If ever there was a vertical more amped to save the planet and the human race, it’s foodtech/agtech. Moving beyond convenience applications, like the magic food machines of Star Trek and The Jetsons, there are so many incredible startups launching with the vision to bring better efficiency and sustainability to the way that we raise and consume our food. That’s why we’ve compiled a shortlist of the 5 Foodtech/Agtech Startups to really watch as they grow in 2018.
Food for All
In 2016, Bloomberg published a troubling stat that America wastes $160 Billion in food every year. Food For All is on a mission to fix that by making quality food affordable to all, while also stopping perfectly good food from being wasted. They do this by connecting customers to restaurants, through their app, to be able to buy food at a discount that’s about to be thrown out before closing. Everybody benefits.
Saavor
Saavor connects home cooks, bartenders, home-kitchens, restaurants and even servers to consumers. While there’s similar delivery services out there, there’s not really anything quite like this. They literally cater to whatever you want to eat or drink and find a way to get it to you. Partnering with a fleet of delivery personnel (ULYX) that picks up orders from home-kitchens and restaurants to deliver, Saavor delivery personnel take one order at a time and bring it to you as fast as possible.
Apeel
According to their LinkedIn, Apeel Sciences develops plant-derived solutions to help organic and conventional fresh food providers increase produce quality and reduce food waste. Basically what this means is that they’ve figured out how to grow just a little extra layer of peel around fruits and vegetables to help them keep and last longer. There’s so much science behind it and of course there is, but at the end of the day it still sounds like sorcery.
CRIK Nutrition
If you watch any TEDTalks ever, you know that insect food is the food of the future and Crik Nutrition is here to save the planet tons in Greenhouse gases, water consumption, and land use over cattle. How you ask? By using crickets for food for people. They develop and sell high quality cricket based food products and specialize in a pretty awesome protein powder that not only rocks on as a healthy boost for you, but it’s also super sustainable for the environment.
Aquabyte
To put it plain and simple, Aquabyte uses AI learning tech to farm and raise fish for consumption. So like, they’ve figured out how to get a computer to take care of a bunch of fish and it’s pretty awesome. As one of the few companies applying this kind of tech to directly solve the world’s food sustainability issues, they’re improving fish farm efficiency to help close the world’s impending protein deficit.
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