Future Food News Review #2: Impossible's $10bn IPO, Vegan Cheese, CRISPR Tomatoes

From the heady days of the dot com boom -- and subsequent bust -- Eric Archambeau cofounded Astanor Ventures with George Coelho in 2017 as an impact venture capital fund for food and agriculture."We founded it with a vision that the agrifood market was going to go through a deep disruption that was needed to move from a system that was delivering cheap calories, to a system that would be able to deliver affordable nutrients," Archambeau tells AgFunderNews on a new episode of the Future Food podcast.Fast forward to today and the European firm has made around 40 investments across the suppy chain and recently announced the closing of its second fund on €360 million.Hear Eric talk about when and where exits will come to the industry -- something so many of us are wondering! How agrifoodtech fits into the impact investing world, and much more!

In this preview, Jacob talks with Katherine Sizov, founder of Strella Biotechnology. Her problem: Tons of food is wasted before it ever gets to the consumer. Katherine started working on this problem in 2018, when she was a junior in college. Her idea: imitate the natural world and build a device that detects when fruit is ripening. It worked. Now some of the biggest apple and pear packers in America use her device. You can hear more from What’s Your Problem? at https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/wypfuture.

A somewhat controversial category, during my hot or not rounds on this podcast, most guests have responded negatively to the concept of replacing meals with a drink - and perhaps Soylent took this on board as  in more recent years it's started calling itself a nutrition company with a small but growing number of product lines not just focused on meal replacement but all made from plants. Demir has been the CEO for nearly two years now and it's been a bit of a turnaround story as the company turned profitable in mid-2020. With a background in food and media, and having worked at one of the first almond milk companies out there, I jumped at the chance to chat to Demir about the future of plant-based foods as well. Enjoy!

Amy Yoder is CEO of Anuvia Plant Nutrients, a company that's converting waste to help crops uptake fertilizers more efficiently, and even help them to sequester carbon in the soil. She is a trailblazer being one of the best-funded women in agtech on record, raising $103 million in Series D earlier this year.For those of you who aren't knowledgeable about the fertilizer industry, Amy gives a great description. Enjoy this episode with a powerhouse of agtech, Amy Yoder.

Since Sriram co-founded Shiok Meats three years ago, the startup has gone from strength to strength. According to AgFunder's most recent ASEAN Agrifoodtech Investment Report, it was Southeast Asia’s highest-funded startup in the ‘Innovative Food’ category in 2019.It raised $4.6 million for its April 2019 seed round, which saw Y Combinator make its first-ever investment in a ‘clean meat’ company.Last year, Shiok Meats netted $3 million in bridge funding from investors including UK firms Agronomics and Impact Venture, US trust VegInvest, and UAE-based Mindshift Capital, before closing a $12.6 million Series A round led by Dutch aquaculture-focused fund Aqua-Spark.

The Future Food News Review is part of a collaboration between AgFunder and Food+Tech Connect to host meaningful conversations about the future of our food system on Clubhouse and other platforms.The Future Food News Review features leading journalists in foodtech and agtech sharing and discussing their top headlines of the week, hosted on Clubhouse.See below for a list of participating journalists and the articles they introduced; some of them joined purely for the discussion and debate. We always strive for diverse voices on Future Food News Review, so if you're a journalist covering food systems, agtech or foodtech, or know someone who is that would make a great edition, please reach out to [email protected] or [email protected] Figueiras - Green Queen MediaArticle: Food System Change: ‘Who’s Making Decisions, Who’s Benefiting, Who’s Gaining The Wealth?’ Errol Schweizer’s Got QuestionsErrol Schweizer - Forbes/TheCheckOut Article: How New York City Delivery Workers Are Rewriting The Rules Of Gig WorkArticle: Not Just Junk: Why We Need To Re-Think Food ProcessingLouisa Burwood-Taylor - AFNArticle: Bowery bags ‘biggest-ever’ vertical farming raise with $300m Series CPodcast: Up, up and away! Irving Fain on building Bowery's biggest vertical farm yetChloe Sorvino - ForbesArticle: JBS Cyberattack Shines A Spotlight On The Biggest Risk To Big Meat: ConsolidationJenn Marston - The SpoonArticle: Tesla May Soon Open Its Own RestaurantSam Silverstein - Grocery DiveArticle: Amazon to open its first Fresh supermarket with checkout-free technologyKristen Hawley - EaterArticle: Delivery Apps Are Making Concessions to Restaurants. But Who Pays?Thin Lei Win - ThinInk

