🍚 Cultured beef rice

If you bought chocolate for Valentine’s / Galentine’s Day or any other occasion this week, you likely saw prices were at their highest in years.

Amidst cocoa shortages caused by extreme weather and disease challenges, production has fallen and is driving prices up by 11% YoY.

Of course some startups are already out of the blocks with cocoa-free alternatives.

Using fermentation (e.g. WNWN Food Labs, Planet A Foods) and plant cell culturing (e.g. California Cultured, Celleste Bio) to meet our chocolatey-cravings.

Expect to see more funding, partnerships and new entrants in the space.

This week in FoodTech:
 
🚢 Food colonialism: Salmon spotlight
❌ Closing down: Plant-based startup
🧀 Say cheese: Self-affirmed GRAS

The Digest

📈 What’s up? A report from Research and Markets predicts that the global precision fermentation ingredients market could reach an estimated value of $31.2 billion by 2030.

📉 What’s down? PepsiCo posted a quarterly revenue decline for the first time in nearly four years, likely driven by product price hikes.

 📉 Also down? Plant-based seafood startup Ordinary Seafood is shutting down, having faced a “dramatically changed” funding landscape. Why it didn’t work out.

👀 Good Read: A new study by agrifood campaigner Feedback International shows why Norway’s farmed salmon industry is an example of ‘food colonialism’.

🪐 Scientists at Yonsei University in South Korea have developed a ‘beef-rice’ hybrid, growing beef muscle and fat cells inside grains of rice to create a new food source which may “serve as relief for famine, military ration, or even space food”. Could it be the food of the future?

👩‍🌾 Interesting: Andean farmers are using age-old techniques to fight the climate crisis, creating circular patterns of planted furrows in flooded fields to produce a microclimate, absorbing heat from the sun during the day and radiating it back at night to ward off frost in sub-zero temperatures.

💡 Opinion: How innovation gets started and funded today.

⌛️ Last chance to apply to become a FoodHack Ambassador (closes Sunday).

New in Funding

🦛 Hippo Harvest raised $21 million Series B funding, in a round led by Standard Investments, at a $145 million post-money valuation. It uses closed-loop, direct-to-root fertiliser systems, machine learning and robots to grow fresh produce in repurposed greenhouses, reducing food waste and land use.

🧫 South Korea-based cultivated meat startup Simple Planet raised 8 billion won (approximately $6 million) pre-Series A funding to accelerate its R&D efforts and scale production of its cell-based meat, which it claims has a higher concentration of fatty acids than conventional meat.

🇰🇪 Kenya’s Shamba Pride secured $3.7 million pre-Series A funding from EU agriculture financing initiative EDFI AgriFI and Seedstars Africa Ventures. Its platform is designed to digitise last-mile distribution for the country’s agricultural inputs, to help improve quality and traceability alongside access to information.

🍄 London-based D2C ecommerce startup Spacegoods raised £2.5 million seed funding to expand its functional mushroom and nootropic product line, with a view to capturing more of the adaptogenic mushroom market, which is predicted to reach $30 billion by 2032. Here’s why they got funded.

👀 Check out all 11 funding rounds including Cargill’s next investment and investment for cultivated pork fat in just 21 days.

New in Startups

🥦 UK-based artisan chocolatier Chococo partnered with Tenderstem to launch a broccoli-infused chocolate range for Valentine’s Day. The chocolates are filled with a green ganache made of real Tenderstem broccoli blended with fresh Dorset cream. See the verdict.

🌾 Israeli startup SaliCrop unveiled a new seed treatment capable of transforming deserts into arable land for growing food, increasing crop cultivation in arid regions and supporting food security. 

🥃 US artists Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg launched a new spirits brand, Gin & Juice By Dre and Snoop. Named after Snoop Dogg’s 1994 song ‘Gin & Juice’, the brand offers RTD gin-based cocktails. 

Alt Protein

👅 Europe’s first official cultivated meat tasting happened this week, held by Australian cultivated meat startup Vow and Iceland’s ORF Genetics and featuring dishes crafted with Vow’s cultivated quail. Take a look.

🧀 US precision fermentation startup New Culture earned what it claims is the world’s first self-affirmed GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status for animal-free casein in the US, as it gears up to launch into Nancy Silverton’s Pizzeria Mozza later this year. Listen in to the founder.

🇮🇱 SimpliiGood, based in Israel, unveiled spirulina-derived filaments, designed to mimic the texture of conventional meat and fish in plant-based alternatives.

🇸🇬 Singapore-based TurtleTree became the first precision fermentation dairy company to earn a vegan certification. Its animal-free lactoferrin secured the Certified Vegan logo from Vegan Action.

🧫 Cultivated chicken producer UPSIDE Foods has paused building its new, 187,000-square-foot plant in Illinois in favour of using the plant it currently operates. Here’s why.

🍣 Austrian plant-based seafood startup Revo Foods has been sued for “misleading” consumers that its vegan salmon is real fish, but the court case has been dismissed.

Big Food

🍫 Cell-based cocoa startup California Cultured is partnering with Japanese chocolate giant Meiji, with a 10-year commercial agreement that will see the former’s Flavanol Cocoa Powder included in packaged goods.

🤍 Nestlé unveiled its first precision fermentation dairy protein powder, an animal-free and lactose-free whey isolate product which it will sell under the Orgain brand. Are they working with Perfect Day?

💰 GEA, a global leader in engineering systems for the F&B and pharmaceutical industries, is planning to invest €18 million in a state-of-the-art technology centre for alternative proteins in Wisconsin, USA. 

🚀 Ingredients giant Döhler is set to dedicate “substantial fermentation capacity” to the production of a high-protein ‘postbiotic’ ingredient from US-based biomass fermentation startup Superbrewed Food, with a view to launching products made with this ingredient in the country later this year.

🤝 PIPA is partnering with Dairy Management Inc. on AI-powered research and development of functional milk products with new health benefits and “meet the growing world’s needs for personalised nutrition solutions”.

🇫🇷 Danone has converted one of its facilities in southwestern France to a plant-based beverage production site to ‘focus on anticipating consumer needs’. 

From the Community

New jobs in FoodTech:

• Improvin’ (Sweden) are looking for a Sustainability Manager

• Better Nature (UK) are hiring a Grocery National Account Manager

• EIT Food (Nordics) are recruiting for a Corporate Venture Manager

💡 Why sampling is not simply sales and marketing. And why it’s so much more.

🗓️ Which FoodTech Events will you attend this year? Here are some key dates 

🚀 Apply for MassChallenge Switzerland’s 4-month program.

🎬 Sign up for StartLife’s next Demo Day on May 21st. Pitches, food, drink, DJ and good company, join them.

⏰ Last chance to apply for EIT Food’s Startups Program.

📆 Come and join us this month at a FoodHack Meetup near you in Melbourne, Lisbon, Istanbul, Zurich, New York City, Paris, Berlin, Basel, Ljubljana

🚂 Just for Fun: 

Until next time - Stay Hungry

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