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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Funding

Spinn Extracts $20M from Investors for its Connected Coffee Machine and Marketplace

Spinn, the makers of the connected coffee machine that uses centrifugal force when making a morning cup of joe, has raised $20 million in new funding. TechCrunch was first to report the news this morning, writing that the new round was led by Spark Capital with participation from Amazon’s Alexa Fund, Bar 9 Ventures and other existing investors. This brings the total amount raised by Spinn to $37 million.

The Spinn is perhaps best known for its looooooong journey to market. Spoon Founder Mike Wolf pre-ordered a Spinn back in 2016, and after years of delays, Mike finally got his machine in July of last year. Based on the Spinn website, new machines can be pre-ordered for delivery this Fall, and cost between $479 and $779, depending the accessories included.

The hook with Spinn is that it uses centrifugal force to, well, spin the coffee grounds for extraction rather than pressing. The machine spins the grounds more slowly for regular coffee, and higher for espessso-based drinks. The result, according to the company, is a more nuanced and flavorful cup of coffee.

In addition to its hardware, Spinn also has an online marketplace selling more than 700 different types of whole beans. During an interview at our Food Tech Live event in 2020, Spinn CEO Roderick de Rode told us that when users order coffee from Spinn, they can scan the bag with their phone and precise extraction instructions are sent to the machine.

We actually haven’t seen a ton of coffee-related news so far this year. The similar superautomatic Terra Kaffe coffee machine raised $4 million in November of last year. And Trade raised $9 million for its online coffee marketplace last September.

De Rode told TechCrunch that his company will use the new funding to further develop its brewing technology and scale up production to fulfill outstanding orders for the machine.

Bezos-Backed NotCo Raises $235M for Plant-Based Alternatives

NotCo, a Chile-based food tech company that produces various plant-based alternative foods, announced today that it has raised $235 million in its Series D round of funding.

The round was led by Tiger Global and saw participation from DFJ Growth Fund and ZOMA Lab, with individuals also joining including Jack Dorsey, Joe Gebbia, Lewis Hamilton, Roger Federer, and DJ Questlove. Existing investors include Bezos Expeditions, EHI, Future Positive, L Catterton, and Kaszek Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to $360 million.

This new capital will allow NotCo to expand into new product categories in North America and scale its proprietary A.I. platform. Additionally, the funds will help the company accelerate its plans to launch in Europe and Asia. Currently, NotCo offers five products: NotMilk, NotBurger, NotIceCream, and NotMayo. The products are available in approximately 6,000 retailers and foodservice locations throughout the U.S., Chile, Brazil, and Argentina.

Something that sets NotCo apart from other plant-based companies is its use of its A.I. technology (the company has five patents in the U.S. for this). Called Giuseppe, the proprietary A.I. platform analyzes the properties of thousands of plants in a database and then creates unique combinations with the goal of replicating animal ingredients. For example, the ingredients in the NotMilk product include pea protein, pineapple juice, chicory root, coconut oil, and cabbage juice.

NotCo joins the ranks with other large players in the plant-based space that have successfully expanded internationally. Beyond Meat fortified its presence in Europe earlier this year, and around the same time announced that it had opened a manufacturing facility in China. Impossible Foods and Just Eat made major expansions to Asia in the fall of 2020. Oatly is currently building or planning future production facilities in Singapore, China, and the UK.

In the U.S., NotCo’s NotMilk is currently available in Sprouts, Whole Foods, Wegmans, and other retailers. All of the company’s products are available in Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. By the end of 2021, NotCo aims to have its products available in 8,000 retailers globally.

Food Tech News: Online Food Bank, Upcycled Cacao Fruit Bites, and $10M for Gluten-Free Snack Brand

If you feel like you’ve fallen behind in the fast-paced world of food tech, you’ve come to the right place. In this week’s Food Tech News roundup, we have stories on Feeding America’s new online platform, Costco’s partnership with Uber, a snack brand’s $10 million funding round, and one of the first companies to receive the Upcycled Food Certification.

Food bank launches online grocery ordering for those facing food insecurity

Feeding America is one of the largest food banks in the country, and this week the non-profit began offering online ordering. Called Order Ahead, food is ordered through a Feeding America network food bank or partner food on a smartphone, tablet, or computer. The order can then be picked up at schools, libraries, or a drive-thru distribution center. Certain markets will also be offering home delivery. Those requiring food assistance unfortunately might feel embarrassed or stigmatized, so offering an online platform allows for the option of being more discreet.

