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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Olio

The Week in Food Tech Funding: Olio Continues Food Waste’s Hot Streak

Food waste reduction is a hot investment space and one of the most active investor segments within the broader category in surplus food marketplaces.

And last week food waste kept on trucking as Olio, perhaps the most well-known of the share-your-food app startups, announced a $43 million Series B investment. Cofounder Tessa Clarke describes the funding as transformational via this Medium post and explains the three ways she sees funding being put to use:

  • Investment in Core Product: The company plans to hire more developers and build out new features in the core product, including “new features such as ‘Borrow’ and ‘Wanted’.”
  • Expansion of Food Waste Hero Programme: The company plans on expanding its corporate partner program that sources food from food service companies to pick up their excess food waste and redistribute into the community
  • International: the company is eyeing expansion into markets beyond Europe and North America, and it currently has 10 most promising in mind in ” Latin American, Asian & Northern European regions.”.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve watched as companies like Too Good to Go, Flashfood and Karma have raised funding to expand their platforms that enable restaurants and grocery stores to sell excess or soon-to-expire food to deal-shopping and lower-income consumers.

What sets Olio apart is that it enables home to home sharing for food. In this way, it’s like a more focused and less cluttered version of the Buy Nothing Facebook groups that have popped up in recent years. According to Clarke’s Medium post, Olio has helped save 25 million portions of food and 3 million other household items from being tossed in the waste bin.

Olio’s round continues a hot streak for food waste prevention investment over the past month after we saw Apeel raise an eye-popping quarter billion in funding in August. Both Apeel and Olio said they’d seen an acceleration in adoption over the past year, which echoes what we heard at our Food Waste Innovation Forum in June: The pandemic forced both companies and consumers to get serious about reducing food waste.

Here’s what else happened in food tech funding:

Plant-Based

Proeon – $2.4 Million: Pune-based plant-based ingredient company Proeon has raised a $2.4 million seed round. The company is similar to Motif Foodworkds in that its focus is building a range of different ingredient building blocks for companies building plant-based food products. The company plans to use its funding to build an R&D facility in the Netherlands, file more patents and hire more people.

CHKN Not Chicken – $4.5 Million: Portland Oregon based plant-based chicken startup CHKN Not Chicken has raised $4.5 million from Stray Dog Capital. The company will use the funding to expand the distribution of its flagship product into retail and grow its restaurant business. Unlike many of the alt-chicken products like Impossible’s new nuggets, which is made with soy, CHKN Not Chicken is made with pea protein.

Precision Fermentation

All G Foods – AU$16 million: Australian alt-protein startup All G Foods has raised AU$16 million in seed funding to fund growth for its plant-based meat business (Love BUDS Meat) and its precision fermentation-based alt-milk (CellMilk). The company is moving fast with veteran entrepreneur Jan Pacas at the helm. Pacas, who cofounded pet-sitting website Mad Paws, started the company only a year ago.

Cell-Based Meat

CellX – $4.3M: China-based cell-based meat startup CellX has raised $4.3 million in funding. The company makes a cell-based pork product. The company, which has 25 scientists working on developing its cell-based meat product platform in Shanghai. CellX is one of two startups this week that are semifinalists for the XPRIZE “Feed the Next Billion” competition, which is an indication that investors see participation in the XPRIZE contest as a validation of the company.

Wild Earth – $23 Million – Plant-based pet food startup Wild Earth announced a $23 million funding round from a group of investors that includes Mark Cuban and the star of Vampire Diaries, Paul Wesley. The company plans to use the funding to expand its pet food product line into products that use cell-based meat. The company plans to offer cell-based beef, chicken, pork, and seafood as part of the ingredient list for the new lineup, which it plans to start rolling out in 2022.

Mogale Meat Co. – Investment Amount Unknown: Mogale Meat Co, a South African-based cultured meat company, received an investment from alt-protein investor CULT Food Science Corp. Mogale plans to use the capital to invest in BioBank, which, according to the announcement, is “Mogale’s core intellectual property asset that currently contains over 500 cryo-preserved cell samples derived from free-roaming livestock and wild antelope.” Like CeeX, Mogale is an XPRIZE “Feed the Next Billion” semi-finalist.

Food Delivery

Cookunity – $47 million; Chef-powered meal delivery service CookUnity raises a $47 million Series B funding round. CookUnity, which provides chefs with kitchens and the digital platform to connect directly with consumers, is planning on using the money to expand the cities it’s doing business in. The company saw a topline revenue growth rate of over 5x over the past 12 months and has 55 chefs on its roster.

Food Robotics

Piestro – $2 Million+: Piestro, the automated artisanal pizza-making robot that is part of the Wavemaker Labs family of food robot investments, has raised over $2 million on crowdfunding startup platform StartEngine with less than three weeks to go. WaveMaker has continued to emphasize equity crowdfunding as a way to raise capital, starting with Miso Robotics, in which the company has raised $30 million so far via crowdfunding, and other portfolio properties such as the Bobacino robotic tea bar and Future Acres’ ag-bot.

Restaurant Tech

Heard – $10 Million: Hospitality and restaurant point of sale startup Heard has raised $10 million. The company, which counts Tiger Woods as one of its investors, makes point of sale software suite that includes front and back-of-house management tools for smaller restaurant operators.

That’s it for this week. If you have funding news you want in our weekly food tech news wrapup, let us know. And make sure you subscribe if you want to get The Week in Food Tech Funding in your inbox.

