Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Funding

Upcycled Flour Co. Planetarians Closes $750K Seed Round, Partners with Barilla’s BLU1877

This week Planetarians, the San Mateo-based upcycled ingredient startup, announced that it had closed a $750,000 seed round with participation from Barilla’s venture/innovation arm BLU1877, Techstars, The Yield Lab, SOSV, and a group of angel investors.

Planetarians takes defatted sunflower seeds — the hulls and fiber left behind after the seeds have been pressed for oil — and upcycles them into high-protein, high-fiber flour.

In a phone interview, Planetarians CEO and co-founder Aleh Manchuliantsau told me that for the past few months they’ve been doing tests in the Barilla facility, using their upcycled flour to make crackers, breads, biscuits, tortillas, and, of course, pasta.

The various products Planetarians has developed with Blu1877.

“With Barilla, we completed scalability tests in an industrial setting,” Manchuliantsau told me. “Next, we expect to do commercial manufacturing.” The company also just won the Most Innovative Startup Pre-Series A award at the Agfunder Agrifood Tech Innovation Awards, which it announced yesterday.

Planetarians will use its new funding to continue developing and trialing new products. They still have their upcycled chip snacks, which they developed with Techstars last year, and have been working with Italian meat-focused company Amadori to develop flexitarian meatballs cut with their defatted sunflower flour.

Upcycling —that is, turning food byproducts into new edible goods — is becoming quite the CPG food trend as of late. Regrained repurposes spent beer grain as energy bars, Renewal Mill (who just raised $2.5 million) turns leftover soy from tofu into baking flour. Even big players like Tyson Foods have gotten into the food waste game with their Yappah! crisps made of chicken breast trimmings. Clearly by investing in Planetarians, Barilla hopes to get their own piece of the upcycled pie.

Last year Manchuliantsau told me that it can be difficult to get consumers comfortable with eating upcycled food waste products, especially ones typically designated for livestock feed. But having a powerful food corporation like Barilla behind them will help Planetarians push their food to the masses  — especially if it’s in the form of pasta.

FoodBoss, the Price/Time Comparison Tool for Food Delivery, Raises $2M

This week FoodBoss, the food delivery search engine formerly known as Bootler, announced that it had raised over $2 million in funding. The venture round was led by Cleveland Avenue, a food-focused VC firm founded by the former CEO of McDonald’s, Don Thompson.

Founded in 2016, the Chicago-based startup is basically an aggregator of food delivery services. Users can go to the FoodBoss website or its mobile app and search through various delivery options, like Uber Eats and Caviar, to determine which will deliver food fastest and with the smallest delivery fee. As ChicagoInno points out, this makes the company essentially Kayak for food delivery.

Hungry deal-seekers can either enter their address or search by restaurant name or cuisine (e.g. “McDonald’s” or “Indian food”) and FoodBoss will aggregate all available information on price and live estimated wait time from delivery services to find the “best” deal. It doesn’t just list third-party delivery services (Caviar, etc.), but also restaurants that have their own internal ordering and delivery.

Screenshot from FoodBoss website.

FoodBoss currently serves roughly 50 cities and aggregates info from over 50,000 restaurants. According to a company blog post, FoodBoss will use the new funds to expand to more cities.

With so many third-party food delivery services out there, a company like FoodBoss makes a lot of sense. People don’t have any loyalty to a particular food delivery company (yet), like they might to a certain local restaurant or fast-food chain (Chipotle 4 lyfe).

However, there are a couple of risks and downsides with FoodBoss’ business model. First of all, the company currently only has partnerships with four food delivery services: UberEats, Postmates, Caviar, and Delivery.com. That leaves out significant players like DoorDash, Grubhub, and smaller local food delivery services (e.g. Waitr), meaning that users aren’t getting a complete picture of every possible option before they order.

FoodBoss is also reliant on its delivery service partners for its data. So while the company might be able to aggregate freely from participating third-party delivery sites now, if UberEats doesn’t like their rankings and cuts them off down the road, FoodBoss could lose their relevance fast.

