The following infographic was created by Float Mobile Learning using data compiled in their report mAgriculture: The Application of Mobile Computing to the Business of Farming. The report explores how farmers are using mobile technology for business, market data, pest and disease control, weather and farm management.

The post Infographic of the Week: The Farmer and the Mobile App appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

What’s the difference between Grade A, organic, natural and free-range eggs? Amongst a sea of misleading food labels, Buying Poultry hopes to take the guess-work out of choosing the most humane and sustainable poultry products and plant-based alternatives. The company, an initiative of farm advocacy group Farm Forward, is working to create a Real Time Farms– esque online buying guide featuring animal, farm worker and environmental ratings for every poultry producer in the country. Free to use via smartphone, tablet and computer, the guide will help combat the secrecy of factory farm poultry production by providing consumers with easily-accessible, real-time information.

As Executive Director of Farm Forward, Buying Poultry Co-founder Ben Goldsmith was constantly being asked for the best option for finding alternatives to factory farming. But there simply wasn’t an easy-to-use nationwide guide. Farm Forward polled its newsletter subscribers and found that 90% percent of carnivores would “definitely” use the guide. And so they decided to tackle the poultry transparency beast themselves. For the past four years they have been working with high-welfare poultry farmers and animal welfare experts to create the beginnings of the site.

To make this comprehensive project a reality, the team has launched a Kickstarter Campaign to raise $40,000. To date, they’ve secured nearly half and have just under 40 days to go. If they reach their goal, the money raised will go towards site design and development, building and programming the massive database, paying for servers, and an eventual API. Though they are raising money through multiple sources, Goldsmith says they believe kickstarter is great source of support because their product is catered towards “tech-savvy, contentious consumers” who are “likely familiar with kickstarter and hungry for more transparency in the food they consume.”

Buying Poultry hopes to connect good farmers with consumers while bringing accountability back to the poultry industry. If executed, the project will empower conscious consumers with the information they need to make the best choices for themselves, farmed animals and the planet.

Check out their in depth POULTRY PRODUCTION INFOGRAPHIC

The post New Site Brings Transparency to Buying Poultry appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

From home cooking to the restaurant experience, technology-focused food startups are enhancing the way consumers engage with food. These startups are creating significant value for consumers and notable opportunities for restaurants and brands to better understand and provide value to their customers. As the food tech sector matures, we are seeing an increasing number of these companies being funded or acquired by industry players. This monthly column highlights the most interesting acquisitions, financings and partnerships within the Food Tech & Media ecosystem – digital content, social, local, mobile, e-commerce, payments, marketing and analytics – to give you insights into the latest funding and growth trends.

“Food Tech” investing has been a hot topic this past month, with perhaps the most discussed article being this New York Times piece focused on food startups. The article broadly lumped all food startup investments into one category, however mainly focused on consumable food products, and got some flak from industry players as one source expressed doubt over the long term-promise of food startups. The article also caps 2012 food tech investing at $350m, according to this CB Insights report. My data, however, reveals over $700m was invested in food-related tech and media companies (digital content, social, local, mobile, e-commerce, payments, marketing and analytics) in 2012 – which doesn’t include the numerous innovations in the agricultural, supply chain, nutrition and CPG spaces. Bottom line: we have only begun to scratch the surface of the food tech opportunity and continued innovation will lead to increasing investment in the space.

Meanwhile, the theme of  “delivery” dominated the news in April, as it did in February. Rather than creating a digital infrastructure for existing delivery services, a lot of the recent activity in this space has focused on leveraging existing systems and resources, like underutilized kitchen capacity or social and corporate networks, to create new products and services. Given the steep challenges with gaining meaningful traction among the pillars of the food space – restauranteurs, CPGs, grocers, producers, farmers – it will be key for many startups in the food tech industry to build products that harness existing infrastructures.

M&A

No M&A activity this month.

FUNDING

Relay Foods Raises $8.25m. The online grocery marketplace partners with local farmers and producers as well as grocery stores (including Whole Foods, and other national retailers) to offer a combination of local products and grocery staples that customers pick up at a central location in their city. The team has expanded market share in the Mid-Atlantic, and will soon be live in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. According to TechCrunch, “the next major market – North Carolina – will take place in 2014.” The funding will used to power the build-out of a new mobile platform, expand the executive and development team, and redesign the company’s online marketplace.

Announced: 4/14/13  Stage: Series A  Participating Institutional Investors: Battery Ventures, TomorrowVentures, Quantitative Investment Holdings  Previous Investment: $1.2 Seed Extension, $3.1m Seed  Founded: 2007

HealthyOut Raises $1.2m. The company first launched as an app to help users find healthy, low calorie dishes at nearby restaurants and now, as it became a TechCrunch Disrupt Finalist, the team unveiled its subscription meal delivery service for New York City, with plans to expand to new cities soon. HealthyOut designed the subscription program, which sources meals from restaurant kitchens, to deliver up to 10 tailored meals a week based on health goals and flavor preferences, and charges a monthly fee to manage the orders and diets.

Announced: 4/29/13  Stage: Seed  Participating Institutional Investors: 500 Startups, Bradley Harrison Ventures  Previous Investment:  Blueprint Health Incubator  Product Launch: October 2012

Plated Raises $1.4m. The NY-based meal kit delivery service, which compiles gourmet recipes from noted chefs and delivers all of the pre-portioned ingredients to make the meal, closed on a large seed which, according to VentureWire, was raised in two separate convertible debt rounds. A member of the current TechStars class, Plated is working to expand delivery regions and is actively growing its full time staff. TechCrunch points out that part of the seed funding was used to develop a new section of the site called “Social Recipe Pages,” which appears to be a cooking version of Rent The Runway’s “Our Runway” where users add tips and upload photos of meals they have made.

Announced: 4/09/13  Stage: Seed  Participating Institutional Investors: ff Venture Capital, TechStars, Alain Bankier, Andrew McCollum, Paige Craig  Previous Investment: Angel  Founded: June 2012

SavingStar Raises $9.1m. The digital grocery coupon and loyalty service enables shoppers to link deals to their grocery and drug store loyalty cards and then receive the rewards in the form of a cash payment, giftcard, or donate it to charity. Rather than aggregating deals, the company works directly with grocery stores to create exclusive deals. The round was led by corporate benefits provider Edenred, and as part of the strategic investment created a joint venture to integrate the SavingStar product into a healthy living rewards program, called NutriSavings (as noted in the “Partnerships” section below).

Announced: 4/05/13  Stage: Series D  Participating Institutional Investors: Edenred (lead), American Express, DCM, Flybridge Capital Partners, First Round Capital  Previous Investment: $9m Series C, $7m Series B, $2.3m Series A  Founded: June 2010

Kitchensurfing Raises $3.5m. On the heels of a $1m seed round in February to expand to additional metro areas, the private chef marketplace continues to grow its chef network, which includes nearly 1,500 chefs, as well as its funding. AllThingsD notes that the team currently vets chefs manually, but in order to scale, the team will need to use a portion of the proceeds to create a system where new chefs get approved via peer-review.

Announced: 4/04/13   Stage: Series A  Participating Institutional Investors: Union Square Ventures (lead), Spark Capital  Previous Investment: $1m Seed  Founded: 2011

Chewse Raises $1m.  The LA-based B2B group delivery/catering platform distinguishes itself by presenting only high quality restaurants/dishes that it curates for its corporate clients rather than aggregating all catering options available in the area. Chewse also limits restaurants to those that already do catering and delivery, and have proved they can handle the demands of complex group orders. The team will use the new funds to expand its workforce and add new markets.

Announced: 4/01/13  Stage: Seed  Participating Institutional Investors: 500 Startups, Telegraph Hill Partners, InnoSpring  Previous Investment: $250k seed  Founded: July 2011

Eatclub Raises $5m. The lunch-ordering service has approached the task of feeding office workers in a unique way from other delivery options by limiting the selection to 10-15 dishes from three or four restaurants each day, and managing all of the operations logistics and delivery for the restaurants, including the delivery fleet. The team will use the funding to expand beyond the San Francisco Bay Area into other metropolitan areas around the US, although specific cities have not been mentioned.

