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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food waste

P&P Optica Receives $1M Investment for its Hyperspectral Food Inspection

P&P Optica, a startup that uses hyperspectral imaging to assess food quality and safety, announced yesterday that it has received a $1 million investment from Export Development Canada (EDC), Canada’s Export Credit Agency (h/t to RestoBiz).

Installed on a food production line, P&P Optica’s imaging technology uses light to examine fruits, vegetables and meat to assess their qualities like protein, water, pH balance, and also detects any foreign matter that might be present. Understanding these factors allows food producers to better grade the food they are shipping while reducing food waste by not discarding food that is still good.

The Ontario, Canada-based P&P says it will use the funding to continue development of its Smart Imaging System, and expand its footprint across North America.

P&P will have some competition in the form of ImpactVision, which also uses hyperspectral imaging to assess food quality and uncover foreign objects in food production. ImpactVision has raised $2.7 million (counting shipping giant Maersk as an investor) and is among the first cohort of Chipotle’s Aluminaries accelerator program.

ImpactVision also recently revealed that its technology is being used by Beta San Miguel, Mexico’s largest sugar producer, for detection of non-magnetic foreign objects. ImpactVision’s cameras scan for contaminants in the sugar, and when a foreign object is found, the production line automatically rejects that affected area. This, in turn keeps foreign objects out of the bags of sugar in the first place, so they don’t have to be recalled after reaching the market.

Foreign matter in our food has been in the news lately as Tyson had to recall more than 36,000 pounds of chicken nuggets because they may have contained rubber.

Using hyperspectral imaging like P&P Optica’s and ImpactVision’s has the potential to mitigate those types of issues before food leaves the production line to save food producers headaches, money while reducing food waste.

Apeel Brings Its Longer-Lasting Avocados to Europe

Holy (long-lasting) guacamole! Today Apeel Sciences announced that it’s partnering with Belgium-based produce importer Nature’s Pride to bring their long-lasting avocados to the European market.

If you don’t know, Apeel Sciences is a California-based startup that makes an edible post-harvest coating for fruits and vegetables (called Edipeel) which can significantly increase produce shelf life. Edipeel-coated avocados — Apeel’s first product — are currently available in select grocery stores in the Midwest, including a string of Costco’s.

Nature’s Pride’s new Edipeel-coasted avocados will have a co-branded label to increase consumer awareness around Apeel’s mission. The companies expect that the long-lasting avocados will be available mid-2019 in select retail stores in Europe, as long as they gain EU regulatory approval. There’s no word as to where in Europe Apeel/Nature’s Pride will first roll out the avocados.

The timing is ripe (sorry, I had to). Roughly 88 million tons of food is wasted in the EU every year. In 2012, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that roughly 50 percent of fruits and vegetables in the EU go to waste, and over half of that waste occurs after food is brought home from the store.

Apeel’s edible coating won’t help Europeans (or anyone) be better about eating all of their produce, but it will give them a longer window before said produce goes bad. According to their website, Apeel’s technology has led to a more than 50 percent decrease in food waste at the retail level. If those statistics hold true in Europe, it could take a huge dent out of those 88 million tons of food waste.

In August of last year Apeel raised $70 million, bringing the total funding for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed startup to just north of $110 million. Next up, Apeel plans to tackle citrus and asparagus.

The Wally Shop is a Grocery Delivery Service with Zero Packaging Waste

Even if you’re trying to shop sustainably — buying in bulk, choosing local produce, bringing your own bag to the supermarket — chances are, your weekly grocery order isn’t totally waste-free.

But one startup in Brooklyn wants to make zero-waste grocery shopping a reality. The Wally Shop is an online grocery-delivery service where the packaging, delivery, and bags are all waste-free. Seriously.

Here’s how it works: If you’re in an area where The Wally Shop is active (they currently serve a dozen-ish zip codes in Brooklyn), you can shop on their website for goods from local farmers markets and bulk stores (produce, coffee, tea, grains, etc.). After choosing your goods, you then pick a delivery time between 6-8 p.m. If you order before 2 p.m. you can have your order delivered same day.

Once Wally receives an incoming order, the company’s in-house shoppers will hit up local markets and bulk stores to find the items on your grocery list. Back at the company’s warehouse, those goods are repacked into reusable containers. Think glass mason jars and muslin bags. The entire order gets put in a reusable tote bag and delivered to you via bicycle. Each packaging item costs one dollar; customers can return the containers and get their deposit applied to their next order, or they can keep the packaging.

