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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Nestlé is the Latest CPG Company to Launch a Food & Beverage Accelerator

Nestlé is the latest mega food company to get in on the food & beverage accelerator movement.

Today the Swiss company announced that it was launching an R&D accelerator program in Lausanne, Switzerland. This is the first internal accelerator for Nestlé, who previously partnered with Rabobank and Rocketspace to create the Terra Food + Agtech Accelerator program in 2017.

In the press release, Nestlé was pretty vague on the details. We don’t know what type of startups or individuals they’re targeting, how many have been accepted, or how often the cohorts will cycle through. The release lists “Nestlé scientists, students, and start-ups,” so presumably it will be a pretty diverse mixture of participants.

However, we do know a few key things about the program. Accepted individuals and groups will get access to Nestlé’s R&D labs, kitchens, equipment, and expertise, as well as some office space. The accelerator will kick off before the end of 2019.

Nestlé joins an ever-growing group of big CPG companies who are launching accelerators to sniff out new, trendy brands. Chobani, General Mills, Kraft-Heinz, and Pepsi-Co are just a few that have done so over the past year. It’s a smart move: accelerators are a relatively low-touch way to give corporations access to agile, innovative companies, which they can either acquire or partner with for image, product and marketing purposes.

My colleague, Jenn Marston, predicted we’d see even more of these programs from Big Food in 2019. It seems like she was right.

These 10 Food Tech Startups from Y Combinator’s Latest Cohort are Ones to Watch

If you want a hint about what cool new startups and innovations are coming around the corner, look to Y Combinator. Twice a year, the accelerator, which has helped launch tech giants like AirBnB and DropBox, invests money and time to mentor a cohort of young startups.

With over 200 companies, the Y Combinator’s recently-announced Winter 2019 class is its largest yet. And we’re pleased to note that the group contains quite a few food tech startups. We’ve sifted through the list to highlight the top 10 companies we think are ones to watch.

Shef

A few months ago California passed AB-626, opening up a new market for the sale of home-cooked food. Dishdivvy was the first to jump on this opportunity, connecting Southern California home cooks with hungry diners, but clearly it’s not the only startup realizing the opportunity here. Shef is a new service that lets Bay Area-ites order refrigerated meals made by nearby home cooks, which are delivered to their door. Hungry folks can order four, eight, or twelve meals per week, which cost between $6.50 and $7.50 a meal.

Habitat Logistics

Habitat Logistics is a delivery-only service that helps restaurants get online orders to their customers. The company promises to take a lower commission than other aggregation/delivery services, like GrubHub or Postmates, while also dealing with staffing issues and responding to customer complaints.

Photo: Taali Foods.

Taali Foods

Taali foods is a new natural snacking company. The company’s first product, Water Lily Pops, is a popcorn-like snack made of popped water lily seeds. The snacks come in flavors like Tangy Turmeric and Sriracha Spice, and have significantly less fat and calories than regular popcorn. I sampled some Water Lily pops while at the Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco this winter, and I have to say, they were pretty tasty.

Shiok Meats

Shiok Meats, the Sinapore-based startup that is making cell-based shrimp and other crustaceans, is the first cultured meat company to participate in Y Combinator. Co-founder Dr. Sandhya Sriram told The Spoon that they’re planning to roll out their products in Southeast Asia, and expect to have their first cell-based product to market in three to five years.

Maitian AI

Based in Sinapore, Maitian AI makes high-tech vending machines that it calls “autonomous stores.” Hungry people download Maitian’s app and scan a QR code on their phone to unlock the store’s doors. They can pick up and examine the selection of fresh products (yogurt, salads, etc.) before choosing what they want, after which they shut the door and are charged for their selections. The company doesn’t disclose which technology they use to track customer selections, but the whole operation sounds a heck of a lot like Byte Foods. Maitian AI currently has two stores operating in a WeWork in Singapore.

