Hear Anna Winter, CEO of Auralytica, discuss the low-cost sensor that monitors food quality from inside its packaging. Having raised $350,000 in angel funding from Carbon13, London Business School’s impact investment fund, Hermesa and the British Business Bank, Auralytica is preparing to move from lab testing to trials with food manufacturers. Delve into the interview with Carbon13’s Head of Marketing, Sara Jones, to learn how Auralytica’s in-package, electronics-free, low-cost design makes its technology capable of capturing a share of the $540 billion B2B food waste market.
Sara: Today I’m joined by Auralytica, a trillion-dollar opportunity in the very thing that keeps us alive: our food. I can’t think of a more important topic to talk about with Anna Winter, CEO of Auralytica. Hi Anna, what’s on the agenda right now?
Anna: Right now there’s a big focus on business development, getting more people on board, specifically food manufacturers and food technology providers. That’s our main focus. Then there’s product development. We’ve just moved into our new lab, so we’re able to make some significant strides in that space, which is very exciting.
Sara: It’s such a good feeling when a startup goes from “we’re a team, we’re hustling, we’re trying to get investment” to “now we have a lab. It’s real. It’s happening.”
Anna: Exactly. And it’s really fun, because technically our first lab was my co-founder’s kitchen. We started our product development in an air fryer. Now we actually have an oven in the lab that can cure our samples, and we have a bigger space. We’re no longer in a Harry Potter closet. It’s really exciting to see how quickly it’s growing.
What Auralytica does
Sara: Let’s give everybody some context. What is Auralytica in a nutshell?
Anna: At Auralytica, we want to be the single source of truth on product quality, specifically for our food. As your food travels from where it’s harvested, to where it’s processed, to where you buy it off the grocery store shelf, it chemically changes between each of those points. Our goal is to tell you how it’s changing.
That does two things. First, you can use food well past the use-by date. Use-by dates are rather conservative, so we can use our food for longer and create less food waste. That’s why Carbon13 invested: the carbon impact of reducing food waste. Second, we can tell you if the food has been contaminated or if something has happened in transit, because we can tell you about product quality. So, it’s a double win: extending shelf life, and increasing the safety of the food we consume every single day.
What makes the technology different
Sara: So it’s a sensor for detecting whether food is safe to eat, what’s so special and new about your technology, such that it could feasibly start to appear in everybody’s fridge, or at least in their favourite quiche maker’s factory? What’s the change here?
Anna: You’re right, this isn’t a new idea. People have proposed similar ideas in the past, and some are getting traction in the wider market, which I hope they continue to do. But there are a few things that make our tech better and give us a unique value proposition for our customers.
First, we go inside the packet itself, so we can sense the food directly. Traditional time-temperature indicators have always been external to the packet. They can tell you about the journey of the food, not about the food itself.
Second, ours is completely electronics-free. A lot of in-packet and external sensors in the past have run on electronics. Electronics are expensive, and they make recycling the packaging much harder. By being an internal sensor that’s electronics-free, we keep our costs much lower and we don’t compromise the recyclability of the packaging. That’s hugely important if we want to decrease the carbon footprint of our food and build a circular economy.
Third, it’s low cost. Our material can be manufactured on a roll-to-roll process. That was very technical, so let me explain why it matters. Roll-to-roll means you can make a lot of something for not very much, because it’s used for everything from toilet paper to the packaging already running on production lines. So, it can be integrated into current packaging without much fuss. That’s a huge point, the food industry is massive, so to get this into every single packet you have to integrate into current processes. That’s been a focus of ours from the very beginning.
Milestones since Carbon13
Sara: Tell us about some of the milestones you’ve reached since you left Carbon13.
Anna: I like to think about milestones in four buckets: funding, team, product and traction.
Funding. The biggest one is that we’ve recently closed our angel round at $350,000. Carbon13 was a huge part of it, but we also had LBS’s student impact investment fund come in, and Hermesa, who wrote the largest ticket after Carbon13. We also have the British Business Bank on board, which has been fantastic, plus an incredible group of angels who have been in our corner since day one. It’s been so good to have all of them on board.
We’ve also got into some incredible accelerators outside of Carbon13. Two I’d like to mention. Firstly, the University of Cambridge’s founders’ programme, Start 3.0: we were selected as one of eight companies. They’ve been huge in getting us ready for the next fundraising round, the next round of traction, and moving faster. Secondly, EIT Food: we’ve been accepted into their Food Accelerator Network, focused on sustainable supply chains. They’ve been a huge boon for industry connections beyond the UK, into the wider European market.
Team. The biggest one is that Sam and I have gone full time. That might seem minor, but it’s huge, because now we can dedicate our whole minds to this problem and dive in deep. We’ve been able to move faster: Sam’s lab development has been fantastic, and our conversations with potential customers have been moving well.
Traction. Cranswick, one of the largest food manufacturers in the UK, has been in our corner since our very first pitch to Carbon13. We’re now moving to proof-of-concept trials with them, and we’re in conversations about proof-of-concept trials with other food manufacturers too. Those are the proof points we need to take the product further. We want to make sure we’re building something genuinely useful to those manufacturers before we go further in product development.
Product. We’ve got it working in actual food, which is really cool. Previously everything was lab-controlled, in what we call a buffer solution. Now we’re getting a colour change in the food products Cranswick wants us to test, which is why we can move to proof-of-concept trials with them.
Sara: It also changes the conversation. Food waste often gets framed as blaming the consumer for not finishing everything in their fridge. This shifts it from a moral stick to beat somebody with to a pragmatic business opportunity.
Anna: I agree. Can I comment on that point quickly? Avery Dennison, who are thought leaders in this space, released a report not long ago on how to proactively pre-empt food waste within companies’ own supply chains. Not even considering the consumer, just improving business operations and reducing food waste there is a $540 billion market. It’s massive. Yes, there needs to be some behaviour change from consumers, but there also needs to be behaviour change in these massive companies to improve their bottom line. The size of the market outside the household is incredible.
THE investor message
Sara: When you talk to investors, during your fundraise or now, what’s the main message you want them to take away about Auralytica?
Anna: The answer differs depending on which investors I’m talking to. For Carbon13, eco-minded angels and other eco-focused funds, the biggest message is that we can improve customers’ bottom line and greatly reduce waste. Food waste isn’t good for anyone’s pocket. Across the board it loses resources and money for everyone who has to deal with it: consumers, retailers and manufacturers. So, improving the bottom line and the carbon impact at the same time is huge.
For other investors, it’s simply the scale of the problem. I don’t know if I’ve seen pitches outside AI that can justify as big a TAM as we can. Even when I talk about our TAM, I scale it down, because we can’t tackle all food waste; that’s the value of what we’re reducing, not our addressable market. But if we take 10% of it, which is what we could theoretically charge for our sensors based on the food waste we reduce, that’s still incredible. It’s just how big the food industry is, and how big an opportunity this is.
Sara: Those are all my questions, Anna. Thank you so much for answering them. I’m very excited. It feels like you have a lot of the jigsaw pieces in place, and now it’s about watching you two get your heads down and crack on.
Anna: Exactly. Thank you, Sara. It’s been a pleasure.