😴 Sleepwalking into irrelevance

Big money and bold partnerships are fuelling the next wave of sustainable fats.

This week Singapore’s Terra Oleo emerged from stealth with $3.1 million to scale its precision-fermented, waste-derived alternatives to palm oil and cocoa butter.

Meanwhile in Europe, NoPalm Ingredients and dairy giant Milcobel announced their collaboration to transform cheese by-products into scalable palm oil substitutes.

Beyond waste-based oils, the Time-Travelling Milkman raised €2 million pre-Series A to bring its sunflower-seed fat Oleocream into next-gen cream cheeses and desserts.

Palm oil, meet your match: byproducts and seeds.

This week in FoodTech:

🩸 65x iron absorption with precision fermentation
🍓 100x antioxidant whole-cell strawberry ingredient
🐟 1st of its kind blended salmon with mycoprotein and plants

The Digest

💡 Rob Leclerc of AgFunder on how AgriFood giants are sleepwalking into irrelevance.

📈 What’s up? US grocery prices rose 2.7% year-on-year in August, the fastest pace in two years, as overall inflation climbed to 2.9%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

❎ California lawmakers have passed a bill to ban consumer products containing intentionally added PFAS, phasing out items like food packaging by 2028 and cookware by 2030, pending Governor Gavin Newsom’s approval.

🤑 Claude Kaplan of Kuehnle AgroSystems asks: Is too much money the real problem for Agritech investment?

👋 Get your ticket to the HackSummit on December 10-11th to surround yourself with 500 builders and funders in Climate Deep Tech.

New in Funding

💵 Mad Capital closed its Perennial Fund II at $78.4 million - over seven times the size of its first fund - to provide loans helping US farmers transition to regenerative-organic practices, with backing from The Rockefeller Foundation, Builders Vision, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and more than 100 other investors.

🐄 Norwegian virtual fencing company NoFence raised over $35 million in an oversubscribed Series B round led by the European Circular Bioeconomy Fund, with participation from Capagro, Nysnø Climate Investments, Climate Innovation Capital, Speedinvest, and existing backers, to expand its GPS-enabled livestock collar technology across Europe and the US.

🌯 Brainr, a European startup digitising food manufacturing with its AI-powered platform, secured €11 million in a seed funding round led by C2 Capital Partners to expand across global food sectors.

🇦🇺 Australian plant-based protein manufacturer Harvest B raised $3.5 million in a pre-Series A funding round led by Mandalay Venture Partners with support from Breakthrough Victoria, Alberts Impact Ventures, the Investible Climate Tech Fund, and Investible Club, to scale its operations.

🍳 Singapore-based Terra Oleo emerged from stealth with $3.1 million in funding from investors including ADB Ventures, The Radical Fund, Elev8.vc, Better Bite Ventures, and a strategic palm oil player, while also being named to Breakthrough Energy’s 2025 Fellows cohort to scale its precision-fermented, waste-derived alternatives to palm oil and cocoa butter.

🍄 Romanian startup Terra Wave secured a €1.2 million EU innovation grant to scale its proprietary fermentation technology for producing next-generation fungi-based proteins for meat, plant-based, and pet food applications.

➡ Discover the 12 latest funding rounds including sunflower-seed-based fat alternatives and 3D bioprinting to bring cultivated chicken to market.

New in Startups

🩸 Swedish startup Ironic Biotech has found in a new study that its precision-fermented heme protein absorbs iron 65 times better than lactoferrin and at levels comparable to red meat, offering a sustainable new option for supplements and fertility health.

☀️ Finland’s Solar Foods submitted a GRAS notification to the US FDA for its air-based protein Solein®, aiming to secure a no questions letter by the end of next year to support its US commercialisation plans.

🍫 California Cultured has filed the industry’s first patent for producing cocoa butter via plant cell culture using somatic embryos, aiming to replicate the unique melting properties of real chocolate and strengthen its position in the alternative cocoa market.

🍓 Novella Innovative Technology launched Novella Strawberry, a patent-pending whole-cell strawberry ingredient produced via its AuraCell™ plant cell cultivation platform, offering up to 100 times the antioxidant power of conventional extracts with greater bioavailability, consistency, and sustainability.

🫛 Taiwan’s Ubiquity Sprouting Corporation launched its Climate-Controlled Growing Chamber system, a fully automated germination technology that produces nutrient-rich, clean-label sprouted legumes for use across plant-based and functional food applications.

Plant Based

🍣 Dutch startup Vegan Visboer launched a first-of-its-kind blended salmon fillet made with fish, mycoprotein, and plants, developed in collaboration with aquaculture firm Tiptopp.

🫘 Protein Industries Canada, Maia Farms and Phytokana Ingredients are investing CAD 32.5 million to develop sustainable fava bean–based ingredients for plant-based foods.

🥜 UK dried fruit and nuts brand Whitworths debuted Nutty Kitchen Supermince, the country’s first unprocessed plant-based mince made from walnuts, lentils, and red quinoa, available in Original, Indian, Mexican, and Italian flavours.

🫛 Meala FoodTech unveiled Groundbaker™, a clean-label, single-ingredient pea protein designed to replace eggs in bakery applications.

🧀 UK vegan cheese maker Honestly Tasty has acquired London-based artisan brand La Fauxmagerie, taking full ownership to drive product innovation, expand distribution, and relaunch its online presence under a new Saporia marketplace platform.

Big Food

🌶️ Bel UK launched Babybel Hellfire, a spicy plant-based version of its snack cheese developed to celebrate the final season of Netflix’s Stranger Things.

🤝 Belgium’s largest dairy cooperative Milcobel has partnered with Dutch biotech NoPalm Ingredients to convert whey permeate into sustainable palm oil alternatives, supplying NoPalm’s 2026 demo plant and exploring a large-scale production facility at Milcobel’s Langemark site by 2028.

📝 Mars has signed its largest US clean energy contracts to date with Enel North America, securing PPAs expected to generate 1.8 terawatt-hours of renewable power annually and cut about 700 kilotonnes of CO2e from its supply chain.

From the Community

Apply for your next role:

• Alumni Ventures (USA) are looking for a Venture Associate

• Rival Foods (Netherlands) are hiring a Product Development Lead

• IFF (Netherlands) are recruiting a Senior Designer for Wellness Protein

• Melt & Marble (Sweden) is hiring in Compliance and Business Dev

🔝 Four competitions and pitching opportunities for agtech and foodtech startups.

🇩🇰 Let’s meet in Copenhagen at our next FoodHack Meetup on September 30th. Meet the panelists.

🥗 Comparison: Why Generative AI is like spinach.

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Until next time - Stay Hungry