The Wally Shop launched in October of 2018, but CEO Tamara Lim has been developing the concept for two years — ever since she realized the inefficiencies of America’s recycling infrastructure while working in packaging and shipping department at Amazon. There, she learned how tricky recycling infrastructure is in the U.S., where packaging is difficult to recycle, and recycled packaging is more expensive for companies to buy than virgin. According to the EPA, in 2015 only about half of packaging (boxes, plastic coverings, etc.) was recycled. The remaining ended up in landfills, totaling over 29 million tons (21 percent of the total landfill).

The staggering amount of packaging waste isn’t just because people are lazy. It can be tricky to figure out how to properly recycle various packaging components, especially when it comes to ice packs and tiny containers that keep groceries and meal kits chilled en route to your doorstep. Instead of trying to convert to 100 percent curbside recyclable packaging, like meal kit service Purple Carrot did a few months ago, Lim decided to do away with the problem altogether. “I wanted to make it really convenient for people to be sustainable,” she told me over the phone.

Photo: The Wally Shop

The Wally Shop’s timing could not have been better, as it’s situated squarely at the convergence of three major food trends:

1: Consumers want local, sustainable, organic food with a transparent supply chain, and are willing to pay more for it. With The Wally Store, they’ll have to: As with most farmers market produce, Wally’s prices are higher than your average corner grocery. On top of the actual shopping bill, all orders have a 15 percent service fee tacked on, plus the packaging costs and a $3.99 delivery charge. That can add up, so we’ll have to see if consumers are willing to pay a handsome premium for ethical grocery shopping.

2: Convenience is king. Zero-waste grocery stores do actually exist (though not many), but The Wally Shop will be able to serve a wider range of customers by taking advantage of the growing demand for grocery delivery. And while the Wally Shop can’t compete with the 2-hour delivery windows of Amazon/Whole Foods, their zero-waste angle will likely draw in consumers who are willing to wait longer for a more sustainable shopping experience.

3: In the wake of single-use plastic straw bans and pushback against meal kit/delivery packaging, people are waking up to the widespread problem of non-recyclable plastics and packaging. Even big brands are getting onboard: just last week Pepsi, Nestlé, and Unilever teamed up to ditch plastic and sell their products in reusable containers. Branding themselves as “waste-free” is a smart way for Lim and her team to generate a consumer base of ethical shoppers.

As of now, Wally’s team is a pretty small operation: They have four full-time employees and four to five shoppers. Lim told me The Wally Shop has roughly 500 customers signed up right now, and currently has friends & family funding. Next, Lim told me she plans to expand their waste-free grocery delivery service to Manhattan and, eventually, go beyond NYC into San Francisco, Boston, and L.A.

When speaking to Lim, I couldn’t help but think of Farmdrop, the U.K.-based ethical grocery delivery service that sources goods from local farmers and purveyors. The company also has an option where consumers can choose to have the food unpacked at their house (no packaging left behind). I wrote that Farmdrop is a good option for those who want to support local farmers markets but don’t have time to physically shop there, and I think The Wally Shop could serve the same demographic. Lim also mentioned that the service is a good tool for mobility-challenged consumers who still want to shop sustainably.

While I’m cautious that their high prices and service fees will make it hard to attract a larger consumer base and scale up, The Wally Shop’s sustainable business model could generate enough buzz to carve out a grocery delivery niche that’s actually waste-free — at least in wealthy urban areas.

Goodr Launched Free “Pop-Up Grocery” Store Featuring Surplus Food for MLK Day

In anticipation for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Atlanta-based startup Goodr launched a service project to reduce food waste and feed the hungry in MLK’s home city.

Goodr has partnered with the Atlanta Hawks to launch a “Pop-Up Grocery” event in tandem with the Hawks’ court dedication at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Recreation and Aquatic Center in downtown ATL (h/t Black Enterprise news). Over the weekend, roughly 100 local seniors came out to take advantage of the pop-up, which features free surplus food (like fresh produce, deli products and bread) from Goodr’s Atlanta grocery partners.

