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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Funding

Allplants Whips Up $9.9M for Vegan Meal Delivery Service

London-based vegan meal delivery service Allplants announced today that it had raised £7.5 million ($9.9 million) in Series A funding. The round was led by Octopus Ventures with participation from Felix Capital, Swedish VC firm Otiva, and others (h/t Techcrunch).

Founded in 2017, Allplants delivers ready-made plant-based meals, such as the BBQ Burrito Bowl and the Golden Sesame Satay, either on a subscription or individual basis. The meals are “quick frozen” and come in packs of six, the idea being that consumers will store them in their freezer to take out and heat up as needed. Much like buying frozen food from the grocery store, except fancier and delivered to your doorstep.

Weekly subscription meals shake out to £4.99 ($6.57) per serving, while one-off meal pack deliveries are £5.67 ($7.46) per serving. Which is a pretty good deal, especially since users can adjust their delivery frequency with relative ease.

According to the Techcrunch article, Allplants “reckons it is the U.K.’s largest Series A round for a vegan company.” While I haven’t seen anything to back that statement up — or to challenge it — I am sure that the vegan meal delivery and frozen meals spaces are quickly heating up.

A few months ago Del Monte invested a $4 million in vegan meal kit service Purple Carrot. Denmark’s Simple Feast raised $12 million for its plant-based ready-made meal delivery service. Though they haven’t announced any funding yet, Seattle-based Buttermilk Co makes microwaveable South Indian meals, all of which are vegetarian. It’s not strictly vegan, but Mealhero’s business model also reminds me of Allplants: the Belgium-based company recently raised $1.04 million for its meal kit service which combines frozen meals with a connected cooking appliance.

The idea of combining the convenience of door-to-door delivery with the longevity and flexibility of frozen food is smart. And though Allplants’ decision to go plant-based does put them in a bit of a niche, the timing is right: demand for meat alternatives has been skyrocketing lately, increasing by 20% last year alone. What a few years ago might have been a limiting factor is now be a driving factor to Allplants’ success, which means we might be seeing a few more record-breaking fundraises for plant-based meal companies in the future.

The Spoon Newsletter: Cinder Gets Sued; Food Blockchain Ripens; PicoBrew Ships

This is the post version of our bi-weekly newsletter. If you’d like to get it in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

Happy Friday, all! Catherine here. Our team’s hard at work putting the finishing touches on the Smart Kitchen Summit (you have your tickets, right?), but it’s been a busy couple of days for news as well.

First and foremost, a few days ago Chris Albrecht uncovered the story that Palate Home, the company behind the Cinder grill, was ordered by a court to pay $294,736 to Tony Fadell’s investment firm, Future Shape LLC. We’ve been following this smart grill, which delivers sous-vide-like precision cooking via a unique two-sided precision heating surface, for the last couple years. But like so many crowdfunded hardware companies before it, Cinder was hitting manufacturing roadblocks and delaying shipping dates to its backers. Which is why Chris looked into it in the first place — and found much more than he bargained for.

We’re not sure if this is a death knell for Cinder, though it certainly seems that way. Stay tuned for updates.

In positive news, Ripe.io, a company which is working to create the “blockchain for food,” just raised a $2.4 million seed round. Mike Wolf spoke with Raja Ramachandran, the company’s CEO and co-founder on his podcast last year. Here’s how he explained the concept behind his startup:

If a farmer wants to say I harvest strawberries these two days, well, they can say that, but do they say that to everyone? … That’s the beauty of blockchain. It manages the decentralized nature of the food business, so people can post data, they can protect it, they can share it, they can create records with it… In the end for the consumer, they basically get a longer record.

Ripe.io is capitalizing off of two trends: blockchain madness, and people’s desire for increased food transparency. If the company can successfully create the blockchain for food — something that others like Goodr and FoodLogiQ are already playing around with — then consumers can instantly know a plethora of details about their food: where it was produced, when it was harvested, whether it’s organic/GMO, etc. Ramachandran will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) discussing blockchain’s potential within the food system, so join us there to hear more.

