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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food waste

Apeel Acquires ImpactVision to Fight Food Waste With Hyperspectral Imaging

Apeel officially announced today is has acquired machine learning company ImpactVision for an undisclosed amount. The plan is to integrate ImpactVision’s hyperspectral imaging technology into Apeel’s applications systems at produce packing houses and distribution centers in North America, South America, and Europe. This is Apeel’s first major acquisition, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. To date, ImpactVision has raised $2.8 million.

Apeel’s existing application systems involve coating different types of produce with what the company calls its “shelf-life extension technology” — an edible, plant-based coating that gets applied to produce after harvest. The coatings extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables by keeping moisture trapped inside the produce and oxygen out. In doing so, the rate of decay significantly slows. 

With the ImpactVision acquisition, Apeel will be able to add further analysis of the produce to its operations. ImpactVision’s tech collects and processes hyperspectral images of each individual piece of produce. Through machine learning models, the system can identify cues in the produce around its freshness, degree of maturity, and phytonutrient content.

Based on those elements, suppliers and distributors can then decide where each piece of produce should go. Those  with a shorter ripening window can ship to retailers geographically closer to the supplier, for instance, to avoid excess food spoilage. By way of example, today’s news announcement gave the following scenario: “If a produce supplier sees that one avocado will ripen tomorrow while another will ripen in 4 days, they know that one has more time to travel and should be sent to the retailer that is further away.”

Writing in a blog post today, Apeel CEO James Rogers noted that through the acquisition, “Apeel will now be able to integrate hyperspectral imaging technology into our supply chains, enabling us to provide new insights to our customers, both upstream and downstream, ranging from ripeness prediction to nutritional characteristics, even information on how the produce was grown; the very aspects that make every individual piece of fruit unique.”  

Rogers added that Apeel has already started the process of upgrading its application systems to include hyperspectral camera capabilities. The company says it has 30 supplier integrations on three continents with plans to double that number by the end of 2021.

Food Tech News: Powdered Oat Milk, Vietnamese Coffee Pour-Over Kits

Welcome to the weekend, the peak of spring, and your favorite place to catch up on food tech news. A few stories caught our eyes this week including China’s recently passed food waste law, new high-protein sesame seeds, Copper Cow Coffee’s latest funding round, and oat milk in the form of powder.

Copper Cow Coffee secures $8.5M in Series A funding round

Copper Cow Coffee produces Vietnamese coffee pour-over kits, and this week the women-owned company raised $8.5 million in funding that will be used for expanding distribution and product innovation. The round was led by Cultivian Sandbox and Arborview Capital and saw participation from Siddhi Capital, Silverton Partners, Social Starts, Montage Ventures, CRCM, and Stormbreaker Ventures. Copper Cow Coffee sources its coffee from farms in Vietnam that apply organic agricultural and processing practices. The company’s pour-over kits include condensed milk or coconut milk creamer packets and Vietnamese coffee, with flavor varieties including vanilla latte, churro, rose, and vanilla. The pour-over kits require no special equipment because the coffee bags fit over the rim of any mug or cup (as depicted above).

Photo by Diego Morales on Unsplash

High-protein sesame seeds for plant-based alternatives

Equinom, a seed-breeding technology company, has partnered with Dipasa, a sesame seed processor and exporter, to develop a high protein sesame seed for use in plant-based protein alternatives. The new sesame seed will be bred using Equinom’s AI-backed genomic optimization algorithms and distributed globally by Dipasa. Sesame seeds do not naturally have a high protein content like soy or wheat does, but the new high-protein sesame seed will contain 65 to 70 percent protein content (a normal sesame seed has a 23 percent protein content). Boosting the protein content of a sesame seed will make it a more viable option as a base for plant-based products.

Photo from Blue Farm’s website

Blue Farm aims to make oat milk more sustainable

Berlin-based Blue Farm has created a powdered oat milk base with the intention of making the plant-based milk sector more sustainable. Transporting liquid-filled cartons across the country, or even globally, releases transportation emissions. On top of this, many plant-based milk cartons are not recyclable. Blue Farm’s oat milk powder comes in a compact, 100% recycled plastic packaging which can be recycled again. The oat milk powder is shelf-stable, and simply must be shaken with water to create liquid oat milk.

Too Good To Go Expands Its Food Waste App Nationally Across the U.S.