But for now, FoodBoss makes it easier to choose which service will save you a few precious dollars and minutes. Which, admittedly, is a super first-world thing to think about. But as food delivery becomes more and more omnipresent, those dollars and minutes could add up.

Bright Cellars Raises $8.5M Series A for Personalized Wine Delivery Service

Unless you’re a sommelier, figuring out which wine to buy at the grocery store (red? white? rose? sparkling? orange?) can be more of a random choice than anything else.

Milwaukee-based startup Bright Cellars is trying to make the whole “figuring-out-which-wine-to-buy” thing a little easier with its B2C wine subscription service which matches consumers with bottles curated to their taste. Yesterday, the company announced that it had raised an $8.5 million Series A round led by Revolution Ventures (hat tip to Techcrunch). This brings Bright Cellar’s total funding to $13.5 million.

To determine which wines are the best match for your palate, Bright Cellars first has users take a quiz, asking about things like your chocolate preference and your favorite boozy drink (besides wine, of course). The algorithm then matches you with four bottles that are the best fit for your taste and delivers them to your door in a monthly subscription. Consumers can also give ratings and feedback on their wines, which Bright Cellar uses to tweak their future selections.

All of that feedback equates to a bunch of juicy data. Each time someone rates their Bright Cellars wines, the company is getting a coveted peek into consumers’ wine-drinking preferences. So it’s not exactly surprising that TechCrunch reported that in addition to sending you curated wine bundles, Bright Cellars is also using consumer data to create its own white label wines with undisclosed partners. Since they know so much about what their customers buy, they can create only varietals they know will sell — and then presumably they can continue to collect data on their wines through Bright Cellar reviews.

Even with its basic offering, Bright Cellars is capitalizing hardcore on two big consumer trends: personalization and convenience.

It’s no secret that people are thirsty to have every. last. thing. shipped to their doorstep — wine included. To feed the demand, everyone from small retailers to grocery giants like Kroger are doing just that. British company Garçon Wines has even figured out how to make flat-pack wines that are so thin they can slide right through your mail slot, so you don’t have to worry about package theft.

On the personalization side, several companies are working to find the perfect bottle(s) of vino to fit your tastes. Last year online wine search engine Wine-Searcher launched a chat bot to help lead consumers to their ideal bottle. Denmark-based Vivino lets users take a photo of a wine label and gives them in-depth details, consumer ratings, and an option for online purchase. Just last month, B2B wine recommendation service Wine Ring partnered with Signature Kitchen Suite to develop a wine fridge that tracks your bottles and uses data to make suggestions based on consumers’ in-app wine profiles and their collections.

Bright Cellar’s service costs $80 for monthly four-bottle delivery. For someone like me who rarely buys wine over $12 (sorry), this is a little costly. True oenophiles might also shy away from the service, opting for something like Vinsent, which gives people early access to exclusive wines. But for those who want some guidance and don’t mind paying for it — and who really value convenience — Bright Cellars might be worth a shot.

DoorDash Raises $400 Million, Now Valued at $7.1B

DoorDash announced yesterday that it has raised $400 million in Series F funding, giving the delivery startup a $7.1 billion valuation. Temasek Holdings and Dragoneer Investment Group co-led the round, which brings the total amount raised by DoorDash to $1.4 billion.

The actual dollar amount raised was less than the $500 million that The Wall Street Journal had reported last week. But what’s $100 million among food delivery startups, which have been raking in the investments. Instacart has raised $1.9 billion while Postmates raised $678 million and has filed to go public.

My colleague, Jenn Marston, provided some context about DoorDash’s fundraise last week, when reports first surfaced, writing:

I expect 2019 to be a year of one company trying to unseat another repeatedly over the next several months as they expand into new territories and test out new technologies that might give them more dominance in the market. (Cue obligatory Game of Thrones metaphor.)

DoorDash is certainly on board with adopting new technologies, and the new funding could very well help the company further develop things like its self-driving car initiative or even something like drone deployment (something Uber has reportedly been dabbling in.) DoorDash last year posted a job listing for someone to help build “10x ideas from the ground up e.g. robotics, drones, next-gen dispatch, ML-chatbots, strategic partnerships, etc.” So drones likely are a part of the future, for DoorDash and probably every other delivery service mentioned in this post.