Bensen

Restaurants can license Bensen technology to let customers place their orders via voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant. Restaurant partners upload their menu to Bensen, which builds out a voice ordering interface. The voice technology can be used in drive-thrus (like Valyant AI and Clinc are already doing), or even on restaurants’ apps or website.

Eclipse Foods

Eclipse Foods makes plant-based dairy products that it claims are indistinguishable from their animal dairy counterparts. With co-founders Thomas Bowman from JUST (who spoke at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit) and Aylon Steinhart of the Good Food Institute, Eclipse Foods has quite the plant-based pedigree. Details are scant on what exactly Eclipse’s first product will be, but the team told Techcrunch that it would debut in pilots with SF-based Wise Sons deli and Humphrey Slocombe ice cream.

Taobotics

Startup Taobotics makes a self-driving robot that roves around supermarkets to help retail brands promote their products by putting them on their circular, tiered shelves. To me this sounds kind of annoying, but there’s no denying that shoppers are more prone to buy something when it’s right in front of them (damn you, Twix bars at checkout). Taobotics is currently operating in Chinese grocery stores and, according to Techcrunch, recently closed a Letter of Intent for 1,000 retail robots.

Releaf

Releaf is developing machines to help affordably scale the processing of raw food materials in Africa. In their website, the company claims that food factories are operating under-capacity because they can’t secure enough consistent, high-quality raw food ingredients. The company didn’t give specifics on how they will scale to supply better raw materials, but the website stated that they’ll start by tackling the Nigerian crude vegetable oil industry.

Bottomless

There’s no worse feeling than getting ready to brew a pot of morning coffee and realizing you’re out of beans. Startup Bottomless makes a connected scale which, when placed under a bag of coffee beans/grounds, tracks users’ coffee supply and re-orders when they’re about to run out of joe. Bottomless users get an alert 12-24 hours before the system reorders, and can opt to get the same bag every time or switch it up. In addition to the bag of coffee, users also pay a shipping fee and a membership fee.

Starbucks Invests $100M Into Food and Retail Startup Venture

Starbucks announced today it will invest $100 million in Valor Siren Ventures, a new venture fund from Valor Equity Partners. Valor Siren Ventures will serve as an incubator for food and retail tech startups. According to a press release, the investment is the first of its kind for Starbucks.

The incubator will focus on companies developing technologies and products related to food and retail. Valor Equity Partners counts Eatsa, Fooda, and Wow Bao among its portfolio companies, which is to say it’s had its hands in foodtech for some time now. (Side note: Valor was also an early-stage investor in Tesla.)

In addition to the investment from Starbucks, the new fund will, according to the press release, seek an additional $300 million “in the coming months” from other partners. Specific companies for the incubator have not yet been named, nor did the press release specify what areas of foodtech the new fund will support. Based on what’s already in Valor’s portfolio, however, those areas could range from data analytics to managing cryptocurrency to providing front- and back-of-house systems for restaurants. Valor also has a few investments in clean energy, a sector Starbucks is involved with through its Greener Stores initiative. Starbucks also just announced it is trialing greener packaging in select locations, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a company related to that pop up in the new incubator.

The investment in the Valor fund will give Starbucks access to new tech that could potentially be used for both food and retail aspects of Starbucks stores. Starbucks said in the release it will explore commercial partnerships with companies from the new incubator, with CEO Kevin Johnson adding, “We believe that innovative ideas are fuel for the future, and we continue to build on this heritage inside our company across beverage, experiential retail, and our digital flywheel.”

Starbucks is one more name on a growing list of food and beverage brands investing in young companies via incubators and accelerators. Land O’ Lakes, Tyson Foods, and Chobani are among the major CPGs looking to inject their companies with some startup blood. Coca-Cola has its Venturing and Emerging Brands (VEB) program, as does Chipotle.

FoodBoss, the Price/Time Comparison Tool for Food Delivery, Raises $2M

This week FoodBoss, the food delivery search engine formerly known as Bootler, announced that it had raised over $2 million in funding. The venture round was led by Cleveland Avenue, a food-focused VC firm founded by the former CEO of McDonald’s, Don Thompson.

