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As the pandemic creates supply chain chaos, Craft raises $10M to apply some intelligence
During the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chains have suddenly become hot. Who knew that would ever happen? The race to secure PPE, ventilators and minor things like food was and still is an enormous issue. But perhaps, predictably, the world of “supply chain software” could use some updating. Most of the platforms are deployed “empty” and require the client to populate them with their own data, or “bring their own data.” The UIs can be outdated and still have to be juggled with manual and offline workflows. So startups working in this space are now attracting some timely attention.
Thus, Craft, the enterprise intelligence company, today announces it has closed a $10 million Series A financing round to build what it characterizes as a “supply chain intelligence platform.” With the new funding, Craft will expand its offices in San Francisco, London and Minsk, and grow remote teams across engineering, sales, marketing and operations in North America and Europe.
It competes with some large incumbents, such as Dun & Bradstreet, Bureau van Dijk and Thomson Reuters . These are traditional data providers focused primarily on providing financial data about public companies, rather than real-time data from data sources such as operating metrics, human capital and risk metrics.
The idea is to allow companies to monitor and optimize their supply chain and enterprise systems. The financing was led by High Alpha Capital, alongside Greycroft. Craft also has some high-flying angel investors, including Sam Palmisano, chairman of the Center for Global Enterprise and former CEO and chairman of IBM; Jim Moffatt, former CEO of Deloitte Consulting; Frederic Kerrest, executive vice chairman, COO and co-founder of Okta; and Uncork Capital, which previously led Craft’s seed financing. High Alpha partner Kristian Andersen is joining Craft’s board of directors.
The problem Craft is attacking is a lack of visibility into complex global supply chains. For obvious reasons, COVID-19 disrupted global supply chains, which tended to reveal a lot of risks, structural weaknesses across industries and a lack of intelligence about how it’s all holding together. Craft’s solution is a proprietary data platform, API and portal that integrates into existing enterprise workflows.
While many business intelligence products require clients to bring their own data, Craft’s data platform comes pre-deployed with data from thousands of financial and alternative sources, such as 300+ data points that are refreshed using both Machine Learning and human validation. Its open-to-the-web company profiles appear in 50 million search results, for instance.
Ilya Levtov, co-founder and CEO of Craft, said in a statement: “Today, we are focused on providing powerful tracking and visibility to enterprise supply chains, while our ultimate vision is to build the intelligence layer of the enterprise technology stack.”
Kristian Andersen, partner with High Alpha commented: “We have a deep conviction that supply chain management remains an underinvested and under-innovated category in enterprise software.”
In the first half of 2020, Craft claims its revenues have grown nearly threefold, with Fortune 100 companies, government and military agencies, and SMEs among its clients.
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Agtech startup iFarm bags $4M to help vertical farms grow more tasty stuff
Vertical farming technology provider iFarm has bagged a $4 million seed round, led by Gagarin Capital, an earlier investor in the startup. Other investors in the round include Matrix Capital, Impulse VC, IMI.VC and several business angels.
The Finnish startup is focused on providing software that enables others to carry out vertical farming — targeting sales at food processing companies and FMCG giants, as well as farmers, university research centers and even large corporates with their own catering needs as a result of operating large physical office footprints.
Its software as a service platform automates crop care for plants such as salad greens, cherry tomatoes and berries grown in vertical stacks. The system involves a range of technologies to monitor and automate crop care, applying computer vision and machine learning and drawing on data on “thousands” of plants collected from a distributed network of farms, per iFarm .
At this stage it’s providing technology to around 50 projects in Europe and the Middle East — covering a total of 11,000 square meters of farm. Its platform is currently able to automate care for around 120 varieties of plants, with the goal of getting to 500 by 2025 (it says 10 new crop varieties are being added each month).
“iFarm started three years ago, with three founders. The goal is to build technology… for growing tasty and healthy food that we already eat,” says co-founder and CEO Max Chizhov, who notes the business has grown to 15 employees along the way.
“We started from a greenhouse. First year just looking for technologies — which kind of technologies to use. After one year of experiments we have some pilots and now we are focused on indoor farming, vertical farming.”