Announced: 4/01/13  Stage: Series A  Participating Institutional Investors: August Capital (lead), First Round Capital, Siemer Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Launch Capital, Tekton Ventures  Previous Investment: $1.5m Seed  Founded: 2010

PARTNERSHIPS

Locu partners with Yelp. The digital menu company will integrate Locu-managed menu information to augment Yelp restaurant listings with real-time menus and prices.  It is actually surprising that it has taken Yelp this long to incorporate menus in a meaningful way, and this partnership will be a boon to operators and customers alike.  As we noted last month, this partnership comes on the heels of Locu’s recent WordPress integration.

LevelUp and Merchant Warehouse partner to launch $1m fund to encourage developers to build mobile-payment apps.  The co-sponsored development fund was created to encourage more developers to build apps leveraging LevelUp’s mobile payments platform. Qualified merchants will receive a sponsorship of 25% of the cost of a custom-developed LevelUp White-Label mobile payment and loyalty app. As The Next Web notes, Sweetgreen, small chain in the DC area, was the first company to take advantage of this service in February with its Sweetgreen Rewards app.

Mobile restaurant payment app TabbedOut partners with Harbortouch POS system. The new integration will allow Harbortouch terminals to accept mobile payments, and will be installed on all future HarborTouch POS systems, with the option to install on existing terminals as well. Partnership with POS companies  is essential to the growth of TabbedOut, and over the past couple of years, the company has partnered with Micros, Aloha, Future, Focus, Dinerware, Digital Dining, and Jumpware.

Recipe Kit Service HelloFresh Partners With Weight Loss App Noom.  Noom users will now be able to integrate their diet plan into HelloFresh’s delivery meal service, so they can make calorie appropriate meals from scratch in under 30 minutes, and have the info automatically uploaded in the app. As TechCrunch points out, this is “essentially a white label version of HelloFresh inside of the Noom app,” as Noom is taking responsibility for managing both the partnership and the customers and shares revenue with Hello Fresh for each purchase.

Digital grocery coupon and loyalty company SavingStar and global employee benefits firm Edenred create joint venture to launch NutriSavings. Putting the strategic investment (see “Funding” section above) in SavingStar right to use, Edenred is promoting the NutriSavings program as an employee benefits program to encourage healthy and balanced diets (thus reduce healthcare-related expenses). The program provides nutritional info for grocery purchases as well as incentives such as digital eCoupons for healthier products.

Pizza Hut teams up with Microsoft to create an Xbox Live app where gamers can order pizza directly from console. Kurt Kane, chief marketing officer at Pizza Hut, positioned the partnership as a family-focused move, “With today’s avid gamers and busy modern families gathering around their gaming consoles as much as they gather around a dinner table, we felt this was a natural next step for Pizza Hut as we continue to own the digital ordering experience for pizza lovers everywhere.” As the first tangible good ever made available via the Xbox Live platform, it show an interesting potential for the merging of food and technology. However as Forbes points out, the app is more of a gimmick than a solution, as gamers need to exit out of the game in order to order the pizza – which is not as convenient as just picking up the phone or other online ordering options.

INDUSTRY LANDSCAPE

As The Food Tech & Media ecosystem continues to see rapid change, we created The Food Tech & Media Industry Map  to help entrepreneurs, participants and investors understand this quickly evolving landscape.

Let us know about your recent or upcoming funding, partnerships or acquisitions here.

Check out last month’s round-up here.

Would you be interested in a round-up of agriculture-related funding, partnerships and acquisitions? Let us know in the comments below.

The post Food Tech Media Startup Funding, M&A and Partnerships: April 2013 appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

From home cooking to the restaurant experience, technology-focused food startups are enhancing the way consumers engage with food. These startups are creating significant value for consumers and notable opportunities for restaurants and brands to better understand and provide value to their customers. As the food tech sector matures, we are seeing an increasing number of these companies being funded or acquired by industry players. This monthly column highlights the most interesting acquisitions, financings and partnerships within the Food Tech & Media ecosystem – digital content, social, local, mobile, e-commerce, payments, marketing and analytics – to give you insights into the latest funding and growth trends.

Digital media startups focused on expert and user-generated content hit the spotlight in March with investments, acquisitions and partnerships ranging from recipes to the restaurant experience. While many content companies are searching for the best way to monetize in a time when many consumers aren’t willing to pay for content, as we pointed out in the fall, food-related content is a driving force of consumer engagement both in terms of traffic and interactions with brands. In a 2012 AOL/comScore case study focused on the key drivers of video engagement, food content easily trumped both the entertainment and style categories.

Beyond the ability for highly targeted ad and marketing campaigns for brands, the everyday nature of food-related content drives repeated use cases for consumers and often converts into actionable leads: coupons, grocery shopping, restaurant reservations, travel, e-commerce and more. As pointed out in a recent Restaurant SmartBrief article, food dominates all other categories on Pinterest, and in one survey 33% of respondents claim to have purchased food or cooking-related items (the biggest category in the group) after having seen the item on Pinterest. Furthermore, consumers are increasingly depending on their mobile devices to deliver (and interact) with this content through email, apps and the web, thus most companies featured below have included mobile strategy as part of their next phase of growth.

M&A

TripAdvisor Acquires Tiny Post. The travel and local reviews site purchased Tiny Post, which is “like Instagram for Yelp reviews.”  According to TechFlash, TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer recently stated that “rich user-generated content is the lifeblood of the business.” Given the high engagement factor of food content – especially photos – and TripAdvisor’s recent restaurant data partnership, TripAdvisor seems to be eyeing the food vertical as a driver of traffic. TechCrunch reports this was an acqui-hire as well as a product acquisition.

Announced: 3/22/13  Terms: Not Specified  Previous Investment: Not Specified  Founded: August 2011

Coupons.com Acquires KitchMe. As Coupons.com unveiled the public beta launch of their new next-generation meal planning and savings web/mobile application, the company revealed it had actually completed the acquisition of the base product, KitchMe, almost a year ago (Q2 of 2012). The visual recipe saving, meal planning and shopping list service was acquired before ever publicly launching, and the two founders joined Coupons.com to continue working on KitchMe. The shopping list capability is powered by the same technology used in Coupons.com’s Grocery iQ – a product that I personally find clunky and inelegant – so perhaps the new capabilities and interface will help Coupons.com compete with the numerous apps and websites in this sector.

Announced: 3/21/13  Terms: Not Specified  Previous Investment: Not Specified  Founded: April 2011

Pinterest Acquires Livestar. With its second acquisition, Pinterest scooped up the engineering talent of the personalized recommendations mobile app and will be shutting down the operations of Seattle-based Livestar immediately. This comes after the recent acquisition of Punchfork, which was also an engineering aqui-hire, and on the heels of the wide launch of Pinterest’s redesign. As GigaOM points out, user experience is key to Pinterest and the management is constantly pushing the team to come up with new ways to engage people’s attention on the site.

Announced: 3/20/13  Terms: Not Specified  Previous Investment: $2m. Institutional investors included: SV Angel, Allen and Co, Betaworks, Mitch Kapor, The Chernin Group, William Morris Endeavor, Morado Ventures  Founded: January 2011 (Launched June 2012)

Target Acquires Cooking.com and Chefs Catalog. In order to expand its presence in the $3bn+ cooking and kitchenware market, and serve customers who are increasingly spending time both in the kitchen and shopping online, Target  acquired two established cooking e-commerce companies in separate transactions.  Following the closings, the two businesses will be combined to create a new, wholly owned subsidiary of Target and both brands will continue to operate under their current names.

