🫘 Glow in the Dark Soybeans

It’s tough out there for fundraising Founders right now. So if that’s you, here at FoodHack we’re giving you a head start, by publishing a gold mine of VC-backable technologies and potential investors to add to your radar.

If you’re fundraising or simply curious about what’s top of mind for investors, head this way to unpack 90 upcoming trends across Food and Agriculture.

3 recurring themes:

💊 Food as Medicine.

McWin Capital Partners, Bluestein Ventures, Mandi Ventures, Great Circle VC, Unovis Asset Management and FLORA Ventures point out that food is increasingly seen as a tool for weight management, longevity, disease prevention and treatment, driven by advances in microbiome research and personalised nutrition.

🔍 Sustainable Supply Chain & Traceability.

PINC, Big Idea Ventures, Clear Current Capital, ZINTINUS, Amplifica Capital and Lever VC echo the need for new and alternative ingredients that can reach price parity with established incumbents as well as technologies to tackle challenges in production, procurement, processing, distribution, and trade.

🌾 Regenerative Farming Practices.

Clima Now, ICL Group, Satgana, Rubio Impact Ventures, Mudcake, FoodLabs and Equator VC highlight the urgency to develop crops that are drought-resistant, salt-tolerant that work in harmony with natural ecosystems. They also emphasise the importance of soil monitoring and analytics, regenerative robotics and automation, carbon markets with blockchain integration, as well as microbial and biostimulant innovations.

ICYMI This week, we launched the HackSummit (May 15-16), so come and join us in Lausanne, Switzerland where we’ll turn these investor predictions into investments.

This week in FoodTech:
🥚 Egg-specting record prices
🧪 Chemical chlorate in Coca-Cola
💰 $50 million AgriFoodTech Fund

The Digest

📈 What’s up? Egg prices in the US could break records this year as a worsening avian flu outbreak forces farmers to cull millions of birds, according to the USDA.

📉 What’s down? Nestlé has discontinued its vegan KitKat in all markets except the UK due to declining sales, dealing a setback to the plant-based chocolate industry.

🧫 Lawmakers in South Dakota and South Carolina have advanced bills requiring cultivated meat products to be clearly labelled as “cell-cultured protein,” aiming to enhance consumer transparency in the alternative protein market.

🇨🇿 The Czech government has dropped a proposed ban on plant-based meat terms like “soy sausage” after widespread backlash from businesses and consumers. And the French government’s proposed labelling ban on plant-based meat products has been cancelled by the country’s Conseil d’État.

👩‍🌾 The USDA has promised it will provide financial aid to farmers and ranchers impacted by a new trade war under the second Trump administration, according to nominee Brooke Rollins.

🍫 Good read: AgFunder asks Is plant cell culture a scalable way to future-proof cocoa and coffee?

Fundraising

💰 Lever VC announced a $50 million first close of its AgriFoodTech Fund II for early-stage investments in agrifoodtech startups. The first 5 investments in Fund II are Gavan Technologies, Oobli, Flox AI, HerdDogg and Mush Foods

🇳🇴 Oslo-based Avisomo raised €5 million, including a €1.6 million grant from Innovation Norway, to advance its “no-hands farming” system, a fully automated vertical farming technology for sustainable large-scale food production.

🥗 OneThird raised €3.5 million Series A funding to expand its AI-powered near-infrared technology, which helps farmers, distributors, and retailers reduce food waste by accurately predicting produce shelf life.

🧮 Dutch startup Agurotech secured €2.25 million to accelerate international growth and expand its data-driven farming hardware and software solutions, designed to help farmers optimise resources with real-time insights.

🛰️ Seaya Andromeda acquired a 55% stake in agricultural SaaS company Nax, supporting its AI-powered satellite analytics expansion in Latin America, particularly Brazil, to optimise crop production and reduce costs.

Startup Milestones

🌈 InnerPlant has completed the FDA’s New Protein Consultation for its InnerSoy product, a genetically engineered soybean that emits fluorescent signals for early detection of fungal stress.

🥓 Munich-based MyriaMeat has developed cultivated pork muscle tissue from iPS cells that exhibits spontaneous contractions, marking a breakthrough in replicating real meat’s functionality and advancing consumer acceptance of cell-based meat.

🍗 Upside Foods plans to launch its second product, cultivated chicken shreds, in the US by the end of the year. The shreds are made using suspension technology to produce a more scalable and cost-effective alternative to its original chicken fillet.

🪸 CH4 Global launched what it claims is the world’s first commercial-scale Asparagopsis seaweed production facility in South Australia, making methane-reducing livestock feed supplements commercially viable without subsidies.

🤍 Israeli startup Vanilla Vida announced the “world’s first” scaled harvest of indoor-farmed vanilla, using a system that halves growing time and boosts vanillin yields to address supply-demand imbalances.

🧫 Mosa Meat launched a crowdfunding campaign, inviting individual investors to join prominent backers (like Leonardo DiCaprio and Lowercarbon Capital) in supporting its mission to bring cultivated beef to market by funding R&D, regulatory approvals, and production efforts.

Plant Based

🧈 Gordon Ramsay has partnered with Dutch vegan brand Flora Food Group to promote its plant-based butter in the "Skip The Cow" campaign after “putting it through its paces” in his professional kitchen.

🤝 Finnish dairy company Valio is joining forces with Swedish startup Melt&Marble to develop next-generation plant-based food products using precision-fermented fats for improved functionality and taste.

☕️ Oatly and Nespresso have partnered to launch limited-edition oat milk coffee capsules for Nespresso Vertuo machines internationally.

🚀 Oat drink MYOM launched into Whole Foods Market, with their the oat drink where which just requires you to just add water to a premix for a milk alternative.

🎓 Research from Purdue University and the University of Kentucky suggests that digital "nudges" like carbon footprint labels and product categorisation in online grocery platforms can encourage consumers to choose plant-based foods.

Big Food

🥨 Ferrero is acquiring protein snack brand Power Crunch for an undisclosed sum to expand its US footprint and better-for-you snack offerings, with the deal expected to close in the coming weeks.

🌾 First Milk and Nestlé Waters UK launched a four-year regenerative dairy farming project in Pembrokeshire, involving up to 30 farmers to improve soil health, enhance biodiversity, and capture 250 million liters of groundwater annually.

📈 ADM is expanding its re:generations™ program in partnership with Klim to support regenerative farming across 60,000 acres in Germany, enhancing soil health, biodiversity, and farm profitability.

👶 Lidl GB announced plans to remove all packaging designs appealing to children from its least healthy own-label products by mid-2025, aiming to help families make healthier choices, in an initiative described as an industry first.

🧪 Coca-Cola has had to recall some of its beverage products in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands because they contain higher levels of the chemical chlorate. But it also unveiled a new flavour.

🏋️ Interesting: UK supermarket Iceland debuted dumbbell baskets weighing 15kg for customers to “train while they shop”.

From the Community

Job opportunities with:

• OlsAro (Sweden) is looking for an Agronomist

• Kumasi Drinks (Netherlands) are hiring a Head of Sustainable Juice

• Nutreco (Netherlands) are recruiting an Investment Manager

👋 Join us at the a FoodHack Meetup in Ljubljana, Boston and Lausanne - sign up here

💡 Is it crazy or brave to jump straight into retail? A startup founder tells all.

🎧 A good listen on chocolate and getting an early startup funded.

⛽️ (Not) for fun: What a day on a petroleum diet looks like.

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Until next time - Stay Hungry