The Future Food News Review is part of a collaboration between AgFunder and Food+Tech Connect to host meaningful conversations about the future of our food system on Clubhouse and other platforms.The Future Food News Review features leading journalists in foodtech and agtech sharing and discussing their top headlines of the week, hosted on Clubhouse.See below for a list of participating journalists and the articles they introduced; some of them joined purely for the discussion and debate. We always strive for diverse voices on Future Food News Review, so if you're a journalist covering food systems, agtech or foodtech, or know someone who is that would make a great edition, please reach out to [email protected] or [email protected] Honig - The NationArticle: The Story Behind Your Salad: Farmworkers, Covid-19, and a Dangerous CommuteSonalie Figueiras - Green Queen MediaArticle: Cell-Cultured Meat Pioneer Memphis Meats Is Now UPSIDE Foods, First Chicken Product To Launch This Year Pending Reg. ApprovalErrol Schweizer - Forbes/TheCheckOut Article: What Questions Should We Be Asking about Cultured Meats?Article: How Fast Food Workers Are Finally Getting $15 an HourElaine Watson - Food NavigatorUSAArticle: Brave New Animal Free WorldJoe Fassler - The CounterArticle: Regenerative Agriculture Needs a Reckoning Luke Winkie - VoxArticle: Right-wing coffee companies want to make coffee great againLouisa Burwood-Taylor - AFNArticle: Ginkgo Bioworks to go public at $15bn valuation as agrifood SPAC frenzy continuesChloe Sorvino - ForbesBettina Makalintal - VICE

Bowery has just launched FarmX, its new vertical farm for R&D that's 300 times larger than the first. It's also building a new, bigger than ever commercial farm in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania which will enable it to sell over 20 million clamshells of leafy greens and produce each year. While that's still the equivalent of just 115 acres of outdoor farmland, it's certainly a turning point and year-over-year growth is significant; since January 2020, the company has increased its brick-and-mortar grocery sales by 750%.Challenges lie ahead. Energy efficiency and costs are still battles to contend with and other vertical farming groups have struggled to live up to their promises of international expansion. But Bowery founder and CEO Irving Fain has an answer for everything.If you're a vertical farming enthusiast, or a newbie keen to learn about this exciting industry, this episode will take you on a journey of Bowery's founding, why they decided to build all their technology in-house, their growth plans, how they're breaking into new crops and digging into crop genetics to do so, and the overall mission and hopes for the industry at-large. Enjoy!

Crop protection is a serious business; each year a farmer battles a range of different pests, weeds and diseases trying to kill their harvest.  It's complicated too, with timing and weather other forces to contend with. Since the Second World War and the Green Revolution of the 1960s, the playbook for managing pests, by and large, has revolved around a combination of chemical applications at various point during the year together with synthetic fertilizers, and in the US, genetically modified seeds. Leaving the negative connotations of using chemicals on farmland aside -- and there are many -- weeds and pests are becoming resistant to these chemicals and farmers' options are starting run out. The pressure from consumers and lawmakers to use fewer chemicals and move away from GM crops is also growing. Agrichemicals companies can't ignore the cancer lawsuits, health and environmental concerns and hefty settlements they've faced either."At some point, most of the compounds have been made, have been tested and it becomes harder and harder to really introduce new products that are significantly better than what's already there," says Dr. Marijn Dekkers, the former CEO of the world's biggest ag chemicals and seeds business Bayer."New ways of controlling diseases and insects have dropped off a cliff over the last 20 years," adds Eric Ward, the CEO of AgBiome, a startup working on creating crop protection products using naturally-occurring microbes.Microbes, they say, are the next frontier for crop protection.Listen to this podcast (or read the transcript) to find out why Dekkers joined the board of AgBiome, his views on the agchemicals industry today, and how AgBiome is approaching this challenging space with backing from high profile investors like the BIll & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Stockeld Chunk will be the first in a series of cheese products from Stockeld Dreamery this year and I really enjoyed it! Listen in to hear my thoughts about the cheese, why Sorosh Tavakoli, an advertising tech entrepreneur got into foodtech, how to build the most ambitious cheese company in the world (his phrase, not mine), without cows, moving beyond nuts as the key ingredient in plant-based cheese, and creating a simple, healthy alternative to dairy cheese with just a few ingredients.