UPP

🎄🌟 A Broc-tastic Christmas Wish from All of Us! 🌟🎄 As we wrap up another floret of a year, we want to take a moment to extend our warmest wishes to all the incredible people who have made 2024 truly stalk-tacular! To our suppliers, investors, and friends of the company: your support has helped us grow stronger and greener than ever. We hope your holiday season is filled with joy, laughter, and maybe even a little broccoli 🥦 Looking ahead to 2025, we’re excited about the opportunities and innovations on the horizon. Together, we’ll keep leafing the way in making big things happen. From all of us here, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Here’s to a bright and nutri-fun year ahead! 🥦✨ Let’s grow together in 2025! ✨🥦

🎄Christmas Cheer & Team Spirit!🎄 This year’s Christmas works do was full of festive laughs, family, team bonding, and some much-needed holiday fun! From escaping together to celebrating by the tree, we proved once again that our team knows how to bring the joy to the season. It’s days like this that remind us how lucky we are to work with such a brilliant bunch of people - we really sprouted some festive cheer in Worcester! ✨ Here’s to more moments like this as we grow into 2025!✨

Thank you so much to Emma Roebuck, great work on our redesign! Very much appreciated! https://www.upp.farm/

Drum roll please... 🥁 Over the past decade, the REAP Start-Up Showcase has featured more than 60 trailblazing ventures, providing exposure to early-stage innovations - from university spinouts to farmer-led inventions. Last week at REAP 2024, we proudly unveiled the latest eight start-ups we have chosen as the ones to watch in 2024🚀. In no particular order, they are... 🤖 Versatile RobotX – Robotics for efficient, multipurpose farm tasks. 🌐 Extend Robotics – Using AR and remote operation for accessible global farm labour. ☀️ Lambda agri – Enhancing greenhouse productivity through innovative light conversion. 🌿Plant Metrics – Real-time plant health insights with SAP sensor technology. ☕ Morrow (Nihilo Food Systems) – Coffee crafted without beans for a more sustainable brew. 🍓 FruitCast – Precision yield forecasting with AI-driven insights for fruit growers. 🥦 UPP – Broccoli harvesting automation and upcycling for sustainable food systems. 📷 Vet Vision AI – Improving animal welfare through AI-powered monitoring. ✨ Over the past three years, 15 of our featured companies have collectively raised nearly £120 million. Where will these latest be in a year's time?! We'll be watching... Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/e789_dK4 And big thank you to Nicole Sadd for chairing the session and bringing each of these companies into the limelight!

Thank you Michael Lee and Jack A Bobo, the message of hybridization as a way to deliver healthy food with lower environmental and financial cost is one we love! Look forward to supporting you on this!

The team at UPP would like to thank all our suppliers and partners for making this years trials in Scotland a success. It may be near the end of the UK season but we haven't finished this year just yet... with a special thanks too: The Engineering team and CERC from Harper Adams University MSP engineering Eagle Engineering Fab-Tech (Telford) Ltd Tibberton Engineering SOS Agricultural Ltd FRICTION HYDRAULICS Billcar Precision Engineering Ltd Redmore UK Ltd TELFORD PLASTICS LIMITED TJW Precision Ashish and Patrick from ifm James from Micromech Ltd James from Lockwell Electrical Strimech Engineering Limited MCL Ltd Renold Chain Europe Gary of AVISON SPRAYERS LIMITED Matt from Fluid Power Solutions Limited NVIDIA Last but by no means least UK Agri-Tech Centre for keeping us housed here at the Midlands Hub.

Great to see immediate interest in our next generation Automated Selective Harvester! In 2021 the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee of the UK Parliament found "There have been reports of labour shortages affecting some businesses throughout the food and farming sector, for example: farms have been unable to hire all the seasonal workers they need to harvest food." (https://lnkd.in/ep7DTpKM) In this Sep 2024 article by HOBBS ONLINE LIMITED, UPP is quite rightly identified as a technology answer to this major farming issue. In 2023 while market prices increased by 4.3%, broccoli yields fell by 0.4% and the area planted reduced by 1.0% resulting in production falling by 1.4% to 63 thousand tonnes and total farmgate sales falling by 0.2%. (Data source: https://lnkd.in/eK3KKGNK). This lost opportunity is important for UK agriculture. So, thank you Hobbs for recognising our work, and we feel even more of an obligation to get our AI-enabled new technology on British fields to address this major issue in UK agricultural sustainability.

