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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Fieldcraft

Food-X Announces Cohort 11, Its First-Ever Virtual Accelerator Program

Food-X, a hugely popular startup accelerator for food businesses, today announced the eight chosen companies for Cohort 11 of its program. While they vary in focus — food traceability, restaurant tech, pet food, and upcycling — the selected companies all share Food-X’s mission of solving some of the biggest challenges the global food system faces. And for Cohort 11, the companies share something else in common: They are part of Food-X’s first-ever virtual cohort.

While many food accelerator programs operate remotely or through a combination of remote and onsite work, Food-X’s NYC-based program has historically always been done onsite and in-person for its three-and-a-half-month duration. That was in a pre-pandemic world, though. With most states still locked down to stem the spread of COVID-19, and with NYC getting hit especially hard with cases, holding a program onsite is more or less impossible at the moment.

As far back as the beginning of March, the Food-X staff was preparing for this possibility. Program Director Peter Bodenheimer told me over the phone last week that they had initially considered pushing program’s start date back a couple weeks. When it became obvious that two weeks would be something of a drop in the bucket in terms of statewide shelter-in-place mandates, the program decided to pivot to an entirely virtual model for the first time ever.

That’s included using video chat in place of the standard office drop-ins, doing virtual “coffee breaks” with the participants, and finding alternative ways for companies to meet with potential investors in place of the usual “demo day” event.

The results, it turns out, have been a pleasant surprise. “It’s been even better than I hoped it would be in terms of engagement,” Bodenheimer said. “It feels like it’s been one of the most engaged cohorts we’ve had ever.”

That’s significant, considering this particular cohort is also Food-X’s most diverse ever in terms of where companies are located. Milk Moovement, which makes supply chain software for the dairy industry, is headquartered in Canada. Health supplement maker Rambuhealth hails from Costa Rica. Latin American restaurant tech company remotekitchen works out of Mexico City, while ingredients marketplace Fieldcraft is from Austin, TX. 

Normally these companies would all converge at the Food-X offices in Manhattan. Now, like the rest of us, they are being forced to carry out normal business in abnormal circumstances. And, as Bodenheimer sees it, they’ve more than stepped up to the task: “The companies have been incredibly active and incredibly engaged. They’ve rolled with the punches, and that’s a great signal from an investment standpoint. We’ve made a good investment because on some level these companies have barely skipped a beat.”

Food-X hasn’t yet decided if the success so far of this virtual accelerator will permanently change the program’s format moving forward. “I could see something where we do a hybrid where there’s a portion that’ sin person, a portion that’s remote,” says Bodenheimer.

In the meantime, here’s the full Cohort 11 roster, as outlined in a press release from Food-X:

  • Bramble: A fresh, 100% plant-based pet food company that aims to consciously boost your pet’s diet.
  • Ester: A startup harnessing science and AI to develop hyper-personalized customer flavor profiles for retailers of beer and wine.
  • Fieldcraft: The first B2B marketplace for commodities and ingredients built to simplify sourcing from growers to manufacturers.
  • Living Food Company: A managed consumer marketplace offering access to fresh, clean and delicious food made by world-class farmers, bakers, brewers and other food artisans.
  • Milk Moovement: A startup that is providing actionable intelligence across the dairy supply chain through its cloud-based software.
  • Nature Preserve: A sustainable food tech brand that is upcycling produce to minimize waste and maximize health via a proprietary food preservation process. First up: Lovi Smoothies, a natural plantbased mix packed with nutrients for use in smoothies, shakes, baking, and beyond.
  • Rambuhealth: A venture leveraging the antioxidant-dense shell of Rambutan for heightened health benefits, which can be found in their food bars, supplements and ingredient offerings.
  • remotekitchen: A single unified platform to empower restaurants to run, manage and grow their business effectively.

Bodenheimer suggests a point I’ve heard mentioned frequently over the last few weeks — that the pandemic’s complete disruption of day-to-day business is forcing most to rethink norms and experiment more. Startups, too, are inherently more open to taking risks typically, and those that do may actually find some upsides to this situation. “Downturns tend to be a great time for companies to start because there’s less noise, less frothy money being flopped around to companies that may not be as great,” he says.

