🍍 Breeding a Piña Colada Pineapple

It’s been a landmark week for cultivated meat this week as 3 continents celebrate historic firsts.

🇫🇷 Parima just became the first European startup cleared to sell cultivated meat for human consumption.

🇦🇺 Vow’s Forged will become the first cultured meat available for home purchase in Australia, with a limited-edition quail smoked spread.

🇺🇸 Mission Barns will host the US’s first retail sale of cultivated meat, offering pork meatballs at Berkeley Bowl in California.

🏭 Also in the US, Believer Meats just became the first non-US company approved by the USDA to produce and sell cultivated chicken.

🧫 And last but not least, Fork & Good has acquired California’s Orbillion Bio to merge their B2B platforms and accelerate global commercialisation of cultivated red meat.

Is cultivated meat finally moving from promise to plate?

Also, this week in FoodTech:

🇩🇪 Where it is 5% cheaper to shop vegan
☕️ Prefer x Solar Foods iced beverage team up
👋 3 next Meetups in Vienna, Lisbon, Barcelona

The Digest

📈 What’s up? Swedish oat milk maker Oatly achieved its first profitable quarter since going public, posting record Q3 2025 revenues of $222.8 million driven by its Gen Z-focused flavour strategy and strong European and Chinese sales.

📉 What’s down? In Germany, a vegan shopping basket is now 5% cheaper than one with meat, dairy, and seafood, according to ProVeg International.

💡 Abu Dhabi has launched a strategic initiative to create a regulatory framework for novel foods such as cultivated meat and animal-free dairy, led by ADAFSA, QCC, and ADIO, aiming to streamline approvals, attract innovation, and position the UAE capital as a global food tech leader.

🌀 Researchers at the DWI – Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials have patented a fibre-spinning method that embeds living cells within edible fibres, enabling continuous, scalable production of structured cultivated meat by allowing tissue growth and texture formation to occur simultaneously in a single step.

🏷️ US nonprofit The Non-UPF Program launched the nation’s first certification label for non-ultraprocessed foods, allowing brands to highlight products free from excessive processing and artificial additives based on the Nova Classification System.

🍄 What if we could cheaply and consistently produce high quality mushrooms from even just a 100 different species?

New in Funding

🫐 LA–based superfruit company Fruitist raised $150 million in equity financing, led by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, to accelerate its and tech-enabled berry platform, following rapid growth of its premium blueberry and emerging berry categories across 40 countries and 12,500 outlets worldwide.

🧉 US functional beverage brand Recess secured $30 million in a funding round led by CAVU, which also backed Poppi, to expand its magnesium- and adaptogen-based “Mood” drinks.

🚜 California-based agtech Agtonomy raised $18 million in a Series B funding round led by DBL Partners, with participation from Nuveen, Autotech, Allison Transmission, Rethink Food, and Black Forest Ventures, to scale its AI-powered farm autonomy platform that embeds “physical AI” into agricultural machinery.

Plastomics raised $5.8 million Series B funding. The round was led by Fulcrum Global Capital, Lewis & Clark Partners, and others, and it will use the funds to advance its chloroplast engineering platform, expanding from its soybean success to corn and accelerating field trials to enhance insect- and herbicide-resistant crop traits.

🎓 US-based Food System Innovations received a $2 million investment from the Bezos Earth Fund’s AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge to develop AI tools for improving sustainable protein design in collaboration with Stanford University.

👀 Brevel explains why FoodTech funding is back - and why this time it’s different.

New in Cultivated

🍗 France’s Parima has become the first European startup approved to sell cultivated meat for human consumption, after receiving regulatory clearance from the Singapore Food Agency for its cultivated chicken. Here’s why this milestone is a defining moment from the CEO.

🧆 California-based Mission Barns will host the US’s first retail sale of cultivated meat on 1st November, offering its cultivated pork meatballs at Berkeley Bowl West in Berkeley, California.

🇦🇺 Australian cultivated meat producer Vow announced that its brand Forged will become the first cultured meat available for home purchase in Australia, as it launches a limited batch of handcrafted cultured quail smoked spread this week.

🏭 Israel’s Believer Meats has become the first non-US company approved by the USDA to produce and sell cultivated chicken in the US, completing regulatory clearance for its North Carolina facility - the world’s largest cultivated meat plant - and enabling commercial production and exports.

🧫 New Jersey-based cultivated meat startup Fork & Good has acquired California’s Orbillion Bio to merge their B2B platforms, expand operations across North America, Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, and accelerate global production and commercialisation of cultivated red meat. Hear from Orbillion Bio’s Founder.

Big Food

☕️ Japanese food conglomerate Ajinomoto launched GRe:en Drop Coffee in Singapore - a line of iced beverages made with Prefer’s beanless coffee and Solar Foods’ Solein gas-derived protein.

🧫 Shanghai-based JS Biosciences, a leading cell culture media manufacturer with operations in the US and South Korea, has expanded from biopharma into cultivated meat, applying its large-scale cell culture expertise to develop serum-free, food-grade media and process support for China’s growing alternative protein industry.

🍍 After more than 15 years of research, Dole unveiled the Colada Royale pineapple, a new non-GMO variety bred in Honduras to capture the flavour and aroma of a piña colada.

👩‍🌾 Danone launched the Danone Milk Academy, a multi-year global programme developed with Cornell University and Wageningen University & Research to train and support dairy farmers in sustainable, resilient, and technologically advanced farming practices.

❌ The Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority has warned three manufacturers and three major retailers, including Albert Heijn, Jumbo, De Vegetarisch Slager, and Vivera, that using the term “minced meat” on plant-based products violates a 1998 law reserving the term for animal-derived meat.

From the Community

Get a job in FoodTech

• Sarah AI is recruiting a Founding Engineer

• Hoxton Farms (UK) are hiring for multiple roles

• Chunk Foods (USA) is looking for a VP of Marketing 

• Every Company (USA) is looking for a Sr Business Dev Manager

👋 Sign up for the next FoodHack Meetups in Barcelona (Nov 4th), Vienna (Nov 6th) and Lisbon (Nov 11th).

🧬 The BEAM Circular Accelerator is now accepting applications for its next cohort - a collaborative initiative between BEAM Circular, a nonprofit building a vibrant regional ecosystem for the circular bioeconomy in California's agricultural heartland, and gener8tor, a global venture firm and accelerator network.

🌾 Agro Innovation Lab launches the Proteinnovation Discovery - help secure our protein future, from novel sources and smarter processing to market-ready products - apply by 24 November 2025. 

🤪 If you’re a FoodTech founder freaking out about fundraising, this post is for you.

🐻 To all FoodTech Founders launching and raising in 2025.

Give us a thumbs up, or thumbs down in 10 seconds

I love it 😁 Meh 😐 I hate it 🙁

Until next time - Stay Hungry