The ability to trace the origin of your food with 100% accuracy is a good thing, but what if you could bring the farm to you? That’s exactly what Freight Farms, a company which creates “Leafy Green Machines” — that is, climate-controlled vertical farms in shipping containers — is trying to do.

Excited to see new ideas for recreating the future of food and cooking? We announced our Startup Showcase winners this week, so you’ll want to check them out!

Jenn Marston wrote about their new Grown service this week, which helps Freight Farms customers manage temperature, water usage, and other aspects of the indoor farm units so that they can grow produce with super-limited space. Jenn’s optimistic that this tech could allow institutions — like public schools and hospitals — to have access to super-fresh, healthy greens (and more). While smaller scale than Freight Farms, Estonian smart indoor grow system Natufia raised $1.2 million this week.

The PicoBrew Z brewing system

In other news, Mike Wolf covered PicoBrew’s initial shipment of their Z Series, a modular brewing system that lets home beer creators scale up to make 10 gallons per brew. They may have delayed the Kickstarter for their Pico U, but this shipment shows that PicoBrew is still kicking — er, brewing.

Chris also covered NEXT Future Transportation’s new mobile lockers, which are yet another step towards a future in which autonomous vehicles deliver us our groceries and pizza along with our packages. For those who still want a retail experience in the future, however, the convenience store will probably still be there — it just might look different. Read Chris’ piece on Dirty Lemon’s new cashierless, honor system-run pop-up store to see how.

Finally, this week I wrote about all the food I tasted at last week’s inaugural Good Food Conference. It’s a smorgasbord of plant-based products, from vegan sausages to eggs made of mung beans. Check it out.

Smart Kitchen Summit is a mere three and a half weeks away, and it’s shaping up to be our best one yet. Just check out our program and speakers if you don’t believe me. Don’t get left behind — use the discount code NEWSLETTER to get 25% off of tickets (just click here to have the discount applied automatically via Eventbrite).

Have a great weekend!
Catherine

In the 09/14/2018 edition:

John Pleasants Thinks the Oven of the Future is Powered by Light

By Catherine Lamb on Sep 14, 2018 10:02 am
We at the Spoon have long been curious about Brava, the stealthy smart kitchen startup which recently debuted its first product: an oven which uses the power of light to cook food quickly and precisely, with low energy usage. See him at the Smart Kitchen Summit in October.

Walmart Acquires Cornershop, While Jet.com Gets in a New York State of Mind

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 14, 2018 08:50 am
Walmart announced yesterday that it is expanding its digital presence in Latin America with the $225 million acquisition of Cornershop, an online marketplace for on-demand delivery from supermarkets in Mexico and Chile. While that move continued the retail giant’s global spending spree, domestically, the company’s subsidiary Jet.com unveiled a revamped website featuring enhanced grocery delivery options.

Dirty Lemon’s New Pop Up is Part of a Convenience Store Revolution

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 13, 2018 03:48 pm
Dirty Lemon, a startup that sells fancy water infused with ingredients like charcoal, CBD and collagen for more than $10 a pop, made The New York Times today with its new pop-up store in New York that puts you on the honor system when you pay.

Mod Pods! NEXT Future Transportation Announces Mobile Lockers

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 13, 2018 12:19 pm
A lot of transportation in old sci-fi movies was pod-based. People would travel through futuristic cities in quiet, autonomous, sleek pods that picked them up and dropped them off. What those movies missed, and is now becoming a reality, are fleets of pods running around to bring us our packages, restaurant food and groceries.

A Plant-Based Tour of What I Ate at the Good Food Conference

By Catherine Lamb on Sep 13, 2018 09:00 am
From vegan sausages by Beyond Meat to mung bean scrambled eggs from JUST, here’s a culinary tour through all the plant-based foods I tried at the Good Food Conference last week.