DoorDash recently became the first third-party delivery service to operate in all 50 states, and the company says its services are now available in 3,300 cities.

Tillable, the Zillow for Farmland, Raises $8.25M Series A

Tillable, a farmland rental management company, raised an $8.25 million Series A funding round led by First Round Capital and The Production Board (hat tip to Axios).

The Chicago-based startup has an online marketplace which helps landowners and farmers settle on fair land rental prices. Through Tillable, farmers can input bids on pieces of land, and landowners can manage said bids, vet potential renters, and get insight into how their land is being used post-rental (yields, fertilizer usage, etc). The Tillable website also takes care of administrative rental tasks, like leases and monthly payments.

Basically, it’s Zillow for cropland.

It seems clear what landowners get out of a tool like Tillable — more visibility, efficient rental management, access to more land bids — but I was initially skeptical about why farmers would like the system. After all, more farmers knowing about a chunk of cropland = more bids = higher rental prices.

However, unlike eBay, the highest bid doesn’t always win on Tillable. When farmers apply for a piece of land they also submit information on their farming practices and experience. So if a landowner, say, doesn’t want pesticides used on its land, it might favor an organic farmer. Owners can also make residency rules, like designating their land “no till.” (As far as I can tell, Tillable doesn’t provide a monitoring service, so landowners have to assume that farmers are being honest with their reported yields and practices.)

Tillable could also help open up the agricultural industry and make it accessible for new farmers. According to the FAO, the average age of farmers in the U.S. is 60 years old. If we want to keep, you know, having food, we need a new generation to take over. However, there are surprisingly few resources for incoming farmers, especially those who don’t have parents or grandparents’ farms to take over.

Tillable plans to use its new funding to expand sales, marketing, and engineering operations to attract more landowners and farmers before the 2020 growing season.

Agriculture is getting a major tech makeover, with players developing everything from autonomous tractors to “bee drones” — and now, farmland rental marketplaces — to help make the notoriously difficult profession a little bit easier.

JUST Might Be Seeking $200M — Here’s What They Should Do With It

Yesterday Bloomberg reported that JUST, the company known for its plant-based cookie dough, mayo, and eggless scramble, is raising $200 million. According to Crunchbase, JUST has raised $220 million so far.

JUST and CLSA (the overseas arm of Chinese investment bank Citic Securities Co. rumored to be involved) declined to comment, but given how hot plant-based (and cell-based) foods are right now, here are a few ways the company should consider spending the investment:

What Just’s lab-grown burger will look like.

Cell-based meat

JUST was supposed to bring cell-based meat to market by the end of 2018. Suffice it to say, that didn’t happen. The production technology seemed to be in place and the taste tests went well. What kept JUST from its goal was regulatory hurdles. Last November the USDA and FDA decided they would jointly regulate cell-based meat, which was a step towards establishing a clear regulatory process for bringing cultured meat to market. However, there are still a lot of question marks, including labeling. Until those are resolved, JUST can’t move forward.

The JUST website states the company will now bring cell-based meat to market by the end of 2019 (again, pending regulatory considerations), which gives it another 10 months to get its cell-based meat approved by the FDA/USDA and figure out how it will be labeled. To facilitate the process, JUST is currently hiring a Director of Regulatory Affairs, which is a step in the right direction. But if the startup wants to be the first to bring cell-based meat to market — or to have a prayer of bringing it to market, period —  it would be wise to use the new round of funding to help hire more folks to navigate the sticky regulatory issues surrounding cultured meat.

(Interestingly, the Director of Regulatory Affairs job posting calls for someone to “serve as subject matter expert for domestic and international regulations. Which makes sense since JUST recently told CBS San Francisco that the company plans to launch its cell-based meat in Asia first.)

 

Breakfast sandwiches made with JUST Scramble.