This isn’t the first pop-up grocery event from Goodr, which uses blockchain to redistribute excess food from businesses and venues to non-profits which provide food to those struggling with hunger. In a statement to The Spoon, Goodr’s CEO Jasmine Crowe said “Pop-up free grocery stores are a signature Goodr event, and one of our favorite ways to bring food to the gathering spaces and even the doorsteps of people who need it the most.” This particular “store” was only open this past Thursday, to kick off the Hawk’s MLK Day programming, but Crowe said that one of their goals for 2019 is to pop-up in a new place every two weeks.

In this job, you see a lot of companies leveraging technology for technology’s sake. Sometimes it’s really nice to read about a company that’s tackling widespread issues in the food system — like food waste and hunger — head-on, especially on a holiday dedicated to remember the legacy of a man who fought for equity and justice.

When we spoke to Crowe in preparation for this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, she told us that Goodr has plans to be in 20 cities by 2020. Hopefully that will mean a lot more pop-up grocery stores, a lot less food waste, and a lot more people with access to fresh, healthy food.

Render Teams Up with Chefs to Upcycle Whey, Pickle Juice and Quinoa

I’ve been walking the seemingly neverending show floor of the Winter Fancy Food Show this week in San Francisco, scouting out new products and eating my body weight in cheese samples.

I was especially excited to talk to Render, a brand from the culinary innovation company Pilot R&D. Unlike Pilot R&D, which helps develop products for CPG companies, Render collaborates with chefs to make their own edible (and drinkable) goods for consumers. As Render CEO and co-founder Dana Peck told me: “We’re bringing the restaurant experience to people at home.”

Most interestingly: Render is making said ingredients out of food products that would normally go to waste. The first product, which launched in 2017, is State Bird Crunch, for which Render teamed up with the culinary crew at San Francisco’s State Bird Provisions to develop a product inspired by a quinoa dish on the latter’s menu. State Bird Provisions often had quinoa leftover at the end of the night, and to avoid throwing it out, would crisp it up with nuts and seeds and use it as a topping. Render took that concept and turned it into snackable bits of puffed quinoa/sunflower/sesame nuggets.

State Bird Crunch comes in three flavors (my personal favorite was almond rosemary). Peck told that ME that, as with all their products, the Crunch can be used in multiple ways: it can be crumbled into a topping for yogurt or salads, or you can just shovel it into your mouth by the handful (it’s really addictive stuff). State Bird Crunch is currently available in natural food stores across the country, as well as Whole Foods in Northern California, Fairway in NYC, and online. A 3.5 ounce bag retails for $4.99, which is roughly on par with other artisanal granola products.

Left: Bryner, right: Weyla.

Earlier this year, Render launched two upcycled beverages: Weyla and Bryner. Weyla is made from repurposed whey from California’s Pt. Reyes Creamery. The whey is combined with fruit, herbs, and botanicals, then carbonated for a lightly-sweet drink. Bryner is made of leftover pickle juice from a Sonoma pickle factory; its flavor skews savory, with ingredients like beets, horseradish, and carrots. As with the State Bird Crunch, the drinks are versatile: they can be sipped as-is or used as a mixer for a cocktail or mocktail. Weyla retails for $3.99 and Bryner for $3.79, and both are available in Fairway, through the Bay Area’s Rainbow Grocery, and online.

Based in Berkeley, CA, Render currently a team of seven people. The company does a good job capitalizing off of a few big food trends. First, they partner with well-known chefs (like those of State Bird Provisions) to help them develop their products. Secondly, they’re making products that can serve double, and sometimes even triple, duty in the kitchen. Third, and most importantly, they’re upcycling food waste products, a trend that companies like Pulp Pantry and Toast Ales are also taking advantage of. (In addition to being great PR, repurposing traditional waste ingredients is also just a budget-friendly way to source ingredients.)

It’s also worth keeping an eye on Render because of their parent company, Pilot R&D. A few months ago Pilot R&D CEO Ali Bouzari blew our minds when he spoke to Mike Wolf and suggested that robots can make food taste better by closely emulating top chefs. Render may not have any robots involved (yet), but they’re also working to democratize the dishes and flavors that come out of high-end restaurants. And that’s more exciting than all the cheese samples put together.

Ali Bouzari is speaking at Articulate, our food robotics and automation summit in San Francisco on April 16th! Check out the full lineup here and get your tickets while the getting’s good. 

Presto Eats May Be the Most On-Trend Meal Kit Company Yet. But Will It Succeed?

Whenever I get word about a new meal kit company, it’s hard not to be immediately skeptical.

