The roller-coaster ride is set to continue for Beyond Meat, one of our largest Food Revolution positions, with significant disappointment and confusion last night following the company’s Q3 earnings report and McDonald’s announcement of its MacPlant burger (initial perception was that McDonald’s would develop plant-based burgers on its own). Even if we understand the short-term reaction,…
There’s definitely a lot of excitement around liquid biopsies and genomic testing, as illustrated by the acquisition announced today of Thrive Earlier Detection for up to $2.15bn by Exact Sciences. This transaction follows the $8bn purchase of Grail by Illumina a few weeks ago and that of ArcherDx by Invitae for up to $1.4bn in June.…
HelloFresh, the leading German online mealkit provider, just pre-announced impressive figures for Q3 with revenue expected up 120% to around EUR970m (vs. EUR836m initial guidance) and EBITDA expected to rise 7x to around EUR115m (vs. EUR73m initially). The company raised its full-year guidance accordingly, now forecasting 95%-105% revenue growth vs. 75%-95% previously. The read-across is…
Restaurant closures, bankruptcies, reopenings with restrictions… The restaurant industry has had a pretty rough time, to say the least. And things should remain difficult in the foreseeable future as Covid-19 doesn’t seem in a hurry to go away. In spite of this adverse environment, we have been investing in various restaurant software names since day…
In early July, we commented that Livongo was arguably one of the most attractive assets in the Digital Health and Nutrition Tech space and was likely to attract takeover interest. Well, we didn’t have to wait long to see some M&A action as Livongo and leading telemedicine player Teladoc announced their merger today in a…
After more than 20 years covering the Technology and Innovation space, we didn’t think we would one day spend some time researching companies offering lawn and garden products… Here we are, investing in the Scotts Miracle-Gro, a US company that spotted the hydroponic trend at an early stage and became, through its Hawthorne division, the…
The disruption of the global meat supply chain, which started a couple of weeks ago in the US with the Covid-related closure of meat processing facilities, intensified in recent days. Over the weekend, China’s customs suspended imports of poultry products from a Tyson meatpacking facility which was a coronavirus cluster. This move followed the discovery…
While it was already on an upward trajectory, consumption of plant-based meat recorded a major acceleration during the pandemic with Nielsen estimating that sales of fresh meat alternatives in the US were up 240% year-on-year over the March-May period. The disruption in the traditional meat processing industry clearly helped: some of America’s largest processing plants…
Back in April, we commented that a new generation of cloud-native cybersecurity companies (Zscaler, Okta, CrowdStrike…) was likely to disrupt the actual leaders (Check Point, Palo Alto…). Clearly, the accelerated digitization of the economy in the last couple of months helped them deliver on our expectation, with several players reporting impressive earnings last week and…
Last week, highly popular video game Fortnite hosted an in-game virtual concert by rapper Travis Scott. The performance attracted a record 12.3 million players, a number that should be revised upwards when taking into consideration people who watched the concert outside of the game on streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube. While some could argue…