🌾 Pee-cycling for crop biostimulants

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This Week in Food:

• Self-sustaining, solar vertical sea farm

• Molecular farming with tobacco plants

• A 187,000 sq ft cultivated meat facility

The Digest

📈 What’s up? US cultivated meat company Upside Foods announced its first large-scale production plant, ‘Rubicon’, a 187,000 square-foot facility located in the Chicago metro area. Take a closer look.

📉 What’s down? Californian plant-based bacon producer Hooray Foods has shut down operations after four years in business.

📉 What’s also down? Turkish grocery delivery company Getir’s valuation has dropped by 80% to $2.5 billion ahead of its latest funding round as it struggles to make profits amid ‘challenging conditions’.

🌊 Researchers from the University of South Australia have designed a self-sustaining, solar-driven vertical sea farm that evaporates seawater and recycles it into freshwater, growing crops without any human involvement.

🛒 UK supermarkets are under pressure to put warning labels on products that have been impacted by shrinkflation, like French supermarket Carrefour, which has started identifying the products involved with labels stating: ‘This product has seen its weight decrease and the price charged by our supplier increase’.

👀 Good Read: Irina Gerry at Change Foods, outlines what would happen if we cut meat and dairy consumption in half.

New in Funding

🍜 Palmetto Gourmet Foods, which makes high-protein, low-cost ramen meals, announced a $100 million expansion over the next five years to construct new facilities and install a solar farm to fully power its operations.

🌾 French startup Toopi Organics raised a total of €16 million - €11 million in a Series A round led by VisVires New Protein and €5 in non-dilutive funds from the French government and Bpifrance - for its crop biostimulant made from urine collected at motorway rest areas and other public locations.

🍝 Gal Gadot’s healthy noodle brand Goodles raised $13 million Series A funding to expand its operations and “move boxed mac and cheese beyond kids’ food”.

🍇 Chicago-based The Bettering Company, which makes cannabis edibles formulated with fruits, herbs, teas and spices, raised $6.7 million to support construction of a new facility, expand its team, and broaden distribution to other states.

💦 UK-based Oceanium raised $2.6 million to scale its seaweed processing operations. It develops and makes innovative, functional seaweed-based ingredients for food, wellness and materials

👉 Check out all the funding rounds, including the winners of the Cultivated Meat Innovation Challenge receiving €1.8 million to continue their R&D efforts.

Plastic from coffee

☕️ Researchers at the University of Colorado have devised a method using recycled coffee grounds in 3D printing to potentially replace conventional plastics.

🇮🇱 Israeli startup BioBetter opened its first food-grade pilot facility, where it will produce cultivated meat growth factors in tobacco plants using molecular farming.

🤖 Dutch startup Eatch has built a fully automated robotic kitchen that makes up to five thousand meals per day, handling the entire meal production flow, including plating and pot cleaning.

☕️ Netherlands-based startup Northern Wonder has made its retail debut, launching four beanless coffee products, made from ingredients such as lupin beans, barley, rye, chickpeas, chicory and blackcurrant, into supermarket chain Albert Heijn.

🇯🇵 A new study from the Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan shows that diets containing an extreme amount of carbohydrates - whether extremely high or extremely low - are associated with a higher risk of all-cause and cancer-related mortality.

Alt Protein

🐟 Austria’s Revo Foods launched its 3D-printed whole-cut salmon fillet, developed in partnership with Sweden’s Mycorena, in Rewe Group’s vegan flagship store in Vienna this week, which it says marks the first time a 3D-printed meat alternative is on supermarket shelves. Watch how it’s made in 60 seconds

🍄 Barcelona-based Libre Foods is set to commercialise the EU’s first mycelium-based whole-muscle chicken breast by early next year, as the strain of fungi used isn’t considered a novel food and so doesn’t require regulatory approval. Here’s where you can taste it.

