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10 notable deals and things to know this week (2023 – week #37)

Published on September 11, 2023

🇬🇧 🐶 Butternut Box, a UK-based dog food startup, is raising a massive £280M. This is also a new successful “exit” for Europe’s FoodTech. With a £500M valuation, the new investors will become majority owners. It’s a great demonstration that developing great D2C brands in Europe is possible.
It also shows that the appetite for pet food startups is strong even now. Have a look at our last report on the subject to discover more.

🇫🇮 🥛 Solar Foods, the Finnish startup that has developed a process to “create” proteins out of thin air (by feeding bacteria with carbon dioxide), announced a new project: create dairy proteins from CO2. This is still a research project, but it is quite notable to see the European Innovation Council, a body of the European Commission, finance something close to precision fermentation (not yet authorised in Europe).

🇫🇷 🌱 Intact, a French startup, raised €55M for its innovative process to create ingredients for plant-based alternatives from regenerative agriculture-grown crops (notably legumes).

🇮🇱 🍄 MadeRight, an Israeli startup, raised $2M to use fungi to create alternatives to plastic packaging for food. While there is a growing interest in alternatives to plastic, very few startups focus on food packaging, which is both highly technical (as the packaging is in contact with food and has to preserve it) and needs to be extremely cheap.

🇫🇷 💰Qilibri, a French meal delivery startup dedicated to weight loss, was acquired by Laboratoire NaturAvignon, a supplement company. Qilibri plans to have a €5.6M turnover in 2023 and to reach €1M per month by next year.

🇫🇷 ✋ Oh no, they’re doing it again! After a failed attempt at banning plant-based alternative products from using meaty names, France’s agriculture ministry is planning a new decree to ban 21 words such as “steak”, “saucisse”, and “nuggets”. Apparently, using such names would confuse consumers (I wonder who is looking down on people there).

🇧🇷🌱 Nuu, a Brazilian startup, raised $4M for cassava-based products, such as the well-known paõ de queijo.

🇫🇷 🚚  La Tournée, a French startup, raised €4.5M for its online zero-waste supermarket and delivery service for consigned products.

🇫🇮 📦 Paptic, a Finnish startup, raised €23M to replace plastic with sustainable packaging.

🇮🇱🍞 Yeap, an Israeli startup, raised an undisclosed investment from French fermentation giant Lesaffre for its business activity of developing proteins from upcycled yeast.

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