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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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“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.

Karma Raises $12 Million for App which Combats Food Waste

Today Karma, a Stockholm, Sweden-based startup fighting food waste, announced a $12 million Series A fundraise. The round is led by Swedish investment firm Kinnebick, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Electrolux, and others. This brings Karma’s total funds raised to $18 million.

Launched in 2016, Karma is a mobile app that helps retailers sell excess food to consumers at super-reduced prices. The only rules are that the food can’t be past its legal sell-by date and that retailers must list it for at least 50 percent less than its original price.

Karma hopes to distinguish itself from competitors who also create new retail channels for food waste, such as Too Good To Go, by offering meals from high-end restaurants (even those with Michelin stars). They also emphasize transparency: they require retailers to be 100 percent clear about which foods or dishes they sell each day, so a user knows exactly what they’re getting.

“There’s a risk that when you talk about surplus or waste, people worry it’s low quality,” Karma’s VP of International Development Alex Spain told The Spoon a few months ago. “We want to make it seem like they’re not just picking up leftovers; we’re just trying to optimize supply and demand.”

Though the majority of Karma’s participating retailers are in Sweden, the app rolled out in the U.K. in February, 2018. Karma currently works with over 1,500 grocery stores, bakeries, cafés, and other food establishments, 300 of which are in the U.K. As of now, over 350,000 people have used the app to purchase surplus food. That’s none too shabby, but also pales in comparison to the reach of Too Good To Go, which has over 3 million downloads and is active across eight European countries.

The main investor name that jumped out for me is Electrolux. In Karma’s press release, Marty Carroll, Global VP of Digital at Electrolux stated, “As a world leader in appliances, Electrolux is working closely with Karma to help alleviate the global problem of food waste.”

How will the world’s second-largest appliance maker, also based in Sweden, make use of an app which facilitates B2C sales of surplus food? Will Electrolux customers of the future be able to discover recipes based off the surplus produce they purchased through Karma? Which they could then cook in their Electrolux smart ovens? After walking through the recipe with guided cooking app SideChef, which recently partnered with (you guessed it) Electrolux? Just some thoughts.

This investment also fits in well with Electrolux’s Food Foundation, which supports sustainable food projects around the world. The company has already partnered with several food waste initiatives through the foundation. They even created a documentary entirely dedicated to the subject.

Karma will use their newly raised funds to add over 65 positions and extend their reach to new stores. They’ll also expand to new markets, starting within Europe. The plan is to be in 150 markets by mid-2020. Let’s hope they don’t let their new funds go to waste. (Get it?)

Icebox’s Grocery Replenishment Service Wants You to Never Run Out of Eggs

You know that feeling when you wake up craving an omelet only to realize you used the last of your eggs on yesterday’s fried rice? Icebox is a new (very early stage) startup working to make sure you never experience empty fridge disappointment again.

The company uses tech to automate the grocery shopping experience so it can replenish ingredients in your fridge — before you even know you’ll need them. “It’s a pocket-sized smart fridge that uses machine learning for automatic fulfillment,” Icebox co-founder Jazz Singh told me over the phone. The startup was co-founded last October by three Berkeley undergrads who met a Caltech hackathon. Thirty-six hours later, they had made the first version of Icebox.

As of now, Icebox is only a smartphone application. You download the app, then take a picture of your fridge and any recent grocery receipts. Singh told The Spoon that Icebox combines these two pieces of data with an unspecified “couple of other sources,” applies machine learning, and voila — it creates a shopping list. The list is customizable, so you can add extra odds and ends as needed.

As of now, that doesn’t seem super helpful — I can generally remember what i need on my weekly shop off the top of my head. What’s intriguing about Icebox is its potential.

Down the road, Singh told me that Icebox plans to partner with retailers and e-commerce services to offer anticipatory grocery delivery, keeping you stocked on your fridge staples. They’ll also provide users with recipe suggestions based on their grocery haul. “It will be much more streamlined,” said Singh.

