🍫 Advent Calendar Calamity or By Design?

As 2025 wraps up, let’s take a quick look at some of our standout moments from the FoodHack community.

Together our growing team of 75 FoodHack Ambassadors (19 new Ambassadors this year) welcomed over 3,000 attendees to local Meetups. Were you one of them?

And we’ve got big plans for 2026, starting with the HackSummit on April 22-23, with much more in the pipeline.

Here’s a quick recap of the fun, food tastings and food-nerd energy served up at the 31 free global Meetups this year.

Thank you for being a part of the community, whether you joined us at HackSummit(s), Meetup(s) or supported us in spirit as a regular newsletter reader.

Onwards to 2026.

This week in FoodTech:

• 8 red flags in a VC and 8 red flags in a startup

• £300K commercial agreement for a cell culture supplement

• $100K for collagen-boosted frozen cottage cheese concept

The Digest

💰 US Senator Adam Schiff introduced the PROTEIN Act, a bill proposing a national alternative protein strategy and more than $500 million in federal R&D funding for plant-based, fermentation-derived and cultivated foods over the next five years.

🇪🇺 The EU’s first Biotech Act proposes stronger regulatory guidance to speed up novel food approvals but excludes products like cultivated meat and precision-fermented foods from regulatory sandboxes, drawing criticism from the food innovation sector.

🌍 Good Read: How can AI help restore some of the world’s most degraded land? Verdant’s deep dive follows Justdiggit’s mission to regenerate East Africa using AI-powered, offline-first training for farmers, showing how tools once built for corporate HR are now helping tackle soil loss, food insecurity, and climate resilience at scale.

New in Funding

🥩 Australian startup MEQ Solutions raised $15 million Series A funding in a round led by Insight Partners to scale its integrated hardware and AI platform for objective, real-time measurement of red meat quality and yield.

🫘 The Green Dairy secured an $8.6 million investment from Ikea’s VC arm Ingka Investments, which has taken a majority stake to support the Swedish company’s plant-based and hybrid dairy alternatives made from oats and fava beans.

👩🏻‍🤝‍👩🏾 New women’s health brand Biologica launched with $7 million in seed funding led by Addition to roll out effervescent, beverage-based supplements formulated around a woman’s hormonal age rather than chronological age.

🧀 Belgium-based precision fermentation startup Those Vegan Cowboys raised €6.25 million to scale production of its animal-free, dairy-identical casein protein and move its cheese, yoghurt and chocolate applications toward commercialisation.

🚜 French agtech company Agreenculture secured €6 million in a Series A backed by Supernova Invest, Future Food Fund and Unilis to industrialise its plug-and-play autonomy kits, helping tractor and machinery makers deploy certified, unsupervised operation in the field.

👀 See all 15 fundraises before the end of 2025 including upcycled fish-free algal omega-3, €5 million to scale a regenerative coffee model and the winner of $100,000 to market collagen-boosted frozen cottage cheese concept.

New in Startups

🇨🇳 Joes Future Food has built China’s largest cultivated meat pilot plant, capable of producing up to 50 tonnes annually, following the world’s first scaled trial run of cultivated pork in a 2,000-litre bioreactor as it prepares for regulatory approval and future commercialisation.

🧫 UK biotech 3D Bio-Tissues has signed a £300,000 commercial supply agreement to provide its City-Mix® cell culture supplement to South Korean cultivated meat startup SeaWith, supporting the scale-up of cultivated beef production by reducing growth media use and costs.

♻️ Swiss startup Yeastup has opened an industrial-scale plant in Lyss to upcycle spent brewer’s yeast into protein and functional ingredients, while launching a new Series A raise to support further growth.

🍽️ Pickpad is a restaurant tech startup developing smart, sensor-equipped pickup pads that automate off-premises order handoff and give restaurants real-time data on pickup operations, with pilots underway across hundreds of locations ahead of a pre-seed raise.

🐟 Shinkei uses an AI-powered on-boat robot to humanely process fish within seconds of capture, dramatically extending freshness and shelf life while supplying “Seremony-grade” seafood to restaurants and retailers at scale.

🧀 Smearcase took the top prize at the California Milk Advisory Board’s latest Real California Milk Excelerator, winning $100,000 in marketing support after pitching its collagen-boosted frozen cottage cheese concept.

Big Food

🍹 Aldi UK launched a new festive “Sprout Nog” canned cocktail, blending cream, spices and Brussels sprout flavour. 

🍗 Livekindly Collective has acquired TiNDLE Foods’ foodservice operations in the US, the UK and Germany, taking over manufacturing and distribution of its plant-based chicken products to strengthen its fast-growing B2B and foodservice business.

🗑️ Whole Foods has struck a deal with food waste startup Mill to begin installing smart, sensor-equipped food waste bins in its produce departments nationwide from 2027 to cut waste and turn discarded food into chicken feed for its egg supply chain.

💬 Why Oatly is saying ‘Trust the Processed’.

From the Community

👋 Want to get more involved in all things FoodHack in 2026? Let’s chat.

🔝 Meet the 3 winning startups of Generate Program 2025.

🚩 8 red flags in a VC and 8 red flags in a startup.

🍫 Not so fun (for kids):

How Tony’s Chocolonely has upset thousands of kids with their advent calendar, to show how unfair chocolate really is.

What did you think of today’s round up?

I love it 😁 Meh 😐 I hate it 🙁

Got a news story to share? Hit reply.

Until next time - Stay Hungry