Founded in 2016, the Chicago-based startup is basically an aggregator of food delivery services. Users can go to the FoodBoss website or its mobile app and search through various delivery options, like Uber Eats and Caviar, to determine which will deliver food fastest and with the smallest delivery fee. As ChicagoInno points out, this makes the company essentially Kayak for food delivery.

Hungry deal-seekers can either enter their address or search by restaurant name or cuisine (e.g. “McDonald’s” or “Indian food”) and FoodBoss will aggregate all available information on price and live estimated wait time from delivery services to find the “best” deal. It doesn’t just list third-party delivery services (Caviar, etc.), but also restaurants that have their own internal ordering and delivery.

Screenshot from FoodBoss website.

FoodBoss currently serves roughly 50 cities and aggregates info from over 50,000 restaurants. According to a company blog post, FoodBoss will use the new funds to expand to more cities.

With so many third-party food delivery services out there, a company like FoodBoss makes a lot of sense. People don’t have any loyalty to a particular food delivery company (yet), like they might to a certain local restaurant or fast-food chain (Chipotle 4 lyfe).

However, there are a couple of risks and downsides with FoodBoss’ business model. First of all, the company currently only has partnerships with four food delivery services: UberEats, Postmates, Caviar, and Delivery.com. That leaves out significant players like DoorDash, Grubhub, and smaller local food delivery services (e.g. Waitr), meaning that users aren’t getting a complete picture of every possible option before they order.

FoodBoss is also reliant on its delivery service partners for its data. So while the company might be able to aggregate freely from participating third-party delivery sites now, if UberEats doesn’t like their rankings and cuts them off down the road, FoodBoss could lose their relevance fast.

But for now, FoodBoss makes it easier to choose which service will save you a few precious dollars and minutes. Which, admittedly, is a super first-world thing to think about. But as food delivery becomes more and more omnipresent, those dollars and minutes could add up.

RISE Brewing Co. Blends 3 Major Coffee Trends into One Canned Latté

Cold brew is cool. Oat milk is hot (in the metaphorical sense). Put them together, add some nitrogen, and you’ve got the buzzy concoction that is Rise Brewing Co’s nitro cold brew cans.

Founded in 2014 in New York City, Rise Brewing Co. was originally a few friends who started hawking kegs of nitro cold brew — that is, cold brewed coffee charged with nitrogen to make it rich and creamy, like Guinness — to local restaurants. Soon they started rolling out the kegs into office kitchens, and in 2016 started canning their brews and selling them through retailers along the East Coast. In May of this year they started selling their cans via Amazon.

According to COO Melissa Kalimov, Rise Brewing Co. is the U.S.’s first shelf-stable nitro cold brew. The cans have a widget at the bottom very similar to the one in a Guinness can, which replicates the nitro beer experience (and gives you the *crack* — hisssssss sound when you pop the top). See the video below for the full sound experience. (Apologies for the low quality, I took the video one-handed.)

Cold brew has also been experiencing a boom these past few years: it has more caffeine and less acid than hot coffee, so it gives you a stronger buzz and less of a stomachache. From 2015 to 2017, cold brew sales grew by a whopping 370% to $38.1 million.

And while products like the Gravity Cold Brewer, the Dash Cold Brew Coffee Maker, and the PicoBrew Z Series let you make your own cold brew at home, adding nitro to the mix is outside most home barista’s skillset. Nitro certainly isn’t necessary to get the cold brew buzz, but it is pretty tasty: it’s smooth, creamy, and has a frothy head — sort of like iced coffee meets Guinness. Many coffee shops have hopped on the nitro trend, including Starbucks, who put nitro cold brew on tap in 2015.

In addition to their original black brew, Rise Brewing Co. also has a few more adventurous flavors. Last summer they launched two new cold brew options, one mixed with lemonade and the other blood orange juice. In August of this year, the company launched their nitro latté line, with both traditional and oat milk options. “With so many cold brew coffee makers coming into the space, we wanted to show ourselves as innovators,” said Rise co-founder and CEO Grant Gyesky.

