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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Funding

Cricket One Announces New Funding as it Rolls Out Cricket-Based Burger Patty

Cricket One, a Vietnam based startup specializing in cricket-based protein powders and oils, has raised a new funding round from Singapore based Corecam Partners The Spoon has learned. The funding follows a seed round investment from 500 Startups and Masik Enterprise made last year.

While the amount of the funding was not disclosed, cofounder Nam Dang told The Spoon the Corecam Partners does not make investments below $1 million.

Cricket One, which made a name for itself providing cricket protein powder and oils to food manufacturers, plans to use the new funding to fuel the rollout of a new cricket-based burger patty. The company sees burgers as a logical next step to attract new consumers not accustomed to having crickets as part of their diet.

“When we were building a roadmap for cricket protein to reach a wider audience, we thought it had to be in a common form,” said Dang. “There is nothing more familiar than a burger patty.”

To make their cricket-burger more meat-like, the company adapted their ingredients to address some of the common complaints about food made from cricket powders. According to Cricket One, foods made with cricket powder can have a grainy texture some consumers don’t like, so the company removed the exoskeleton of the crickets to result in a softer, more meat-like texture and taste.

This new direction beyond powders is just the beginning. The company, which has been working with other food manufacturers to develop meat analogs using cricket protein and cricket oil, is looking to extend its own meat substitute technology beyond the burger.

“We actually want to introduce a meat analog technology using cricket as an ingredient,” Dang told The Spoon via email. ” Burger is one thing, it can be used in other application like sausage and pâté.”

The company plans to sell its new cricket burger in different countries, including the US. According to Dang, what form it takes depends on the country and its local rules and regulations. For some markets it makes more sense to ship frozen patties made in Vietnam, and for others they may license the manufacturing process to local manufacturers and sell them the ingredients to make the burger in-market.

There’s no doubt that many see cricket and insects as a much more sustainable source of protein, but can cricket-based products make a dent in the fast growing market for more sustainable meat substitutes? Possibly, but the product’s success will ultimately depend on a large part on taste and, in markets like the US, how well they can convince consumers who are normally reticent to consuming insects.

To do that, a burger seems like a good place to start.

Mealhero Raises €2.5M for Its Frozen Meals-by-Mail Service

Mealhero, a Belgium-based frozen meal kit delivery service, has raised €2.5 million (~$2.97M USD) in funding. Mealhero’s CEO, Jeroen Spitaels announced the fundraise via a Linkedin post today (though according to Crunchbase, the close date was November 1).

At the time of this writing, there wasn’t an English press release announcing the funding, so the following details are taken from a Google Translation of a Dutch article running in De Tijd:

The lead investor is Mealhero’s new round is Jan Haspeslagh, whose family is behind the European frozen meal giant Ardo. The founders of Deliverect and Bavet also participated, and this brings Mealhero’s current total funding to €3.5M (~$4.15M USD).

Mealhero is a little different from other players in the meal kit space. It ships frozen ingredients that can be mixed and matched to create different dishes. The frozen ingredients are “cooked” in a steaming device that people rent for €5 a month (~$6 USD).

The article in De Tijd had a number of interesting tidbits from Spitaels, including:

  • The company is shipping “tens of thousands” of meals every month
  • COVID-19 “turned on the turbo button” for the company. The number of orders during the pandemic has doubled, and the company’s customer base has quadrupled.
  • Mealhero is doubling its workforce to 60 employees.

The meal-by-mail space has experienced new life during the pandemic, largely due to the fact that restaurants have had to shut down dine-in operations. Meal kit pioneer Blue Apron said it added 20,000 new customers during the pandemic, while Nestlé recently acquired prepared meal-by-mail service Freshly in a bid to gain a direct-to-consumer distribution network.

Mealhero has expanded into the Netherlands, and has plans to expand to other countries across Europe.