More JUST Egg

So far, JUST’s mung bean-based “egg” is its most unique offering. Vegan cookie dough and mayo are great, sure, but other companies make those products, too. But no one else so far has been able to make scrambled eggs without, well, the eggs. I’d like to see JUST Egg available more widely here in the U.S., and also internationally.

JUST has already started that expansion outside North America. In addition to the U.S., the eggless scramble is now available in Hong Kong, and China, and the company plans to move into Japan and India next.

It’s in this area of the world that JUST could make some of the greatest impact. According to World Atlas, Japan is the largest consumer of eggs in the world, and China is the third largest. If consumers there are willing to try a newfangled product like JUST Egg, it could significantly cut down on the global environmental footprint of poultry production.

New products would also be great. Imagine, say, a line of frozen breakfast sandwiches made with JUST Egg patties. Which would be especially good with…

 

Cheese?

JUST has not hinted at any plans to develop plant-based cheese, but there’s certainly a big market for it. While there are plenty of reasonably delicious stand-ins for meat, eggs, mayo, and yogurt, no one has yet been able to crack the code to excellent vegan cheese (at least in my mind). And we all need something to tide us over until Perfect Day swoops in with cheddar made without the cow.

—

Obviously to achieve all this would take a lot more than $200 million. But if the rumors are true and JUST’s coffers are about to expand, it seems like the most lucrative place to invest time and resources is in cell-based meat. After all, the company has a promise to fulfill and is racing against a timeline to do that. And as the first company to bring cultured meat to market, JUST is also paving the way for all cell-based meat and seafood companies. That’s a lot of pressure. If they want to succeed, the startup will have to invest some serious time, talent, and cash in figuring out a way around the regulatory roadblocks.

This post has been updated with information from a San Francisco CBS Local piece on JUST’s plans for the future. 

Prima Raises $3.3M to Educate Consumers, Regulators about The Benefits of CBD

Yesterday prima, a wellness brand championing the use of CBD, announced it had closed a seed round of $3.3 million. The round was led by Lerer Hippeau, with participation from Greycroft and other undisclosed investors.

As of now, the website is just an email signup form to request early access to the site. The Santa Monica, CA-based prima plans to launch an education platform to share data and research about CBD and, eventually, sell CBD-infused products. (If you’re not familiar, CBD is short for “cannabidiol,” the non-hallucinogenic chemical compound in cannabis.)

According to Techcrunch, prima will initially peddle beauty and pain-management products. This entry point makes sense. One of prima’s founders, Christopher Gavigan, previously co-founded The Honest Company, a wellness brand which sells nontoxic beauty and household products. Besides beauty products, down the road, prima will add edible products to its lineup, including powders that can be added to everything from coffee to water. Each blend will have a different intended effect, such as sleep, energy, or immunity.

It’s a tumultuous time in the CBD market. The passage of the Farm Bill in late 2018 legalized sales of hemp-derived CBD, but the FDA has yet to approve CBD as GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe). In other words, it’s not exactly legal to sell food products infused with CBD.

Up until recently, however, regulators seemed to have been turning a blind eye to companies selling things like CBD-infused gummies or skin serums. But the tides may be changing. Just this week, the New York City Health Department issued a ban on CBD in food and beverage items and cracked down on local NYC establishments selling CBD-infused products.

That’s where the platform aspect of prima could really do some good. According to a press release from the company, prima wants to help lead the global transformation from “fear-based cannabis prohibition into a hemp industry fueled by facts, market data, medical research, customer-patient experiences, and evolving legislative solutions.” Essentially, prima want to help de-stigmatize CBD and re-label it as a wellness ingredient, not an intoxicant.

Though they don’t provide any details on how they plan to achieve this mission, there’s one reason that Gavigan can help move the needle on CBD acceptance for one reason: his resume. Gavigan’s past experience at the Honest Company — which built its brand on transparency and ethical, non-toxic products — could give prima a boost not only in terms of media buzz, but also consumer trust. True, his co-founder was Jessica Alba, who did a lot of heavy lifting to give Honest Company its status, but just being associated with the brand will work in Gavigan’s (and prima’s) favor.

