💰 Funding News
🇺🇸 🥛 Ripple Foods, a US startup, raised $49 M to relaunch pea milk, expand protein ingredient production and fund marketing.
🇬🇧 🍲 Borough Broth, a UK startup, raised £7.5 M to scale its premium bone-broth business and expand sustainable production. This is a fascinating topic of a niche market becoming increasingly mainstream through the emergence of startup brands.
🇿🇦 🧬 Immobazyme, a South African startup, raised $2.9 M to expand its precision-fermentation biologics platform.
🇳🇱 🧬 Melt&Marble, a Dutch startup, raised €7 M for its fats made through precision fermentation.
🇬🇧 🧬 BSF Enterprise (3D Bio-Tissues), a UK startup, raised £15 M to scale its cellular agriculture leather and meat platform.
🇦🇪 📦 Funch, an UAE startup, raised $0.5 M to scale its AI-powered workplace lunch subscription model in Dubai.
🇫🇷 🌾 Resoil, a French startup, raised €4M to scale its regenerative-agriculture projects and its platform for carbon management.
🇿🇦 🐄 SwiftVEE, a South African startup, raised $10.1 M to expand its livestock marketplace into fintech and insurance.
🇦🇺 🌿 Fremantle Seaweed, an Australian startup, raised AU$2.2 M through crowdfunding to scale its methane-reducing seaweed supplements for cows.
🇫🇷 🌱 Veragrow, a French startup, raised €4.5 M to scale its process that uses worms to upcycle organic waste into bio-stimulants.
🇺🇸 📦 TrackTile, a US startup, raised $1.25 M to scale its warehouse-order tracking solution using computer vision.
⭐ Acquisitions, regulation, and bankruptcies
🇸🇪 🧪 Tetra Pak acquired Bioreactors.net, a Latvia-based company, to expand its expertise in manufacturing bioreactors, the key equipment for scaling up alternative proteins.
🇳🇱 🧬 The Netherlands approved for precision-fermentation food tasting.
🇪🇺 🌱 Brussels confirmed deregulation plans for new genomic techniques (CRISPR). This is a major step forward, which should help support the adoption of these new techniques for more efficient and climate-resilient crops.
🇧🇪 🌾 Biotalys received US EPA approval for its bio-fungicide Evoca.
🇫🇷 🐛 Ÿnsect has been placed into full liquidation after months of financial struggle.
📊 Leading companies and macro-trends
🇬🇧 🍿 Unilever confirmed the sale of Graze to Katjes as part of its ongoing portfolio simplification. Graze was once the symbol of “healthy snacking” and of a successful food brand being acquired by a major food company. Unilever failed to scale the brand beyond its home country (the UK) and its original subscription model.
🇨🇭 ☕ Nestlé is reportedly exploring a sale of Blue Bottle Coffee, the upscale coffee chain it acquired in 2017. Again, this portfolio restructuring showcase how big food companies are moving away from the “expansion bets” they made pre-covid and how they are re-focusing on their core brands and strategies.
🇺🇸 🌾 A glyphosate safety report was abruptly retracted, reigniting global debate on the use of the pesticide.
🇺🇸 🍫 Mars invested $20 M to bolster sustainable rice production. Rice production is a major global-warming gas emitter (on par with aviation emissions globally).
🇬🇧 ☕ Great article about the story of Grind, the well-known UK coffee chain and online coffee store, and its founder. Valued at £150M, it shows a good example of an asset-light brand scale-up.
