Eyeing vision-based autonomy for farm equipment, Bonsai Robotics raises $10.5M

One can’t accuse Bonsai Robotics of lacking focus. The Bay Area-based firm is starting with trees — specifically nut trees. Like most labor-intensive sectors these days, farms have suffered from a profound lack of available workers, so the startup began striking deals with OEMs to outfit heavy farming equipment with its vision-based autonomy. This morning, […]

Planet FWD secures $10M so consumer products industry can track carbon emissions

Planet FWD, a carbon-assessment startup founded by Zume Pizza co-founder Julia Collins, grabbed another cash infusion in the way of 10 million Series A dollars to continue developing technology so that the $1.5 trillion consumer products industry can more accurately measure and reduce their carbon footprint.

We profiled Collins’ journey from pizza to climate-friendly food beginning in March 2020 when she announced a $2.7 million seed round, led by BBG Ventures, for Planet FWD to look at regenerative agriculture. The company went on to launch its Moonshot Snacks brand later in that year.

It was while Planet FWD was creating its cracker product that Collins says she learned just how difficult it was to develop a product that is carbon neutral.

“We want to expand our carbon footprint at the product level for a box of crackers, and that was really hard,” she added. “We wanted to understand our corporate level footprint as a company and that was really hard. We wanted to understand how to reduce our emissions, and that was really hard. We wanted to understand how to purchase very high-quality, carbon offsets, to get to carbon neutral, and again, it’s really hard.”

What emerged from those learnings was a carbon-management technology platform for consumer brands to create a climate-friendly company and products more easily by being able to measure, reduce and neutralize emissions and report its carbon footprint.

For example, if your company wanted to launch a line of granola bars that is as low in emissions as possible, you can use Planet FWD’s emissions-reduction engine during the product-development phase to understand how to change your supplier or your packaging supplier to a more efficient method.

“Imagine the next generation of products that can be produced with low emissions because we’ve made it really easy for customers to understand not just details on how to calculate calories, fat and protein, but actually how to calculate carbon and carbon equivalent during product development,” Collins added.

The company’s technology provides GHG Protocol Scope 3 emissions modeling capabilities to help brands address the emissions along their supply chain. Scope 3 emissions account for up to 89% of emissions for consumer products on average, Collins added.

Time is of the essence in reducing emissions, with Collin noting that there are less than 100 months left to reach the 2030 global goal of cutting at least 40% of greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels. Household consumption of things like food, which impacts land, energy and water, account for 60% of global emissions, she added.

Planet FWD JustSalad carbon label

JustSalad’s carbon label create from Planet FWD

“The emerging regulatory landscape is causing an acceleration of companies really needing better solutions for carbon management and that regulatory framework or those regulatory frameworks are being bolstered by the emerging consumer appetite, sustainable and climate friendly products,” she said. “Retailers paying more attention are prioritizing brands that are motivated, sustainable and willing to stand behind it. And then of course, new ESG is becoming an important part of the way that companies are able to access financial instruments.”

As a result, the past year has been one of growth. Though Collins declined to go into detail about growth metrics, she did say the company is now working with 25 customers, including Kashi, Pangaia, Just Salad, Numi Organic Tea, Healthy Hippo, Toodaloo and Sweet Loren’s.

Planet FWD, aided by an acquisition of climate tech startup CleanMetrics in 2021, also amassed what Collins touts as the “largest Life Cycle Analysis database for agricultural production systems in North America.” It also hired a climate science team to continue to expand that data.

Meanwhile, the Series A is co-led by Acre Venture Partners and Congruent Ventures and includes participation from existing investors BBG Ventures, Precursor, Concrete Rose, January Ventures, Elemental Excelerator, Cleo Capital and Rethink Food. To date, Planet FWD has raised $16.8 million.

The new funding will be deployed into the company’s ongoing development of its data, including building out its climate science team. It will also go into product development, like more predictive emissions reduction, and supporting existing and new customers.

“Supply chains are so complex, and frankly very difficult to manage, and that is why Planet FWD is very much a vertically-oriented solution,” Collin said. “We are obsessed with helping to decarbonize the consumer landscape and focused on continuing to heat up and fine tune our emissions reductions engine.”