Announced: 3/14/13  Terms: Not Specified  Previous Investment: Cooking.com: $101m; Chef’s Catalog:  JH Partners acquired Chef’s Catalog in 2004 from The Neiman Marcus Group for $14.4m  Founded: Cooking.com: 1998; Chef’s Catalog: 1979

FUNDING

Food52 Raises $2m.  With plans for a unique online shop, improved mobile experience and expanded publishing platform, the recipe and cooking community Food52 announced their Series A investment was led by (quasi-strategic) investment firm Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments. Food52’s growth plans also include an “innovative” publishing partnership with Random House (which is owned by Bertelsmann AG).

Announced: 3/27/13  Stage: Series A  Participating Institutional Investors: Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Vocap Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, Gary Vaynerchuk, Lerer Ventures, 15 Angels, Joanne Wilson  Previous Investment: $750k  Founded: 2009

Skinny Mom Raises $100k.  The online mom community focused on fitness, food, fashion and family will use this first tranche of an estimated total of $500k in seed funding to “continue building the brand by delivering daily, weekly and monthly content” by adding a virtual Recipe Index, Fitness Video Index, city-specific & category-specific virtual mom groups, and personal profile pages for users.

Announced: 3/14/13  Stage: Seed  Participating Institutional Investors: Cincy Tech Previous Investment: Not Specified  Founded: 2011

500friends Raises $5m.  The loyalty and marketing SaaS company, which has made its name in online loyalty initiatives for mid- to enterprise-sized retail companies, will use the new funding to bolster its omichannel loyalty solutions (i.e. linking brink & mortar to digital platforms). According to PandoDaily this means “building out the research and development team, building out its mobile software development kit, expanding its sales and marketing team, and building a platform that supports Android devices.” In addition to the equity raise, the company also raised $2m in debt.

Announced: 3/12/13  Stage: Series B  Participating Institutional Investors: Intel Capital (lead), Fung Capital USA, Crosslink Capital  Previous Investment: $4.5m Series A; $1.4m Seed  Founded: 2010

Tastemade Raises $5.3m. The You-Tube-centric multi-channel food programming network, founded last year by three top executives from Demand Media, will use the proceeds to build out its network of affiliated channels and develop more original content for the Tastemade channel. According to the Los Angeles Business Journal, the company received financing from YouTube as part of YouTube’s strategy to increase high-quality original content (a strategy that did not pan out for most partners), and built a 7,000-square-foot production studio in Santa Monica that features a kitchen set. According to Geoff Yang, the lead investor at Redpoint Ventures, the team is focused on creating “what traditional networks like Food Network, Cooking Channel, or Travel Channel did – with one difference: building it for a connected, broadband world.”

Announced: 3/04/13  Stage: Series A  Participating Institutional Investors: Redpoint Ventures  Previous Investment: Undisclosed Amount from YouTube  Founded: 2012

PARTNERSHIPS

TripAdvisor Partners with Factual to Create Global Restaurant Data Partnership. To bolster TripAdvisor’s dining options and reviews with location-specific restaurant data, the company partnered with Factual, one of the largest global geo-location databases which will in turn, receive TripAdvisor’s user-generated review data to help to maintain Factual’s Global Places data. According to PandoDaily, Factual already has “relationships with Foursquare, Yelp, LivingSocial, SimpleGeo and Trulia, while it is widely reported, though not confirmed publicly, that it also powers elements of Facebook’s and Google’s platforms.”

Evernote Food Integrates OpenTable and Foursquare with new update. In order to improve functionality for Evernote’s mobile app dedicated to documenting cooking and dining experiences, the new features allows users to discover restaurants and dishes through Foursquare’s ratings and reserve a table through OpenTable, directly within the app. The company also added additional recipe sharing, ability to import recipes from Evernote into Evernote Food, and regional recipe content partnerships in China and Japan.

Locu Partners with Automattic to Bring Real-Time Menus to WordPress.com Restaurant Sites. After launching a restaurant-focused vertical in November, WordPress.com improved restaurateurs’ ability to update their menu through a new integration with the menu management system and dashboard, Locu. The integration provides menu templates, printable menus, enhanced SEO and free advertising to Locu’s content partners (including OpenTable and CitySearch).

LevelUp Announces Several Key Mobile Payment Partnerships. Heartland, one of the largest payments processors, partnered with LevelUp to accelerate national acceptance of m-payments through a national rollout of a mobile payment solution. As FastCasual notes, “In addition to the LevelUp app for individual merchants, the companies will also co-promote white-labeled apps for businesses with multiple locations.” At SXSW, LevelUp partnered with Nokia to demonstrate the service, and also debuted a newly-refined version of its mobile phone scanner which it designed using a 3-D printer from MakerBot to prototype the hardware.

INDUSTRY LANDSCAPE

As The Food Tech & Media ecosystem continues to see rapid change, we created The Food Tech & Media Industry Map  to help entrepreneurs, participants and investors understand this quickly evolving landscape.

Let us know about your recent or upcoming funding, partnerships or acquisitions here.

Check out last month’s round-up here.

Would you be interested in a round-up of agriculture-related funding, partnerships and acquisitions? Let us know in the comments below.

The post Food Tech Media Startup Funding, M&A and Partnership Deals: March 2013 appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

From home cooking to the restaurant experience, technology-focused food startups are enhancing the way consumers engage with food. These startups are creating significant value for consumers and notable opportunities for restaurants and brands to better understand and provide value to their customers. As the food tech sector matures, we are seeing an increasing number of these companies being funded or acquired by industry players. This monthly column highlights the most interesting acquisitions, financings and partnerships within the Food Tech & Media ecosystem – digital content, social, local, mobile, e-commerce, payments, marketing and analytics – to give you insights into the latest funding and growth trends.

“Delivery” was a major investment theme in February. Ranging from restaurant dishes to subscription-based models to in-home chefs, investors and startups are betting that a huge number of consumers will continue to increase their reliance on the convenience of online ordering and delivery. While these cash flow businesses can be appealing (as investor Gary Vaynerchuk noted on a recent panel: “When people buy [stuff], you make money. That’s good.”), managing the costs of distribution (mainly shipping) for food businesses has proved to be challenging. Profits are elusive without considerable scale. Furthermore, beyond the simple transaction, successful new models need to merge the physical and virtual worlds by utilizing data, analytics and ingenuity to generate new methods of creating and capturing value.

M&A

Fancy Acquires Samplrs. Commerce-focused photo-sharing social network Fancy, which itself has raised $44.4m, made its first acquisition with Samplrs, a NYC delivery/subscription startup for local artisan food. The acquisition will likely bolster Fancy’s own subscription service, Fancy Box, and as Techcrunch notes, the new food offerings can be used “to steer the site further into direct commerce.”  This month Fancy also partnered with Google+ to power ecommerce functionality with a recently-launched commerce platform.

Announced: 2/22/13  Terms: Not specified  Previous Investment: Not specified  Founded: May 2011

Yahoo Acquires Alike. In a move to push deeper into local mobile discovery, Yahoo acquired mobile app Alike, which helps users discover nearby venues (restaurants, local businesses) based on their personal interests. The team will join the mobile product group at Yahoo, joining other recent acqui-hire mobile talent including the team from Stamped, and the existing iPhone and Web apps will be shut down. As CEO, Marissa Mayer has often emphasized, Yahoo is looking to mobile to rekindle growth in its user base and will continue to focus on smaller acquisitions under $100m.

Announced: 2/12/13  Terms: Not Specified  Previous Investment: Not Specified  Founded: 2011

Jawbone Acquires MassiveHealth. Wearable computing hardware company Jawbone acquired mobile app maker MassiveHealth, in a move to improve user experience for the personal health focused wearable computing device UP. Known for its photo-based nutrition app The Eatery, TechCrunch reports it was primarily a talent acquisition.

