🇳🇱 🐜 Tyson Foods, the US-based meat giant, made a strategic investment in Protix, the Duch insect protein startup. This will help the startup increase its animal feed production and open a facility (the first “at scale”) in the US, turning byproducts into insect protein. This investment follows a handful of other partnership investments of large food players into startups scaling insects for animal feed.
🏴 🐜 Beta Bugs, a Scottish startup, raised €1.46M to produce insects for animal feed.
🇩🇪 🏪 Lidl Germany announced that it will offer price parity for the plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy products under its private label brands. As price is one of the major limitations of growth for plant-based, it will be interesting to observe how this will affect sales over the more than 100 plant-based products sold by Lidl.
🇯🇵 🌱 DAIZ, a Japanese startup, raised $47M to build the country’s “largest” plant-based meat factory.
🇺🇸🧪 Liberation Labs, a US startup, raised $75M for its commercial-scale precision fermentation protein facility (startups and established companies will then use that to manufacture their precision fermentation ingredients). The move toward cloud bioreactors is something we have already discussed here and a solution to finance the transition toward synthetic foods.
🇺🇸🤖 PickNik Robotics, a US startup, raised $2M for its robotic platform, which enables developers to create applications with robot arms.
🇦🇷🌱 Moolec Science, an Argentina-based startup using molecular farming to produce alternatives to animal ingredients, raised $30M to keep working on its R&D projects.
🇺🇸🌿 Zordi, a US startup, raised $20M for its automated greenhouses. It uses both AI and robotics to cut labour costs by 80%.
🇺🇸 🍔 Salted, a US startup, raised $14M for its network of virtual restaurant brands. Its focus on “better for you” brands is relatively new in an ecosystem dominated by unhealthy offerings and inconsistency (unlike most virtual brands, Salted cooks its products). We’ll see if delivery consumers are finally ready to move toward new types of food.
🇩🇰 ☘️ Denmark announced the world’s first national action plan to promote plant-based foods. It wants to bolster local consumption but also the exports of plant-based foods to make the country a leader in this field.
Denmark may be a small country, but it fights above its weight when we talk about FoodTech. You should have a look at the country’s state of investments and top startups in our dedicated report published a few weeks ago.
🇫🇷 🍃 VIF Systems, a French vertical farming startup using containers to grow leafy greens, raised an undisclosed amount of money from the French seed giant Limagrain.
