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13 FoodTech news to know this week (2025 – week #13)

Hooked, ben&jerry's, bioniq

Published on March 25, 2025

Funding news

🇺🇸🤖 GrubMarket, a US startup, raised $50M at a $3.5B valuation for its AI-driven platform for the food distribution industry.

🇸🇪🌱 Hooked Foods, a Swedish startup, raised SEK 8.4M (€750k) to launch new vegan products powered by AI-driven insights. It’s crazy how everything is now “powered by AI”, even plant-based seafood products… Maybe companies (small and big) should be more selective in their use of AI in their communication to maintain their credibility.

🇬🇧💊 Bioniq, a British personalised supplement startup, gets another football star as an investor (contributing €1M) and ambassador.

🇮🇪🎣 Catchwise, an Irish startup, raised €1.25M to promote sustainable practices and efficiencies in the fishing industry.

🇩🇪 🍽️ TastyUrban, a German startup, raised €6.5M to internationalise its asset-light network of restaurants. The startup develops restaurant delivery brands, which are then licensed to existing restaurants seeking to optimise their unused kitchen space and time.

Acquisitions, restructuring & bankrupcies

🇺🇸📱 Wonder, a US food delivery unicorn, acquired content platform Tastemade, aiming to integrate multimedia content into its super-app experience around meal services.

🇫🇷🚜 Akanea, a French logistics software firm, acquired Agrivitech, a French startup developing tools to optimise agricultural logistics.

🇫🇷👥 Extracadabra, a French interim staffing platform for hospitality, is getting acquired by Groupe Actual, an investment fund specialised in interim work.

🇺🇸♻️ Upside Foods, a leading US cellular agriculture startup, restructures to remain “agile”. The whole cultivated meat industry is doing poorly currently, and this news is not a surprise as it follows rounds of layoffs in 2024 and some controversies on the startup’s ability to produce meat at scale. However, even if the consolidation is still underway, cellular agriculture is far from “dead”, and we still expect positive developments in the coming 12 to 18 months.

🇺🇸⚠️ Benson Hill files Chapter 11. The American startup, which had developed a platform to enhance traits in crops such as soy, is looking to find acquirers for some of its assets.

Leading companies & ecosystem updates

🍔 Unilever sold its plant-based meat brand “The Vegetarian Butcher”, to Vivera, a division of Brazil’s meat giant JBS.

🏢 Pladis, the company behind well-known brands such as McVities and Godiva, launched an accelerator programme aimed at early-stage foodtech startups.

🍦 Is it the end of brand activism? Unilever, the owner of Ben&Jerry’s, is seeking to oust the CEO of the ice cream brand due to brand activism. Ben&Jerry’s is the poster child of brand activism, which is now waning very quickly as companies move as far away as possible from being too politically engaged.

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