On the regulatory side, Gavigan told Fortune that the startup also plans to work with the FDA to push CBD products labeled as a nutritional supplement — though again, he didn’t give any details.

We predicted that 2019 would be a big year for CBD. In fact, over the next three years, the CBD market is expected to grow to as much as $22 billion. However, continued regulatory hurdles and health department crackdowns would put a serious damper on what has the potential to be the next big wellness ingredient. Hopefully prima will be able to use its pedigree to destigmatize CBD for consumers — and maybe even get the FDA to play ball.

Too Good To Go Raises €6M to Rescue Food in 16 Countries

Too Good To Go, the Denmark-based company fighting food waste, recently announced that it had raised €6 million ($6.8 million) in internal funding.

I spoke with Javier Amigo Miranda, CMO of Too Good To Go (TGTG), who told me that the fundraise was powered by private investors, including Mike Lee, co-founder of fitness tracking app My Fitness Pal, with participation from TGTG’s own CEO and Chairman of the Board. Amigo Miranda told me that this latest funding brings TGTG’s total warchest to roughly €18 million ($20.4 million).

TGTG is essentially a surplus food marketplace. At the end of the day businesses can post leftover food on the TGTG app at a discount. Hungry people can use the consumer-facing side of the app to search local restaurants and grocery stores for surplus food, place an order, then swing by and pick up their discounted grub in a pre-set collection window.

TGTG currently serves 9 countries and has aspirations to expand to 16 by the end of the year. According to Amigo Miranda, the company has saved over 10 million meals from the landfill since it was founded in 2016.

Europe is becoming a hotbed surplus food rescuing companies. Winnow optimizes BOH kitchen operations to reduce food waste, and Olio facilitates free food surplus sharing among neighbors and businesses. TGTG’s biggest competitor is Karma, based across strait in Sweden, which also connects local restaurants with deal-hungry consumers looking to purchase leftover food at the end of the day.

TGTG may have a bigger reach than Karma — which is only available in the U.K. and Sweden — but the latter seems to be experimenting more widely with new marketplaces for surplus food. In August of last year Karma raised $12 million, and a few months later Karma partnered with Electrolux to install smart fridges in grocery stores filled with discounted surplus food. Hopefully TGTG will use some of its new funding to not just expand geographically, but also explore new ways to get excess food out of the landfill and onto consumers’ plates.

Good Food Institute Announces Winners of $3M Grant to Revolutionize Meat Alternatives

Back in September, GFI called for applicants for a $3 million grant to fund research into plant- and cell-based meat. Yesterday, the company named the 14 winning scientists, each of whom will receive up to $250,000 over the next two years to fund their investigations.

The chosen projects are pretty evenly divided between cell-based meat (six companies) and plant-based meat (eight companies). Some topics were broad, like how to scale up cell-based meat production, how to improve texture in plant-based meats. Others were quite specific, like a project exploring the potential of red seaweed as a meat substitute, or a Norwegian research center building out a “farmyard” of animal tissue for cell-based meat.

The most interesting part of the grant awards, however, is the purpose behind the grant itself. According to an email from GFI to The Spoon, the grant was created in order to establish “a base of scientific inquiry” in the meat alternative space. The email goes on to say that the science of plant-based and cell-based meat “skipped a step,” leaping immediately from idea to product in development by private companies. That means that there’s no scientific basis for the technology, so meat alternative companies end up doing duplicating a lot of scientific legwork.

Which is actually true. Many cell-based and plant-based companies are very protective of their technologies (the exception being Shojinmeat’s open source clean meat initiative), so any new company in the space basically has to start from scratch. That means a lot of trial and error, a lot of wasted money, and a slower route towards the end goal: making a product that tastes as good as — and costs less than — traditional meat.

But if the GFI’s chosen scientists can help establish some base framework for the technology used to create plant-based and cell-based meats, alterna-meat companies new and old could use it as a resource to optimize R&D and eventual product scaling. And with $250,000 in their coffers, hopefully the winning scientists will be able to do just that.