Spoonshot Raises $1M for its AI-Powered Flavor Trend Prediction Service

Spoonshot, a company that uses AI to predict new and different flavor combinations, announced today that it has raised $1 million in Seed funding. The round was led by SRI Capital and brings the total amount of funding for the company to $1.8 million.

The thesis behind Spoonshot is that companies looking to develop the next big thing in food need to look ahead. If your company only watches what is trending now, by the time it gets a product into market, that trend will already be over or commonplace.

To get ahead of the curve, Spoonshot’s platform examines data from across a vast number of food-related sources including online menus, food science, CPG ingredients and online food communities. Spoonshot runs this data through its proprietary machine learning and AI algorithms to help companies identify existing and novel flavor combinations.

The company launched its Ingredient Network product last October. At the time, we wrote:

Ingredient Networks lets you search ingredients for recommended flavor combinations and pairings. For example, when you search “banana,” it brings up what might be considered unusual recommendations like coffee concentrate and sunflower seed butter. But remember, what Spoonshot wants to do is surface flavors you probably haven’t considered. So bringing up something like chocolate or strawberries would be useless because you already know about them.

I spoke by phone this week with Kishan Vasani, Co-Founder and CEO of Spoonshot, and he said that the company has taken its Ingredient Network to the next level with its new Concept Generator.

Whereas Ingredient Network was more about exploring different flavor combinations and possibilities, the Concept Generator is more concrete. CPG companies can come to the service with a set idea in mind, like say, a cookie with blueberry as the main flavor. The Concept Generator then takes that information and returns with a blueprints of different blueberry cookies with different flavor combinations as well as all the ingredients that would go into making it.

Spoonshot’s tools are available at a unique time, given the pandemic. The lockdowns have people eating at home more and doing quite a bit of snacking. Giving CPG companies tools to quickly create new types of comfort foods could be quite appealing.

Vasani said that Spoonshot will be using the new money for marketing, something the company hasn’t really done up to this point, as well as hiring out its team.

Pudu Robotics Raises $15M in Series B+ Round

Chinese delivery robot company Pudu Robotics (aka Pudu Tech) announced this week that it has completed a Series B+ round of nearly $15 million in funding. The round was led by Sequoia Capital China with participation from existing investors Meituan, Everwin Investment, QC Capital, and Chengbohan Fund.

Pudu makes self-driving restaurant server robots equipped with racks of trays that can shuttle plates of food and empty dishes to and from the kitchen.

This B+ funding comes on the heels of Pudu Robotics’ Series B fundraise of $15 million, which the company announced on July 1 of this year. The B+ round brings the total amount of announced funding raised by Pudu to roughly $30 million. (Crunchbase lists prior Series A, Seed and Angel rounds of undisclosed amounts.)

According to today’s press announcement, Pudu’s robots have been sold to more than 20 countries and regions around the world. Earlier this month, Pudu announced that the Muhguri restaurant is Sokcho, South Korea now had 11 Pudu robots serving food to customers.

Pudu is certainly not alone in creating a new robotic labor force for restaurants. Other players in the space include fellow Chinese company Keenon Robotics, California-based Bear Robotics, and South Korea’s Woowa Bros., which has partnered with LG for server bots.

Pudu said this latest funding would be used to expand its market. The money is coming just as the global pandemic has restaurants reassessing their dine-in businesses. Server robots like Pudu’s remove one possible vector of human-to-human viral transmission, and come with the added benefit of not getting sick themselves.

While that may be good news in terms of not spreading the coronavirus, the increased use of robots means fewer jobs for humans. A recent survey from Aaron Allen & Associates found that more than 80 percent of restaurant jobs could be automated, with the majority of them being server positions.

That stat, of course, brings up a host of other societal issues, but right now, most people are pre-occupied with the more immediate pandemic-related problems.

Plant Jammer Gets €4M Investment for its AI-Powered Recipe Platform

Plant Jammer, a four-year-old Danish startup building an AI-powered cooking assistant, is one step closer to its goal of reaching one billion people, thanks to a €4 million investment in its AI recipe algorithm and platform. The Copenhagen-based company plans to expand its presence in the digital food space by licensing its API to third parties who can build branded customized experiences for their customers.