There are other companies working in the grocery tracking and replenishment space: Smarter has a fridge cam that allows you to remotely check what groceries you need, Amazon has their Dash button and might be working on a smart fridge, and Pantri (a participant at the SKS Europe Startup Showcase!) is a grocery fulfillment platform. In terms of the recipe component, Chefling takes photos of barcodes and shopping lists to recommend recipes based on the food you have on hand, and Cooklist connects with retailers to generate recipe suggestions based on your recent grocery purchases.

Icebox is still in its very early stages; they’re currently in the midst of preparing for a private beta launch. Singh said they want to make sure that their computer vision is ready for a mass release, and then they’ll focus on partnerships with grocery fulfillment companies like Amazon Prime.

Icebox plans to initially market itself to university campuses as a way for young college-goers to ensure that they, God forbid, never run out of Gatorade or Monster energy drinks.

That seems a bit far-fetched that college kids, who, at least based on my own experience, are far more likely to turn to dining halls, delivery, and fast food for sustenance than actually cook on their illegal dorm room hot plate. But I could see Icebox being a boon to working parents or harried millennials; people who have the motivation to cook but not always the time or headspace to grocery shop.

Singh told me that Icebox plans to position itself as an affordable, modular alternative to smart fridges. Which is, well, smart. Unlike smart fridges, Icebox’s tech isn’t a pricey investment that you’ll have to replace every few years. The company plans to release the shopping list creation service for free, and offer a paid subscription tier which will integrate with e-commerce sites for hands-off grocery delivery. (Once that becomes available, of course.)

Singh didn’t want to disclose exact amounts, but she said that Icebox has funding from campus resources and venture capital funds. The company also recently got accepted to Berkeley Sky Deck: an accelerator fund and incubator which gives funds to early-stage Berkeley startups. We’ll keep you updated on Icebox’s progress — hopefully over spur-of-the-moment omelets.

Before “I Do,” See Your Wedding Cake in AR

Choosing a wedding cake is — I assume — a big deal. Not only do you want to pick one that tastes excellent, but you’ve also got to ensure that the confection matches your floral arrangements and the bridesmaid’s dresses, and… I guess just generally looks nice. And when you’re investing in something as significant and expensive as a wedding cake, the stakes can be high.

To help combat this anxiety, New York City’s Magnolia Bakery partnered with Kabaq to debut what it says is the world’s first augmented reality (AR) catering menu. Kabaq, a NYC-based startup founded in 2016, stitches together 360° photographs to create and project 3D visualizations of food — which, I must say, look pretty darn realistic. At Magnolia Bakery, engaged couples can use Kabaq’s tech to display virtual wedding cakes onto the tables in front of them, zooming in and out on frosted details and rotating the confections with a flick of their finger.

Augmented Reality Catering Menu - Magnolia Bakery

This isn’t NYC-based Kabaq’s first AR-powered foray into the food space. Last month, the Economist debuted a Snapchat AR filter made with Kabaq which enabled users to envision what meals might look like in the future, from insect-laden dishes to 3D-printed food. Kabaq also teamed up with Domino’s to create a Snapchat-driven ad campaign, which allowed people to “see” a 3D image of a pizza when looking through the app. Most recently, they partnered with Bareburger to transform the chain’s menus into a 3D visual guide.

Kabaq’s app is free to download for users. Businesses who want to use their AR services can either book a Kabaq photographer to shoot 360° images of their products, or else buy a “photoshoot set” and do it themselves.

More and more food businesses are leveraging AR for enhanced customer experience, ads, or just publicity stunts. Suggestic leverages AR to help health-conscious people stick to their diet plans at restaurants, while Waygo helps translates menus into English. Chinese startup Coolhobo is using AR to enhance the grocery shopping experience for millennials. In the agtech world, Huxley is combining AR with AI to optimize plant growth.

Maybe seeing a 3D rendering of a wedding cake isn’t exponentially more illuminating than looking at a photo of it, but these steps by Kabaq and others indicate the potential of AR in food. We’re not far from a future where we will be able to see exactly what our meals — or three-tiered cakes — look like before we order them.