Taranis Harvests $20M for Aerial Imaging Tech that Detects Crop Diseases

Today crop threat detection company Taranis announced that they closed a $20 million Series B funding round led by Viola Ventures, with participation from existing investors Finistere Ventures, Vertex Ventures, and others. This latest round brings the company’s total funding to $30 million.

Founded in 2014 and based in Tel Aviv, Taranis uses aerial imaging to help farmers monitor their acreage for crop threats and irregularities, such as disease, weeds, soil nutrition, and harmful insects.

To do this, the startup combines multi-spectral imagery gathered from satellites, planes, and drones to keep constant tabs on farmers’ fields. The image resolution is so high, according to Taranis co-founder and CEO Ofir Schlam, that they can see a single beetle on a single leaf.

All images (they’ve captured 2 million in the past year alone) are uploaded into the Taranis database, which then analyzes them and creates a synthesized report of any potential threats/problems they “see”. Farmers can access said report through Taranis’ mobile app or via a web browser and decide how best to remedy any issues.

A soy plant with a potassium deficiency.

Pricing varies depending on the type of crop: high-value plans like sugar beets or potatoes, which require more scans, would cost farmers around $15 to $20 per acre per season. Lower-lift crops like soybeans, wheat, or cotton would cost them only $5 per acre per season.

Considering the average U.S. farmer has 444 acres, the price of Taranis’ service can really add up. However, Schlam was quick to emphasis that the return is 3 to 5 times the price, and that their technology can increase crop yields by up to 7.5 percent. As regulations around drones relax and open up in rural areas, he also expects that they’ll be able to reduce their price.

While I’m wary of any company that claims to do anything so drastic as increase crop yields across the board by 7.5 percent, Taranis seems to have the technology and team to back it up. Schlam has a background in tech and intelligence, and another cofounder came from aerospace engineering. He told me that the company has been awarded three patents and has 24 others pending. Earlier this year, Taranis also acquired Mavrx, a San Francisco-based agricultural aerial imaging platform.

As of now, the company has around 60 contracted agronomists who manually train the system to identify problems. However, once the technology has learned that a certain discoloration equates to, say, a potassium deficiency, it can make the connection on its own from then on. Bad for any future agronomists, good for farmers.

Taranis isn’t alone in using technology to make farmers’ lives easier. On the ground, companies like CropX (also based in Tel Aviv) and Teralytic use wireless sensors to help farmers manage things like moisture and fertilizer in their fields. Most similarly, Walmart has filed a patent for an application which uses machine learning to monitor pests, though to our knowledge they haven’t done any pilots so far.

The startup currently works with 19,000 farms across 30 states in the U.S., with an additional footprint in Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Russia, the Ukraine and Australia. With their new funding, Schlam said Taranis would continue to scale up operations in their existing geographies. They’ll also invest in R&D so that their service can identify more types of pests and diseases.

Tupperware is Fine and All, but A New Wave of Smart Food Storage is Here

Last week at the Smart Kitchen Summit, Israeli startup Silo unveiled its smart kitchen storage solution which combines vacuum seal tech with specialized plastic containers and Amazon Alexa. Check out the video below to see it in action.

This week, the company launched their Kickstarter, reaching their $80,000 goal in 22 hours. Early backers can get the Silo vacuum base plus four storage containers for $165, and prices increase based on container size and quantity. That’s not cheap, especially considering that you’ll need to buy all new containers to sync with the Silo. However, for families that shop in bulk at Costco and the like, Silo could definitely help them save money — and reduce their food waste. If all goes well in the manufacturing (and as we know, that’s a bit “if”), Silo will ship to its first batch of backers in July of 2019.

The fact that Silo reached their Kickstarter goal in less than a day illustrates a hungry market for kitchen storage systems. Because plastic containers are fine, but we’re living in the era of the smart kitchen — and food storage is one area where we’re seeing some serious innovation. Here are a few companies leading the charge:

 

Ovie
Ovie makes LED tags which you can affix to your food containers to monitor how long that particular item will last. A green tag means your food is good, yellow means it’s nearing expiration, and red means do not eat. The startup launched their own Kickstarter back in May, where it also surpassed its funding goal by over 50 percent.

