🪶 Chicken meat from feathers

PLUS: 100+ technologies investors are looking to fund next

September 22, 2023

Since there’s no silver bullet to solving the climate crisis, founders and scientists are pioneering radical technologies to address this global challenge.

And impact investors are doubling down on climate-positive investments to help scale and bring the solutions to market.

But which solutions do leading investors think Food and ClimateTech startups should be working on? And which technologies are they looking to fund next?

Hear from 40+ top ClimateTech investors as they share over 100 climate-critical solutions.

A must read if you’re a founder looking for investment, actively investing in the space, or just curious to hear what’s on their radar.

This Week in Food:

  • France’s factory farming U-turn

  • Candy giant’s new innovation centre

  • 12.4% YoY decline for FoodTech VC

The Digest

Source: Pitchbook

📈 What’s up? British discount platform CouponBirds found that over £800 million has been stolen from UK supermarkets this year, with loose fresh fruit and vegetables the most frequently uplifted items.

📉 What’s down? Data from PitchBook reveals that the median FoodTech VC deal size declined for the first time in seven years to $3 million in Q2 2023, marking a 12.4% decline year-on-year.

🖊 A new report from investor network FAIRR shows that two thirds of publicly-listed agrifood firms that have talked publicly about the potential of regenerative agriculture “have not put in place any formal quantitative company-wide targets to achieve those ambitions”, and even fewer have committed funds to incentivise farmers.

🇫🇷 The French government has made a U-turn on its factory farming agenda, calling for the production of cheaper meat and ‘taking back the market from imports’, while saying that animal welfare only works for the rich.

🪶 Researchers from the University of Trento, Italy are studying how to obtain chicken meat from a feather.

❎ 5 common founder mistakes. And how to avoid them.

🥚 Not getting laid: Formo’s latest research explores (promising) consumer acceptance around precision fermentation-made eggs.

Funding x Funds

Credit: Treetoscope

💰 Agrifoodtech investor Astanor Ventures closed its second fund with €360 million. It will continue to support early-stage and mission-driven companies that are working on “nature positive solutions'' to environmental and social issues. See where they’ll be investing next.

💸 New York-based Humble Growth, a growth equity investment firm launched by three CPG veterans, raised $312 million for its first fund, with which it will invest in ‘disruptive’ consumer brands working within food, beverage, health, beauty, vitamins, supplements, and apparel.

🇬🇭 Ghanaian startup Complete Farmer secured $10.4 million pre-Series A funding. It is building technical and physical infrastructure to connect farmers in Africa to global food buyers and improve efficiency in the region’s agricultural value chain.

🌾 Israeli agtech Treetoscope raised $7 million seed funding, in a round led by Champel Capital, to scale what it says is the world’s first plant-based SaaS platform for optimising irrigation, which uses AI to process data and allows farmers to control irrigation saving farmers approx. 30% in irrigation costs. Here’s why Champel Capital invested.

🎁 Here’s a wrap up of all 8 funding rounds this week including instant groceries for the Brazilian market and tech for instructing protein cell growth.

New Pilot Facility

Credit: Hoxton Farms

🏭 British cell-based startup Hoxton Farms has opened a pilot facility in London for its cultivated fat, which will have a capacity of up to ten tons per year. Take a look inside.

🇮🇳 Indian startup HealthifyMe unveiled an AI-powered image recognition feature for Indian food, which can accurately identify food from images for calorie intake logging, something which has historically been difficult for Indian food as there are so many different cuisines.

🧫 German cultivated meat producer The Cultivated B, a subsidiary of Germany’s second-largest animal-based sausage manufacturer Infamily Foods, has entered the pre-submission phase of regulatory approval for the sale of hybrid cultivated meat products in Europe.

🧀 Good Read: Magi Richani, founder and CEO of Nobell Foods, shares how the company is leveraging technology and temptation to change the way consumers eat.

Alt Protein

Credit: Meati

🛒 Mycelium meat producer Meati opened a direct-to-consumer online storefront, The Meati Marketplace, to offer product deliveries and subscriptions for its customers.

🍗 UK-based alt meat brand THIS unveiled its latest product, THIS™ Isn’t Roast Chicken & Stuffing, a limited-edition plant-based chicken crown with stuffing in the middle and a sage and garlic melt topping, designed for the upcoming holiday season.

🧀 US-based vegan cheese producer GOOD PLANeT Foods debuted olive oil cheese, to tap into what it’s calling an “underdeveloped plant-based cheese market”.

👋 Meatless Farm is “back for good” following its acquisition by VFC earlier this year, and has relaunched into UK supermarkets with a national comeback campaign and a new filled pasta product.

🎄 Holidays are coming: US startup MALK Organics debuted its clean-label Holiday Nog (eggnog equivalent), made with just five plant-based ingredients.

Big Food

Credit: Zero Acre Farms

🤝 Two Shake Shack locations in New York are piloting Californian startup Zero Acre Farms’ sustainable Cultured Oil as a replacement for soybean oil.

🍔 Israeli startup Chunk Foods’ whole-cut plant-based steak is making its fast-casual foodservice debut at vegan burger chain Neat Burger.

🍹 Heineken UK has acquired a “significant minority stake” in pop star Ellie Goulding’s ready-to-drink brand Served, which offers a range of cocktails and hard seltzers using sustainably sourced ingredients, rescued ‘wonky’ fruit and premium spirits, for an undisclosed sum.

🍪 Ferrero North America announced the opening of its new Innovation Center and North America R&D Labs, which will be used to develop new cookies and other sweet treats.

👎 UK supermarket Tesco has been accused of greenwashing after selling Brazilian meat despite pledging to ban it over deforestation.

🍫 British vegan and free-from chocolate brand NOMO exclusively launched a new Mint Sharing Box into Tesco, and claims that the product is the first ever vegan after-dinner mint that’s free from dairy, gluten, egg, and nuts.

HackTrends: Mycoremediation

🔎 Discover in the full HackTrend Report:

While there’s no one-fungi-fits-all solution, find out how careful adaptation of fungi’s detoxifying superpowers could deliver tailored remediation solutions to problems as wide ranging as clean water, heavy metals, plastic pollution, microplastics, soil degradation, construction and mine waste.

From the Community

Get a (new) job in FoodTech:

- Formo (Germany) are looking or a Content Marketer and Project Manager
- Good Food Institute Europe (Remote) are hiring an Investment Manager
- Oobli (USA) are recruiting a Head of R&D and Product Dev Leader
👉 See all job openings

👋 Join us next in: Mexico City (Sept 25th), Wageningen (Sept 28th), Milan (Oct 4th), Berlin (Oct 6th), Zurich (Oct 9th), Lisbon (Oct 10th), Amsterdam (Oct 10th), New York City (Oct 12th), Valais (Oct 16th), Brussels (Oct 19th), Boston (Nov 16th). FoodHack Meetups are always free to attend. Sign up here

🇮🇱 FoodTechIL returns this November 7-8th. Join 3,000+ attendees and global FoodTech leaders in Tel Aviv - Save 10% with FoodHack10.

👎 5 things you don’t need to found a FoodTech startup

🇵🇱 The Plant-Powered Pitching contest for plant-based startups with R&D potential is taking place on October 19th in Warsaw, Poland and the prize pool is 10,000+ EUR. Apply until October 5th.

🇯🇵 Connect with the Japanese market by applying for The Climate-Tech Challenge by Hyogo Prefecture and Kobe City.

 🎂 Just for fun: How not to think about market fit for your FoodTech startup.

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Curated by Nicola and Laura 

Until next time - Stay Hungry