Not so very long ago, the United States lagged far behind Europe in terms of the widespread availability of food rescue apps. Fortunately, a heightened awareness of the world’s food waste problem has changed this and created opportunities for food rescue companies in the U.S.

Case in point: Too Good To Go’s recent expansion westward. The company, originally started in Denmark, today announced its plans to expand across the United States, following a successful program in select East Coast states. The first stop is San Francisco, with 200-plus food businesses participating, including Mission Chinese, La Boulangerie, and Indie Superette.

Via the Too Good To Go app, users can browse surplus food options from participating restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stores at the end of every day. They can then sign up for a “surprise bag” which includes surplus items from these businesses. Depending on the business from which it’s ordered, that bag could include pastries, extra sushi rolls, surplus produce, and many other items. 

Too Good to Go brought its app Stateside in 2020, starting in New York City. The company followed that move with a $31 million fundraise at the start of this year, specifically meant to enable a wider expansion around the U.S.

And while the concept of food rescue might be more commonplace Stateside compared to a couple years ago, it’s still unusual in the restaurant biz. Grocery delivery services like Misfits Market and Imperfect Foods address the grocery sector. Canada’s Flashfood app, based in Toronto, Ontario, similarly addresses surplus food in the grocery store via its U.S. partnership with Meijer. 

That leaves a wide-open opportunity for Too Good To Go when it comes to restaurants. After the San Francisco launch, the company will expand to Seattle on May 12 and Portland on May 19. The plan is to be in “many of the largest U.S. cities” by the end of this year.  

That expansion comes at a time when the conversation around food waste has gotten much louder. In the U.S., 35 percent of all food went to waste in 2019, the most recent year for data. ReFED points out that “a massive acceleration” is needed in order to address this problem and meet  national and international goals to reduce food waste by 50 percent by the year 2030. That effort has to come from many different groups — government and regulatory bodies, food companies, restaurants, and tech companies alike.

Interested to learn who is innovating in that space to better help us reach that goal? Join The Spoon and ReFed on June 16 for a half-day virtual event discussing the businesses, innovators, and capital partners behind the country’s fight against food waste. Reserve a ticket today.

Food Tech Show Live: Beyond Launches 3.0

It’s another weekly news round up with the Spoon team and this week’s special guest, Ron Shigeta.

The stories/topics we discuss this week include:

As always, you can find to the Food Tech Show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also just click play below or download the episode direct to your device.

Researchers Develop Lactic Acid Bacterium to Extend Shelf Life of Food

Researchers at the National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark have developed a new biological method of extending the shelf life of food and fighting food waste. According to a blog post pubished this week on the university’s website, scientists have created a natural lactic acid bacterium that secretes nisin, an antimicrobial peptide, when grown on dairy waste (hat tip: Technology Networks).

This finding has a couple of different applications. First, as the university post writes:

Nisin is approved for use in a number of foods, where it can prevent the growth of certain spoilage microorganisms as well as microorganisms that make consumers sick. It can for instance inhibit spore germination in canned soups and prevent late blowing in cheeses—without affecting its flavour.

In addition to extending the life of foods, Nisin can help utilize existing inefficiencies in dairy production. Large amounts of whey are leftover during the cheesemaking process, and as the researchers point out, this leftover whey can now be used to create nisin.

For a more deep technical dive into this nisin research, you can check out this scientific article in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

This research could add to a growing number of commercially available products using biochemical approaches to extending the shelf life of food. Currently, Apeel uses a special plant-based coating to cover and preserve fresh food like avocados. Hazel Technologies, which raised $70 million this month, makes a sachet inserted with perishable food shipments that emits 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP) gas to inhibit ethylene, which plants produce they age.

Food waste is a big problem around the world. In the U.S. alone, it’s estimated that 54 million tons of food goes to waste every year. Thankfully startups and researchers are making progress to combat this issue. To that end, The Spoon has partnered with ReFED, a US-based non-profit organization dedicated to ending the food waste crisis, to hold a one day virtual summit highlighting some of the solutions coming to market. The Food Waste Insights + Innovation Forum is a free-to-attend half-day virtual event on June 16th from 9 AM to 1 PM PT (12 PM to 4 PM ET) and will feature some of the leading companies and organizations. Get your ticket today!

