🍭 AI-Powered No-Pee Lollipop

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This week in FoodTech:

🌾 $11 million to develop climate-resilient crops
🐒 Supermarket caught up in forced monkey labour
🏆 1 week left to enter the FoodTech World Cup

The Digest

📉 What’s down? Meati Foods has warned staff of mass layoffs and plans to shut down its Colorado production facility after a lender seized two-thirds of its cash reserves due to a technical default.

🇬🇧 The UK’s Food Standards Agency has launched a two-year regulatory ‘sandbox’ with eight cultivated meat startups to streamline approval processes, reduce costs, and modernise regulations, aiming to accelerate market entry for novel foods.

➰ US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has directed the FDA to close the self-affirmed GRAS “loophole”, potentially making it harder for alternative protein companies to bring novel ingredients to market.

❌ Mississippi lawmakers have unanimously passed a bill to ban the sale of cultivated meat, sending it to the governor for final approval, which will make it the third US state to enforce such a ban.

🧈 A long-term study of over 200,000 people found that replacing butter with plant-based oils like soybean, canola, and olive oil could reduce overall mortality by 17%, significantly lowering the risk of death from cancer and cardiovascular disease.

🧪 Bryan Johnson, founder of the Don’t Die movement, plans to sequence the US "foodome" by testing the 20% of foods that make up 80% of the American diet, creating a public database where people can fund testing for toxins like heavy metals and microplastics to hold brands accountable for food safety.

👀 As seen in Asia Food Journal, enter your startup into the FoodTech World Cup in collaboration with Givaudan and Nestlé R+D Accelerator Lausanne.

Fundraising

🌾 Avalo, a North Carolina-based startup that uses interpretable AI to develop climate-resilient crops, raised $11 million Series A funding and has partnered with CCEP to advance its rapid evolution platform, with a focus on creating low-input cotton and sugarcane.

🇰🇷 South Korea’s Uiseong County has secured $10 million in government funding to build the country’s first cultivated meat research centre, set to open in 2027 to support food tech innovation and regulatory approvals.

🍽️ Berlin-based TastyUrban secured €6.5 million to expand its asset-light, digital-first restaurant franchise model, enabling underutilised kitchens to generate revenue by licensing its food brands, with plans for international growth.

🧑‍🌾 Indonesian agritech company Elevarm raised $4.25 million pre-Series A funding to develop new agricultural inputs, expand seedling options, and launch AI-driven digital tools to enhance farming practices.

🇳🇱 Netherlands-based Cano-ela secured €1.6 million to scale its innovative method for processing rapeseed. The resulting ingredients—cano-cream, cano-soluble, and cano-fiber—are nutrient-dense, and designed to replace synthetic additives with clean-label, sustainable alternatives while reducing food ingredient waste.

🇬🇧 UK tempeh brand Tiba Tempeh raised over £1.1 million to drive marketing, sales, and product development following a 736% retail sales surge in the past year, with plans for new product launches and further expansion in 2025.

🧫 Swedish cultivated meat startup Re:meat raised €1 million to develop a modular, brewery-inspired production system for cost-competitive cultivated minced beef, using muscle cells from free-range Swedish cows, with the funding supporting the establishment of Scandinavia’s first “Re:meatery”.

🌱 Ag biotech startup Quercus Biosolutions emerged from stealth with pre-seed funding to develop a new category of crop protection products using generative AI-designed mini proteins, leveraging a partnership with drug discovery startup Ordaos Bio.

Startup Milestones

🇧🇷 Swiss agritech company xFarm Technologies is merging with Brazilian field management specialist Checkplant to enhance its global farm management and monitoring solutions, strengthening its presence in Brazil’s $160 billion agribusiness sector.

🪸 Marine Biologics debuted MacroLink, a digital platform that maps seaweed biochemistry to create what it claims is the world’s first programmable biomass, enabling the production of customisable, liquid-based SuperCrudes with defined mineral, protein, and carbohydrate compositions.

👀 The financial fraud scandal surrounding Indonesian agritech unicorn eFishery, which allegedly inflated its revenue by nearly $600 million, is shaking Southeast Asia’s food tech ecosystem.

🍭 Chilean startup Notco unveils the AI-created No-Pee Lollipop to let you ‘sip smart, dance harder, and skip the mid-set sprint to an overcrowded stall’, here’s where you can try it.

Protein

🧫 Californian startup Mission Barns has become the third cultivated meat company to receive US regulatory approval and the first cleared to sell cultivated pork anywhere in the world, with its cell-cultured pork fat set to debut in plant-based meatballs and bacon at Sprouts and San Francisco restaurant group Fiorella.

✅ Dutch startup Vivici has received a ‘no questions’ letter from the US FDA for its precision-fermented whey protein, certifying that it is safe to use in a suite of applications.

🍕 Animal-free dairy company New Culture has secured over $5 million in early demand for its precision-fermented mozzarella from US pizza chefs and restaurant operators, with a planned rollout at select pizzerias, starting with LA-based Pizzeria Mozza.

🤝 Shiru and GreenLab, Inc. are partnering to commercialise sustainable protein production by combining Shiru’s AI-powered protein discovery with GreenLab’s corn-based expression system, enabling faster innovation, lower costs, and more efficient, plant-based bioindustrial ingredient manufacturing.

🫛 French startup HappyVore debuted a plant-based ham made from pea and bean protein, offering 20g of protein per 100g, a Nutriscore A rating, and four times lower emissions than conventional ham.

🍄 Hamburg-based The Raging Pig Company launched a pea-and mushroom-based burger patty for the food service industry, designed for both traditional and smash-burger preparations.

Big Food

🥣 M&S is disrupting the breakfast cereal market with this single ingredient cereal.

🥥 Morrisons is switching its own-brand coconut milk supplier after reports from PETA Asia exposed the use of forced monkey labour in Thailand’s coconut industry, highlighting animal suffering at monkey training schools and farms.

🥖 Tesco is trialling a scheme to give away unsold food for free after 9:30 pm in select Express stores as part of its net-zero drive.

From the Community

Job opportunities with:

• Puratos (Belgium) are hiring a R&D Pilot Assistant

• Meatable (Singapore) are looking for a Head of Asia

• Nice Rice (UK) are recruiting a National Account Manager

• Planetary (Switzerland) are hiring a Commercial Director

🌱 Good read: Why we need food system transformation, and how tech/innovation is a key driver.

👋 Come and join us as a Volunteer at the HackSummit.

🇪🇺 Why the EU should prioritise protein diversification.

💡 13 food trends spotted at ExpoWest

🔵 Just for fun: The perks of being a FoodTech Founder

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Until next time - Stay Hungry