Quebec’s six Foodtech Frontier winners have something unusual in common. All of them are building technology for the food manufacturing industry, making the province’s group one of the most focused on this year’s list.
They’re smaller companies today, but the numbers point to strong growth ahead. Their sales are projected to grow twice as fast from 2025 to next year as they did between 2023 and 2025, and all six expect to raise investment in the near term. On average, they plan to raise 2.7 times what they’ve secured to date.
Several of them are focused on helping manufacturers spot and solve problems sooner.
Faster answers on food safety
Quebec leads the cohort in food safety and traceability, and the province is at the centre of one of this year’s key trends, a shift in food safety and quality from dealing with problems after the fact to anticipating them. Of the four companies that best illustrate that shift, three are from Quebec.
Bioeureka is one of them. A single food product can require more than 70 pathogen tests over its lifecycle, and conventional microbiology can take days to deliver a result. With Bioeureka’s AIMO platform, a colony grows for 12 to 24 hours and is photographed through an ordinary microscope. The AI then identifies what’s in the image within minutes and generates a compliance report automatically. Paired with the company’s MicroSelect culture media, Bioeureka estimates it can cut diagnostic time by three-quarters and testing costs by roughly 40 per cent.
Innodal, based in Longueuil, takes on one of the industry’s most persistent threats. Listeria can hide in processing plants and reappear despite cleaning, and a positive result can lead to costly recalls. Innodal’s INNEO is a bacteriocin-based solution that targets the pathogen while leaving the food’s beneficial microbes alone, then breaks down into natural amino acids. It’s the first bacteriocin-based solution approved by Health Canada, and well-known players in seafood, ready-to-eat foods, dairy and other segments have already adopted it.
Decisions made in real time
Quebec’s other two examples of that shift work on the move and on the plant floor.
Meerv, the company behind the Cooldat platform, is built around the idea that a pallet of produce should be routed according to how much shelf life it actually has left. Cooldat pairs temperature data from refrigerated trucks with mailable sensor tags that travel with a sample of packages all the way to the retail case or a customer’s fridge. From there, it estimates each pallet’s remaining life. Fresher product goes to farther, higher-value stores, while product that’s breaking down faster is redirected to nearby markets, markdown or food banks while it’s still good.
Soralink, from Brossard, combines rugged sensors built for washdown environments with AI that watches for warning signs in vibration, temperature and sound before they lead to downtime or spoilage. Because that analysis happens on-site, the data never has to leave the facility. For large grocery distributors and other operators with strict security requirements, keeping data out of U.S. cloud services and the reach of the U.S. CLOUD Act can decide whether they adopt predictive maintenance at all. Soralink now has 12 paying customers in Quebec and reports zero churn.
Rethinking how plants run
Relocalize and DeepSight, both based in Montreal, tackle very different pressures on manufacturing.
Relocalize builds autonomous micro-factories that produce packaged ice and cold packs at or near a customer’s distribution centres, so bulky, inexpensive goods no longer have to be trucked in from a distant plant. The company says the model can lower delivered costs by more than 30 per cent and cut transportation emissions by more than 90 per cent. It owns and operates each micro-factory as a service. This year, Relocalize broke ground on Canada’s first autonomous dark factory, a project partly backed by a royalty agreement.
DeepSight is focused on people. As experienced workers retire or move on, it captures their know-how on the floor and turns it into interactive guides, complete with video and 3D models, that teams can pull up at the workstation on a tablet, phone or pair of smart glasses. The company has more than 30 paying customers across food processing, manufacturing and aerospace.
Capital for the next stage
Every one of Quebec’s winners has a raise on the horizon. Relocalize is in the middle of a $40 million Series A, and Innodal and Meerv are both raising seed rounds now. Soralink and Bioeureka expect to raise within the next year, and DeepSight is planning a Series A further out.
Through Food 4.0, CFIN aims to connect Canadian foodtech companies with food businesses ready to modernize, and to help fund the adoption of their technology. Quebec’s winners are building the kind of technology Canadian food manufacturers can put to work on their own floors.
Learn more about all 40 of this year’s winners and the Foodtech Frontier.