CaPao is one of the first companies to receive the Upcycled Food Certification

CaPao has created a snack product that is made from upcycled cacao fruit. The brand was developed in Mondelēz International’s SnackFuture innovation and venture hub, and this week announced that it is one of the first companies to receive the recently launch Upcycled Food Certification. After cacao beans have been extracted from the cacao pod, there is about 70 percent of the pod remaining goes to waste, and this remaining fruit is used in the snack product. CaPao sources this potential food waste from Cabosse Naturals, a food and beverage company that uses cacao pods to make various ingredients. Using the upcycled cacao fruit, CaPao produces three flavors of snack bites: mango cashew coconut, golden berry apricot chia, and cherry almond cocoa. The products are available for purchase on the company’s website and retailers in Southern California.

Photo by Henry & Co. on Unsplash

Costco partners with Uber to trial same-day delivery

Costco is currently trialing same-day grocery delivery with Uber at 25 Texas locations in Dallas, Houston, and Austin. Uber has announced that its drivers will be able to deliver groceries in minutes to a few hours. To use the service trial in Texas, customers must order at least $35 worth of Costco groceries and products. Costo currently also works with Instacart to offer same-day delivery.

Gluten-free snack maker raises $10 million

Quinn produces various gluten-free snacks, and this week the company secured $10 million in its Series B funding round. NewRoad Capital Partners led the round, and Echo Capital, Boulder Food Group, and Sunil Thakor also participated. The capital will be used for product innovation, company growth, and be put towards Quinn’s mission of supporting regenerative agriculture. Quinn uses gluten-free ingredients like sorghum, cassava, and corn for its pretzels sticks and chips, stuffed pretzels, and flavored popcorn. The company provides a map of where its ingredients are sourced and a list of farmers (who are taking steps to reduce their environmental impact) it buys from to provide transparency to consumers. Quinn’s products are available for purchase in approximately 10,000 retailers nationwide.

Bbot Raises $15M Series A for its Restaurant Ordering and Payment Software

Restaurant ordering and payment processing platform Bbot announced today that it has raised a $15 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by CRV and follows a $4 million extension to its Seed round the company raised in January of this year. Bbot’s total amount of funding is now $22.3 million.

Broadly speaking, Bbot helps restaurants, bars, hotels, ghost kitchens and other hospitality establishments add in-venue and online ordering. The company offers a range of hardware tools such as tablets, scanners and printer controls, as well as a suite of software to enable contactless and online ordering and manage catering.

Bbot’s system uses QR codes, which restaurants can place on tables and customers can scan with their own phones to pull up the menu, order, and pay for items. While the QR code-based ordering isn’t new, it has gained much more attention over the last year because of its inherently contactless nature. In her recent 2021 Restaurant Tech EcoSystem market map, Brita Rosenheim predicted that these type of tools will become more important to restaurants, writing:

Stateside, we’ve increasingly been adopting mobile-first ordering and marketing strategies, but the mobile-only approach (often seen in Asia) wasn’t widely embraced before the pandemic. Now, whether via QR codes, apps or mobile web, there has been a huge shift towards mobile-optimized menus, ordering and payments which eliminate or reduce most employee/customer contact. This can help to improve the guest experience via increased speed and fewer errors. For fine dining, this also saves time/costs in printing and sourcing supplies for paper menus.

Bbot is just the latest bit of restaurant tech funding we’ve seen over the past month. 86 Repairs raised $7.3 million for its restaurant machine maintenance and repair service. Choco raised a whopping $100 million to digitize the relationship between restaurants and food suppliers. And Zenput raised $27 million to help multi-unit restaurants widely release and enforce operating procedures and health and safety protocols.

In its press announcement, Bbot said it has added more than 700 customers and reached 85 employees across 14 states over the last year. With its new funding, Bbot said it will create new POS and loyalty program integrations, and will focus on features for food halls and virtual brands. The company also plans to launch a self-service Bbot app store, so developers can integrate their apps with Bbot’s existing platform.

Halla Raises $4.5M for Its Food Recommendation Platform

Halla, the AI-powered production recommendation service for grocery retail, announced today that it has raised $4.5 million in Series A1 funding, led by Food Retail Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by Halla to $8.5 million.

Halla’s platform integrates with a grocer’s existing digital commerce solution to provide customized product recommendations and substitutions for out of stock items to consumers. But Halla’s platform doesn’t just rely on previous purchases to make its recommendations. The company says it uses more than 100 billion shopper and product data points to predict what a shopper is looking for. Halla’s product video embedded below illustrates how Halla’s the system looks at all kinds of data about a shopper as it makes a recommendation in real time.

