Oh Switchers, Levels & Colors of Food 🍥

Food colouring and additives make up a huge $2 Billion industry. 

That figure alone should tell you how much color goes into our food and eventually into our body.

To remedy this, startup Michroma has decided to ferment fungi in a lab to produce natural food coloring. The San Francisco-based startup founded in 2019 by Argentines Ricky Cassini and Mauricio Braia, has already created a red food color dubbed the Red+ to replace the artificial red dye used in most strawberry or tomato flavoured foods. 🍓

Why does this matter? 

Food colorings, like Red 40 and Yellow 5, often include synthetic, petroleum or animal-derived products. Studies show a relationship between food dye exposure and adverse behavioral outcomes in children. Plus, food companies aren't obligated to list the amount of Food, Drug, & Cosmetic (FD&C) dyes used in products. Meaning the only way you can know how much dye you're consuming is through direct analysis of foods. 🌰

Michromia has already raised a $6.4m seed round. And it plans on applying for regulatory approval from the FDA and the European Food Safety Authority, though that could take years.

But this isn’t the first company to enter the food dye and flavoring business. Vanilla Vida, Spero Renewables and Pigmentum are working on vanilla. Motif FoodWorks is developing a beef flavor substitute.

Why is wage growth slowing down? 

• The demand for workers has reached, or is at least nearing, its peak. ⛰️
• The shortage of workers scenario has now turned into an oversupply of workers with the recent mass firings in tech. 
• The Federal Reserve raised interest rates at a historic clip last year, which is dampening labor demand in interest-rate sensitive sectors.

Everybody has health goals. Whether you’re tuning your diet, optimizing your exercise, or just trying to stay healthy. 

Some common questions people have about their health:

• How does diet impact health and by how much? 🥩
• How much do I need to eat to sustain muscle workouts?
• Will a single cookie raise my blood sugar levels?

You can definitely find the answers to all of these questions on google. But what if there was an app that gave you these answers and more without your prompts? 

Levels, a New York-based software startup provides real-time feedback on how food affects health. The company uses data from biosensors to offer people personalised information about how each meal and snack is absorbed and processed in individual bodies. 🍔

This works wonderfully for people with diabetes or blood sugar problems or those trying to gain athletic advantage. 

The startup has already raised more than $55M to date and has a strong user engagement rate.