It’s no secret that meal kits are struggling: Chef’d surprised everyone when it shut down abruptly earlier this year. Boston hyper-local meal kit Just Add Cooking ceased operations this fall. And Blue Apron’s stock continues to underwhelm. And with complicated supply chain logistics and the challenge of customer loyalty, and its no wonder why. To fight back, meal kit companies are turning towards new sales channels (i.e. drug stores), targeting specific audiences (i.e. kids) and are experimenting with customizeable and frozen ingredients.

But one Canadian company seems undeterred by the bleak, overcrowded meal kit landscape. Based in Vancouver and Calgary, soon-to-launch Presto Eats makes meal kits that can be cooked in a pressure cooker or slow cooker.

“I started Presto Eats because I fell in love with the new wave of kitchen appliances,” CEO Connie Chong told me in a phone conversation. She found that she could get a flavorful meal out of her pressure cooker in 30 minutes, but it still took her over an hour to shop for and prep ingredients. So she decided to create a meal kit specifically targeted at the Instant Pot crowd: millennials and busy professionals who like to cook at home and aren’t afraid of new kitchen technology.

Earlier this year Campbell’s tried a slow cooker meal partnership with Chef’d. The meal kit company shuttered only four months later so it’s hard to get a sense of how successful the partnership was. But it also only offered slow cooker meals, which took 6-ish hours; it didn’t capitalize on the wild popularity of the quick-cooking Instant Pot.

Presto Eats is smart to take advantage of the pressure cooker’s cult-like status. While many meal kit companies advertise ready-to-eat meals in 30 minutes, you still usually have to actually do the whole cooking thing. Presto Eats takes the same amount of time but it’s all hands-off. “The convenience factor is huge,” said Chong. Plus it’s all done in one (Instant)pot, which means fewer dishes.

Since Presto Eats’ meals are destined for a pressure cooker, they can be sold frozen. Which means that consumers can buy them in bulk and cook them on their own time. Frozen meal kits make a lot of sense, from both a business and consumer perspective, and Presto Eats is one of several companies taking advantage of the frozen food renaissance. It could also mean more packaging waste (ice, cold packs, etc.), which is something Presto Eats should be conscious of.

While it’s a smart move to capitalize off of Instant Pot’s widespread and loyal fan base, there are a few potential drawbacks to Presto Eats’ offering. Firstly, some people get meal kits because they actually like cooking — just not the minutiae of, say, shopping for, peeling and grating a ginger root. To them, meal kits are a way to experiment with new meals that they might not otherwise be bold enough to try and cook. Dumping a bunch of ingredients into an Instant Pot and pressing a button means there’s significantly lower chance of failure, but there’s also not much of a cooking “experience.” And at $10 per serving, some people may want to shell out a few bucks more and order in delivery.

Secondly, the fact that all of Presto Eats’ meals are cooked in a pressure cooker limits their variety. Chong listed menu choices like salmon risotto with vegetables, lentil bolognese pasta, and Thai curry, all of which sound delicious but reside in the same sort of warm, soupy comfort meal category. You can’t make seared steak or crunch roasted cauliflower in an Instant Pot, after all.

Presto Eats is cashing in on yet another dining trend: local food. It will partner with local farmers and suppliers to source ingredients for their meal kits. Which may attract eco-conscious consumers, but also means they will no doubt have to pay more to stock their kits. In an industry where margins are razor-thin, this is a risk. Just Add Cooking also sourced local ingredients for their meal kits, and ended up folding because they couldn’t make the economics work. Chong told me that they will create rotating menus featuring farmers’ surplus food, which could help keep costs down — but it’s still probably more expensive than buying from a mega produce supplier.

As of now, Presto Eats has a team of three and is bootstrapped. They will partner with food delivery companies to get their meal kits to consumers, and Chong said that down the road they hope to partner with grocery chains to get on retail shelves. They plan to launch their meal kits at the end of January in Calgary, and soon after that in Vancouver.

There they’ll have to duke it out with several local competitors. Earlier this week Chris wrote about Fresh Prep, a Vancouver, Canada-based direct-to-consumer meal kit company which raised $3.3 million. And in October Hello Fresh, the biggest meal kit company in the U.S., acquired meal kit company Chefs Plate, which also has a fulfillment center in Vancouver.