The new injection of capital comes from Danish investment firm Vaekstfonden, German food processing company Dr. Oetker, and German appliance manufacturer Miele. Miele had previously invested in Plant Jammer in 2018.

”Plant Jammer’s combination of recipe creation with AI is both unique and functional. We expect that this technology will be a core pillar in the connected kitchen of the future. Therefore, we believe Plant Jammer has great business potential,” says Dr. Christian Zangs, Managing Director of Miele Venture Capital.

Plant Jammer’s application, already in use by 10,000 households in Europe, allows users to build customized recipes by factoring in their individual preferences and what they may have in their home or what may be on sale in the local supermarket. While the app is focused on plant-based and vegetarian creations, partners who license the platform are not limited to those options. The database also contains food choices that include animal products and dairy; the PlantJammer app chose not to surface those results allowing the company to focus its version on a select niche.

In an interview with The Spoon, CEO and founder Michael Haase explained that partners who license the Plant Jammer’s API will pay based on the number of “calls” or accesses by users. For example, a grocery chain in Sweden can use the Plant Jammer API to develop a branded application such as a chatbox, that could include such extras as a link to online shopping. Each time a user of that third-party application builds a recipe, based on ingredients, tastes, diet, or any number of factors, the PlantJammer AI-driven database would work behind the scenes to deliver the results.

“I like to think of the analogy of the gold rush,” Haase adds. “We are interested in being the supplier of the jeans and shovels that enable others to do their jobs better.”

Personalized data from commercial partners will not be shared with Plant Jammer, but those partners can pass on generalized information via tags to allow the Haase’s company to continue to innovate on its platform. There are several areas Haase hopes to develop focused around food waste and the increased use of the excess capacity of local farmers and vendors.
Initially, the company founder says, the goal is to focus on food waste in the home. Haase says that 50% of all food waste takes place in the home, so we want people to build recipes based on what they already have in their refrigerator or cupboard.

“Our declared purpose is to empower one billion people with food habits that increase their health and the health of the planet,” Haase added.

That said, Haase admits his goal is a lofty one. “Right now, we are in a world of what I would call ‘trickle-down gastronomy’,” he says. “There is a huge divide between those whose world is focused on things such as molecular gastronomy and the masses. If we can show people that you can make something great in 25 minutes with simple ingredients, that would be great.”

Chinese Online Grocer, MissFresh, Adds $495M in Funding

MissFresh, a Chinese online grocer, announced yesterday that it has raised a $495 million funding round led by China International Capital Corp., with participation from new investors ICBC and the Abu Dhabi Capital Group, as well as existing investors Tencent, Goldman-Sachs ans Tiger Global. This brings the total amount raised by MissFresh to $1.4 billion.

That is a lot of money, even by today’s frothy standards, and reportedly gives MissFresh a pre-money valuation of $3 billion. For comparison, here in the U.S., grocery delivery startup Instacart has raised a total of $2.1 billion with a valuation of $13.7 billion.

This funding also highlights how online grocery shopping isn’t just big business in the U.S. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced lockdowns around the globe, spurring massive adoptions of online grocery shopping. In the U.S. online grocery shopping has experienced month after month of record customers and sales since the pandemic began, hitting $7.2 billion in June.

It’s worth pointing out MissFresh’s business model, which foresakes big, centralized warehouses in favor of smaller distribution centers. There are 1,500 of these smaller distribution hubs located closer to residential areas allowing for faster delivery and a a reduction in cold chain costs. We see this type of centralized versus distributed distribution models playing out between companies like Kroger, which is building large robotic fulfillment warehouses that cover large geographic areas, and Takeoff Technologies, which builds micro-fulfillment centers inside existing supermarkets, closer to where people actually live.

