The Coming Food Bubble
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This is just amateurish, or intentionally completely misleading. that 48bil is for ALL startups, not food. That number would be absurd otherwise. The words "food" and "agriculture" and "delivery" do not appear once in the referenced source @ http://nvca.org/pressreleases/annual-venture-capital-investm...
That said, yeah instacart seems kind of over valued. Its a thing i do when I don't feel like leaving the house once every couple of months - not a weekly thing. Then again, $10 * 100,000,000 adults * 2x / quarter is approximately a ton of money.
Plus it's early days. Food is so important to every single individual for it not to become large is impossible. I wonder what the author would say about how restaurants are financed and if there's a bubble there given the 9999999999 other restaurants competing.
I have a friend that's doing a munchery-like service. At first I thought what are you doing different than sprig or spoonrocket. Then I remembered SF alone has more restaurants than I could uniquely eat at within a year. There's so much to be done -- from delivery, to cooking, to helping you cook, to group organizing, grocery shopping, farming, nutrition and more.
In fact I think it's category that's barely even formed. The big winners likely haven't even incorporated yet. Exciting times.
Also of note and let's not forget -- $100M 2014 revenues are the "groupon-esque" pass through revenues -- Whole Foods, Safeway, etc... are also booking these as revenue.
Remember when Groupon, on the eve an IPO, cut it's reported revenue in half? Yeah, only a $300,000,000 difference.
> "On Friday, Groupon said it would change what it books as revenue after discussions with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It will now only count as revenue its commission on sales, rather than the total value of an online coupon."
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240531119037915045765892...
Providing sufficient food efficiently has been a primary challenge since day 1 of human history and probably will be right up until they invent those titanium bodies.
those containers with blue&red LEDs (pioneered by marijuana growers) is pretty much the solution (or at least preview of a very large part of the solution) as it allows to not waste water and energy and multiplies square footage by using several layers of shelves. Due to such efficiency, it also allows to grow food where normal open-air agriculture wouldn't be very feasible. Non-mobile versions, more like warehouse scale than container, can be built-in into cities (even underground like parking) or suburban areas.
Technically it might be possible to capture more of the solar energy falling on the surface and convert it to light with the exact wavelengths used by plants photosystem 1 & 2, but I suspect it would be hard to make this work.
It might be the most important challenge, but it's certainly one of the challenges we seem to be rising to. People have been predicting mass starvation with population growth forever; From the seventeen hundreds to the seventies, Malthus has been a huge influence on the hippies, and he's been wrong for most of that time, too. Our ability to grow food is growing faster than the population; apparently arable land isn't the limit people thought it was.
At this point in history, famine is generally a political problem, not a resources problem.
I'm just saying that we have solved the "produce enough food for everyone" problem, and that's pretty great, even if we have other problems that have to do with hunger that we still haven't fixed.
Certainly, our ability to produce cheap food is vastly reducing the number of starving people out there, and that's good, even if there are still problems to solve in that arena.
In other words, at the current usage levels places like California will not be arable forever.
I think we are vastly more conscious of this sort of thing than we were, say, in the '20s and the '30s, and that consciousness is going to help us screw up less.
Which isn't to say we aren't screwing up some things now; I'm just saying that we're getting better at this sort of thing, in the two steps forward, one step back kind of way that humans as a whole seem to get better at things.
Well that's certainly an opinion. I know it's TC, so a certain agenda is assumed, but facts not in evidence and all that.