Announced: 2/04/13  Terms: ‘Mid to low tens of millions’, stock + cash  Previous Investment: $2.25m  Institutional investors included Felicis Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Collaborative Fund  Founded: December 2010

FUNDING

LocalResponse Raises $1.5m.  The New York-based social advertising platform helps marketers respond to consumer “intent” in real-time and works with over 125 advertisers, working with brands ranging from Coca-Cola to Arby’s to 7-Eleven. With the recent launch of the company’s new product, Desktop Intent Targeting, CEO Nihal Mehta states that the company’s goal is to “make ads way more contextual and relevant so they become more like content that consumers can engage with.” TechCrunch reports that the “startup is almost at profitability, and the company is now on a $10 million annual run rate.”

Announced: 2/27/13  Stage: Seed  Participating Institutional Investors: Cava Capital (lead), Extreme Venture Partners, Verizon, Advancit Capital, WIN  Previous Investment: $5m Venture Round; $1.5m Angel Round  Launched: April 2011

EatStreet Raises $2m.  The Madison, WI-based restaurant ordering and marketing platform is focused on secondary markets across the US, and providing small and medium sized restaurants with competitive tools they often can’t afford. CEO Matt Howard tells TechCrunch, “EatStreet’s main goal is to give restaurants websites, their own mobile apps, their own mobile websites, their own Facebook ordering – we’re giving them everything they need for online ordering…we push more of a platform approach”.  The company has already grown to 20 cities, and will use the money to expand into new (secondary) markets.

Announced: 2/26/13  Stage: Series A  Participating Institutional Investors: Cornerstone Opportunity Partners (lead), Great Oaks Venture Capital, Independence Equity, gener8tor  Previous Investment: Not Specified  Founded: 2009

Blue Apron Raises $3m.  Positioned as “a new concept in grocery delivery,” the Brooklyn-based subscription meal kit startup delivers weekly boxes that include the fresh ingredients and recipes to make three meals. Currently only available on the East Coast, AllThingsD reports that “Blue Apron will be using the funding to expand nationwide over the next several months and to increase marketing. It will also be looking for ways to accommodate customers with specific dietary restrictions.” Even with the handful of recent shutterings in the space, the subscription meal/kit-delivery arena is becoming increasingly crowded.

Announced: 2/19/13  Stage: Series A  Participating Institutional Investors: Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital, Graph Ventures Previous Investment: $800k Seed  Founded: Summer 2012

Kitchensurfing Raises approximately $1m.  The marketplace for hiring private chefs and “community for a unique food and social experience” took in an angel round to expand beyond New York and Berlin, and announced the launch of its third city, Boston. Co-founder Chris Muscarella explains Kitchensurfing’s positioning to PandoDaily, “We’re shifting the cost structure of how a restaurant works.”  In addition to the impressive recent addition of Ben Leventhal (the co-founder of Eater) as its President, Kitchensurfing attracted an elite set of investors beyond the institutional names below, including Chris Dixon, David Tisch, Tumblr founder David Karp, Joanne Wilson, Homeaway co-founder Brian Sharples, Blue Hill Farm executive chef David Barber, angel investors Josh Stylman and Peter Hershberg, former Tumblr president John Maloney, and Groupon founding CTO Ken Pelletier.

Announced: 2/13/13  Stage: Angel  Participating Institutional Investors: SV Angel, Founder Collective  Previous Investment: Not Specified  Founded: 2011

ClubW Raises $3.1m.  The Los Angeles-based subscription-based wine ecommerce company is, as PandoDaily cleverly put it, “what the wine of the month club would be if it were invented in 2012 rather than 1972.” The company curates and personalizes the wines based on each member’s taste profile, and in early 2012 stated that it was already on track to sell $1 million worth of wine for the year. PandoDaily’s Michael Carney is astute to point out that “given the uncertainty around e-commerce in general, and many of the local category leaders in specific, ClubW is fortunate to have raised this round. Its atypical fundraising strategy may have contributed.”  With 10 employees, and fulfillment outsourced, the use of proceeds is to ramp up customer acquisition efforts through both online marketing, and offline grassroots campaigns.

Announced: 2/07/13  Stage: Series A  Participating Institutional Investors: Crosscut Ventures (lead), Guild Capital, Siemer Ventures, Brener International Group, 500 Startups, Amplify  Previous Investment: $500k Seed  Founded: August 2011

MomentFeed Raises $1.8m.  After launching out of beta in January 2012, the location-based analytics and campaign management enterprise platform is used by multi-store chains (including 8,000 7-Eleven stores) to both manage and understand all social media activity around their physical locations. According to PandoDaily, “The decision to raise a seed round wasn’t one of limited interest. Rather, the company is growing so fast, according to founder and CEO Rob Reed, that the insiders decided to raise as little as possible and keep the action to themselves.” Although “initial adoption of the platform was actually slower than expected,” it is important to note that Reed has seen an evolution in the priorities of large brands, and that they “are increasingly recognizing the value of the social presence of each individual local.”

Announced: Feb 2013  Stage: Seed Extension  Participating Institutional Investors:  Gold Hill Capital, DFJ Frontier, DFJ-JAIC Venture Partners, Double M Capital, Daher Capital  Previous Investment: $1.2 m Seed  Founded: April 2010

Perkville Raises $500k.  The San Francisco-based SaaS loyalty program platform helps merchants build customized loyalty programs, and links rewards to customer’s email addresses. POS integration includes MerchantOS, Vend, Erply, VisualTouch, Revel Systems, and the loyalty platform also has a cloud-based interface for a tablet or desktop. The funding will be used to bolster Perkville’s sales and marketing team, as well as enhance platform functionality.

Announced: 1/30/13  Stage: Seed Extension  Participating Institutional Investors: Band of Angels, Keiretsu Forum  Previous Investment: $700k Seed  Product Launch:  October 2011

PARTNERSHIPS

Foursquare partners with Visa and MasterCard; users sync cards to receive targeted discounts from participating merchants. With the new partnerships, which will be a core part of the company’s revenue model going forward, Foursquare will be paid on a cost-per-transaction basis. Burger King, and its 7,000-plus locations, signed on as the pilot partner. In other news from Foursquare this month, the partnership with Voice Media Group went live, which adds local content from the regional magazines like Miami New Times, L.A. Weekly, and Village Voice to the “Explore” recommendation feature in Foursquare.

General Mills and Procter & Gamble Co. partner with CircleUp Networks, an equity-based crowdfunding startup that promotes early-stage consumer brands. A compelling value exchange for all parties involved, the partnership gives the CPG giants the ability to interact with, mentor and invest in innovative consumer products companies with early traction. And, according to the Wall Street Journal, CircleUp is also providing insightful industry data by “providing trend reports to General Mills and P&G about startups in 18 categories, including pet foods, beverages, snack foods and infant products.”

ShopKeep POS and LevelUp launch payment platform which integrates iPad POS and mobile this payments on a single device. In a move that will benefit the growth prospects for both companies, ShopKeep, an iPad point-of-sale solution and LevelUp, a mobile payment and loyalty system (which offers zero payment processing fees), will now offer an alternative way for customers to complete their payment and allow merchants to consolidate cash, credit and LevelUp transactions all in one spot. ShopKeep has been strategically going after partnerships with mobile and online payments companies, and has announced similar partnerships with Paypal and Dwolla. Similarly, LevelUp has been focused on the transition from product to platform with its recent launch of public APIs, and an SDK for its white-label solution.

INDUSTRY LANDSCAPE

As The Food Tech & Media ecosystem continues to see rapid change, we created The Food Tech & Media Industry Map  to help entrepreneurs, participants and investors understand this quickly evolving landscape.

Let us know about your recent or upcoming funding, partnerships or acquisitions here.

Check out last month’s round-up here.

Would you be interested in a round-up of agriculture-related funding, partnerships and acquisitions? Let us know in the comments below.

The post Food Tech Media Startup Funding, M&A and Partnership Deals: February 2013 appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

2012 was an amazing period of growth for FTC. I secured fellowship funding from CUNY to hire my first paid employee and validate key business model assumptions. With that employee, I launched a new website, increased our editorial coverage and created a product development strategy. I also produced 6 events, consulted for a wide range of food-related companies and traveled around the country speaking about the emerging food tech sector.

