💸 Funding News

🐔🇮🇱🇨🇭 SuperMeat, an Israeli startup, raised $6M for its cultivated chicken. Interestingly, it just filed for regulatory approval in Switzerland while leveraging a distribution deal with a local retailer.

🍄🇬🇧 Adamo Foods, a British startup, received a €10M European grant to scale and commercialise its whole-cut mycelium steaks made with food-industry sidestreams as feedstock.

🧫🇺🇸 Melazyme, an American startup, raised $2M Seed to develop melanin (for cosmetics and suncare) and speciality sweet proteins, including brazzein, through precision fermentation

🍺🇩🇰 Alcolase, a Danish startup, raised €1.5M for its enzyme-based dietary supplement that breaks down alcohol in the stomach (before it enters the bloodstream).

💧🇦🇹 Waterdrop, the Austrian sugar-free hydration cube brand, raised €100M+ to accelerate global retail and digital commerce expansion. The startup says it generates €150M in revenue and operates profitably.

💪🇺🇸 Rogue, an American high-protein snack startup, raised $2.5M and will launch nationally in Walmart stores.

🍓🇺🇸 Oishii, an American startup producing high-end strawberries through vertical farming, closed the first $150M tranche of its Series C to scale up production and distribution. While most players using vertical farming focused on leafy greens, and were never able to find profitability, Oishii, betting on a premium version of an already expensive product, and with a real differentiation,s is now almost alone in its category.

🌱🇧🇪 B-COS, a Belgium-based startup, raised €1M for its crop protection solutions developed using precision fermentation.

🌱🇬🇧 Resurrect Bio, a UK startup, raised $10.3M (an expansion from its $8.1M rouned announced in February). The company uses gene editing to “resurrect” native disease-resistance genes from wild crop relatives that were lost during domestication.

🍽️🇮🇳 Dil Foods, an Indian startup, raised ~$7.7M to grow its network of cloud kitchens where it operates its own set of vertical restaurants focused on Indian regional cuisines.

🗑️🇦🇪 Peekabox, a UAE-based startup, raised $1.5M for a “surprise bag” app where consumers buy discounted mystery boxes of surplus food from 1,000+ restaurants, cafés and retailers at a fraction of the original retail price.

⭐ Acquisitions & Bankruptcies

☠️🇩🇪 Cultimate Foods, a German startup specialising in fat ingredients produced through cellular agriculture, has filed for bankruptcy. It joins the growing list of cellular agriculture and precision-fermentation startups struggling to finance their path to commercialisation.

💊🇺🇸 Function Health, a blood testing startup valued at $2.5B, has acquired SuppCo, a supplement testing and verification app that audits products for label accuracy and active ingredient dosing. We observe a strong increase in activity around blood testing linked with food, activity, and supplement recommendations, making it a key space to watch.

🥇 Leading Companies

🍬🇬🇧🇺🇸 Ingredion has launched a £2.7Bn takeover bid for Tate & Lyle. The two groups are direct peers in food ingredients (sweeteners, starches, texturants, reformulation) with significant overlap. The deal carries meaningful antitrust risk given the combined positions in sweeteners and texture starches. This comes as Tate & Lyle has lost 60% of its value over five years, squeezed between weak consumer demand and GLP-1 acceleration, which is weighing on its core categories.

🍟🇯🇵 Calbee, Japan’s top snack maker, is switching to black-and-white packaging because the war in Iran has disrupted supplies of naphtha, the petroleum derivative used to make coloured printing inks. This is a typical case of the complexity of globalised supply chains with second-order consequences that often go unnoticed.

🍕🇺🇸 Pizza Hut franchisee Chaac Pizza Northeast has filed a $100M lawsuit against Pizza Hut, alleging that the corporate AI system, designed to optimise workflows, caused “cascading operational breakdowns,” longer delivery times, and a collapse in consumer satisfaction. This is a good reminder that while implementing AI systems for efficiency gains is an obvious move, hastily built solutions shouldn’t be deployed without proper testing.

📊 Macro trends

🌽🇺🇸 Interesting opinion piece on why US agriculture is structurally broken as it relies on the wrong metrics of success. Farm bankruptcies rose 46% between 2024 and 2025. Under the “get big or get out” policy, the system has been engineered to maximise soy and corn yields, two crops that mostly flow into biofuels, animal feed, and Chinese exports (a buyer actively decoupling). The result is paradoxical: the US now imports 59% of its fresh fruit and 35% of its vegetables.

⛽🌍 Hedge funds have nearly tripled their net long positions in soybean oil (biodiesel) since the Iran conflict began. As oil prices have risen and the Strait of Hormuz is closed, agricultural commodities are becoming the energy “proxies” and are increasingly correlated to fuel markets. This can be seen in the results of some giants. For example, ADM has already raised its full-year guidance on soy crushing and ethanol margins. Beyond food commodity companies becoming the oil companies of tomorrow, there are much darker consequences: if crops are diverted massively into biofuel rather than food, we could face a severe global food crisis.

🍅🇺🇸 Tomato prices have surged to a multi-year high. Globally, tomatoes, a crop that requires intense use of fertilisers are getting more expensive. In the US specifically, the situation is worse due to a combination of droughts in key supply regions, rising labour costs and tariffs.