Vertical farming is an urban farming technique that involves stacking plants in dense layers in a highly controlled indoor environment, using LED lighting to replace sunlight to power all-year-round agriculture.
Furthermore, iFarm notes that the fully automated approach also means there’s no need for pesticides to grow a range of edible greens, herbs, fruits, flowers and vegetables. There are some natural limits on what can be grown within such systems — taller plants and trees obviously can’t be squeezed into stacks. Deep-root vegetables also aren’t suitable, although iFarm touts baby carrots among its product portfolio.
“We focus on profitable products,” says Chizhov. “Small crops, very fast growing crops, and easy to irrigate and easy to grow in many layers. Many layers is the advantage of indoor farms.”
Photo credit: iFarm
While there are now hundreds of vertical farming startups whose business model is fixed on selling the edible produce they grow, such as to supply supermarkets and other food retailers, iFarm is purely focused on developing technologies to support automated indoor agriculture.
So it might, for instance, be eyeing the likes of Infarm, Bowery and Plenty as potential customers for its vertical farming optimization technologies.
It says its systems can be applied to vertical farms of 20 to 20,000 square meters, supporting scalability.
“Our main advantage is we know how to grow and you don’t need any special technologies to know how to grow. All of our algorithms, all of the data, is based in our software,” says Chizhov, emphasizing the software is hardware agnostic — meaning customers don’t need to use iFarm’s kit for their vertical farms but just can apply its algorithms to their own set-ups.
The company has designed various bits of vertical farm hardware it can supply, or co-develop with customers, per Chizhov, such as fertilizer units and LED lighting. But the software as a service platform isn’t locked to any specific piece of kit.
“The main thing is the software that combines optimization systems like humidity, temperature, CO2 etc; and some business separations — like why, how, when we start growing, which clients,” he says, adding: “It’s like a CRM plus an ERP system that controls all the parameters.
“In this system we use computer vision systems. We use AI for increasing taste [of the edible produce], increasing yield parameters of our growing crops. We also use drones which fly in our farms and observe all of our greens and all of our plants. We optimize all of the processes in the farm using software and some [pieces of hardware] that use the software.”
Chizhov says the seed funding will be used to gradually expand the business into new regions — with a launch into the U.S. market on the cards in two years’ time — but the main priority now is to spend on further software development.
“The main goal is [adding] new type of crops,” he notes. “Research, development, new products.”
On the competitive front, iFarm is not the only technology provider seeking to sell to the burgeoning vertical farming sector. Chizhov says there are around 10 to 15 similar agtech startups. But he contends its tech and approach has the edge over the likes of U.K.-based Intelligent Growth Solutions, Belgium’s Urban Crop Solutions, Switzerland’s Growcer, U.S. “container farms” provider Freight Farms or China’s Alesca Life, to name-check a handful of other players in the space.
“There are some companies in this market that also provide solutions but with less optimization, with less software value and with less product mix/product line,” he argues. “The main difference is the type of crops; it’s software that we provide for our clients — because you don’t need to know how to grow; you don’t need to be a specialist in your company, you just push a button. And we provide excellent services for our clients. Design, installation, operation, help to sell the final product, etc.”
Chizhov also notes iFarm has filed patents to protect some of its technologies.
Photo credit: iFarm
Mikhail Taver, GP of Gagarin Capital, who is the lead investor in iFarm’s seed round, says the startup stood out on account of having a competitive advantage in the sector. Although he also notes that the fund’s agtech strategy is focused on indoor farming rather than mainstream outdoors — which again makes iFarm a good fit.
“We do see a large potential in the sector with the [world’s] rising population. We see the increasing demand for food — it’s only going to continue. We see global warming and general sustainability issues. And iFarm seems to be able to solve most of those,” Taver told TechCrunch.
“I don’t really see much competitors able to grow things other than greens,” he added, elaborating on the competitive edge claim. “You don’t normally get proper tomatoes or edible flowers and things like that grown in vertical farms. They mainly concentrate on a couple of salads at most.
“Plus most of our competitors they focus on competing with actual farmers, whereas we’re trying to augment them. We don’t try to force them off the market — we’re trying to help them get bigger. Which is a totally different approach and it should be working better. At least that’s what I believe.”