The question now is exactly how much consumer behavior around grocery shopping has permanently changed because of the pandemic. Will convenience and lingering fears over the virus continue to push grocery e-commerce even higher? MissFresh, at least, now has the money to find out.

S2G Ventures’ Managing Director on the 4 FoodTech Trends That Will Rise Post-COVID (Spoon Plus)

I wanted to (virtually) sit down with Krishnan to discuss S2G’s recent white paper entitled “The Future of Food in the Age of COVID-19.” It outlines four foodtech trends that S2G expects will grow in the coming months and years: digitalization, decentralized food systems, de-commoditization, and food as as medicine. Krishnan and I unpacked these four trends — and speculated about how investors will change their focus post-COVID — in our call.

The Deep Dive interview is available for subscribers to Spoon Plus. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

Kitchen Software Startup Drop Raises $13.3 Million To Help it Build The ‘Kitchen Operating System’

Today Drop, the San Francisco and Dublin based smart kitchen platform startup, announced that it had raised $13.3 million in Series A funding co-led by Alpha Edison and Morpheus Ventures.

The funding brings the company’s total funding to just over $20 million.

As with the company’s last funding round, Drop indicated they plan to use the funding to continue building out its core platform, but this time with a heavy focus developing the consumer experience.

“The kitchen is a mix of motors, heating elements and fragmented interfaces,” said Ben Harris, the CEO of Drop. “Someone walking into a new kitchen has to relearn all of those different pieces. We believe there is a need for a incredibly intuitive experience that pulls all of those together into one unified experience where you can go from your Thermomix to your GE oven, from your Instant Pot to your LG fridge.”

As part of the investment, the company also announced they will welcome two new members to their board: Steve Horowitz, partner at Alpha Edison, and Ray Musci, managing director at Morpheus Ventures.

Horowitz is a particularly interesting addition given his background as lead engineer for Android during its early days. Drop has long talked about building a kitchen OS (they actually own the domain kitchenos.com), something Horowitz clearly has experience in.

I asked Horowitz if he saw parallels between those early smartphone market and today’s kitchen space and he told me did.

With the iPhone and Android, phone makers saw “there is really a better way to do this,” said Horowitz. “I think Drop is in a very similar position.”

The funding news comes a week after Tovala announced a $20 million series B. The two funding announcements show that, despite a pandemic, investors see significant opportunity for innovation in the consumer kitchen.

I asked Harris about this and why interest in the digitization of the consumer kitchen is so strong today.

Appliance makers, grocers and other kitchen industries have seen their business “move from retail to online,” said Harris. “The importance of digital experiences has dramatically increased. That’s the only way that a brand can now have a touch point.”

Harris said he believes the COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the kitchen and cooking industry’s move online “by close to five years”.

Steward is a Crowdfunding Platform for Small, Sustainable Farms

During this pandemic consumers have been trying to shop from local farms more than ever. And yet these farms — small, family-owned operations — are having a tough time scaling up and pivoting to serve increased demand from new sales channels.

One thing that might help is if they had easier access to funding. An online platform called Steward is trying to help sustainable farms attract more capital. Steward lets individuals invest in pre-vetted local farms via its website. The company also recently launched new software to allow farmers to sell directly to consumers and even raise funds for projects, like building a new barn or expanding CSAs.

Dan Miller, the CEO and founder of Steward, told me over the phone recently that he got the idea for his company after he heard from lots of individuals who wanted to support sustainable local food systems, but weren’t sure exactly how. “There were way too many intermediaries,” he said. 

Steward funded its first farm, an urban farm in Detroit, in 2017. Since then they’ve funded 15 more farms with a total of $3 million. Over 50 farms also use Steward’s software for their own fundraising ventures. 

“Funding is hard to come by,” said Miller. “Traditional [investment] sources are focused on big commodity farmers, and sustainable farmers are often dismissed as not serious enterprises.” The reality, he argues, is that if farmers get access to the capital they need they can grow enormously.