Grocery has been the beneficiary of a ton of funding this year, with $10 billion going into the sector as of July this year. Most of of the funding and attention has been around speedy grocery delivery services, but money has been doled out to startups working up and down the grocery stack. Hungryroot, and online grocer that uses machine learning for predictive recommendations, raised $40 million last month. In April, Trax raised $640 million for its computer vision-based inventory management system, and Shelf Engine raised $41 million for its perishable inventory management platform.

A big reason for all this money flowing into grocery is the pandemic. Fears around COVID-19 sent record amounts of people into online grocery shopping last year, creating new logistical and fulfillment issues for retailers. But the pandemic also highlighted flaws in our existing grocery supply chain, as evidenced by the panic hoarding and empty shelves that happened at the beginning of the outbreak. All of this is to say there are a bunch of new issues for grocery retailers to solve post-pandemic, which means plenty of opportunities for startups.

Halla said that a “top-5 U.S. grocer” is currently running Halla in more than 1,100 e-commerce storefronts. Halla will use the new funding to double the number of stores it’s in, and double its headcount by 2022.

Wicked Kitchen, UK Plant-Based Food Brand, Raises $14M Series A Round

Wicked Kitchen, a UK-based plant-based food and prepared meal brand, announced this week that has closed a Series A round of $14M. This is the company’s first public round and it was led by Unovis Asset Management and NRF Nove Foods.

Following this funding, Wicked Kitchen will soon expand into the U.S. with its plant-based offerings, and will build out its teams in London, Austin, and Minneapolis. Its current product lines are extensive, featuring everything from vegan desserts to alternative protein analogs. For the U.S. consumer, Wicked Kitchen will bring plant-based prepared frozen meals, ready-to-eat lunch and breakfast options, sauces, mayo, pesto, and meals kits to select retailers.

The founders of Wicked Kitchen are Chad and Derek Sarno, who are also chefs and co-founders of Good Catch, a plant-based seafood brand in the U.S. In 2018, the Sarnos collaborated with Tesco in the U.K. to launch Wicked Kitchen as a new plant-based range. Wicked Kitchen products are sold exclusively in Tesco, and has yet to be announced which retailers will carry the company’s products in the U.S.

In 2020, $2.1 billion was invested into plant-based companies, and they have continued to score a lot of funding this year. Large funding rounds like Wicked Kitchen’s recent round has allowed plant-based companies to expand into additional markets throughout the world. Singapore-based Next Gen Foods announced yesterday that it will be bringing its plant-based chicken brand TiNDLE to the U.S. following a $20 million extension of its seed round. Cultivated meat producer Aleph Farms raised $105 million earlier this month and shared it will use this funding to grow its operations internationally. Eat Just also shared that it plans to use its $200 million funding round that was closed this past March to expanding internationally.

Wicked Kitchen’s products are expected to roll out by the end of summer in the U.S., with a total of 20 products launching initially.

FreshRealm Raises $32M for Fresh, Prepared Meals

FreshRealm, a prepared fresh meals company based in Ventura, California, announced this week that it has raised $32 million. The institutional investors were not disclosed, and this brings the company’s total funding to $46.6 million.

This most recent round of funding will be used to expand FreshRealm’s production facilities, with the goal of opening additional facilities throughout the country for increased distribution. The company plans to focus on product innovation and developing proprietary ingredients for its meals. FreshRealm has plans to accelerate its growth strategy for its upcoming nationwide rollout in grocery retailers.

FreshRealm claims to be the only fresh meal company with a nationwide reach. Its prepared meals are not frozen, and the company applies “just-in-time” logistics to ensure all ingredients are fresh. The capital will also be used to develop different products, including ready-to-heat meals, ready-to-cook meals, and meal kit offerings.

Quite a few direct-to-consumer prepared meal companies already exist, including Freshly, Daily Harvest, HungryRoot. Companies like Blue Apron and HelloFresh ship meal kit boxes filled with various ingredients to the consumer with directions on how to assemble the meal at home. Sunbasket and Purple Carrot are now a hybrid service offering both prepared meals and meal kits. FreshRealm is taking a slightly different approach by offering fresh, not frozen, prepared meals that will be offered in grocery stores and retailers rather than shipped directly to the consumer’s home.

FreshRealm has not announced which exact retailers it will partner with but did say its meals are currently available in a few select retailers. The company has plans for a national rollout in Fall 2021.