FoodShot Global Launches Fund to Land Food Moonshots

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 13, 2018 06:30 am
We know that there is no shortage of food-related accelerators helping get the next generation of startups off the ground. But FoodShot Global, a new investment platform that launched today, doesn’t just want to get startups off the ground: it wants them to aim for the moon.

Court Ordered Cinder Grill Maker to Repay Tony Fadell’s Investment Firm $294,736

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 12, 2018 11:00 am
Palate Home, the company behind the Cinder grill, was ordered by a San Mateo court in August to pay $294,736 to Tony Fadell’s investment firm, Future Shape LLC. The default judgment compels Palate Home to repay a $250,000 loan to Future Shape plus $43,737 in interest as well as $999 in costs.

Impossible Sliders Roll Out at all White Castles Nationwide

By Catherine Lamb on Sep 12, 2018 10:18 am
Today Impossible Foods, the company famous for their plant-based “bleeding” burgers, announced today that it’s expanding its partnership with fast food chain White Castle. The Impossible slider is now available in all of White Castle’s 377 locations, from New York to St. Louis.

PicoBrew Ships Z Series, A Modular Brewing System for Aspiring Craft Brewing Pros

By Michael Wolf on Sep 12, 2018 09:00 am
PicoBrew announced this week that the first Picobrew Z1 has rolled off the production line and made its way to the customer, local food pioneer Ron Zimmerman of the Herbfarm. As you might recall, the Picobrew Z series is PicoBrew’s attempt to fill the gap between the home and pro markets with a modular brewing system.

Freight Farms Unveils Onsite Vertical Farming Service

By Jennifer Marston on Sep 12, 2018 06:00 am
Your average institution, be it schools, company, hospital, or university, typically doesn’t have the space or cash to consider an indoor farming initiative, even if it would mean putting fresher, more local greens into cafeterias and dining halls. That’s an issue Freight Farms looks to solve with the release of its new service Grown.

Ripe.io Racks up $2.4 Million for its “Blockchain for Food”

Today Ripe Technology INC (better known as Ripe.io) announced the completion of a $2.4 million funding seed round, led by Maersk Growth.

Founded in 2017, Ripe.io is working to create what they call “The Blockchain of Food.” When Michael Wolf had Ripe.io’s co-founder and CEO Raja Ramachandran on the Smart Kitchen Show last year, he said:

If a farmer wants to say I harvest strawberries these two days, well, they can say that, but do they say that to everyone? … That’s the beauty of blockchain. It manages the decentralized nature of the food business, so people can post data, they can protect it, they can share it, they can create records with it… In the end for the consumer, they basically get a longer record.

That means that when people go to a restaurant or a grocery store, they can know exactly where their food comes from, whether or not it’s organic or GMO, and how fresh it is. Ripe.io hopes that blockchain technology can help digitize supply chains end-to-end and ensure maximum food transparency for the end consumer. Which, as Ramachandran explained on the podcast, is a $30-40 billion dollar market.

Other companies are also turning to blockchain to bolster their food businesses. Goodr is a startup which harnesses blockchain to reduce large-scale corporate food waste, and FoodLogiQ recently piloted a blockchain pilot to see how this emerging tech could increase supply chain transparency. But Ramachandran doesn’t see the blockchain of food as a zero sum game. “It’s not going to be one blockchain, it’s going to be many,” he said. “And we all have to connect.”

We’ve reached out to Ramachandran for comment on how his company plans to use their new funds, and will update this article if we hear back. 

Ramachandran will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle on October 8-9th, discussing blockchain and food with executives from Goodr and Walmart. Join us — use discount code THESPOON to get 25% off your tickets. 

Mealhero Raises €900,000 for its Frozen Meal Kit and Smart Cooker Service

Mealhero, the European meal kit delivery startup, announced at the end of last week that it has raised a €900,000 (~$1.04 million) seed round of funding.

