💥 2 big failures this week from well-known startups:
🇺🇸 🤖 Zume, the famous pizza robot, is shutting down. After a lot of hype, $500M raised, and a $1B+ valuation, it looks like a tale of everything that can go wrong with food startups: too much money, a tech that doesn’t work, no real product market fit and strange picots.
🇺🇸 🥬 Aerofarms, a vertical farming startup, announced that it has filed for bankruptcy protection.
🇬🇧 🥩 Higher Steaks (now rebranded as Uncommon), a British startup, raised $30M for its cell-based meat production technology.
🇫🇷 🧀 Jay&Joy, a French startup, raised €2M for its plant-based cheeses. Recently, the startup went into receivership as its products were called back due to a listeria contamination. It hopes to achieve a successful return with this new funding and a new CEO. It will be interesting to see how it performs in the current context of sluggish sales and consumer defiance against plant-based alternatives (especially in France).
🇨🇴 ☕ Green Coffee Co, a Colombian startup, raised $25M for its sustainable coffee farming and direct trade platform.
🇬🇧 🌱 Nium, a British startup, raised $3M for its system that enables on-site synthesis of ammonia (a key component of fertilisers).
🇺🇸 🍄 MyForest Foods, a US-based startup, raised an additional $15M for its meat alternatives (notably bacon and beef jerky) made of mycelium.
🇹🇷 🥦 Fazla, a Turkish startup, raised €6M for its waste reduction and surplus food management platform.
🇪🇸 🥩 JBS, Brazil’s largest meat producer, announced that it is starting to build in Spain the “world’s largest” cellular agriculture meat production facility. This comes a year after the acquisition of BioTech Foods, a Spanish startup. The new facility could produce up to 4,000 tonnes per year.