Comet Bio Raises $22M Series C for its Upcycled Ingredients

Comet Bio, which manufactures various ingredients through upcycling, announced today that it has completed its Series C with an initial close of $22 million. The round was led by Open Prairie, the Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC), BDC Capital, as well as existing investor Sofinnova Partners.

With headquarters in London, Ontario and Schaumberg, Illinois Comet Bio takes agricultural leftovers from farms and upcycles them through a proprietary process to turn them into a number of different ingredient products including a prebiotic dietary fiber called Arrabina, sugar syrup alternatives called Sweeterra, as well as animal and bionutrition industrial products.

Upcycling is a trend we follow closely here at The Spoon, and it’s one that thankfully seems to be catching on with a number of startups. ReGrained upcycles grain from beer brewing into bread and even ice cream. Kern Tec upcycles stone fruit pits into oils and and alternative dairy products. And Rind produces upcycled dried fruit snacks.

In fact, there’s been so much momentum going into upcycled foods that the field now has its own certification label. As my colleague, Mike Wolf wrote recently:

The interest in upcycled food is also a part of a broader interest in companies up and down the food system in tackling the problem of food waste. The pandemic helped accelerate this interest as everyone saw entire crops go to waste, but the reality is rising costs of food products has made reducing food waste not only appealing to sustainability-oriented organizations, but also to the bottom-line focused types in big corporates at CPG, retail and restaurants.

In the press announcement, Comet Bio said it will use the new funds to invest in its product innovation and health claims development.

 

Shopic Raises $10M for its Clip-On Smart Cart Cashierless Checkout Solution

Smart shopping cart startup Shopic announced today that it has raised $10 million in equity funding. The round was led by Claridge Israel, with participation from existing investors Entrée Capital, IBI Tech Fund, and Tal Capital. This brings the total amount raised by Shopic to $21 million.

The Tel Aviv, Israel-based Shopic creates cashierless checkout retail experiences through its a device that clips on to the handles of existing shopping carts. The Shopic device has cameras and a touchscreen, and uses computer vision to recognize products placed inside the cart. The Shopic system keeps tally of everything in the cart and ties in with a store’s POS so customers can skip the checkout line and get charged automatically upon leaving.

Shopic also promotes its smart carts as advertising vehicles and real-time inventory management systems. In addition to presenting an ongoing receipt as people shop, the touchscreen can also display customized digital promotions and ads based on data such as a customer’s shopping history. Because Shopic’s system is keeping track of what items are placed in the cart (and taken out) and when, it also provides real-time inventory insight as well as information about how customers shop.

The cashierless checkout space has seen a ton of funding and installation activity around the world so far this year. There are a number of solutions coming to market including retrofitting stores with cameras (Trigo, Grabango) and smart shopping carts (Caper, Veeve). Even Shopic’s very specific sub-section of turning existing shopping carts into smart carts is getting crowded, with other players such as SAI, WalkOut and Nomitri vying for grocery retailer dollars as well.

All of this action illustrates how adoption of cashierless checkout is certainly accelerating, thanks in part to its contactless nature and fears stirred by the pandemic. But despite all the funding and the momentum, it will still be awhile before it crosses over into the mainstream. I recently spoke with the CEOs of cashierless checkout startups Trigo and AiFi. The Trigo CEO believes we’ll see cahierless checkout options in every major city of the world as early as next year. That could mean there’s just one store offering it, however. AiFi’s CEO said we’re about a decade away from cashierless checkout becoming mainstream.

In its press announcement today, Shopic said that it is already deploying solutions with major grocery chains around the world, and will use its new funding to accelerate commercial activities and expand its team.

Meati Raises $50M Series B for Mycelium-Based Meat Alternatives

Colorado-based Meati produces whole cuts of meat alternative analogs from mycelium, and today the start-up announced that it has raised $50 million in its series B round (news from Forbes). The round was led by Acre Venture Partners and BOND, with participation from Prelude Ventures, Congruent Ventures, and Tao Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $109.1 million.

Meati uses fermentation to produce its alternative protein products, a technique that the Good Food Institute calls the third pillar of alternative protein. The company has so far introduced two products, a whole cut alternative steak and chicken breast. The mycelium steak was piloted at a restaurant in Boulder, Colorado last year, and the chicken alternative was only offered to select consumers that applied to taste test it. Through the versatility of mycelium, it is likely that Meati will be able to create a wide variety of alternative protein analogs.

This most recent round of capital will be used to develop an 80,000 square foot production plant in preparation for the startup’s commercial launch. According to the Forbes article, Meati’s goal is to be able to produce enough of its alternative protein in its new facility that would be the equivalent of 4,500 cows in a single day.

