Signal of the week: FoodTech is moving from “better for the planet” to “better product economics”

Taken together, deals and news from Formo, MicroLub, Ferm Labs and Endless Food Co point towards a significant shift in how food technologies are being commercialised. The argument is increasingly less “replace the incumbent because it is more sustainable”, but deliver better functionality, lower formulation costs, cleaner labels, add a healthy claim or create protection from commodity volatility.

This narrative shift is happening under pressure: startups are having an increasingly hard time raising funding if they don’t show a clear path towards commercialisation and profitability.

💸 Funding News

🛒🇫🇷 Kheops, a French startup, raised €12M for its platform helping supermarkets source and manage products from local suppliers. Kheops digitises the entire process, from supplier onboarding and product listing to ordering, replenishment and invoicing, making local assortments easier for retailers to manage at scale.

🧈🇬🇧 MicroLub, a British startup, raised $10M for its fat alternatives recreating fat’s lubrication properties. With it, manufacturers can cut fat and calories by up to 75%.

🧪🇨🇭 Ferm Labs, a Swiss-Italian startup, raised €3M for its bioprocessing platform for natural, clean-label ingredients.

🍵🇯🇵 Blue Farm, a Japanese startup, raised $2.3M for its platform that connects corporate buyers directly with tea farms. The model is designed to secure matcha supply while supporting an ageing Japanese tea-farming sector struggling to meet booming international demand.

🌱🇺🇸 Robigo Bio, a US startup, raised an undisclosed amount, notably from Bayer, to move its microbial crop-protection products towards commercialisation.

🥑🇨🇱 Loads, a Chilean startup, secured a $15M credit facility to finance working capital for small and mid-sized agricultural exporters. Its cross-border platform connects food buyers, suppliers and financing.

🧬🇺🇸 Spearhead Bio, a US startup, raised $1.62M for its genome-engineering platform designed to insert or replace large pieces of DNA more precisely in crop genomes, hence aiming to overcome a limitation of conventional CRISPR.

🥤🇺🇸 SOL-TI, a US company, raised $30.3M to expand its functional beverage shots across retail and foodservice.

📹🇨🇴 Emilia AI, a Colombian startup, raised $1.5M, notably from Prosus, for its AI that analyses restaurants through existing security cameras and point-of-sale data. Its agents identify missed upselling opportunities, fraud and operational issues in real time.

⭐ Acquisitions, regulation, bankruptcies & partnerships

🧒🇺🇸 Cerebelly acquired kids-snack brand Fresh Bellies in its first acquisition. The deal broadens Cerebelly’s formats and helps it move towards broader health claims than its brain health core promise.

🥬🇰🇪 Twiga Foods entered administration after raising more than $185M. Once one of Africa’s most heavily funded agrifood startups, Twiga had aimed to digitise fragmented produce distribution between farmers and retailers.

🧫🇺🇸 Ayana Bio and India’s Zenfold acquired Meati Foods’ fermentation equipment for just $75K, including twelve 25,000-litre fermenters representing 300,000 litres of capacity. The equipment will be relocated to India to scale plant-cell-produced bioactives. Meati had raised a total of $365M.

🛵🇺🇸 DoorDash and Wonder signed deals worth $425M: DoorDash will buy Wonder’s Grubhub Campus Dining business for $300M and invest another $125M in Wonder.

🇪🇺🌾 The European Commission launched a new long-term agri-food innovation strategy. The frameworks will guide future EU-funded R&D and put greater emphasis on getting technologies from research into deployment, with priorities including startups and scaleups, resilience, food security, AI, robotics, health and circularity.

📊 Macro trends

🥔🇪🇺 European potato production is heading towards a potential shortage. Output in Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands could fall from 27.3M tonnes in 2025 to 19.5–20.5M this year, while processing potatoes have jumped from around €30 to as much as €250 per tonne, an illustration of the growing volatility climate extremes can create in agricultural supply chains.

🍔🇨🇳 McDonald’s has started delivering meals by drone in Shanghai through Meituan, with a dedicated route delivering orders to waterfront kiosks in around ten minutes. Meituan has now completed more than 1M paid drone deliveries.