A Malaysian fruit-stall problem became a Seattle biotech company, an $8.1 million round, and a lesson most deep-tech founders learn late: the best market is not always the biggest one - it is the one already paying for the pain.
A tenth of an atmosphere is all it takes. RipeLocker's vacuum chambers keep blueberries market-fresh for three months - and want to move the world's fruit by boat instead of plane.
Marty Kolewe is a chemical engineer turned food-tech founder and the CEO of Foodberry, a Boston company that reverse-engineers fruit skin to make edible, plant-based coatings that keep fresh food fresh without plastic. Trained at Johns Hopkins, UMass Amherst, and MIT's Langer Lab, he traded a career in drug delivery for one in snacks, betting that the science behind a peach's peel could reshape how the world packages and eats food. Under his leadership Foodberry has amassed 20-plus patents, closed a $15 million Series A, and lined up partners from a dairy-free ice-cream maker to the global owner of Babybel.
Foodberry is a Boston food-technology company that reverse-engineers the way nature wraps fruit. Its proprietary plant-based coatings turn purees, nut butters, dairy, and even ice cream into self-contained, mess-free, bite-sized snacks - no plastic wrapper required. Spun out of Harvard and MIT lab research and backed by 20-plus issued patents, Foodberry works as a B2B innovation and co-manufacturing partner to consumer brands, with a recent strategic partnership with Bel Group (Babybel, GoGo squeeZ) aimed at the $6B+ U.S. fruit-snack category.