Hopefully, menu anxiety will soon be a thing of the past.

We Can Uber-Ize That: Cheff Applies the Sharing Economy to Personal Chefs

“Almost five years ago nobody had a personal driver, and now we have Uber. Why can’t we do that with personal chefs?” That’s the question that prompted 18-year-old Abbie Krech to drop out of college and start Cheff; a web platform which connects professional chefs with individuals who can’t — or don’t want to — cook.

Time-pinched customers can head to the Cheff website (they eventually plan to build out an app), select a chef from its directory, and negotiate a price. Krech envisions a variety of use cases where chefs do everything from weekly meal prep for clients to catering larger-scale dinner parties. “We want to make this an everyday lifestyle choice,” said Krech.

Of course, the concept of personal chefs is nothing new. There are plenty of websites offering lists of local culinary professionals, ready to come and cook for you or your group. What distinguishes Cheff is its attempt to uber-ize personal chefs selection — that is, to make it affordable, convenient, and millennial-friendly. “Meal kits don’t do it all for you, and restaurants can be expensive and unhealthy,” said Krech. The startup is trying to hit the sweet spot right in the middle, capitalizing off of two trends we’ve seen in millennial dining habits: convenience and healthy eating.

Here’s where things start to get sticky. Chefs’ prices are negotiable, but their site lists one rate of $30-$50 per person (for 1-2 people) and $20-$40 per person (for 4+ people), which includes food. For a single meal. Even compared to food delivery, that’s on the pricey side. Cheff isn’t publicly disclosing their exact business model, but Krech stated that it would be a subscription, based on the volume of clients each chef has.

Of course, Cheff is in their initial stages, and there’s plenty of time for prices to come down. Plus, since the rates are negotiable, chefs might be amenable to some price haggling. But still — those numbers make the idea of hiring a private chef, which is already a semi-tough sell for millennials who are used to ordering super convenient delivery while bingeing Netflix, a tougher pill to swallow.

Cheff launched last week for friends and family and is aiming to be available to the Chicago public by the end of August. They’re planning to expand into San Francisco and New York City by the end of 2018, at which time Krech said they’ll start fundraising.

Yes, this scrappy startup — right now it’s just Krech, her co-founder, and two interns — will certainly run into a few roadblocks; their prices are high, and they’ll need to work to familiarize consumers with their concept, and get them comfortable with the idea of everyday personal chefs. Despite these obstacles, it’s still tempting to root for the 18-year-old girl who had an idea and just decided to make it happen. If they can get their prices down and get millennials onboard the whole everyday personal chef concept, they might have a shot.

In the Future, Shared Kitchens Will Function Like Community Centers

At the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS), we love to highlight people who are forging new paths in the food world. But for those who are trying to jumpstart their own CPG food business, or scale up production, finding affordable commercial kitchen space can stop their idea in its tracks.

Ashley Colpaart is trying to lower that barrier to entry with The Food Corridor; a platform which connects budding food entrepreneurs with commercial production space. She’ll be speaking about how her startup is harnessing technology to disrupt the specialty food industry at SKS this October in Seattle.

To get you excited, we asked Colpaart a few questions about how she envisions the future of new food businesses, which CPG trends are on the rise, and why she considers her company “the Mindbody of food.” Read the full Q&A below.

This interview has been edited for clarity and content.

Q: How is the Food Corridor unique compared to other shared kitchen startups?

A: The Food Corridor is a tech-enabled platform that lets shared kitchens across the country operate more efficiently and grow more food businesses. Without owning any physical space, The Food Corridor is powering 80+ shared kitchen facilities across the US and Canada. Our network of co-cooking spaces is providing 4000+ chefs, caterers, food trucks, craft food producers, and delivery-only concepts a space to legally produce food and grow their dream business.

Q: You recently launched the app The Kitchen Door — what exactly does it do?

A: At The Food Corridor, our mission is to enable efficiency, growth and innovation in local food. Since our launch, we’ve done this through our kitchen management software that helps kitchen managers better operate all the moving parts of a shared commercial kitchen. This month, we are excited to launch our newest app: The Kitchen Door.