Environmental Engineers Use Corn Waste to Treat and Filter Water

America is the top producer of corn in the world, and approximately 90 million acres of land here are used to grow this grain. Most of the corn in the U.S. is used for animal feed and unfortunately, a lot of the corn plant is not nutrient-dense and goes to waste. This month, engineers at the University of Riverside found a way to incorporate the waste from corn production and use it to filter and treat water.

This leftover biomass from corn production is called corn stover can be used as emergency livestock feed, left in the fields to replenish soil, or converted to biofuel. A lab at UC Riverside focuses on upcycling waste products like biomass back into the economy and decided to focus on additional applications for corn stover. The UC Riverside lab found that corn stover could be turned into activated carob, also known as activated charcoal, by charring it. Activated carbon is commonly used to filter and treat water because it contains millions of microscopic pores that can absorb water and filter out toxins.

The lab experimented with multiple ways of processing the corn stover into activated charcoal, and through hydrothermal carbonization, the biochar had a high surface area and large pores capable of filtering high amounts of pollutants. To test the upcycled corn stover, the lab added vanillin, a water pollutant produced by the vanilla industry, to water, and filtered it through the corn stover activated carbon. It was found that activated carbon was able to absorb 98 percent of vanillin from the water.

Upcycling food waste is all the rage right now, and last year Whole Foods predicted upcycled food to be a major trend in 2021. Some food waste is used to make new food products, while other food waste (like corn stover) is used to make commercial products. Agraloop uses sugar cane bark, pineapple leaves, and hemp stalks to create natural fibers for textile production. Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough discovered that they could turn waste oil sourced from McDonald’s fryers into a high-resolution, biodegradable 3D printing resin.

Approximately 366 million metric tons of corn is grown in the U.S. each year, and this results in a lot of leftover corn stover. UC Riverside lab’s discovery is a viable and useful option for unproductive biomass, but the lab did not say if it has plans for a commercial application of this discovery.

Join The Spoon and ReFED for the Food Waste Insights and Innovation Forum

By now, you know the stats: Each year, over one-third of our food produced is wasted.

That translates to about $285 billion (or 54 million tons) worth of food each year in the US alone. That’s more than a quarter trillion dollars worth of food, produced from or with scarce inputs like water, land and animals that are slaughtered — food that won’t end up on the plates of people who go hungry every day. Food that will be tossed aside and become trash.

It’s a big problem, but the good news is there’s a huge movement across the food system to find innovative ways to reduce the amount of food waste. One of the strongest voices at the center of this movement is ReFED, a US-based non-profit organization dedicated to ending the food waste crisis. ReFED’s efforts to create awareness through a data-driven approach to catalyze change is something we’ve covered here at The Spoon and one of the reasons we’re big fans of what they do.

All of which is to say, when we decided to do an event focused on highlighting innovation in reducing food waste, ReFED was our first choice for a partnership.

Today we’re excited to announce the event and share details with the food tech community.

The Food Waste Insights + Innovation Forum is a free-to-attend half-day virtual event on June 16th from 9 AM to 1 PM PT (12 PM to 4 PM ET) and will feature some of the leading companies and organizations. We’ll dive into their work and progress in building a less wasteful food system and hear about how they overcame barriers through leveraging innovation.

We’ll hear from leaders within companies like The Wonderful Company and Hellmann’s about innovative approaches they’ve taken to reducing food waste. We’ll talk to investors like S2G Ventures and Cultivian Sandbox about the ways in which capital can be deployed to scale impactful solutions. Finally, we’ll also hear from innovators like Spoiler Alert and Smoketown building new technologies and systems to reduce food waste.

We’ll also highlight emerging innovators chosen by ReFED and The Spoon who are creating technology-driven solutions to reduce waste across the food system, whether that’s at the farm, in the supply chain, at the restaurant or grocery store or in our own fridges.

If you have ideas you want to share about how to reduce food waste, are looking for a new partner to help supercharge your own company’s efforts in this area, or just want to learn more about this growing movement, register today for this half-day event on June 16th (it’s free!, thanks in part to our sponsors Google and FoodX Technologies).

We’ll be keeping you updated over the next several weeks as more speakers are added and the full agenda is released. In the meantime, reserve your ticket today, and get ready to help us further the conversation around how we can innovate to fight food waste.