This article was updated with a correction: We were originally given the incorrect job title for Max Chizhov; he is in fact CEO, not CBDO.
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Hong Kong’s food e-commerce startup DayDayCook raises $20 million
The food blogging community in China is booming, and many creators have been cashing in big time by touting food products to loyal followers, a business model that has lured investors.
This week, Hong Kong-based startup DayDayCook announced that it has raised $20 million to expand its multifunctional food platform, whose users mainly come from mainland China. The company, founded by banker-turned food blogger and entrepreneur Norma Chu, offers a bit of everything: an app featuring recipes and food videos, cooking classes in upscale malls and a product line of its own branded food products sold online, which makes up 80% of its revenues.
London-based Talis Capital led the funding round, with participation from Hong Kong’s Ironfire Ventures. The eight-year-old startup has raised a total of $65 million to date from investors, including Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, the e-commerce giant’s not-for-profit effort to support young entrepreneurs in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The selling point of DayDayCook products is their carefully crafted brand stories. Users first consume the content put out by the startup across social channels, and then they become customers of DayDayCook’s ready to eat or cook food packs, kitchenware and more.
“We really believe in the content-to-commerce model,” said Matus Maar, managing partner at Talis Capital .
He went on to explain that as content creation becomes easier thanks to an abundance of mobile editing tools, “even one person in rural China can make amazing content that creates a huge following.” He was referring to China’s reclusive influencer Li Ziqi who rose to stardom by posting videos on YouTube and domestic sites about her rural self-sufficiency.
“That goes hand in hand with people not wanting to see content that is super polished or comes out of mega agencies. People on the internet want to see authenticity. They want to see people doing real things,” suggested the investor.
While there is a legion of food influencers out there, not all are equipped to build a money-making venture. Matus believes DayDayCook has all the pieces in place: suppliers, distribution, logistics and shipment. By developing its private label products, the startup is also able to sell at higher margins.
Chu said her company has amassed 2.3 million registered users on its own app. Its paid users, ordering through e-commerce channels like JD.com and Alibaba’s Tmall, grew 12 times year-over-year to 2.2 million.
DayDayCook’s content has a wider reach, garnering 60 million followers across microblogging platform Weibo, TikTok’s Chinese edition Douyin, Tencent’s video site and more. That may not seem like a lot in the influencer era — Li Ziqi herself has nearly 12 million subscribers just on YouTube.
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Lana has launched in Latin America to be the one-stop shop for gig workers’ financial needs
Lana, a new startup based in Madrid, is looking to be the next big thing in Latin American fintech.
Founded by serial entrepreneur Pablo Muniz, whose last business was backed by one of Spain’s largest financial services institutions, BBVA, Lana is looking to be the all-in-one financial services provider for Latin America’s gig economy workers.
Muniz’s last company, Denizen, was designed to provide expats in foreign and domestic markets with the financial services they would need as they began their new lives in a different country. While the target customer for Lana may not be the same middle to upper-middle-class international traveler that he had previously hoped to serve, the challenges gig economy workers face in Latin America are much the same.
Muniz actually had two revelations from his work at Denizen. The first — he would never try to launch a fintech company in conjunction with a big bank. And the second was that fintechs or neobanks that focus on a very niche segment will be successful — so long as they can find the right niche.
The biggest niche that Muniz saw that was underserved was actually in the gig economy space in Latin America. “I knew several people who worked at gig economy companies and I knew that their businesses were booming and the industry was growing,” he said. “[But] I was concerned about the inequalities.”
Workers in gig economy marketplaces in Latin America often don’t have bank accounts and are paid through the apps on which they list their services in siloed wallets that are exclusive to that particular app. What Lana is hoping to do is become the wallet of wallets for all of the different companies on which laborers list their services. Frequently, drivers will work for Uber or Cabify and deliver food for Rappi. Those workers have wallets for each service.
(Photo by Cris Faga/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Lana wants to unify all of those disparate wallets into a single account that would operate like a payment account. These accounts can be opened at local merchant shops and, once opened, workers will have access to a debit card that they can use at other locations.