On a daily basis, food businesses contact us searching for a clean, friendly, and stable place to launch and grow their businesses. In response to this demand, our team has built the most comprehensive database of trusted commercial kitchens who have space available to rent.

The Kitchen Door is the go-to place for food entrepreneurs to search and contact an exclusive kitchen space to produce their goods.

Q: You’ve likened The Food Corridor to MindBody — the cloud-based management software for wellness classes — but for shared kitchen space. Why do you make that comparison?

A: Liking The Food Corridor to Mindbody actually led us to secure one of our favorite angel investors. In the early 2000’s his wife encouraged him to invest in a small software company that was helping yoga studios manage and book its yogis. It provides cloud-based business management software for the wellness services industry.

Similarly, The Food Corridor is a cloud-based business management software for the food industry. Our software handles tasks unique to a shared kitchen like hourly bookings, equipment rentals, compliance management, monthly plans, invoicing, and bill payment. The removal of these tasks, which used to be manual, frees up our kitchen owners to focus on increasing their number of renters, incubating clients and providing innovative services and programs.

Q: How do you see the cottage food industry space evolving over the next 5 to 10 years?

A: This may ruffle some people’s feathers, but I’m of the belief that the home kitchen is not equipped for growing a food business, specifically when it comes to scalability and consistency. The commercial kitchen, which is subject to safety standards pertaining to food and energy usage, is an important part of maintaining public health. That said, the cottage industry plays an important role for hobbyists following their passion for food and for budding food entrepreneurs testing recipes and getting direct feedback from consumers.

Like the rise in co-working spaces, I predict a rise in “co-cooking”  community-based commercial kitchen spaces. Paying a monthly membership fee to access a commercial kitchen that covers cleaning, water, waste, electricity and equipment repairs definitely takes a lot of stress out of the mix for food producers. With the rise in automation and the total cost of production of professionally-made food, the domestic kitchen may be becoming obsolete. I see co-cooking, community, and shared-use kitchens as the meeting places, gyms, and yoga studios of the future.

Q: What’s one of the most unique/bizarre foods you’ve seen made in one of The Food Corridor’s shared kitchen spaces?

A: Well, we are based in Colorado, so we see our share of marijuana or CBD inspired products — we are at a pretty high elevation after all. Pet foods seems to be super popular (you first-world dogs, you!) and of course, the sustainable and insect protein companies seem to also be making a go at it. I tend to get excited about the “delivery only” and “pop-up restaurant” concepts that we see taking hold.

Oh, and we do collect a list of creative food company names that we share across our team. Our favorites include: Fast and Curryous, Pride Enjoy, Subtle Tea, For Goodness Cakes, and Bruce Tea (to name a few)! There is not a lack of creativity in the food industry. That’s why we like it here.

Thanks, Ashley! If you want to see her speak more about the future of the cottage food industry and commercial kitchens, make sure to get your tickets to the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle on October 8-9th.

Three Strategies Companies Are Using to Tackle Produce Waste in the Supply Chain

You’ve probably heard the widely-quoted factoid that the majority of food waste happens in the home. From grocery over-purchasing to over-zealous expiration dates to just plain forgetting to cook that cabbage you bought, it’s not exactly a surprise that the kitchen is where a lot of needless wastage takes place. Consequently, there are quite a few companies tackling home food waste, from Ovie’s freshness-tracking container tags to Mimica’s bumpy food labels.

So where does the rest of our food waste occur? According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, when it comes to fresh produce (the most wasted foods, at least in industrialized countries), almost 1/3 happens along the supply chain. From lack of coordination and communication to inconsistent quality standardization, there are plenty of things that need to go right to get fresh food from A to B without it spoiling — and that doesn’t always happen.

However, there are a few tools and strategies that companies are using to try and reduce food waste at various points along the supply chain. Here are three to watch:

Blockchain

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard of blockchain. (Actually, they might have subterranean blockchain by now, too.) But you might not know that quite a few companies are leveraging blockchain to fight food waste along the supply chain — or are at least thinking about it.

