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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Melt&Marble

The Week in Food Tech Funding: Apeel’s Quarter Bil, Bug Farm Beta Hatch Snatches $10M

The waning days of August usually mean a slowdown in news, but not so in the red hot food tech space. This week’s food tech funding news includes (yet another) quarter-billion round for food waste unicorn Apeel, a bug farm’s fresh $10 million, and the continued steady drumbeat of funding going into ghost kitchens.

Apeel’s Appeal

Food waste reduction continues to garner investor interest and food-life extension startup Apeel is leading the pack. The company, which announced this week it had raised a $250 million Series E, plans to use its new funds to ramp up operations for 10 new supply networks over the next year to add to its already impressive 30 food suppliers and 40 retailers in 8 countries.

The new funding round comes just a year after its celebrity-infused (Oprah, Katie Perry) Series D – also for $250 million – and brings the company’s total funding to $635 million at a $2 billion valuation. That makes Apeel the most highly valued startup in food waste prevention, above Imperfect Foods (valued at $700 million in January of this year).

Apeel’s, um, appeal is that life-extension technology is perhaps one of the most effective tools to fight food waste at grocery stores, which throw away about one-third of produce in any given year. Apeel isn’t the only player in the space as Hazel and Ryp Labs (the 2019 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase winner) also have life-extension tech, but Apeel is the one with far and away the most market traction.

I’ll be watching to see if Apeel uses its funding and strong market position to continue to expand its product portfolio beyond its core life-extension coating technology. This year’s acquisition of hyperspectral imaging company ImpactVision was a move in that direction, and I can see the company making more adjacent moves under the broader food waste prevention umbrella.

Ghost Kitchens/Virtual Restaurants

C3, $10 Million: C3, a virtual restaurant startup that operates 40 different concepts as part of its virtual food hall concept, has secured a $10 million strategic investment from private equity firm TriArtisan Capital Advisors. The investment, announced this week, is part of a larger $80 million series B funding round announced last month.

BigSpoon Foods, $2 Million: BigSpoon Foods, a ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant operator based in India, has raised a $2 million pre-Series A round from Dubai-based NB Ventures. BigSpoon runs its own kitchens in a number of mid-sized (what it calls tier 2) cities and also has a portfolio of virtual restaurant brands. It offers a “digital franchise” model that turnkeys a new franchise with a ghost kitchen facility and an arsenal of delivery-only restaurant brands for approximately $20 thousand per location.

Bug Farms

Beta Hatch, $10 Million: Cashmere Washington-based mealworm farm raised a $10 million funding round which it plans to use to expand production at its flagship production facility east of Seattle. Beta Hatch’s 42 thousand square foot facility produces mealworms for use in feed for livestock and pets and plans to use its cash infusion to increase production by 10x over the next year.

Alt Protein

Melt&Marble, €750,000: Melt&Marble, formerly known as Biopetrolia, announced this week it had raised a €750,000 (~$876,000 USD) seed round to further develop its fermentation-based fats for plant-based foods. M&M and others like Motif are building out the toolbox for plant-based meat brands to make their products more meat-like.

Shandi, $700,000: Singapore-based Shandi, a maker of plant-based chicken analogs (including shreds, pieces, strips, and drumsticks), has raised a $700 thousand seed round. This round, its second seed round, was led by the large Singaporean food conglomerate Tolaram Group.

Delivery & Marketplaces

Trifecta, $20 Million: Organic meal kit startup Trifecta has raised a $20 million Series B. While many first-gen meal kit startups fizzled, some of the entrants’ focus on health and sustainability seems to be gaining traction. Trifecta, Thistle, and Freshrealm have all raised funding rounds this year, which means the category has moved beyond the cold-shoulder many of them got after the disappointing Blue Apron IPO and closures of companies like Chef’d and Plated. As for what it plans to do with the money, Trifecta will expand its meal offerings and hopes to (perhaps ill-advisedly)become ‘Peleton of Nutrition’ with an expanded set of digital offerings.

Do you have funding news? Drop us a line and let us know.

Melt&Marble Raises €750K Seed Round for its Fermentation-Based Fats

Melt&Marble, formerly known as Biopetrolia, announced today that it has raised a €750,000 (~$876,000 USD) seed round to further develop its fermentation-based fats for plant-based foods. Nordic FoodTech VC led the round with participation from Paulig’s venture arm PINC, Purple Orange Ventures, and Chalmers Ventures.

In addition to the funding, the company is also debuting its new name, branding and direction. Under its previous name Biopetrolia, Melt&Marble used fermentation to create advanced biofuels. But as Anastasia Krivoruchko, Co-Founder and CEO of Melt&Marble explained to me via video chat this week, “We were looking at what our technology could do and saw we produce fatty acids at very high levels.” Additionally, not only were they producing fatty acids, but they could also adjusts the fermented fats to produce a variety of outcomes.

Melt&Marble is an ingredient company, so it will use this ability to manipulate fermented fats to produce a wide range of fats for other plant-based meat manufacturers. It can create fats specifically for plant-based beef, pork other meat analogues. It can also adapt its fat to work better with specific plant-based proteins such as soy, or peas. Because it is tweaking these compounds from the ground up, Melt&Marble can also change the nature of the fats created to deliver different textures, melting points, or even replace bad fats with healthier ones.

Plant-based proteins grab all the headlines, but developing the right kind of fats to go with it is equally as important for meat analogues. Other companies looking to develop plant-based fats include Australia’s Nourish Ingredients, which also uses fermentation to create fats, and Motif Foodworks, which was developing plant-based fats in partnership with the University of Guleph in Canada.

Meat&Marble itself is spun out of research done at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden. Krivoruchko said that the company expects to have its first prototype done by the end of the year.