According to Dutch publication datanews (translated via Google Translate) roughly one-third of the €900k comes from loans, another third from subsidies from the Flemish Enterprise Agency and the final third from IMEC and an investment angel.

The Belgium-based Mealhero differentiates itself from other meal kit services on the market through its combination of frozen food and a dedicated connected cooking appliance. As we wrote about the company last year:

The mealhero service is comprised of three parts: a box of frozen ingredients delivered to your home, an app to help you assemble your ingredients into a recipe, and a connected three-container steamer to cook them automatically.

The app knows what [Mealhero] ingredients you have and can suggest a recipe, or you can assemble a combination of foods how you like. The frozen ingredients include vegetables, starches, and meats and come in their own containers, each with an RFID label. Once selected, you scan each container on the steamer and place the ingredient in its own compartment. The steamer knows how long to cook each individual component, so you don’t have to actually do any cooking.

One of the benefits of Mealhero’s approach is that since it ships frozen food, the ingredients will last longer, so you can make them when you like. More traditional meal kit companies send fresh ingredients that spoil more quickly, so you have to make them relatively quickly, whether you want to eat that meal or not.

This new seed funding adds to the €79,151 Mealhero raised on Kickstarter last year as well as an undisclosed amount of funding the company had prior to Kickstarter. The Mealhero device is available for purchase (the company’s website says 100 smart steamers are available for delivery at the end of Sept.), with the Starter Pack costing €299 (~$350 USD).

Mealhero was also a finalist at the Startup Showcase at our first Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe earlier this year. Be the first to see the next generation of food tech startups at our flagship Smart Kitchen Summit: North America event in Seattle next month!

Bear Flag Robotics Raises $3.5 Million for Autonomous Tractor Tech

The common refrain from robotics companies is that they help with manual, repetitive tasks. And when you run a farm, there are plenty of manual, repetitive tasks, and Bear Flag Robotics raised $3.5 million seed funding right before the holiday weekend to help agricultural workers out with them.

Bear Flag Robotics develops autonomous driving technology for tractors so growers can automate common tasks such as spraying, mowing, discing and rippling. According to the company, the result is lower labor costs and because of the smaller tractors increased yield through reduced soil compaction. You can see the company’s work in action in this video:

With its autonomous tractor tech, Bear Flag says that one person can manage a fleet of vehicles instead of requiring a whole crew to run them. Which brings us back to the question that always arises from advances in robotics: what is the human cost to automation? More robots equals fewer jobs for us fleshy folk.

The answer in this case, is actually a little less dire. Farms are in the midst of experiencing a shortage of agricultural workers right now, and robots can help fill in those gaps to make sure farms stay productive.

The advantage of robots, of course is that they can work all hours, never call in sick and don’t get injured. Robots are going to play an increasingly important part of our food’s journey from farm to fork, and you’re seeing more of that technology coming to fields. Augean Robotics’s “Burro” is a self-driving cart meant for pure manual labor like hauling small equipment and harvests around a farm. More advanced robots like harvesters are on the way from companies like Traptic and Abundant Robotics.

Based in Sunnyvale, CA, Bear Flag Robotics’s $3.5 million round was led by True Ventures, and the company has raised $4.5 million total since its founding in 2017.

Miele Invests in AI-Powered Cooking App Plant Jammer

German appliance giant the Miele Group has bought a minority stake in foodtech startup Plant Jammer. The Copenhagen-based company uses AI to suggest complimentary ingredients and build modular recipes. 

As I wrote back in February:

Vegetarian recipe-generating app Plant Jammer is out to help those with low kitchen confidence who want to cook healthy meals and reduce their food waste. The app creates custom recipes for users based off of whatever ingredients they have in their kitchen—then walks them through how to go from recipe to meal, step by step.

According to a press release, Plant Jammer’s algorithm and “choose your own adventure” approach to cooking is now being tested in Miele’s experimental kitchen. The two companies are working together to improve Plant Jammer’s app and test new ideas for kitchen equipment and interfaces.

