🇪🇺 🛵 European food delivery apps are (finally) becoming profitable. All three leading companies (Deliveroo, Delivery Hero and Takeawy-Just Eat) are expected to report profits for 2023. As planned, margins tend to increase when the number of consumers and restaurants increases (with shorter delivery times). After a decade of existence, years of doubts and capital consumption, it is pretty satisfying to see this sector stabilising, turning a profit, and appearing attractive to public market investors.
🇺🇸 💥 Uber is shutting down Drizzly, an alcohol delivery app acquired for $1.1B in 2020. Now, the delivery company wants to focus on its Uber Eats food and grocery delivery service to deliver alcohol. I wonder what’s the most impressive here: the amount of money spent on the app, the fact that Drizly was never integrated into Uber (indicating the absence of any kind of strategic foresight behind the acquisition), or simply how different the world is today from what it was in 2021.
🇮🇱 🥩 Aleph Farms became the world’s first startup to receive regulatory approval for cultivated beef in Israel. This is also the first global approval for cultivated beef (others have been for cultivated chicken). While using the same technology as its competitors (cellular agriculture, which enables to create meat out of animal stem cells), Aleph Farms is focused on high-end products such as steaks.
🌍 💉Food companies are already planning their responses to the success of GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic. It appears that users of these weight-loss drugs are consuming fewer snacks during AND after using them. And beyond, some, such as Nestlé, are planning companion products. More agile startups, such as Daily Harvest (frozen meals delivered to your door), have already launched their range of companion meals. While we don’t know exactly how big this market will be (the predictions for the success of GLP-1 drugs are as wild as those of people betting on Bitcoin), the direction is clear: we are moving toward healthier and more personalised food products (for more, you can read DigitalFoodLab’s last year insight on “food as medicine”).
🇺🇸 🚜 Farm-ng, an American startup, raised $10M for its small farm robots. They help in soil preparation, planting, harvest, and crop care.
🇮🇩🌾 Dayatani, an Indonesian startup, raised $2.3M for its digital agriculture platform.
🇮🇱 🍅 The Mediterranean Food Lab, an Israeli startup, raised $17M to create natural and fermented flavours for alternative meat and plant-based foods.
🇮🇱 🌳 SeeTree, an Israeli startup, raised $17.5M for its orchard tree intelligence platform. With drones and sensors, it gathers information on the trees to optimise their performance.
