🍜 Oodles of (healthy) noodles

On Wednesday we spotlighted 250+ 320+ top women in Food and Climate. The list quickly grew with more influential women added in throughout IWD.

There’s still plenty more to be done in our industry and beyond to fund, support, promote, hire and raise more women leaders. 365 days of the year.

And at this year’s HackSummit we’ll be introducing you to some of the high flyers - if you haven’t booked yet, do it quick, the early bird ends today.

This week in FoodTech

• Cell-based bovine collagen

• Hershey’s latest plant-based chocs

• How Meati will raise $1B in retail sales

The Digest

📈 What’s up? Data from the National Confectioners Association shows that US confectionery sales reached $42.6 billion in 2022, a $5.7 billion increase year-on-year, perhaps because more than a third of consumers “don’t know what constitutes an appropriate amount of candy to eat at one time”.

📉 What’s down? Hormel has seen an 80% drop in its commodity turkey volumes year-on-year, due to the ongoing impact of highly pathogenic avian influenza.

👀 Good read: AgFunder published its Global AgriFood Investment Report which shows climate agrifoodtech bucking the global funding decline.

🧀 The Court of Appeals of Virginia has ruled that the name ‘gruyère’ can now be used to label cheeses produced outside the Gruyère region of Switzerland and in France, upholding a prior decision finding the name to be a generic term used for a number of cheeses. Sacré bleu!

📊 This graph shows how startup funding can work out and how to deal with the emotional rollercoaster of fundraising.

New in Funds and Funding

💸 German VC Bitburger Ventures launched its €105 million early-stage fund, called Simon Capital, to support startups working within CPG, food tech and biotech.

🥓 UK plant-based meat brand THIS secured £15 million Series B funding, in a round featuring Lever VC, BGF, and Five Seasons Ventures, to support its international expansion plans.

🎨 Danish biotech Chromologics closed an extended seed round with €12.6 million. It produces innovative natural food colours, and its first product, Natu.Red, is a pH- and temperature-stable, tasteless, water-soluble and vegan natural red food colour.

🍜 Immi secured $10 million in a celeb-backed Series A funding round to grow its portfolio of the world’s first low-carb, high-protein, 100% plant-based instant ramen, which is “just as crave-worthy as its classic comfort food predecessor”.

🌱 Female-owned biotech Tiamat Sciences raised $2 million in a seed extension round. The startup is developing plant molecular farming technology to create affordable growth factors for cellular agriculture.

💸 Read the week’s funding rounds including plans for the world’s largest plant-based smokehouse and Series A for mushroom-infused functional energy drinks.

Patented bioreactor platform

🔬Israeli startup Ever After Foods, formerly Plurinuva, launched its patented bioreactor platform for cultivated meat production, which it claims is the “first that can bring cultivated meat to the mass market at scale.”

🌾 US-based crop health and protection startup Texas Crop Science emerged from stealth after nearly a decade in business to announce a partnership with plant genetics company GDM to develop high-yielding soybeans.

🧫 Jellatech announced it has created a fully functional human collagen from a proprietary cell line, after investigations have linked the collagen supplement industry to deforestation in Brazil.

📩 Burcon NutraScience plans to submit a formal offer to acquire pea and canola protein processor Merit Functional Foods, which went into receivership last week. 👉 ICYMI here’s what happened.

Alt Protein

🍦Singapore’s Next Gen Foods, parent company to vegan chicken brand TiNDLE, acquired plant-based gelato brand Mwah!, based in the UK. Mwah! makes vegan and lactose-free Italian-style ice cream that “mirrors the creaminess of real dairy” from plant ingredients.

🇮🇹 The Italian government is proposing restrictions on using “meaty terms” when labelling plant-based meat products, in an effort to protect local livestock production.

🥩 Impossible Foods announced its new Beef Lite, which has 75% less saturated fat and 45% less total fat than 90/10 lean ground beef from cows.

🏭 Naylor Farms, based in the UK, has begun constructing a €38 million facility that it claims will be the first in the world dedicated to extracting brassica protein. It will extract protein, fibre and an umami syrup from cabbages.

🍄 Meati is rolling out its mycelium-based meat alternatives to Sprouts stores across the US, and predicts that it will achieve $1 billion in retail sales in five years.

Big Food

🍫 Hershey is introducing two new plant-based products, its first permanent offer in the category: Reese’s Plant Based Peanut Butter Cups and Hershey’s Plant Based Extra Creamy with Almonds and Sea Salt bars.

🍻Beer giant Carlsberg is set to expand its regenerative barley usage across the UK, Finland, and France, as part of its ‘Zero Farming Footprint’ goal.

🛒 Discount supermarket ALDI announced that it plans to increase its plant-based offer to 1,000 products by the end of next year.

🌾 Lundberg Family Farms launched Regenerative Organic Certified rice and aims to certify its entire organic portfolio by 2027. It prioritises soil health through compost and cover crops, and floods a portion of its fields each winter to provide habitat and nutrition for wintering waterfowl.

🇳🇱 ADM is partnering with Marel to build an alternative protein innovation center in the Netherlands, expected to open in the second half of 2024.

Trends: Singapore’s Commitment to Novel Protein

This city state perched just north of the equator is a centre for foodtech innovation, especially where cultivated meat is concerned. Home to just 5.5M people (of which over 1M are foreign-born workers, aka expats), Singapore remains the only country in the world where consumers can buy cultivated meat.

🔎 Discover in the full FoodHack+ Report:
- 2x case studies (GOOD Meat, Solein®)
- The why, the challenges and the figures behind the space
- List of 21 Singapore companies committed to novel protein

From the Community

Find your dream job:
- BettaF!sh (Germany) is looking for a Business Development Intern
- Astanor Ventures (France and Belgiun) are hiring a HR Manager and a Marketing and Communications Lead
Or see all 50+ jobs

💸 Pitch for $100K investment in front of 100+ top Food and Climate investors at the HackSummit. Apply today if you’re fundraising.

🗺 Meet your local community in one of these 12 cities over the next month.

👋 Join the GlobaLink Food & AgTech Innovation Conference in Italy co-hosted by Plug and Play on March 28-30th. Apply for your invitation.

🎧 Take this audio quiz on precision, biomass, gas fermentation, molecular farming as Red to Green covers all the essential topics of biotech in food.

💡Techstars Farm to Fork Accelerator is looking for extraordinary founders solving challenges in climate change, water scarcity, food security and sustainability. Apply here

🌟 Take part in Igeho’s Rising Star Award, open to startups in the hospitality sector making an impact with new innovations, services and business models.

🖇 Just for fun: How your stationery expenses can cover your lunch too.

You’re all caught up! Have a great weekend.

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Curated by Nicola and Laura 

Until next time - Stay Hungry