Our Innovation Analysts recently looked into emerging technologies and up-and-coming startups working on solutions for the food sector. As there is a large number of startups working on a wide variety of solutions, we want to share our insights with you. This time, we are taking a look at 5 promising food safety startups.
Heat Map: 5 Top Food Safety Startups
Using our StartUs Insights Platform, covering 1.116.000+ startups & emerging companies, we looked at innovation in the field of FoodTech. For this research, we identified 381 relevant solutions and picked 5 to showcase below. These companies were chosen based on a data-driven startup scouting approach, taking into account factors such as location, founding year, and technology among others. Depending on your specific criteria, the top picks might look entirely different.
The Global Startup Heat Map below highlights 5 startups & emerging companies developing innovative food safety solutions. Moreover, the Heat Map reveals regions that observe a high startup activity and illustrates the geographic distribution of all 381 companies we analyzed for this specific topic.
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Vmoksha Technologies – Food Safety Management System
As the world population grows, the intensification and industrialization of agriculture and animal production to meet the demand for food create opportunities and challenges for food safety. Such challenges put greater responsibility on food producers and handlers to ensure food safety. Nowadays, startups offer digital and automated food safety solutions to improve transparency across food supply chains.
The US-based startup Vmoksha Technologies offers ionhaccp, food hygiene, and safety management system. The system enables companies to comply with standards like Safe Quality Food (SQF), Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP), and ISO 22000. The platform employs modern technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud services, and mobile apps to empower ingredients suppliers, processors, manufacturers, packaging, retail, and restaurant chains to automate food safety compliance.
SafeTraces – Rapid Sanitation Verification
Unsafe food poses global health threats, endangering everyone. Local incidents have a chance to quickly evolve into international emergencies due to the speed and range of product distribution. Serious foodborne disease outbreaks occur on every continent, often amplified by global trade and tourism. This gives rise to emerging companies using innovative technologies to detect and verify food supplies at various stages of distribution.
SafeTraces is a US-based startup that develops solutions for food and drug traceability, sanitation verification, and safe airflow verification by using DNA analysis. saniDART is a solution for verifying sanitation effectiveness, at a microbial level, and is certified by the Association of Analytical Chemists Research Institute (AOAC-RI). Moreover, the solution uses an indicator to monitor pathogenic bacteria removal and presents the results within 25 minutes. Additionally, in the end, saniDART delivers aerobic plate count (APC)-level results at adenosine triphosphate (ATP) test-like speeds.
FoodDocs – Virtual Food Safety
Food safety is also a public health priority and governments play a pivotal role in developing controls and regulations. Legislative policies provide a basic framework for companies to implement effective food safety systems. Urbanization and changes in consumer habits, including travel, have increased the number of people buying and eating food prepared in public places. As a result, all these issues are being addressed by startups and emerging food safety companies.
FoodDocs is an Estonian startup helping food handling businesses to ensure that food safety documents are always compliant with the standards and meet all legal requirements. This solution also enables food suppliers to create virtual systems and digitally manage mandatory food safety processes and documentation. The startup caters to small and big food handling companies by offering real-time analysis of food safety operations.
VPCIR – Food Pathogen Detection
Regardless of the point in production, food gets contaminated, and the primary responsibility often lies with the food producers. Moreover, a large proportion of foodborne diseases are caused by improper preparation or mishandling of food. This occurs in homes, food-service establishments, or at markets. From clean labels and packaging to scalable foodborne disease detection, numerous solutions to address food safety are in the works.
Danish biotechnology startup VPCIR is currently building proprietary and patent-pending novel technology: viability polymerase circle reaction (VPCIR), for the detection of food pathogens. The VPCIR technology detects enzymes expressed specifically by a pathogen. In comparison to conventional techniques like polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), this approach to pathogen detection is faster, adds higher sensitivity to assays, and also detects living pathogens.
Sous Temp – Automated Temperature Monitoring
Safe food supplies support national economies, trade, and tourism, as well as contribute to food and nutrition security. Various international conferences on food safety reiterate the importance of food safety in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. From policymakers to producers and consumers, all stakeholders have a role in building and maintaining robust food systems and infrastructure.
Sous Temp is a US-based startup providing a temperature monitoring system for restaurants to prevent food spoilage, reduce labor requirements, and simplify compliance. Moreover, the startup uses easy-to-install and compact sensors placed inside refrigeration units and LoRa, a low-power wide-area network (LP-WAN) protocol, technology to connect to a network. As a result, the sensors monitor temperature throughout the day and provide real-time alerts through a mobile app.
What About The Other 376 Solutions?
While we believe data is key to creating insights it can be easy to be overwhelmed by it. Our ambition is to create a comprehensive overview and provide actionable innovation intelligence so you can achieve your goals faster. The 5 food safety startups showcased above are promising examples out of 381 we analyzed for this article. To identify the most relevant solutions based on your specific criteria, get in touch.