Photo: Specialty Coffee Association/Square.

Bringing oat milk into the mix was a smart choice for Rise Brewing Co.. The 2018 Square Coffee Report released last month showed that oat milk is the third most popular alternative milk in the U.S., but that could soon change — sales have increased by 425 percent since June 2017. Oat milk also has less separation and, in this ex-barista’s opinion, goes better with coffee than almond or soy milk. Plus, it won’t affect people with nut or soy allergies.

I had the opportunity to try the brew out for myself and let me tell you, it’s pretty darn good. There’s a distinct oatmeal flavor to the oat milk latte, but I actually liked it — and as someone who’s lactose intolerant, I could drink it without a stomachache. (I’d recommend skipping the more adventurous Lemon and Blood Orange cold brew, however.) The one problem is that it’s almost too easy to drink: the creaminess makes it go down smooth, so you can end up drinking one super-fast and not realize it until the jitters kicked in.

Rise cold brew cans retail from $2.99 to $3.49, which is cheaper than a cold brew from your local coffee spot (at least in urban areas). Add the portability aspect — and the fact that you don’t need to keep them chilled — and Rise Brewing Co. is a great option for caffeinating on the go, or keeping on hand for the mid-afternoon office lull.

Apparently, other people think so, too. The company raised $2.3 million in July of this year, bringing their total funding to $4.9 million. Let’s see if they can keep milking the coffee trends.

Wasteless Grabs $2 Million, Dynamic Food Pricing Algorithm Combats Food Waste

This week Israeli startup Wasteless raised a $2 million Series A round, led by Slingshot Ventures with participation from several angel investors (h/t Agfunder). The company closed a $400,000 seed round in 2017, which, with their new capital, brings their total funds raised to $2.6 million.

Founded in 2016, Wasteless fights food waste on the retail side using a dynamic pricing algorithm. Using machine learning, Wasteless prices products in real time based on variables including expiration date, brand popularity, seasonal popularity, and more. The sooner a food will expire, the lower the price dips. Adjusted prices are displayed on electronic shelf labels which also show the product’s original price and expiration date, or online for e-commerce.

Employees can scan incoming cases of goods with an Android smartphone or a PDA barcode scanner. Wasteless’ tech then recognizes the expiration date of the product and the number of items in each case and uploads all of that information to their system, which syncs with both the electronic price displays and the retailer’s PoS system. (If the barcode is missing, the employee can scan one of the items in the case and enter the expiration date manually.) All of that information can be accessed via the Wasteless mobile app, which retailers can integrate into their own inventory tracking platform.

Reduced pricing for soon-to-expire products is nothing new in the grocery world. Many supermarkets offer a section of blanket discounted baked goods or prepared foods at the end of the day. But by bringing tech into the equation, Wasteless can theoretically fine-tune all prices to optimize sales, saving money for the retailer while reducing the amount of food it throws away.

Wasteless’ technology is a pretty strong win-win. Grocery stores can push more product and increase revenue while also cutting down on food waste. And many need some serious help in this arena: this April, the Center for Biological Diversity and the “Ugly” Fruit and Veg Campaign released a report grading how the 10 largest U.S. supermarkets managed their food waste, and let’s just say nobody was headed for valedictorian. Wastless could be a big help to get up these grades.

That is, if they can make it easy enough for widespread implementation. With different stores using different barcodes, inventory management systems, and PoS systems, it could be a big lift for Wasteless to manage onboarding all the different partners and training employees on how to use the new technology. Each store will also have to attach the electronic labels to the shelves in front of all products, which takes time and might require maintenance.

Thus far, Wasteless has piloted its technology at one Madrid location of a Spanish grocery store. With their new funding the startup is establishing New York headquarters, which will join its Tel Aviv and Amsterdam offices.