Then, in November, everything changed due to some unforeseen circumstances. My employee took a higher paying job at another company 5 weeks before Hack//Meat, our marquee event. I scrambled to pull together a new team for the event (thank you Veronica and Rachael) and began working 14-18 hour days. Hack//Meat was a major success (we even had a forward in The New York Time Green Blog!), but the loss of my employee set me back close to 4 months with other things we were working on.

When January hit, I quickly discovered it would be impossible for me to balance hiring a new team, finalizing event and product strategy for 2013 and selling sponsorships, as well as managing consulting projects and editorial. There are, after all, only so many hours in a day! I knew that I had to prioritize planning, building a team and income generation to ensure the future sustainability of the company. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks and will continue to do through the end of February. It’s why editorial will continue to be a little light for now. But I promise we’re working on some really exciting things that I look forward to sharing with you in early March.

Some major takeaways from my experience over the last couple of months:

The Hardest Conversations Are The Most Important Ones to Have: Setting clear expectations from the beginning is important in any kind of relationship, especially in working relationships. Addressing the topics or issues you find yourself pushing off will likely save you time, money and peace of mind in the long run.

Always Be Hiring: Much like the adage “always be closing,” always be hiring is my new mantra. Most startups don’t have the luxury of time or budget to find the perfect candidates when an employee leaves. As a startup, it can also be difficult to find people that share your vision and can handle the inevitable uncertainty that working at a startup brings. I’m going to start taking meetings with more people that inquire about positions at FTC, and I will be looking for people at events that I host or attend.

Rest & Work-Life Balance Are Key: I was completely burnt out and stressed after Hack//Meat. I had trouble sleeping, which meant I was less productive. Once I committed to sleeping 8 hours a night no matter what, focused on planning and made time for my friends and family, everything suddenly felt manageable and I’ve been able to make significant progress.

Now, it’s your turn. What have you learned from your fails? How have you overcome some of your greatest challenges with securing funding, launching and growing your company? Being an entrepreneur is not easy by definition, but there are some unique challenges in the food and health tech sectors, and we all have a lot to learn from one another’s experiences.

FTC invites you to share your stories as part of our new “Fail Friday” series. Fail Friday will be a place for food and health startups to write about their challenges and lessons learned. We’ll do our part to promote your story and encourage feedback from investors and other startups in the community. And as an little extra incentive for anyone that’s on the fence, we’re guaranteeing a startup profile for anyone that shares their story. Sign up to share your story here.

Thank all of you for your continued support and understanding as FTC grows.

– Danielle

The post Announcing Fail Friday: Learn From Food Startup Failures appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

From home cooking to the restaurant experience, technology startups are enhancing the way consumers engage with food. These startups are creating significant value for consumers and notable opportunities for restaurants and brands to better understand and provide value to their customers. As the food tech sector matures, we are seeing an increasing number of these companies being funding or acquired by industry players. So, we’re kicking off 2013 with this monthly column highlighting the most interesting acquisitions, financings and partnerships within the Food Tech & Media ecosystem – digital content, social, local, mobile, e-commerce, payments, marketing and analytics – to give you insights into the latest funding and growth trends.

“The digital restaurant” was a major theme in January as technologies focused on loyalty, marketing and ordering/payments saw significant investments and acquisitions. However, substantial disruption in the restaurant industry still has not occurred as rapidly as many entrepreneurs had hoped. As investor Dave McClure impatiently points out in his treatise on the Food Tech Revolution, “everyone eats, everyone is online; what the hell we waiting for?”

It’s true that establishing a digital platform increases visibility, gives restaurants a direct method of communication with customers and allows them to utilize and analyze tremendous amount of data. But competition for consumer and operator mindshare is fierce. Given the slim margins and generally slow adoption by restaurant operators, both established participants and new entrants need to aggressively focus on partnerships and more collaborative approaches if they hope to achieve meaningful growth.

M&A

OpenTable Acquires Foodspotting. The food world was ablaze last week when the visually-focused food-sharing and recommendations app Foodspotting announced it had joined the OPEN family. While there are many different perspectives on which aspects of the acquisition are the most compelling, the somewhat modest pricetag suggests that despite its engaged userbase and recent partnerships designed to increase revenue and utility to users, Foodspotting still faced a challenging environment to scale to the next level. Take note: even with numerous partners, it is increasingly difficult to build a model that requires massive mobile user adoption, and the vast, hyperlocal world of restaurants is a tough nut to crack.

Announced: 1/29/13 Terms: $10m Previous Investment: Approx. $3.75m Institutional Investors: 2020 Ventures, 500 Startups, BlueRun Ventures, Felicis Ventures, High Line Venture Partners, Zelkova Ventures Product Launch: March 2010

Delivery Hero Fully Acquires Hungryhouse and EatitNow.co.uk. The European online food ordering market continues to heat up with the announcement that Berlin-based Delivery Hero fully acquired UK-based Hungryhouse and also purchased EatitNow.co.uk. In February 2012, Delivery Hero acquired a ‘pivotal’ stake in Hungryhouse, but the complete acquisition allows Delivery Hero to triple its monthly business to approximately £6 million in sales across 11,000 restaurants, reports The Next Web. Interestingly, rather than an exit for the Hungryhouse team, they “re-invested 98% of the purchase price of [their] shares [back] into Delivery Hero,” and Hungryhouse co-founder Tony Charles will be taking a product innovation role, helping the company expand and develop its service well into the future. Delivery Hero has grown significantly in the last year through its aggressive acquisition of other companies, and it does not seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

Performance Marketing Brands (dba Ebates) Acquires Pushpins. In a move to expand into the grocery category, as well as offline coupons, PMB, a conglomerate of several online shopping/rewards programs, snatched up the mobile grocery shopping startup Pushpins which includes a mobile coupon app, the grocery product API SimpleUPC, and nutrition comparison app Food Fight!!.

Announced: 1/19/13 Terms: Estimated $10-$15m. The deal was reportedly structured as “cash with some earn-out targets based on product and business incentives.” Previous Investment: “Sub $1m seed round” from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Archimedes Capital. Product Launch: Nov 2010 

Pinterest Acquires Punchfork. Deemed a great outcome for both Pinterest and Jeff Miller, the one-man team behind social recipe curation website Punchfork, and a sad outcome for enthusiastic users, the acquisition means Miller will soon shut down the popular website, API and mobile apps as Miller joins Pinterest’s engineering team to help improve the discovery product. Punchfork’s social ranking of recipes and highly visual UI helped it stand out in the crowded recipe space, however Miller’s focus on building out an API business model with robust technology  (vs. an advertising model) was likely an influencing consideration in the deal. It is notable that this is Pinterest’s first acquisition.

Announced: 1/03/13 Terms: Not specified; CEO to join engineering team Previous Investment: Bootstrapped Founded: May 2010

FUNDING

OLO Raises $5m. The mobile/online ordering platform for restaurants has reached profitability, and more than doubled its users last year to over 2 million. OLO plans to use the new funding to “aggressively” expand the team and scale up operations. The new strategic investment from PayPal speaks to OLO’s ambitions to ultimately expand into a full mobile commerce platform, beyond the restaurant category. CEO Noah Glass explains in an interview with TechCrunch, “Since June 2005, I thought that mobile commerce was a huge and compelling idea, but for it to really gain mainstream adoption, we had to find the right application for it … PayPal’s thinking is about being an online-plus-mobile account… is incredibly aligned.”