RipeLocker Raises $5M for its Low Atmosphere Approach to Extending Food Freshness

RipeLocker, a Seattle-area startup that makes specialized containers to extend the life of fresh food after harvest, announced yesterday that it has raised a $5 million Series B round of funding. GeekWire was first to report the news, writing that the round was led by angel investors. The total amount raised by RipeLocker is now $12 million.

RipeLocker’s patented technology precisely manages the atmosphere (oxygen, pressure, CO2 and humidity) inside its containers to extend the freshness of perishables. The containers are pallet-sized, made from recyclable material and are reusable. They’re also stackable and can be used in the cold chain, with 40 RipeLockers able to fit inside an ocean or truck refrigeration container.

The company says that it has already completed several trials with berries, pomegranates, cherries, papayas, fresh hops and flowers. According to the funding announcement yesterday, RipeLocker’s containers held freshly harvested organic blueberries in “pristine condition” for eight weeks. The company also said that its RipeLockers extended the life of fresh hops by six weeks.

Approximately 1.3 billion tons of edible food around the world is wasted every year, and that number could reach 2.1 billion tons by 2030. By extending the life of fresh food, RipeLockers can help tackle this waste problem in the supply chain and also bring fresher food to places farther away from farms.

RipeLocker is among a number of new startups that are using technology to improve the way we ship perishables. Companies like Zayndu and Clean Crop Technologies run electricity inside special containers to kill off mold and bacteria and extend the life of fresh food. And TeleSense combines sensors and IoT to monitor the humidity and temperature of grains as they are stored and transported.

RipeLocker said that its containers will become commercially available this summer, and that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has started trialing its containers as a chemical-free quarantine replacement.

OneThird Raises €1.5M for Its Food-Waste-Fighting Tech

Netherlands-based food tech company OneThird announced today it has raised €1.5 million ($1.8 million USD) for its shelf-life-prediction technology that helps growers, retailers, and distributors cut down on food waste. SHIFT Invest and Oost NL participated in the round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The new funds will partly go towards further developing OneThird’s tech, which it calls a “fresh produce quality prediction platform.” The platform consists of a handheld scanner, near-infrared sensors, artificial intelligence, and data analytics used in combination to “look inside” the produce and determine its remaining shelf life.

“Our unique prediction technology allows quality inspectors throughout the food supply chain to get immediate feedback about shelf life and other quality parameters of fresh produce and take better decisions,” Marco Snikkers, founder of OneThird, said in today’s press release. 

OneThird says that its technology can work in multiple stages of the supply chain. Growers, for example, can use the platform to determine where they should ship different batches of produce. Distributors can use it to make routing decisions, while retailers can train their staff to assess the freshness of produce in the store.

The point of all this, of course, is to cut down on food waste. As underscored by the OneThird company name, a third of all the world’s food goes to waste each year, with $408 billion spent in the U.S. alone to grow, process, transport, and store food that is never consumed. The waste has a number of consequences, from environmental degradation to people going hungry to lost money for retailers, distributors, and growers.

OneThird joins a growing list of companies bringing a variety of food-waste-fighting solutions to market, from Hazel’s packaging inserts to food redistribution companies like Too Good to Go to Apeel’s edible coating.

OneThird will also use its new funds to expand retail pilots of its platform and build out its technical team by acquiring AI specialist firm Impact Analytics.

Hazel Technologies Raises $70M in Series C Funding to Fight Food Waste

Hazel Technologies announced today it has raised $70 million in Series C funding. The round was co-led by the Pontifax Global Food and Agriculture Technology Fund and Temasek. S2G Ventures, Pangea Ventures, Rhapsody Venture Partners, Asahi Kasai Ventures, Jordan Park Group, and the Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Foundation also participated. Including the Series C round, Hazel has raised $87 million to date, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Hazel is among those companies using technology to extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables and in doing so cut down on food waste. Its packaging insert, called a sachet, gets placed in bulk boxes of produce after harvest. The sachet emits 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP) gas to inhibit ethylene, which plants produce they age. Different crops have different respiration rates and production levels of ethylene, so there are different sachets for different produce types. Currently, Hazel has sachets for 14 different produce types, including avocados, mangos, plums, pears, and cantaloupe. In December of 2020, the company announced Hazel Root, designed to slow the growth of sprouts in potatoes and other root vegetables.  

The company said that in 2021, its products will be used with “over 6.3 billion pounds” of fresh produce, preventing more than 500 million pounds of food from going to the landfill. 