Estonian startup Delicia uses blockchain to create a platform from which retailers can sell nearly-expired food to local restaurants or consumers. Ripe.io is working to forge a “Blockchain for Food,” creating transparency at each step of the food system. Food traceability company FoodLogiQ recently launched an innovation lab which will implement blockchain pilot programs with their partners, who include Tyson Foods and Subway.

Blockchain fights supply chain food waste in a few ways: it helps companies keep track of all the touch points their product has passed through, from farm to shipping truck to retail shelf or restaurant cooler. So if a consumer gets sick from contaminated spinach, suppliers can track exactly which shipment of spinach from which farm caused the problem and dispose of it — without throwing away every bag and bunch in the store. It can also help restaurants and grocery stores track how much food they throw out, so they can adjust their order accordingly.

I don’t want to blow things out of proportion: it’s still early days for blockchain. And even if the public ledger software works exactly as it’s supposed to, it still places a lot of trust and power in each of the players that interact with a tomato as it passes from the farm to the grocery store. But it’s definitely a tool worth exploring.

 

It’s Fresh! sheets at work.

Hands On

Some companies are tackling food waste along the supply chain by turning to the food itself. Apeel creates non-toxic protective barriers for fruits and vegetables, made out of crops left behind in farm fields. With the coating, produce can stay fresh for nearly twice as long — which means less spoilage en route to retailers. Their tech is already being tested on avocados in some Costcos, and I fully expect to see it grow to more locations and perishables soon.

Across the pond, It’s Fresh! has a product which also extends produce life. The company, which started in 2010, makes sheets which absorb ethylene, the hormone which makes fruit and vegetables rot. The sheets can be cut to fit produce-packed palettes or small containers on grocery shelves. According to Simon Lee, one of the founders of It’s Fresh!, their sheets can extend produce life by 1-4 days in the home, and 1-4 weeks in transit. They’re working to integrate their technology into the film around the produce itself, so they can reduce packaging waste as well as food spoilage.

 

AI & Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been playing a growing a role in the food system, from robotic food delivery vehicles to dairy farming. (If you’re curious about how AI is affecting food startups, check out our podcast The Spoon: Automat.)

So it’s no surprise that companies are leveraging AI to reduce waste along the food supply chain. Agshift harnesses computer vision and machine learning to standardize produce quality ratings. By taking objective human ratings out of the equation, vendors and buyers don’t waste time or valuable produce over quality disputes, which can lead to canceled orders and unintended food waste.

In the same vein, Intello is using a combination of AI and computer vision to generate produce ratings. Their goal is more to help farmers get a fair price for their crops, but the outcome is the same; clear, objective quality assessment for fruit and veg means less bickering, fewer dissatisfied customers, and less overall wastage.

Walmart’s Eden technology harnesses machine learning to quantify freshness, so it can divert soon-to-expire produce to nearby stores and make sure it gets eaten before it’s past its prime.

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None of these technologies is a cure-all in and of itself. And when it comes to food waste along the supply chain, we definitely still have a long way to go. But these three areas are definitely ones to keep an eye on — and, when combined, can hopefully reduce the amount of produce destined for the landfill.

TimberFish Launches IndieGoGo to Raise Trout on Brewery Waste and Wood Chips

It’s no secret that wild-caught seafood is fraught, what with its declining supply and associations with inhumane labor practices. Many tout farmed fish as a more ethical and sustainable (not to mention cheaper) way to satisfy our seafood cravings, which is why aquaculture is the fastest growing food-producing sector. In fact, as of 2016, aquaculture produced half of all fish for human consumption.

While aquaculture doesn’t lead to overfishing of limited ocean resources, it can have other unsavory consequences. Farmed fish produce a lot of waste (AKA fish poop), and can sometimes cause chemicals to leak into our drinking water.

