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What are the top FoodTech trends for 2019? – #DFInsights

Published on February 25, 2019

 

What are the top FoodTech trends for 2019?

Hi,

In 2018, FoodTech became even more serious, which will be a record year in terms of investments with huge rounds and many more food unicorns (as we will see in a future report). 2018 was also a tipping point in the way corporates, and VCs look at the domain. Before FoodTech was mostly a synonym for delivery startups. It is now viewed more broadly with interest (and great fear) as a domain with tremendous potential to reshape the current food industry.

Therefore, in our mission to help all the players (corporates, retailers, VCs and entrepreneurs), we asked ourselves what were the top trends that will shape the  FoodTech of the future. For that, we deep-dived and analysed our data (startup creation, investments, newsflow…) to select the top 8 trends. The result is a 40-pages premium report you can order here. Below is a summary of the technologies matching these trends put on a Gartner innovation curve (the higher you are, the more hype or public interest you have).

FoodTech trends by DigitalFoodLab

The 8 trends are (some may be made of more than one technology has shown on the graph):

  1. The way food is accessed by the consumer will continue to evolve, even if delivery startups are arriving at a plateau. Top sectors to look at are vending machines, multiple-meal delivery and new means of delivery (see the 7th trend).
  2. Retailers and corporates will continue to gather as much data as possible on the consumer. Big deals will continue in this domain to help retailers “amazonify” their stores.
  3. Plant-based startups will become mainstream and the first samples of synthetic meat will be available to public tasting.
  4. Digital Native Vertical Brands (see our last insight on DNVBs) will continue to pop-up in every direction.
  5. Urban farming will get more momentum. We may observe disillusionment if profitability and productivity don’t appear soon.
  6. New initiatives will take place to (re)create more trust between agribusinesses and consumers, still lacking a solid business model.
  7. We will see more and more robots in the kitchens and food delivery experiments will continue, questioning the future of the gig-economy employees.
  8. Startups will start to offer some levels of nutritional personalisation while the lines between food, health and beauty will continue to blur.

These are obviously just the titles of more detailed chapters. We will cover them Wednesday on a private briefing. You can access to all the details in the report here.

Have a great week!

Matthieu

Big Deals

Goosto

Ynsect raised €110m last week. The french startup will use the capital to increase its insect production by building the world’s largest insect farm near Amiens.

 

Goosto

Perfect day raised a new round of $34 million. The startup is known for its cellular milk (real milk without the need of milk cows). This round aim is to bring the milk to the market.

 

Goosto

Relex raised $200 million. This reflects our second trend (see above) when we talked about the need for current retailers to “amazonify” the customer’s experience (and therefore the logistics behind) with the help of startups.

Top News

Fancy water bottles became are a 21st-century status-symbol. An interesting read about the too often commodified water bottles and how small companies are providing millennials with a tool to express their identity.

The Atlantic

 

Unilever acquires Graze. The London-based startup has been delivering healthy snacks (on a weekly subscription model) since 2008 and was since then present in retail stores in the U.K and in the US. The deal was around £150 million. It will help Unilever to boost its presence in the coveted hea

Forbes

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