Source makes greenhouses smarter to secure the future of food supply

Agtech startup Source.ag today announced it harvested a $10 million investment to make greenhouses smarter. The founders have set their eyes on a horizon where, driven by climate change and a rapid increase in global food demand as population continues to increase, more crops are being forced indoors to secure greater crop yields. You wouldn’t believe the amount of restraint it takes to not make a pun about seed funding in a piece about greenhouses. I have no such restraint, so let’s report on this, ahem, growth industry.

The $10 million funding round was led by Acre Venture Partners, with participation from the E14 fund and food-focused venture firm Astanor ventures. The company also raised from industry insiders, including the international association of (mostly) salad growers Harvest House, tomato specialists Agrocare and bell pepper specialists Rainbow Growers.

The company is developing software to empower greenhouses to get smarter. The company argues that greenhouse agriculture is a safer, more reliable and more climate-resilient mode of food production, producing up to 15 times higher yields, using a twentieth as much water as traditional agriculture. What Source adds to the mix is the ability to use data and AI to help greenhouses operate at even higher levels of efficiency and repeatability of high-yield harvests.

“Climate change is driving substantial scarcity and strains in our global food supply. As this accelerates in the coming years, we must find ways to scale efficient growing solutions that lighten the footprint of agriculture,” said Lucas Mann, managing partner at Acre. “Greenhouse agriculture is a proven and viable solution, but without innovation, demand will be impossible to meet. We believe Source.ag can play a vital role in driving its global scalability.”

The funding will be used to accelerate product development and expand commercial collaborations.

“Greenhouses come in all shapes and forms — both more and less technically advanced. On the higher-tech side, want to have control over every dimension you can imagine, including humidity, irrigation and nutrition. Tomatoes, for example, don’t grow in soil. They go in substrate slabs. That means that these operations are arable land independent,” explains Rien Kamman, co-founder ad CEO at Source. “Because you have more control, you’ll have to make more decisions every day. Growers are making decisions on 60-70 parameters every day, which influences how this crop will grow for the rest of the season. You need to get the decision right every day. This might include what to feed the plant, plant-specific parameters, pruning, etc. It’s really a craft and this is why it’s still so hard. You need decades of experience to be doing well at it.”

The complexity of the farming operation itself isn’t in doubt, and Source’s pitch is to take all of these growth parameters, combine that with historical crop yield data and market pricing etc., to create a better experience for the growers.

“Our system is comprised of two aspects. One is a recommendation system that assesses the current state of the plant. It looks at forward-looking predictors like resource prices, weather, etc. And then gives very concrete recommendations to the grower. What should you do today and tomorrow, both on the plant (i.e. how should you trim it, prune it, etc.) and on the indoor climate around the plants to maximize sustainability and production. The second part is what happens when something doesn’t go to plan? This is where the algorithms come in,” Kamman says. “They collaborate with the different control systems to take that strategy and actually make sure to do so implemented in the most efficient way possible.”

Indoor farming still requires a fair chunk of manual labor, especially for big-vine crops such as tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, etc.; but Source suggests that it can be helpful there, too — by choosing how and where to prune or how many crops to leave to ripen on the vine, you can affect various aspects of the plants’ growth. The interesting thing is overlaying real-time pricing data here — by speeding up or slowing down ripening, I can imagine that could potentially time the harvest time around when your competitors have ripe products, potentially even trading lower yields for better prices, or working with temperatures and weather conditions to reduce production costs, for example.

The company is running on a SaaS model, charging growers on a sliding scale depending on the amount of space they are using for growing.

“Our belief is that agriculture is at an inflection point in history. [Farming] that brought us to where we are today won’t bring us to 10 billion people with a more changing extreme climate. This is a massive market — the need for climate-resilient food systems is going to increase. And then we haven’t even talked about what other traditional agriculture crops could be moved indoors in the next decades,” says Kamman. “I think that what unites our investors and our team is that we’re not so much looking at these advantages short term, but we can build knowledge that is scalable globally.”

The company declined to share screenshots of its product, stating it was “competitively sensitive”.