MyFavorEats Lets You Customize Recipes to Your Likes and Your Kitchen

One of the biggest themes we hear about in the future of recipes is the ability to fully customize recipes to accommodate allergies, dietary needs, and plain old dislikes. (Sorry, olives!)

MyFavorEats, one of the 13 companies pitching at the Startup Showcase for the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) next week, is working to make recipes modular, so home cooks can easily swap out ingredients or customize them to their particular appliances. Read our Q&A with co-founder Orly Rapaport to learn a little more about how MyFavorEats is leveraging AI to transform the way we interact with recipes forever, then get your tickets to see her pitch live at SKS next week!

The Spoon: First thing’s first: give us your 15-second elevator pitch.
MyFavorEats: We use AI to transform online linear text recipes into a machine-readable, easily customizable format. Users can easily swap ingredients and personalize meals to their particular dietary preferences, and adapt recipes to their new kitchen appliances.

What inspired you to create Myfavoreats?
I am a home cook and a software engineer. I like to cook and to experiment with innovative gadgets in the kitchen. I realized the need for a tool that would help me tweak recipes to meet various dietary needs and to easily adapt recipes to my new kitchen appliances.

What’s the most challenging part of getting a food tech startup off the ground?
Food and kitchen digitization opens up a new world of cooking experience. This is a new domain that is still under development, being pushed by startups as well as big enterprises. With various stakeholders’ involvement, it is quite clear that standardization and technological alignment are needed to ensure a holistic scalable user experience.

How will Myfavoreats change the day-to-day life of its users?
MyFavorEats will give home-cooks the flexibility to personalize their favorite recipes. It would help recipe publishers to automatically upgrade their linear text recipe sites into a smart, revenue-generating format. It would provide kitchen appliance manufacturers a tool for automated scalable recipe generator.

What’s next for Myfavoreats?
We are now focused on launching pilots together with recipe publishers and appliance manufacturers.

Thanks, Orly! See her pitch live onstage at the Smart Kitchen Summit next week — tickets still available. 

Meatable Claims to Hold the Key to Scalable Cultured Meat In a Single Cell

Meatable, a new startup creating cell-based meat, claims it will be able to change the world with a single cell. It’s a tagline, sure, but it might also be true. The Netherlands-based company works with pluripotent cells to create cultured meat quickly and without a need for fetal bovine serum (FBS).

They’re not the only ones who believe in their potential. Last month the startup, which was founded in early 2018, raised a $3.5 million seed round led by BlueYard Capital, with participation from Atlantic Food Labs, Backed VC, and angel investors.

Pluripotent stem cells are superior to other stem cells (which cultured meat companies have been using up until now) for two reasons: versatility and speed.

A muscle stem cell can only ever proliferate to create muscle, and a fat stem cell can only be fat. Pluripotent cells, however, can transform into whatever type of cell the scientist chooses. “They’re very malleable, with a high proliferation capacity,” Meatable CTO Daan Luining explained to me over the phone. “Like a blank slate.” Before Meatable, Luining cut his teeth with Dr. Mark Post, creator the first cultured burger, and spent time at New Harvest, an NGO which finances research into cell-based meat.

Pluripotent cells also divide 2 to 2.5 times faster than non-pluripotent cells, proliferating to create a burger-sized amount of meat in just three weeks. “You have to wait three years to raise a cow,” said Luining.

Significantly, Pluripotent cells require minimal animal intervention. Instead of gathering a tissue sample from a living animal, which is what most cultured meat companies are doing, Meatable scientists collect blood from the clipped umbilical cord of a just-birthed calf then filter it to harvest the special cells.

Perhaps most importantly, they don’t rely on fetal bovine serum (FBS), the controversial media many startups making cell-based meat take from the necks of baby cows in slaughterhouses and use to grow their product. But FBS is expensive and, well, requires animals to be killed. “FBS defeats the purpose of cell-based meat,” said Meatable CEO Krijn De Nood.