Around the same time they took a minority stake in Plant Jammer, Miele also invested in German shoppable recipe startup KptnCook. And just a few weeks before that, they announced that they were partnering with MChef to create a food delivery service for customers who own Miele’s high-end Dialog oven.

My colleague Chris Albrecht posited that Miele’s investment in KptnCook could be used to gain valuable data on customer recipe preferences, then applied to MChef meal development. Down the road, their partnership could also help Miele get into a more direct version of shoppable recipes.

I imagine Miele could use Plant Jammer for a similar purpose. They would collect data on what types of recipes customers “jammed,” then use the information to develop plant-based dishes for MChef. But more importantly, they will use Plant Jammer to see if people prefer their modular recipe creation to the traditional recipe format.

“We set out to find if Plant Jammer’s approach could be a viable alternative to recipes for the next generation and the preliminary tests point to a roaring YES” Gernot Trettenbrein, Executive Director of Miele Venture Capital, said in the press release.

If they discover consumers prefer a more flexible, dynamic recipe creation process to following a list of instructions, that could inform their future plans to get into the shoppable recipe game. At the moment Plant Jammer doesn’t have shoppable recipe integration built into their app, but they do have a service where users can build a shopping list; it’s not hard to imagine them teaming up with an e-commerce company at some point.

Plant Jammer launched in early 2018 and has roughly 10,000 active users. Miele’s investment shows that they’re not sure exactly what the future of the recipe will be, but they’re willing to invest in a few to find out.

 

“Ugly” Produce Startup Full Harvest Reaps a $8.5 Million Series A

Today Full Harvest closed an $8.5 million Series A funding round led by Spark Capital with participation from Wireframe Ventures, Rent the Runway founder Jenny Fleiss, Cultivan Sandbox Ventures, and others.

The San Francisco-based startup, which was founded in 2015, is a business-to-business produce marketplace for cosmetically imperfect (or “ugly”) fruits and vegetables. They connect farmers with food and beverage companies which use produce to make blended and processed finished products, like juice, kombucha, or sauerkraut. That way, the aesthetics don’t come into play.

Founder and CEO Christine Moseley got the idea for Full Harvest while she was working at Organic Avenue, a cold-pressed juice company. “They were paying top dollar for perfect-looking produce that they were immediately processing,” she told me over the phone. Which meant that they had to charge a super-high price — $13 per juice — to make a profit.

A self-professed “longtime entrepreneur,” Moseley started looking for innovative ways to bring down the company’s food costs. The lightbulb moment came when she was visiting the largest romaine farm in the country and saw that they only harvested about 20% of their crop. The rest — heads of lettuce that didn’t meet grocery retailers’ aesthetic standards, and therefore couldn’t be sold — were turned back into the dirt to decompose. “That produce would have been perfect for the Organic Avenues of the world,” said Moseley.

So she decided to apply her business acumen to the agricultural industry and tackle post-harvest produce waste not as a sustainability problem (though it is), but as an economic one.

The first step: creating the technology to support a marketplace for the imperfect produce. Moseley likens Full Harvest to Airbnb: “Before Airbnb, you probably would never have thought to rent your room out for the weekend, since you’d have to coordinate all the logistics yourself,” she explained. “That’s where we’re at in the world of agriculture today.”

Currently, growers have to spend hours on the phone coordinating sales — and still, Moseley told me that almost 60% of them are on the brink of bankruptcy. Full Harvest opens up a new revenue stream for growers by connecting them with buyers who will buy produce that’s too ugly for the grocery store shelves at a cheaper price than the cosmetically perfect stuff. Farmers get more money, food companies get better deals on produce, which they pass on to the consumer.

Full Harvest markets themselves as the only B2B marketplace which covers the entire end-to-end sale of imperfectly formed produce.”You can view it as an Amazon-like experience,” said Moseley. “We don’t actually make or touch the product, but we coordinate logistics and make sure the product shows up on time as promised.” At the moment they’re still pretty far from Amazon-sized, though; they’re a managed marketplace, and each participating buyer and supplier is vetted before they can join.