In 2019, 35 percent of all food in the United States went unsold or uneaten, according to the most recent numbers from nonprofit ReFed. Both national and international goals aim to cut food waste in half by 2030. To do that, waste will have to be reduced at every step of the supply chain, from the farm itself all the way down refrigerators inside the average person’s home.

Hazel’s technology currently aims to prevent loss and waste earlier in the supply chain, just after harvest. Apeel is the other notable competitor here, though it has a completely different approach to extending the lifespan of produce that involves coating individual pieces of produce with a plant-based protection.

Hazel hinted that funds from the Series C round could go towards commercializing a solution meant for further down the food supply chain, at consumer-facing levels like retail and restaurants. 

ReFed and Others Introduce a New Policy Action Plan to Fight Food Waste

Several organizations banded together this week to release the US Food Loss & Waste Policy Action Plan, which calls on the Biden administration and Congress to take more action when it comes to fighting food waste. ReFed, the World Wildlife Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC) are founding supporters of the new plan.

Between 30 and 40 percent of all food produced is lost or wasted, with $408 billion spent in the U.S. alone to grow, process, transport, and store food that is never consumed, according to an email from ReFed sent to The Spoon. Food waste is also a major contributor to climate change, with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimating its global footprint to be 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases.

“Addressing this challenge is essential to building a regenerative and resilient food system that helps to mitigate climate change, reverse nature loss, and delivery positive outcomes for both producers and consumers,” notes the new plan.

To do that, the above organizations have compiled a list of recommendations for Congress and the Biden administration that would aid in the goal of reducing food waste and loss by 50 percent by 2030 (in accordance with the UN SDG Target 12.3.1). 

The US Food Loss & Waste Policy Action plan makes five recommendations, as noted by ReFed’s email: 

  • Invest in the infrastructure to measure, rescue, recycle, and prevent organic waste from entering landfills and incinerators
  • Expand incentives to institutionalize surplus food donation and strengthen regional supply chains
  • Assert the US Government’s leadership on FLW globally and domestically
  • Educate and activate consumers via private and public food waste behavior change campaigns
  • Require a national date labeling standard

The plan, which you can download and read in full here, outlines each of these recommendations and delves into specifics as to what action steps might be taken by Congress and the Administration. 

ReFed earlier this year unveiled its new Insights Engine, an online hub for both data and insights around the global food waste problem. It also includes an extensive database of companies innovating up and down the food supply chain to combat the country’s food waste issues.

Meanwhile, other notable supporters of the new Action Plan include Kroger, Unilever, Hellmann’s, and many other food companies.

Two Good and Full Harvest Team Up With Chef Marcus Samuelsson to Fight Food Waste in Restaurants

Two Good Yogurt today announced a new food waste initiative the company has launched in partnership with Chef Marcus Samuelsson and food rescue company Full Harvest. The partnership aims to get more restaurants to cook with rescued produce in their kitchens, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Chef Marcus Samuelsson will lead the campaign by using produce rescued by Full Harvest at his NYC restaurant Red Rooster Harlem during Earth Week (April 19–24). The campaign will also support Two Good’s One Cup, Less Hunger initiative, which donates a portion of the proceeds from its yogurt product to City Harvest food banks.

Other restaurants are invited to email wastelessfeedmore@twogoodyogurt.com to get involved with Samuelsson’s Earth Week campaign. 

“We all know that food is [a] number one reason for climate change,” Samuelsson told me over the phone recently, adding that chefs’ carbon footprints are impacted by which companies they choose to supply their ingredients and what happens to leftovers and unused parts of the food. 

Roughly 1.3 billion tons of edible food goes to waste each year, and some of this is surplus produce or produce considered too “cosmetically unfit” for sale. There are many companies nowadays that rescue these unwanted food items to keep them out of landfills, including Imperfect Foods and Misfits Market. Full Harvest, however, is slightly different in that it sells directly to food businesses, rather than consumers. 

The company first partnered with Two Good in December 2020 to make flavored yogurt using rescued fruits, including lemons. 

Along with Samuelsson, these companies are hoping that the new initiative will familiarize more chefs with the concept of rescued food items and get more of them using the method, educating consumers in the process.

Of food waste in general, Samuelsson noted that fighting it has to be “as easy and accessible for consumers as possible.”