On the flip side, it’s also hard for individuals to figure out how to invest in farms. Miller said that the business is “heavily regulated,” and that Steward simplifies the process. He told me that the majority of their investors are individuals who go in for a few hundred to thousand dollars.

Photo courtesy of Steward

Right now, individuals have two ways to invest through Steward. They can either invest in the Steward Farm Trust, which is a portfolio of loans picked by the Steward team. They receive interest payments from the loans of 8 to 10 percent. People can also look through the farms on Steward’s platform and invest individually, but Miller said that’s trickier because it involves regulatory hurdles (read: is probably not for the casual investor).

Steward makes money by charging farmers a 2 percent origination fee for investment, and collecting a 1 percent servicing fee yearly from investors. They also make money from the SaaS side of the business, which costs $95 per month. Thus far Steward is self-funded.

COVID is upending the entire food system and prompting consumers to examine where their food comes from in a way they might not have pre-pandemic. According to Miller, sustainable farms are benefiting from this emphasis on transparency. “We’ve seen boosted sales on all of the farms that we support,” he said.

To adapt to this spike in sales, small farmers are facing new challenges. They need to set up e-commerce sites to fulfill new demand, and figure out how to sell produce now that restaurant sales are down.

“They need capital to up their production,” Miller told me. He hopes that Steward will be able to provide some of that capital to help sustainable farms continue to grow, in COVID and beyond.

GOOD PLANeT raises $12M for Meltable Plant-based Cheese Made from Coconut

GOOD PLANeT Foods, a company that makes plant-based cheese, announced yesterday that it had raised a $12 million Series A round. The funding was led by Cleveland Avenue with participation by GreatPoint Ventures, Tasseo Consumer, Stray Dog Capital and Lever VC. This is the company’s total funding announced to date.

Based in Seattle, GOOD PLANeT makes vegan cheese — from shredded mozzarella to sliced cheddar — that doesn’t contain any soy, nuts, or GMOs. Instead, it’s made from coconut oil and potato starch plus natural flavorings.

Since it’s coconut oil-based the cheese will melt, which not all vegan cheeses, especially those made from nuts, can do. However, that also means that it’s high in saturated fat: a one-ounce serving of GOOD PLANeT’s shredded mozzarella contains 5.6 grams of saturated fat, or 28 percent of your daily recommended value.

GOOD PLANeT’s cheese is sold at major retailers like Walmart, Costco, and Whole Foods nationwide. With its new funding, GOOD PLANeT will expand production and reach.

We haven’t tasted GOOD PLANeT’s cheese ourselves, so I can’t pass judgment on how close it comes to the real thing. However, I’ve tried other coconut oil-based cheese before and find that it falls short, both on texture and flavor.

Cheese is one of the trickier products to successfully make vegan and tasty. Several startups out there, like Noquo Foods and Grounded Foods, are experimenting with new ingredients and formulations to make a better cheese alternative. On the more high-tech side, New Culture, Legendairy, and Perfect Day are using microbes to recreate actual dairy proteins to make cheese without the animal. However, none of these options are to market yet.

GOOD PLANeT’s funding does illustrate the continued interest in animal alternatives, even during COVID-19. Since the start of the pandemic we’ve seen meat alternative companies attract significant amounts of investment as consumers flock to plant-based foods in the grocery store. Now it seems that dairy alternatives are also getting in on the action.

Apeel Sciences Raises $250M to Extend Produce Shelf Life

Apeel, the startup that makes a natural coating to extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables, announced today via a release emailed to The Spoon that it had raised $250 million in fresh financing. The round was led by GIC with participation from Viking Global Investors, Upfront Ventures, Tao Capital Partners and Rock Creek Group. Celebrities Oprah Winfrey and Katy Perry have also joined as minority, non-participatory investors.

