Welcome to 2025!

Happy New Year, folks. Wishing you all a bright, joyful, and healthy year ahead.

I do hope you all had a more restful break than I did. Unfortunately, two small kids, no school, flu season and disrupted sleep do not make for relaxing, energizing holidays 😉 Still, we managed to get some quality family beach time, which was priceless.

In mid-December, I had a catch-up call with a general fund investor and he told me his sense from talking to other investors in Asia and the US was that no one was deploying capital in food tech. He asked me point blank if food tech as a category was over.

We talked for over an hour and, during the call, it became clear that for many people, food tech has become synonymous with one category: plant-based meat. Even worse, it's become synonymous with just ONE company: Beyond Meat.

We have to fight back against this perception. Future food innovation is so much more than a plant-based burger patty!

ALSO: let's keep in mind that the basic reason for food tech to exist has not changed!

The food system is under pressure from inflation, supply chain disruption, extreme weather, lower yields, growing populations, ageing farmers, decreasing food security, deforestation, water security and more… so we NEED solutions. We NEED innovations. We NEED ideas. That's the whole reason food tech VC exists, to fund this innovation. 

Towards the end of the call, the investor asked me what areas I was bullish on in the space, and I obliged. Then I realized the list I gave him was the perfect fodder for my annual trends report.

Click to read 2025 Trends

-Sonalie

💡 Only On Green Queen

🏆 2024 Wrapped: The Top 10 Food Tech Wins of the Year
2024 was a milestone year for the future food industry, with regulatory approvals, big partnerships, and major court rulings. These are (in chronological order) the 10 biggest wins for food tech in 2024.

💰 2024 Wrapped: The Top 10 Future Food Funding Rounds of the Year
While investment in alternative protein and future food startups has fallen again this year, there have still been some sizeable VC funding rounds. These are the 10 biggest raises of 2024, featuring mycelium meat, animal-free milk, and cocoa-free chocolate.

✨ Editor’s Picks: Green Queen’s 10 Favourite Future Food Stories of the Year
It has been a big year for the future food sector. These are our editor’s picks of the 10 best stories on Green Queen in 2024 (in chronological order), featuring a public tasting for cultivated meat, an interview with a US senator, and Portugal’s plant-based strategy.

🇫🇷 Deep Dive: Legumes are Taking Centre Stage in France
French consumers are eating more legumes, vegetables, and vegan meat and dairy – but concerns about prices and health are major barriers.

📈 Must-Read Headlines

🌱 Irish startup Nuritas, whose early investors include Bono and The Edge from U2, raised $42 million Series C funding to scale up its AI-powered discovery platform for plant-based peptides.
Its platform identifies and commercialises rare plant-based peptides faster than the industry standard, to be used in food products, supplements, cosmetics, and other functional offerings.

🌿 Anglo-Portuguese startup Arborea secured €5 million to build a facility for its Biosolar Leaf system, which industrialises photosynthesis to create high-value microalgae proteins.
The modular, soil-free system can sequester CO2 directly from air, making it suitable to be sited on any surface, even barren land and rooftops. 

🇬🇧 The UK government has set up a new £15 million fund to save food waste from the farm gate and redistribute it to those experiencing hunger.
Government data suggests that about 300,000 tonnes of edible food is either wasted or converted to animal feed before leaving farms every year in the UK.

🇪🇺 Backed by a €5 million investment from the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, the four-year Delicious initiative is launching to create next-gen dairy alternatives.
The entities involved will use cutting-edge technologies like data analysis through machine learning and bioinformatic tools to enhance the sensory properties of dairy alternatives and significantly lower product development costs.

🤝🏼 Hot Topic: Collabs

🥩 Meat analogue maker The Better Butchers has signed a letter of intent with Genuine Taste, a student-founded cultivated fat startup, to develop hybrid meat.
The Better Butchers says the cultivated fat will enhance the taste and texture of its product offerings, as well as maintain the functional properties of beef fat.

🧁 British ingredients giant Tate & Lyle is partnering with BioHarvest Sciences to develop plant-based sweeteners that are better for human and planetary health.
Sugar is a $66B market that employs over 100 million people, but it looms as a giant public health and planetary problem.

✅ Hot Topic: The Path to Approvals

🇦🇺 Australian biotech startup All G received a second regulatory approval for its precision-fermented bovine lactoferrin in a month – this time in the US.

🇫🇮 Finnish startup Onego Bio submitted a formal notice to the FDA, asserting the safety of Bioalbumen, its precision-fermented egg protein.

📚 Key Research

🌱 A three-year research project funded by the EU and Switzerland, Sustain-a-bite, aims to develop minimally processed plant-based products from whole grains and food waste.

🛒 A new study by Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business reveals that US households with at least one user of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are spending 6-9% less on groceries, with the sharpest declines seen in ultra-processed categories.

📊 A Eurocentric review of health studies by the Good Food Institute Europe has shown that plant-based meat has multi-pronged health benefits, despite its association with ultra-processed foods.

💩 Tim Spector’s health app Zoe analysed poop samples from over 21,000 people to find the best diet for the gut microbiome - here are the results.

🧊 A national survey in the US has found that discarded frozen items account for only 6% of all household food waste. Could stocking freezers be the secret to preventing food waste?

👩🏻‍⚕ Researchers at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have found that a plant-based dietary invention rich in fibre may slow the spread of multiple myeloma, a rare, incurable blood cancer, in at-risk individuals.

🍔 Everything Else in Future Food

☕️ California-based Minus Coffee has debuted a new beanless instant oat milk latte with calibrated caffeine, L-theanine and pea protein to support women’s health. Here’s why.

🚫 Atlantic Natural Foods, the parent company of Loma Linda and Tuno, terminated an agreement to be acquired by fellow plant protein maker Above Food. Here’s why the company changed strategy.

🇩🇪 German confectioner Katjes Fassin is battling European competitors like Lindt and Nestlé over its patent for oat milk chocolate.

🍫 Singaporean startup Prefer is adding cocoa-free chocolate to its beanless portfolio in an effort to fight the economic and planetary costs of the cocoa industry.

👩🏼‍⚖ MasterChef is getting its first vegan judge – almost – in the form of Grace Dent, the Guardian food critic who describes herself as mostly vegan, who will replace Gregg Wallace on Celebrity MasterChef UK.

🌱🍔  Future Food Quick Bites 

In our weekly column, Future Food Quick Bites, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers a host of launches for Veganuary, several plant-based brand campaigns, and a Bezos Earth Fund Ted Talk.

📆 Scene & Heard

Future Food-Tech Returns to San Francisco in March

🇺🇸 Join global leaders from CPGs & retailers, ingredient and technology providers to cutting-edge innovators and investors for strategic networking, exclusive industry insight and startup discovery at Future Food-Tech San Francisco, happening 13th-14th March 2025. Find out more here.

🗓️ Taking place 5th-8th May, at SynBioBeta 2025 you will connect with pioneers who are transforming the life sciences—reprogramming biology for faster drug discovery, designing enzyme-driven industrial processes, and deploying climate-positive solutions at scale. Register here.

🇪🇸 Attracting over 22,000 industry experts from over 160 countries every year, Vitafoods Europe, taking place in Barcelona 20th-22nd May, is the place to be for networking, collaboration, and innovation. Find out more here.

🇺🇸 With more than 400 delegates expected and +40 exhibiting companies, the Future of Protein Production Chicago boasts an industry-leading agenda that showcases the latest innovative breakthroughs to help accelerate the commercialization and scaling of alternative proteins. Sign up here.

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