’t clear what we were trying to do would work, so there was a lot of interaction with growers though prototypes and real world testing to prove we were on the right track.”

Robotic apple picker trials continue in Washington

Steere’s team at Abundant Robotics came from SRI International, a non-profit research center, with its members bringing backgrounds in robotics and software. The initial funding to build a prototype came from The Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission which seems logical given Washington is among the leading apple-producing states in the country. Another investor in the company is BayWa, a German agricultural investment firm with interests in the New Zealand Envy Apple business.

The harvesting art of the robotics device is a refinement of previous technology-based attempts at reducing labor costs and increasing efficiencies in harvesting. What sets Abundant Robotics apart is its computer vision system which is able to identify the apple on the tree aside from the tree branches and other foliage. By carefully pinpointing the apple, there is less chance of damaging the fruit and the tree. The apple is then carefully plucked from the tree and softly put into the device’s bin.

Abundant Robotics is by no means alone in its quest to bring technology to the harvesting process. FFRobotics, an Israeli firm also is working on a similar solution which it claims can gently pick 10 times as much fruit as the average field worker. The company hopes to be in field testing by the end of the year.

Beyond fruit picking, Blue River Technology, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., has smart boxes that hook on to tractors which identify the optimal location to plant, the right time to fertilize as well as the best time to harvest. Autonomous harvesting is gaining a lot of traction in Europe (perhaps even more than in the U.S.) with projects such as CROPS (Clever Robots for Crops) a Pan-European project sponsored by the EU. The goal is automation of the agricultural business and has manifested in such work as a greenhouse robotic pepper picker.

While certainly a delicate subject, the issue of replacing farm workers with robots must be addressed.

“Who knows what this administration will do or not do (related to immigration)?” said Jim McFerson, head of the Washington State Tree Fruit Research Center in Wenatchee told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. For farmers, “it’s a question of survival.”

Beyond immigration issues, there is grave concern among those farm workers whose livelihoods depend on regular work. The eventual loss of jobs for humans will be huge, said Erik Nicholson of Seattle, an official with the United Farm Workers union.

“They are scared of losing their jobs to mechanization,” Nicholson said. “A robot is not going to rent a house, buy clothing for their kids, buy food in a grocery and reinvest that money in the local economy.”