🧁 🇨🇭 Macaron scandal! The delicious and absurdly expansive Ladurée macarons are not even baked in France but in a factory in Switzerland.
🍔 McDonald’s released its McPlant burger in selected stores across the United States last week. The burger is made in partnership (but not in cobranding) with Beyond Meat. The reviews seem to have been mixed.
In the meantime, Beyond Meat release was very disappointing (at least according to investors’ reaction the following day). While retail sales grow, the ability to generate profits is moving away as competition stiffens (on price notably). In the coming months, more restaurant sales and the rumoured IPO of Impossible Food may help.
📰 DigitalFoodLab in the press. Following the release of our report on FoodTech trends, we have been featured in many articles that cover the subject of the future of food from different angles:
- LeMonde on how French FoodTech startups invent tomorrow’s meal
- Les Echos (FR) and Green Queen (EN) for a quick overview of the five megatrends
- L’ADN for an interview on the future of food personalisation
💰 The best deals of the week:
- Motatos (known in Sweden as Matsmart) raised €24M. It already raised €35M earlier this year for its anti-food waste e-commerce platform. This shows the growing appetite from consumers for more sustainable shopping experiences. It also demonstrates the increasing appeal of Nordic FoodTech startups which are expanding all over Europe and in the US. This additional money will be used to launch a new market (beyond Germany, Sweden, Finland and Denmark).
- Nuro raised a new massive round of $600M, which values the company at $8.6B. Interestingly, Kroger is among the investors. Kroger develops autonomous delivery cars (which use the road). It is currently building its first facility and working on multiple small scale partnerships across the US.
🚴 A lot of things happened in the quick-commerce and more generally in the grocery delivery ecosystem, but we’ll focus on that in next week’s newsletter!
