🍖 Big news in big meat: JBS acquires Spanish cellular agriculture startup BioTech Foods:
- JBS is one of the world’s biggest meat companies and is already highly involved in the alternative protein space. It has notably launched a division dedicated to plant-based, Planterra.
- BioTech Foods is one of the handfuls of European cellular agriculture startups. It recently received funding from the Spanish government and the EU Commission to explore how to scale cellular agriculture production (notably healthier fats).
JBS invested $100M in the deal, $41M of which will be used to develop a new plant to scale up production.
🥩 🏭 Meat factory and some mental arithmetic: Upside Foods announced the opening of its “EPIC” production facility. The cellular agriculture startup has raised $206M until now, it is by far the most heavily funded in this space, and it claims to be the leader.
The facility can produce 50,000 pounds of finished product per year. This could rise to 400,000 pounds.
The average retail price of a pound of meat is around $4.7 in the US. Without considering any retail or distribution costs and without any margin, 400,000 pounds would make $1,9M (and 50,000 would make $235k). This is certainly huge progress compared to lab production. We should keep in mind that a single slaughterhouse can be 1,000 bigger.
💰 The best deals of the week:
- Lyre’s, a UK-based startup developing non-alcoholic drinks, raised £20M. This is quite significant for this ecosystem which is attracting more and more attention as consumers want to make more reasonable choices.
- Daily Harvest raised $77M and is now one of the many 2021’s new FoodTech unicorns. The startup, which started with upscale ready-to-blend frozen smoothies and soups, now sells a whole range of frozen foods delivered to your door. The pandemic and the acquisition of Freshly by Nestlé last year (at $1.5B) has been a trigger for higher growth of investments in the ready-to-eat meal kit ecosystem.
- Farmers Business Network (FBN) has raised a $300M series G. Among the investors, grain giant ADM stands out. FBN helps farmers with an e-commerce platform that helps them to buy and sell. It gathers 33,000 farmers in the US, Canada and Australia, up from 12,000 in 2020. FBN could be targeting an IPO.
