💸 Startup Funding News
🇺🇸 🧀 Climax Foods, a US vegan cheese startup, raised $6.5M and rebranded as Bettani Farms. Beyond the name, it hired a new CEO to replace its founder and a switch from niche products to more mainstream ones (like mozzarella). Even with significant funding ($33M, a well-identified founder, and a good PR about its “AI-made cheeses”), this shakeup highlights the challenges of succeeding in plant-based cheeses, where price remains the primary driver of scale.
🇬🇧 📱 Simple Life, a UK-based startup, raised $35M Series B for its AI-driven weight-loss coaching app.
🇫🇷 🍸 Kikleo, a French startup, raised €3.5M to scale its platform that helps restaurants reduce food waste through analytics and computer vision.
🇮🇹 🛒 Tuidi, an Italian startup, raised €3M to optimise grocery stores’ level inventory and operations with AI.
🇫🇷 🦠 Phagos, a French startup, raised €29M to advance its innovative antibiotics alternatives for livestock.
🇺🇸 🍦 Alec’s Ice Cream, a US startup brand from the US, raised $11M to expand its climate-positive (leveraging regenerative agriculture) dairy ice cream brand.
🇦🇪 🌾 Aydi, a UAE-based startup, raised $7.5M to develop an AI-powered agronomy assistant combining data points from satellites and analytics to support farmer decisions.
🇮🇱 🌿 Asterix Foods, an Israeli startup, raised $4.2M to scale plant-cell-culture protein production as an alternative to precision fermentation.
🇮🇳 👶 Ozi, an Indian babycare quick-commerce startup, raised $3.3M from Blume Ventures. This confirms that India is the “place to look at” when talking about quick commerce and CPG delivery, notably with this new trend of verticalized quick-commerce platforms.
🤝 New product launches & Regulation
🇺🇸 💉 Evolv, a US startup, launched a new peptide targeting GLP-1 receptors, creating a new “biomimetics” category bridging nutrition and pharma. This goes beyond “natural GLP-1” activators, and if the studies prove successful, it could create a whole new category of food supplements and products.
🇫🇮 🇺🇸 🥚 Onego Bio, a Finnish startup, received US regulatory approval for its egg-alternative ingredient produced through precision fermentation.
🇫🇷 🇺🇸 🥛 Verley Foods, a French startup, received approval for its whey protein produced through precision fermentation in the US.
🇪🇺 🌱 EU Parliament approved a “plant-based naming ban” focused on seven items: egg yolk and white, burger, hamburger, sausage, escalope and steak. Again, Europe is taking the risk of constraining innovation through burdensome regulation.
🇺🇸 🏫 California introduced a ban on ultra-processed foods in schools in the next ten years.
📊 Leading Companies & Macro Trends
🇯🇵 🍵 A global matcha shortage is coming, as supply can’t keep up with social media–driven demand for matcha lattes.
🇧🇷 🥩 JBS, the Brazilian meat giant, warns of beef shortages, notably in the US. Indeed, the rise of GLP-1 drugs and the broader “protein craze” is increasing the consumer demand for meat, which in turn is driving prices up. This uptake in beef demand is quite contrarian to what we assume is a long-term decline in meat consumption. An optimist view of this evolution would point at the reduction of the price gap between meat and plant-based alternatives. It may help some consumers to experiment (again) with (hopefully better) meat alternatives.
🇧🇴 🍃 Bolivia seeks to rebrand coca leaf from its association with cocaine, emphasizing its cultural, medicinal, and economic importance while lobbying the United Nations to relax international controls to allow for legal exportation. The opposition from the US and the public perception won’t be easy to change.
🇬🇧 🌍 A UK study found that enjoying diverse cuisines boosts social tolerance toward immigrants and reduces support for anti-immigrant political candidates, mainly due to positive interactions fostered by multicultural dining experiences.