There are few more beautiful places than Scotland, and so it was a pleasure to see the next version of UPP's AI-enabled Automated Selective Harvester on field trials there. In 2024 we moved from a trailed version harvesting at less than 1.8km/hour to a self-propelled version with 4-wheel steer that weighs less than the trailed version (even without tractor), requires less power, and can harvest at 3km/hour+. The massively improved turning circle transforms usability; the reduced weight improves performance in mud and reduces soil compaction; and, the raised height reduces crop attrition. However the most important developments were improved reliability and the step-change in harvest speed. This effectively addressed the feedback we had received in 2023. Broccoli is a high value crop, but a low margin crop, mostly due to high harvest costs. It requires 2-4 passes through the field over the course of a couple of weeks, and today it is harvested by hand, with each harvest team typically comprising 8-20 people. This reliance on labour is a driver of high costs, farmgate price inflation and crop loss. At UPP we are close to solving this problem for the farmer - at 3km/hour harvest, speed crop-production economics transform. The next steps are to optimise the off-load including leaf strip and shred - as you can see the quantity of biomass is a major, but very solvable, problem - and to move to three harvest arms (four for the US). Most importantly for us it brings proprietary scale access to low-cost feedstock for our protein production in reach. This has been a great team effort, so thank you James Drewnicki (MSc, CEng MIMechE), Mark Thackwray, Hasitha Rathnayake, Matthew Dingle, and Rhys Brown. Thank you also to Innovate UK who have funded this project though the 'Farming Futures R&D Fund: Sustainable farm-based protein industrial research', 'AI Solutions to improve productivity in key sectors' and 'Defra Farming Innovation Investor Partnership' grants. Thank you also to Susan Gordon and the team at UK Agri-Tech Centre, and also our collaborators and supporters at The James Hutton Institute and Harper Adams University. We are very much looking forward to the next steps in this exciting development. For the Harvester this includes further improvements; the transition to manufacture; the creation of value from the huge volumes of data we gather to enable precision agriculture; and, progressing along the pathway to autonomy. For the business we are focussed on refining the 'Harvester-as-a-Service' proposition for farmers, and integrating the supply chain to deliver our highly-nutritious, hypoallergenic, high-protein sustainable ingredients for food manufacturers.

We love the message in Chris Van Tulleken's book ‘Ultra Processed People’ (https://lnkd.in/eSjyuBV3) It did however give us a problem. What we do is take broccoli ‘side stream’ and turn it into highly nutritious, hypoallergenic, sustainable plant protein in several forms that can be included within many foods (burgers, sausages, breads, cakes, sauces, smoothies, soups) as an ingredient. The only problem is that when the company was incorporated in 2022 it was christened ‘Upcycled Plant Power (‘UPP) Limited’ and the domain ‘www.upp.farm’ taken. Upcycling is a great thing, so you can see why this was chosen. But it was chosen before Ultra Processed People was published in 2023. So ‘UPP’ for people interested in health and nutrition has a very bad connotation. Doh! UPP absolutely buys in to the message of reducing the use of ultra processed foods to improve health, but Chris van Tulleken unwittingly trashed our brand (for which we obviously forgive the good Doctor). So we have to re-brand, to be fair we were always going to have to – despite the Automated Selective Harvester we are producing to secure proprietary access to feedstock, most of our revenues will come from protein sales, thus ‘.farm’ is not really representative.  So, what can you do to help? Great question. We were looking for a name that resonated with the target brand values: Clean & natural; Fair & trustworthy; Healthy & nutritious; Environmentally positive; Hypoallergenic; Low-processed; and, Locally produced. Finding such a brand is hard, so we looked to mythology for inspiration. Demeter, was the Olympian goddess of the harvest and agriculture, presiding over crops, grains, food, and the fertility of the earth, but a bit close to Harry Potter’s ‘dementors’. Priapus, a fertility god, was a no-go. In Norse mythology, Freyja (Old Norse "(the) Lady"), was a god of love, beauty and fertility. She was often depicted associated with boars - creatures that represented both her connection to fertility and the untamed aspects of nature. We thought that Freyja could be the brand we seek, although we recognise that she, like many Norse gods, is not free from a bit of controversy viewed through today’s lens! And, in fact it was her brother Freyr who was the god of agriculture. But that the spelling of his name could cause communication issues, so we chose the anglicised version of his sister Freyja, or ‘Freya’, not least as we wanted a ‘mother nature’ iconography. Fortunately ‘www.freya.food’ is available and we now have it. So, can you help us avoid a naming failure (https://lnkd.in/eRE98VfR). What are your thoughts on this new brand? And also, can you let us know your thoughts on the proposed logo options?

The Guardian reports "Europe’s food and farming lobbies have recognised the need to eat less meat after hammering out a shared vision for the future of agriculture with green groups and other stakeholders. The wide-ranging report calls for “urgent, ambitious and feasible” change in farm and food systems and acknowledges that Europeans eat more animal protein than scientists recommend. It says support is needed to rebalance diets toward plant-based proteins such as better education, stricter marketing and voluntary buyouts of farms in regions that intensively rear livestock." (https://lnkd.in/eVZdssVm) Here at UPP, we agree. Now, quite a few of us enjoy eating meat. But for the sake of our health and that of the planet, we recognise the need to cut back. Joe Sanderson produced 'hybrid' burger patties which taste just like whole-meat burgers, but are 20% broccoli pulp. Same taste and mouthfeel, but ~20% less CO2, better for your health, and more affordable. So you can enjoy burgers that taste just the same as the burgers you love, but know you are making a little difference with each meal. About 16% of the UK population follow a meat free diet. If the rest of us who aren't prepared to do so reduce our meat intake by 20% we make a big difference. After all, while food makes up ~26% of GHG emissions,  meat makes up ~60% of that and beef alone makes up ~50% of meat GHG. Displacing beef would avoid almost 8% of global GHG. If we use 'hybrid' products to reduce beef use by 20%, we can avoid over 1% of GHG emissions. Let's all make a little difference! Doing so could be delicious.