Fish 2.0 Announces 40 Finalists
Fish 2.0, the business competition for sustainable seafood-focused innovations, announced the 40 companies that will pitch to investors November 7–8 during the Fish 2.0 Innovation Forum at Stanford University. The selected companies include transparency & traceability tools and supply chain innovation, and are a truly global group yielding from Asia, South America, the Pacific and the US. The finalists were chosen from an initial pool of 184 entrants; 50 percent of the finalists are post-revenue businesses, and more than half are based outside the US. “This is the strongest group ever,” said Monica Jain, Fish 2.0 founder. Read more here.
Agrible Partners with Anheuser-Busch for Sustainable Barley
Anheuser-Busch InBev and Agrible, the Champaign, Illinois startup offering a suite of decision support software tools for farmers as well as sustainability tracking for food brands, have partnered to improve barley production while minimizing environmental impact. The two companies are joining forces to help farmers around the world access better data and predictive analytics on crop management and climate effects. AB InBev is the largest brewer and user of malt barley in the world. Read more here.
AgriProtein Wins BBC Food Chain Award for Alternative Protein
South African startup growing insects for animal feed using waste, AgriProtein, has been named the BBC Food Chain Global Champion. The company makes a protein substitute for animal and fish feed. Part of the BBC Food & Farming Awards 2017, the Food Chain Global Champion is a new category for this year – and the BBC’s first ever international food and farming award – recognizing outstanding work that is challenging established methods and practices to secure the future. Read more here.
Australia Gets a New Agtech Accelerator in SparkLabs
Asian accelerator group SparkLabs Group, and Australia’s NSW Department of Primary Industries, announced that they will be launching SparkLabs Cultiv8, an ag and food technology accelerator that will offer companies prototyping and scaling support for their research and business. The program will be based outside of Sydney at the Orange Agricultural Institute in the Global AgTech Ecosystem (GATE) and will commence in Q2 2018. Participants will be able to access up to A$100,000 (US$80,000) for an agreed stake. Read more here.
FOOD X Announces Cohort Six
Abby’s Better – a clean label nut butter company.
Agron Solutions – portable soil testing tech.
Assured Bites – provides parents an easy guided system for early infant peanut introduction to help prevent allergies.
Cambridge Crops – a biotechnology company focused on extending the shelf-life of perishable foods without the need for cold chain.
EIO Diagnostics – hyper-spectral imaging to detect infections in dairy animals.
FoodCloud – a marketplace connecting more than 350 verified home chefs across Delhi, NCR and Kolkata with customers.
Indemand – an eCommerce solution for brick and mortar supermarkets to easily sell online and deliver to their customers.
KLOVE – is a Voice Guided Connected Cooking platform with a suite of smart sensors.
NonFood – radically sustainable algae-based foods.
PowCow- low fat, high protein, probiotic frozen yogurt.
Other News That’s Fit To Chew
- The US National Organic Safety Board is considering formally revoking the possibility for hydroponic farms to be certifiers organic and there are three upcoming opportunities for growers to weigh in, reports Green House Grower.
- Market research says that even though eGrocery is growing at a fast clip, consumers still want to pick out their groceries by hand, according to Quartz.
- A research team from Columbia Engineering’s Creative Machines lab has developed synthetic muscle that can lift 1,000 times its own weight, says The Robot Report.
- A recent study published in the medical journal The Lancet says poor diet plays a role in one in five deaths worldwide, according to The Guardian.
- Japan is getting into the cultured meat game, reports the Japan Times.
- We may have jumped the shark now that a Singaporean plant-based meat-alternative company is marketing itself as tasting like “lab meat,” says Plant Based News.