By combining three consumer dining trends — frozen food, Instant Pot, and local ingredients — Presto Eats has developed a very appealing product. The question is whether those value-adds will help it attract enough customers to carve out a spot in the crowded meal kit space. I’m optimistic that they have a shot, mostly because of how much people love their Instant Pots. But first, they’ll have to nail down a supply chain and scale up: two things that plague even the biggest meal kit companies.

Plentiful is a Free, SMS-Based Reservation System for Food Pantry Visitors

This time of year most of us, at least in the U.S., are focused on seeing friends and family, giving thanks, and eating as much turkey, pie, and mashed potatoes as humanly possible. But for millions of Americans, getting access to food is a struggle which can entail long wait times at food pantries and an unpredictable selection.

Plentiful, a project within the New York City Food Assistance Collaborative, is working to make the process of visiting a food pantry a little easier for everyone involved. Funded by the Helmsley Charitable Trust, the free software tool lets New Yorkers search local food pantries and make a reservation, so they can get served quickly without excessive time spent in line.

A simple feature, to be sure — but apparently the results have been dramatic. According to Bryan Moran, technical lead for Plentiful, the tool reduces the average wait time from an hour and a half to just a few minutes. Users can also easily look up nearby food pantries and get accurate, up-to-date operating hours, and give feedback on a particular pantry’s selection. On the flip side, pantries can use Plentiful’s service to see upcoming reservations and plan ahead to make sure they have enough food for the day.

Plentiful is available through an Android-based app with maps, but the software works with any phone that can text message. Users just have to text the word “FOOD” to PANTRY, answer a few basic questions, and they’ll be able to book a reservation to visit a food pantry in their area.

Not an English speaker? No problem — Plentiful works in nine languages. If a client begins answering Plentiful’s text questions in, say, Bengali, the software will recognize the change and translate all future communication into that language.

Plentiful also functions as a data collection tool, tracking which zip codes food pantry users are coming from, where they’re going to, and how frequently they visit each pantry. “This is the first time we have unduplicated results across cities about people who are using food pantries,” said Moran, “It’s much better than a paper sign-in sheet,” he added, which is how food pantries have historically tracked their users.

Since its launch with three pantries in 2016, Plentiful has grown to work with 200 locations in the New York City area. Moran told me that, in any given month, they see roughly 40,000 – 50,000 users on the app. As of now, Plentiful is only available in NYC, but their team is working to expand to more locations soon.

Eventually, Moran hopes that Plentiful can help tackle food waste, as well. He told me that they see an opportunity to integrate Plentiful data into the food procurement side of the pantry system, so they can optimize for less food waste. They’re even looking into creating a pathway to help people with excess food share meals.

At the Spoon, we’re always on the lookout for smart, simple solutions to solve big problems in the food system. It’s time to give thanks that Plentiful seems to be doing just that.

Silo Eclipses $1.4 Million On Way To Kickstarter Smart Kitchen Top Three

The “smart kitchen” category on Kickstarter has a new member of the top three.

Silo, the smart vacuum seal storage solution that debuted a little over a month ago at the Smart Kitchen Summit, just completed its successful Kickstarter campaign this week with over $1.4 million in backer pledges. This haul puts the product just behind PicoBrew and Anova as the crowdfunding site’s top smart kitchen campaigns.

Of course, it should be noted that Kickstarter doesn’t technically have a smart kitchen category, but that doesn’t keep us from segmenting campaigns that way. The reason to do so is the site’s food category – with everything from sous vide circulators to crickets – is massive, and so for our purposes it’s helpful to separate the more technology-forward offerings from the campaigns featuring products like barbecue sauce and bacon jerky (not that those aren’t delicious).

Silo’s campaign puts the company just behind onetime belt holder Anova and current smart kitchen champ PicoBrew C. Both PicoBrew ($1.9 million) and Anova ($1.8 million) not only top our “smart kitchen” category, but they also lead the actual overall food category for Kickstarter.

I personally backed Silo’s campaign because, like so many, I struggle with food waste and found my old school plastic containers aren’t cutting it.  I also like the idea of a vacuum sealer that could extend the life of my food, especially if I can track that food in some way through an app.

The company is one of a new crop of startups focused on food preservation. Earlier this year Ovie also succeeded with a Kickstarter for its food tracking solution, while companies like Karma and Goodr are looking to push tech to tackle food waste further up the food chain.

Newsletter: Feeling Good About the Fight Against Food Waste

Happy Friday! Chris here,

When you wake up every morning and scroll through the headlines, it’s easy to feel like we are in the darkest timeline. But then, there are weeks like this one, when bright spots appear and, for a little while, anyway, you think things just might be okay.