They certainly came along at the right time: food waste is a hot-button issue, with startups cropping up to mitigate the staggering amount of food wasted throughout the supply chain. “I would say that it could not have been more perfect timing,” said Moseley. “We found a problem, and very shortly afterwards people became aware of it.”

Imperfect Produce is another startup capitalizing on the recent trend towards “ugly” fruits and vegetables. But while Imperfect facilitates the delivery of said produce from the growers to consumers’ doorsteps, Full Harvest focuses on the B2B side of things.

According to Moseley, so far Full Harvest’s efforts have increased profits for at least one farm partner by 12% per acre. The marketplace also saves their partner CPG companies 10-30% off their produce costs. To date, the startup has facilitated the sale of almost 7 million pounds of fruits and vegetables.

Which is still small potatoes in the overall fight against food waste. According to the Ugly Fruit and Veggie Campaign, 20-40% of all produce goes to waste because of strict grocery standards. That translates to about 20 billion pounds of food per year.

But now they have some serious capital behind them: this funding round will bring Full Harvest’s total money raised to $10.5 million. Moseley said that the company will use its new funds to scale up its tech platform, expand its market reach, and grow its team from 10 people to 30-40.

And this is just the start. “There’s a huge scalable business opportunity here,” said Moseley. The good news? The more this company scales, the more produce they save. I’ll cheers an ugly fruit-based kombucha to that.

Good Catch Foods Reels In $8.7 Million for Plant-Based Seafood

Good Catch Foods, the Pennsylvania-based startup which makes seafood out of plants, closed an $8.7 million Series A funding round yesterday. This ups their Series A from the $5.5 million the company announced in April. The round was led by New Crop Capital with participation from Stray Dog Capital, the PHW Group, Blue Horizon, and others.

Founded in 2016, Good Catch Foods is developing plant-based alternatives to shredded tuna, crab cakes, and fish patties. They’re aiming to bring their fish-free tuna, which comes in three flavors and has roughly half the protein of “real” tuna, to market by 2019.

According to the U.N., around 90% of the world’s stocks are currently fully or overfished — and our demand for fresh seafood continues to grow. Some companies are tackling this by ensuring they only source sustainable fish and shellfish or raising farmed fish with low environmental impact. Despite these efforts, the fact remains that seafood is a finite resource. Which makes the work of companies like Good Catch Foods, who hope to sate our seafood craving using plants, all the more important.

The alterna-seafood market, which is developing more slowly than its meaty counterparts, has recently experienced some serious growth. Wild Type raised $3.5 million a few months ago for their lab-grown salmon, followed a few months later by an identical fundraise from Finless Foods, a startup developing cultured bluefin tuna. And just a few weeks ago, Terramino Foods raised $4.25 million for its “salmon” burger made out of fungi.

Terramino Foods’ “salmon” burger.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first investment in meat alternatives for the PHW Group, which is one of Europe’s largest poultry producers. They recently invested in cultured meat company Mosa Meats, and also partnered with SuperMeat, an Israeli company developing lab-grown chicken.

This is in line with the idea that Tom Mastrobuoni, the CFO of Tyson Ventures, put forth at the Smart Kitchen Summit Europe: for Big Food companies, the smart move is to invest in their own disruptors. Which explains why Tyson Foods, which produces one in five pounds of protein consumed in the U.S., has invested in both plant-based and cultured meat companies. (P.S. If you want to hear more about food tech investment trends, see Tom speak at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle this October.)

Cafe X Raising $12 Million “Seed-1” Round

Cafe X, the startup that builds robot baristas, is in the process of raising a $12 million “Seed-1” round. Crunchbase News broke the story after coming across regulatory filings which showed that Cafe X has already raised $9.42 million of the new round. Cafe X Founder and CEO Henry Hu later confirmed the news with Crunchbase.

