🍦 Cauliflower powered ice cream

We just announced the first batch of speakers for this year’s HackSummit.

Featuring some of the top voices in the Food and Climate sector: Ecovative, Plantish, Nuritas, FoodLabs, Zero Carbon Capital, World Fund and many more.

Here’s a quick overview of the speaker line up (so far):

47% females
46% startup founders and CEOs
34% VC investors and angels
20% brands and operators

Ready to join them? Use FHNEWSLETTER to save 10% on your summit pass.

This week in FoodTech

• Japan’s cellular ag commitment

• What Oatly’s launching next

• Getting a buzz from zero alcohol

The Digest

📈 What’s up? Data from the Private Label Manufacturers Association and IRI shows that US private label sales surged by 11% to $229 billion in 2022.

📉 What’s down? Impossible Foods filed a notice with the California Employment Development Department last week to cut 132 jobs in April. And Australian plant-based meat producer v2food is set to close its manufacturing facility in Wodonga, Victoria as its co-founder, Nick Hazell, steps down as CEO.

🇯🇵 Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced his intention to develop the country’s cultivated meat industry, including implementing safety assurance measures and developing labelling rules.

🥛 The FDA has confirmed that plant-based milk alternatives can be labelled as “milk”, but should feature nutritional disclosures on-pack to allow consumers to compare their nutritional quality with that of dairy milk.

👀 Good Read: Eatable Adventures' report, "The State of open innovation in the Agri-Food Sector", is out now.

💡 Here’s why it’s time to change the conversation around sustainable foods, according to Steve Molino at Clear Current Capital.

New in Funding

🇮🇳 Indian startup FreshToHome secured $104 million in a Series D round led by Amazon. It sells fresh fish and meat to consumers in the South Asian and Middle Eastern markets, using its own rigorous processing plants and vast supply chain network to reduce lead times and improve product quality.

🥩 Paleo raised €12 million Series A funding, in a round led by DSM Venturing and Planet A Ventures, to scale up its precision fermentation technology for plant-based food ingredients, designed to bring the experience of ‘real’ meat to plant-based alternatives.

🪰 Future Fields, based in Canada, announced $11.2 million seed extension funding to scale its EntoEngine, which uses fruit flies instead of steel bioreactor tanks for recombinant protein production.

🗺 French startup Carbon Maps secured €4.3 million just a few weeks after its inception. It is building a software-as-a-service platform for the food industry so that restaurants and food producers can track the climate impact on products, as a basis for eco ratings. Investor, Greg Michel shares why the race is on for carbon footprinting in food.

🧫 Wild Microbes, based in the US, raised $3.3 million pre-seed funding to generate “next generation microbial hosts” for precision fermentation technology via its proprietary gene-editing process.

💸 Read all 12 funding rounds from this week including AI for greenhouse growers and vegan cheese made from olive oil and melon seeds.

Dayse drinks and ‘shroom chocolate

🍄 Californian premium chocolate producer Oodaalolly Chocolate has joined forces with Perfect Day to launch a new product, Mushroom Milk chocolate, made with Perfect Day’s precision fermentation whey protein.

💰 The government of Victoria, Australia is offering $1.3 million via its AgTech Grants Program to twenty emerging agtech startups, through a partnership between Agriculture Victoria and startup agency LaunchVic.

🌱 Vertical farming company Plenty has entered into a strategic alliance with REIT Realty Income, which will provide for up to $1 billion of development opportunities for Plenty’s indoor farms.

🇫🇮 Finnish startup Collo wants to help reduce raw milk costs and the dairy industry’s carbon footprint with its “liquid fingerprint technology”, which it claims can detect any type of liquid in pipes in real-time, allowing companies to optimise production and reduce product losses.

🍹 Organica Beverage Co unveiled its new drinks brand. Dayse zero-alcohol drinks are made from plant-based extracts and incorporate adaptogens and nootropics to give consumers a “functional buzz”.

Alt Protein

🍔 Israeli startup Mush Foods unveiled its 50CUT mycelium protein ingredient, designed as a hybrid solution aimed at reducing animal protein in meat products.

✍️ Canada’s Vejii Holdings Ltd has signed a letter of intent to purchase UK-based Frozenly Ltd, which owns and operates vegan marketplace MightyPlants.com, expanding its footprint into the UK.

🇦🇪 Singapore’s Float Foods is partnering with Bidfood Middle East to launch its plant-based egg alternatives in the UAE.

🍦 EatKinda, based in New Zealand, has developed a plant-based ice cream made from upcycled cauliflower combined with coconut oil, pea protein and chickpea flour.

💡 Opinion: Tindle Foods’ CEO explores what’s behind the public backlash on the number of ingredients in plant-based foods.

Big Food

🥣 Post Holdings unveiled its new line of ready-to-eat bedtime cereal that’s “designed to encourage a healthy sleep routine while satisfying late-night hunger”. It contains whole grains and a nighttime herbal blend of vitamins and minerals and claims these will support melatonin production.

☕️ Starbucks is launching a line of olive oil infused beverages in Italy, claiming that olive oil's "unexpected, velvety, buttery flavour... enhances the coffee and lingers beautifully on the palate." Here’s how it went down in Milan.

🧀 Oatly has announced the limited release of a plant-based Philly-style cream cheese, spearheaded by its Philadelphia-based food scientists.

🍗 In response to McDonald’s McPlant nugget launch in Germany this week, Burger King released this “better late than never” social media marketing campaign to “welcome” its competitor to the plant-based family.

Trends: AI for Ingredient Innovation

Increasingly, food and CPG companies are turning to intelligent machines to brainstorm the latest innovative ingredients and flavour pairings. Because if they can do it better, more cost-effectively and more quickly than humans, why wouldn’t they?

🔎 Discover in the full FoodHack+ Report:
- 2x case studies (NotCo, Nuritas)
- The why, the challenges and the figures behind the space
- List of 26 companies banking on machines to find the next big flavour

From the Community

Find your dream job:
- Nutropy (France) are offering a two year Post Doc
- Higher Steaks (UK) are hiring a Lead Scientist and COO
- Revent (Germany) are looking for a Head of Impact and Research

💸 Pitch for $100K investment: Apply now and take to the stage at the HackSummit in front of 100+ top Food and Climate investors.

👋 Meet your local community at a FoodHack Meetup in Lausanne (March 2nd), Basel and Lisbon (March 14th) or Wageningen (March 16th).

🍨 EIT Food has teamed up with General Mills for an innovation challenge that identifies 5 key areas for the Häagen-Dazs brand covering product, packaging and environmental impact.

😅 Just for fun

That’s it for this week’s news. Have a great weekend ahead!

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Curated by Nicola and Laura 

Until next time - Stay Hungry