The Lana service also has a bill pay feature that it’s rolling out to users, in the first evolution of the product into a marketplace for financial services that would appeal to gig workers, Muniz said.
“We want to become that account in which they receive funds,” he said. “We are still iterating the value proposition to gig economy companies.”
Working with companies like Cabify, and other, undisclosed companies, Lana has plans to roll out in Mexico, Chile, Peru and, eventually, Colombia and Argentina.
Eventually, Lana hopes to move beyond basic banking services like deposits and payments and into credit services. Already hundreds of customers are using the company’s service through the distribution partnership with Cabify, which ran the initial pilot to determine the viability of the company’s offering.
“The idea of creating Lana was initially tested as an internal project at Cabify,” Muniz wrote in an email. “Soon Cabify and some potential investors saw that Lana could have a greater impact as an independent company, being able to serve gig economy workers from any industry and decided to start over a new entrepreneurial project.”
Through those connections with Cabify, Lana was able to bring in other investors like the Silicon Valley-based investment firm Base 10.
“One of the things we’ve been interested in is in inclusion generally and in fintech specifically,” said Adeyemi Ajao, the firm’s co-founder. “We had gotten very close to investing in a couple of fintech companies in Latin America and that is because the opportunity is huge. There are several million people going from unbanked to banked in the region.”
Along with a few other investors, Base 10 put in $12.5 million to finance Lana as it looks to expand. It’s a market that has few real competitors. Nubank, Latin America’s biggest fintech company, is offering credit services across the continent, but most of their end users already have an established financial history.
“Most of their end users are not unbanked,” said Ajao. “With Lana it is truly gig workers… They can start by being a wallet of wallets and then give customers products that help them finance their cars or their scooters.”
The ultimate idea is to get workers paid faster and provide a window into their financial history that can give them more opportunities at other gig economy companies, said Ajao. “The vision would be that someone can plug in their financial information for services. If they’re working for Rappi and have never been an Uber driver and they want to be an Uber driver, Lana can use their financial history with Rappi to offer a loan on a car,” he said.
That financial history is completely inaccessible to a traditional bank, and those established financial services don’t care about the history built in wallets that they can’t control or track. “Today if you’ve been a gig worker and you go to a bank, that’s worth nothing,” said Ajao.
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How tech can build more resilient supply chains
Over the past two years, the global supply chain has been hit with two major upheavals: the United States-China trade war and, more cataclysmically, COVID-19.
When Reefknot Investments launched its $50 million fund for logistics and supply chain startups last September, the industry was already dealing with the effects of the tariff war, says managing director Marc Dragon. Then a few months later, the COVID-19 crisis began in China before spreading to the rest of the world, disrupting the supply chain on an unprecedented scale.
Almost all industries have been impacted, from food, consumer goods and medical supplies to hardware.
Reefknot, a joint venture between Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign fund, and global logistics company Kuehne + Nagel, focuses on early-stage tech companies that use AI to solve some of the supply chain’s most pressing issues, including risk forecasting, financing and tracking goods around the world.
In March, around the time the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 crisis a pandemic, Reefknot surveyed nine shippers about the challenges they face. While there are other macroeconomic factors at play, including Brexit and the oil price war, the survey’s main focus was on the combined effect of COVID-19 and the U.S.-China trade war on the supply chain and logistics industry.
According to the study, the main things shippers want is the ability to dynamically manage supply chain risks and operations and optimize cash flow between corporate buyers and their suppliers, who often struggle with working capital.
Many of the current solutions used in the supply chain involve a lot of manual tasks, including spreadsheets to predict demand, phone calls to confirm capacity on planes and ships and checking goods to make sure orders were fulfilled properly.
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DST Global pumps $35 million into Asian e-grocer Weee!
Coronavirus stay-home orders have sparked an unprecedented demand for grocery delivery around the world. Now investors are clamoring to bet on promising players in the field.
That includes DST Global, the investment firm helmed by Israeli-Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. Most recently, it poured $35 million into Weee!, a California-based startup that from its own warehouses delivers to major cities across the U.S. Asian groceries like fresh kimchi and Japanese desserts. The funding boosted the five-year-old startup’s total raise since launch to more than $100 million.