Spoon Plus: The Consumer Food Waste Innovation Report

Nowadays, governments, grocery retailers, industries like agriculture and grocery, tech companies, and many others are working to fight food waste at both the local and international level. In the developed world, at least, much of that focus over the last 12 months has been on the consumer kitchen, which is responsible for by far the most food waste in those regions.

This report will examine why so much food is wasted in the consumer kitchen, what new technologies and processes can be leveraged to fight that waste, and the companies working to change consumers’ relationship to both food and waste.

Report highlights include:

  • One-third of the world’s food goes to waste annually. In the U.S. and Europe, the majority of that waste happens downstream, at consumer-facing businesses and in the home.

  • Food waste at home is a three-part problem that stems from a lack of awareness about waste, inadequate information and skill sets around home cooking, and the convenience economy driving consumer behavior.

  • Grocery store shopping, current recipe formats, inconsistent date labels, and a lack of smart storage solutions for grocery purchases and restaurant leftovers are the main drivers of at-home food waste.

  • The refrigerator itself may be one of the single biggest contributors to food waste. Moving forward, appliance-makers will need to consider overhauling the appliance’s entire design to help consumers fight food waste.

  • Solutions for fighting food waste will come from a range of different players. For tech companies, areas of focus will include more smart appliances and more tech-enabled storage systems as well as meal-planning and meal-sharing apps.

Companies profiled in this report include LG, Samsung, Vitamix, Smarter, Ovie, Bluapple, Mimica, Blakbear, Silo, Mealhero, MealBoard, Kitche, No Waste, Ends & Stems, and Olio.

Introduction: The Size of the World’s Food Waste Problem

In 2012, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released the first edition of its now-famous report, “Wasted, How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food From Farm to Fork to Landfill.” That report proved to be a groundbreaking look at the inefficiencies in the U.S. food system that lead to massive amounts of food waste from the farm all the way into the average person’s kitchen. 

The report also proved to one of the biggest catalysts for change in recent years. Since its publication, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced federal targets to cut food waste by 50 percent by 2030 — the first goal of its kind in the U.S. Similarly, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 12.3 seeks to “halve global food waste at retail and consumer levels, as well as to reduce food loss during production and supply.” As NRDC noted in the second edition of “Wasted,” published in 2017, food businesses have made commitments to reduce waste, and 74 percent of consumers polled say fighting food waste is important to them. Most recently, the Consumer Goods Forum launched its Food Waste Coalition that aims, in part, to support SDG 12.3 by focusing on consumer-facing areas of food waste like home and retail. And these are just as sampling of the countless efforts happening on both international and local levels in the war on food waste.

Even so, the oft-cited figure, that one-third of the world’s food supply goes to waste, is as relevant now as it was nearly a decade ago when NRDC first published its report.

In 2020, food waste is a multibillion-dollar problem with environmental, economic, and human costs that grow more urgent as the world advances towards a 10-billion-person population. The United Nations’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates food waste’s global carbon footprint to be 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases, and that economic losses of this food waste total $750 billion annually. The United Kingdom’s Food Waste Recycling Action Plan (WRAP) notes that keeping food scraps out of landfills would be the equivalent of removing 20 percent of cars in Britain from the roads. Meanwhile, over in the U.S., rescuing just 15 percent of the food we waste could feed 25 million Americans each year, or well over half of the 40 million Americans facing food insecurity.  

Worldwide, different regions waste food in different ways. UN estimates show that per capita waste by consumers in Europe and North America totals to 95-115 kg/year. That number drops significantly, to 6-11 kg/year, in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeastern Asia. Overall, 40 percent of losses occur at post-harvest and processing levels in developing countries. Not so in developed nations, where over 40 percent of food waste occurs at retail and consumer levels.

Given the enormous amounts of waste occurring at the consumer level in Europe and North America, it makes sense that recent efforts towards fighting food waste now go towards understanding how and why food gets wasted downstream, at grocery stores, restaurants, and, most importantly, within consumers’ own homes.

The full report is available to subscribers of Spoon Plus. To find out more about Spoon Plus, click here. Use discount code NEWMEMBER to get 15% off an annual or monthly subscription. 

Olio, Luckin Coffee and Eat All Raise New Funding

Food tech startups continue to raise money around the world, and the first half of this week has already seen a bunch of funding news: Olio, a UK-based food waste startup, raised a $6 million Series A round led by Octopus Ventures. Taking a hyperlocal approach, Olio’s platform lets people and business list unwanted or surplus food online for other people in those neighborhoods to choose from and pick up. Olio is part of a burgeoning U.K. food waste fighting scene that includes Winnow and Too Good to Go. The company has raised $8.2 million to date. Over in China, on-demand coffee delivery company Luckin Coffee just closed a $200 million Series A round from Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, China’s Legend Capital, Joy Capital, and Centurium Capital. According to China Money Network, Luckin is combining offline and online retail modes to reach as many consumers as possible. This new funding values Luckin at $1 billion, creating one highly caffeinated unicorn. Spinning the globe once more we land on Bahrain, where regional restaurant reservation platform, Eat, raised an undisclosed sum from Middle East Venture Partners. According to Entrepreneur, Eat has raised $3.4 million to date. Eat’s service allows restaurants to accept online reservations. The startup has customers in Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and has generated “$250 million worth of orders for restaurants.” And finally, for startups on the hunt for money, IEEE reports that early stage robotics companies can get up to $2 million dollars from Toyota AI Ventures and Toyota Research Institute for work “improving mobile manipulation technology for assistive robots that can help people in and around the home.” This isn’t strictly food tech per se, but work towards helping people put delicate and oddly shaped groceries away in the kitchen would certainly fall into this category. Are you a startup that just got or is about to announce funding? Tell us all about it!