The independence from FBS alone would be enough of a reason to get jazzed about pluripotent cells. Add in their speed and agility, however, and they’re Meatable’s ticket to culture meat a lot quicker than their competitors in a completely non-invasive, animal-free way. And make it cheaper, to boot.

Meatable CTO Daan Luining, left; CEO Krijn De Nood, middle; Ruud Out, who runs Meatable lab in Leiden, right.

So why don’t all cultured meat companies take advantage of these miracle cells, you might ask? Up until now, pluripotent cells were difficult to control. However, recently Dr. Mark Kotter, a scientist at the University of Cambridge, collaborated with Dr. Roger Pedersenat of Stanford University to develop a technology which can better manage the cells and dictate their growth. Luining told me that Meatable has an exclusive license to use this tech in cell-based meat production, which should theoretically give them a leg up on the competition.

But first, they’ll have to debut the cells in a taste test. Meatable is currently focusing on beef, but they hope to rapidly expand into pork, poultry, and even liver, for ethical foie gras. They expect to present their first burger to the public in three years, by which time they’ll already have a production process in place so they can quickly scale. Commercial sales are probably five years down the road.

This timeline puts them behind other cell-based meat companies. Memphis Meat and Mosa Meat have stated that they will bring cultured meat fully to market by 2021, and Just Inc. claims it will make the first sale of cell-based meat by the end of this year. But Meatable isn’t necessarily in a rush. “We’re not necessarily going for first; we’re going for best,” Luining told me.

Their timing might actually be an advantage. When cell-based meat products first come to market, it will no doubt take time for consumers to warm up to the idea of chowing down on a hamburger grown in a lab. By the time there’s a hungry demand for cultured meat, Meatable will be there — with cheap, scalable beef — to meet it.

“Eventually, people will choose a product that tastes the best and is the cheapest,” said Luining. “We will have the edge there.”

Chipotle Fires Up New Accelerator for Food Tech Startups

Fast food chain Chipotle is getting into the startup biz: the company announced today that it is launching a new accelerator program for food-related ventures.

Dubbed the Chipotle Aluminaries Project, the seven-month program will be run in partnership with Denver-based non-profit Uncharted and will focus on ventures working on “alternative farming and growing systems, farming and agriculture technology, food waste and recovery, and plant and alternative products.”

Buzzfeed News reports that Chipotle is contributing $200,000 to Uncharted to support the program and will lend its marketing and communication expertise to the ventures. Programs accepted also get some Chipotle perks, like monthly office catering and free burritos.

Chipotle has even recruited celebrity chef (and future Smart Kitchen Summit speaker!) Richard Blais and restauranteur (and member of the Chipotle Board of Directors) Kimball Musk to provide mentorship for those ventures accepted into the program.

The elephant in the room for Chipotle, of course, is their checkered past with food safety, including a recent incident that left hundreds of people in Ohio sick. Though the company didn’t specifically call out food safety among the types of ventures it’s looking for right now, a Chipotle rep told Buzzfeed” “We anticipate that we could see some food safety ventures, no doubt.”

The verticals Chipotle has identified are pretty hot areas — especially food waste and plant-based products. Both of those sectors have seen an influx of venture funding lately.

But food tech accelerators in general are all the rage nowadays. BSH Home Appliances teamed up with TechStars to create one. TechStars has its own Farm to Fork accelerator. A.P. Moller-Marsk partnered with startup accelerator Rockstart for a food waste-focused program. Hatch is an accelerator for aquaculture from Alimentos Ventures. Food Nest should be announcing its first cohort soon. And while technically not an accelerator, Albertsons recently formed a grocery tech venture fund with Greycroft. And there’s even more than those!

Let’s hope there are enough good ideas to fill all those accelerators. If Chipotle is looking for a few good startups to invest in, they should swing by our Startup Showcase at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle in October. And if you’re looking to join the Chipotle accelerator, they start accepting applications on September 12.

Six Intriguing Startups Pitching at FoodBytes! London

FoodBytes! recently announced the 20 emerging startups pitching at their London future of food and agriculture event on September 13th. We’re big fans of events that give new, innovative companies a chance to show off what they’re working — in fact, the Startup Showcase is one of the most popular parts of our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit.