Founded in 2015, Apeel is fighting the global fresh food waste problem by creating a foodsafe powder coating out of plant oils which, when applied to produce, can double or triple their lifespan. The “peel” functions as a barrier to keep water in and oxygen out, fighting the two main causes of produce rotting. Each fruit or vegetable has its own proprietary coating.

Currently, Apeel avocados are available in retailers in the U.S., including 1,110 Kroger stores. Last year the company launched its Apeel-treated avocados on store shelves in Denmark and Germany. In Germany it also offers coated mandarins and oranges.

Apeel’s CEO James Rogers also told me in an interview last week that, in addition to citrus and avocados, the company also has coatings for asparagus and cucumbers in the works.

Extending the lifespan of fresh produce can not only cut down on food waste but can also equate to major savings for retailers. So it’s no surprise that Apeel isn’t the only company working to make your fruit stay fresh for longer. StixFresh has a sticker that can extend produce shelf life by two weeks, and Hazel Technologies makes packaging inserts for bulk fruit and vegetable harvest boxes to slow ripening. Perhaps most similar to Apeel, Italian company Sufresca also makes an edible coating which it claims can extend produce shelf life by several weeks.

According to Rogers, Apeel distinguishes itself by using only edible, natural elements to “copy the way that Nature does it.” They also develop different coatings for each fruit or vegetable to optimize its lifespan. “Every piece of produce is a living, breathing thing, [and] it needs its own optimized little microclimate in order to survive optimally,” said Rogers.

Food waste is one of the leading contributors to global warming, and fresh foods — like fruit and vegetables — are one of the most common foods to go to waste. Of course, wasting food is also bad news for a grocery store’s bottom line — and consumers, for that matter.

Thus far, both consumers and grocery stores seem to be on board by Apeel’s products. Rogers told me that when markets put signs indicating that their produce has been coated with Apeel, they see double-digit increases in sales. “That starts to make sense when you realize that a lot of people are pricing waste into their purchase decisions.”

Today’s raise brings Apeel’s total funding to $360.1 million. With its new capital, Apeel will continue to focus on expansion in U.S. and Europe, but it will also allocate funds to support its initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America.

Botrista Raised $4M Seed Round for its Cloud-Connected Drink Machine

Botrista, which makes the automated, cloud-connected drink dispensing DrinkBot, raised $4 million in Seed funding earlier this year, which has not been previously reported. Botrista Co-Founder and CEO, Sean Hsu shared the news with The Spoon by phone this week, and said the company has raised $4.55 million to date.

For those in need of a refresher, here’s how we described Botrista when covering them last August:

Drinkbot is a hardware/software solution for restaurants looking to expand their drink options. The dispensing hardware connects to a library of hundreds of drink recipes (mocktails, juices, fusion teas, etc) in Botrista’s cloud, and restaurants can choose anywhere from 6 – 20 drinks they want to serve at a given time.

In addition to giving restaurants a single machine that could dispense all kinds of mocktails, one of the hooks with the service was that the actual DrinkBot was free. Restaurants buy the ingredients through Botrista and pay per drink ($1.40 – $1.90 each).

Hsu told me that the company’s model has evolved somewhat. The hardware is still free, but now there is a monthly service fee associated with the device in order to maintain it.

According Hsu, Botrista’s free hardware model is paying off. He says that the company now has 20 customers across Northern California, and that the model has been able to generate a profit. But Botrista, like everything else on the planet, was negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The first month was horrible,” Hsu said, “Because our main customers are restaurants.” But, he said that many of their restaurants adapted with delivery and brought some of that business back. “We got almost 40 percent of our business back,” Hsu said.

Given what’s happened with the restaurants and their uncertain future, Hsu said that Botrista has accelerated its self-service option. This new line of business would be for offices that want to offer employees fresh juices. While this could be a nice perk for employees, there are bigger, more existential questions about the role of actually working in an office going forward as well.

While it remains to be seen exactly what dining out (or office work) will look like, Botrista’s low up-front cost model and fresh capital could help it weather the coronavirus upheavals.