Though it doesn’t actually facilitate food freshness, Ovie is like Silo in that both use voice to help you track the lifespan of your food. They originally tried to sync it with Alexa, but developers weren’t satisfied with the gadget skill. That means Ovie requires a separate wifi-enabled hub to facilitate voice interaction, though the startup is working to make their tags talk with smart assistants.

 

PantryChic
Dry goods storage company PantryChic pitched onstage at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase, where they captured our attention with their system of connected cannisters and dispensing unit. Together, the two can keep track of your dry goods inventory and portion out precise amounts of each ingredient (see video above for an example).

When Chris Albrecht caught up with the PantryChic team at the International Housewares show in March, they said they would be shipping in August. August has come and gone, and no word on PantryChic, despite multiple attempts to reach out. While that’s certainly worrisome, the enthusiasm around the product — including from our team — shows that there’s certainly a demand for smart dry goods storage.

 

Stasher
Outside of the (resealable) box, Stasher‘s reusable silicone bags make a great alternative to single-use plastic baggies. The company makes resealable bags that they claim are “safer, more flexible, and more sustainable than plastic.” They can be used for sous vide, or as storage to keep snacks, kids’ lunches, and perishable ingredients fresh. Stasher made waves earlier this year when the founder went on Shark Tank and walked away with $400,000 from investor Mark Cuban.

—

In researching companies for this piece, I was excited to see so many companies working to disrupt plastic containers, single-use plastic bag, vacuum sealer, and other food storage methods that are practically screaming for a reboot. Many of these new solutions, however, are just that: new. Most of them haven’t even shipped to their backers, which means we’ll have to wait and see if they can follow through on their promises — before they turn stale.

Wasteless Grabs $2 Million, Dynamic Food Pricing Algorithm Combats Food Waste

This week Israeli startup Wasteless raised a $2 million Series A round, led by Slingshot Ventures with participation from several angel investors (h/t Agfunder). The company closed a $400,000 seed round in 2017, which, with their new capital, brings their total funds raised to $2.6 million.

Founded in 2016, Wasteless fights food waste on the retail side using a dynamic pricing algorithm. Using machine learning, Wasteless prices products in real time based on variables including expiration date, brand popularity, seasonal popularity, and more. The sooner a food will expire, the lower the price dips. Adjusted prices are displayed on electronic shelf labels which also show the product’s original price and expiration date, or online for e-commerce.

Employees can scan incoming cases of goods with an Android smartphone or a PDA barcode scanner. Wasteless’ tech then recognizes the expiration date of the product and the number of items in each case and uploads all of that information to their system, which syncs with both the electronic price displays and the retailer’s PoS system. (If the barcode is missing, the employee can scan one of the items in the case and enter the expiration date manually.) All of that information can be accessed via the Wasteless mobile app, which retailers can integrate into their own inventory tracking platform.

Reduced pricing for soon-to-expire products is nothing new in the grocery world. Many supermarkets offer a section of blanket discounted baked goods or prepared foods at the end of the day. But by bringing tech into the equation, Wasteless can theoretically fine-tune all prices to optimize sales, saving money for the retailer while reducing the amount of food it throws away.

Wasteless’ technology is a pretty strong win-win. Grocery stores can push more product and increase revenue while also cutting down on food waste. And many need some serious help in this arena: this April, the Center for Biological Diversity and the “Ugly” Fruit and Veg Campaign released a report grading how the 10 largest U.S. supermarkets managed their food waste, and let’s just say nobody was headed for valedictorian. Wastless could be a big help to get up these grades.

That is, if they can make it easy enough for widespread implementation. With different stores using different barcodes, inventory management systems, and PoS systems, it could be a big lift for Wasteless to manage onboarding all the different partners and training employees on how to use the new technology. Each store will also have to attach the electronic labels to the shelves in front of all products, which takes time and might require maintenance.

Thus far, Wasteless has piloted its technology at one Madrid location of a Spanish grocery store. With their new funding the startup is establishing New York headquarters, which will join its Tel Aviv and Amsterdam offices.