🍗 Lab-Grown Hits the Shelves

It might not be lunchtime yet, but we couldn’t resist tickling your taste buds with our exclusive HackSummit menu.

Spoiler alert: It’s packed with exciting food and drink brands from across Europe, so come ready to try your first beanless coffee, real-deal vegan prawns or plant-based duck and chicken wings. 

Join us in Lausanne on June 13-14 as we tuck into a totally vegan, totally tasty menu with ingredients inspired from around the world (and yes it’s all included in your summit pass).

This week in FoodTech:

🔝 50 Founders: Swiss startups to know
🍫 14 Startups: Working on alt chocolate
💰 13 Funding Rounds: Announced this week

The Digest

📈 What’s up? A new report from McKinsey reveals that the majority of US consumers are open to trying novel protein ingredients.

📉 What’s down? The US state of Iowa just passed a bill that restricts the labelling of meat and egg alternatives, and excludes them from federal food assistance programmes.

🤝 The UK’s Department of Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs and the Food and Drink Sector Council have joined with food industry heads to form a new ‘resilience group’, which will meet for a series of discussions about the impact of the climate crisis on the food supply chain.

👀 Good Read: Footprint released a report detailing how FoodTech can free up land and protect nature.

🔝 Cool: Fast Company released its 2024 list of World Changing Ideas, featuring Clean Crop Technologies and Voyage Foods, among others.

🚀 Exclusive: We caught up with Hadar Ekhoiz Razmovich at Meala ahead of their cooking demo at the HackSummit. Here’s what they’re working on next.

🇨🇭Check this: 50 Climate Founders in Vaud, Switzerland including AgroSustain, Ecorobotix, KITRO, Nectariss, Alver World.

New in Funding

💸 Agrifoodtech VC PeakBridge closed its PeakBridge Growth Fund II with $187 million to support startups working in the future of food. It has made eight investments so far, including animal-free dairy company Standing Ovation, cultivated meat producer Vow, and cacao replacement maker Win-Win. Get the lowdown.

🫑 Pepper secured $30 million in a Series B funding round led by ICONIQ Growth. It will use the funds to leverage advanced technology, like generative AI, to expand its e-commerce platform for food distributors.

🌾 Singapore-based Rize raised $14 million, in a Series A funding round co-led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, GenZero, Temasek, and Wavemaker Impact, to decarbonise rice cultivation in Asia. Its digital platform is designed to help farmers understand their carbon footprint, and define and finance their climate action plan. Here’s the TL;DR.

🇰🇷 South Korea’s Simple Planet received a grant of ₩11 billion ($8.1 million) for a government project to boost the country’s food security through cultivated ingredient development, and is working towards regulatory approval for its cultivated meat ingredients in 2025. This infographic shows how.

🇦🇺 Australian startup AgriWebb raised $7.2 million for its beef cattle management platform, designed to give meat packers and retailers access to data to reduce emissions in their supply chain, and which is currently being used to manage more than 23 million livestock across more than 150 million acres in 18 countries.

👉 See all 13 FoodTech funding rounds announced this week across biostimulants, alt seafood, greenhouse optimisation and a micro-factory platform.

New in Startups

🔪 Eat Just debuted its Good Meat cultivated chicken in the freezers of Huber’s Butchery in Singapore, marking the first time these proteins are available in retail. Good Meat 3 is a lower-cost formulation comprised of fewer cultivated meat cells than its foodservice version, going from 60-70% to just 3% of the product to meet retail-friendly costs. Here’s the catch.

🤝 San Francisco-based New Culture is joining forces with South Korean food giant CJ CheilJedang on a manufacturing deal to enable cost-effective production of its precision-fermented casein.

🇫🇮 British startup Ivy Farm Technologies signed a manufacturing agreement with Finnish synthetic biology leader Synbio Powerlabs to produce its cultivated meat products on “an unprecedented scale” in Finland.

Plant Based

🍗 Waring and Planet Protein unveiled the Planit POD Fermentation Chamber, a commercial fermentation system to create plant-based proteins in commercial kitchens, capable of producing eight pounds of customisable protein base in 24 hours.

🍅 BranchOut Food Inc., which makes dehydrated fruit and vegetable-based products, secured a 50,000 square foot production facility in Peru capable of $40 million production capacity.

🛒 UK supermarket Tesco launched a plant-forward own-label range, Root & Soul, developed with in-house chefs to offer meals packed with a variety of vegetables, grains and seeds in a bid to appeal to flexitarian diets.

🥛 The Canadian arm of the world’s largest dairy company, Lactalis, launched Enjoy, a plant-based milk brand targeted towards health-conscious individuals.

Big Food

🥚 Unilever-owned The Vegetarian Butcher is partnering with The EVERY Company to incorporate its animal-free egg whites into select meat alternatives, which will act as a clean-label alternative to binding agent methylcellulose.

🐼 Uber Technologies is acquiring Delivery Hero’s Foodpanda business in Taiwan for $950 million, marking ‘one of the largest ever international acquisitions in Taiwan’, excluding the semiconductor sector.

🏭 GEA has broken ground on its alternative protein technology center, with features including pilot lines for cell cultivation and precision fermentation, where it will produce plant-based, microbial and cell-based foods.

From the Community

🔬 100+ open job opportunities from attendees of the HackSummit.

❓Controversial question. Should a startup charge for samples? Have your say.

💸 An extensive list of pre-seed investors. Add your VC or take note.

🐝 Enter the NatureTech challenge - a pitch competition to showcase the best of nature-based solutions.

💡 4 myths about vertical farming, debunked.

🙌 Join us at the next FoodHack Meetup in Tokyo, Basel and Istanbul.

🦅 Just for fun: When Founders offer a VC a dirty term sheet.

Until next time - Stay Hungry

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Until next time - Stay Hungry