The Good Food Institute reported that approximately $1 billion has been invested into companies using fermentation to develop alternative protein. That being said, Meati faces a few competitors in this space. AtLast had an impressive funding round earlier this year ($40M), and is currently developing new alternative protein analogs alongside its existing bacon product. Prime Roots uses fermentation and fungi to craft various protein alternatives, including bacon, chicken, lobster, and beef. Focusing on the B2B realm, Mushlabs also ferments mycelium to create alternative proteins products.

Meati has stated that the commercial launch of its first product will be sometime in 2022. According to an article published on Techcrunch, the first commercial product will likely be a mycelium-based jerky.

Czech Online Grocer Rohlik Raises $119M, Its Second Nine-Digit Round This Year

Czech online grocery startup Rohlik announced today that it has raised a €100 million (~$119M USD) Series C round of funding. TechCrunch was first to report the news, writing that the round was led by existing investor Index Ventures, with participation from Partech and Quadrille Capital, who had also previously invested in Rohlik.

This funding comes just months after Rohlik raised a €190 million (~$230 million USD) Series B round in March of this year. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Rohlik to nearly $380 million, and according to TechCrunch, Rohlik is now valued at €1 billion (~$1.2 billion USD).

That Rohlik is able to raise gobs of money in such quick succession is not a surprise. Investment in the online grocery space has been frothy this year, with players like Weee!, Instacart, Xingsheng Youxuan and many more all hauling in big rounds in the first half of 2021. Driving much of this investment is the pandemic, which pushed droves of people into avoiding public spaces and buying their groceries online for either pickup or delivery.

More recently, funding has been going towards smaller, dark grocer stores that promise grocery delivery in under fifteen minutes. Companies like Gorillas, Getir and Gopuff have also raised tons of cash for rapid expansion this year. Rohlik, however, is more of like a traditional big-box online grocer offering delivery in two hours. This “slower” approach doesn’t seem to have impacted the bottom line. Rohlik told TechCrunch that its revenues in 2020 passed €300 million with more than 750,000 customers, with basket sizes between €60 and €100 per order.

The pandemic remains the big question mark looming over the entire online grocery space. While vaccines are rolling out around the world, many countries in Europe have only a third of their populations fully vaccinated as of now, and the full effect of complications like the Delta variant remain unknown. How potential resurgences in the virus could impact how people shop for groceries remains to be seen.

For its part, Rohlik has already expanded its services to Hungary and Austria, with plans to move into Germany, Romania, Italy, France and Spain.

Botrista Raises $10M Series A for Its DrinkBot Automated Drink Dispenser

Botrista, the company behind the commercial DrinkBot automated beverage dispenser, announced today that it has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Purestone Capital and La Kaffa International with participation from Sony Innovation Fund, Middleby Corporation and PIDC. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Botrista to $16 million.

Meant for restaurants an other foodservice companies, the DrinkBot is a cloud-connected automated drink maker, dispensing mocktails, infused teas and lattes, iced coffees, lemonades and more without the need for a full bar. Drinks are ordered via an on-board touchscreen, so the experience is contactless, and they are mixed and served in less than 20 seconds.

Botrista is taking a vertically integrated approach as it comes to market. The company provides the hardware for free, charging a monthly maintenance fee and selling the drink ingredients, which as of last year were $1.40 – $1.90 per drink. DrinkBots connect to the Botrista CloudBar for drink recipes, automated inventory management, as well as sales and menu performance analytics.

In a press release sent to The Spoon, Botrista said it experienced 10x growth year-over-year, which isn’t that hard to believe. The pandemic is driving demand for more contactless food and beverage preparation, as well as the need for takeout and delivery-related tech. The Botrista can churn out drinks continuously, quickly and at the touch of a button — perfect for high volume establishments like ghost kitchens and restaurants with high off-premises volume.

Automated mocktail and juice dispensing is becoming a hot little sub-sector of the food and beverage robotic space. Over in Switzerland, Smyze’s robot baristas also make a bevy of juice beverages. And last year, SomaBar, which makes a countertop drink dispenser, pivoted away from Soju-based cocktails to have its machine create juices, teas and regular mixed drinks.

It’s worth noting that both Sony and Middleby participated in Botrista’s latest funding. Last year Sony set up an artificial intelligence unit to work on both recipe creation and robotics. It’s easy to see how DrinkBot’s combination of data and automation fits in with that endeavor. And Middleby, a giant in foodservice automation, could open up a large network of customers for Botrista.

Botrista said it will use its new funding to scale up deployment operations to roll out DrinkBot nationally.