One thing to feel particularly hopeful about this Friday is the fight against food waste. The Guardian reports that Americans alone are wasting 150,000 tons of food a day. That’s dumb, especially when 40 million people in the U.S. are food insecure. But there are a host of startups from around the world stepping up to fight this big, dumb, problem from a number of different angles — and getting funding from the venture community.

This week, U.K.-based Tenzo and French startup Phenix raised $1.8 million and €15 Million (~$17M USD) respectively to take on food waste. Tenzo uses an AI platform to help restaurants analyze data across their operation to optimize things like food and labor spending. Phenix uses a combination of on-site training and software to divert unsold food from landfills and into charities, animal feed and recycling centers.

Diverting food from landfills is almost an industry unto itself with other players like Goodr, Copia and Spoiler Alert working to get surplus food into the hands of people who can use it.

And food-fighting innovation is happening up and down the food stack. Taranis uses aerial imagery and computer vision to keep crops healthy. Companies like AgShift use machine learning to analyze food in the supply chain so transactions are fairly priced, and food can be routed to the optimal locations based on their ripeness.

You also see completely new ideas for food waste prevention from companies like Apeel, which uses a special plant-based coating on fruits to make them last longer. In stores, Wasteless uses dynamic pricing to reduce prices on food as they near their expiration date, and Karma teamed up with Electrolux this week to install smart fridges in grocery stores that let consumers purchase totally fine food that would otherwise be thrown out. And in our homes, technologies like Silo promise to improve the way we store food.

I could go on, but this newsletter is already at 313 words, and I need to wrap it up.

The point is: the food tech community (darkest timeline callback!) is coming together like never before, and can hopefully help make food waste a problem of the past.

But the good news doesn’t end there! There were some other cool food tech news bites from this week. One I’m particularly excited about is that it looks like Impossible Foods will be selling their plant-based burgers at retail next year! Details were slim — just an emoji based hint dropped on social media, but still! The more plant-based burger options at retail, the better!

Truly personalized food choices got a little bit closer to being commonplace this week, thanks to a couple SKS alumni. Kraft Heinz purchased wellio for an undisclosed sum. The wellio team was building an AI platform to power recipe discovery and commerce, and the acquisition will help jumpstart Kraft Heinz’s newly announced digital hub in San Francisco. Elsewhere, Analytical Flavor Systems raised $4 million to help develop its AI-powered, flavor recommending platform: Gastrograph.

If you are in the Los Angeles area, you won’t want to miss our upcoming Spoon/MiLA foodtech meetup on November 27th. We have an amazing lineup that includes the CEOs of Ordermark, Kitchen United, Pathspot, Somabar and DishDivvy. Register today — it’s free!

Finally, if you have a cool foodtech product and are going to be at CES (and you should be), you won’t want to miss the only future of food and cooking event at the world’s biggest tech show! FoodTech Live is on January 8th. You can find out more about how to participate in FoodTech Live here.

Alright, the other bit of good news is that we are at the end of this week’s newsletter and the end of the week. Go out and enjoy the weekend.

Be kind.
-Chris

Phenix Raises €15 Million to Fight Food Waste

Of all the problems plaguing our world right now, there’s one that we can and do seem to be getting a handle on: Food Waste. Yes, we are nowhere near conquering the problem (Americans waste 150,000 tons of food each day), but there are so many energetic startups tackling the issue that you can’t help but feel hopeful.

Adding to the global ranks of those fighting food waste is Phenix, a French startup that just raised €15 million ($17 million USD). EU Startups reports the money came from ETF Partners, Bpifrance, Sofiouest and Arkéa.

Phenix diverts unsold food headed for a landfill to alternative places/uses such as charities, animal feed or recycling. According to its website, Phenix uses a combination of staff training to implement anti-waste best practices, as well as a web platform to identify available recipients for various food items.

Finding a place for food before it becomes waste is a hot area, which makes sense as you aren’t trying to build a new technology from the ground up or change consumer behavior. Instead, Phenix, and companies like Goodr, Copia and Spoiler Alert are making existing supply chains more open and efficient to get food where it’s needed most.