This new round is being led by famed angel investor Jason Calacanis and Craft Ventures. The $9.4 million raised so far brings the total amount raised by Cafe X to $14.5 million. We reached out to the company for any further comment as well as information about what the new funds will be used for, and will update this post when we hear back.

While Cafe X has two dedicated indoor locations in downtown San Francisco, the company recently deployed its second generation barista-bot-in-a-box on a street corner, also in downtown SF. These automated kiosks are meant to serve high-traffic areas where people can grab a (quality) cup of coffee quickly.

Cafe X isn’t alone in the robot coffee space. Austin-based Briggo, which makes the Coffe Haus, just installed its automated coffee kiosk at its latest location, in the Austin Airport. And later this summer, the robotic MontyCafe will be up and running in Russia.

Presumably, Cafe X’s new money will be used to hire out engineering and software teams and help fuel expansion, as this type of money often does. When I talked with Hu earlier this year, he said that while Cafe X has received inbound interest from all over the world for their robot barista, geographic expansion would focus first on the Bay Area.

There might be a different type of expansion possible, however. Craft Ventures also led the Series A investment round in electric scooter sharing startup Bird. Perhaps after riding one to get your afternoon latté from a Cafe X kiosk, you’ll be able to recharge it there (and maybe even earn a Cafe X discount). Or perhaps that’s just a bit of overly corporate synergistic caffeinated strategy that this new funding has me thinking.

Shojinmeat Scores Grant for Open Source Clean Meat Initiative

Last week Shojinmeat announced on Twitter that it had received a flash grant from the Shuttleworth Foundation. Shojinmeat was nominated for the $5,000 grant by Isha Datar, a Shuttleworth Fellow and the Executive Director of cellular agriculture non-profit New Harvest.

If you’re not familiar, Chris Albrecht covered Tokyo-based Shojinmeat a few months ago for the Spoon:

“Shojinmeat is now an active Slack channel that connects roughly 30 DIY citizen scientists from across Japan. They gather to talk about their homegrown meat experiments and related topics such as tissue engineering, animal welfare, and regenerative medicine. Shojinmeat has also put out ‘zines with articles and pictures about their work, and recently made a move to the West by creating an English-speaking Slack channel.”

Essentially, Shojinmeat is an informational platform for DIY clean meat enthusiasts — more like a club than an actual company. So it’s easy to see why the Shuttleworth Foundation, who supports open knowledge resources, would want to support them.

Shojinmeat isn’t founder Yuki Hanyu’s only project. He also created Integriculture; a startup which is making clean meat infrastructure for B2B sale. On our call Hanyu said that Integriculture is gearing up for their first product launch this fall: a food-grade culture media, which is the “food” which clean meat needs to grow. This plant-based media is composed of sugars, amino acids, and vitamins, and Hanyu said he anticipates customers will range from companies to biohackers.

Clearly, Hanyu and his team have their fingers in quite a few pies. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. (Apologies for the mixed metaphors.) Shojinmeat is also developing incubators for their members to “grow” their own cultured meats. He’s planning to launch these incubators, which will market for roughly $100, at COMITIA125, a manga event in Tokyo, on August 18th. (See top image for a look at the incubator, which will be distributed with a clean meat ‘zine detailing how it can be used to grow animal tissue.) Afterwards, he’ll make them available online and put the blueprint on open source development platform GitHub.

Hanyu told me that they would use the money to buy new equipment for DIY clean meat research and fund travel to biohacking conferences, so they could share their message to a wider audience.

Interestingly, he also mentioned that Shojinmeat would also use the grant to support a project they’re working on with local high schools. Hanyu is collaborating with a group of government officials (among others) to launch a high school class focused entirely on cell cultures.

Clean meat has sparked quite a bit of controversy as of late. With the government and groups like the National Beef Cattleman’s Association attempting to exert influence over and regulate the clean meat space, a virtual army of people working on affordable, attainable solutions around the world (or at least in Japan) is pretty cool. It’s also a sign that the steady march towards cultured meat can’t be stopped.

