💸 Funding News
🍌🇬🇧 Tropic, a UK startup, raised $105M for its gene-edited banana platform. Commercial products already include non-browning and extended-shelf-life bananas, approved in the US, Canada, the Philippines, Colombia, and Honduras.
🌱🇬🇧 CytoTrait, a UK startup, raised £3M to develop its gene editing platform that targets plant organelles with potential applications in improving plant yields, resistance, or introducing new food traits.
🧬🇫🇷 Living Models, a French startup, raised $7M for its AI foundation models trained on plant biological data. It can predict which genetic variations to test to achieve goals such as increased yields or climate resilience.
🧬 🇺🇸 NOVOS, a US longevity biotech brand, received a minority investment from Unilever Ventures. NOVOS sells a supplement targeting all 12 hallmarks of ageing. It’s another signal of the growing appetite among leading corporations for the healthy ageing and longevity markets.
🛒🇺🇸 The Open Food Company, a US startup, opened $3M for its “radically transparent” pantry food brand.
🧴🇨🇭 Seprify, a Swiss startup, raised CHF 12.25M, notably from the IKEA group, to scale its cellulose-based replacement for titanium dioxide across food, cosmetics and coatings (often used as a whitening agent).
🥦🇬🇧 UPP (Upcycled Plant Power), a UK startup, raised £1.5M to commercialise its broccoli side-stream protein and fibre ingredients.
🤖🇺🇸 Chowbus, a US startup, raised $81M to scale its restaurant management and delivery platform, with a focus on Asian restaurants.
🛒🇱🇹 Saltz, a Lithuanian, raised €20M for the European expansion of its B2B food marketplace connecting professional kitchens directly with verified food suppliers.
🤖🇺🇸 Anchr, a US-based startup, raised $5.8M for its operating system for food distributors. It adds autonomous AI agents on top of legacy systems to automate order management, procurement, inventory, customer support and finance.
📊 Leading Companies & Macro Trends
🌾🇨🇳 China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) explicitly includes “new protein sources” in its national food security strategy. It develops China’s Big Food Concept of producing food from non-traditional sources, and calls for developing synthetic biology, expanding microbial and cultivated proteins
🧪🇺🇸 South Dakota has become the eighth US state to ban cultivated meat, signing a five-year moratorium. This remains quite strange, as cellular agriculture is nowhere near the stage where it could pose a threat to livestock (notably in a context where demand is increasing rapidly).
🥩🇺🇸 PepsiCo is launching its Good Warrior meat snacks. There is a growing demand for meat and meat products in the US alongside the rise of GLP-1 drugs. This translates into many meat product brands (beef jerky, meat “sticks” like Chomps) growing extremely fast.
🍫🇩🇪 Nestlé just launched its first cocoa-free “chocolate” product, partnering with German startup Planet A Foods and its ChoViva ingredient for a new “Snack Vibes” range launching in Germany in April. Cocoa alternatives remain one of the hottest topics in the agrifood ecosystem, as explained here, even if prices are now normalising.
🥫 🇯🇵 Japan’s iconic vending machine industry is shrinking as inflation, cheaper convenience-store drinks, and labour shortages undermine the economics of operating machines. Operators are cutting networks and shifting strategy as a once-ubiquitous retail channel becomes harder to sustain.