And then there’s the fish food. Often, farmed fish are fed pellets of corn, soy, unwanted chicken parts, or even fish meal. Sometimes people even catch smaller, less popular fish from the ocean and grind them up to feed their farmed bretheren. Obviously, it takes a lot of energy and environmental resources to create all this fish food, and even more to filter out waste from fish enclosures.

TimberFish Technologies‘ eponymous technology promises to offer a more palatable alternative to aquaculture. The company launched in 2008 and have so far raised or won $260K, which they used to build a test facility at Five & 20 Spirits & Brewing facility in Westfield New York.

There, they feed their fish not with animal parts or corn, but with a combination of nutrient-rich wastewater from food processors (such as breweries, distilleries, and wineries) and woodchips. Microbes grow on the woodchips, small invertebrates (like worms and snails) eat the microbes, and the fish eat the invertebrates. The fish poop is grub for the microbes, and the whole cycle starts again.

In addition to seafood, the TimberFish system’s only outputs are clean water and spent wood chips, which can be used as a biofuel or soil supplement. Another benefit is that TimberFish can build their aquaculture farms close to cities, shortening the supply chain and guaranteeing fresher fish.

This is obviously not as idyllic as plucking salmon from the Alaskan seas or catching trout in a mountain stream, but, as aquaculture operations go, it’s not bad. And it’s certainly cost-efficient; diverting a waste product to make it profitable.

This week TimberFish Technologies launched an IndieGoGo campaign to raise funds for their no-waste, sustainable aquaculture system. If they reach their $10,000 goal, they’ll use the funds to design plans for a larger commercial facility, which they estimate could produce 2 to 3 million pounds of fish per year.

Investment has been slow so far, but personally I hope TimberFish gets the funds it needs to keep swimming along towards its goal of creating a more sustainable agriculture.

If you’re in New England and want to learn more about blue tech and sustainable seafood, join us for our next food tech meetup in Providence, RI on July 17th!

Suggestic Experiments with Augmented Reality to Help You Stick to Your Diet Plan

What if you could wave your phone over a restaurant menu and see “through” the descriptions, instantly assessing which dishes are best (and worst) for you to eat?

That’s exactly what Bay Area startup Suggestic is working on. When users first open the free app, they set up their goals (lose weight, have more energy) and dietary preferences or restrictions (vegetarian, no dairy, allergic to peanuts). The app then recommends a series of dietary plans to match those preferences and goals, such as Anti-Inflammation or Low-Carb Mediterranean.

After selecting your plan, the app will create weekly meal plans with 3 to 4 recipes per day. “All recipes are found via machine learning,” Suggestic’s co-founder Shai Rozen told me over the phone. In fact, after they started the company four years ago, they spent the first year and a half applying for patents (which are currently pending) around their recipe-curating analytics. For a $100 annual fee, Premium members get access to food recommendations and recipes from selected health influencers. Users can turn their weekly meal plan into a dynamic grocery list, and Rozen said they’re working on making it shoppable.

Suggestic also provides videos and tasks to keep you on-track with your selected health program, a chatbot to guide you through meal and restaurant selection, plus a place for users to log their sleep quality and water intake. Its restaurant feature uses algorithms to analyze menu items at over 500,000 restaurants in the U.S., and will give each dish a score 1-10, depending on how well it’ll fit into your chosen diet. They’re also working on integrating genetic insight with DNA sequencing service Helix.

But the coolest part isn’t what they already offer — it’s what they’re working on. Suggestic is currently beta testing an augmented reality (AR) feature that allows users to point their phone camera at a menu and see color-coded indications of which dishes are best for their diet. “Then you can interact with the menu as if you were RoboCop or Terminator,” said Rozen. As of now, this service is available in 10% of the restaurants Suggestic covers.

It’s a little further out, but Suggestic is also developing tech to integrate AR into their grocery shopping service. So if you pick up a bag of gluten-free crackers and want to see how well it fits into your diet, all you’d have to do is bring out your smartphone and Terminator it.

The startup currently has a staff of around 20. Rozen told me that they have raised “around $3 million” over two funding rounds. The app launched about two months ago and has roughly 20,000 downloads.

