🍖 A Chunk of Funding

These 12 emerging climate startups will present live at the HackSummit Pitch Competition. And with the chance to receive $100K funding, stakes are high.

You’ll spot a few familiar faces, alongside plenty of new names. Get to know the finalists, their technology and its impact potential in this short overview.

P.S. The Summit’s networking platform goes live Monday, so get your ticket and be one of the first to book 1-1 meetings before schedules fill up.

This Week in FoodTech

• Israel approves animal-free dairy

• Consumer opinion on Greedflation

• Food waste’s role in GHG emissions

The Digest

📈 What’s up? Crop forecasters are anticipating that prolonged periods of drought will tighten stocks and cause wheat and flour prices to increase through 2024.

📊 80% of consumers believe that brands are involved in “greedflation” (using inflation as an excuse to raise their prices), according to data from Attest. In a week when Nestlé reported 9.3% organic sales growth in Q1 2023 and ADM has beat its first quarter profit expectations…

🚀 Here’s why Venturing Exec Gil Horsky launched AgriFoodTech fund, Flora Ventures and how he’s helping startups to navigate the corporate world.

🇮🇱 Israel’s Ministry of Health has granted Remilk approval for its animal-free dairy products, meaning it can now bring them to market, marking an historic first for the country’s precision fermentation sector.

🥗 It was Stop Food Waste Day earlier this week, which saw various articles covering food waste figures from around the world. Among the most shocking is that the US generated 91 million tonnes of surplus food in 2021, accounting for 6% of all GHG emissions. No surprise that the industry is calling for meaningful change…

🔝 Here’s one thing most founders forget when pitching to investors.

New in Funding

🌾 CropX Technologies raised $30 million in a Series C funding round led by Aliaxis SA. It will use the funds to further develop its agronomic farm management system, especially within the field of data-driven precision irrigation.

🍖 Chunk Foods, based in Israel, is building “one of the largest plant-based whole cuts factories in the world” to manufacture “millions of steaks” per year, having raised $15 million in the country’s “biggest-ever” seed round at the end of last year. 👉 Check out their steak.

🇧🇷 Brazil-based Arado raised $12 million in an oversubscribed Series A round for its agribusiness marketplace, designed to streamline the country’s agribusiness supply chain.

🍎 British biotech It’s Fresh! secured £6.7 million Series B funding, in a round led by BGF, to help extend the shelf life of fresh foods. Its ethylene control filters remove and absorb ethylene from the environment, delaying food decay.

💸 APAC alt protein fund Better Bite Ventures made four new investments via its early-stage funding initiative, First Bite, including New Zealand’s EatKinda, which makes ice cream from cauliflower, and India’s self-proclaimed first cultivated seafood startup, Klevermeat.

🔦 Discover this week’s 9 funding rounds including Danone’s minority stake in animal-free dairy and seed funding for clean comfort cheese and meals.

Cultivated Fish Fillet

🐟 Israel’s Steakholder Foods and Singapore’s Umami Meats have joined forces to 3D bio-print the world’s first cultivated grouper fish fillet.

🤝 Representatives from alt protein pioneers Eat Just, Finless Foods, Impossible Foods, Next Gen Foods and Oatly assembled in Washington, DC to “advocate for increased government funding and updated regulation of alternative proteins”.

🏭 Divert has broken ground on its integrated diversion and energy facility in California, where it will capture and turn wasted food into carbon-negative renewable energy via anaerobic digestion.

Plant Based

🍦 Lithuanian startup Super Garden has developed a plant-based, freeze-dried “ice cream that doesn’t melt”, made from oat milk and hazelnut paste.

🍳 Singapore’s Float Foods launched its OnlyEg Poached Eg and OnlyEg Eg Yolk, which it claims are Asia’s first commercially available plant-based poached egg and egg yolk for food service.

🇪🇸 Heura, based in Spain, announced the development of a new patent-pending technology that it claims allows it to produce plant-based foods with “previously unattainable nutritional values”.

🍽 Singapore’s Jungle Kitchen unveiled its tropical vegan range with indigenous ingredients and traditional cooking using Asian produce such as jackfruit, coconut, chilies and banana blossom.

Big Food

👋 Starbucks is trialing Amazon’s biometric payment system, Amazon One, which allows customers to pay in-store with the scan of a palm, at some of its stores in Seattle.

🍞 US supermarket giant The Kroger Co. is partnering with Upcycled Foods, Inc. to launch two upcycled bread products under its private label brand, Simple Truth.

Trends: Green Chemicals

Until recently, the chemical industry has been somewhat forgotten in the climate debate. No free pass any longer! New tech is enabling forward-thinking companies to wean themselves off fossil fuel-based feedstocks for chemicals. How are they getting on?

🧪 Discover in the full FoodHack+ Report:
- 2x case studies (Second Circle, C1 Green Chemicals)
- The why, the challenges and the figures behind the space
- List of 16 companies developing sustainable chemicals

From the Community

🎒 StartLife shares why you should get a job at an AgriFood startup. And how to get it.

😋 Check out the tasty menu of future foods and drink we’ll enjoy at the HackSummit including Redefine Meat tacos, Planted banh mi, Libre bacon ceasar salad, Kynda x Raging Pig bratwurst and Current Foods tuna maki.

👋 Join one of these FoodHack Meetups in Thessaloniki (3rd May), Toronto (4th May), Basel (4th May), Paris (May 4th), Melbourne (18th May), Reykjavik (May 25th), Bologna (25th May) and Mexico City (21st June).

🚀 Last chance to apply for the 7th Annual Coller Startup Competition of The School of Management, TAU and be in with a chance of receiving $100,000.

🪂 Interesting: Indoor skydiving for microbes

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Curated by Nicola and Laura 

Until next time - Stay Hungry