Weee! declined to share its post-money valuation, but the figure likely surpasses $500 million, given it’s widely known that DST Global does not generally back companies whose valuation is less than $500 million.
Online grocery is a capital-intensive business with thin profit margins, so it’s unsurprising to see many contenders — in both China and the U.S. — operating in the red. Against the odds, Weee! turned profitable earlier this year and went cash-flow positive.
That means the startup was in no rush to fundraise, probably giving it more bargaining power in negotiating terms with a storied investor like DST Global, whose portfolio spans Spotify, Twitter, Airbnb, Slack, Didi and Gojek, just to name a few.
Weee! certainly matches DST Global’s investment target as a high-growth startup. In June, the company recorded 700% year-over-year growth in revenue and was on course to generate revenue in the lower hundreds of millions of dollars in 2020, it told TechCrunch at the time.
Since the U.S. began winding down lockdowns and people returned to supermarkets, some grocery delivery services have seen their revenue growth slow. Weee!, however, is currently growing 15-20% more than its March peak. CEO Larry Liu explained the sustained boom stems from the service’s product differentiation: Asian specialties that one can’t even find in Chinatowns.
“People don’t want to pay extra if [an online grocery] only provides convenient delivery but no product differentiation,” said Han Shen, founding partner of iFly.vc, a California-based fund that backed Weee! in its Series A round.
In addition, Weee! tries to streamline every step of its operations, from product procurement, warehouse management, staff allocation, through to door-to-door delivery. The result is zero food waste thanks to fast inventory turnover.
“There is no secret tactic that we can’t talk about, nothing more than achieving efficiency throughout the entire process,” Shen observed.
In the meantime, Weee! works to keep prices down by cultivating direct relationships with suppliers like local farms and opting for next-day delivery rather than the more costly 30-minute standard expected in China, where he grew up. Earlier this year, former chief operations officer of Netflix Tom Dillon joined the board to help beef up Weee!’s operational efficiency.
With the new proceeds, the Asian e-grocer hopes to hire new talents and expand its delivery service from eight key regions to 13-14 cities across the U.S. by the end of this year.
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Impossible Foods gobbles up another $200 million
Impossible Foods has raised $200 million more for its meat replacements.
The new round values the company at a Whopper-sized $4 billion valuation, according to the data tracker PrimeUnicorn Index.
The new round was led by Coatue, a technology-focused hedge fund; another New York-based hedge fund, XN, also participated in the round.
Since its launch the company has raised $1.5 billion from investors, including Mirae Asset Global Investments and Temasek. The presence of these new public/private investment firms on Impossible Foods’ cap table could mean that the company is readying itself for an initial public offering, but that’s just speculation.
Impossible previously raised money from investment firms including Horizon Ventures and Khosla Ventures, as well as some of the biggest celebrities in the U.S., like: Jay Brown, Common, Kirk Cousins, Paul George, Peter Jackson, Jay-Z, Mindy Kaling, Trevor Noah, Alexis Ohanian, Kal Penn, Katy Perry, Questlove, Ruby Rose, Phil Rosenthal, Jaden Smith, Serena Williams, will.i.am and Zedd.
The most recent price per share is $16.15, an up round from Series F at $15.4139, according to PrimeUnicorn.
The company said it would use the funding to increase its research and development efforts and work on new products like pork, steak and milk, as well as expand its internationalization efforts and build out its manufacturing capacity.
“The use of animals to make food is the most destructive technology on Earth, a leading driver of climate change and the primary cause of a catastrophic global collapse of wildlife populations and biodiversity,” said the incredibly credentialed Dr. Patrick O. Brown, MD, PhD, CEO and founder of Impossible Foods, in a statement. “Impossible Foods’ mission is to replace that archaic system by making the most delicious, nutritious and sustainable meats in the world, directly from plants. To do that, Impossible Foods needs to sustain our exponential growth in production and sales, and invest significantly in R&D. Our investors believe in our mission to transform the global food system — and they recognize an extraordinary economic opportunity.”
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IoT and data science will boost foodtech in the post-pandemic era
Sunny Dhillon is an early-stage investor at Signia Ventures in San Francisco where he invests in retail tech, e-commerce infrastructure and logistics, alongside consumer and enterprise software startups.
