Hi,

Earlier this year, we released our report on the state of the European FoodTech ecosystem (available here). Today, we’d like to share with you DigitalFoodLab’s FoodTech Europe top 50 for 2025. As for each year, our goal with this list is to create a snapshot of what DigitalFoodLab considers to be the 50 European startups with the biggest potential for growth, a significant exit, or to leverage innovation to improve the agrifood value chain in the year ahead.

Europe FoodTech 50 – what happened in a year?

First, let’s look at the startups of last year’s top 50 (here is the link to the mapping). As for the rest of the ecosystem, it was a rough year for many ecosystems and hence for most of the companies on this mapping:

• A single exit with the IPO of Moolec (UK, molecular farming) earlier this year
• No bankruptcies, even if some companies are facing difficulties, which is almost a feat for a list of 50 AgriFoodTech startups in the current context.

Now, how did we make the list for 2025?

This edition was more challenging than previous years: startups raise money and have fewer successes to report, making it harder to evaluate where they are. Behind the scenes, and even in the absence of deals (or maybe due to that), the AgriFood innovation ecosystem is changing a lot; that’s why we made a lot of changes to the mapping by removing more than 50% of last year’s startups.

First, from the huge pool of about 3,000 active AgriFoodTech startups in Europe, we select those that have raised significant funding (depending on their categories) over the past three years and rank them using the following questions:

• Trend: is the startup surfing on key trends identified by DigitalFoodLab?
• Funding or profitability: Is there enough money to go to the next level?
• Hype: Can it communicate its service or product well enough to attract interest?
• Exit potential: can it realistically become either a unicorn (become a leader and go through an IPO) or be acquired in less than five years