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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Forager

Forager Raises $4M for Local Food Procurement Platform

Forager, a digital platform that grocers and food retailers can use to easily source local food, announced this week that it has raised $4 million. This funding round was led by Duncan Saville of ICM Limited and Coastal Enterprises Inc., with participation from other private investors.

For a food retailer, connecting with hundreds of local farmers, fishers, ranchers, and artisanal producers can be an arduous process. This is where Forager comes in handy; rather than a grocer having to deal with each local producer individually, Forager’s platform lists available local producers and their products in one place. This allows local farms and such to update their inventory on-demand with a phone or computer, and buyers from grocery stores can immediately see the amount of stock available and price of each product.

Forager’s new capital will be used to expand key product features, further develop sales channels, and incorporate upgrades to their product. Towards the end of last year, the company announced that it had partnered with Roche Bros. supermarkets to be used in 20 of its locations and subsidiaries in the Boston Metro area.

Eating food that has traveled shorter distances typically tastes better, helps support a farmer in your community, and is more resilient to supply change disruptions. With all of these benefits, it makes sense that the demand for local food has spiked has spiked, and why more companies in the food tech space are catering to this. Cropswap launched at the start of the pandemic in 2020, with its app connecting consumers to local farmers in their area. Grubmarket, a virtual farmer’s market, raised $60 million in October of last year. Chipotle launched a virtual farmers market last summer to give its customers the opportunity to source food from its ingredients suppliers.

As Forager continues to expand, hopefully local food will become more of the norm in standard grocery stores. To date, Forager has sourced over 200,000 local products through its platform, and currently operates in 12 states with more than 40 grocers and retailers.

Brightseed’s First Major Phytonutrient Discovery Finds Black Pepper May Help with Fatty Liver

Brightseed, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover previously hidden phytonutrients in plants, today announced preclinical data from its first major discovery targeting liver and metabolic health.

The discovery was made with Forager, Brightseed’s AI platform that looks at plants on a molecular level to identify novel phytonutrient compounds (for example, antioxidants in blueberries). Once found, Forager then catalogs these compounds and uses that information to predict the health benefits of those compounds.

With today’s announcement, Brightseed’s Forager has identified phytonutrients that can help with fat accumulation in the pancreas and liver, a condition linked to obesity. Brightseed explained its findings in a press release, writing:

Using a computational approach with data from Brightseed’s plant compound library, Forager identified two natural compounds with promising bioactive function, N-trans caffeoyltyramine (NTC) and N-trans-feruloyltyramine (NTF). Researchers determined that these compounds acted through a novel biological mechanism governing the accumulation and clearance of liver fat. The preclinical data was presented in the fall of 2020 as a poster session at The Liver Meeting® Digital Experience hosted by American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, and published as abstract #1679 in Hepatology: Vol 72, No S1. 

The release continued:

IIn preclinical studies, NTC and NTF acted as potent HNF4a activators, promoting fat clearance from the steatotic livers of mice fed a high fat diet, by inducing lipophagy.  HNF4a is a central metabolic regulator that is impaired by elevated levels of fat in the bloodstream resulting from chronic overeating. Administered in proper doses, NTC and NTF restored proper function of this central metabolic regulator, including maintaining healthy lipid and sugar levels in the bloodstream to normalize organ function. Their activities were confirmed using a cell-based human insulin promoter activation assay. Forager found NTC and NTF in over 80 common edible plant sources. 

One of those plant sources, Brightseed Co-Founder and CEO, Jim Flatt told me by phone this week, is black pepper. Now, before you run out and grab your pepper grinder, there is still a lot of work that remains before the results of this discovery bear out.

First, the compounds still need to go through clinical trials to validate Brightseed’s initial findings. This includes not only confirming any health benefits, but also determining the doses and best methods for administering the compounds. Then the best plant source for those compounds needs to be determined as well as the best method for compound extraction. Flatt told me that if all goes well, you can expect to see some form of supplement on the market by the end of 2022.

Even though that is a ways off, part of the reason to be excited by today’s announcement is because of how little time it took Brightseed to make this particular discovery. Through its computational processes, Flatt told me his company was able to shrink what used to take years down to months. “Fifteen to 20 percent of time that is computational saves us 80 percent of the time in the lab,” Flatt said.

Brightseed has already analyzed roughly 700,000 compounds in the plant world for health properties and says it’s on track to surpass 10 million by 2025. Doing so could help unlock a number of previously unknown treatments for a number of ailments and conditions as well as general improvement to our metabolic and immuno health.

In addition to independent research such as today’s findings, Brightseed also partners with major CPG brands to help them identify new applications for their products. For instance, Danone is using Brightseed’s technology to help find new health benefits of soy.

Brightseed’s announcement today also reinforces the bigger role AI will play in our food system. AI and machine learning is being used to do everything from turning data into cheese, to solving complex issues around protein folding.

As more discoveries using AI are made, more investment will be poured into the space, which will accelerate even more discoveries.

Forager Partners With Roche Bros. To Make Local Food More Accessible

Forager, a procurement platform for sourcing local food, announced its partnership with Massachusetts-based Roche Bros. grocery store this week. Over 20 Roche Bros. and its subsidiaries in the Boston Metro area will be implementing Forager’s platform.

Forager forms relationships with local farmers, ranchers, fishers, and artisanal producers, and then streamlines the process of getting their products into stores. Local producers can update their inventory on a phone, and buyers from grocery stores can instantly see the price and amount of these items. Through the Forager program, local food and products go straight from the farm to the grocery store, rather than to a warehouse before heading off to the grocery store.

I spoke with Forager Founder, David Stone, this week about this recent partnership and Forager’s mission. Stone said that his company prefers focusing on partnering with smaller, independent grocery stores over the big players in the grocery game like Walmart or Amazon. By connecting smaller grocery stores with more local producers, this gives smaller stores a chance to compete with larger retailers and providers by attracting consumers that are specifically looking for local produce.

The demand for local produce surged at the beginning of the pandemic, and although it is unclear if this trend is still on an upward trajectory, companies have responded to it. Besides Forager, other companies have made an effort to connect consumers to local goods. Grubmarket raised $20 million in funding earlier this month for its virtual farmer’s market platform. This summer, Chipotle also launched a virtual farmer’s market so consumers can have access to local cheese, meat, and produce from its suppliers.

The Forager platform is currently being used in about 30 grocery stores in nine different states. The company is in discussion with about 10 other grocery stores for new potential partnerships.