Announced: 1/24/13 Stage: Series B Participating Investors: PayPal, David Frankel, RRE Ventures, Core Capital Partners Previous Investment: $7m Series A Founded: 2005 (Previously called GoMobo)

Abe’s Market Raises $5m. With its third round of funding, the online marketplace for natural and organic products Abe’s Market  plans to invest in marketing, hiring more talent, technology enhancements, content creation and product expansion. Although the e-commerce portal has referred to itself in simple terms as an online farmer’s market, it has been able to surpass the growth of other specialty products sites by broadening its focus to include everyday non-food items, and has augmented the shopping experience with a comprehensive product quality system that categorizes every item by every attribute (gluten free, fair trade, GMO free, Petroleum free, etc.) so customers can find exactly what they want through a targeted search.

Announced: 1/17/13 Stage: Venture Round Participating Investors: Carmel Ventures (lead), Index Ventures, Accel Partners, Beringea, OurCrowd Previous Investment: $3.4m Series A, and undisclosed seed capital Founded: Sept 2009

ChowNow Raises $3m. White label SaaS mobile and Facebook ordering startup ChowNow has “hundreds of restaurants in 44 states,” and plans to use the new funding to further build both its team and its product offering. The company also plans to expand into the catering order segment – a rapidly growing space for startups – and add additional CRM and analytics features for restaurants.

Announced: 1/16/13 (Closed in Sept ’12) Stage: Series A Participating Investors: GRP Partners (lead), Daher Capital, Double M Capital, Karlin Ventures, Velos Partners Previous Investment: $1m Product Launch: May 2012, Graduated from Launchpad LA

PARTNERSHIPS

Virgin America partners with restaurant loyalty platform MOGL for Elevate® Frequent Flyer Program. Given the numerous challenges that many restaurant-focused tech companies face as they attempt to scale, this is a tremendous partnership for the startup MOGL, which increases both brand visibility and utility to users, and provides added incentive for restaurants to join the network. Elevate members who sign up for MOGL will be able to earn 10% cash back from every bill at MOGL partner restaurants, and then exchange that cash to Elevate points each month. Adding to the feel-good component, MOGL also donates a meal through Feeding America every time MOGL members spend more than $20 on a check.

Epson bolsters its OmniLink POS solutions by partnering with mobile loyalty rewards platform RewardLoop and operational and consumer analytics provider Livelenz. By partnering directly with the POS provider, both RewardLoop and Livelenz are able to skip to the front of the line and have direct interaction with all OmniLink restaurant operators. RewardLoop’s cloud hosted, self service rewards platform resides on the printer – not the POS system – and prints QR codes on the receipts for customers to scan. Although the current solution is bolstered by printer/POS partnerships, the company views NFC as a more compelling solution and is “poised to take advantage of this technology as it becomes more prevalent in consumer markets.”

Restaurant menu dashboard and local business data provider Locu partners with TripAdvisor and CitySearch. Following a partnership with OpenTable in November, Locu scored a big distribution win by powering menus, deals, and more to the mobile and web users of TripAdvisor, which has been recently focusing more on its restaurant content, and CitySearch – although it doesn’t appear that sister property UrbanSpoon is part of the partnership.

PayPal takes another step outside of the ecommerce world to partner with NCR Corp’s POS technology for restaurants and gas stations. Ahead of PayPal’s announcement that it was a strategic investor in OLO’s latest round of funding, it made a splash by announcing it will be further expanding into the physical restaurant category through a deep implementation into NCR’s Mobile Pay app and NCR Online Ordering, and perhaps more interestingly, vise versa, as PayPal will integrate NCR’s Mobile Pay merchants into its own branded app. VentureSource observes that this partnership “could end up being of the most significant developments for PayPal in its quest to become the One True Payment Service” (NCR’s customer base includes 38% of the top 100 U.S. restaurant chains). While this may be true, neither are monogamous, and NCR has stated that it is open to similar deals with other mobile payments providers down the line.

ADDITIONAL NEWS

Gourmet meal delivery startup Pop-Up Pantry shuts down operations. While accomplishing a lot of momentum in just six months – including 1,300 monthly paying customers and securing an innovative partnership with TV show “MasterChef” – the economies of scale were not achieved quickly enough, and the cost of shipping the meals was a hurdle they couldn’t surpass.

Stage: Seed Participating Investors: GRP Partners (lead), Crosscut Ventures Investment Amount: $1.7m Product Launch: June 2012, Graduated from Launchpad LA

Ethnic cooking and monthly commerce startup Culture Kitchen closes shop. As part of the second class of 500 Startups, Culture Kitchen started as an online site that featured classes on how to cook ethnic dishes and evolved into a monthly commerce venture that sold DIY Ethnic Cooking Kits. Despite an enthusiastic community, the team decided it was time to move on, and in their farewell post  the co-founders candidly discussed the difficulties that confronted them, including “challenges with sales, bumps in the road with funding and the sometimes dwindling team energy from working very long hours.”

Stage: Seed Participating Investors: 500 Startups, from the incubator’s Design Fund Investment Amount: NA Product Launch: August 2011

INDUSTRY LANDSCAPE

As The Food Tech & Media ecosystem continues to see rapid change, we created The Food Tech & Media Industry Map  to help entrepreneurs, participants and investors understand this quickly evolving landscape.

Let us know about your recent or upcoming funding, partnerships or acquisitions here.

Would you be interested in a round-up of agriculture-related funding, partnerships and acquisitions? Let us know in the comments below.

The post Food Tech & Media Funding, M&A and Partnership Deals: January 2013 appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Beef Stakes, an art project by ITP student Sarah Hallacher, offers a sensory examination of 2011 beef production and consumption data from the top 4 U.S. producing states: Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Texas. The data comes from  beefusa.org and Cornell’s library of USDA data.

The  size of each clay steak represents the amount of beef produced in the state of origin, using 1 inch per every billion pounds.  “The correct execution would be to map the amount of production in lbs to the square mileage of the state, then to the size of the 'state steak,'” writes Hallcher on her blog. “My current mapping process left Texas in the dust, when in reality it produces “only” about 2.5 billion lbs less than the top-producer, Nebraska.”

The price tags also offer up some meaty data about each state: a barcode bar graph of monthly production quantities, total weight of beef produced, cost of beef production (per pound & total) to produce the beef, the 2011 state population and the amount of beef each citizen would have to consume annually to consume total production in-state.

While incredibly creative, as well as aesthetically appealing and thought-provoking, for me the question remains: is this the most useful data to use when telling the story of beef production? What data is missing? What do these numbers mean?

“I would love to expand my project to discuss beef imports/exports between the U.S. and the rest of the world,” Hallacher writes in a blog post. “I’m also fascinated in the amount of waste involved in beef production; the oil used to transport, the methane produced by corn-fed cows, the actual amount of meat we consume vs. produce, etc.”

For me, comparison data would help put these numbers and those already included on the label in context. I'd also like to see data on prices paid to producers, farm employment and farm closures, and number of recalls annually. This data could help illustrate the impacts of consolidation, and how we support further consolidation with our dollars.

What data would you like to see included in Hallacher's Beef Stakes? What story would you like to tell?

The post Beef Stakes Visualizes 2011 US Beef Production & Consumption Data appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Local Food Lab is a startup lab for the ideas and companies that will change the food system. We create impact through entrepreneurship. By providing state-of-the-art entrepreneurial education and a dynamic network of diverse professional mentors, Local Food Lab supports entrepreneurs in transforming their ideas into thriving, sustainable ventures. The final day to apply to our Palo Alto, CA Winter Food & Farm Startup Accelerator is January 14 at midnight PST. Apply here.

The Local Food Lab Accelerator is a six-week program located in the heart of Silicon Valley that helps entrepreneurs take an early stage idea for a food or farm startup and turn it into a complete business plan and product concept. We will work with any food or farm idea that simultaneously shows strong business potential and a social commitment. Entrepreneurs well suited for our program are those interested in creating startups that offer packaged and prepared food products, catering and food services, food+tech products, urban to medium-scale agricultural products and services, and programs that expand the interest and demand for a more sustainable food system.