AR is starting to pop up in more and more places throughout the food system. Huxley is combining AR, AI and machine learning to help increase indoor agricultural outputs. Big Food companies like Campbell’s are also exploring AR as a way to engage consumers from the grocery store to guided cooking, as is Williams Sonoma. Chinese startup Coohobo is using AR to make the grocery shopping experience easier and more social. App Waygo translates menus around the world into English, complete with pictures. And down the road, virtual reality (VR) in nutrition, cooking, and grocery shopping will be pretty common, too.

At the end of the day, Suggestic might be trying to do too much — they’ve got the buzzwords down (algorithms, AI, etc.), but combining them into a useful tool that can actually enable longterm healthy lifestyle changes will be a big lift.

That said, dining out can be a minefield for people with specialized diets or food restrictions; if Suggestic can nail the augmented reality aspect of their app and expand it to more restaurants, that could have huge benefits for those trying to watch what they eat.

 

Zach Ware Steps Up as New CEO of Pilotworks

Today The Spoon discovered that Pilotworks co-founder Nick Devane has left his role as CEO of the company and transitioned into a strategic role. Former COO Zach Ware has taken over position of CEO.

The startup, headquartered in Brooklyn, offers rent-by-the-hour kitchen space for budding food entrepreneurs, and also gives its members access to mentorship opportunities and networking events. It has facilities in Brooklyn, Chicago, Portland (ME), Newark, Dallas, and Providence. Last December, the company received $13 million in expansion capital.

Devane previously told Jennifer Marston of the Spoon that he considered Pilotworks “the AWS [Amazon Web Services] of food” because of their pay-as-you-go approach to all-included kitchen rental.

Ware comes to Pilotworks after working at the Republic of Tea, Zappos, and investment fund VTF Capital. Devane reportedly asked Ware to join Pilotworks as COO in February after Ware spent a week consulting on the company. Devane had served as CEO since co-founding the company in 2016, and will now transition to “a new role focusing on long-term creative and strategic initiatives,” according to a statement we requested from Pilotworks.

 

Full statement here:

“As Pilotworks continues to grow and expand our commercial kitchens and services for food entrepreneurs and business of any size, we’re pleased to announce Zach Ware as CEO. Mr. Ware brings an extensive record of operations with previous leadership roles at The Republic of Tea, Zappos, and as Pilotworks’ COO. Nick Devane who has served as Pilotworks CEO since co-founding the company will transition to a new role focusing on long-term creative and strategic initiatives.”

We’ll be hosting a free food tech meetup at Pilotworks Providence on July 17th! The event will be focused on sustainable seafood; if you’re in the Providence/Boston area, we’d love to see you there.

Filtru is a One-Stop App for Coffee Obsessives (Or Aspiring Obsessives)

I am a self-admitted coffee snob, but I’m fully aware that most people don’t want to put the time and effort into the minute measuring, timing, and coordination that it takes to make a top-notch cup of joe.

However, if you are one of those people — or want to become one — Filtru was made for you. The Manchester, U.K.-based startup has a mobile app which walks users step-by-step through the coffee brewing process.

Founder (and sole employee) Bobby Bobak came up with the idea for Filtru shortly after he got an Apple Watch. A developer by day, he was also a serious coffee nerd, and wanted to create a step by step timer which would tap you on your wrist to indicate when to stir and pour in the brewing process. He launched the app in early 2016.

When you open the Filtru app you’re greeted with nine coffee brewing methods, from AeroPress to Chemex to French Press. Each choice leads you to a page with a quick brew guide, including grind size, the weight of coffee needed for a single serving, and water temperature and volume. There’s also a “how to” section so new brewers can figure out how to use that Moka Pot or Kalita Wave.

Once your ingredients are prepped, press the ‘Play’ button to start the timer. The app will walk you through each step of the brewing process, buzzing to indicate when to move onto the next task. “Sort of like being guided by a barista,” Bobak explained to me over the phone.