A rind is a terrible thing to waste: Spoiler Alert leaps to the rescue

We spend such a tremendous amount of our resources growing, processing, transporting and selling food items. In a world where not everyone has enough to eat, it’s a disgrace that in the US, 30%-40% of food that is produced is never consumed. That’s the problem Spoiler Alert has set its crosshairs on. The company just raised $11 million to really start scaling its operations and save more food from meeting an end more bitter than a karela jilted at the altar.

“When we look at food waste, it’s not just a major drain on business profitability, but it’s also one of the largest contributors to the climate crisis at a global level. What our vision and hypothesis from the very beginning has been, is ‘how do we better provide major food manufacturers with the tools, intelligence insights and network connectivity to keep good product from going to waste?,'” explains Spoiler Alert co-founder and CEO Richard Ashenfelter. “We are getting that to as many consumers as possible, prior to resorting to dumping or organics recycling.”

The Spoiler Alert platform is in use by a growing list of global consumer packaged goods (CPG) leaders to digitize their B2B liquidation processes. Customers include Nestlé, Kraft Heinz, Campbell Soup Company and Danone North America — four of the largest food and beverage manufacturers in the world.

“One of our core beliefs is that waste is no longer a necessary or acceptable cost of doing business,” said Spoiler Alert co-founder and CPO Emily Malina. “Everything we do is geared toward moving perishable inventory faster to benefit brands, retailers, consumers and the planet.”

“Roughly 30% to 40% of the world’s food supply is never ultimately consumed. Project Drawdown has since identified food waste as the number one initiative and opportunity for addressing the global climate crisis,” says Ashenfelter and explains how that has become part of the company’s mission. “For us, the more food we can keep out of landfills, the less emissions and resource resources that go into growing, harvesting, distributing that product, the better. It ultimately has a financial benefit for businesses, too, because they’re selling more product, they’re writing off less product, they’re not spending money on disposal fees.”

Ricky Ashenfelter and Emily Malina, the Spoiler Alert founding team. Image Credits: Liz Linder Photography

Brands use Spoiler Alert’s flexible and private liquidation platform to seamlessly sell their excess, short-dated and obsolete inventory. This results in increased profitability for brands and a stronger supply of opportunistic inventory for retailers and other closeout channels. And not a minute too late, either. What’s particularly encouraging about Spoiler Alert is that the company is operating within the confines of capitalism to try to put a dent in this issue.

“My father was an environmental lawyer, and I’ve dedicated my entire academic pursuits to how the private sector can solve some of the world’s biggest energy and environmental challenges,” says Ashenfelter. “I’m sort of a tree hugger, born and raised, trying to wear more of a commercial hat. All of this is providing easy, tangible solutions for businesses and consumers to do the right thing for the environment. We feel strongly that the best approaches to sustainable climate focus investments have to be rooted in a true business case in order for them to scale.”

This investment is led by Collaborative Fund with participation from existing investors, including Acre Venture Partners, The Betsy & Jesse Fink Family Foundation, Maersk Growth, Spring Point Partners and Valley Oak Investments.

I can’t believe it’s not meat! Mycelium meat replacement company aims for summer launch of first products

Meati, a company turning mycelium (the structural fibers of fungi) into healthier meat replacements for consumers, is prepping for a big summer rollout.

Co-founder Tyler Huggins expects to have the first samples of its whole-cut steak and chicken products in select restaurants around the country — along with their first commercial product, a jerky strip.

For Huggins, the product launch is another step on a long road toward broad commercial adoption of functional fungi foods as a better-for-you alternative to traditional meats.

“Use this as a conversation starter. About 2 ounces of this gives you 50% of your protein; 50% of your fiber; and half of your daily zinc. There really is nothing that can compare to this product in terms of nutritionals,” Huggins said. 

And moving from meat to mushrooms is a better option for the planet.

Meati expects to turn on its pilot plant this summer and is joining a movement among mushroom fans that includes milk replacements, from Perfect Day, more meat replacements from Atlast, and leather substitutes from Ecovative and MycoWorks.

“We’re definitely all in this together,” said Huggins of the other mob of mycelium-based tech companies bringing products to market.

