🍬 🇫🇷 Les Miraculeux, a French supplement startup, raised €5M for its gummies. It is rebranding itself to Mium Lab and will use the funds to grow faster.

🐜 🇬🇧 Entocycle, a UK-based insect farming startup, raised £4m. Unlike other startups in this space, it does not market insects themselves but hardware for insect farms to improve their productivity. This deal is a demonstration of the growth of this ecosystem as it has now dedicated suppliers.

♻️ 🇩🇰 Kanpla, a Danish startup, raised €2.2M for its solution to help canteens reduce food waste. It helps managers to understand what sells and what doesn’t and so to better plan their stocks. Additionally through a consumer app, it helps to manage leftovers through discounts.

🍽️ 🇫🇷 Luna Food, a French startup raised €11M for its freshly cooked meals (cooked in its own kitchens) and delivered in retail stores. It builds on the model of virtual restaurants but here the brands are distributed in grocery stores and in travel retail stores, which dramatically reduce the cost for the consumers.

🐈 🇫🇷 Caats, a French startup, raised €4M for its D2C brand that sells personalised meals for cats through a subscription. The rise of petfood D2C brands has been impressive over the past couple of years, find more in our latest insight report on the subject here.

🥚🇺🇸 Every, a US-based startup that uses precision fermentation to create alternative to egg proteins, announced a new, undisclosed, investment from the actress Anne Hathaway. As for other celebrities investing in alternative proteins, this may help the startup to better explain its products to consumers.

🐟 🇨🇦 New School Foods, a Canada-based startup, raised $12M for its plant-based fish. As many other startups right now, it focus on “whole-cuts” (big pieces) of fish, to provide a better texture and go beyond fish nuggets. Indeed, with taste and price, texture (how it looks and how it feels) is a key challenge of the alternative protein ecosystem. However, this can be a tricky problem to solve. In our experience, when plant-based products look better, they loose on the taste.

☘️ 🇺🇸 Plenty, a US vertical farming startup, that raised almost a $1B over the years, announced it is closing down one of its farms. The context is gloomy for indoor farming: week after week, we have news of startups closing some or all of their operations.

🚚 Connecting the dots between restaurants, small shops and caterers on one side, suppliers or directly producers on the other is the “place to be” if you want to raise money in 2023. It represents a huge opportunity but also a similarly huge challenge as the entry barrier is low and the number of players is growing fast.

• 🇦🇺 FoodByUs, an Australian startup, raised $12M for its platform that enables restaurants to connect with thousands of suppliers.
• 🇮🇩 Eden Farm, an Indonesian startup, raised $13.5M to connect suppliers (from farmers to larger companies) to B2B customers (restaurants but also food manufacturers).