🇪🇺 🏆 TOP50 European FoodTech startups in 2023

Last month, we released our report on the state of the European FoodTech ecosystem (the report is available here). Today, we’d like to share with you DigitalFoodLab’s FoodTech Europe top 50 for 2023.

First, what happened to the startups of DigitalFoodLab’s last FoodTech Europe top 50?
This is the second mapping we are doing on European FoodTech startups (here is the top 50 published in late 2021). We are quite proud of it as:

• 16% of the startups were acquired, compared to 1% of all European FoodTech startups “alive”.
• One went public through an IPO (Oatly)
• Only one shutdown (Simple Feast)

In 2023’s top 50, half of the startups were already present in our last top 50. This is a testimonial of the dynamism of FoodTech in Europe, where ecosystems can reinvent themselves and new leaders are emerging fast.

On a less positive note for Europe itself, two startups were removed as they switched their headquarters to the US. It shows the limitations of Europe, which is still a sum of medium and small markets with widely different regulations and views on innovation.

Now, how did we make the list for 2023?
We selected all the startups that raised significant amounts of money in their respective categories (here is the recently updated list of FoodTech categories). Then, out of around 500 startups, we used the following criteria:

• people: between different startups, who had the entrepreneurs and/or investors more susceptible to make a difference
• hype: the ability to attract interest from clients, investors and the general public
• trend: how the startup is surfing on short-term or long-term trends identified by DigitalFoodLab
• the individual potential of the startup compared to others based on the available information we have

In a word, this is a combination of objective and subjective information to provide a snapshot of what is happening right now in Europe’s FoodTech and which are the best players.

Most of these startups are already well-developed. Collectively, they raised €8.4B and represent almost 50% of all the funding that went into European FoodTech startups in 2022 and 2023.

Compared to investments, DigitalFoodLab’s top 50 gives greater importance to food science startups. These are getting more and more attention, and Europe is nurturing a strong ecosystem, notably in alternative proteins.

You can find here the list with the names, links and activity descriptions of the 50 startups.

If you have any questions or comments, let us know. Also, we are planning a lot of private talks and conferences with our clients to help them discover what is happening in the FoodTech ecosystem (broadly or on any specific topic). This is a first step to spreading knowledge about innovation internally and a great way to start collaborating. If that could be relevant to you, contact us here!