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Even as e-grocery usage has skyrocketed in our coronavirus-catalyzed world, brick-and-mortar grocery stores have soldiered on. While strict in-store safety guidelines may gradually ease up, the shopping experience will still be low-touch and socially distanced for the foreseeable future.
This begs the question: With even greater challenges than pre-pandemic, how can grocers ensure their stores continue to operate profitably?
Just as micro-fulfillment centers (MFCs), dark stores and other fulfillment solutions have been helping e-grocers optimize profitability, a variety of old and new technologies can help brick-and-mortar stores remain relevant and continue churning out cash.
Today, we present three “must-dos” for post-pandemic retail grocers: rely on the data, rely on the biology and rely on the hardware.
Rely on the data
Image Credits: Pixabay/Pexels (opens in a new window)
The hallmark of shopping in a store is the consistent availability and wide selection of fresh items — often more so than online. But as the number of in-store customers continues to fluctuate, planning inventory and minimizing waste has become ever more so a challenge for grocery store managers. Grocers on average throw out more than 12% of their on-shelf produce, which eats into already razor-thin margins.
While e-grocers are automating and optimizing their fulfillment operations, brick-and-mortar grocers can automate and optimize their inventory planning mechanisms. To do this, they must leverage their existing troves of customer, business and external data to glean valuable insights for store managers.
Eden Technologies of Walmart is a pioneering example. Spun out of a company hackathon project, the internal tool has been deployed at over 43 distribution centers nationwide and promises to save Walmart over $2 billion in the coming years. For instance, if a batch of produce intended for a store hundreds of miles away is deemed soon-to-ripen, the tool can help divert it to the nearest store instead, using FDA standards and over 1 million images to drive its analysis.
Similarly, ventures such as Afresh Technologies and Shelf Engine have built platforms to leverage years of historical customer and sales data, as well as seasonality and other external factors, to help store managers determine how much to order and when. The results have been nothing but positive — Shelf Engine customers have increased gross margins by over 25% and Afresh customers have reduced food waste by up to 45%.
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The Not Company, a maker of plant-based meat and dairy substitutes in Chile, will soon be worth $250M
The Not Company, Latin America’s leading contender in the plant-based meat and dairy substitute market, is about to close on an $85 million round of funding that would value it at $250 million, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans.
The latest round of funding comes on the heels of a series of successes for the Santiago-based business. In the two years since NotCo launched on the global stage, the company has expanded beyond its mayonnaise product into milk, ice cream and hamburgers. Other products, including a chicken meat substitute, are also on the product roadmap, according to people familiar with the company.
NotCo is already selling several products in Chile, Argentina and Latin America’s largest market — Brazil — and has signed a blockbuster deal with Burger King to be the chain’s supplier of plant-based burgers. It’s in this Burger King deal that NotCo’s approach to protein formulation is paying dividends, sources said. The company is responsible for selling 48 sandwiches per store per day in the locations where it’s supplying its products, according to one person familiar with the data. That figure outperforms Impossible Foods per-store sales, the person said.
NotCo is also now selling its burgers in grocery stores in Argentina and Chile. And while the company is not break-even yet, sources said that by December 2021 it could be — or potentially even cash flow positive.
NotCo co-founders Karim Pichara, Matias Muchnick and Pablo Zamora. Image Credit: The Not Company
With the growth both in sales and its diversification into new products, it’s little wonder that investors have taken note.
Sources said that the consumer brand-focused private equity firm L Catterton Partners and the Biz Stone-backed Future Positive were likely investors in the new financing round for the company. Previous investors in NotCo include Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; the London-based CPG investment firm, The Craftory; IndieBio; and SOS Ventures.
Alternatives to animal products are a huge (and still growing) category for venture investors. Earlier this month Perfect Day closed on a second tranche of $160 million for that company’s latest round of financing, bringing that company’s total capital raised to $361.5 million, according to Crunchbase. Perfect Day then turned around and launched a consumer food business called the Urgent Company.
These recent rounds confirm our reporting in Extra Crunch about where investors are focusing their time as they try to create a more sustainable future for the food industry. Read more about the path they’re charting.