Until then (the next event is October 8-9th, if you’re interested!), here are a few startups pitching at FoodBytes! London that caught our eye:

 

Mimica
This U.K. startup has developed gelatine labels that turn “bumpy” to indicate when fresh food is past its prime. Called “Mimica Touch,” the label is meant to reduce food waste and lead to large-scale behavior change for both consumers and retailers, who as of now have been constrained by overly-cautious expiration dates. When we last reported on Mimica in March, they were piloting their technology with Danish dairy giant Arla Foods and expect to take it mainstream soon.

 

TIPA
Also in the smart packaging space is TIPA. The Israeli company makes bags which look and act like regular plastic, but are fully compostable. Flexible plastic, used as packaging for everything from produce to coffee beans, is traditionally very difficult to recycle because it’s a blend of several materials. However, TIPA has developed a material that is transparent, flexible, and durable, but will break down into compost in 6 months.

 

Photo: Garcon Wines.

Garçon Wines
Sometimes companies make head-slappingly simple innovations that make you wonder why no one ever that of that before. Garçon Wines has done just that: They make full-size flat wine bottles that can fit through your letterbox, so you don’t have to wait at home for your delivery or chase it down at the local Post Office. Their bottles are also made of 100% recycled plastic (no breakage!) and made in the U.K.

 

Photo: Wikimedia

Easilys
French startup Easilys is working to optimizing back of house management for restaurants and reduce food waste. Their purchasing software helps organize ingredient suppliers, store (and calculate the cost of) each recipe, and track food waste, among other services. Altogether, the company claims their software will save restaurants 15% on food costs. Imagine if U.K. restaurant food waste startup Winnow and restaurant software company Ingest.ai had a baby — that would be Easilys.

Connecterra
This Amsterdam-based startup has created an artificial intelligence platform to help dairy farmers manage their cows. Dubbed ‘Ida,’ it learns cows’ behavioral patterns to improve animal welfare, increase dairy farm productivity, and generally make dairy farmers’ lives a lot simpler. You can actually check out a chat we had with their CEO on our food robot podcast, The Spoon: Automat.

 

Photo: Provenance

Provenance
If you’ve ever been around a millennial (or if you are one — hi!) you’ve probably heard the question: “Is it local?” Provenance and sourcing are growing trends in the food world; people are starting to care more about where their food comes from. Which is why the aptly-named U.K. company Provenance has come around at such an opportune time.

Their platform partners with suppliers to gather and verify origin stories for their products and display this information online. They’re also one of several companies experimenting with blockchain to increase supply chain transparency; FoodLogiQ, Ripe.io, and even Nestlé and Alibaba are playing with the emerging technology to tackle food fraud, track product recalls, and increase traceability.

There are plenty more startups presenting at FoodBytes!, and you can see the full lineup here.

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The Startup Showcase applications for Smart Kitchen Summit close today! Keep an eye out over the next few weeks to see which groundbreaking young companies will pitch at SKS in Seattle this October.

Goodr Raises $1.25M to Get Surplus Food From Corporations to Communities in Need

It’s a banner day for food waste startups around the world. Earlier today San Francisco’s Full Harvest and Stockholm, Sweden-based Karma announced major fundraises — now it’s Atlanta’s turn.

A-town’s Goodr just announced that it raised a $1.25 million pre-seed funding round as first reported by Hypepotamus. The raise was led by Precursor Ventures with participation by Trail Mix Ventures, Techstar Ventures, and Halogen Ventures, along with angel investors.

Goodr is an app which coordinates and facilitates the donation of excess food from large enterprises and venues to communities in need through non-profits. Corporate clients post surplus food on the platform and Goodr coordinates a driver to pick it up and take it to its final destination. As of now, they work with clients like the Hartson-Jackfield International Airport, the Georgia World Congress Center, and fancy foodhall Ponce City Market.

