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15 FoodTech news to know this week (2025 – week #18)

Published on April 28, 2025

Startup Funding News

🇺🇸 ☀️ UbiQD raised $20M to scale its quantum-dot powered greenhouse films, improving crop yields by optimizing light spectrums.

🇫🇷 🍅 Beyond Green, a French startup, raised €1.5M for its set of brands supporting farmers transitioning from traditional to organic agriculture.

🇫🇷 🍬 Yacon&Co, a French startup, raised €1.5M for its sugar alternative, leveraging the sweet power of yacon, a root vegetable originating from South America.

🇬🇧 🌾 Agridex, a British starutp, raised $9M to build a B2B marketplace improving traceability and efficiency for the global trade of agricultural goods.

🇮🇳 🍔 Rebel Foods, an Indian startup, raised $25M to expand its multi-brand cloud kitchen platform across new markets. Despite a more complicated market for virtual brands, Rebel Foods seems to be doing fine and is planning for its IPO.

🇮🇩 🌾 Eratani, an Indonesian startup, raised $6.2M for its farm management and financial services platform for farmers.

🇮🇳 🥤 Good Monk, an Indian startup, raised $2M to grow its nutrition-focused D2C platform, offering supplements to blend with food or drinks.

🇺🇸 🛒 ROH, a US-based startup, raised $9M to grow its tech-enabled platform for independent hospitality brands.

Leading Companies & Trends

🇬🇧 🚀 How to feed astronauts in space for the long term? A mini-lab to produce proteins through precision fermentation has been launched in orbit this week. Led by British universities, this project aims to test the viability of precision-fermentation production in zero gravity conditions.

🇺🇸 🌎 Eion, a US startup, is partnering with Perdue on a major enhanced rock weathering project to sequester CO₂ in agricultural fields.

🇩🇰 🍔 Novo Nordisk, the pharma giant from Denmark, is investing $7.6M to create non ultra-processed plant-based meat.

🌏 💰 The global success of Dubai chocolate, a pistachio-rich indulgence, is creating a shortage of the green nut. Prices of pistachios have surged by bout 30% in a year. This shows that social network trends can be as powerful as the supply chain tensions on eggs, cacao, and coffee, which are caused by environmental reasons.

🇺🇸 🥤 PepsiCo Q1 2025 results are out. Beyond the miss on quarterly revenue, the company is cutting its forecast due to the uncertainties caused by tariffs and their impact on consumer spending.

🇺🇸 🛍️ Shoppers rethink grocery splurges — premium brands are winning, but mass-market players are being squeezed into categories like dairy and packaged snacks.

🇺🇸 🥩 High-protein everything — the WSJ reports a massive surge in protein fortification across every aisle, from chips to cereals to desserts.

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