However, not all mycelium is created equally, Huggins said. Meati has what Huggins said was a unique way of growing its funguses (not a real word) that “keep it in its most happy state.” That means peak nutritional content and peak growth efficiency, according to the company.

For Huggins, whose parents own a bison ranch and who grew up in cattle country, the goal is not to replace a t-bone or a ribeye, but the cuts of meat and chicken that find their ways into a burrito supreme or other quick serve meat cuts.

Rendering of Meati mushroom meats in a Banh Mi. Image Credit: Meati

“Head to head with that kind of cut, we win,” Huggins said. “I’d rather pick a fight there now and buy ourselves some time. I don’t think we’re going to go super high-end to start.”

That said, the company’s cap table of investors already includes some pretty heady culinary company. Acre Venture Partners (which counts Sam Kass — President Barack Obama’s Senior Policy Advisor for Nutrition Policy, Executive Director for First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign, and an Assistant Chef in the White House — among its partnership) is an investor. So is Chicago’s fine dining temple, Alinea.

But Huggins wants Meati to be an everyday type of meat replacement product. “I want to make sure that people think this is an every day protein,” Huggins said.

Meati thinks its future meat replacements will be cost competitive with conventional beef and chicken, but to whet consumers’ appetites, the company is starting with jerky.

“Meati’s delicious jerky,” said Huggins. “It provides this blank canvas. We’ll start with these beef jerky like flavors. But I want to come out of the gate and say that we’re mycelium jerky.”

The company currently has 30 people on staff led by Huggins and fo-founder Justin Whiteley. The two men initially started working on Meati as a battery replacement. Based on their research (Huggins with mycelium and Whiteley with advanced batteries) the two men received a grant for a mycelium-based electrode for lithium ion batteries.

“We were trying to tweak the chemical composition of the mycelium to make a better battery. What we found was that we were making something nutritious and edible,” said Huggins.

Also… the battery companies didn’t want it.

Now, backed by $28 million from Acre, Prelude Ventures, Congruent Ventures and Tao Capital, Meati is ready to go to market. The company also has access to debt capital to build out its vast network of mycelium growing facilities. It’s just raised a $18 million debt round from Trinity and Silicon Valley Bank.

“Two years ago … most companies in this space … there wasn’t this ability to take on debt to put steel in the ground,” said Huggins. “It’s an exciting time to be in food tech given that you can raise VC funding and there’s this ready available market for debt financing. You’ll start seeing faster and more rapid development because of it.”

Meati co-founders Tyler Huggins and Justin Whiteley. Image Credit: Meati

From lab-grown meat to fermented fungus, here’s what corporate food VCs are serving up

In a foodie’s ideal world, we’d all eat healthy, minimally processed cuisine sourced from artisanal farmers, bakers and chefs.

In the real world, however, most of us derive the lion’s share of calories from edibles supplied by a handful of giant food conglomerates. As such, the ingredients and processing techniques they favor have an outsized impact on our daily diets.

With this in mind, Crunchbase News decided to take a look at corporate food VCs and the startups they are backing to see what their dealmaking might say about our snacking future. We put together a list of venture funds operated by some of the larger food and beverage producers, covering literally everything from soup to nuts (plus lunch meat and soda, too!).

Like their corporate backers, startups funded by “Big Food” are a diverse bunch. Recent funding recipients are pursuing endeavors ranging from alternative protein to biospectral imaging to fermented fungus. But if one were to pinpoint an overarching trend, it might be a shift away from cost savings to consumer-friendliness.

“You think of food-tech and ag-tech 1.0, these were technologies that were primarily beneficial to the producers,” said Rob LeClerc, founding partner at AgFunder, an agrifood investor network. “This new generation of companies are really more focused on what does the consumer want.”

And what does the consumer want? This particular consumer would currently like a zero calorie hot fudge sundae. More broadly, however, the general trends LeClerc sees call for food that is healthier, tastier, nutrient-dense, satiating, ethically sourced and less environmentally impactful.

Below, we look at some of the trends in more detail, including funded companies, active investors and the up-and-coming edibles.