Their platform uses blockchain to follow food’s journey from corporate cafeterias to its final destination, so it can tell each client where their surplus food ended up. Through the app, corporations can not only track how much food they’re saving, but also how much they’re saving in tax deductions. So far, the startup has picked up and redistributed close to a million pounds of food.

Across the country in San Francisco, Copia offers a similar service. Their suite of apps help large companies track their food purchasing and consumption, then helps them find non-profits to take their excess food. It also tracks food donations for tax purposes.

Goodr is also working to license out their technology on a SaaS level to big food companies; they’re currently piloting the tech with Campbell’s and are in talks with other food brands. Goodr founder and CEO Jasmine Sparks (see her at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle this October!) said they’re also exploring the potential of using food waste for renewable energy; in fact, one of their recent investors is an alternative energy company.

For now, though, the startup will use their new funds to expand across the country; they’re launching pilots in Chicago, Raleigh and Los Angeles over the next few months. This is the first institutional fundraise for Goodr, which was founded in 2017.

Come see Jasmine Sparks speak more about food waste solutions at the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th! Spots are limited, so register now. 

Lo-Dough is a No-Go for Bread Lovers, But Gives Food for Thought

When something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Such is the case with Lo-Dough, a fat-free, gluten-free, high fiber product that’s meant to be a substitute for bread. With 90 percent fewer carbs than bread and 39 calories per serving (a serving is one 9-inch disc), it’s geared towards the health-conscious and paleo market.

Ben Holden, the Co-founder and Creative Director of Manchester, U.K.-based Lo-Dough, developed the company’s eponymous product in 2015 in his parent’s kitchen. He started commercial production a year ago and now ship to roughly 55,000 customers in 35 countries.

When Holden reached out to see if we would like to sample some of this miracle product, we said… well, sure.

Fast forward a few days: I picked up a box of twenty Lo-Dough discs, sealed in packs of two, from the Post Office. I ripped into one of the packs and tore off a bite. Reader, you guessed it — Lo-Dough was, indeed, too good to be true.

The pasty discs were thin, pliable, and had a texture that put me in mind of building insulation. The flavor? None, that I could discern. The Lo-Dough team says you can enjoy the product straight out of the packet (though I find it hard to imagine anyone chowing down on the flavorless, carboard-like disc on its own), though they push it chiefly as a base for sandwiches, wraps, burritos, and, their personal favorite, pizzas. Which makes sense, since it was pretty darn bland on its own.

Here’s where I think Lo-Dough could be, if not good, then at least not bad. Cover almost anything in tomato sauce and cheese, bake until bubbly, and it will taste, at the very least, passable. (I tried it, and it was.) And while there are certainly other carb-free pizza base options, like cauliflower crust, Lo-Dough does have versatility going for it: it’s flexible and neutral-tasting (read: flavorless) enough to work as well for Italian pizzas as for Mexican burritos and Turkish kebabs.

Which begs the question: If something tastes, at the very best, like nothing, why eat it at all? If you have to smother something in toppings — especially high-calorie ones like cheese and sauces — to make it palatable, is it really healthy?

The answer, I suppose, is that people are creatures of habit who love convenience as much as they love fad diets (hi, Paleo). Lo-Dough is good enough to be a substitute for the non-healthy foods you love, at least when covered with toppings. Most importantly, it can be used interchangeably.

It puts me in mind of other “miracle” healthy foods, like healthy ice cream success story Halo Top. And while I think Halo Top tastes a lot more like regular ice cream than Lo-Dough tastes like bread, they’re both riding the health-food wave.

Lo-Dough “bread” sells exclusively online and has a 6-month shelf life, direct to consumers. It retails for £5 ($6.44) for a two-piece pack, though you can also get 6 pieces for £14 ($18) and 14 for £26 ($33.50). If you’re really sold on the concept, you can also sign up for a monthly subscription service — though if you choose this option, I highly recommend making sure you have plenty of cheese on hand first. You will need it.