☕️ Edible coffee cups

It’s been a few weeks since the HackSummit. If you’re still reminiscing on the time we spent together, you’re not alone. Green Queen’s Sonalie Figueiras shared why the HackSummit is the ClimateTech conference you can’t miss.

And here’s our round up on the action in this short recap.

This week in Food:

• Cultivated pork in 8 days

• $30M for sugar sweetener

• Indonesia’s next unicorn

The Digest

📈 What’s up? A report from SNAC International shows that US snack sales were up 15.6% in 2022, despite a decline in volume, driven by price hikes in the sector.

📉 What’s down?USDA’s most recent egg market report shows that egg prices are declining as egg producers rebuild their flocks in the wake of the bird flu crisis.

📦 Google has launched a call to food companies with sustainable packaging to submit their products to the Google Single-Use Plastics Challenge for the opportunity to pitch their products to Google and “leading global food operators” to scale them across Google’s US offices, in a bid to put an end to single-use plastics.

🇮🇪 Ireland has become the first country in the world to introduce a policy on alcohol health labelling, to alert consumers to the calorie content, grams of alcohol in the product, the risks of cancer and liver disease and the dangers of drinking while pregnant.

🐝 New Zealand has lost its eight year trademark battle for manuka honey. If successful, it would mean that the certification mark would only be used on products if “the goods are honey, which is manuka honey according to the laws of New Zealand” and “are produced in New Zealand”, but was disputed by Australian beekeepers.

💡 Don’t fall in to the trap of thinking the more you raise, the more impressive it is, here’s why.

New in Funding

🍽 US-based Restaurant365 secured $135 million in a round led by KKR and L Catterton for its restaurant management software, which handles back-office tasks such as accounting, inventory, and purchasing, alongside staff-related items like hiring and scheduling workers.

🐟 Indonesian agritech eFishery hit unicorn status with a $108 million Series D raise which pushed its post-money valuation to $1.3 billion. It has developed several tools for fish farmers in the ten years since its inception, including an IoT device called eFishery Feeder, which enables automated feeding, eFishery Mall, a marketplace for selling fish and shrimp feed, and eFishery Fresh, a platform that sells fresh fish and shrimp to B2B customers.

🍬 Israeli startup Incredo Ltd, formerly DouxMatok, raised $30 million Series C funding in a round led by DSM Venturing and Sienna Venture Capital. It makes Incredo Sugar, a sugar-based sweetener that allows for 30% to 50% sugar reduction, and is joining forces with confectionery giant Ferrero to create products with the sweetener.

🍼 New York-based BBy raised $3 million seed funding, in a round led by Pioneer Fund, for its tech which turns breast milk donated by lactating mothers into a powder for neonatal intensive care units, to save on the costs of storage, thawing, and reheating.

💸 All Y’alls Foods, based in Texas, secured $1 million from a vascular surgeon as a Simple Agreement for Future Equity note raise. It makes better-for-you plant-based jerky from soy, olive oil, and seasonings with flavours typical of different regions of Texas, including Black Pepper and Sea Salt, Prickly Pear Chipotle, and Prickly Pear Teriyaki.

NASA Finalists

🚀 NASA has announced the finalists competing for the $1.5 million prize in its Deep Space Food Challenge.

🇸🇬 Solar Foods debuted its microbial protein Solein in the first-ever tasting event of an air protein in Singapore this week.

🇮🇱 Sensifi, based in Israel, has come out of stealth with an ‘artificial nose’ which it claims could disrupt the food testing market by enabling fast, on-premise detection of pathogens such as E. Coli and salmonella. It contains electrodes coated with carbon nanoparticles to detect volatile organic compounds from bacteria and other microbes, with results in under an hour.

🧫 Dutch cultivated meat startup Meatable says it has achieved a world-first breakthrough in its mission to produce cultivated meat at scale: it claims to be able to produce its cultivated pork in just eight days, when previously the process took three weeks.

☕️ Bulgarian startup Cupffee has created an edible coffee cup, made from oat bran, wheat flour, and water, which can withstand temperatures up to 85 degrees Celsius and remains crisp for up to 40 minutes after being filled, to help reduce single-use coffee cup waste.

💡 Here’s why synthetic biology is the next innovation frontier across food, health and new materials.

Plant Based

🐟 Wicked Kitchen is expanding its portfolio with the strategic acquisition of plant-based seafood startup Current Foods, which makes sushi-grade vegan salmon and tuna.

🥛 Oatly is launching a global regenerative agriculture movement, F.A.R.M., that will work with farmers to restore carbon, improve biodiversity, and support farm viability.

🍦 Swedish startup Veg of Lund has secured patent approval for its “unique” potato-based ice cream.

🧀 Paris-based Les Nouveaux Affineurs unveiled La Bûche, a vegan gourmet goat’s cheese log made with fermented cashews.

🍔 Sweden’s oldest burger chain, MAX Burgers, debuted its new Supreme Green meatless menu, featuring patties made from mung beans and yellow split peas to “make going green the natural choice”.

Big Food

🛒 UK supermarket Iceland has joined forces with Myprotein to launch the “world’s first” frozen protein meal vending machine into gyms. The machine will sell a range of ten frozen Myprotein meals, each containing 20-30 grams of protein, designed for aiding muscle building and recovery.

🤝 Amcor, Delterra, Mars and P&G are launching a strategic partnership to scale upstream and downstream solutions for a circular plastics economy, jointly committing $6 million over the next five years to “stem the tide of plastic pollution in the Global South”.

🐄 French dairy giant Bel Group is rolling out a methane-reducing feed across its dairy producers in Slovakia, which supply around 70 million litres of milk each year to make Babybel cheese, with the aim of reducing methane emissions by 25%.

🥛 Woolworths has acquired Australian rapid grocery delivery startup Milkrun, which shut down suddenly last month, and will run the brand under its own speedy grocery service, Metro60.

Trend Report: Fermentation Infrastructure

A rapidly increasing class of companies are harnessing the potential of fermentation to create novel ingredients and proteins – but to do so they need somewhere to actually carry out that fermenting. As Kynda explains, most types of industrial fermentation processes require bioreactors – essentially large vats or chambers – that provide the ideal conditions for microorganisms and fungi to multiply and grow.

🔎 Discover in the full FoodHack+ Report:
- 2x case studies (Kynda, Planetary)
- The why, the challenges and the figures behind the space
- List of 15 companies building the necessary infrastructure to scale up alt proteins

From the Community

💡Get hired in FoodTech:

• ECBF (Germany) are looking for a Junior Analyst

• Heura Foods (Spain) are recruiting a Research Scientist

• Gourmey (France) are hiring a Food Texture Scientist

👋 Let’s meet in Madrid (29th May), Zurich (30th May), New York (8th June), Boston (13th June), Mexico City (21st June) and Singapore (9th July).

🤝 VC Rubio Impact Ventures and agrifoodtech accelerator StartLife, both based in the Netherlands, announced a strategic partnership to support startups working within sustainable food and agtech.

🚀 ICYMI: Founders Alex Gould and Dave Adams hosted their official launch party to a sold out crowd in Lausanne. Alt Collective is a specialised recruitment agency exclusively dedicated to emerging brands in Food and Climate.

🔝Meet the 6 winners of MassChallenge Switzerland in Renens this afternoon.

🏆 Find out who won the Nordic Startup Awards including portfolio co Loki Foods.

 🤸 Rare footage of an average day at a startup

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Curated by Nicola and Laura 

Until next time - Stay Hungry