Startup Stash - The "Thing" Drink, Meats and Fire 🍶

The U.S. Beverage Manufacturing and Filling Locations Database contains nearly 2,500 alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverage manufacturers making everything from beer and soft drinks to coffee and 10,000 flavors of fizzy water.

The market is super-saturated. As investor Kevin O’Leary would put it, ‘startups are cockroaches in the beverages industry’. The competition for space on grocery store shelves is fierce, eclipsed only by the fact people are finicky.

Despite this, more and more startups are creating “healthy drinks” from probiotics, cacti, tree sap, CBD and whatnot. According to Precedence Research, the global functional beverages market was valued at $129.3 billion in 2021 and is expected to balloon up to $279.4 billion by 2030.

So what’s motivating this startup and VC craze?

After the pandemic, when at-home alcohol drinking increased, consumers greatly shifted to healthy drinks in a bid to get over the social need to consume alcohol. 

Today, the younger generations are looking for a way to hang out with friends and hold something in their hand that isn't alcohol, helping them fit in with those who are drinking. 

Takeaway: These beverage startups are not just vying to be for the next Coca-Colas and the Pepsis. They are alternatives meant for the alcoholic, diabetic and health conscious groups.

Expect Halloween candy to be a pricier treat than food this year. In September, candy prices were up 13.1% compared to a year ago, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Reasons: Droughts hurting sugar-beet crops in northern US states, and supply chain disruptions for chocolate makers related to the Russia-Ukraine war, according to Bloomberg.

Venture capitalists are trying to make "firetech" a thing. 

There’s a big and obvious problem in California. Wildfires.
In the state that has seen eight of its 20 largest wildfires on record since 2017, Silicon Valley investors are throwing their money into the flames by funding the nascent “firetech” industry. 

For example, Convective Capital, a new investment fund backed by a group of successful entrepreneurs has raised $35 million to invest in startups building technology to prevent and deal with fires. 

These mostly innovative or non-profit startups use tech such as; 

• Robots (called the burnbot) that perform controlled burns to avoid megafires.
• Autonomous drones that can drop fire suppressants from above.
• Satellites that give forest managers better information to direct their limited resources. 
• Towers that use cameras and machine learning to spot smoke. 

One of these towers, Pano, has become quite widely used in California and Oregon. It uses off-the-shelf technology to put panoramic cameras on mountaintops to spot smoke and warn fire agencies. 

Then there’s Wildfire.org, a non-profit that develops software to solve bureaucratic delays in fire mitigation, which requires complex environmental reviews and permitting.