The new, new protein

Mass-market foods may get better but also weirder. This is particularly true for one of the more consistently hot areas of food-tech investment: alternative protein.

Demand for protein-rich foods, combined with ethical concerns about consuming animal products, has, for a number of years, led investors to startups offering meaty tasting tidbits sourced from the plant world.

But lately, corporate food giants have been looking farther beyond soy and peas. Lab-grown meat, once an oddball endeavor good for headlines about $1,000 meatballs, has been attracting serious cash. Since last year, at least two companies in the space have closed rounds backed by Tyson Ventures, the VC arm of the largest U.S. meat producer. They include pricey meatball maker Memphis Meats (actually based in California), which raised $20 million, and Israel-based Future Meat Technologies, a biotech startup working on animal-free meat, which secured $2 million.

Much of the early enthusiasm for new products stems from disillusionment with the existing ingredients we overeat.

If you cringe at the notion of lab-grown cell meat, then there’s always the option of getting your protein through microbes in volcanic springs. That’s the general aim of Sustainable Bioproducts, a startup that raised $33 million in Series A funding from backers including ADM and Danone Manifesto Ventures. The Chicago company’s technology for making edible protein emerged out of research into extremophile organisms in Yellowstone National Park’s volcanic springs.

Meanwhile, if you hanker for real dairy milk but don’t want to trouble cows, another startup, Perfect Day, is working on a solution. Per the company website: “Instead of having cows do all the work, we use microflora and age-old fermentation techniques to make the very same dairy protein that cows make.” Toward that end, the Berkeley company closed a $35 million Series B in February, with backing from ADM.

Fermentation

Perfect Day isn’t the only fermentation play raising major funding.

Corporate food-tech investors have long been interested in the processing technologies that turn an obscure microbe or under-appreciated crop into a high-demand ingredient. And lately, LeClerc said, they’ve been particularly keen on startups finding new ways to apply the age-old technology known as fermentation.

Most of us know fermentation as the process that turns a yucky mix of grain, yeast and water into the popular beverage known as beer. More broadly, however, fermentation is a metabolic process that produces chemical changes in organic substrates through the action of enzymes. That is, take a substance, add something it reacts with and voilà, you have a new substance.

Several of the most heavily funded, buzz-generating companies in the food space are applying fermentation, LeClerc said. Besides Perfect Day, examples he points to include the unicorn Ginkgo BioworksGeltor (another alt-protein startup) and mushroom-focused MycoTechnology.

Colorado-based MycoTechnology has been a particularly attractive investor target of late. The company has raised $83 million from a mix of corporate and traditional VCs, including a $30 million Series C in January that included Tyson and Kellogg’s venture arm, Eighteen94 Capital . Founded six years ago, the company is pursuing a range of applications for its fermented fungi, including flavor enhancers, protein supplements and preservatives.

Supply chain

Besides adding strange new ingredients to our grocery shelves, corporate food-tech investors are also putting money into technologies and platforms aimed at boosting the security and efficiency of existing supply chains.

Just like new foods, much of the food safety tech sounds odd, too. Silicon Valley-based ImpactVision, a seed-funded startup backed by Campbell Soup VC arm Acre Venture Partners, wants to employ hyper-spectral imaging to perceive information about contamination, food quality and ripeness.

Boston-based Spoiler Alert, another Acre portfolio company, develops software and analytics for food companies to manage unsold inventory. And Pensa Systems, which uses AI-powered autonomous drones to track in-store inventory, raised a Series A round this year with backing from the venture arm of Anheuser-Busch InBev.

Is weirder better?

We highlighted a few trends in corporate food-tech investment, but there are others that merit attention, as well. Probiotics plays, including the maker of the GoodBelly drink line, are generating investor interest. New ingredients other than proteins are also attracting capital, such as UCAN, a startup developing energy snacks based on a novel, slow-digesting carbohydrate. And the list goes on.

Much of the early enthusiasm for new products stems from disillusionment with the existing ingredients we overeat. But LeClerc noted that new products aren’t always better in the long run — they just might seem so at first.

“The question in the back of our head is: Are we ever creating margarine 2.0,” he said. “Just because it’s a plant product doesn’t mean it’s actually better for you.”