Food-X is currently four weeks into Cohort 11, and already taking applications for Cohort 12, which will kick off in the fall of 2020. Whether that will be an in-person or virtual affair is anyone’s guess right now.

Fieldcraft is an Online Marketplace Helping Companies Develop New Plant-Based Products

Say a bakery chain wants to add a vegan blueberry muffin to its menu. First, they’d have to find substitutes for butter and eggs — depending on their preferences, maybe even ones that are certified organic or locally made — and ensure that these producers could consistently keep them supplied.

Maybe they should take a look at Fieldcraft. The Austin-based startup, which just launched last month, is an online B2B marketplace for plant-based ingredients. Growers and manufacturers can list their products — everything from specialty grains to kale chips — on the site, and buyers can search the database by production method, certifications (organic, non-GMO, etc.), location, supplier production capacity, and more.

If buyers can’t find what they need, they can submit requests to Fieldcraft for new products or even contract out farmers to sow a certain crop, such as an heirloom grain. On the farmer’s side, this is also a win since it gives them a guaranteed marketplace and, by putting in demands for new/different crops, promotes biodiversity.

Though it’s just over a month old, Fieldcraft already has over 7,000 companies in its marketplace. Yesterday the company rolled out a new solutions tool to help people who might not be sure exactly what they’re looking for — which, according to Fieldcraft CEO and co-founder Michael Chapman, is about one-third of their users. “We want to give buyers the chance to find new products that they didn’t even know were out there,” he told me.

For example, the aforementioned bakery might not know what type of egg substitute would be the best fit for their new vegan blueberry muffins. In this case, they could search Fieldcraft for a list of plant-based egg alternatives, which include minute details about the properties of each ingredient (emulsifying, thickening, etc.), and then determine which one to purchase.

On the other hand, for those who know exactly what they’re looking for, Fieldcraft can get pretty granular. So instead of just searching for broad “egg alternatives,” users could track down a “clean-label, non-GMO upcycled aquafaba.”

With so many new players — both young startups and veteran food corporations — entering into the plant-based protein space, I think there’s certainly a market for Fieldcraft’s, well, market. It offers a couple obvious benefits: it cuts out the middleman and gives suppliers instant access to new audiences.

But Fieldcraft’s greatest asset is its opportunity for discovery. When I visited the JUST offices last year I was wow-ed by their high tech plant research center, where the company tests plants sourced from around the world to suss out their properties: if they foam, thicken, etc. A resource like Fieldcraft, with its wide-ranging database, could help smaller startups who don’t have the warchest or lab space of a JUST to discover new ingredients that could lead to better plant-based products.

There are certainly other wholesale ingredient supply companies out there, including major players like Sysco or U.S. Foods, which carry plant-based ingredients. However, Fieldcraft is targeting buyers who want a more direct relationship with their supplier or need hard-to-find ingredients with exacting specifications. As of now, they sell to CPG brands, meal kit makers, bakeries, brewers, and even food manufacturers.

From my conversation with Chapman, it seems like the size of growers and suppliers using Fieldcraft varies pretty widely. I’ll be curious to see if they ever run into the problem of a grower running out of an ingredient (or just having a bad harvest) which a supplier relies upon for its product. That being said, his cofounder (and wife) Kristy Chapman, CPO of Fieldcraft, has a background in data science, so maybe they’ll be able to set up a backend that can nimbly adjust based on suppliers’ yield.

Fieldcraft is free for buyers to use and costs $195/year for suppliers. The company currently has four employees (including the Chapmans) and has yet to seek any external funding.

Obviously, Fieldcraft isn’t for everyone. Big players like Tyson or even Beyond Meat clearly have their own ingredient supply chains nailed down. But for newer startups, or even medium-sized players looking to develop new animal-free products, Fieldcraft could be a valuable resource.

There also seems to be a new trend of pick-and-play plant-based ingredient companies, like Motif Ingredients, a new company that makes ingredients for vegan products from genetically engineered yeast. With the plant-based market as red-hot as it is — sales grew by 20 percent in 2018 alone — I imagine we’ll see a lot more food companies and manufacturers looking to develop their own animal-free products over the coming years. Fieldcraft seems to be entering the market at just the right time.