Every day, around 30,000 tons of fresh food are wasted across Europe due to inaccurate demand planning in food retail and food service. Ultra-fresh products, with a shelf life ranging from just a few hours to one day, require an entirely new category of forecasting solutions. foodforecast, a German FoodTech Startup, is tackling this challenge with AI-based demand and production forecasting and has now secured €8 million in a Series A funding round.
The round was led by impact investors SHIFT Invest from the Netherlands and the European VC ECBF acting as a co-lead. The existing investors Future Food Fund and Aeronaut Invest also participated in the raise.
Justus Lauten, Founder and CEO, said: “This Series A represents a major milestone for foodforecast. Our ambition is to fundamentally rethink how ultra-fresh food is planned and produced. With our new investors on board, we are ready to scale our technology internationally and set a new benchmark for planning, efficiency, and sustainability.”
Fueling International Growth and Enterprise-Ready Expansion:
The Series A investment will enable foodforecast to expand its presence across European markets and further scale adoption among both SME and enterprise customers in food service, bakery chains, and food retail, enabling smarter production decisions that reduce waste and improve margins.
Thijs Gitmans, Partner at SHIFT Invest, adds: “foodforecast stands out as a rare combination of ambition, market understanding, and execution. The team tackles a large, structural problem in ultra-fresh food supply chains with an AI solution that is both highly sophisticated and easy to implement. That balance makes foodforecast exceptionally well positioned for scalable, international growth.”
Proven traction across thousands of stores:
Since launching commercially in 2022, foodforecast has grown rapidly and is now used in several thousand stores across Europe. Customers include leading food service, bakery and retail operators such as SSP Germany and Eat Happy. By enabling highly automated production and ordering processes, foodforecast helps its customers not only reduce food waste by an average of up to 30%, but also increase sales by up to 11%, and automate more than 90% of previously manual ordering and production processes. The company’s technology is designed to integrate seamlessly into existing workflows, allowing teams to reduce waste without adding operational complexity.
Impact at the intersection of AI, economics, and sustainability:
Sustainability remains a core pillar of foodforecast’s business model. By improving forecast accuracy, the company enables its customers to use resources more efficiently, reduce emissions, and measurably cut food waste, resulting in more than 8,800 tons of food waste saved to date. At scale, this data-driven approach has the potential to save tens of thousands of tons of food annually, while simultaneously reducing emissions and improving profitability across the value chain.
Isabelle Laurencin, Partner at ECBF, said: “Sustainability is not an add-on, but an integral part of the value proposition. foodforecast clearly demonstrates how AI can generate both economic value and measurable impact.”
This operation benefits from support from the European Union under the InvestEU Fund.