Meanwhile, large food chains continue to experiment with plant-based menu items and push even further afield into cell-based meat using cultures from animals. KFC recently announced that it would be expanding its experiment with Beyond Meat’s chicken substitute in the U.S. — and would also be experimenting with cultured meat in Moscow.
Behind all of this activity is an acknowledgement that consumer tastes are changing, interest in plant-based diets are growing, and animal agriculture is having profound effects on the world’s climate.
As the website ClimateNexus notes, animal agriculture is the second-largest contributor to human-made greenhouse gas emissions after fossil fuels. It’s also a leading cause of deforestation, water and air pollution and biodiversity loss.
There are 70 billion animals raised annually for human consumption, which occupy one-third of the planet’s arable and habitable land surface, and consume 16% of the world’s freshwater supply. Reducing meat consumption in the world’s diet could have huge implications for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. If Americans were to replace beef with plant-based substitutes, some studies suggest it would reduce emissions by 1,911 pounds of carbon dioxide.
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Shelf Engine has a plan to reduce food waste at grocery stores, and $12 million in new cash to do it
For the first few months it was operating, Shelf Engine, the Seattle-based company that optimizes the process of stocking store shelves for supermarkets and groceries, didn’t have a name.
Co-founders Stefan Kalb and Bede Jordan were on a ski trip outside of Salt Lake City about four years ago when they began discussing what, exactly, could be done about the problem of food waste in the U.S.
Kalb is a serial entrepreneur whose first business was a food distribution company called Molly’s, which was sold to a company called HomeGrown back in 2019.
A graduate of Western Washington University with a degree in actuarial science, Kalb says he started his food company to make a difference in the world. While Molly’s did, indeed, promote healthy eating, the problem that Kalb and Bede, a former Microsoft engineer, are tackling at Shelf Engine may have even more of an impact.
Food waste isn’t just bad for its inefficiency in the face of a massive problem in the U.S. with food insecurity for citizens, it’s also bad for the environment.
Shelf Engine proposes to tackle the problem by providing demand forecasting for perishable food items. The idea is to wring inefficiencies out of the ordering system. Typically about a third of food gets thrown out of the bakery section and other highly perishable goods stocked on store shelves. Shelf Engine guarantees sales for the store, and any items that remain unsold the company will pay for.
Image: OstapenkoOlena/iStock
Shelf Engine gets information about how much sales a store typically sees for particular items and can then predict how much demand for a particular product there will be. The company makes money off of the arbitrage between how much it pays for goods from vendors and how much it sells to grocers.
It allows groceries to lower the food waste and have a broader variety of products on shelves for customers.
Shelf Engine initially went to market with a product that it was hoping to sell to groceries, but found more traction by becoming a marketplace and perfecting its models on how much of a particular item needs to go on store shelves.
The next item on the agenda for Bede and Kalb is to get insights into secondary sources like imperfect produce resellers or other grocery stores that work as an outlet.
The business model is already showing results at around 400 stores in the Northwest, according to Kalb, and it now has another $12 million in financing to go to market.
The funds came from Garry Tan’s Initialized and GGV (and GGV managing director Hans Tung has a seat on the company’s board). Other investors in the company include Foundation Capital, Bain Capital, 1984 and Correlation Ventures .
Kalb said the money from the round will be used to scale up the engineering team and its sales and acquisition process.
The investment in Shelf Engine is part of a wave of new technology applications coming to the grocery store, as Sunny Dhillon, a partner at Signia Ventures, wrote in a piece for TechCrunch’s Extra Crunch (membership required).
“Grocery margins will always be razor thin, and the difference between a profitable and unprofitable grocer is often just cents on the dollar,” Dhillon wrote. “Thus, as the adoption of e-grocery becomes more commonplace, retailers must not only optimize their fulfillment operations (e.g. MFCs), but also the logistics of delivery to a customer’s doorstep to ensure speed and quality (e.g. darkstores).”
Beyond Dhillon’s version of a delivery-only grocery network with mobile fulfillment centers and dark stores, there’s a lot of room for chains with existing real estate and bespoke shopping options to increase their margins on perishable goods, as well.
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