Each session is organized around a critical element of business education, and always through the lens of creating a food system that is more healthy, just and resilient. Topics covered include market and industry analysis, product and service design, financial forecasting, sales and marketing strategy, development of a social mission s

tatement, management of a mission aligned team, and the effective pitch and presentation of a new business. Students will meet and learn from a wide variety of food and agriculture industry mentors to develop and grow their startups and networks. Lunch or dinner will be included at every class session.

Participating startups will also have the opportunity to work one-on-one with MBA students from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business who are focusing their studies on the business of food.

The Winter Accelerator will culminate in a capstone event, a Venture Fair, to be held at Stanford University's Design School. The Venture Fair will allow students to showcase their startups to investors, industry leaders, potential co-founders and key partners in the good food economy.

Participating in LFL’s Accelerator is a great way to validate a startup idea while surrounded by other food system entrepreneurs and experts. The community of startups established during our Accelerators lives on long after the program concludes.
Local Food Lab Alumni include:
Chef Surfing
Real Good Food
Hungry Globetrotter
My American Pantry
Valley Girls Foodstuffs
Brunched in the Face
And more…

Meet the Local Food Lab Mentors

Local Food Lab will also hold a Spring Accelerator in New York City from April 8 – May 14. Applications for our NYC Accelerator will open on January 25 and will be due March 6. Early applications are eligible for a partial scholarship towards the cost of the program.

The post Food Startups: Apply to Join Local Food Lab's Winter Accelerator by Jan 14 appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Earn and Play – an app that gamefies grocery shopping and rewards shoppers with cash and prizes.

Agricultural Food Systems – this was one of the ARK companies that caught our food+tech eye, you can read our interview with its founder in a previous post. It is developing a TenderID product that measures the tenderness of meat on the production line. It's designed to greatly improve the efficiency and value of meat production.

Farmeto – connects small farmers with local retailers in an online marketplace.

Mass Vector – “a web based Software as a Service that provides real-time analytics and progressive demand prediction based on individual UPCs,” according to its Crunchbase profile. Basically, it can help retailers predict inventory needs. It also tracks competitors prices on individual items.

Truckily – a service that helps customers find their favorite food trucks by location and cuisine.

The post Startup Incubator Graduates New Food & Ag Tech Companies appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Photo Credit: miltedflower

Every year, Food+Tech Connect looks at the trends that are transforming the future of how food is produced, sold and consumed. We always pay particular attention to Phil Lempert’s, CEO of The Lempert Report and author of SupermarketGuru.com, foresights. This year, Lempert’s predictions touch on many of the topics we’ve covered over the past year like food waste, transparency, health and wellness and protein consumption. Lempert also points to the terrible drought of 2012 as a direct cause of increasing food prices and predicts that consumers will use technology to reduce waste and make smarter purchasing decisions.

Below is a summary and analysis of a few of his ideas for the coming year. Quotes below come from Lempert’s summary on Supermarket News. Read his trend predictions in full here and here.

Trend #1 – Sustainability: We Stop Wasting Food

“The National Resource Defense Council estimates 40% of food goes uneaten each month in the United States. Not surprisingly, the Eco Pulse Survey from the Shelton Group reports 39% of Americans feel the most ‘green guilt’ for wasting food, almost double the number who feel guilty about not recycling.”

Earlier this year, we reported on how food is lost at each step in the supply chain, illustrating facts about the costs of food waste through data-packed infographics. We’re seeing large food companies and entrepreneurs developing technological solutions to improve efficiency and minimize waste, as described by  NRDC in this report.

Two innovative waste reduction projects we followed this year were Halfsies, a social initiative giving restaurant diners the ability to eat a half portion of their meal and donate part of the plate’s cost to a charity, and Sian’s Plan, a new meal planning tool. Given rising food prices, coupled with the significant cost saving potential outline in the NRDC report for manufacturers, restaurants and consumers, we expect there will be even greater attention on food waste reduction technologies in 2013.

Trend #3 – The Boomer Reality of Diabetes, High Blood Pressure and Heart Disease

“Studies by the NPD Group show that nutrition and healthy eating habits are top meal-planning priorities for Baby Boomers…Boomers will focus on their intake of antioxidants as they continue their search for the fountain of youth. Boomers will control more than half the dollars spent on grocery foods by 2015, look for more heart-healthy antioxidant-rich foods including oily fish such as salmon, as well as green tea, sweet potatoes, dark leafy greens, popcorn, berries and whole grains to take over supermarket shelves.”

We couldn’t agree more with this prediction. A staggering two-thirds of adults and one-third of children in the United States are overweight or obese. Earlier this year, the Institute of Medicine reported that obesity-related illness treatments cost an estimated $190.2 billion annually  and cost businesses $4.3 billion in losses as a result of obesity-related absenteeism. Food Marketing Institute and Prevention Magazine’s annual “Shopping For Health” annual survey also indicates that consumers are increasingly looking for healthier food options.

A number of startups launched new products to meet this growing demand for healthier food choices. Some of the companies we reported on this year include:

• Massive Health launched the Eatery, an iPhone app that helps users track and analyze their eating patterns to better understand their strengths, weaknesses and the best places to make changes in their diet. In just 5 months, users from 50 countries contributed over 7.68 million food ratings
• Nutritionix launched a suite of tools that allow restaurants and food brands to organize and publish their nutritional data. They also announced plans to release an API for developers. At the time of our interview, the company had over 150 developers on their API waiting list.
• Maya Design launched Maya Food Oasis, a virtual grocery marketplace to improve access to healthy and affordable food in food deserts. Sanofi Aventis provided the company with funding after they presented at the Health Data Initiative. Sanofi is also committed to supporting the next generation of diabetes prevention and management technologies, while also reinvigorating their business model, through its Data Design Diabetes competition.

Trend #4 – The Economy: The New Proteins

“The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates the cost of both beef and chicken will increase by at least 5% due to the 2012 drought and declining supply. A major shift is anticipated in the nation’s protein food s

medieval furniture plans

upply away from meat-based proteins and shifting to meatless proteins like eggs, nut butters, tofu, beans, legumes, with an increase in awareness and consumption of vegetarian and vegan meals.”

With tech investors like Vinod Khosla and Biz Stone betting on fake meat, we agree that the dialogue about consuming new proteins will flourish in 2013. But during our online conversation “Hacking Meat,” we found it’s not all about substitutes. Recipe development startup Foodpairing is seeing a growing interest among chefs to develop dishes that incorporate more vegetables and smaller servings of better meat, without compromising flavor and satisfaction.

Similarly, Cookstr’s Kara Rota sees technology as critical to reducing meat consumption, but not “ in the form of in vitro meat.” She advocates for using technology to provide home cooks recipes that emphasize quality over quantity. And Haven Bourque of HavenBMedia invites “meat lovers to sit at the table with committed vegans and dream up farm-fresh, seasonal meals that anyone would enthusiastically eat.”

There is also growing demand for sustainably and humanely raised meat, but farmers and chefs face significant barriers to making these kinds of operations economically sustainable. Following the success of Hack//Meat, you can be sure to expect more conversation and events to help help support the development of technologies that can address some of these challenges.

Trend #8 – Mobile the Next Generation: Tests for Allergens, Ripening Produce, Organics, and Start Cooking Your Meals

“The newest wave of technology includes smartphones that network with kitchen appliances and allow consumers to do everything from checking how much milk they have left in the refrigerator, to turning the oven on from another room. The next generation of mobile apps may determine if fruits and vegetables are ripe, if refrigerated and frozen foods have been kept at the correct temperature farm to freezer, and even test for foodborne bacteria.”

We also believe mobile and sensor technologies will reshape the way consumers interact with and purchase food. We are particularly excited about some of the innovative technologies retailers, technologists and researchers are developing that bridge the digital and physical worlds. Three of the more interesting projects we covered include:

• Peapod created a virtual store in a Chicago transit station, lining the walls with product images and QR codes. Customers could, theoretically, order items while they waited for a train.
• Lapka launched a “personal environment monitor” device and app that allows you to test the “organicity of your food.
• An interactive cheese, meat & fish counter designed by German interaction design students provides customers with detailed product, origin and recipe information for food items.

