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- FoodTech Weekly #237 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #237 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
March 14, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 16 minutes
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#237
Hi there,
What is the modern food system? Why did we build it, and what’s been its impacts on human and planetary health? And how can tech and innovation help to advance another, more sustainable and nourishing food system? I just wrote a piece on this that I think you’ll enjoy (feel free to subscribe to Solvable for more texts like this).
Brought to you by the same robots that stole your job but made you a perfect burger
I was recently interviewed by Green Queen on what drives my interest in the future of food (and much more) — check it out.
This week's rundown:
💶 Vytal bags €14.2M for reusable packaging in takeout and delivery
💰 AgZen harvests $10M for precision spraying that cut chemical use by up to 50%
🐷 Mission Barns gets world-first regulatory clearance for cell-cultivated pork fat
Let's go!
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💬 Conversations
Aquafeed is a $80B market growing about 5% per year. But aquafeed producers and relying on fishmeal and soy protein concentrate as their main source of protein in feeds, and this causes severe pressure on fish stocks and ocean biodiversity. Seaqure labs upcycles food side streams (that would otherwise go to waste) via solid state fermentation into a sustainable mycelium ingredient. To learn more, I recently spoke with Seaqure labs’ CEO, Johan Henriksson, during TechArena in Stockholm — read the full convo here!
Johan Henriksson / Seaqure labs
💰 Funding
🇩🇪 Vytal, which offers a sustainable, reusable packaging system for take-out and delivery (e.g. in restaurants, supermarkets, and canteen operators), has bagged €14.2M ($15.5M) in funding led by Inven Capital and Nrw.Venture and joined by e.g. Emerald Technology Ventures, Grazia Equity, Rubio Impact Ventures, Chi Impact Capital and Kiko.
🇸🇪 Cultivated meat startup Re:meat has closed a €1M ($1.1M) funding round led by 8+ Ventures and joined by family offices and various prominent angel investors. The company will now launch Scandinavia’s first Re:meatery, conceptualized as a meat brewery that will ensure a resilient protein supply for the future.
🏴 Biotech firm Beta Bugs has scooped up £2.1m ($2.7M) in funding led by Tricapital Angels and supported by Scottish Enterprise. The company does selective breeding of high-performance Black Soldier Flies (BSF), which are larger and faster growing, and are sold to large-scale farms that turn BSF into protein and oil. I interviewed Beta Bugs’ founder/CEO Thomas Farrugia for FTW back in Jan 2023.
🇸🇪 Fossil-free fertilizer startup NitroCapt has received an investment from FoodBridge/Novax. The investment follows an announcement from Swedish food companies Axfood and Dafgårds that they’ve signed a takeoff agreement with NitroCapt to produce one million loaves of bread using the company’s green fertilizer (full disclosure: I’m an advisor to NitroCapt).
🇫🇮 SuperGround has reeled in €2.5M ($2.7M) in fresh funding led by Hatch Blue’s Blue Revolution Fund to scale its innovative technology that enables the full utilization of fish, cutting waste in that industry. I interviewed SuperGround’s CEO Jaako Kaminen back in October for FTW.
Jaako Kaminen / SuperGround
🇺🇸 AgZen has banked a $10M Series A, led by DCVC Bio alongside Material Impact. The company enables farmers to precision spray chemicals, optimizing in real-time based on the number of spray droplets that stick to the target plant — thus cutting chemical use by up to 50%.
🇳🇱 Cano-ela has secured €1.6M ($1.75M) from OostNL, Value Factory Ventures, and Ecoseed. The startup is developing a new process that allows companies to extract a wider range of ingredients from seed, helping food companies develop plant-based products using more of the seed’s natural components, and reduce the use of refined ingredients.
🇺🇸 Biotech startup Decibel Bio emerged from stealth with an oversubscribed $12M round from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Future Ventures, Bayer, and Syngenta. Decibel has a proprietary platform that can read and write the plant epigenome, which when done right can help improve things like seed germination, flowering, fruit development, adaptability to droughts, temperatures and pathogen attacks.
🇸🇬 Agros, which offers solar-powered irrigation systems, has brought home $4.25M in Series A funding, co-led by Gaia Impact, Schneider Electric Energy Access Asia, Wavemaker Impact and the Global Innovation Fund.
🇸🇪 Gårdsfisk, which does sustainable land-based fish farming via RAS (recirculating aquaculture system) has landed a SEK 50M ($5M) Series A round, co-led by Hatch Blue’s Blue Revolution Fund and Industrifonden, and backed by Novax and LRF Ventures.
