💸 Funding News
🍫🇬🇧 Fermtech, a British startup, raised £2.5M for its cocoa alternative made by fermenting cocoa shells (a byproduct of cocoa production). It claims its ingredient can reduce chocolate and bakery formulation costs by up to a third.
♻️🇮🇳 Ecoil, an Indian startup, raised $2.5M to expand its supply chain that collects waste oil from restaurants and food businesses for applications in biodiesel and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
📲🇧🇬 nFuse, a Bulgarian startup, raised $2M for its AI ordering layer for FMCG brands and distributors. Retailers can place orders via WhatsApp, Viber, or SMS, using voice notes, images, or handwritten lists.
🧒🇺🇸 cadootz!, an American startup, raised $3M+ to support the retail expansion of its organic, seed-oil-free kids snack brand.
🥬🇮🇳 Pluckk, an Indian startup, raised ~$10.8M to expand its premium farm-to-door fresh fruits and vegetables brand into offline retail.
🥔🇮🇱 Finally Foods, an Israeli startup, raised pre-seed funding, bringing total funding to $2.6M for its caseins grown in potatoes using molecular farming.
👃🇳🇿 Scentian Bio, a New Zealand startup, raised $7M to commercialise its digital nose. It uses insect olfactory proteins to detect volatile compounds associated with food spoilage and supply-chain quality.
🍓🇬🇧 Fieldwork Robotics, a British startup, secured £3M to move its raspberry-harvesting robots towards commercial trials.
🥦🇺🇸 Harva, an American startup, raised $113M in debt and equity to build what it calls the operating system for the perishable goods industry.
🌿🇳🇴 Kilter, a Norwegian startup, raised €6.5M led by Kubota (a leading Japanese agriculture machinery company), for its autonomous, precise spraying for high-value crops.
♻️🇺🇸 Nirova, an American startup, raised $3M to expand its real-time monitoring and optimisation platform for anaerobic digesters (to process liquid organic waste from livestock farms, food processing and municipal wastewater into biogas).
⭐ Acquisitions & Bankruptcies
💊🇬🇧🇺🇸 Unilever is acquiring Grüns, an American vitamin gummies brand. Grüns is selling 10 million gummies per day and is also the largest supplier of greens (all-in-one powdered plant-based blends of supplements), competing with AG1, Bloom and IM8. Competition is intense for high-value startup acquisitions. This deal comes after Danone’s acquisition of Huel and signals an acceleration of Unilever’s repositioning away from slower-growth food categories (after it sold off these businesses) and toward higher-margin health and functional consumer products.
🛒🇧🇷 Trela, a Brazilian online grocery startup, has shut down after six years and 100,000+ users, failing to secure its next financing round. It’s a reminder that while grocery-delivery funding remains strong in developing economies, many models still fail to scale quickly enough.
🪲🇭🇺 Agroloop, a Hungarian startup, has entered bankruptcy protection only a year after inaugurating its €30M commercial insect protein plant. This is now becoming a familiar pattern: heavy capex towards industrialisation, a building process that is slower and more expensive than anticipated, insufficient revenue at scale as potential contracts don’t materialise, and finally a quick bankruptcy
📊 Leading Companies & Macro Trends
🔧🇺🇸 John Deere, a giant US agricultural machinery company, settled the US “right to repair” class action for $99M, agreeing to maintain access to repair tools, manuals, and diagnostic software. Beyond the direct benefit for farmers who will be able to repair their tractors themselves, it could also spur more innovation around retrofitting automation.
🌾🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia’s Agricultural Development Fund invested $1.72B in loans in 2025, as part of a broader strategy to increase domestic production, notably by backing new technology projects (such as the new Unibio fermentation facility).
⚠️🌍 A possible “super El Niño” arriving on top of the Iran-war fertiliser shock creates a compound food risk for 2026. Climate-driven droughts or erratic rainfall could amplify yield shortfalls just as input supply is constrained. Potential shortages, supply chain disruptions, and price volatility should be expected across a wide range of food commodities.
🥤🇯🇵🇺🇸 7-Eleven, the US-Japanese convenience store chain, is having a viral merch moment. Through limited drops of branded apparel and other items, this chain, like Lawson and Family Mart in Japan (foreigners are literally storming stores to buy Lawson merch), and also Lidl in Europe to a lesser extent, are becoming lifestyle brands.
🏥🇺🇸 The “Food Is Medicine” movement is entering the US medical mainstream from two directions at once: the progressive Good Food movement (local produce, food equity, sustainability) and RFK Jr.’s conservative MAHA initiative.