Read about more of the R&D projects we covered this year here.

Trend #10 – Transparency: Who is making our food?

“2013 will be a transitional year as on-package claims proliferate and confuse. Look as supermarkets take on the role of gatekeeper and actually demand proof and transparency of claims before they will permit products to be sold on their shelves. Consumers are reading labels selecting their foods more holistically based on all the ‘food factors’ including taste, ingredients, source and nutritional composition, as well as who is making their food.”

In 2012, consumer distrust of food grew as reports of “pink slime,” antibiotic overuse in animals and arsenic in rice made their way across the Internet. California’s Proposition 37 fueled a growing debate about food labeling, and even though the proposition was not passed, the debate will likely continue into 2013.

A number of startups and NGOs developed mobile apps to help meet growing consumer demand for information about what's in their food. For example,  Fooducate launched a GMO app to help consumers determine which foods are made with GMO ingredients; Real Time Farms launched the FixAntibiotics Food Finder to help consumers find meat raised without antibiotics; and Center for Science in the Public Interest  launched Chemical Cuisine to help people understand additives in our food. Additionally, NRDC launched the Label Lookup iPhone app.

But without public databases available with data about GMO use, for example, companies like Fooducate are only able to offer a level of probability that a product contains GMO ingredients. This is not ideal for the consumer, and it's certainly not ideal for manufacturers. But there are glimmers of hope. This year, Kraft and Nestle opened up their recipe and ingredient data. And while these are just small first steps, we hope it’s an increasing trend that will give rise to new applications that improve transparency and the customer experience.

What are your trend predictions for 2013? Let us know in the comments section below, and we will feature your ideas in our weekly newsletter read by the top food and technology investors, executives and startups.

We will also inviting the individuals with the best responses to contribute a guest post on the topic of their choice to Food+Tech Connect.

The post 2013 Food Trends Favor the Tech Savvy Consumer appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

The National Restaurant Association conducted a survey of professional chefs and members of the American Culinary Federation on predicted food trends for restaurants in 2013. Almost 2,000 chefs were asked to rank 198 items based on popularity in the food industry. Among the questions, the topics of technology, health and food cost were addressed – all with an emphasis on environmental sustainability.

The top-ranking trends for the coming year are encouraging indicators that sustainability is top of mind for ma

ny chefs. Within the first ten items, mindful protein choices appear three times, highlighting the importance of local sourcing (#1), lesser used cuts of meat (#6) and sustainable seafood (#9). Similarly, an emphasis on locally grown and sourced ingredients is seen throughout the top twenty; the phrase “hyper-local sourcing” (#7) suggests that more restaurants will be hosting their own gardens in 2013.

Health and nutrition, especially for children, is a notable theme throughout the report. “Healthful kids’ meals” ranks in third place; “children’s nutrition” in fifth%3

The post Health, Sustainability & Tech Top NRA’s 2013 Restaurant Trends appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

There have been not one, not two, but three papers published in the last six months, the last one published last week, encompassing an impressive body of work around behavior change and weight loss, from the same research group led by Bonnie Spring, PhD, at Northwestern University.

There’s a lot of stuff in here – everything from financial incentives to the way you coach people about behavior change to the use of mobile devices. If you don’t read them all (or don’t read any of them all the way through), it’s highly likely that you’ll come to the wrong conclusion, in my opinion, so I’m going to break it down here:

1. The way you counsel people about behavior change makes a difference

This is actually the most important part of the first two papers linked here, not the up to $730 incentive (more on that later). What the authors studied was competing theories about how to talk to people. They looked at four different ways, which I’m going to summarize, because it’s important – these are things that are cost-free and don’t require any capital expenditure to deploy .

• Theory 1: Familiarity hypothesis, I’ll call it “MOTS: More of the Same” – “Decrease your saturated fat intake, increase your physical activity”
• Theory 2: Behavioral Economic hypothesis: Crowd out an unhealthy behavior with a heathy one – “Eat more fruits and vegetables, decrease your sedentary activity” < - This was the winner
• Theory 3: Low Inhibitory Demand, I’ll call it “Don’t be a downer, tell people what they CAN do rather than what they CAN’T” – “Eat more fruits and vegetables, increase physical activity”

People coached with the winning theory had significantly higher changes in a calculated “Diet-Activity” score compared to others. If you break it down a little more, it looks like it was far more likely that they could eat more fruits and veggies, than that they could increase their physical activity, across all groups. The winning group, though, dramatically decreased sedentary leisure,  almost by half, which persisted 20 weeks later.

2. Paying people is a background activity to the above

In the first two papers, people were paid $175 to go through 3 weeks of intervention and point incentives along the way up to 20 weeks of follow up, for a total of $730. It seems like this got them through to recording their information. I don’t think it’s the most important feature of the study, and as the authors point out, probably not a realistic approach moving forward.

3. The mobile technology itself doesn’t help in isolation

Notice, I keep saying “mobile technology” not “smartphone.” That’s because these studies used PalmPilots (!) to support entry of data and target feedback. All of the study participants in the behavior change theory study improved their diet-activity score. There was no control group there, the goal was just to compare the theoretical approaches. The first study relied on self report of food intake and physical activity, which the authors sought to keep accurate by deploying a “bogus pipeline” approach where they told people to submit their grocery receipts and accelerometer data that were actually not used – clever.

The second study, which is in the third paper linked to this post, was more focused on weight loss itself rather than behavior change, and in it, the authors planned at the start that the mobile technology would be part of intensive coaching for all study subjects – they didn’t even try to have the mobile device make this happen for people. And in fact, the mobile device by itself didn’t make it happen for people – the one group who were randomized to get the mobile device and didn’t go to class actually gained weight. They gained more weight than the control group who had no mobile device.

What did happen for people was weight loss when they (a) used the mobile device to track and get feedback AND (b) they went to classes, in person. That was the requirement – that both happen, and when it did, this group lost more weight initially, and kept it off – average of 6.38 pounds at 12 months. The people with the mobile devices that didn’t go to classes, gained about 5 pounds at 12 months, which is more than the people who went to classes by themselves, and more than people who didn’t do the classes or get mobile devices.

There’s another really important piece of information in all of this, which is that the people who were randomized into the study were selected after a two week trial of recording their information. About 35% of the people that went into this gate didn’t make it, so in the end, this was a study of people who can use mobile devices to record their information.

As I said, there’s a lot here

I’m looking at this from a population/social determinants perspective, and I would ask the question, “Should mobile devices or apps be deployed to the entire population to make weight loss happen compared to other approaches?” The answer for me would be “no.”

I think what the authors are demonstrating is the answer to this question, “Should mobile devices or apps be deployed to people who are motivated to use apps to lose weight and participate in intensive behavioral interventions?” to which the answer is more of a “yes.”

Also, “Should we get smarter in communicating with people, with technology and not, about their choices?” – answer is “yes.”

I think we still need to think about technology as an enabler at the right time / place , everyone is necessary, and the hard work of looking at the causes of the causes of poor health is not going to go away (see: Now Reading: Why a focus on lifestyle behavior change may not improve health: The Marmot Review | Ted Eytan, MD).

The reason I love technology and have been invested in it for so long (and will continue to be) is because of its role in facilitating communication and connecting people to people. The best.app.ever is the human brain, the most important innovation in health information technology is listening. Oh, and prevention is the new HIT.

I communicated with Dr. Spring before writing this post to help me understand what we can take away from this research, which is very important/timely/useful (and I of course invited her to Washington, DC to the Behavior Change Summit in 2013  – More info on that here: Behavior Change: What can we learn from other industries? – EXAMPLES | Ted Eytan, MD). I learned a ton here that I didn’t know before, which makes me happy that talented behavioral scientists are working in this area.

This post originally appeared on Ted Eytan's blog. 

The post Does Mobile Technology Support Weight Loss and Behavior Change? appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

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