Gårdsfisk
🇸🇪 GlennTex, a spinout from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, has scored a SEK 7.2M ($0.7M) pre-seed round led by Almi Invest and joined by PINC. The company has developed a method using graphene that reduces the need for virgin plastic in packaging incl. for food & bev by up to 30% (fun trivia: The company name is a nod to a popular joke in Sweden that everyone in Gothenburg is called Glenn, stemming from a chant in 1980s football culture).
🇺🇸 AgBioTech startup Quercus Biosolutions emerged from stealth with pre-seed funding from undisclosed investors. The company uses GenAI to rapidly create a new generation of crop protection products.
🎙️ Investment Climate: Charles Christory of Le Fourgon on how to get funded in 2025
This week, Alex Shandrovsky met with Charles Christory, Co-Founder of Le Fourgon, which tackles plastic waste by offering doorstep delivery of groceries, beverages, and hygiene products in reusable packaging. The episode dives into how to handle investor crises, the secrets to running a successful crowdfunding campaign, and the discipline needed to balance fundraising with execution.
The full episode can be found on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Top three findings from this conversation:
Resilience in Fundraising: When an investor dropped out at the last minute from Le Fourgon’s Series A, the team had to quickly adjust their strategy, securing $10M instead of $15M and extending the round later. They leaned on their existing lead investor’s confidence in the company. "Nothing was signed, but there was like a gentleman agreement on that point to say, 'Okay, we all know that we would have preferred not to face that situation, but we are really confident in the company, in the team to meet the figure in a year."
Crowdfunding as a Strategic Fundraising Tool. Le Fourgon raised €2.5M from over 1,500 investors through a crowdfunding campaign. The decision was motivated by customer demand, as many loyal users wanted to invest in the company. "So many people are saying, 'We know that you are doing good, and we would like to be more around you and supporting you more, not just to be a client but also maybe to be an investor.’ So we had that in mind a year ago.
Crisis Management: Communicating an Investor Dropout to Stakeholders. When a key investor backed out due to internal policy restrictions on alcohol-related businesses, Charles quickly devised a recovery plan, reassured existing investors, and secured alternative funding. "We told investors, ‘It's not linked to Le Fourgon—we are all good. This is our plan.’”
🧐 Noteworthy
💰 Novo Nordisk Foundation has announced a DKK 50M (appr. $7.3M) RECRUIT grant for the AI4NaturalFood project at Copenhagen University’s Department of Food Science, to help improve the sustainability of plant-based foods using AI and mild processing.
✅ Mission Barns has received FDA approval for its cultivated fat, saying it’s the first company in the world to receive regulatory clearance for cell-cultivated pork fat. The fat will be combined with plant-based proteins, and will initially debut at San Francisco restaurant group Fiorella as well as in Sprouts Farmers Market stores in the coming months.
💡NECTAR launched its second annual Taste of the Industry report, based on the world’s largest public sensory database of about 122 plant-based meats across 14 categories conducted through blind taste tests in restaurant settings. Over 2,600 omnivores compared plant-based products vs. animal-based products. The report e.g. highlights 20 plant-based products meeting mainstream consumer expectations, which ingredients do and do not resonate with consumers, what categories that still have whitespace for leader products, and more. Also see Green Queen’s coverage of the report.
🍸 Converting dairy waste into boutique booze; fun read from Ambrook.
🐣 In-ovo sexing detects the sex of a chicken while still in the egg, so that egg producers can dispose of them before they hatch, to avoid having to kill billions of day-old male chicks. The tech is already used by 20% of the European egg industry and is expected to expand in the coming years.
🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community
🎤 HackSummit (🇨🇭) tickets are out. See you there in May?
🌍 Nominate for the world’s biggest environmental award. The Food Planet Prize annually awards $2M USD to an initiative significantly reducing the environmental impact of the way we eat. Nominations are open all year, and you can nominate your own initiative or someone else’s.
🏆 Help Polish REFAL to valorize up to 6M kgs of apple biomass per year! The Refal Hackathon is organised by Pro Civis Foundation. Share your idea and apply to take part by March 23, 2025.
🏆 Estonian Piesta Kuusikaru produces premium apple products and wants to find innovative ways to extract value from apple pomace - a byproduct of their production process. Pärnu County Development Center is organizing a Hackathon on this — share your idea and apply to take part by March 28, 2025.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
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🎲 Random Stuff
🍉 I think I’ve shared this story before, but it’s kinda cute — old school buses repurposed to haul watermelons during harvest.
🥚 Egg smuggling is up: Among skyrocketing egg prices in the U.S., customs officers are seizing more illegal eggs than illegal fentanyl. The average price for a dozen eggs in the U.S. has hit $4.95, almost 2x the price in March 2024.
I love you.
Daniel
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🎵 This issue was produced while listening to Chop Suey! by System Of A Down.
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