🇫🇷 French plant-based leader La Vie unveiled its new plant-based French ham, announced a €1 million crowdfunding round on CrowdCube, and is launching a new delivery-only virtual restaurant, Kiss My Burger.

🧀 Miyoko’s Creamery debuted a new line called Plant Milk Cheese Spreads, crafted with an organic cultured cashew milk base using traditional cheesemaking techniques.

📉 Colorado-based Meati Foods, which makes meat alternatives using mycelium, has begun its second round of layoffs in three months as part of a “structural reorganisation that impacts nearly every part of the company” to “focus on near-term profitability”.

Big Food

🥤Coca-Cola unveiled Coca-Cola Y3000, a limited-edition beverage it claims is the first flavour co-created with human and AI. 

🍔 McDonald’s Netherlands debuted new meatless options, and has listed them ahead of beef on its menus.

🗺 Mars released its $1 billion ‘Net Zero Roadmap’, an action plan for achieving net zero emissions across its full value chain by 2050, including a new target to cut emissions by 50% by 2030.

🇨🇱 Chile’s NotCo, which makes plant-based products using AI, announced an “innovation” partnership with Mars Wrigley. Here’s how they’ll work together.

🔍 Nestlé UK and Ireland, Cargill and CCm Technologies are joining forces on a two-year project to assess whether cocoa shells, a sidestream of Cargill’s confectionery production, could be used to create a low-carbon fertiliser, for use in Nestlé’s UK wheat supply chain.

🎂 Frito-Lay North America is celebrating the 75th anniversary of its Cheetos brand with Cheetos-flavoured birthday cakes.

🤝 The US’ largest private label and food contract manufacturer, LiDestri Foods and Drinks, has joined forces with fermentation capacity expert Fermentum to build a facility with 510,000 litres of precision fermentation capacity.

🇳🇱 The Netherlands’ largest supermarket chain, Albert Heijn, launched AH Terra, an own-label plant-based line with 200 products, which it claims is the country’s widest selection of plant-based options.

HackTrends: Alternative Leather

Today, while the leather goods market is still going strong (predicted to hit $738B by 2030), its production has major environmental impacts. This report by Collective Fashion Justice found its environmental impact included major emissions, water use and land inefficiency attributed to cattle ranching and the polluting of waterways across slaughterhouses and tanneries. So startups are developing bio-based materials or upcycling resources to create new, sustainable alternatives.

🔎 Discover in the full HackTrend Report:
- 2x case studies (Arda Biomaterials, Uncaged Innovations)
- The why, the challenges and the figures behind the space
- List of 18 companies making sustainable leather
- Expert insights from Sonalie Figuieras and Stephanie Downs

From the Community

Apply today:

- Sun Bear Biofuture (UK) are hiring a Senior Scientist
- Greencovery (Netherlands) are recruiting a Lab Technician
- Climate Generation (USA) are looking for a Senior Marketing Manager
- Oobli (USA) are hiring a Head of R&D and Product Development Leader

👋 14 cities to meet the local FoodTech community: Basel (Sep 16th), Kigali (Sept 20th), Lausanne (Sept 21st), Mexico City (Sept 25th), Mexico City (Sept 25th), Wageningen (Sept 28th), Milan (Oct 4th), Berlin (Oct 6th), Zurich (Oct 9th), Lisbon (Oct 10th), Amsterdam (Oct 10th), New York City (Oct 12th), Valais (Oct 16th), Brussels (Oct 19th), Boston (Nov 16th).

💡Listen in as Josh Tetrick of EatJust and GOOD Meat tells Sonalie Figuieras of Green Queen Media about the common misconceptions of cultivated meat and why they chose Singapore over USA for their first approval.

 🔁 Just for fun: When your round is oversubscribed, and a VC who rejected you wants to join back in. Credit: David Citron

Wishing Shana Tova if you are celebrating Rosh Hashanah this weekend.

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Curated by Nicola and Laura 

Until next time - Stay Hungry