The Phenix funding tops off a pretty good week in the fight against waste. Earlier this week, Tenzo raised $1.8 million for its AI platform that helps reduce restaurant waste, and in Sweden, Karma teamed up with Electrolux to install special smart fridges that sell food that would otherwise be tossed out.

We still have a long way to go, but it all adds up to give us a bit of hope. Which counts for a lot these days.

Electrolux and Karma Team up for Smart Grocery Fridge to Reduce Food Waste

Electrolux announced today that is has partnered with startup (and fellow Swedes) Karma to create a new smart refrigerator that helps grocery stores fight food waste.

As my colleague Catherine Lamb wrote this past summer, “Karma is a mobile app that helps retailers sell excess food to consumers at super-reduced prices. The only rules are that the food can’t be past its legal sell-by date and that retailers must list it for at least 50 percent less than its original price.”

Electrolux is also an investor in Karma, and as part of that investment, the two companies agreed to partner up to find ways to fight food waste. One of those ways is this new smart refrigerator, which launched its beta today at the ICA Kvantum Liljeholmen grocery store in Stockholm, Sweden.

The fridge acts as a locker/waystation where unsold food that would otherwise be thrown away is held. Karma users can purchase that food through the Karma app, then pick it up from the new smart fridge in the store. The user unlocks the fridge by displaying a QR code and shows the product at checkout to complete the transaction.

While we haven’t used it, this actually seems like a really smart marriage of hardware and software to fight the food waste problem. It gives Karma shoppers a more streamlined user experience when purchasing food. It gives Karma some in-store advertising. And it provides stores an elegant means of keeping food that would otherwise be thrown out while weaving that experience into broader shopping trips.

Karma says their app has been downloaded 400,000 times (though didn’t mention usage). The startup works with 1,500 food-sellers (grocery stores, cafés, bakeries, etc.) and is also expanding outside of Sweden into the U.K. Electrolux already cranks out refrigerators, so if this new solution catches on with consumers, it’s not hard to see these fridges popping up in more stores and chains across Sweden and Europe.

And while it’s weird to put something as noble as fighting food waste in competitive terms, this appliance partnership with a big brand like Electrolux could give Karma an edge over rival food waste company Too Good To Go, which currently has a much bigger reach across Europe.

As noted, this is the first partnership between Electrolux and Karma. Now we’ll see if they expand the relationship into other appliances and perhaps even shoppable recipes.

Food Tech News: Plant-Based Moves, Ugly Produce, and UberEats (Almost) Everywhere

Happy cozy autumnal weekend, all! I hope your Halloween costumes are ready, candy bars ordered and pumpkins carved.

Once all that’s done, take a well-earned break and catch up on our latest food tech news roundup. This week we’ve got stories about investments and trends in plant-based food (and drink), ugly produce going bi-coastal, and UberEats going, well, pretty much everywhere. Enjoy!

UberEats to cover 70 percent of U.S. by end of 2018
The rideshare-cum-transportation-of-all-stripes company with the fastest-growing food delivery service announced this week that they have ambitious plans to have UberEats available in 70 percent of the U.S. by the end of this year (h/t CNBC). As of now, UberEats covers 50 percent of America, which means they’ve got some serious work to do in the next couple months.

 

Photo: Kite Hill.

Plant-based company Kite Hill raises $40 million
Kite Hill, a company which makes vegan, nut milk cheeses, yogurt, and ravioli, completed a $40 million capital round this week. The round was led by 301 INC, the venture capital arm of General Mills, with participation from CAVU Venture Partners. In 2016, Kite Hill’s owner Lyrical Foods closed a previous funding round led by 301 INC for $18 million.

 

Photo: Quaker.

Quaker unveils their own line of oat milk
Quaker Oats announced plans to launch their own line of dairy-free oat milk in January of 2019. The 48-ounce bottles of “milk” will come in three flavors — Original, Unsweetened Original and Vanilla — and will retail for $4.29 in most stores. There’s been a 425 percent increase in oat milk sales since 2017, so this is a smart play by Quaker (and its parent company, PepsiCo) to try to carve out a piece of the market before Swedish competitor Oatly claims it all for themselves. 

Kevin Durant invests in Imperfect Produce
This week NBA all-star Kevin Durant made a “major investment” in Imperfect Produce, the company which delivers aesthetically ugly fruits and vegetables to your door, through his investment operation Thirty Five Ventures. San Francisco-based Imperfect Produce has plans to expand into Washington, D.C. in 2019, which will be their first city on the East Coast.

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