The Shuttleworth Foundation website says it awards Flash Grants to companies that are “social change agents.” There’s no question that Shojinmeat — with its mission to make cultured meat open and accessible — is exactly that.

Apeel Sciences Raises $70M to Extend Avocados’ Shelf Life

This week Apeel Sciences, the startup known for its plant-based peels that keep produce fresh longer, raised a cool $70 million. The Series C round was led by Viking Global Investors, a $26 billion hedge fund behemoth, and brings the total funding for the Bill Gates-backed startup to $110 million.

Apeel’s solution to fighting produce degradation is called Edipeel. It’s a plant-based powder which fruit and vegetable producers can mix with water and use to coat their wares before shipping them off for distribution and retail. By mimicking the natural coatings in fruits like lemons and avocados (yeah, guys, they’re a fruit), Edipeel keeps produce fresh by warding off oxygen and maintaining moisture levels. It’s also a healthier and more environmentally friendly alternative to wax, which is used as a coating for fruits and vegetables today.

Apeel’s technology also cuts down dramatically on food waste throughout the supply chain, in grocery stores, and even in the home. As Jenn Marston wrote when she profiled Apeel a few months ago, “less waste and longer transport time windows are a win for everyone involved in getting food from the farm to the store.”

In addition to their not-so-shabby funding, Apeel also announced this week that they had added former Whole Foods executive Walter Robb to their board. Do we smell some Edipeel-coated avocados (and more) on Whole Foods shelves in the future? Thinking on a bigger scale, Apeel’s technology would also come in handy for Amazon-Whole Foods grocery delivery orders, as it could keep in-transit produce fresher as it travels from the farm to your doorstep.

So far, Edipeel-coated avocados — which last twice as long as typical avocados — are being piloted in roughly 100 grocery stores in the Midwest, including 30 Costco locations. Next up: Apeel plans to apply their tech to citrus and asparagus.

Dishq Raises $400,000 Pre-Seed From Techstars and Arts Alliance

Dishq, the Bengaluru, India-based startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver personalized food recommendations, announced today that it has raised a $400,000 “pre-seed” round of financing from several investors including the Techstars Farm to Fork accelerator and Arts Alliance. This brings the total amount of money raised by the company to $560,000.

Dishq combines a vast database of dishes and their attributes, as well as anonymized customer behavior analytics and food science research into a machine learning algorithm. The company’s AI platform plugs into any digital food business, such as Uber Eats or at an in-restaurant ordering kiosk, to provide recommendations for the end-user.

According to Vasani, dishq has 11 customers across 6 countries spanning across more than one thousand restaurants and foodservice locations. The software is powering 30 million recommendations per month with more than 176,000 consumers receiving recommendations each month. For comparison, when I spoke with the company in January, it has 6 customers and was powering just two million recommendation a month.

In addition to TechStars and Arts Alliance, existing investors Zeroth and Artesian Venture Partners also participated in this round, as well as The Syndicate Fund and angel investor Sven Hensen. Dishq says it’s going to use the new money to build out its engineering team and expand sales and marketing activities. In addition to the Bangaluru office, dishq will be growing its presence in London and just opened up an office in St. Paul, MN, which is where the TechStars accelerator is located.

Now is a good time for dishq to bolster its coffers, as the AI-powered recommendation space is getting hot. Just yesterday, Halla announced its I/O platform for B2B food recommendations, and others such as FoodPairing and Plantjammer are all bringing their machine learning to help predict what people want to eat.

This money will also presumably help dishq get closer to its long-term goal of creating a real-time “taste analytics as a service,” which will help CPG brands better react to food trends as they are happening and take action.

Vasani spoke at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe, where he was on the panel Personalized, Shoppable and Guided: Recipes Are Not Dead. You can watch it here.

SKS Europe: Personalized, Shoppable and Guided: Recipes Are Not Dead from The Spoon on Vimeo.