Edacious raises $8.1m to measure nutrient density in whole foods

Edacious—a startup developing a rapid testing and data insights platform to measure and map nutrient density in whole foods from meat and milk to fresh produce—has closed an $8.1 million seed round led by Patagonia’s venture fund Tin Shed Ventures.

The round, which was backed by Nest Family Office, Trailhead Capital, Grantham Environmental Trust’s Neglected Climate Opportunities, iSelect Capital, First Thirty, Pelican Ag, and other private investors, will help Massachusetts-based Edacious scale up and strengthen collaborations with industry partners.

“At Edacious, we have the data and technology to reveal how genetics, soil health, and management practices impact nutrition in our food,” said founder and CEO Eric Smith. “This funding allows us to build the platform necessary to break the cycle of commoditization by empowering producers and consumers with verified, actionable data for food quality differentiation.”

“Nutrient density should be the catalyst for full food and agriculture value chain transformation. Edacious is making that possible by measuring and mapping nutrient density 10 times faster and cheaper, with an intuitive interface that incentivizes and enables the best regenerative practices from producer to consumer.” Pete Oberle, managing partner, Trailhead Capital

“Nutritional transparency has the potential to reshape our food system. Edacious’ approach not only advances soil health but also empowers producers and consumers with critical data to make informed choices. We’re proud to support a company making such a profound impact on both human and environmental health.” Paul Lightfoot, general manager, Patagonia Provisions.

Nutritional transparency

In the first instance, Edacious is developing high-throughput lab testing capabilities to conduct nutrient analyses on grains, milk, meat and other whole foods so that farmers, growers, and other stakeholders can see how their products compare to the (anonymized) competitive set, and to industry averages.

Over time, as Edacious is also collecting data on 40-50 attributes relating to how the food was produced, it will also be able to provide more insights into the relationship between different farming practices and inputs and the nutritional density of the crops in question, Smith told AgFunderNews.

Ultimately, the data may help farmers using regenerative farming practices build an evidence-based case to partners and consumers around nutritional density and soil health, he added.

In recent years, said Smith, farmers have been incentivized to prioritize yield above all else, which has led to declining food quality, environmental degradation, poor nutrition, and the commoditization of food. By demonstrating that different farming practices and inputs can deliver meaningful improvements in nutrition that may command a price premium, Edacious hopes to provide a different incentive structure.

According to Smith: “I’ve been working on climate and environmental issues for 15 years as a funder in the space and on the philanthropic side via the Grantham Foundation, and [much of that has focused on how to] find a way to incentivize behavior change in order to address the greenhouse gas intensity of the food system.

“We started to see research showing that healthier soils through regenerative ag changes the nutritional quality of food, which we felt could unlock a market mechanism to incentivize better, healthier soils through the differentiation of food quality.”

While myriad factors can impact nutrient quality from plant genetics to farming practices to soil health, to the weather, it is possible to control some of these variables to start to see correlations between certain practices or inputs or soil conditions and the production of certain nutrients, said Smith.

“It’s a long term process to tease out those very direct drivers, but we can look at the signals and say, When you doing this and controlling for that, you’re getting a much better nutritional profile.”

The Edacious platform

Edacious has two key offerings: High-throughput, low-cost nutritional testing capabilities assessing key nutrients including fatty acids, minerals, vitamins, proteins, phytochemicals and carbohydrates; and a software platform enabling partners to understand, compare, benchmark, and share nutrition data and insights, said Smith.

“We’re really focusing on where things are commoditized, on animal products, grains, and fresh produce where there’s a lack of brands and differentiation, where better data and insights can transform those markets.”

Edacious is not, however, making “sweeping generalizations” about specific farming systems when it comes to nutritional density, however. “That’s never going to work,” said Smith. “There’s just too much variability within and between each of these systems.”

While it could benchmark against USDA’s nutritional database, Edacious is instead building a proprietary data set from products sent in by partners for testing and continually updating it, he said. “The USDA food composition database is actually based on a limited number of samples.”

“We are seeing huge variations in nutrients from selenium to certain vitamins in samples we’ve tested. There’s a lot of high-quality stuff that’s not getting properly compensated, and a lot of low-quality stuff that one one’s really raising awareness of.”

High-throughput, lower-cost lab testing

Right now, Edacious is working with “everyone from genetics and breeding companies to producers,  farmers and ranchers, distributors, packers, wholesalers, and branded whole food companies,” said Smith.

While sending out food samples to 3^rd party labs for nutrient testing is hardly new, he acknowledged, Edacious’ costs “are less than a 10th of the traditional analytical service labs,” he claimed. “We’re optimized for high throughput and we run in batches. What might typically cost $2,500 to $3,500 per sample, we’re able to do for $200 per sample. Plus, if you get a report back from a regular lab, it doesn’t tell you how you’re performing relative to others. We put all of that information in context.”

Actionable data?

Most food companies are not going to send one sample, get some data suggesting they are producing crops with higher-than-average levels of selenium and immediately start marketing that to consumers “off a single data point,” he stressed.

“They’re going to work with us on a sampling plan and a monitoring plan to see how they’re performing over time, so that they can feel confident that they’re consistently delivering that product. This allows them to mitigate risks of communicating that information, which is a unique asset that we’re bringing to them. They’d never be able to do that with traditional testing because the cost is too high [for the ongoing testing] and they don’t have software to track and monitor that change over time.”

Right now, he said, Edacious is “providing data insights so that brands can go build their own marketing kits and communication kits and showcase this information. But we are also working on a nutritional profiling system that will distill all of this complex information down to a single data point, which could be a score or a grade.”

The funding round

While raising money is never easy, he said, Edacious managed to secure a sizable seed round (taking its total funding to just over $14 million) in just four months. “We lined up an incredibly exciting, mission-aligned strategic [Patagonia] right out of the gate.”

He added: “There is a certain capital intensity associated with building a lab that’s just not a software, so at the inception of the business, I was a bit nervous. But the food lab is one of our best assets because we are generating verified primary data for the food system that is authenticated through an ISO certification that allows us to really be transparent about how the data is being generated.”

Initially, the company is making money through selling its testing and analysis services, he said. But the real value will come from the insights it is able to generate over time, he predicted.

“As more producers show up to benchmark and compare, we are collecting genetics, environmental data, management data, so we can really tease out what are the drivers of nutritional outcomes? And that’s the longer-term play. If an input is improving the nutrient density of a crop, that’s a very strong selling point for companies, so we’re getting a lot of interest from many different parts of the supply chain.”