If you want to take it up a notch, Filtru also syncs with three bluetooth-enabled scales (with a fourth option in the works) to guide your brew with even more detail — telling when you’re pouring too fast, too slow, or at just the right rate. Which seems like a small detail, but my barista training taught me that water flow rate can actually make a noticeable difference to your end cup.

You may be thinking: “Whoa, this is way more detail than I ever want to think about when making coffee.” And if that’s the case, let’s be clear: Filtru is probably not for you. I should also say that it really doesn’t make sense to use Filtru if you don’t have a kitchen scale, since all the steps are indicated in weight. (Side note: you should get a kitchen scale — they’re inexpensive and make baking such a breeze.)

But if you are looking to up your coffee game, Filtru is a nice option that provides a lot of hand-holding — and clean, attractive graphics — along the way. Novice brewers can stick to the brew “recipes” already on the app, and experienced coffee nerds can take matters into their own hands and record their specialized brew methods, then share them on the app or social media. Eventually, Bobak wants Filtru to have a community library of brew recipes for anyone to peruse and try for themselves.

Bobak is also exploring ways to add augmented reality (AR) elements to Filtru to help users assemble their new coffee makers, and leverage machine learning to automatically record new brew recipes through scale data. 

At the moment, Filtru is free to use, and Bobak told me that he’s looking at the possibility of monetizing the app by integrating a shop aspect. Users would have the option buy the various coffee makers, filter papers, and even coffee beans through a single tap, and Filtru would get a cut of every product sold through the app. 

In many ways, Filtru is similar to other brew recipe-recording apps, most notably Acaia Coffee, which also syncs to bluetooth-enabled scales. But Acaia only works with its own coffee scales, and is meant to act as a platform for coffee obsessives to record and share their recipes. Filtru, on the other hand, has a wider audience appeal. According to Bobak, roughly half of its users opt to use the pre-set coffee brew recipes, which he takes to indicate that they’re new(er) to the high-tech homebrew game.

Filtru has over 3,000 monthly active users and has been downloaded about 27,000 times since it launched. Currently, it’s only available for iPhone’s OS, but Bobak said there was an Android version in the works.

When Bobak developed Filtru, he wanted to explore one thing: “How can tech improve the end user experience of coffee?” This is a question a lot of companies we’ve covered on the Spoon — an IoT-enabled coffee brewer, a countertop coffee bean roaster, and an electric vacuum brewing system,  among others — are trying to answer.

Filtru may have a niche audience, but it’s free, user-friendly, and versatile; plus it doesn’t take up any counter space. I for one tried it and ended up with a pretty great cup of coffee. While I don’t think I’ll use it every single morning, it was super accessible and easy to figure out. Next time I’m brewing coffee with an unfamiliar tool — I see you, moka pot — I’ll definitely use Filtru as my guide.

This coffee brought to you by Filtru!

 

Finless Foods Raises $3.5 Million for Cultured Bluefin Tuna

Today cultured seafood company Finless Foods CEO & Co-founder Mike Selden wrote a piece on Medium announcing that they had closed a $3.5 million seed round. The round was led by Draper Associates, with participation from Softmatter VC, Blue Horizon, Hemisphere Ventures, Yakumi Investment and more.

In the piece, Selden wrote that this invesment would bring them “to the end of our initial R&D phase,” and give them “the tools necessary to move into production pending the closing of a Series A.”

Finless Foods uses cellular biology to grow fish (and, eventually, other seafood) in bioreactors. They’re doing similar work to Memphis Meats or JUST Foods, but are focused on fish instead of meat. Wild Type is another startup using cellular agriculture to develop seafood (specifically salmon) grown outside the animal, and similarly raised $3.5 million a few months ago.

The company got its start in the legendary IndieBio accelerator program in 2017, where they created the first fish product grown in a lab. They later got investment from Hatch, a Norwegian aquaculture accelerator, as well as Hi-Food, an Italian company focused on sustainability in food.

Their first product will be bluefin tuna, a species which is threatened with overfishing. They plan to bring it to market by the end of 2019 — and with this funding, they just got a lot closer to that goal.